The Crotchety Old Fan

Wow. I’ve just received an email from the distribution company that picked up my paintball book (A Parent’s Guide to Paintball) asking me how much it would cost them to obtain an additional 25,000 copies.
Of course I know that the inquiry may very well turn into fewer copies by the time we get to [...]

There’s been a lot of Heinlein discussion of late, mostly prompted by the release of the authorized biography (just head on over to TOR’s website to see what I mean).
SFSignal’s MindMeld this week (next big thing in SF) plays into this a bit as well.
So many writers these days (fans as well) are of the [...]

I picked up a telescope the other day, one of those ’see if the kid gets hooked without spending too much money’ student refractors. Hey, what the heck, it cost me five bucks and I can always use the (cheap) tripod for the video camera (it’s actually a few crucial inches taller than my [...]

Ottinger always finds neat stuff (not the least of which is my stuff, lol).
While waiting to answer comments over on GFTW (my monthly column premiered there today) I found this meme link from The World in the Satin Bag blog from Michio – who’s always positing wonderful concepts from the science side of science fiction. [...]

Will be the premiere of my column over at Grasping for the Wind, John Ottinger’s excellent review and other stuff site.
www.graspingforthewind.com
John does crazy stuff like creating popular memes out of thin air…

Abject apologies to all and sundry who have been visiting in the vain hope that there would be something new here. Get’s kind of old after a while, don’t it?
I’m still mired in paintball business stuff. No (business) plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Like nearly every war the US has [...]

1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – [...]

Available June 22, 2010
ECCO/Harper Collins
254 pages
$23.99
Larry Doyle is the author of I Love You Beth Cooper and a former writer on the team that weekly brings us The Simpsons. It should come as no surprise then that his latest novel – Go Mutants – is hilarious. Humorous even. Side-splittingly funny, to borrow [...]

Norman Spinrad announces his return home from the hospital and looks forward to writing more once he’s completed his recovery process.
Norm is one of my ‘new wave faves’ (anyone who can write the alt history/SF tale The Iron Dream as a stand-in for Hitler the SF author is doing something special); I’m still amazed that [...]

An expanded look at the recommendations.
I’m not surprised at the way the graph looks.  My off the cuff explanation of the general ‘U’ shape is that most of the contributors have been exposed (in one fashion or another) to a grounding in the classics and believe, as did their educators, that those early works are [...]