
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1991                   TAG: 9104170315
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

THEY CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DID THIS

It began with filk-singing (that's right: FILK-singing) over a few drinks and ended up as a science-fiction book called "Carmen Miranda's Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three."

It was edited by Don Sakers, who admits you never know what will come out of a sci-fi convention.

Sakers was attending another one last weekend at Virginia Tech, where he was among the guests at Technicon 8, when he explained all this.

But back to filk-singing. Basically, it's original folk songs with a science-fiction or fantasy bent to them. Sci-fi fans have their own language, and the Technicon program booklet contains a translation of some of the more common terms.

Filk-singer Leslie Fish wrote the song about Carmen Miranda in a sudden inspirational spurt. She was inspired, she told Sakers later, by equal parts of Thanksgiving eggnog and the sight of one of her group making his way through a crowded room bearing a fruit basket on his head.

Sakers heard the tape at a sci-fi gathering and mused, "You know, I think there's the possibility of a story in that song."

He had already published some sci-fi magazine stories and a novel, "The Leaves of October," among other things. When he mentioned his Carmen Miranda inspiration to some writer friends and played the tape for them, they joked that they might like to write a story on that theme, too.

At still another sci-fi convention, he suggested a collection to a publisher's representative "halfway through her second drink," and the rest is history.

The paperback came out last year from Baen Books, with 19 stories and a cover illustration by Tom Kidd showing Carmen Miranda with a basket of fruit on her head doing one of her Latin dances somewhere above the Earth with a wheel-like space station spinning around her hips.

And, Sakers noted, "no two authors went in anything resembling the same direction" in their song-inspired contributions.

One of the story contributors was the same Leslie Fish who wrote and performed the song that started it all. Others include Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh, and Susan Shwartz who kept commenting throughout the project that "I still can't believe we're doing this." - New River Valley bureau

by CNB