Upcoming Things

I’ve got a few ’specials’ planned for the near future, among them are:

Retro-Interviews with Samuel R. Delany and Norman Spinrad.

These interviews were originally conducted in 1978 by my then SF-partner in crime Joe Zitt, and were published in our SEMIPROZINE Contact:SF.

Delany has been coming back into focus in the industry with reprints of most of his early SF work starting to appear.? Earlier this year he was written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer SFSite had a conversation with him as well? ? The Lannan Foundation website has an audio intro, reading and conversation with him from January HERE and his personal website is HERE

Joe Zitt is, among other things, a musicologist and explorer of all things tone related.? His musical background and similar interests on Delany’s part provides an interesting curve to the interview.? Joe’s website is HERE

He also conducted an interview with Norman Spinrad around the same time as the one with Delany.? (Both of us were living in SF heaven in the 70s – smack-dab in-between Philadelphia and New York;? later on in the year we would jointly interview the editors of all of the major fiction mags – interviews that were never transcribed and are, I believe, now lost:? they included George Scithers, David Hartwell, Gardner Dozois, Ted White and others.)

Norman Spinrad – many casual fans may know him from his Doomsday script for Star Trek:TOS (he also wrote for other series including Land of the Lost) but we knew him for groundbreaking works like Bug Jack Barron, The Men in the Jungle and The Iron Dream.? He has continued to write since those (A World Between and Riding the Torch being the most recent I’ve read) and remains on my ‘to-read’ pile.

SciFiDimensions has an interview with him from 2001 HERE and you can visit his personal webspace HERE

If you don’t know these authors from their works, I do recommend the following:? Einsten Intersection, Triton and Dhalgren (I’m not sure if I should recommend reading Dhalgren with or without the assistance of mind-altering chemicals, so consider it an option.? Don’t THINK anything about the book until you are at least twenty pages in – just let it kind of wash over you) and all of the aforementioned – Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream and Men in the Jungle in particular – for an experience of Norman.

I have almost completed Niven & Pournelle’s Escape From Hell (the Inferno sequel) – less than ten pages to go (and I still don’t know what’s going to happen, which is a good thing) and I’ll have a few words to say about both takes on Dante in a future review.

Following that, a quick dip into Harry Harrison’s STAR SMASHERS OF THE GALAXY RANGERS as a re-read:? somewhere amongst my many moves I seem to have lost a box of book – there are some suspicious holes in the collection, one of them being SSOTGR, probably one of the funniest send-ups of SF ever written.? I finally managed to re-acquire a copy of the same edition I used to have and am rewarding myself for persistence with a re-read.? I may as well write it up here too – there’s a reprint out there (and maybe a movie…)

And after that – a review of Space Cops, a new anthology from a small press – science fiction trails publishing that features a short story by John M. Whalen, one of the regulars over at RayGun Revival.? They also saw fit to send me something called The Devil’s Due by David Riley, so I’ll be taking a look at that too.

AND and and.

There’s going to be a new front page to the website – probably later on today – and someone over at Readercon suggested that I make a t-shirt out of the COF logo – she thinks it will sell – so I’ll be getting around to putting that up too.