Picofarad #16

Picofarad: The Zine of Little Capacity #16
Edited by Petréa Mitchell
www.bidalaka.com/picofarad

This is a real live science fiction fanzine! I didn’t know these were still made. Considering that to many people the word “zine” still conjures up “fanzine,” the relative rarity of them today is kind of interesting.

Anyway, there’s a lot of what you’d expect a scifi fanzine to contain: reviews. The zine starts with a whole lot of incredibly short reviews of manga, movies, books, comics, and anime, of which my favourite is “For god’s sake would everyone just pick a set of genitalia and stay with it already so the plot can get moving again.” (There’s slightly more to the review than that, but that seems to be all you need to know.)

There are some longer reviews, an account of a trip to Disneyland (which I don’t really see the appeal of), and fairly amusing account of the New Carissa running aground on the coast of Oregon, but what this zine is really about is cons.

That is science fiction conventions, not ways in which to con people (though that would be a neat zine).

There’s a review of Orycon 30 (discussing some of the panels and a play about multiple continuums, robotic masters, and filk), a letter talking about cons, some news about cons, and nine (9!) pages listing cons going on around the world from March to June of last year. Holy crap that’s a lot of cons, and it doesn’t even include the two fairly large ones (Emerald City Comicon in Seattle and Anime Evolution in Vancouver) I went to!

All in all it’s an interesting look into a subculture that I don’t really experience much, despite being a massive nerd. Who knew that people still used usenet?