New Farmer collection: Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

Subterranean Press has posted the cover to their upcoming Philip Jose Farmer anthology, Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe. The contents include a diverse array of great stories spanning Phil's career:

* Attitudes
* How Deep the Grooves
* The Blasphemers
* A Bowl Bigger Than Earth
* Down in the Black Gang
* The Voice of the Sonar in My Vermiform Appendix
* Father’s in the Basement
* Toward the Beloved City
* Skinburn
* The Sumerian Oath
* Extracts from the Memoirs of Lord Greystoke
* The Two-Edged Gift
* Saint Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye
* Crossing the Dark River
* Up the Bright River
* Coda

Some of my absolute favorites are in here, so I'm really looking forward to this--a strong retrospective selection both for those aiming to dip into Farmer's work for the first time and those who'd like to revisit some classic and wonderfully creative short stories by the Grand Master of Peoria.

The book can be pre-ordered here.

ERB movietime!

Oh, and I forgot to mention with my last post that after I had some time to chill out following all the craziness, I've been rewatching with strangely fond memories the Edgar Rice Burroughs-Doug McClure 1970s movie trifecta, all of which are now available on Hulu. I haven't yet made it to The Land That Time Forgot (I'm viewing them out of order since I watched the ones I had on DVD first), the sceeenplay of which is co-credited to Michael Moorcock!

At the Earth's Core, by the way, I saw in the theater when it was released in 1976. It was the first movie my dad took me to just by ourselves. Thanks, Dad! I'll never forget it.

General update

It's been a crazy several months, with a heavy workload and little sleep. Here's some of what I've been up to lately:

• In May, I helped the Paizo team wrap up production on a ton of projects for our giant slew of Gen Con releases, including the launch of the Pathfinder Tales novel line with Dave Gross's excellent Prince of Wolves. At Planet Stories, we're now moving on to working on the Planet Stories Double Feature of Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star by Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale, and at the same time, Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty. As a big fan of Sword & Planet and prehistoric adventure fiction, I'm really psyched to be working on both of these projects.
• I completed an exhausting freelance copy-editing gig in May.
• I attended PaizoCon 2010 in Bellevue, WA, where I was on a panel and got to meet and hang out with lots of great folks.
• I sold a story to Meteor House for the anthology The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions, which debuted at FarmerCon V/Locus Awards Weekend 2010. The book, an affordable trade paperback limited to 500 numbered copies, can now be purchased directly from Meteor House's newly launched website.
• I finished a story for another cool anthology I was invited to submit to. The story is with the editors right now under consideration.
• Laura and I attended FarmerCon V/Locus Awards Weekend 2010/Science Fiction Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony here in Seattle and had a blast. In another couple weeks, I'll be on a podcast with some of the other FarmerCon organizers talking about the weekend. Details to follow.
• Last night I just started working on a story for a third anthology that's invited me in. I've been taking notes on the story for a long while, but am just now breaking ground on the manuscript.
• I haven't had much time to read of late, but I did just finish Brian Stableford's new translation of Rosny's Hareton Ironcastle's Amazing Adventure (L'Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle), available in the collection The Mysterious Force from Black Coat Press.I'd previously read Farmer's retelling a number of times and was fascinated to finally discover what "Translated and retold" meant on the title page of Phil's version. Essentially, the first and last chapters of the DAW Books edition are Phil's additions (the Wold Newton and extraterrestrial explanation), and there is some respectful retweaking throughout the book. That, and Ironcastle and his daughter are extremely devout in the pure Rosny text, and Sir George Farnham in the pure Rosny text is Sir George Curtis (nephew of Sir Henry Curtis from Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, and others) in the Farmerian retellling.  Both versions of Ironcastle are great, and if you haven't yet read either, I'd probably recommend starting with the Black Coat Press edition first, and then seeing how Farmer lightly but ingeniously innovated on the tale in the DAW edition.

After all that, I've pretty much wiped my schedule clean for work on the novel. Whew!

French publication of "Iron and Bronze" ("De Fer et de bronze")

Les Compagnons de l'Ombre 6 (Rivière Blanche, 2010) just arrived in the mail today. It includes Win Scott Eckert's and my story "Iron and Bronze," translated into French by Thierry Virga as "De Fer et de bronze." This marks the first time a story of mine has been published in a foreign language (!!!).

Of course, if you'd like to read our story in English, you can find it in Tales of the Shadowmen: The Vampires of Paris (Amazon).

Story in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions

I've been so crazily busy for the past couple months that I haven't had time to post very much at all, including the fact that I have a story upcoming in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions. "A Kick in the Side" is set in the world of Farmer's Khokarsa series, and while the story is not a direct tie-in to the novel The Song of Kwasin (which I co-wrote with Phil and about which I hope to have some news to share later this year), discerning readers should be able to notice some intriguing connections after both the story and the novel are published. The story involves pirates on Khokarsa's northern landlocked sea and the fate of Hinokly, the hero Hadon's bard, after he slips into the watery depths of the Kemu in the second book in the series.

In any case, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions promises to be an exciting anthology for Philip José Farmer fans and readers of SF in general, with authorized fiction set in Farmer's worlds by Rhys Hughes ("The Pollinators," set in the world of The Lovers), Win Scott Eckert ("Is He in Hell?" set in the Wold Newton family continuity), David Bischoff ("No Trees of Earth," set in the World of Tiers), Dennis E. Power, ("Flesh Endures," set in, you guessed it, the future world of Farmer's novel Flesh), and Chris Roberson ("The Final Flight of Greatheart Silver," set, of course, in the pulp-inspired world of Farmer's zeppelin-flying hero). The book also includes tribute stories from Edward Morris and Pearls from Peoria editor Paul Spiteri, as well as a great lineup of articles examining Farmer's literary career by authors like James Gunn and Randall Garrett. You can find the full table of contents and ordering info here. I wouldn't wait to order it though--it's a limited edition.

Black Coat Press wins Major French SF Award

If you read my blog or know me you probably know I'm a big fan of what Black Coat Press has been doing over the past few years, bringing out English-language editions of classic French science fiction and popular literature. And I'm particularly excited about BCP of late because of the fantastic series of J.-H. Rosny books they're publishing. So I'm very pleased to hear that they've won the 2010 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. Here's the press release:

STABLEFORD, LOFFICIER, BLACK COAT PRESS
WIN TOP FRENCH GENRE AWARD

23 May 2010

Writer/translator Brian Stableford, editor/translators Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier, and Black Coat Press have won a Special Award for their outstanding work in bringing French science fiction to the English-speaking public.

The award is part of the coveted Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the oldest and most prestigious genre award in France. Created in 1974, the “GPI” is given yearly by a jury of twelve professionals.
This award recognizes the unprecedented effort made by Black Coat Press, established in 2003 by the Lofficiers, to publish classic French science fiction in the United States. Competing for this special award were two other nominees, French anthologists Richard Comballot and Jean-François Thomas.
Heading the Black Coat Press releases for 2010 are Stableford’s translations of a five-volume series of works by Maurice Renard and a seven-volume series of works by J.-H. Rosny Aîné, the two most important writers of Golden Age French SF after Jules Verne.

Amongst the other winners of the GPI this year are Jack O’Connell, Greg Egan, Ted Chiang, John Connoly and Warren Ellis.

The official site of the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire is: http://www.noosfere.org/gpi/index.php

Black Coat Press e-mail: info@blackcoatpress.com
P.O.Box 17270 website: www.blackcoatpress.com
Encino, CA 91416 contact: Jean-Marc Lofficier

Farmer's Up from the Bottomless Pit: Science fiction prognostication?

A few years ago I edited Philip José Farmer's previously unpublished novel of man-made ecological disaster, Up from the Bottomless Pit, both in its original serialized publication in Farmerphile and its subsequent collection in Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories for Subterranean Press. Before the novel's initial magazine installment, my co-editor Paul Spiteri, publisher Mike Croteau, and I got into a little debate about whether the novel could really be considered science fiction. I fell squarely on the side that the novel could certainly be equated with Vernean prognostication, and eventually that's how we decided to present it, even though no such disaster had yet happened, at least on the level described by Farmer. But it was clear from reading the novel that in Phil's mind it could. The first installment hit the streets in July 2005. Then, toward the end of August, came Hurricane Katrina. We were all stunned and horrified by those events, and I remember shooting off an email to Mike and Paul about how eerily both the Katrina response efforts and the bureaucratic fallout and mismanagement in the days following corresponded with what Phil had described in Up from the Bottomless Pit.

Okay, you probably can draw the lines for yourself and figure out where I'm going with this post even without me saying another word. So I won't go on much further, except to say, I wish I hadn't been right about that novel, and I wish it had just stayed fiction. Because, you know that "containment box" that they tried to send down to suck up the oil from the "leak" in the gulf? Well, Phil predicted that too. In his book it was called "the Hoover," like the vacuum cleaner, and well, it didn't go over so well in the novel either. I'm just sayin.'






Art from Up from the Bottomless Pit by Keith Howell, Copyright 2007.