This would be weird. According to this article, organisers at Glastonbury will give ravers headphones so that the noise doesn’t disturb nearby residents. That’s fine, but picture the hot, sweaty dance floor, with everyone going off and dancing, but the only sound is people moving. No music. Very weird.

It occurs to me that it is not really fair of me to make glancing reference to the ongoing Simak and Leiber reprint programs without actually ennumerating what I think is wrong with them. Well. I think both writers are important to the history of the field, and each has a body of work that could still reach a reasonable sized audience. I also think that they are in great danger of being forgotten by all but the cognoscenti, and that what is needed is an evangelical approach to their work that will take them to a new, younger audience.

So, what’s happening? Well, Seattle-based small press publisher Darkside
Press is publishing their collected works in multiple volume sets (an announced twelve volume set for Simak and an unannounced no. of volumes for Leiber, but three volumes have been published to date). Darkside’s books all sell for approximately $US40.00, are restricted to print runs of 400 – 500 copies, and have fairly uniform black and white dustjackets. They are, and this is just a personal opinion, extraordinarily ugly books. That in itself isn’t a terrible problem. The problem is that they are costly and go out of print quickly. They are not books that will preserve the legacy of the writers in question, they will simply pass through, pick up a few sales and disappear forever.

What should happen? Well, first, someone should publish a definitive selected stories for both writers. I believe NESFA considered at least one of these projects, but really someone like Tor or Ace would be best. With a good selected stories in print, you could then produce an omnibus of the three or four most important novels. That way, Simak and Leiber might actually continue to be read, and even have a chance of attracting a larger readership. Just my two cents.

I think I mentioned somewhere having dinner last Thursday with the wonderful and entertaining Glenda. During dinner she mentioned a bookblog that was interesting and worthwhile. She sent me the link, and it is.

I was browsing the web, and stopped by the Meisha Merlin website, and noted the following announcement:

Meisha Merlin in collaboration with the Robert A. Heinlein trust are proud to announce the printing of the Virginia Edition, the definitive collection of Robert A Heinlein. This historical project will span 40+ titles over four years. Included in this Limited Edition series will be many never before seen passages that had been edited out in subsequent printings. Our desire is to produce a collection true to the spirit and vision of one of our genres greatest authors.

There are all sorts of things that disappointed me about this, but the main ones are that I’d hope such a project might have come from one of the mass market publishers, and that they might have learned from previous unexpurgated Heinlein texts, and stuck with the original published versions. In fairness, I will say that it’s much less disappointing than what has happened with the Fritz Leiber and Clifford Simak reprint series, but it does make it seem like some strange, weird irony that these classic authors are being published in this manner. It makes you appreciate how lucky Edgar Pangborn has been.

I was browsing amazon.com and I note that ibooks will be reprinting Best Short Novels: 2004 in January 2006 in a trade paperback edition as The Best Short Science Fiction Novels of the Year. This is a happy thing. I hope everyone will join up at the SFBC and buy the books there, but if you can’t, this is a great way to have the book come out.