I had an absolute blast with this book but then it's about as far up my alley as it's comfortable to get. It's nonfiction, edited by Richard Wolinsky, one of the hosts of the 'Probabilities' radio show on KPFA Berkeley, but it's compiled from interviews conducted by him and a pair of co-hosts, the late Richard A. Lupoff and the late Lawrence Davidson. Lupoff wrote the introduction for an early attempt to bring this material into print, which is very much a fan-turned-pro introduction, then Wolinsky adds plenty of good context.

Almost all these interview subjects are no longer with us, even those in more recent chapters, the book roughly moving forward in time, but these people all serve as connections to other eras. For instance, the first chapter goes back to the very beginning of science fiction in the United States. Ed Earl Repp talks about running a string of movie theatres in Los Angeles and inviting Edgar Rice Burroughs in to do a personal appearance, and Jack Williamson sold his first science fiction story the month before Hugo Gernsback named the genre.

This first chapter is a glorious glimpse into a completely different time, courtesy mostly of names that are mostly forgotten today. We tend to still remember A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov and Forry Ackerman, but not so much Charles D. Hornig, Stanton A. Coblentz and E. Hoffman Price. However, they were hugely important back in the twenties and they're the perfect people to introduce us to the business back then. I've read and enjoyed Price's work but I now realise that he's someone who was worth listening to, the sort of person to sit down with in a convention consuite and soak up his stories. His tale here about telling Barbary Coast stories to the young professional ladies in a New Orleans whorehouse is priceless, pun not intended.

I loved the first chapter but the second focuses on 'Weird Tales', my favourite pulp which I ought to systematically dive into for 'The Nameless Zine'. It's what I know Price for most, so he's still here at this point, but so are personal favourites like Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber, not to skip over Hugh B. Cave, a couple of whose compilations of stories from that era sit on a bookshelf on my desk as I write. I relished these stories and wish this chapter could have been expanded into a book all of its own.

I didn't know, for instance, that Farnsworth Wright, famed editor of 'Weird Tales', had Parkinson's disease, but everybody brings that up. Price talks up H. P. Lovecraft's whimsy a great deal, not the sort of thing he's generally remembered for. His best story may be the one when he asks Lovecraft about trilateral and quadrilateral roots in Arabic, having studied the language, but Lovecraft told him that he came up with the name of Abdul Alhazred, author of the 'Necronomicon', when he was six, writing 'Arabian Nights' fan fiction.

Only one of the growing cast members thus far is still alive, that being Joyce Carol Oates, but the list constitutes a serious percentage of the greats of the genre. Chapter 3 is about the rise of the pulps in the thirties, with contributions from grandmasters like Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon and Poul Anderson. It focuses on science fiction for the most part but drifts into other genres, too; and I was happy to see some 'Doc Savage' coverage, courtesy of one W. Ryerson Johnson, who was one of the other Kenneth Robesons to the main one, Lester Dent.

Chapter 4 shifts into the forties and the golden age of 'Astounding' under the famed editorship of John W. Campbell. Now the contributors are Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Harlan Ellison... pretty much everyone. Wolinsky states that Donald A. Wollheim was a primary name they never managed to interview, but Robert A. Heinlein is the most obvious gap for me. He comes up, Forry talking about his first meeting with him, but he isn't interviewed.

As the book runs on and the time periods covered shift newer, the results don't feel as substantial but that's mostly because there are fewer people, often just one, talking about each subject. That still works and I devoured every word until the very end, but it's the back and forth of memories in the earlier chapters that works best, when half a dozen people are remembering the same person or the same magazine. That doesn't happen as much with the coverage of the forties and fifties as science fiction thrived in the digests that replaced the pulps and then in paperback. It does return somewhat for a more general look at fandom in the final chapter, but it's a shorter chapter.

Quite frankly, I didn't want this book to end and fortunately I was able to dive into the interviews at a deeper level by downloading them from the KPFA archives. They're not all there, but many of them are and I've happily dived in already. The interview with Howard A. Browne made even more connections. He's here because he edited 'Amazing Stories' after Ray Palmer, taking over in 1950, but the full interview brings in his television and film work, which is where I know him from, being the writer of films like Roger Corman's 'The St. Valentine's Day Massacre'.

While I enjoyed the book immensely, I wish I'd have known about the 'Probabilities' radio show far sooner. I've never met Wolinsky or Davidson, but I did meet Dick Lupoff at a San Diego convention. He kindly signed a bunch of books for me and we chatted for a while. We might have chatted for a lot longer had I known about this show at that point! However I'm still happy to dive into it now. It could easily be said that this book isn't just a glimpse into past eras, it's a gateway to more online and, because of that, it's a gift that will keep on giving for me. ~~ Hal C F Astell