Ash-Tree Press, the brainchild of Barbara and Christopher Roden, issued the first of its elegant, essential books in 1994. Having survived—nay, flourished—for well over ten years, the Rodens and their firm stand as seminal, senior players in the small press field. So it’s instructive to examine what they do, for secrets to their success.

First off, the Rodens staked out a well-defined, under-served niche for themselves: to publish “classic supernatural fiction, old and new.” Long unavailable works by such masters as M.R. James, H.R. Wakefield, and Marjorie Bowen were ushered back into print, delighting collectors and fans. And the door was left open for simpatico work from living authors.

Second, the Rodens focused on subject matter they were in love with. They did not choose to publish whatever kind of book was hot at the moment. Scholars and critics of the ghost story and allied supernatural genres, they operate from passionate involvement with their chosen literature.

Third, the Rodens decided to create ultra-handsome physical artifacts. Their limited-edition books, while on the pricey side of average, offer heft, durability, keen graphic design, and meticulous proofing for the money, more so than your run-of-the-mill bestseller printed on Kleenex and held together with bubblegum. Ash-Tree Press books invariably appreciate in value from the moment they are launched.

But of course, what ultimately counts is the contents. And the Rodens here have shown a keen instinct and good taste as well.

Let one of their latest offerings serve as an example.

The Captain of the ‘Pole Star’ (hardcover, $46.00, 460 pages, ISBN 1-55310-068-9) collects all the “weird and imaginative” fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, assembling in one essential volume a body of work that stands both the test of time and comparison with the canon featuring Doyle’s famous detective.

The volume starts with an appreciation by Michael Dirda, well-known critic for the Washington Post. Dirda hints with his typical precision and delight at the joys awaiting us. Then an introduction by the Rodens puts the stories in context. From 1877 to 1922, at the same time he was writing all his Holmes stories and much of his other naturalistic fiction, Doyle kept up a steady production of eerie tales, ranging from near-SF through quintessential ghost tales to contes cruel. Plainly, this mode was central to his artistic vision, even though the average reader tends not to see Doyle in this manner. Thus this book does literature a service by casting a brighter light on this author’s full career.

The stories are arranged in their order of publication, and one would suppose them to reflect a kind of bell-curve graph, with low-quality on either end and the good stuff in the middle. And it’s true that the first story, “The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe,” written when Doyle was just eighteen but left unpublished until 2000, is slight. But even here, Doyle’s sure hand with dialogue, characterization, plot, and creepiness is evident. And it doesn’t take long before Doyle is exhibiting his full powers, and there’s no real diminution right up through his sixties. These stories all read as easily as contemporary fiction, with no truly archaic language or conceits to impede one’s enjoyment—or shivers.

Doyle shows himself adept at a variety of scary modes. In stories such as “The New Catacomb,” where a jealous man lures his rival into an underground labyrinth, Doyle pulls off Poe-like effects quite well. In “The Case of Lady Sannox,” where a man is tricked into mutilating his beloved, we get a taste of the French conte cruel. Likewise in “The Lord of Chateaux Noir,” where a vengeful father enacts a ritualistic humiliation with a surprise twist at the end. Finally, in “A Pastoral Horror,” Doyle comes close to a prototype of the modern serial-killer novel.

Of course, Doyle also provides plenty of actual uncanny incidents. Women with supernatural, lamia-style powers were a favorite theme, cropping up in “John Barrington Cowles” and “The Parasite.” Ghosts naturally are everywhere, whether in the polar wastes (the title story); a target range (“The Winning Shot”); or in Roman ruins (“Through the Veil”).

Using such then-cutting-edge scientific trends as mesmerism and manned flight, Doyle also generated stories that tread close to science fiction. In “The Great Keinplatz Experiment,” minds change bodies between a professor and his student. In “The Horror of the Heights,” a new airplane ventures high enough to encounter aerial forms of life. The era’s latest findings of Egyptology lead to spooky doings in both “The Ring of Thoth” and “Lot No. 249.” And in “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” death by electrocution produces a novel result.

This last mentioned story also brings up Doyle’s flair for comedy. Several stories, including “Selecting a Ghost,” in which spirits audition for the role of haunting a house, mix laughter with the terror. And certainly the black humor of many of the stories is undeniable.

For someone who in later years famously became infatuated with spiritualism, Doyle maintains an even-handed approach to this fad, often making fun of table-rapping and its ilk. In “Playing with Fire,” a séance produces an ectoplasmic unicorn that gives the naïve spiritualists a sound thrashing.

The Rodens also include a Holmes story here: “The Speckled Band.” This inclusion points up how integral Doyle’s tone was even to the canon of the master of Baker Street. Watson’s opening sums up the kinship: “Sherlock Holmes . . . refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend toward the unusual, and even the fantastic.” Doyle was at heart a fabulist, even when supposedly most rational and mimetic.

One fascinating aspect of these stories is the glimpse they give of Doyle’s era, when the British Empire was at its height. Except for one or three tales, all these stories were based contemporarily with their writing, and set on many different continents. (Doyle eschewed the fusty Gothic for the modern, as if to say that oddities still flourished amidst all progress.) This comes out most explicitly in the opener to “ ‘De Profundis,’ ” which is a paean to the oceans that are “the ligaments which bind together the great, broad-cast British Empire.”

Stylewise, Doyle was a master of a clean prose that sucked the reader in cinematically. But he was also not averse to poetry and metaphor. The start of “The Parasite,” with its evocation of the pleasures of spring, is both a lyrical treat and a symbolically useful foreshadowing of the problems that will arise when the romantic urges of man and woman go astray.

To read this volume is to be plunged back into what Interzone founder David Pringle calls “The Age of the Great Storytellers.” We are lucky that the Rodens have the patience and insight to produce such volumes for our delight.

You can contact Ash-Tree Press online at www.ash-tree.bc.ca/ashtree current.html, or at POB 1360, Ash-croft, British Columbia, V0K1A0, Canada.

From a small press that has endured for ten years, we pass to one just beginning a journey that, with luck and skill and support from readers, could last easily that long or longer.

The Rose Press <www.therose press.co.uk>, founded by Philip Rose, has just issued its first publication: Brian Aldiss’s newest novel, titled Jocasta (trade paperback, $44.95, 311 pages, ISBN 0-9548277-0-8). As is so typical of Aldiss’s oeuvre, the book is not quite like anything he’s ever done before, and also a triumph.

But before discussing the text itself, a slight detour into the physical makeup of the book. Limited to 750 signed copies, the oversized paperback offers marbled covers of extra-heavy stock. Full-color endpapers (a perfectly apt Gustave Moreau painting) bracket the rich creamy pages. The interior design reflects a sure hand, offering such nice touches as a few black-and-white illustrations and decorative motifs at the ends of chapters. In short, an eminently collectible production.

What Aldiss has set out to do is to retell one of the core myths of our civilization—that of Oedipus and his fate—from the point of view of Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother and wife. Of course, such a strategy—looking at famous events from a relatively neglected angle—is not unique with Aldiss. Perhaps Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) is the most famous instance of this tactic.

But Aldiss has much more in mind than a mere re-staging of the myth from a female perspective. He intends to use his tale to examine issues of free will, the pursuit of happiness, and justice. As well, he hopes to illustrate a theme first made famous in Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: namely, that our ancestors were literally unable to think in the same manner we think today, their minds hardwired to hear divine voices. Moreover, he is going to make his tale a full-fledged fantasy, complete with a querulous living Sphinx, ghosts, gods, and griffins. Finally, the tragedy will be tempered with large dollops of comedy.

Whew! That’s one major agenda. But at this point in his awesome career, Aldiss is fully equal to the task. After all, he has recently passed the fiftieth anniversary of his debut (like his coevals Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison), and this is his twenty-fifth novel, among numerous other works.

Chapter one introduces us swiftly to almost the entire cast, and the rest soon follow. Besides Jocasta and Oedipus, there are the four children of their union (the most important being Antigone); Jocasta’s self-righteous brother Creon and his wife Eurydice; Tiresias, the blind, prophetic hermaphrodite; and, the real scene-stealer, a woman of Aldiss’s creation, Semele, Jocasta’s petulant grandmother. A host of less-important but fully realized folk also populate these pages.

These citizens of Thebes are all suffering as the city labors under its mysterious curse. Jocasta, as protagonist, is the only one to know the reason why the city has been stricken. In Aldiss’s interpretation of events, she realized from the moment she saw Oedipus that he was her abandoned son, now returned to fulfill his fate. Complicit in his crime from the start, she is almost as much to blame as Oedipus.

But Jocasta is no deviant or fainting martyr in Aldiss’s hands. She emerges as a smart, strong-willed, intellectually curious woman whose fatal flaw was to love not wisely, but too well. And her daughter Antigone, who will ultimately accompany her father into his exile, shares these traits.

The immemorial tale unfolds basically as in Sophocles’s play, but with many nuances and touches unique to this version. For instance, Sophocles himself, thanks to a spacetime distortion, appears as a character. But the main appeal of Aldiss’s version is to open up the domestic life among the royal family. We get to see exactly how the parents and children (and dotty Grandma Semele) interrelate. And the flavor of their relationships is, believe it or not, rather like a classic BBC sitcom such as Keeping Up Appearances, or a Monty Python skit blended with Mike Leigh’s film Secrets and Lies (1996).

Contemplate some of Semele’s senile maunderings, and tell me that Aldiss is not deliberately and hilariously taking the piss out of the solemnity with which such subject matter is usually presented:

“ ‘We mainly ate horse meat. Mares’ meat, of course. You could get womb trouble if you ate stallion meat by mistake. Your womb turned to wood. There was a woman in the next village whose womb turned to wood, and she had eaten stallion meat by mistake. She told me so. I forget her name.’ ”

So, in ways both comic and tragic, Jocasta experiences the last defining days of her life, asking big philosophical questions that Aldiss does not so much answer—who could?—as he affirms the worth of their asking. The whole production shines with the genuine dusty light of Greece’s Golden Age, which is always really Right Now.

The story ends with Jocasta’s suicide, as it must. But then Aldiss, as lagniappe, in one of his typical meta-fictional creative flourishes, offers us a small story titled “Antigone,” in which a twentieth-century Soviet dissident has an out-of-body experience at the point of death, bringing him back astrally to meet Antigone many years after the tragedy. And here Aldiss confers a happy ending on at least one member of that cursed household.

In meditating on what makes a genius, Jocasta thinks, “Men of genius are born to express their knowledge of reality. Often that knowledge is highly idiosyncratic. But reality itself is highly idiosyncratic. The gods have not made the path smooth.”

I will leave to the ages whether Aldiss qualifies as a genius or not. But as an expresser of many highly entertaining, idiosyncratic realities, he knows few competitors.

“The world is flat” is the shorthand phrase which political commentator Thomas Friedman uses to indicate how modern mass communications and the global spread of capitalism and democracy have conspired to level barriers between the marketplaces of nations. Nowadays, Beijing and Bombay are as close economically to New York as is Boston.

Something similar, it seems to me, is happening in literature. Certain global best-sellers, in greater and greater numbers, can leap across borders to ignite the imaginations of readers equally. (Paradoxically, this does not excuse a paucity of translations into English of novels from other countries, nor deny the export hegemony of popular literature in English.)

We can see this change especially in one of our beloved genres, namely that of fantasy. A writer like Paulo Coelho appeals to English-speakers and German-speakers and others as much as he does to his fellow Brazilians. Tolkien’s daydreams now encircle the planet. Umberto Eco hypnotizes both Europe and America. Possibly, fantasy exports even more easily than other genres, since the best fantasy has its roots in ancient concerns and tropes common to the whole species, whereas naturalistic fiction is more culture-biased.

In any case, a kind of Universal Fantasy that appeals to postmodern audiences is shaping itself around us. Disregarding commodified trilogies for the moment, we can identify the exponents of this style as people such as Tim Powers, Jonathan Carroll, Paul LaFarge, Nicholas Christopher, Gene Wolfe, Paulo Coelho, Graham Joyce, Michel Houllebecq, and Victor Pelevin. Perhaps these are the children of Borges in a way, fabulists who blend magical realism, surrealism, and even SF into rich new modes.

Surely Japan is a notable contributor to this mighty river of fantasy. Hayao Miyazaki’s films, notably Spirited Away (2001), while often using intensely Asian subject matter, appeal to fantasy lovers everywhere, and stand as a good example of this pan-cultural phenomenon.

Another fine example from Japan of this new movement is Haruki Murakami.

Murakami’s books, in English translations, have become touchstones for Universal Fantasy. Rich with local color, they nonetheless embody themes and characters that readers everywhere can identify with: loss, grief, confusion, redemption, transcendence.

His latest novel, Kafka on the Shore (Knopf, hardcover, $25.95, 436 pages, ISBN 1-4000-4366-2), is no exception.

Kafka on the Shore features perhaps a smaller cast than other novels by Murakami, and fewer venues. But it remains as multivalent and satisfyingly mysterious as his other works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1989).

The book is divided, at first, into three alternating parts. One thread, though, soon falls away, leaving us shuttling between two points of view.

Our main focal character, who opens the book in his first-person voice, is Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway. Kafka is fleeing from his unspecifiedly evil father, in search of his lost mother and older sister. He hops a bus in Tokyo to a random destination, the city of Takamatsu. On the bus he encounters a young woman named Sakura, with whom he instantly establishes a bond. Arriving in Takamatsu, Kafka and Sakura part. Shortly thereafter, the literate Kafka finds his way to the Komura Library, a privately funded memorial to one man’s love of books. The library is staffed by two people: the androgynous Oshima and the enigmatic Miss Saeki, a beautiful middle-aged woman. Kafka immediately feels at home here, and in no time the library literally becomes his residence.

The second thread concerns an incident from Japan’s wartime past, when a group of schoolchildren on a rural holiday experienced an inexplicable fainting sickness that seemed to leave no ill effects. This incident, which calls to mind John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; and deliberately so, I’m sure, for Murakami is well-read in SF), is presented in detail, then dropped, its connections to the rest of the narrative not apparent at first.

The last thread features an elderly Tokyo man named Nakata. Simple-minded, Nakata is a kind of holy fool. Able to understand the language of cats, Nakata has made a living acting as a “cat-finder” for distraught pet owners. But his latest assignment involves him with a gruesome serial killer of cats. Forced against his will to slay the evil fellow, Nakata is thrust on a quest that will eventually dovetail with Kafka’s own mission. Along the way, Nakata picks up a kind of Sancho Panza figure named Hoshino.

Chapter by chapter, Murakami weaves the parallel narratives into a seamless tapestry of synchronicity and predestination, bringing in the second, almost forgotten leitmotif as well. Ironically, although Kafka has an immense impact on Nakata’s life, and vice versa, Kafka and Nakata never meet in the flesh or are even aware of each other’s significance. One finishes the book with the sense that life is a playground for forces larger than us, which direct human lives from a higher plane, leaving our interdependencies concealed.

In the realm of characterization, Murakami achieves wonders. Kafka emerges as an authentic teenager, indecisive one moment, full of confidence the next. His wants and dreams drive him impulsively, right over the borderland of life and death. He exits these pages a changed man, having passed into adulthood before our eyes.

The Sturgeonesque emptiness of Nakata’s mind (think More Than Human [1953]) is likewise fully limned. Nakata is both awesome in his supernatural abilities and single-mindedness and pitiful in his foreclosed possibilities. In a similar manner, the wounded figures of Miss Saeki and Oshima are compounded of bravery and weakness, denial and self-awareness.

But it’s in the comic personage of Hoshino that Murakami strikes gold. A rough-edged truck driver who happens to give the hitch-hiking Nakata a lift, Hoshino’s story proves to be the best illustration of how magic can touch a life and ennoble it.

Murakami’s brand of fantasy is compounded both of undeniable eruptions of the uncanny—talking cats, the ghosts of two soldiers, a demiurge who takes the convenient shape of KFC’s Colonel Sanders!—and more subtle congeries of coincidences and patternings. For instance, Miss Saeki in her youth was the composer of a song titled “Kafka on the Shore,” which also happens to be the title of a cryptic painting that hangs in the library. Through such mosaics of meaningful juxtapositions and superimpositions, Murakami succeeds in rendering the everyday world a realm of beauty, terror, awe, and grace.

Once in a great while, Murakami can lay on the allegory a little too thick. Was it really necessary, in the closing pages of the book, to introduce surfing as another metaphor for living boldly? Hadn’t we already had enough systems—classical music and so forth—given to us as templates by then? Still, Murakami’s generous fecundity and generally unfailing sense of rightness and sufficiency can’t be faulted when he produces novels that serve as modern fairy tales and doorways into the conundrum that is life.

When I was starting my own career nearly thirty years ago, the path to publication for an aspiring newcomer was plainly staked out by hundreds of genre writers who had gone before. What you did was, you broke into the magazines, learning your trade and acquiring a name for yourself. Then came book publication, either of a novel, or, if you were very lucky (as I was), with a collection of your short stories.

Of course, I was really the last generation to imprint fully on such a template. With the gradual diminishment of the importance of SF zines in the field (not in my estimation, I hasten to add!), and the upwelling of many lines of SF books from many “younger” publishers (DAW, Tor, et al), as well as the establishment of franchise fiction, which allowed many a newbie to make a start, the old route of apprenticeship via short stories came to a dead end.

Oh, sure, occasionally a Ted Chiang would arise to fulfill the ancient pattern, but the very sparsity of such personages testified to the prevalence of the replacement paradigm: new authors debuted in book form immediately, almost always with a novel.

What was in the past and remains today the most rare kind of debut for a writer has to be the appearance in book form of a volume of original stories never previously seen.

We encounter such a unicorn of a book today in Holly Phillips’s In the Palace of Repose (Prime Books, hardcover, $29.95, 208 pages, ISBN 1-894815-58-0). This volume of nine stories consists of seven virginal ones and only two that have seen print previously.

It comes with an introduction by talented fantasist Sean Stewart and an encomium from noted author Michael Bishop that predispose the reader to receptiveness. But for us old salts who came up through the periodical ranks, a niggling doubt remains: can these stories be any good if no magazine had swooped upon them prior to now?

Well, what if they were simply never marketed? What if the author wanted to present them as a whole? What if there were simply not enough niches for them in the dwindling marketplace, or editorial quirkiness caused them to be slighted?

I can’t say what led Holly Phillips to offer her wares in this fashion. But what I can do is dispense with any similar doubts you yourself might be having in connection with this book.

These are some accomplished, splendid, enticing—even masterful—stories. Holly Phillips steps out for her first time on stage, all unknown, and brings down the house with a restrained yet bold performance. We are present at the birth of something major.

Let’s step through the stories to get an idea of what we’re being gifted with.

The title piece (one of the previously printed stories) concerns a nameless city of somewhat steampunkish nature. It’s a place rife with fusty old bureaucrats in High Edwardian mode. But one of the ministers has a very unusual job. He happens to be in charge of the Palace of Repose, an eldritch structure where a literal deity is confined. This sleeping King seems to have dreamed the land into existence, and continued survival depends on keeping him somnolent. But upon visiting the Palace recently, our protagonist finds a stranger therein, a young woman named Ivy. Will her presence wake the King? Where did she come from? What does she portend for the future of the realm? And how will our hero manage to keep his job in the light of government reorganization?

“The Other Grace” is set in the 1950s, in a small town. (Many glancing references in her stories seem to indicate that Phillips is Canadian, and one could profitably envision this tale as being set in, say, some rural Canadian spot. Although at first I pictured it as taking place in America’s South.) A teenager named Grace experiences a weird kind of spontaneous, instant amnesia that robs her of her whole personality. Surrounded by relatives and friends, she is the ultimate stranger. How can she possibly refashion her life from the ground zero of her affliction?

A young adult woman flees from town to town, staying only as long in each place as her pursuers allow. But what exactly is pursuing her? Well, there’s the Nerd, a mysterious human antagonist. But there are also the clanking hybrid monsters that she herself raises out of the detritus of civilization. That’s the setup for “The New Ecology,” the other story with an earlier instantiation.

Sometime in the early twentieth century, an archaeological dig is taking place in Central Asia. The Western scientists intend to open an ancient barrow. The natives warn them of the consequences of disturbing the corpse within. Caught between rationalism and superstition is the young female interpreter, a native girl gone Western. Which worldview is right? One, neither, or both? Such is the quandary caused by “A Woman’s Bones.”

In “Pen & Ink,” a teenaged girl, daughter of an artist gone missing, finds herself stalked by a being known as “the curator.” He wants to find the lost last painting of the girl’s father, which contains a certain secret. So does she. But how to discover it without placing it into the greedy hands of the curator is the question.

The month is October in “One of the Hungry Ones,” and a street kid named Sadie is adopted by a trio of juveniles who enjoy the patronage of the mysterious Mr. Nero. Sadie is soon swept up in Mr. Nero’s queer celebrations, which prove much easier to enter than to leave.

The town of End Harbor has always been a spooky place of strange potency. When one of its native sons returns in “By the Light of Tomorrow’s Sun,” old scandals are reawakened, and old debts must be paid.

“Summer Ice” is set in the near future, when the Western world is on the skids. A painter named Manon finds herself doubting her art in the face of the exigencies of a hardscrabble existence. But she learns to savor her new life, and to see the opportunities for creativity that hide behind gray clouds.

Finally, “Variations on a Theme” jumps back and forth between 1914 and 2003, charting the parallel careers of two young preternaturally talented musicians, who are revealed in the end to be linked in the strangest, yet most obvious way.

What makes these stories so exceptional? Several things.

First is Phillips’s easy familiarity with many of the classic tropes of the field, and the voices of the geniuses who have worked such veins in the past, a familiarity that allows her to put refreshing spins on her tales while still hewing to a proud lineage.

The title story, with its dreaming god, invokes Dunsany, but the addition of imperial bureaucracy adds a piquantly mundane and comic element to the mix, in the manner of Jeffrey Ford. “The New Ecology” speaks to the Ellisonian notion of strange new gods arising to fill vacant niches, but does so in a hopeful rather than despairing fashion. Echoes of Le Guin’s anthropological slant permeates “A Woman’s Bones,” but the “primitive” culture is not overly privileged. Bradbury, as he must, surfaces in the autumnal atmosphere of “One of the Hungry Ones,” but it’s an unromantic Bradbury. Tinges of a modified Lovecraft permeates “In the Light of Tomorrow’s Sun,” while the John Crowley of Beasts (1976) seems to inform “Summer Ice.”

In short, Phillips’s models for her fictions, her influences and guides, are among the very best. And in the subtlety of her narratives, the depth of her characterizations, and the determined ambiguity and open-endedness of her resolutions, she does honor to them all.

Phillips also has a knack for beginning her stories sharply, with awesome hooks, even though the reader is often delightfully left—in the words of Tiptree—“a mile underground in the dark.” She continues to hold the reader with silky, limpid prose that neither strains too heavily after fine writing, nor disdains a certain poetry. She knows instinctively just how much description is enough to conjure up vivid mental images without being over-deterministic. Consider the passage in “The New Ecology” where our heroine summons up “the Largest One” from its slumber. Just a sentence or three, and you have a perfect conception of this monster.

Lastly, Phillips deals with intriguing themes. The search for identity is perhaps her signature. Time and again, her protagonists must learn who they really are, in the light of who society says they must be. “The Other Grace” presents this struggle most overtly, but it’s present in nearly every piece herein.

Whether Phillips continues in the short-story mode or moves on to novels, she’s a writer to watch.

And really, who cares in what venues she first appears? Just let her continue to write.

Visit Prime Books at www.prime books.net to see the work of Phillips and other fine writers.

The history of science fiction is inextricably intertwined with the history of SF fandom. To completely understand one, you must have know- ledge of the other. But while SF proper has a wealth of documentation and critical apparatus surrounding it, SF fandom has comparatively little. And what historical documentation does exist has been of spotty quality. Aside from some works by Sam Moskowitz and Harry Warner, what’s generally available today to the interested reader who wants to know what fandom was like during various eras? Not much.

One of the pivotal documents that does exist is Theodore Cogswell’s PITFCS (1992), a vast reprinting of the pivotal zine, Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies. In these pages, pros and fans of the late 1950s and early 1960s debated every topic under the sun, and the inner workings of science fiction were exposed for all to see.

Now comes another, smaller-scale such volume, and it proves equally fascinating.

The Best of Xero (Tachyon Publications, hardcover, $29.95, 272 pages, ISBN 1-892391-11-2) is a sampler of the zine created by Richard and Pat Lupoff circa 1960-62. Lasting for a mere ten issues, ultimately capturing a Hugo Award, Xero was a hotbed of creativity and controversy, and the contents of this volume convey the excitement of this period in full force. Famous names such as Donald Westlake, James Blish, Avram Davidson, and Lin Carter consort with those of fannish personalities both well-recalled and well-nigh forgotten. Letters to the editor are reproduced along with many articles and illos, capturing some of the lively give-and-take that marked the pages. Context-setting introductions by the Lupoffs, as well as by ex-fan and now famous film critic Roger Ebert, make a strong case for the historical importance of this zine.

Today, fandom has migrated almost entirely to the internet. But the heady fumes of correction fluid still linger in the nostrils of every true fan, even those too young ever to have seen a mimeo machine. And the spirit that animated the Lupoffs and their peers remains alive today. A new generation should welcome this book, as well as those who were there at the time.

Learn details about ordering from www.tachyonpublications.com.