A Flight of Bontlings
Another late 90s wank. Sorry about that; it's been harder than I anticipated getting good primary sources online for some of the epically hilarious earlier stuff. But this one's got a certain amount of meat on its bones.

Anyhow, someone said something about a "new VB", and while I realize that they were probably referring to Victoria Bitter, as that would make sense in context and all, it reminded me of another VB. A VB whose name is seldom spoken, for reasons concealed herein.

There's this actress, Vanna Bonta. I'm sure you all remember her for her unforgettable performances as "Additional Voices", "Computer Voices", "Lead Actress in Play" and so on. There's actually a role people here might recognize: "Zed's Wife", in the . . . erm, remarkable 1982 film, The Beastmaster. She also appeared as "Student in Lab" in Being From Another Planet, MSTK 4x05.

You'd think that a film career as lively as that would be enough for one woman, but you'd be wrong. Horribly, horribly, wrong. She wrote a book, you see. Called Flight. It was "published" in 1995, and soon after a buzz started to develop on the AOL message boards, and on Usenet. I don't know if the AOL stuff is archived anywhere, but if one looks at the Usenet postings, there's something a bit peculiar about them.

There are all these different people, see, and they're all interested in talking about how totally fantabulously awesome Vanna Bonta and her books are. And very little else. Here, have some examples: AIRAFLIGHT. ANNEMAR201. Book Magic. BorgFreeee. Butch 0009. EduKate101. Greeneater. LitWitt. NOTeeBecca. SAGstarpix. Stanblount. Stenoscoop.

Such single-minded dedication from fans of a self-published book!

Oh, wait, did I say self-published? Because on the thread, some of those very different people said that it was published by a really real publishing house, Median House. And here's Median House's website. Puzzling thing about it, though. For a really real publishing house, they seem to have a rather limited list. Three books in a dozen years, apparently. Well, two books in a dozen years. One of the books on their website, Couples and Money, a Couples' Guide, seems to have been published by Gabriel Publications, a completely different vanity, er, subsidy press. So two books then: Flight, and The Story of A Rich Dog and A Poor Dog by Lydia Ugolini. (Remember that name, by the way.)

Anyhow, as you can see, these are people who are very, very interested in Flight, and in asserting that they're real live people. Because it's not just in retrospect that these things get noticed. There's a certain pattern to these interactions: Here TNH explains it all. And Barnaby paints a grim, dystopian vision of the goings-on here (Avram Grumer chimes in with his own version as well.)

The focus at the time was primarily about SwankIV1. She was a far more developed character than most of the other Bontlings, and there was a certain amount of disagreement on the primary kerfuffle venue, rec.arts.sf.fandom as to whether she was for real or no. She had a buddy, Bunky Satch, so presumably, if you grant the existence of one, you grant the existence of the other.

If you want to see for yourself, have a thread. It's a bit long, and it's not the only thread on this, or similar topics. In fact, here's one from 2003 – It marks the beginning, middle, and end of the internet careers of Hugo Rossi and Race Kevin. They don't really type out Vanna Bonta on rassef anymore, for fear of getting internet presences of that sort finding them and having similar careers.

And that's the thing about Flight. It's fans persist in their singleminded, strikingly similar devotion to Flight and Flight alone. Check out the Amazon.com page. Everyone there seems to love it. Except for one or two people, but their reviews are found to be unhelpful by most of those following it. And one of them gets snarked at in comments. Most of the reviewers of Flight don't seem to have read a lot of books, though a number of them do seem to like music. One of them also has unkind things to say about one of Doyle and Macdonald's books. Could it be that this review by Doyle and/or Macdonald touched a nerve?

And then there's Wikipedia: Vanna Bonta gets pretty extensive and kind treatment. It informs us of such facts as, "Bonta's passionate interests in outer space (she is an advocate of space settlement[6] and philanthropy to utilize resources and intelligence to uplift humanity), mechanics (she rebuilt a car engine), physics, and the human relationship to the cosmos appear as themes in the stories she has been writing since age 6", for instance. "Quantum Fiction", the term she prefers for her genre gets equally kind and complete treatment. And then you get her Grandfather, (or possibly Godfather) Luigi Ugolini. Yep, there's that name again – it appears that the author of A Rich Dog and a Poor Dog is Luigi's daughter. Now, I'm not an expert on Italian literature, but it doesn't seem impossible that he's everything that Wikipedia says he is. All the same, there's a lot more hagiography there than you get for most minor Italian writers. There aren't a lot of editors on any of these, but by golly do they edit the hell out of 'em. And not much else.

So who's doing all this work – writing reviews, editing wikipedia, posting to Usenet, and so on? It obviously can't be Vanna; she's been busy with her Musical Trance Fusion thing. It has a caveman in it.

Obviously, it's got to be her fans. Her tightly focused fans; Flight must just be one of those things that such a transformative experience that it leaves no room for enthusiasm about anything else. Only. . . only if it's really got all those fans, why is the first edition still available new, on Amazon?