FOR A GOOD TIME read Louis Fried's adult fantasy anthology Other Countries/Other Worlds, available at booksellers or outskirtspress.com/OtherCountries OtherWorlds
When They Came by DON WEBB, 23 stories, $22.50 postpaid (U.S.A.) Temporary Culture, P.O.B. 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043 “Don Webb is a genius."—Bruce Sterling
ED & CAROL EMSHWILLER First bio/art collection of the 5-time Hugo winning F&SF artist and his wife Carol, 2005 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz. Fully illustrated hardcover, $39.95. www.nonstop-press.com
DREADNOUGHT: INVASION SIX™ by Richard F. Roszko. Existence to extinction is one short trip™. New SF Adventure comic! See sample pages! Buy from www.dreadnoughtseries.com!
Age of Consent: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll; radicals, ghosts, blasphemy. www.howardmittelmark.com
Space Box 2—Hard Rock telling a Sci-fi story. www.dorncreations.com
The Contested Earth by Jim Harmon and The Compleat Ova Hamlet, parodies of SF authors by Richard A. Lupoff. www.ramblehouse.com 318-865-3735
AVAST! Shimmer Magazine presents The Pirate Issue, featuring 10 blood-thirsty pirate tales guaranteed to shiver your timbers, guest-edited by John Joseph Adams. www.shimmerzine.com
Do you have Fourth Planet from the Sun yet? Signed hardcover copies are still available. Only $17.95 ppd from F&SF, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.
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MISCELLANEOUS
If stress can change the brain, all experience can change the brain. www.undoingstress.com
Support the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. Visit www.carlbrandon.org for more information on how to contribute.
Space Studies Masters degree. Accredited University program. Campus and distance classes. For details visit www.space.edu.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award. $1400 in prizes. Winning writers appear in ROSEBUD. Deadline: 10/1/07. www.rsbd.net
2007 Short Story Contest:
Sponsored by Westbank Publishing.
With a Grand Prize of $500.00
www.2007storycontest.homestead.com
Learning a foreign language is fundamental to our civilization. Please support the Jamie Bishop Scholarship for German, Virginia Tech Foundation, University Development, 902 Prices Fork Road, Blacksburg, VA 24061.
Giant Squid seeks humans to advise. Apply within. Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), www.squid.poormojo.org
BARTON PHARMACEUT. UP Another 36.36%. Read This Hit List! Bart Phar Inc. (BS) Close: $0.60 UP 36.36%. In the last two days SREA has been on the watch list of Las Cruces Sun-News.com rocketing it over 200%. Need we say more? Get on BS and ride the wave.
F&SF classifieds work because the cost is low: only $2.00 per word (minimum of 10 words). 10% discount for 6 consecutive insertions, 15% for 12. You'll reach 100,000 high-income, highly educated readers each of whom spends hundreds of dollars a year on books, magazines, games, collectibles, audio and video tapes. Send copy and remittance to: F&SF Market Place, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030.
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CURIOSITIES: TENTACLES OF DAWN by Robert Wilson (1978)
There was a time when it seemed as though new paperback imprints appeared nearly every month, most of them lasting a year or less. The latter—like Flagship Books, Book Company of America, Carousel, and Major Books—primarily published genre authors that no one had ever heard of before, and never would hear of again after the imprint disappeared. Major Books, which actually has the distinction of publishing the first novel by Charles L. Grant, published the only book to appear by Robert Wilson, who certainly wasn't Robert Charles or Robert Anton.
Wilson's Tentacles of Dawn is a post-apocalyptic novel, one of those in which we don't know until very late in the story just exactly what the apocalypse was. In this case, humanity got lazy and relied so heavily on an artificial intelligence to run the world that it was unable to cope when the AI began to fail. Our hero wakens in a barbaric world filled with Brutemen, the Primitives, the Dark Invaders, and the Deformed, all tribes of mutants. He manages to escape the “clutches of Mo-Tung,” tracks down the tentacled Prophetess in his quest to understand his purpose, battles with intelligent, man-sized bats, and eventually confronts the Watcher of the World, which turns out to be the surviving portion of the AI.
Tentacles of Dawn is one of a handful of novels so badly written that readers may take a perverse pleasure in following the protagonist, “the man from the Egg,” as he discovers that his destiny is to reawaken a sense of dignity and the urge for progress in a decadent human race.
Actor Rainn Wilson's father reportedly wrote at least one science fiction novel. Could this be it?
—Don D'Ammassa
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Visit www.fsfmag.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
FSF, October 2007 Page 28
