Ascended Fanboy: Several of the Lanthanides went on to become famous.but the narration also remarks that she's trying to get her own book published and thought such an association would hurt her chances, so she comes off looking fairly silly. When Jay takes over the celebrity D&D game following Dungannon's murder, it's mentioned that one of the players dropped out because she didn't want anything to do with the author of "Bimbos of the Death Sun". Mistaken for Misogynist: Jay is afraid that this will happen if anyone learns about his novel Marion (who is actually feminist) made absolutely certain that it wasn't demeaning note Jay chose to have women be affected simply because some diseases are linked to sex, but that's little reassurance for the man who wrote a book called " Bimbos of the Death Sun" with a Frank Frazetta-wannabe cover.Meaningful Name: Jay chose his pen name because of the significance of jω - "jay-omega" - in electrical engineering.Fur Bikini: The woman on the cover of Jay's book is noted to wear a rather skimpy fur ensemble.When she first met Jay, he was similarly afflicted (though weedy rather than chubby), and with her help he turned into quite the dish himself. Beautiful All Along: Marion was chubby in her fandom days, but started exercising and taking more care in her appearance.Asshole Victim: Both of the victims are portrayed as arrogant jerks, but both get little moments that make them look slightly more sympathetic more so in Zombies, where it turns out the man was quite likely suffering from mental illness.
Clifford Morgan, the obsessive Tratyn Runewind fanboy, takes his fandom so far that he murders the author of his beloved novels out of an insane, misguided belief that he needed to "protect" Runewind from him. McCrumb doesn't mock or condemn people with geeky interests - in fact, most of them are presented in a positive light, not the least of which are the protagonists Jay and Marion - but shows that everyone needs to recognize at what point you're taking things too far and need to step back. An Aesop: While both books are generally focused on their respective mysteries, there's an element of "Everything in moderation" woven into the text.He is murdered that night, and once again Jay and Marion attempt to investigate. They accompany him to the reunion/opening of the capsule, where the Lanthanides' prodigal son has apparently come Back from the Dead and threatens to expose devastating secrets about his former friends. It has Jay and Marion learn that one of their fellow professors is a member of the Lanthanides, a group of SF fans who fancied themselves up-and-coming legends and buried a time capsule before parting ways in the late 1950s. Some time between the costume contest and the celebrity Dungeons & Dragons game, however, Dungannon is murdered, and Jay and Marion do a little investigating of their own.įive years later, McCrumb wrote a sequel, Zombies of the Gene Pool.
#Miss bimbo of the universe contest series#
There, they meet the onerous Appin Dungannon, author of a Conan-like series of novels and owner of an incredibly short fuse and colossal ego. Though he attempts to bury his Old Shame, his girlfriend Marion Farley, the college's assistant professor of English, books him as a guest at Rubicon, a local SF convention. His novel was a serious, hard SF story, but by the time the second-rate publishing house got through with it, it was saddled with a Frank Frazetta-esque cover and the title Bimbos of the Death Sun. What very few people realize is that he is also Jay Omega, one-time science fiction author - and that's exactly how Jay wants it. James Owen Mega is just an ordinary guy, a professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. Award-winning 1988 Whodunit by Sharyn McCrumb which combines a serious murder mystery with the scariest world of all - fandom.
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