Essays

Way Station (column)

BeABohema #4

Release Date: June 1969
Publisher: Frank Lunney
Page Count: 74
Appears on page(s): 15-19
Original List Price: 60¢
Mentioned in this column:
  • Piers Anthony's mention of Dean "in the last column he did," presumably issue #3
  • Sos the Rope, The Ring, Chthon, and Omnivore by Piers Anthony
  • SF Opinion
  • "The suspense novel that I just finished... my agent is taking it to Gold Medal." [Which title this ended up being published as is unclear as Dean never was published by Gold Medal.]
  • "Killerbot"
  • "Soft Come the Dragons"
  • "A Third Hand"
  • "High Weir" by Samuel R. Delany
  • Star Quest
  • Fall of the Dream Machine
  • The Dark Symphony
  • Star Quests [sic]
  • In Our Time and To Have and To Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
  • A letter from Gabe Eisenstein in the previous issue regarding artists Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta. Dean praises Jones specifically mentioning the cover art from the following three books:
  • The Moon of Gormath by Alan Garner
  • Star Barbarian by Dave van Arnam
  • Zanthar at Moon's Madness by Robert Moore Williams

BeABohema #5

Release Date: August 1969
Publisher: Frank Lunney
Page Count: 104
Appears on page(s): 30,31-33
Original List Price: 60¢
Mentioned in this column:
  • More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
  • Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
  • The Rest of Robots, I, Robot, Caves of Steel, and The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov
  • Please Don't Eat the Daises
  • The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
  • Gunsmoke (TV)
  • I, A Woman
  • Therese and Isabelle
  • Mission Stardust
  • Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Five Million Years to Earth

BeABohema #6

Release Date: October 1969
Publisher: Frank Lunney
Page Count: 102
Appears on page(s): 40-45
Original List Price: 60¢
Mentioned in this column:
  • Jack Gaughan, artist (Wikipedia)
  • Speaking at a Shippensburg College creative writing class, presumably taught by O. Richard Forsythe
  • Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Ed Ferman, editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine
  • The Breadloaf [sic] Writer's Conference (Wikipedia)
  • "The Twelfth Bed" having been rejected by Playboy, Esquire, The New Yorker, Atlantic, and "five other... major magazines
  • Kurt Vonnegut
  • Vladimir Nabokov

BeABohema #8

Release Date: 1970
Publisher: Frank Lunney
Page Count: 54
Appears on page(s): 4-9
Mentioned in this column:
  • Robert Silverberg at Philcon
  • "...my lovely and talented wife, with whom I have been collaborating on pseudonymous book (look out, [Richard E.] Geis!). Gerda does the chapter-by-chapter outlines of our erotic work, fleshes them out with some prose, and I do a final draft in two days. I spend four days a month on erotic titles which pays the rent and all out other bills plus puts some into savings--then I rush to the more serious work. The insurance provide by the erotic titles has made it easier for me to do what I want in sf..."
  • The Dark Symphony
  • "One film project it seems I will be involved with is Vaughn Bode's projected ninety minute adult erotic cartoon tentatively titled Bode's Erotica."
    See also: Vaughn Bodé's The Amorous Adventures of Puck
  • Theodore Sturgeon writing a screenplay based on "wooden Ships" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash "According to Variety"
  • Vaughn Bode's "Deadbone" strip in Cavelier
  • Gardner Dozois
  • Screw (Wikipedia
  • A forthcoming speaking gig on June 15, [1970] "to a congregation of high school teachers attending a dour day fest to present them with new ideas for the English classroom."
  • Midnight Cowboy
  • Easy Rider
  • They Shoot Horses, Dont' They
  • Alice's Restaurant
  • The Fixer
  • "The ten best cuts from albums or singles in 1969..."
    • "Walk on the Water by the Credence Clearwater Revival (CCR)
    • "Effigies" by the CCR
    • "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window", Beatles
    • "Lay, Lady, Lay" by [Bob] Dylan
    • "Jingo" by Santana
    • "Helplessly Hoping" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash
    • "Fortunate Son" by the CCR
    • "Black Magic Woman" by Fleetwood Mac
    • "Wooden Ships" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash
    • "The boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel
    • "I have purposefully omitted Led Zeppelin because I can't forgive them for the commerciality of Album Two."
  • Artist Jim Steranko "who's beginning to do Lancer covers."

Notes

BeABohema #4 (Another column by)

“BeABohema was a science fiction fanzine edited by Frank Lunney of Quakertown, Pennsylvania . It lasted for twenty issues from 1968 to December 1971, and was nominated for the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, losing to Richard E. Geis’ Science Fiction Review.”
Source: Wikipedia contributors. (2019, October 12). BeABohema. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:09, January 17, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BeABohema&oldid=920888832

Subtitled “A place in which thoughts–traveling between distant points of my mind–are put onto paper.” in BeABohema #4.

The full byline in BeABohema #4 is “Another column by Dean R. Koontz”

Title variations:

  • “Wav Station” on page 15 of BeABohema #4. [Assumed typo]

Beabhoema #19 contains a column titled “I Fell into an Avalanche” by Jerry Lapidus which covers a basic history of Beabhoema. It contains the following line on page 23 when discussing issue #6:
“…4 pages of Dean Koontz on various issues and people, especially Robert Moore Williams.”

According to Dean:
“In the earliest couple of years of his career, Dean wrote a few letters and articles for science-fiction fanzines. He was not prolific in this area because he was too busy writing fiction to pay the bills and to learn his craft. Therefore, in 1991, Dean was shocked to learn that a person he had previously worked with professionally had, beginning in 1969 and continuing at least through the early 1970s, been writing letters in Dean’s name to individuals and had submitted letters, and even some articles, in Dean’s name to fanzines. The name “X” will do until the full story can be told in Dean’s memoirs. All of this information was first disclosed to Dean in 1991 when X provided a written admission of these activities, although he could not remember everyone to whom these forged letters and articles had been sent. Consequently, any fanzine appearances by Dean after 1968 are highly suspect unless they were submitted with a cover letter on his own letterhead of that time.”
Source: https://www.deankoontz.com/about-dean/collectors

See also: Regarding Certain Fanzines and Piers Anthony

Related items:

Zanthar at Moon’s Madness by Robert Moore Williams, cover art by Jeffrey Jones
Star Barbarian by Dave van Arnam, cover art by Jeffrey Jones
The Moon of Gormath by Alan Garner. cover art by Jeffrey Jones
Worlds of IF, October 1968, containing “High Weir” by Samuel R. Delany
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov
The Rest of Robots by Isaac Asimov
Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
2001: A Space Odyssey
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Five Million Years to Earth
I, A Woman
Mission Stardust
Planet of the Apes
Please Don’t Eat the Daises
Therese and Isabelle
Finnegans Wake> by James Joyce
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Alice’s Restaurant
Easy Rider
Midnight Cowboy
The Fixer
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They

 

Last updated on February 7th, 2020