Join us next Saturday, April 15, at 1:00PM, right here at www.MonSFFA.ca for our April 2023 e-Meeting!

Take part by contributing your top ten list of sci-fi books, authors, heroes or villains, cool spaceships, epic movies, TV shows, actors or actresses, comic books, artists… whatever you choose to highlight, just as long as it has to do with sci-fi or fantasy!

Simply list your favourites in ascending order, tenth to first, maybe share a few illustrative images, and in a few sentences for each entry, tell us about of your choices!

You are welcome to e-mail your top ten lists and images (JPEGS, please, as e-mail attachments) to us in advance for inclusion on the site, or present them live on ZOOM during the e-meeting next Saturday!

Send your lists, in advance of the e-meeting, to: veep@monsffa.ca

Dinosaurs in the news

• Patagotitan on show in London, UK
• Did dinosaurs have lips? Canadian scientists say they have cracked the mystery
• What fossil eggs found in Alberta reveal about how dinosaurs became birds

Patagotitan on show in London, UK

A colossus has landed in London: A cast of what was one of the biggest animals ever to walk the Earth is now on show at the Natural History Museum.

Watch: A timelapse movie of Patagotitan’s assembly at the Natural History Museum

By Jonathan Amos, BBC Science Correspondent

@BBCAmos

The largest is a 2.4m-long femur, or thigh bone. It’s been erected upright to give visitors an extraordinary selfie opportunity.

READ MORE: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65094602

Did dinosaurs have lips? Canadian scientists say they have cracked the mystery

As with many details about dinosaur physiology, an absence of living specimens has left a lot to the artistic imagination. Perhaps because humans are smaller than many dinosaur species, and also edible, popular representations of the ancient creatures are often strongly focused on their teeth.

This tradition is evident in the Hollywood version of dinosaurs as depicted the 1993 film Jurassic Park. Many of the movie’s most memorable scenes feature a tyrannosaur with jaws agape. But even when the giant reptile’s mouth is shut its teeth remain plainly visible, like a row of murderous icicles.

READ MORE: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-dinosaur-lips-canada-scientists/

What fossil eggs found in Alberta reveal about how dinosaurs became birds

Emily Chung · CBC News · Posted: Apr 03, 2023 5:55 PM EDT | Last Updated: April 4

 

Seventy-five million years ago in southern Alberta, a river flooded, burying the eggs of bird-like dinosaurs nesting on the nearby plain. Now, tiny pieces of those fossil egg shells offer new evidence about how dinosaurs lived, bred and evolved into birds.

A new study shows emu-sized, meat-eating troodons were as warm-blooded as birds, with body temperatures of more than 40 C. But unlike modern birds such as chickens that can produce one egg a day, troodons used a very slow egg-forming process similar to the one used by reptiles like crocodiles.

That supports a previous hypothesis that nests found containing up to two dozen eggs were shared by multiple troodons, similar to the way ostriches share communal nests today.

READ MORE https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/dinosaur-egg-shells-1.6799550

This post closes today’s MonSFFA e-meeting.

9) THANK YOU!

We very much thank our guest, today, Lloyd Penney, as well as Keith Braithwaite and Cathy Palmer-Lister for their contributions to today’s programme. Thanks are extended, also, to all of our supporting contributors this afternoon.

And of course, to those who joined us today, and took in our online get-together, thank you for your interest and attention, and don’t forget to leave a comment!

10) NEXT MonSFFA e-MEETING

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed your time with us these past few hours and encourage you to visit www.MonSFFA.ca regularly for additional content.

As club members are aware, our hoped-for return to in-person club meetings has, frustratingly, been hindered by lingering pandemic-related circumstances! And so do we continue our search for a viable meeting hall; we’ll keep you updated as to any progress in that regard. Nothing new to report at the moment.

Do join us next month, on Saturday, April 15, beginning at 1:00PM, right here at www.MonSFFA.ca, for another MonSFFA e-Meeting

11) SIGN-OFF

Until then, farewell and safe travels. And don’t forget to adjust your clocks—spring forward!—before bed tonight.

8) Open Discussion Period

We offer, now, an open period of discussion, perhaps to continue a little more on last month’s topic of divesting ourselves of our SF/F book collections, or the latest fancraft projects of members; whatever strikes our fancy!

GUEST SPEAKER

7) On ZOOM at this time, we welcome our special guest speaker, long-time Toronto SF/F fan, ’zine scribe, and now editor of the modern incarnation of Amazing Stories, Lloyd Penney! Lloyd will be speaking on Amazing Stories, the task of editing, and answering your questions.

5) The Short Story of the “Canadian Whites,” and “CanPulps”

Join us on ZOOM right now for this story:

During World War II, the Canadian government introduced the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA), restricting trade in non-essential goods in order that, as much as possible, Canadian dollars be held in reserve within Canada to support the war effort. Among the products barred from importation were the popular American comic books and pulp magazines of the day, prompting Canadian publishers to seize an opportunity and fill suddenly empty newsstand shelves with homegrown alternatives.

Birthed during this period were a cavalcade of Canadian comic book crime-fighting adventurers and superheroes like Canada Jack, Nelvana of the Northern Lights (pre-dating Wonder Woman), Iron Man (pre-dating by more than two decades the Marvel Comics character of the same name), Captain Wonder, Cosmo, and many others.

Most notable of the science fiction and fantasy pulps resulting from this unique Canadian publishing phenomenon was Uncanny Tales, boasting not merely the reprinted stories of American and British writers, but fresh fiction penned by Canadians.

A colourful, Toronto-based middleweight-boxer-turned-scribe named Thomas P. Kelley, who fashioned himself “King of the Canadian Pulp Writers,” was the most prolific of these authors. Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, he would, aided by his wife, Ethel, regularly pen a couple or more stories per day, some 100,000 words a week! He provided almost all of the content featured in the early issues of Uncanny Tales, but as quickly as he could turn out a story, such was the want of material that even the industrious Kelley could not meet demand.

Uncanny Tales and its contemporaries flourished but their success was short-lived, most of the magazines folding when the trade embargo was lifted after the war ended and American titles returned to newsstands. History has been kind to the Canadian superhero comic books that the WECA era spawned, not so much the pulp magazines, which were not as well regarded. Today, surviving copies of these so-called “CanPulps” are rare and greatly valued among collectors.

1) INTRODUCTION

Welcome to MonSFFA’s March 2023 e-Meeting!

This afternoon, we welcome a special guest speaker, long-time Toronto SF/F fan, ’zine scribe, and now editor of the modern incarnation of Amazing Stories, Lloyd Penney! We’ll also be looking at the brief history of Canada’s wartime comic-book heroes, and this country’s homegrown SF/F pulp magazine, Uncanny Tales.

All of this and more is on the agenda today!

And so, let us begin.

2) JOIN THIS AFTERNOON’S VIDEO-CHAT ON ZOOM!

To join our ZOOM video-chat, which will run throughout the next few hours, simply click here and follow the prompts: This Afternoon’s MonSFFA e-Meeting on ZOOM

If you’re not fully equipped to ZOOM, you can also take part by phone (voice only); in the Montreal area, the toll-free number to call is: 1-438-809-7799. From out of town? No problem; find your ZOOM call-in number here: Call-In Numbers

Also, have this information on hand as you may be asked to enter it:

Meeting ID: 875 9870 4593
Passcode: 552143

3) MEETING AGENDA

Here is the agenda for this afternoon’s get-together:

As always, all scheduled programming is subject to change.

4) PASSINGS

As noted right here on the club’s Website about a week ago, stuntman/actor Ricou Ren Browning passed away last month. He was 93. Browning donned the Gill-Man suit and performed underwater as the iconic Creature from the Black Lagoon in the enduring 1954 monster flick, reprising the role in the movie’s two sequels.

We also recently lost screen siren and movie star Raquel Welch, who came to the attention of film fans in 1966, starring in two SF/F pictures that year.

She played Cora Peterson in Fantasic Voyage, the story of a micro-miniaturized submarine and crew injected into the bloodstream of an important cold-war scientist, injured in an assassination attempt, in order to perform vital, tricky brain surgery not possible by conventional means.

As Loana of the Shell People in Hammer’s One Million Years, B.C., she wore an animal-skin bikini and scrambled about a savage landscape filled with Ray Harryhausen’s marauding stop-motion dinosaurs! A best-selling pin-up poster of her in costume is one of the most famous of the 1960s, and in all of fantasy cinema. The poster was instrumental in making of her an international sex symbol.

Raquel Welch died in Los Angeles at age 82.

Finally, February saw the passing, too, of one of Canada’s greatest thespians, Gordon Pinsent. Not usually associated with the SF/F genre, Pinsent, we will point out, did portray the U.S. president in the 1970 supercomputer-takes-over-the-world cult-classic Colossus: The Forbin Project.

Join us this afternoon at 1:00PM for our March 2023 MonSFFA e-Meeting, right here at MonSFFA.ca!

We welcome guest speaker Lloyd Penney, editor of Amazing Stories for a chat and Q&A!

And, we tell the story of Canada’s wartime comics and pulp magazines!

All this, and more…

From Guy Lillian, The zine dump in which he reviews just about every zine in existence!

The Zine Dump is a zine about zines, by for and about amateur magazines in the science fiction field. We want to see every generally distributed publication devoted to SF and its fandom published in English. Most of the listed productions are available at eFanzines.com or through the editors. Please report all errors to me ASAP. Italicized zines are absent this time. Range: Autumn 2022 through February 2023. Next issue: this summer.)

TZD57

Just added at https://efanzines.com are:

Leybl Botwinik’s CyberCozen – February 2023

Opuntia #543, edited by Dale Speirs

Garth Spencer’s The Obdurate Eye #24

Bob Hole’s Bunyip & ayotochtli #22

Henry Grynnsten’s Wild Ideas #32

—
Bill