SF Legends on The Pulps and More!

Wolinsky, Richard, Richard A. Lupoff, and Lawrence Davidson.  Space Ships!  Ray Guns!  Martian                    Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends.  San Francisco, CA: Tachyon 

        Publications, 2025.

 

Are you interested in science fiction?  Especially early science fiction.  If so this might be a book for you, especially if you want a first person view!  Wolinsky, Lupoff, and Davidson were hosts on a series of radio programs and podcasts that interviewed science fiction and fantasy authors and editors.  Richard Wolinskey has taken snippets of those interviews on certain topics and compiled them into this tome.

 

So what would you find when you crack open this title?  You would hear the likes of Paul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Algris Burdrey, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Leguin, Fritz Lieber, Jane Roberts, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt, Kurt Vonnegut, and Roger Zelazny talking shop about fellow authors, pulp magazine editors, and fan culture from the 1920s to the 1950s.  Chapter 1 covers the birth of SF&F in pulp magazines with Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories.  Chapter 2 focuses on Weird Tales, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch.  Chapter 3 looks at the effects of the Depression on the growth of pulp magazines along with authors such as C. L. Moore, Fletcher Pratt, and Stanley Weinbaum.  Chapter 4 does a deep dive on John W. Campbell and Astounding.  Chapter 5 examines World War II and beyond with authors A. E. Van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, L. Ron Hubbard and others.  Chapter 6 brings in the 1950s and the rise and fall of Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, If, and others alongside William F. Nolan, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jack Williamson, and Philip K. Dick.  Chapter 7 finished off the book with a focus on the Science Fiction League and the Futurians followed by a couple of appendixes with some origin stories and a list of all the interviews.

 

If you have an interest in hearing what SF authors have to say on a variety of subjects, Space Ships!  Ray Guns!  Martian Octopods! gives you that opportunity.  Take a chance and you might learn something you never knew you needed!