Knives in the Bell Jar:
Review of The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Ficton & Fantasy, and Reactions

1. John Clute's Original Review
2. Russell Blackford's Response
3. John Clute's Reply to Blackford; and
4. Letters on the Subject.

Knives in the Bell Jar

Review by John Clute

As this will not be a review in which the publisher receives much praise, let us begin as we mean to continue. Melbourne University Press's publicity release for The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy misspells the title of their own book (they spell it "encyclopedia"); invisibly compresses into one blurbish paragraph two significantly separated sentences from Peter Nicholls' conspicuously guarded introduction; and gives ISBN numbers for both a hardback and a paperback edition, though without bothering to send reviewers copies of the (more expensive) hardback. As it would be discourteous to assume the non-existence of a top-people version, this reviewer independently confirmed the existence of that format; ISBNs for both TP and HB listed above.

This is not a reassuring start.

I mean, after all, The Australian Encyclopaedia (for short) has been published by a firm that can't spell it.

Which is not to say they don't claim any credit they can for doing the job. By inserting their moniker into, and pretentiously inflating, the full title of The Australian Encyclopaedia, MUP have signaled to the world that the book was compiled according to criteria laid down by, and attaining the scholarly standards appropriate to, a university press. The suits of MUP, in other words, claim the book as something of their own.

They claim responsibility for it.

So be it.

Pace Pamela Sargent-who in a recent SFWA Bulletin implied that it was dubious practice for writers of sf or fantasy reference works to review other reference works in the same field (a princessy punctilio that might just as easily apply to novelists reviewing novelists)-this will be an insider review. This reviewer (henceforth I) has been involved in editing and writing sf and fantasy encyclopedias since the mid 1970s; and as a person so situated, what I sense in looking at The Australian Encyclopaedia is no simple dog's breakfast.

No. It took more than one dog's breakfast to make The Australian Encyclopaedia the thing it is today. There is an archaeology of foul-up here. The officers of MUP who claim responsibility for the final result were perhaps overbold to claim credit. Clearly they imposed asinine strictures from above (I cannot for an instant believe that general editor Paul Collins, who has a lot to answer for, could have voluntarily told prospective users of an encyclopedia that "Cross-references are kept to a minimum"). And clearly they are responsible for the title of the thing, which with all its inflatedness is in fact incomplete. The full title of the book should have been The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy Since 1950. Incredibly, with a very few exceptions (some of which were imposed on the book through the anguished expostulations of Peter Nicholls), The Australian Encyclopedia has a basement cutoff of 1950.

But clearly, the MUP editors only seasoned the breakfast. Clearly they had no clue that to eliminate all pre-1950s material would render their encyclopedia almost useless as a research tool for scholars, and make it a laughing stock for everyone: scholars, general users, other encyclopedists, the editors of other university presses. Clearly, it wasn't them. The sound of Paul Collins describing his book is not entirely the sound of an editor under duress. "The bibliographies," he croons in his notes on How to Use This Book, proud as Punch, explaining the incredible cutoff date, "cover the period from 1950. It seems superfluous to go back beyond 1950, if only for the reason that most of the works would now be unobtainable and that, apart from being authoritative [italics mine], such entries would add little to this work. You will note the occasional pre-1950 entry, however, for works deemed particularly important. And for the purists we have included Graham Stone and Sean McMullen's article on pre-1950s fiction.

That passage is written with too unique an idiolect to be just MUP. It is, in fact, so daftly idiolectic that one hardly knows where to start. But here are a few thoughts.

1) The 1950 cutoff almost certainly reflects the starting point for the original author bibliographies which (as Collins makes clear in his Preface) are the fundament upon which the rest of the enterprise was grafted, but which were compiled by Graham Stone and Sean McMullen with no thought that they would eventually be used in this context.

2) The 1950 cutoff has no other excuse-literary, cultural, historical, practical-than the fact that the checklists, compiled at some other time, and for some other purpose, start at that point.

3) An encyclopedia whose shape is governed by its checklists is an annotated checklist.

4) Indeed (at points) The Australian Encyclopaedia is not even that, given the radical lack of continuity between the text of the entries (squidgily, Collins calls them "profiles") and the bibliographical icebergs beneath.

5) Any author whose career traverses the magic cutoff date is in danger of a painful accident. The first writer I looked up myself, before learning about the procrustean constraints which governed entry construction, was Alan Yates (1923-1985), who lived in Australia after about 1945. I had written an entry on him for the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction--which is not directly cited in the entry on Peter Nicholls, despite the fact he was its co-editor, despite its 1,350,000 words, and despite its ample coverage of pre-1950 Australian writers--and was anxious to find out more about the man from some real experts. I knew that, from ignorance, I'd left some relevant stuff out of the entry--only after publication was I told that between 1949 and 1952, under the house name Paul Valdez, Yates had written 15 short novels in the Scientific Thriller Series for a small Australian firm. I duly listed all of them in the SFE Addenda (1995), but warned readers I hadn't seen these titles, and that some of them were not sf or fantasy.

So I looked to The Australian Encyclopaedia for some hard data. The entry refers to the Scientific Thriller Series, without describing it (there is no entry on the series, either); the bibliography lists 4 of the 15 titles, indicating that each of the four is "non-SF," but not whether or not any have fantasy content; the remainder are found in a separate entry on Paul VALDEZ, where they are listed as sf. The entry states that other writers--like Clive BLEECK (12 titles), an amply documented real person; and Raymond GlENNING (1 title) and Art HAYMAN (1 title), who are not, their entries reading in full, "sometimes used the pseudonym Paul VALDEZ"--may have written some of these; but that Yates is the most likely suspect. If so, why wasn't this mentioned in the entry on him? Yates sounds interesting: so where is the joy of discovery? Could the magic 1950 cutoff date, like tinnitus, have deafened the editors?

6) But the whole point was precisely to be "authoritative"-as Collins says in his Preface, "Never before has such an exhaustive study of Australian science fiction and fantasy been conducted...We envisage that scholars of this subject world-wide, and science fiction fans in general, will find..." etc etc.

7) So an encyclopedia editor who disparages authoritativeness (whether or not he was just following orders from his betters at MUP) is an encyclopedia editor who would rather surf than fight (as Peter Nicholls fought in the 1970s to defend the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979) from its packager, who was rightly afraid we were going way over length in order to do a proper job).

8) It is a principle that all encyclopedias of any merit run over length; The Australian Encyclopaedia, generously set in its 188 pages, clearly threatened no forests.

9) An encyclopedia editor who describes as "purists" those readers who might consult his book for information he has failed to provide is an encyclopedia editor who should learn better manners.

10) Those "purists" who do persist, and attempt to look up Stone and McMullen's "article on pre-1950s fiction," should be warned that Collins, the general editor of a book whose entries are in alphabetical order, does not refer to that article under the title by which he has alphabetized it. So don't look up "Pre" or "1950s" or "Fiction" or "Australia." Look up "Early." For "Early Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy."

Let us start again, at the beginning. The bibliographies which form the base upon which The Australian Encyclopaedia is built seem pretty competent, and could if published solo constitute an invaluable research aid. In an encyclopedia, their comprehensiveness is, on the other hand, almost certainly in excess of normal requirements. The listing for each book title includes reading level (YA, adult, etc), genre, publisher and year of first release, which is fine if there's room for the exercise; but goes on to give almost as full data for every reprint and translation published (with some erratic exceptions), which is the stuff of which book-length bibliographies are made, not encyclopedias.

What's missing from these lists is precisely what bibliographers tend not to pay attention to, for their main task is to trace the physical manifestations of a text, which logically includes reprints. Like most bibliographers, however, Stone and McMullen pay little attention to the textual relationship of one book to another, so that (for instance) when they list the vast mass of A. Bertram Chandler's novels and stories (taking 8 columns to do the job), they fail to indicate that most of the books, and many of the stories, are part of the enormous John Grimes/Rim World series. They can be forgiven: paying attention to the content of a book is not primarily the task of a bibliographer. It is, on the other hand, central to the task of a competent encyclopedia editor.

The CHANDLER entry, however, which rides on top of the 8 columns of titles, fails to describe any book in detail, ignores internal relationships among the various Rim World books, and mentions only two titles by name, though (very unusually in this encyclopedia) the series is in fact described briefly, and (almost uniquely) a term ("Rim World") is defined. The usual practice here, a practice congruent with Collins' obedient refusal to countenance more than minimal cross-references, is to eschew definitions altogether (see for example the conceptually vacuous entry on "Fantasy"), so that each entry sits utterly alone.

But isn't "sitting utterly alone" a good translation of the original Greek for "idiot?" And isn't an encyclopedia, properly conceived and executed, a device that transforms idiot data into citizens of the world of knowledge?

Not as far as the underpowered suits of MUP are concerned.

There is worse to come.

As we have seen, the bibliographies in The Australian Encyclopaedia--which preceded the construction of the book, and which comprise its only work done to professional standards--are no more accessible to ordinary readers than the bottom of an iceberg. But the entries (or "profiles") which ride on top of these bibliographies, like refugees from the Titanic, are not only isolated from the rest of the book: they don't have anything to do with the bibliographies they should have been elucidating, either. Those few titles which are ascribed in the entries proper are frequently ascribed differently in the bibliographies directly below. Significant books are listed below, and totally ignored above. Etc. This is all worse than making the occasional referential error: because the inconsistencies between entries and bibliographies are meaningless. They are random. They cause a kind of vertigo.

An example.

The quite extraordinary entry on Kate FORSYTH comprises four paragraphs of oleaginous puffery--"Forsyth has been highly commended in several competitions--" etc., which is a brown-nose way of saying she's never won any--devoted to an author of 2 published stories and one novel, Dragonclaw (1997), which is so listed in the bibliography, as an English release, along with the fact that it is Book One of The Witches of Eileanan series, but which seems never to have come to the attention of the unnamed author of the entry, whose final paragraph contradicts data given half an inch below it in the bibliography. En passant, the entry commits the really quite heinous (and thoroughly unprofessional) bibliographical sin of listing a projected title in the same format as an actually published book, as though they were each real. It reads:

"At the time of writing, her trilogy, The Witches of Eileanan, had been picked up by Penguin for publication in the US and Canada."

Jacobs writes articles as well as occasional poetry. She has been a writer in residence, has joined a writers' tour of the outback, spoken at a writers' festival and various interstate conferences, and has judged several writing competitions, including the inaugural Paul John Stathan Memorial Award for an unpublished fantasy or science fiction story. The future, she hopes, will "hold a cornucopia of other rich experiences."

If I were Sherry-Ann JACOBS or Kate FORSYTH, I'd be bloody pissed off. So should prospective readers of this book.

Most of The Australian Encyclopaedia comprises "profiles" of this sort (except, see below, when the knives are out). Dead authors, who never answered questionnaires to be copied from, are given entries that are significantly more compressed, and less "warm." For instance, the entry on Suzy SUSSEX [actually, Lucy Sussex; see below - LP] --a newish writer-runs to 74 lines of fawning hype, during the course of which we learn that a 1994 anthology she edited, which has not yet been published in America, is going to be; the entry on CHANDLER--whose career was half a century long, and very full--packs that half century into 76 condensed lines of text. (Comparable figures for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, admittedly written before SUSSEX's career had fully taken off: SUSSEX, 19 lines; CHANDLER, 116 lines.) The length of entries, and their "warmth," seem to depend on the existence of questionnaires (except when the knives are out) rather than on any acts of assortative or prescriptive judgment on the part of the book's editors.

This seems disgraceful.

But there are good things to the book.

The Australian Encyclopaedia conveys a great deal of information, almost exclusively through the bibliographies; hard data, when they are given, are extremely accurate; there is much to learn from trawling these pages. Those are the good things. But the problem of the book as a whole is not that it fails to contain facts; it is that it ignores its own facts. As I have already implied, if this book were a person it would not be a citizen of the world. It would be an idiot.

We enter less seemly territory.

We will not stay here long.

As a person very far indeed from Australia, I cannot myself attest to more than a suspicion. But I suspect that the Australian sf/fantasy community is far too small, and lives too much in a belljar of fratricidal consanguinity, for the writing of an encyclopedia of this sort to have been a very safe enterprise. Paul Collins, who wrote the entry on Terry DOWLING, for instance, wrote entries on other writers too, some of them guys and gals whose attainments were very inconsiderable. These entries contain passages whose obsequiousness seems very nearly otherworldly. So I do not know why DOWLING (one of a handful of Australian sf writers with an international reputation) was given such an unpleasant ride. But in the context of the swooningly analgesic tone of the book as a whole, the criticisms offered his extensive work (in an entry hardly longer than some of the transcribed questionnaires which congest so many of the pages of The Australian Encyclopaedia), and the sneers made about his career, to my nose, stank.

It read as though knives were out.

There is no need to continue. Either I am mistaken in my sense that entries were written with more emotion than admitted to, or I am right. If I'm right, then deadlier knives than any I can cast are already scarring the innards of the belljar.

Hope the panjandra of MUP are wearing earplugs.

"The Clute Review From Hell"

by Russell Blackford

Let me confess an interest. I am not a major contributor to the Encyclopaedia, but I did write three "profiles" for it: those of Damien Broderick, Peter Nicholls and Don Tuck. Given that Clute seems to find all the profiles and other entries (as opposed to the bibliographical material) worthless, this is enough to justify my being annoyed. Other contributors have a right to feel the same way, including respected scholars such as Janeen Webb and the unfortunate Lucy Sussex. However, it's worse in my case, since Clute singles out my piece on Nicholls for a special swipe.

In the middle of an uncontrolled sentence about Alan Yates, Clute comments, with what seems like bitterness, that the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is not "directly cited" in the Nicholls entry, "despite the fact that he was its coeditor, despite its 1,350,000 words, and despite its ample coverage of pre-1950 Australian writers." Really? How direct does "direct" have to be? My Nicholls entry spends several lines on the 1979 publication of the original Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It then says the following: "The Encyclopedia contained critical analysis at an unprecedented level for such a work and won the 1980 Hugo Award in the nonfiction book category. The second edition duplicated this feat in 1995. A further updating of the work, with revisions and corrections, is available in CD-ROM format."

To me, this says "directly" enough that there was a second edition of the Encyclopedia, and that it won Nicholls a second Hugo Award. What is Clute talking about?

As it happens, the paragraph concerned has been slightly edited by someone at Melbourne University Press. As I originally submitted the material, it not only gave some more precise information on the second edition but also included an extra mention of Clute's own role. That, however, is not relevant to the point that Clute raises; nor do I have any complaint about the editing.

If the presence of howlers such as these suggests that Clute was writing out of control, the very structure of his review from Hell confirms it. He begins with several paragraphs of waffle about such trivia as the fact that a flyer released in the US spells the title of the Encyclopaedia in American style as "encyclopedia." He worries about the fact that there was a hardback edition as well as the soft cover version that he received as a review copy. He commences using the irritating rhetorical device of one sentence paragraphs, which returns like a muscular twitch later on in the review. All this is poor writing, certainly not Clute at his best.

Much of the review is taken up elaborating Clute's complaint that the Encyclopaedia generally commences at 1950. In itself, this would be a reasonable comment. My own forthcoming book, Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (coauthored with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen) starts back in the 19th century, and I would be inclined to agree with Clute that the Collins Encyclopaedia could profitably have begun earlier than it does. This, however, is an issue on which there can be genuine disagreement among intelligent people. Why couldn't Clute simply express his preference rather than laboring and illustrating the point ad nauseam? If this element were cut down to size, there would be little of substance left in the review.

Though we can all argue about it, there is an intellectual rationale available for choosing 1950 as a cutoff date, since there was little continuity of influence and community in Australian SF prior to the '50s. Clute suggests that the reason for the cutoff was that the bibliographies available to Collins started mid-century. This is simply speculative--and wrong. The Graham Stone bibliographical work to which Collins and his collaborators had access contains detailed pre-1950s material. If the editors were influenced by anything other than the rationale just mentioned, it was more likely to be a fear of duplicating Stone's efforts in the pre-'50s period. Be that as it may, the book makes sense as it stands. It's fine for Clute to say that he would have approached the problem differently (obviously, I might have, too); the point is that Collins' approach was reasonably open to him.

Clute loves speculating. He suggests that the author entries were put together from questionnaires to the authors concerned. Excuse me, but I saw no such questionnaires. It really is gratuitously insulting to suggest that reputable people work in this way, though I make no apology for the fact that I ran two of my completed entries past (respectively) Nicholls and Broderick, both of whom I know quite well. Broderick has stated in his own review of the Encyclopaedia that he has no complaints about his entry.

Which brings me to the title of Clute's piece: "Knives in the Bell Jar." [Editor's Note: Actually, I selected that title. -LP] This refers to Clute's speculation that "knives were out" for Terry Dowling, since Dowling receives some criticism in his author entry written by Collins.

The fact is that Collins originally offered the Dowling entry to others, including me. I declined for the simple reason that Dowling is a difficult author to write about and I was too busy at the time to make more than a minimal contribution to the Encyclopaedia. When no one else picked up the task of writing on Dowling, Collins decided, reluctantly (since he has reservations about Dowling's work), to do the entry himself. There was no sense of his deliberately clinging to the Dowling piece in order to sink the stiletto into a hated rival.

One would assume from Clute's review that Terry Dowling is some kind of national living treasure. Let's get this in perspective. Dowling is, in fact, one of the more important figures on the Australian SF and fantasy scene, along with, say, Lucy Sussex or Paul Collins himself, though not in the same league as Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, Sara Douglass, Keith Taylor or the late George Turner. He has written some superb horror stories and some interesting SF, but never at novel length. His importance is augmented by his critical and scholarly work, and by his popular presence in SF fandom. All very well. Dowling gets a substantial entry that tries to make sense of all this--and pretty much succeeds.

If I had taken on the Dowling entry, I would almost certainly not have given Dowling "such an unpleasant ride" (Clute's words), but the fact is that Collins has praised much about Dowling, while also making criticisms. Clute may disagree with those criticisms, but they were reasonably open to Collins to make. His views about Dowling's work are sincerely held. I'll go further: Collins usually gets it right. He praises Dowling's horror collection, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, saying that it "contains many fine dark fantasy tales." This is absolutely correct. But he prefaces this remark by saying, "If readers ignore the contrived linking material . . ." Perhaps this is one of the "sneers" at Dowling's career that Clute refers to. The fact is that An Intimate Knowledge of the Night is marred by linking material of a painfully contrived and self-congratulatory character. I suppose my making this point will lead to accusations that I also have a knife out for Dowling. I'll have to put up with that. Everyone who knows me will realize that such an accusation would be fatuous. I shouldn't have to say so, but I wish Terry Dowling well, personally and professionally.

Writers in the grown-up world do not complain that knives are out for them when they receive reasonable criticism, and nor do they need the likes of Clute to do so on their behalf. It seems to me that the Collins entry on Dowling contains exactly one principal clause in one sentence that anyone could reasonably object to. This is the statement that "many readers find these stories at best impenetrable and at worst obtuse." Whatever their beauties, the stories concerned really are somewhat obscurely written, but "impenetrable" is too strong and "obtuse" is not the right word. Yet, no one could complain if Collins had simply said "many readers find these stories inaccessible."

Even as the sentence stands, Dowling should be expected to cop it sweet. Let me announce that Strange Constellations will contain a sentence that Collins will not like about Collins' own fiction. In order to exonerate Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, I confess in advance to being the author of the offending sentence. I'll be shocked, however, if Paul Collins spits the dummy about it, or if others make the ludicrous suggestion that I have a knife out for him. It would be equally ludicrous for me to suggest that Clute's silly comment about my entry on Nicholls, however objectionable I find it, was the result of his having a knife out for me. Let's all act like adults here.

Ironically, Collins' entry on Dowling is far more balanced than Clute's hatchet job on the Encyclopaedia. Really, what is Clute talking about?

Buried deep in the review is the real news about The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australia Science Fiction & Fantasy: that it is an unusually informative and accurate reference work. Clute of all people should know how difficult such accuracy can be, as the "Suzy Sussex" reference in his review indicates. Even the mighty Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in its various editions, contains errors, including some embarrassing ones. Errors will doubtless be found in the Collins Encyclopaedia, but it has stood up well so far and clearly deserves respect.

I have my own criticisms of the Encyclopaedia: the approaches taken to the author profiles are uneven, and I agree that many of them are fuzzy. It would have been better if there had been more hard-edged critique such as Collins gave us in writing on Dowling. This would have avoided the kind of contrast that Clute makes so much of. But these faults do not detract from the book's usefulness as an addition to SF scholarship. Anyone writing with a cool head and a modicum of generosity would recognize that as the bottom line.

by John Clute

Mr. Blackford then refers to my critical comments on incompetent omissions from the entry on Peter Nicholls he was credited with in the MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy (hence MUPE), and from which he quotes to prove his point that my specific complaint was inappropriate--I thought it was shambolic ascription practice in a reference book not to cite the vastly different second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction "directly" in the entry on Peter. (I had not, by the way, mentioned Mr. Blackford's name the first time I criticized this entry, thinking it likely that he and his colleagues had been badly treated by MUPE's end editors; but as Mr. Blackford has now made it abundantly clear that he has no "complaint about the editing" which has made him look so incompetent, let him be named.)

When I wrote my review I thought, and still think, that Peter Nicholls, clearly the most important SF critic to have emerged from Australia, had been oddly treated in MUPE. Peter coedited, and wrote something like 500,000 words of copy for, the second edition of Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 1993; his work on that book represents the most formidable critical task any Australian genre critic has yet performed (Donald Tuck's main achievement, I think, has been bibliographical; Damien Broderick's main achievement is as a theorist whose influence, though deep, remains narrow). As Mr. Blackford's own choice of excerpt shows, MUPE's reference to that work fails to mention its editors (different from the 1979 edition), its title (different from the 1979 American title), its date, its size, or its compass (unkindly, I said that its compass, unlike MUPE's mayfly gaze, included Australian SF before 1950). These omissions, it should be remembered, characterize one single entry in a book whose every other entry provides dates and other data for every single printing and reprinting and translation of every work mentioned. True, Mr. Blackford does mention the Hugo Award the book won--but he gets the date wrong (SHOCK WAVES FELT BY CLUTE IN MAINE!), as it won its Hugo in 1994 not 1995--and he fails to list any of the other awards Peter garnered (the BSFA Award, the Eastercon Award, the Locus Award, the Eaton Grand Master Award).

There is of course no requirement that an encyclopedia mention every award any of its subjects may have won (in the SFE many awards, including some of those I've just cited, are systematically not referred to in individual author entries). But in the context of MUPE's oleaginous tendency to gush over every possible award or honor--no matter how obscure--that some of its really minor subjects may have almost won, this passing over in silence of a batch of genuine recognitions accorded Peter Nicholls seems anything but sufficient, or proper, or systematic. Indeed, if the editors of MUPE had applied systematic criteria to the construction of its entries, this pattern of omissions would have constituted a conscious slur; in the event, it's almost certain the slur lacked any intelligent intent.

But of course systematic criteria (or contexts) for entry writing are exactly what MUPE radically lacks--in various ways, throughout my long review, I argued this point again and again. By quoting an error-and omission-marred paragraph from his otherwise unexceptionable entry on Peter, failing in the process to correct the misrepresentations inflicted upon that paragraph (and hence upon the entry as a whole) by incompetent editors with no sense of context, Mr. Blackford demonstrates a thorough refusal to accept that point.

All of which is what I'm "talking about."

Some further points.

1950. I maintain what I maintained before. To have a starting date of 1950 (with exceptions for which no context exists) is irretrievably amateurish. It cuts MUPE off at the knees. It provides no context for whatever happened after 1950. It gives no portrait of an important genre in an important land. It stupefyingly slights the rich history of Australia.

May I give an example? Let me quote in full an entry I wrote for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), with I coedited with John Grant:

SKIPPER, MERVYN (GARNHAM) (1886-1958) Australian journalist and writer whose Meeting Pool beast-fables--The Meeting Pool: A Tale of Borneo (coll 1929 UK) and The White Man's Garden: A Tale of Borneo (coll of linked stories 1930 UK)-presents with considerable energy a series of exemplary tales about proper relationships among the participating animals (as portrayed by the plants of the garden); and, more sadly, lessons in humanity's inevitable triumph over the prelapsarian life of Borneo. The Fooling of King Alexander (1967 chap) is an illustrated version of a tale from the second Meeting Pool volume. Later MS became involved with the Montsalvat artists' colony near Melbourne, where he lived from 1935 until his death; of the 100 or so unpublished manuscripts held at Montsalvat, some may be fantasies.[JC]

Questionnaires. Mr. Blackford misunderstands my point. I have in fact no objection to questionnaires; both encyclopedias I've been involved in used them. What seemed to be happening here, however, was a virtually stenographic transcription of blurbs taken, almost certainly, from questionnaire boxes labelled "Other Comments" or something similar. Faced with an chance to make Other Comments, most writers will talk about themselves, the writing workshops they thought they shone at, their brilliant careers, the fact that their agent has just received a new manuscript from them. This is to be expected of writers, and there's nothing wrong with it per se, in context. But when the editors of an encyclopedia transcribe this sort of material directly into entries, that context is lost. Many of MUPE's "profiles"--especially those on newer writers who may not yet have a clear sense how their words might sound if literally transcribed into that different context--give off, therefore, an infomercial pong.

Dowling. My argument with Paul Collins's entry on Terry Dowling did not depend on his precise choice of critical terms (though I agree with Mr. Blackford that the entry does, at points, transgress any reasonable criteria of decorum for encyclopedia writing). My argument was that, given the nearly delirious sycophancy of most of the "profiles" in the book, any criticism stuck out; and harshly negative criticism, like that applied to Dowling, stuck out unforgiveably from the infomercials. In the context of MUPE, those criticisms were indeed a knife in the belljar.

"The Likes of Clute." I did not mention the treatment of Dowling in order to defend Dowling, but in order to address MUPE's decision to incorporate negative critical comment into a book otherwise devoid of it. Mr. Blackford's statement that authors must expect reasonable criticism is, out of context, blamelessly innocuous, perfectly true, but utterly beside the point (see above); as are the elaborate red-herring references to his Strange Constellations, where he admits to making a critical judgement about an Australian sf writer in the entirely appropriate context of a critical history of Australian SF. My comments on MUPE, which are openly negative, and patently unsuitable within the context of an encyclopedia, were published within the open playing field or context for criticism that Nova Express properly provides.

Bottom Line. The bottom line is not, as Mr. Blackford suggests, that there is a relative scarcity of factual error in MUPE, a scarcity I praised. (Total accuracy is impossible; I've just now finished a second corrigenda for the 1993 SFE, uncovering in the process several errors that had persisted unscathed from the 1979 first edition, through dozens of finetooth readings.) But factual accuracy in a void is relatively useless compared to factual accuracy within a context. The lack of context of MUPE--what I originally described, committing an etymological fallacy, as its idiocy--is, I'm afraid, the bottom line.

Shorn of red herrings, Mr. Blackford's comments seem perfectly in line with this conclusion.

Apparently Blackford is also unaware that Collins never forgave Dowling for his reviews of The Government in Exile and, to a much lesser degree, Metaworlds (a lesson to reviewers and critics there). Ask his friends how it was. We know what disinformation is.

As for Blackford having a knife out for Dowling as well, no, I'm sure he doesn't, but he does relegate himself to being just a reviewer rather than an encyclopaedist. When he regards Dowling's An Intimate Knowledge of the Night as having "linking material of a painfully contrived and self-congratulatory character," surely, as an encyclopaedist, he would have known that this book won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, was reviewed as having "a powerful linking narrative" (go figure) and that what he calls contrived and self-congratulatory is all part of the metafiction surely. Or did Mr. Blackford miss that. I won't comment on his remark "but never at novel length." Snide? Of course not. Just careless. This is a man who does not know who Australia's four leading writers in the field happen to be. I think we can leave it at that.

Many thanks for Nova Express. As always you are doing a fine job of a very informative and well presented magazine. I can sympathize with your position on the economics of Nova Express, knowing full well what even a small fanzine costs to produce. My own fanzine Gegenschein is no longer produced in hardcopy format. Having moved house to a beautiful area, and left my job for health reasons, I am now unlikely to get another job (unless I want to get back into the computer industry again). So I've moved the zine over to a web-based magazine, rather than a printed one. A pity, in many ways, but dollars talk, and the hobby costs I once didn't mind are now just too much.

Justina Robson did an awesome job of reviewing Peter Ham-ilton's material. Despite much the same misgivings, I must say this set of books is one of the most impressive new pieces of SF I've read in many years. I'd have liked it to be a little better, but as a space opera fan, I enjoyed it.

While I think it was absolutely wonderful that Paul Collins somehow managed to get MUP to publish the Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction, I was likewise disappointed at how much early material had to be left out. I know some of the contributors had vast amounts of material available. I rather suspect Graham Stone was a little disappointed at the lack of pre-1950 material in MUPE, however that is sometimes the nature of commercial decisions on what can be successfully published these days. Perhaps someday Graham Stone will agree to his voluminous material being placed on the net. Meanwhile, I know he is close to having much material ready for publication. Indeed, I'm going to ask for some of that material so I can place it on a web site.

At first I wasn't sure what I did to deserve the copy of Nova Express 5.1 which landed in my mailbox this morning. Closer inspection reveals that I probably got it as part of your "Shameless Hugo Campaign." Thanks. It's a great zine, and an interesting read. Here's a couple of copies of my own fanzine in return. I'm sorry I can't give you any money in exchange, but I haven't got any-Out of the Kaje, combined with my other fannish activity, eats up every spare penny I've got at the moment. Otherwise I'd have a money order out to you instantly. I read with amazement of your "losing around $1,000 on each issue." I can't even conceive of getting that much money together in one place, let alone giving it away. Still, if I look at my own figures, each issue of the Kaje costs me $300 (to photocopy and post 100 copies) and I'm doing it 4 times a year and not asking for any monetary return...(I'd better stop thinking about this or I'll have to stop publishing, and I couldn't bear to do that.) Some things are worth more than money.

PageMaker's a bloody good program, isn't it? I use it on the PC, and it's fairly basic style somehow seems to encourage clean, simple, uncluttered publications like yours, which looks great. The only thing you've done that I don't yet know how to manage is to put a text box in the middle of the page and wrap the main part of the article around it. [You select the object you want to wrap text around, then select Text Wrap from the Element menu (at least on the Mac). --LP] (I know it's a novice reaction, but as I flicked through Nova to see what was in it, I was saying to myself "I know how he did that..." I've only been using the program for a year.)

I saw the MUP Encyclopedia of Aust. SF & F in the bookshop and I wasn't impressed, even before I heard anything about the controversy surrounding it. The front cover looks like the Dog's Dinner, and it's far too thin to possibly be the "definitively authoritative" (or whatever) publication the publishers were claiming it to be. My first impression was of a cheap and nasty puff-piece designed to part the ignorant from their money, while pushing the authors the publisher approved of, and dismissing the rest. Needless to say, I didn't buy it, and I'm glad. A purely Australian encyclopedia was a great idea, but if they wanted to do it properly they should have gone back to 1900, and published in two volumes if they wanted to keep it thin. Sorry to be nasty (I'm usually not, honest), but some things deserve it.

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