Small Press Roundup

nce again, as these things seem regularly to happen, I find myself snowed under by a veritable paper-blizzard of fine small-press titles, only a fraction of which I can cover here. But this is hardly a cruel fate for me, and I promise never to complain.

 

Novels and Novellas

Critic and scholar Douglas Anderson is responsible for what surely has to be one of the most delightful literary resurrections in a dog’s years. After almost one hundred and eighty years, a witty, satirical fable sees the light of day again, thanks to his efforts. The Rebellion of the Beasts (Wicker Park Press, hardcover, $21.95, 151 pages, ISBN 0-89733-520-1), published anonymously in 1825 and attributed with good reason to the Romantic poet Leigh Hunt (friend to Byron, Shelley, and their crowd), forms a prototype for George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). A general revolt by intelligent animals, fishes, reptiles, birds, and insects manages to overthrow man’s dominion, practically exterminating our species. But that’s only the first half of the novel. What happens when the anthropomorphic animals try ruling themselves forms the second part, when, under a dictatorial Jackass king, they invariably begin to recapitulate mankind’s follies. Hunt’s wickedly cynical jabs are counterbalanced by the tenderness evinced toward abused domestic beasts in the first portion of the tale. His Swiftian inventiveness is boundless ("kissing tails" is the approved way of showing respect in the new realm, even when it’s a human approaching an animal), and the first-person narration by one "John Sprat" limns a convincing personality. Anyone imagining that this book is outdated, since it focuses its anger on a monarchy, should check out the passage on page sixty-two that describes how a threatened state’s first reaction is to curtail civil liberties. That could never happen nowa- days, right?

It’s been a lonely time since we’ve heard from Marcos Donnelly, whose debut novel, Prophets for the End of Time (1998), was a rousing bit of theologically inclined SF. But now Donnelly returns with similar heady stuff in Letters from the Flesh (Robert J. Sawyer Books, hardcover, $19.95, 191 pages, ISBN 0-88995-302-3). Parallel epistolary tracks converge in a singular revelation about the nature of the universe. In one era, we eavesdrop on the correspondence of the historical Saul of Tarsus, aka St. Paul. Yet these are not Paul’s well-known epistles, but rather communications with aliens. For Paul, we learn, is really a shell inhabited by a non-material entity from the stars, who finds Earth a most perplexing place. In the present, we intercept the e-mails from scientist Lillian Uberland to her cousin Mikey, a high-school teacher caught up in the evolution-versus-creationism controversy. Both tracks are filled with vivid and richly detailed characters and incidents, all of which cohere to make some lively philosophical points. Writing like a combination of Howard Hendrix and Paul Park, Donnelly gives his "ghost in the machine" thesis a thorough workout.

Based on his novella Jigsaw Men (PS Publishing, trade paper, $16.00, 103 pages, ISBN 1-902880-77-3), Gary Greenwood is an author to watch. This deft, thrilling, steampunk excursion into an alternate continuum where Martian Heat-Ray technology and the perfection of Doctor Frankenstein’s researches have resulted in a world-dominating twenty-first-century British Empire is one of the grandest counterfactual rides going, even given the welter of such lately. Detective Livingstone of the London police force is assigned the case of investigating the disappearance of a politician’s daughter. He rapidly finds himself involved in much more than a simple kidnapping, as the girl surfaces in a "Jigsaw" pornography video (the omnipresent Frankenstein revenants are called Jigsaw Men due to their stitching). As Livingstone tracks one lead to the next, he discovers a deadly plot by disgruntled American terrorists that threatens global stability. Greenwood inserts canny infodumps that never detour the fluid action, all the while building a believable portrait of a charmingly skewed world. The tale ends with a promise of more, and I for one look forward to revisiting this milieu.

One of the most accomplished novel debuts to attract my attention in some time can be found in Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine (Wildside, trade paper, $17.95, 242 pages, ISBN 1-59224-210-3). In its portrayal of a dystopian world, Beckett can stand shoulder to shoulder with Orwell and Burgess. In his focus on what separates (or unites) man and machine, he is cousin to Philip K. Dick. In his spiritual speculations, he reminds me of Anthony Boucher. In short, he’s assimilated many classical influences and transformed them into a unique new vision. In Beckett’s near-future scenario, the entire world has been swept by a variegated wave of savage religious fundamentalism known as the Reaction. One last redoubt of science and rationalism remains in the newly formed Mediterranean nation of Illyria. Our protagonist is George Simling (note the echoes of "simulacra" in his last name), who happens to fall in love with an android prostitute named Lucy. George’s subsequent derangement and Lucy’s transcendence form the bulk of the tale. Beckett beautifully and concretely evokes the mundane circumstances of George’s transgressive odyssey while never beating the reader over the head with its larger significance. This is a book rich with pathos, misery, and hope, rather like what we all imagined the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I. (2002) might have been. A triumph.

In The Hunger of Time (E-Reads, trade paper, $17.95, 252 pages, ISBN 0-7592-5512-1), Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes have unleashed one of the most satisfying cosmic romps in a long time. As if Rudy Rucker had collaborated with Olaf Stapledon, or H.G. Wells with Neal Stephenson, these authors have managed to combine vigorous and mind-croggling cosmological speculations with entertainingly off the wall dialogue and characterization. Stylistically slick, relentlessly zooming forward so fast it catches up with its own tail, this book will leave you gob-smacked. Our story opens in the near future. A global plague is about to destroy civilization. But luckily our protagonists–husband and wife Hugh and Grace D’Anzso, their daughters Natalie and Suzanna, and the family dog, Ferdy–have an escape hatch. Genius Hugh has perfected an interdimensional vacuole that exists outside of time and space. Sequestered inside, the family can leap forward in time–with one catch: every jump is exponentially larger than the prior one. Luckily, the jumps start small. The family ventures forward one year, then fourteen, then a few hundred, seeking the perfect place to stop. Well, they don’t quit traveling till the years mount up into the trillions, and there’s a hell of a lot of weirdness to encounter along the way. Narrated by Natalie, this tale possesses the pulp vigor of a 1930s Jack Williamson story with the sophistication to be found in Broderick’s non-fiction opus, The Spike (2002). And in one of their cleverest nods to past SF, these authors have rehabilitated one of Heinlein’s most controversial novels, Farnham’s Freehold (1964), right down to the incestuous subtext. Do you recall Papa Farnham’s first name? Hubert, it was. . . .

 

Single-Author Collections

Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms (Tachyon Publications, hardcover, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN 1-892391-21-X), by Suzy McKee Charnas, exhibits the author at her wide-ranging best. Containing such well-known award-winners as "Boobs" and "Unicorn Tapestry," this collection also features fascinating non-fiction, discussing Charnas’s involvement in the theater, among other topics. In a story such as "Listening to Brahms," where the last survivors of a doomed Earth manage inadvertently to launch a kind of cultural, semiotic virus on the aliens who befriend them, Charnas proves that she can take global tragedies and extract the most minute yet potent seed of hope from the rubble. Three linked stories comprise a nuanced portrait of her vampiric antihero Dr. Weyland. With its Leiberesque love affair with the stage, this entertaining volume deserves to run as long as Cats.

Reading the award-winning fiction of David Langford is like getting a guided tour of the history of fantastical literature with a witty and knowledgeable guide who embroiders his own whimsies on the tapestry being displayed. In his new collection, Different Kinds of Darkness (Cosmos Books, trade paper, $17.95, 286 pages, ISBN 1-59224-122-0), Langford proves himself adept at everything from New Wave experimentalism (his first story, "Heatwave," from 1975, stands up remarkably well) to cyberpunk ideation (the four "blit" stories, about brain-eating ideo-grams, including the Hugo-winning title piece, have been widely hailed by everyone from Sterling to Egan). Langford also turns his hand to pure fantasy and horror, and while he’s generally regarded as a humorist and there are plenty of comedic bits in this volume, he can nonetheless convincingly craft a grim tale of apocalypse such as "Cube Root." And his witty afterwords to each story are further inducement to purchase this anti-blit, brain-enhancing book.

If you’ve been following Interzone over the past few years, you’ve surely encountered the amazing stories of French writer (and aeronautical engineer) Jean-Claude Dunyach. If you haven’t been so lucky, now’s your chance to acquaint yourself with his work, in the form of The Night Orchid (Black Coat Press, trade paper, $20.95, 279 pages, ISBN 0-9740711-7-X). This collection assembles fourteen of his tales, six of which have never been rendered into English before. (The four translators–Sheryl Curtis, Jean-Louis Trudel, Dominque Bennett, and Ann Cale–do a marvelous, seamless job, by the way.) Here you’ll read about Professor Challenger battling pterodactyls in France (the title story); six juvenile killers who turn on their mentor ("The Parliament of Birds"); an artist whose medium is "slices of time" ("Scenes at the Exhibit"); and a colony of aliens stranded on Earth, who meet yearly for a strange ritual ("Footprints in the Snow"). And this merely cites four wonderful examples. Dunyach at various times evokes comparisons to Ballard, Lem, van Vogt, Zivkovic, or Gibson, but is always recognizably his own unique self. In my favorite story, "Watch Over Me When I Sleep," a shepherd boy swallows a fairy and finds his life forever blighted. George MacDonald himself could not have written a more transcendent fable.

In his introduction to Peter Crowther’s new collection, Songs of Leaving (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $40.00, 240 pages, ISBN 1-931081-85-9), Adam Roberts categorizes Crowther’s stories as not strictly SF or fantasy or horror, but rather as all-embracing "tales of wonder." This perfectly apt description implicitly conjures up comparison to a certain other fantasist who defies pigeonholing, and that man is Harlan Ellison. Reading Crowther’s new book is much like discovering a primo Ellison collection you never knew existed. Now, by this I do not mean that Crowther’s elegant stories exactly mimic Ellison’s in style or angle of attack or tone. From time to time, indeed, you might think of explicit points of contact between Ellison’s work and Crowther’s, but they would be thematic ones: the role of the alienated members of society; a reverence for certain aspects of pop culture; the tension between youth and maturity; and so on. But the parallel between Crowther and Ellison consists more of the emotional depths they both seek to plumb, the passionate way they both instinctually home in on just the right dramatic situation that will serve as objective correlative to their desired messages. When, in "Elmer," a young boy is trapped in the wreckage of a truck with his dying father, all the smoldering moments of the story prior to this ignite in a hot flash of perfect action. Then you get the same kind of punch as found in many an Ellison classic. Eleven other stories of this same level of poignancy, along with revelatory story notes, make this one of the more luminous collections of the year.

Wry, caustic, calculated, impulsive, veering unpredictably through the skies of imagination like drunken swallows, the stories of Richard Butner call to mind the work of Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, and Cory Doctorow. In Horses Blow Up Dog City & Other Stories (Small Beer Press, chapbook, $5.00, 63 pages, ISBN unavailable), Butner hews close to contemporary times and settings, but creates gems of gorgeous weirdness that are more exotic than anything found in Planet Stories. A Pee wee Herman-style puppeteer blazes a trail through the lives of his friends and the media in the title piece. An unambitious man wins a "Zen Mistress" in a contest and finds his life turned topsy-turvy ("Drifting"). The insanely egocentric career of a supermodel is blithely chronicled in "Lo-fi." A young couple on a road trip pick up an odd hitchhiker: the Devil himself in baggy long underwear ("Ash City Stomp"). And finally, in "The Rules of Gambling," the protagonist finds his muse in the form of the lone employee of the Institute of Predictology. These marvelous characters dancing their ridiculous waltzes will break your heart and make you laugh.

 

Anthologies and Magazines

The inaugural issue of Postscripts (PS Publishing, perfect-bound, $10.00, 170 pages, ISBN 1-904619-20-7) offers as much prime reading as any standout original anthology on the market. Under the editorship of Pete Crowther (ably assisted by Nick Gevers), this new zine compiles fresh work from such famous names as Aldiss, Wolfe, Oates, and Bradbury; plenty of sterling stuff from slightly lesser-known craftsmen such as Stephen Gallagher, Ramsey Campbell, and Peter Hamilton; and introduces new names such as Allan Ashley and Lawrence Gordon Clark. Toss in non-fiction features like Christopher Fowler’s essay on the decay of horror literature and a rare interview with James Blaylock, and the result is a mighty impressive book. The fiction here is unanimously well-wrought. I particularly enjoyed James Lovegrove’s Sturgeonesque "Seventeen Syllables," about a man who decides to strip his life bare of distractions, and Jay Lake’s "The Rose Egg," about the future of high-tech graffiti. But there’s not a loser in the bunch here. If Postscripts can keep up this high standard, it will soon dominate award ballots and best-of-the-year ToCs everywhere.

The thirteenth issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (Andromeda Spaceways Publishing, saddle-stapled, Aus$7.95, 128 pages, ISSN 1446-781X) strikes me as one of their best ever–and that’s saying a lot, considering the statistics proudly recounted in their editorial: over five hundred thousand words of fiction published since issue one. This time around, the bulk of ASIM is taken up with a rousing interstellar adventure by Stephen Dedman, "The Whole of the Law." But there’s still plenty of space for two promising first-sales, Steven Cavanagh’s Middle-Earth comedy, "Elf Esteem," and Marion Schweda’s "Urban Transit," which examines the bureaucratic nonsense that will one day attend regular use of matter transmitters. Additionally, you’ll find such goodies as David Hoffman-Dachelet’s "Sambilly’s Impractical Noodle Machine," a whimsical yet touching fantasy about a frustrated inventor, and Robert Marsh’s "The Truth About Alternate Dimensions," which harks back to pure Kuttner–or maybe Rucker–goofiness.

The sixth number of Yellow Bat Review (Yellow Bat Press, saddle-stapled, $2.50, 60 pages, ISSN 1539-4891) consists mostly of poetry, a goodly portion of the verses fantastical in nature. Familiar names such as Bruce Boston and Michael Arnzen will tempt Asimov’s readers, but they will also find such offerings as Michael Hemmingson’s poem-cycle "Rwanda" rewarding. In a verse such as "Me vs. the Scorpion," Hemmingson gracefully extracts cosmic lessons out of quotidian events–and that’s one important definition of the essence of poetry. And Kristine Dikeman’s short story, "The New Queen," turns Lewis Carroll into a horror writer–and makes us believe that’s not much of a stretch after all.

Maybe the fiction in issue two of Flytrap (Tropism Press, saddle stapled, $4.00, 53 pages, ISSN unavailable) could be labeled New Weird or Slipstream, Surreal or Horror. But I prefer just to call it damn fine writing. Under the joint editorship of Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw, this zine boasts an impressive array of prose and poetry from writers little-known to me, yet from whom I expect we’ll be hearing much more. Every story here grabs a red-hot trope or conceit and runs for the borders of irreality with it. Just consider "Kank’s Last Breath," by Michael Canfield, in which a connoisseur of dying exhalations journeys far to make a special purchase. Or Rudi Dornemann’s "The Labyrinth Tourist," which resonates with the exotic graphic novels of Schuiten and Peeters. Handsomely designed and lovingly illustrated, this zine deserves your patronage so that it might continue to flourish, benefiting us all.

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a zine named Say . . . which sought to reinvent itself with every issue by adding an interrogative clause to its name. The fourth time it did this trick, it called itself Say . . .Why Aren’t We Crying? (Fortress of Words, perfect-bound, $5.00, 68 pages, ISSN unavailable), and the results were splendid. Jude-Marie Green traffics in the future of interior decorating, ribofunk-style, in "Til the Wildness Cried Aloud." David Schwartz gives a deadpan yet affecting account of a poor fellow with a lacunae-ridden memory in "The Lethe Man." And E.L. Chen’s comic strip "Why Aren’t We Crying" encapsulates this issue’s theme in a witty, metafictional manner. That’s just for starters, of course. And take my word for it: you’ll be shedding tears of regret if you don’t subscribe to Say . . ., the zine of a thousand faces.

Surely the grandmother or patron saint of the current crop of experimental, path-breaking zines is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the production of Kelly Link and Gavin Grant. Through their example of boldness, determination, and offbeat eclecticism, other publishers and editors and writers have been moved to galvanize the formerly moribund zine scene. As has been said of the Velvet Underground and the genesis of subsequent bands, everyone who reads LCRW wants to start their own zine. Issue 14 (Small Beer Press, saddle-stapled, $5.00, 68 pages, ISSN 1544-7782) demonstrates once again that Grant and Link have their vision honed smooth and sharp. James Sallis contributes two beautiful wistful accounts of everyday life viewed awry. Bret Fetzer delivers a fractured fairy tale. Deborah Roggie crafts a genre-friendly piece that would not be amiss in the pages of Realms of Fantasy. And a dozen other contributors shine as well. Old as Methuselah in small-press years, LCRW shows no signs of hardening of the arteries.

The publishing company known as Phobos Books runs a regular contest for new writers, and displays the winning entries in a series of anthologies. With their latest book, Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome (trade paper, $14.95, 351 pages, ISBN 0-9720026-3-4), they’ve solicited new stories from past winners in order to compile, under the editorship of Keith Olexa, a collection that exhibits some solid narrative virtues and pleasures, but which, alas, does not break any new ground. The stories herein are all competently told, and range across the fertile fields of SF: future war, time travel, human bioengineering, exploration of alien worlds, and so on. But there’s an air of conceptual timidity about them all. For instance, Gordon Gross (who is in reality a husband-and-wife team of Harold Gross and Eve Gordon) spend almost fifty pages arranging a legal contest between a man and his digital upload, a riff that would be a throwaway line in a Charles Stross story. And the almost complete lack of stylistic variation among the authors here–I’d except Rebecca Carmi’s first-person voice and Daniel Conover’s gonzo Men in Black pastiche–produces a certain tepid sameness in the collection. I enjoyed these stories as pleasant transient diversions, but none of them showed the staying power or the creative engagement of the best of the magazine work discussed above.

Miscellaneous Titles

Any reader with a scintilla of interest in either a) SF; b) comics; or c) foreign expressions of a) and b) will leap with a yelp of excitement upon Shadowmen 2: Heroes and Villains of French Comics (Black Coat Press, trade paperback, $20.95, 319 pages, ISBN 0-9740711-8-8). Meticulously compiled and written by Jean-Marc and Randy L’Officier as a companion volume to the first Shadowmen encyclopedia (which I reviewed a few columns ago), this book catalogues the highlights of fantastical Gallic comic art. You may know of Barbarella, and possibly Lone Sloane, but who among us has heard of Fantax, Durga Rani, Wampus, or Felina? Yet all of these characters had long and glorious runs, which the L’Officiers thoroughly document and synopsize. Numerous B&W illos provide plenteous eye-candy, and the fun comes in comparing and contrasting the French heroes with their US counterparts. Superboy, for instance, is not the same everywhere, and that’s what makes life exciting.

Star Hawks: The Complete Series (Hermes Press, trade paper, $29.99, 320 pages, ISBN 1-932563-62-8), by Gil Kane, Ron Goulart, Archie Goodwin, and Roger MacKenzie is an astonishing artifact. Immaculately laid out and reproduced, replete with good historical apparatus that grounds the material, and with bonus color pages, this thick, over-sized book rescues from oblivion a satisfying but ultimately frustrating moment of SF history. Shortly after the success of the first Star Wars film in 1977, artist Gil Kane and writer Ron Goulart managed to launch a daily SF newspaper strip titled Star Hawks. Set in Goulart’s Barnum universe as found in his novels of the sixties, the strip concerned handsome and daring Rex Jaxon and his partner, the womanizing, Gypsy-like Chavez, interplanetary law enforcers putting down diverse threats to the galactic peace. From the first, Goulart’s witty, compact, and fast-moving scripts meshed brilliantly with Kane’s dynamic art. Kane’s aliens never looked more convincing, his men more bold, nor his women more luscious. Given two tiers of space on the page each day, Kane could experiment wildly with panel formats, and did so to his heart’s content. The result was a literate SF adventure strip–which of course was doomed to failure, caviar for the unappreciative Mary Worth masses. Goulart was eventually fired, to be replaced by Goodwin, then by MacKenzie, both of whom lacked his panache and inventiveness. The strip was reduced to a single daily tier, and then Sunday pages were eliminated. It all sadly peters out in the last few pages. But for the bulk of this rapturous volume, we can enjoy a wild ride through the cosmos and fantasize about what the comics pages of our newspapers would look like had Star Hawks found the audience it deserved.

The last painting cartoonist Vaughn Bodé finished before his untimely death in 1975 was a large spread of his famous be-hatted anti-hero, Cheech Wizard, leading a girl, a dog, a lion, a scarecrow, and a tin man down a yellow brick road. Titled "The Lizard of Oz," the image was all that existed of Bodé’s hypothetical take on Baum’s fantasy classic. But now, thanks to his son, Mark Bodé, who has taken up the mantle of his father’s outrageous style and themes in exemplary fashion, we get the graphic novel titled The Lizard of Oz (Fantagraphics, trade paper, $12.95, 57 pages, ISBN 1-56097-595-4), and it proves to be worth the wait of three decades. Bodé the Younger displays all of his Dad’s irreverence, goofiness, and proclivity for drawing sexily upholstered nymphs and goofy reptilian men. Some of the satire is predictable, but the imagery remains awesome. You have never contemplated all the counterfactual variations of Oz until you’ve seen the team hauling Cheech Wizard’s carriage: a bevy of bondage-clad, polka-dotted women in harness. Vaughn Bodé himself is allusively depicted on page forty-three, and I think he would be proud to find himself in these colorful funny pages.

Humanoids Publishing has recently engineered a distribution deal with DC Comics, which in turn is part of the Time-Warner empire. Does this render Humanoids not part of the small-press scene any longer? I’m not sure, but I do know that I would be remiss in not pointing out to you the publication of The Technopriests: Book I: Initiation (trade paper, $14.95, 160 pages, ISBN 1-4012-0359-0). Masterminded by polymath Alejandro Jodorowsky, this book–allied with his other series, The Incal and The Metabarons–is, simply put, the best SF being done in the graphics novel field these days. Jodorowsky’s decadent, brutal far-future of guilds and star-travel, barbarism and revenge, is like Frank Herbert’s space-opera mated with noir, spa-ghetti westerns and some Aubrey Beardsley and van Vogt thrown in for good measure. Embodied in the meticulous, baroque, insanely detailed art of Zoran Janjetov, Jodorowsky’s narrative–here concerning itself with the rough path that a young boy named Albino must take to become the master of the games that underpin interstellar society–flies along at breakneck speed without any infodumps or cringing fealty to sober speculation. Who cares how an "electropineal gland" might work, when presented with mindblowing vistas of virtual reality? Jodorowsky keeps a dual narrative–the fate of Albino’s mother and siblings–spinning along as well, and this saga of piracy and rapine across the stars counterbalances the more cerebral plot. If you don’t become an acolyte of The Technopriests, you’ll be damned to an afterlife of reading nothing but Star Wars graphic novels.

Few SF authors have oeuvres substantial enough to merit book-length studies. But Ken MacLeod certainly qualifies, since his well-written leftist space operas have all provided plenty of meat for thought. And to stipulate that he’s only been publishing since 1995 is to add further luster to his career. Now the folks from the UK’s Science Fiction Foundation, in the persons of editors Farah Mendelson and Andrew M. Butler, have assembled The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod (SF Foundation, hardcover, $30.00, 136 pages, ISBN 0-903007-02-9), and it’s a winning volume. MacLeod himself contributes essays and interviews, while a host of critics and reviewers tackle the themes of his work, from utopianism to transhumanism, from libertarianism to feminism. The writing is seldom pedantic, the enthusiasm heartfelt, and the critical standards high. If you’ve enjoyed MacLeod’s novels, this book will only enhance your pleasures.

Also on the critical front, we find Damien Broderick’s x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction (Borgo/Wildside, trade paper, $17.95, 264 pages, ISBN 0-8095-0927-X), a collection of essays that had former lives in various publications, now retrofitted into a brilliantly coherent whole. Much like Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956), this volume uses whatever newish books come to hand, salted with copious thoughts on the classics of the genre, as the jumping-off point for scintillating theoretical discussions of SF’s uses, failings, directions, and destinations. An extremely talented fiction writer as well as critic, Broderick brings an intimate understanding of how SF is composed, marketed, and perceived to the table. Like Knight, he can be fascinating whether discussing flawed one-shot wonders (David Palmer’s Emergence [1984]) or masterpieces from Bester, Pohl, Asimov, and others. And his prose is zesty and inviting, full of witty metaphors. Nothing academic or stodgy here. Is science fiction really "the crazed biker of literature, sloppy-grinned, barreling back down the wrong side of the road into the shrieking traffic"? Read Broderick, and find out!

You know the work of Paul Frees, even if you do not know his name or face. A consummate "voice actor," he lurked behind the animated characters of Boris Badenov, Ludwig Von Drake, and even the Pillsbury Dough Boy! Additionally, his voice greeted every rider on Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction since that ride’s inception. But there was so much more to the man, and we are indebted to author Ben Ohmart for providing a breezy yet comprehensive biography of Frees: Welcome, Foolish Mortals . . . (Bear Manor Media, trade paper, $29.95, 284 pages, ISBN 1-59393-004-6). Here we get to witness Frees’s early days in radio, his transition to the big screen, his involvement with animation, and his dubbing and advertising work.

But aside from the professional aspects of Frees’ life, we are privy to his offstage personality and shen-anigans (Frees was a true eccentric), thanks to extensive interviews with surviving friends, relatives, and co-workers. It’s a balanced warts-and-all kind of treatment, neither excessively reverential nor sniping, and makes for fascinating reading. Frees intersected SF innumerable times–he had small parts in The Thing (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953), for instance–and his amazing voice helped form the fond memories of a generation. Read this book, and the next time you pop a Bullwinkle DVD into the player, dedicate a moment to the memory of Paul Frees.

 

Publisher Addresses

Andromeda Spaceways Publishing, POB 495, Bentley WA 6982, Australia. Bear Manor Media, POB 750, Boalsburg, PA 16827. Black Coat Press, POB 17270, Encino, CA 91416. Cosmos Books, see Wildside. E-Reads, 171 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021. Fantagraphics, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115. Fortress of Words, POB 1304, Lexington, KY 40508. Hermes Press, 2100 Wilmington Road, Neshannock, PA 16105. Humanoids Publishing, POB 931658, Hollywood, CA 90094. Phobos Books, 200 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003. PS Publishing, 1 Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate, UK HG2 9BQ. Robert J. Sawyer Books, Red Deer Press, 813 MacKimmie Library Tower, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. SF Foundation, 22 Addington Road, Reading RG1 5PT, U.K., or through Old Earth Books, POB 19951, Baltimore, MD 21211. Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060. Subterranean Press, POB 190106, Burton, MI 48519. Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street, #139, SF, CA 94107. Tropism Press, POB 13322, Berkeley, CA 94712. Wicker Park Press, c/o Academy Chicago Publishers, 363 W. Erie Street, Chicago, IL 60610. Wildside, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928. Yellow Bat Press, 1338 West Maumee, Idlewilde Manor #136, Adrian, MI 49221.