Lee Gold

Lee Gold is a member of California science fiction fandom and a writer and editor in the role-playing game and filk music communities.^[1]

Gaming

Gold became prominent after 1975 as the editor of Alarums and Excursions, a monthly amateur press association to which RPG writers have contributed over the years.^[2] It won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Amateur Wargame Magazine in 1984, and the Origins Award for Best Amateur Game Periodical in 2000, 2001, and 2002.^[3][4] Gold began the publication at the request of Bruce Pelz, who felt that discussion of Dungeons & Dragons was taking up too much space in APA-L, an amateur press association loosely associated with the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.^[5]

Her professional credits in the RPG field include Land of the Rising Sun and Lands of Adventure, published by Fantasy Games Unlimited; GURPS Japan, published by Steve Jackson Games; and Vikings, published by Iron Crown Enterprises.^[6] Land of the Rising Sun (1980) was a Japanese RPG which used the Chivalry & Sorcery system,^[7]:74 and Lands of Adventure(1983) featured a system intended to run historical fantasy games.^[7]:75

Gold was listed in the 'Top 50 Most Influential People in the Adventure Game Market for Y2000'^[8]

Fiction

In 2012, Blue Oak Books published Gold's Bloodslut Trilogy about the tumultuous life of Sangria, a young woman living in a distant future Habitat where people of different sub-classes are genetically engineered to have special functions. For instance, Sangria has the ability to help the aristocrat class live forever by sucking their blood and filtering out toxins. The three volumes are Bloodslut, Wild Blood and Aristo Blood.

Filk

In 1988, Gold (who had been filking since 1967) also began publishing Xenofilkia,^[2] a bimonthly collection of filk lyrics (and some sheet music). Over 400 songwriters have contributed, including Leslie Fish, Tom Smith and Bob Kanefsky.^[9] Although Gold has published filk lyrics, she has never recorded for public distribution.

Gold was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 1997.^[10]

Lee and Barry Gold were Featured Filkers at Boskone 44 in 2006.^[11]

In 2012, Gold published Dr. Jane's Songs, a compilation of all of Dr. Jane's songs that Jim Robinson could find in his archives, plus a few that Lee Gold found from other sources, with illustrations.^[12] In 2014, she published a compilation of all the songs by Cynthia McQuillin that Gold, Robinson, McQuillin's literary executors and several other people could track down, over 450 pages of songs.^[13]

Publishing history

As of January 2015, she had published 473 issues of Alarums and Excursions and 159 issues of Xenofilkia,^[14] as well as six volumes of Filker Up!, a filk-song anthology.

She published Tom Digby: Along Fantasy Way, a collection of writings by Tom Digby for ConFrancisco, the 1993 Worldcon where Digby was an Honored Guest, and has published writings by other prominent fan writers in the Los Angeles area.

She has also published a collection of songs by Dr. Jane Robinson (2012-9-10),^[12] another of songs by Cynthia McQuillin (2014-3-8).^[13] In both cases, James Robinson sent copies of all the songs in his possession to Gold. Kristoph Klover and Margaret Davis (McQuillin's literary executors) lent McQuillin's handwritten songs to Robinson, who copied them and sent them to Gold for inclusion. Many other people helped make the McQuillin songbook as complete as possible: the subhead for the songbook reads "all the songs written by Cynthia McQuillin that Dr. James Robinson and Lee Gold and Mary Creasey and Harold Stein and Bob Kanefsky and Alan Thiesen and Margaret Davis and Kristoph Klover could find in 2013."

References