Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky

Starting in 1977, three men associated with the KPFA radio station in the San Francisco Bay started an interview program called Probabilities. Over the next couple of decades, they talked to dozens of science fiction writers - and eventually other writers and even non-writers, as the series changed over time and shifted names - in programs that were broadcast on the Pacifica network and that I think have been accessible somewhere online in more recent years.

The three men are Richard Wolinsky of KPFA; Lawrence Davidson, science fiction buyer for the famous Cody's Books of Berkley; and Richard A. Lupoff, SF novelist, editor and fan.

For years, they talked about pulling together an oral history of early SF from those interviews. They had contracts with publishing companies a few times, but things didn't quite work out - until they did.

Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! is that oral history, subtitled Interviews with Science Fiction Legends. It assembles and organizes conversations between one or more of the three interviewers (in various permutations) with fifty-nine people who were nearly all SF writers (and many were also editors or agents, and all but the earliest generation were fans first, in the old familiar way), from Forrest J. Ackerman to Roger Zelazny. It was published a few months ago.

Of the interviewers, only Wolinsky is still with us, Lupoff and Davidson having both died over the past decade. Among the interviewees, I think only Robert Silverberg is left, but I'd be happy to have missed someone. So this is a little bit like Queequeg's coffin, popping up above the waves at a moment when everything else related to it has been dragged down into the murky depths. (Or maybe I'm being overly dramatic about an oral history of a time that is, let's be honest, around a hundred years ago.)

Wolinsky organizes this vast mass of individual transcripts into seven longish chapters, running roughly chronologically from the early days of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing in the 1920s through roughly 1960. We hear from all of the interviewees where they said something relevant, and many of them are seeming to respond to each other, turning the book occasionally into a conversation. They don't always agree with each other in all aspects, of course, and Wolinsky has done a bit of editing to quietly correct misstated facts and add in some explanatory notes - people don't always get everything 100% right when talking live on the radio.

I don't think there's anything new here - obviously, the interviews themselves were public when they were made, and have been incorporated into the standard view of the field and fan lore - but Wolinksy and his fellow interviewers talked to an incredibly broad spectrum of SF personalities, especially in the early days - general pulpeteers like Ed Earl Repp and Louis Lamour, early fans-turned-editors like Julie Schwartz, and notable minor writers like Stanton A. Coblenz, Raymond Z. Gallun, E. Hoffman Price, and Harry Bates.

There's a lot of the usual fan self-back-patting, talking about how smart and forward-looking and wonderful they all were, in the early days of the world when pulp magazines roamed free and the world was their oyster. This is mostly the reminiscences old men - and a very few women - about the days when they were young and pounding out reams of paper for what was a surprisingly good wage, so there's the usual golden glow about all of those memories.

But Wolinsky's editorial voice reins that in, and he's very clear on how the field has changed since then - as well as pointing out some of the obvious flaws in that bright fannish world of the '30s. Space Ships! is a fun book, with a lot of quirky and distinctive voices - a few of those early writers were interviewed at a time in their lives when they clearly didn't worry about burning bridges, avoiding profanity, or any other considerations of propriety - all corralled into telling what turns into a mostly coherent, consistent story of a whole field building itself out of the materials it found at hand.

Better Things: 'Til I Disappear

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

And the last song in this series, the last one I post this year, is another obscurity - another noisy song from a band that never quite hit it big, but made some great songs. (Again, I almost seem to be begging readers to point out somewhere that I'm wrong - that a band I think is obscure actually has an unbroken string of #1 hits in Finland or something.)

The song is 'Til I Disappear, from Yellow Ostrich - but it's more complicated than that. There's a longer version on their 2010 record Wild Comfort, but the version I love is the shorter version, from a 2012 NoiseTrade sampler, where I first heard Yellow Ostrich.

So this is an obscure version of an obscure song by an obscure band - if I seem to be ending the year trying to maximize my hipster-ness, I have to apologize. That wasn't the point.

This is another slow burn song; I've mentioned several times how I love those. It starts with a keening guitar line, and then the singer's voice, also keening, above it.

Stay awhile fleeing glimpses of,
Stay awhile fleeing taste of love.
Go ye now to the ocean peer,
Stay awhile till I disappear

I don't know exactly what it's about. It's the kind of nonspecific, slightly archaic language that the songwriter has clearly crafted specifically. There's some kind of ending - probably not a death, but you can never be sure in a song.

So: probably yet another breakup song. Fitting for me, I think. Whatever it's about, it has a great sound, a great energy, and a propulsive force.

So long farewell,
My love, I see it's time.
It's been nice to know you.
Maybe when we're older,
We can meet again.
We'll see if we remember.

Next week it will be a new year, and a new series of posts here on Mondays. As I write this, I haven't figured out all the details exactly yet - so both you and I will need to find out what that series will be. See you there.

Quote of the Hour: Empty Offices

There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.315 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Sources of the 19th Century Land Rush in Africa

The industrial revolution, which had begun by giving more wealth to nearly everybody, had reached its second stage in which enormous, yearly increasing accumulations of surplus capital were falling into a small, yearly diminishing number of hands; the need of the time was for new sources of raw material, new markets, but more than anything, for new fields of profitable investment.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.553-4 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: Iron Curtain Entertainments

Since neither had eaten, they dined together at the hotel; they discussed Faulkner and Hawthorne while waiters brought them soup and veal a continent removed from the cabbagy cuisine of Russia. A lithe young woman on awkwardly high heels stalked among the tables singing popular songs from Italy and France. The trailing microphone wire now and then became entangled in her feet, and Bech admired the sly savagery with which she would, while not altering an iota her enameled smile, kick herself free.

 - John Updike, "Bech in Rumania," in Bech: A Book, p.25 in The Complete Henry Bech

Quote of the Hour: Listen! Name some towns in New Jersey quick!

I had been trying all afternoon, in vain, to think of the name Perth Amboy. It seems now like a very simple name to recall and yet on the day in question I thought of every other town in the country, as well as such words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink, etc. without even coming close to Perth Amboy. I suppose terra cotta was the closest I came, although it was not very close.

 - James Thurber, "More Alarms at Night," My Life and Hard Times, p.171 in Writings and Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Stakeout

The lull between Detroit-bound commuters and the stiffs who worked locally ended just before the half hour. I wound up the window on the driver's side against the wallop of their passage, watched a slightly chubby blonde in a pink kimono and mules to match trying to wheel an empty trash can up her driveway while holding down her hem against the slipstream - a Vargas Girl moment - and saw a kid on a Segway make a nifty maneuver to avoid becoming a casualty of Overcaffeinated Motorist Syndrome. He turned the scooter in a circle and dismounted to give the driver the international sign of disapproval. As far as stakeouts go it was sweeps week.

 - Loren D. Estleman, The Left-Handed Dollar, pp.97-98

Quote of the Hour: The Bright Side of Disaster

One of the most sustaining gifts a man can possess is the ability to look upon the bright side of disaster. It was a gift which, until now, Sigsbee H. Waddington had lacked almost entirely: but at this moment, owing perhaps to the fact that he had just introduced into his interior a healing drink of quite exceptional strength, he suddenly found himself discerning with a limpid clearness the fact that the elimination of that near-pearl necklace from the scene of things was, from his point of view, the very best thing that could have happened.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor, p.189

Quote of the Hour: One Mind, Concentrated

The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good - a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

 - Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," p.11 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Hour: Just the Right Spot

Inigo stood and walked away, surveying the terrain over which they would battle. It was a splendid plateau, really, filled with trees for dodging around and roots for tripping over and small rocks for losing your balance on and boulders for leaping off if you could climb on them fast enough, and bathing everything, the entire spot, moonlight. One could not ask for a more suitable testing ground for a duel, Inigo decided. It had everything, including the marvelous Cliffs at one end, beyond which was the wonderful thousand-foot drop, always something to bear in mind when one was planning tactics. It was perfect. The place was perfect.

Provided the man in black could fence

Really fence.

 - William Goldman, The Princess Bride, p.106

Quote of the Hour: Misery on the Beach

By this time the afternoon sun had begun to be too warm for comfort, and it struck Wilton that he could be a great deal more comfortable nursing his wounded heart with his back against one of the rocks than tramping any farther over the sand. Most of the Marvis Bay scenery is simply made as a setting for the nursing of a wounded heart. The cliffs are a somber indigo, sinister and forbidding; and even on the finest days the sea has a curious sullen look. You have only to get away from the crowd near the bathing-machines and reach one of these small covers and get your book against a rock and your pipe well alight, and you can simply wallow in misery. I have done it myself. The day when Heloise Miller went golfing with Teddy Bingley I spent the whole afternoon in one of these retreats. It is true that, after twenty minutes of contemplating the breakers, I fell asleep; but that is bound to happen.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Wilton's Holiday," p.62 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Quote of the Hour: Doctors Are Just Like You and Me

He finished his call and hung up, He leaned back and sat there brooding, staring down at his desk, but not forgetting to look out of the window every half minute. He was waiting, and I waited with him, for no reason at all. Doctors make many phone calls, talk to many people. Doctors look out of their front windows, doctors frown, doctors show nervousness, doctors have things on their mind and show the strain. Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, p.22 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: The Speeches of Mr. Bain in the Guiana Bush

During the stimulating fortnight I was to spend in his company he talked at large on every conceivable topic, eagerly, confidently, enthusiastically, not always accurately, sometimes scarcely coherently, inexhaustibly; with inspired imagination, with dizzy changes of thought and rather alarming theatrical effects, a vocabulary oddly compounded of the jargon he was accustomed to use among his subordinates and the longer, less habitual words he had noticed in print. As I have said, he talked of everything at one time or another, but mostly either in metaphysical speculation or in anecdote. He himself always figured prominently in the latter and it was in these that his gestures became most dramatic.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, p.399 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: How I Made It, Least-Useful Edition

Ever since then, my advice to younger comedians and comedy writers who want to break into television is simple: become a huge screw-up, develop a life-threatening drug habit, be forced to leave your hometown and move to a Midwestern city, then randomly and fortuitously get hired to work on a TV show that goes on to be considered a classic. That is my advice. It's idiotic advice, but advice nonetheless.

 - Frank Conniff, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever, p.10

Quote of the Hour: Dangers of the Yard

The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it and so did Frau Dressler's guests.

 - Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p.135