Back In Print After 30 Years from DPS: Feminist SciFi Legend Jody Scott's I, VAMPIRE!!

Digital Parchment Services and the estate Of Jody Scott are pleased to announce the re-publication of Jody Scott's sequel to her feminist, surreal SciFi classic, Passing For Human: 

I, Vampire

—with a special introduction by SciFi Legend Theodore Sturgeon!

Plus new estate-sponsored site dedicated to Jody's life and work by her partner, Mary Whealen!

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"A rip-roaringly magnificent time ... quite unlike anything anyone else has ever done."
—Neil Gaiman

"I liked I, Vampire enough to check it off on the Nebula ballot."
—Pamela Sargent

Back in print after 30 years, I, Vampire is the sequel to Jody Scott's acclaimed SciFi classic, Passing For Human (and part two of the four-part Benaroya Chronicles), featuring the adventures of Jody's charming vampire Sterling O’Blivion:

After seven hundred years, glamorous vampire Sterling O’Blivion has begun to think the joy is going out of life. Then she meets Virginia Woolf in the ladies’ room of a dance studio in Chicago. But Woolf is really Benaroya, a dolphin-like alien anthropologist here to learn all there is to know about humanity and to fight the good fight against the evil, slave-trading Sajorians. Sterling falls madly in love with Benaroya. It’s just the sort of romp an aging vampire needs—but first, to defeat the Sajorians, they have to sell millions of Famous Men’s Sperm Kits to every woman on Earth.

"A lot of fun ... its real appeal is in Scott's stabs at the foibles and shortcomings of our society. Jody Scott sees things with a clear eye. You must read carefully, for she can point a caustic finger with a single throwaway line. And when she really winds up, everything is fair game: big business, the military, politics, religion and more. In addition to sharpness and criticism, there are wackiness, clever dialogue, action and lots of love. I enjoyed this one immensely and recommend it highly."
—The Seattle Times

"Exuberantly clever and wildly iconoclastic ... if you thirst for something really witty, quirky, with bags of brains [...] you'll do no better than this wonderful novel."
—For Books' Sake

"Those who seek to deride feminist SF often suggest that it is too serious and po-faced, but Jody Scott’s wild imagination, seemingly scattershot but tightly controlled, makes ... an absurdly comic romp of unexpected juxtapositions and witty asides."
—SF Mistressworks

Plus Jody's partner, and her Estate Manager, Mary Whealen has launched a band new site celebrating Jody's life, work, and her lasting influence on science fiction, feminism, and modern literature: http://www.jodyscott.info.

Born in 1923, Jody Scott, or Joann Margaret Huguelet as it says on her birth certificate - Mr. Scott came later closely followed by Mr. Wood, two characters out of P.G. Wodehouse (if Wodehouse had happened to marry Jean Genet) - was born in Chicago of an old-settler family of Fort Dearborn (as the toddlin' town was once called) with loose ties to the underworld.

Ms. Scott attended Daniel Boone grammar school, Senn High, North Park College, Northwestern U. and U.C. Berkeley before crying out in clear, ringing tones: "Enough of this crap. If you wanna be a writer never, NEVER go to college or you'll come out a brainwashed zombie who offends nobody but writes like everyone else or as Monty Python used to say: 'Dull, dull, dull!' - the L's sounding like W's."

Our subject then worked as a sardine packer, orthopedist's office assistant, Circle Magazine editor (knew Henry Miller and Anais Nin), artist's model at Art Institute Chicago, factory hand, cabbage puller ("in Texas where I was arrested with my buddy Don Scott for hitchhiking and slapped around then thrown in jail for eight days; how stupid can 'The Law' be? Its reasoning was: my gay friend {close pal of Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams} had long hair, therefore we must be criminals"), blue movie maker, headline writer for the Monterey Herald ("that's where I got my spare, lean style"), bookstore/art gallery owner, vacation land salesman and at many other fascinating trades, spent six months in Guatemala (in Antigua enjoyed a night alone with Gore Vidal at his house both madly talking) and lived in Seattle in a falling-apart house choked with ivy and blackberry brambles a stone's throw from Puget Sound and was the winner of the 'America's Ugliest Couch' contest upon which she wrote every day from 9 AM to 2 PM Pacific time.

Jody died in 2007.

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For review copies or information on the Jody Scott estate please contact the Publisher, M.Christian at m.christian@digitalparchmentservices.com

I, Vampire (The Benaroya Chronicles I)
By Jody Scott
ebook: http://amzn.com/B01BNVU9QY - $2.99 (free on Amazon Unlimited)
Trade paperback: coming soon!

Passing for Human (The Benaroya Chronicles II)
By Jody Scott
ebook: http://amzn.com/B0143K2LXG - $2.99 (free on Amazon Unlimited)
Trade paperback: http://amzn.com/1517285291 - $8.99

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The Estate-Authorized Jody Scott site: http://www.jodyscott.info

The Digital Parchment Services Jody Scott site: http://www.authorjodyscott.com

Digital Parchment Services: http://digitalparchmentservices.com

For information please feel free to contact mchristian@digitalparchmentservices.com

Back In Print After Almost 40 Years: The Surreal Feminist SF Classic, PASSING FOR HUMAN By Jody Scott

Own it for $2.99!

Free on KindleUnlimited

Considered by i09 as "One Of The 10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You've Never Read" Digital Parchment Services, and the estate of Jody Scott, is thrilled to announce the republication of Passing For Human!

"I liked Passing for Human." –Neil Gaiman

Passing For Human is the beginning of The Benaroya Chronicles trilogy, continued in the soon-to-be-released I, Vampire and concluding with Scott's never-before-published final book in the series!

"A joyously and at times scatologically tangled Satire of the post-industrial Western world from a Feminist point of view that wittily verges on misandry." -The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Passing for Human Or
Who Isn't Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?
Starring:
Benaroya
A 36-foot
Extraterrestrial "dolphin"
In the role of:
"Brenda Starr"
"Emma Peel"
Mary Worth
And a happy New Guinea hoptoad

With an all-star cast including
Abraham Lincoln
Jennison, the Kansas Jayhawker
Heidi's Grandfather
General George S. Patton
The Los Angeles Police Department
The Prince Of Darkness
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Ancient Egypt
The Isle of Capri
Interstellar Station 8
Four billion newly created people
And several hundred Richard Nixons

When a dolphin-like alien comes to Earth disguised in a female human body, it sets the stage for a wild feminist romp that out stranges Stranger in a Strange Land!

"The pace of the story never lets up, yet it finds room for serious contemplation of humanity’s woes. The style is easy, with an edge of noir. The central character is a bit of a tough girl which, mixed with her naivety about humans, makes for an intriguing and likeable character. Especially as she (in common with the other aliens) inhabits bodies she has chosen from Earth culture – Brenda Starr, Emma Peel, and Virginia Woolf. Who could not like that, especially the final scenes in which Virginia Woolf is involved in a running gun battle. The humor, pace, and wry observation make this a rare and wonderful beast – a serious science fiction novel that doesn’t take itself seriously."

– Graeme K Talboys, grumbooks Review

"The novel leaps along with an energy and a disregard for convention that reminds me a little of genre outsiders like Barry Malzberg and possibly Josephine Saxton in that this reads like a romp through the Collective Unconscious. A closer comparison might be with the early novels of Ishmael Reed who shares with Scott a vitriolic contempt for seemingly all and everything, sniping and satirizing hilariously along the way.  Jody Scott’s wild imagination, seemingly scattershot but tightly controlled, makes Passing For Human an absurdly comic romp of unexpected juxtapositions and witty asides. Good examples of what SF can do when it steps out of its comfort zone, and of how women’s SF can challenge the genre assumptions by challenging its tropes and its language. Take a look, see what you think."

– Performative Utterance

This Strange Particle Press release features Barry N. Malzberg's original 1977 introduction, and a special forward by Jody Scott's heir and life partner, Mary Whealen.

Passing for Human (The Benaroya Chronicles) By Jody Scott http://amzn.com/B0143K2LXG

$5.99

FREE on KindleUnlimited for a limited time!

Paperback edition coming September 15th

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The estate-authorized Jody Scott site (http://www.authorjodyscott.com)

Digital Parchment Services (http://digitalparchmentservices.com)

For information please feel free to contact mchristian@digitalparchmentservices.com

Out Now: The Unauthorized Guide To Trek: The Complete TOS Crew Book By James Van Hise

“A gem of a book...every Trekkie and sci-fi fan needs this on their shelf.” —Goodreads

The classic, complete guide to both the crew of the Starship Enterprise and the actors and actresses who brought them to life.

Written in the 1990s, this acclaimed book covers the all the members of the original crew: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Chapel. It’s filled with profiles of each character, biographies of the stars who played them, as well as in-depth conversations with the actors.

Trek fans will learn things they never knew, and gain new insights into William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Majel Barrett, and Walter Koenig.

The Complete TOS Crew Book is written by media journalist James Van Hise, creator of the much-beloved Enterprise Incidents magazine. Van Hise has been hailed by the Star Trek Expanded Universe Wiki as “The eminent Star Trek reference book author.”

You'll also find rare publicity stills and personal photos, taken by the author, of the actors themselves.

Bonus: Brand new caricatures of each crew member, especially commissioned for this book, by the award-winning political cartoonist and Filmation animator, Darryle Purcell. Plus a preface by Mr. Purcell on the role Star Trek played in his life.

Publisher's Weekly On Arthur Byron Cover's Wild Scifi Ride Autumn Angels!

(from the Arthur Byron Cover site)

Here's a real treat: a review of the new edition (from Digital Parchment Service's Strange Particle Press imprint) of Arthur Byron Cover's fantastic scifi novel, Autumn Angels from Publisher's Weekly:

"This strange novel-parable launched Cover’s long SF career in 1975. A repulsive demon, a black-derbyed lawyer, and a white-suited fat man plot to bring morbid depression to their race of godlike men, giving them purpose to master the universe. Their instrument is a pathetic crawling bird, whose heart-aching song of lament at its inability to fly causes listeners to feel anger and disappointment. Out of this quirky start, Cover swirls a phantasmagoric slew of allusions, quasi-references, and escapist "sampling" into something Harlan Ellison’s introduction calls "entertainingly meaningful."

- Publisher's Weekly

Read Arthur Byron Cover's Fantastic Nebula Nominated Autumn Angels - For Just $3.99

See and Hear Ernest Hogan On High Aztech!

(from the Ernest Hogan site)

As part of the celebration of the imminent re-release of Ernest Hogan's incredible Chicano science fiction tale, High Aztech, here's a video interview with Ernest himself, via LATINOPIA WORD!

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

First Look at Cover for James Van Hise Bio - Roddenberry: The Man who Created Star Trek

Cover design: Frankie Hill

First book in our new series reprinting James Van Hise's classic books on TOS. We call the series, The Unauthorized Guide to Trek. Due out April 15, 2015.

James Van Hise is a well-known journalist specializing in film, television, and comic history. A long-time fan turned media historian, Van Hise’s credentials as both writer and editor are extensive. He was the editor of the pivotal comix zine Rocket Blast Comic Collector (1974-8) and the pioneering Enterprise Incidents: The Magazine for Star Trek Fans (1976-85). In the comic field he has written stories for Dread of Night, Green Hornet, Ray Bradbury Comics, and Real Ghostbusters, among others. As a journalist Van Hise has authored books on Batman, Dune, Conan, Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Stephen King, and Star Trek.

Rave Review for Locus Award Finalist Ernest Hogan's Cortez On Jupiter From Performative Utterance

(from the Ernest Hogan site)

Check out this rave review for Ernest Hogan's wonderful Cortez on Jupiter - out now in a brand new author-authorized edition from Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press - by Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press

Ernest Hogan’s debut novel, published in 1990 as part of Ben Bova’s Discoveries series, is a remarkable piece of original SF that is radical in ways that perhaps haven’t really been acknowledged yet.

Cortez On Jupiter is the story of graffiti artist Pablo Cortez’ career progression from Basquiat-esque guerrilla muralist in 2020s LA via a staggered Bester-like plot to a weightless take on Jackson Pollock on in orbit above the Great Red Spot. Meanwhile a series of attempts to communicate with the alien Sirens of the Jovian atmosphere repeatedly have fatal consequences. Fascinated, Pablo volunteers.

Initially framed as a documentary on Pablo’s career, told in flashback and transcripts, Cortez on Jupiter steers a course that manages to include explicit satire and old-fashioned sensawunda SF tinged with cyberpunk simultaneously.

The Science Fiction Encyclopaedia talks about Hogan’s ‘pleasing gonzo energy’ which most obviously manifests in Pablo’s rapid-fire Spanglish-with-Nahuatl dialogues. Long, free-flowing sentences leap around worldbuilding impressionistically rather than through any attempted simulation of mimesis. Pablo drops Aztec deities into his rambling seemingly allocating new mythic status to everything.

Paint stick in hand like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool starless night years ago in L.A. that crushed the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute little scarito in my scalp that I wore my hair extra short for months to show off. Or like in that time before time when space wasn’t separate from time or anything was separate from anything else and all was the goddess Coatlicue, She of the Serpent Skirt, but then she was the Cipactli monster: alligatoroid, fished, but more a great, quivering mass swimming in an endless sea that was also a sky, a mass with mucho, mucho hungry mouths that devoured everything, the monster, the sea, the monster, the sea, so the sea was the monster and vice versa — everything all mixed up like Siren zapware feedback — ay! Makes me want to be like the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca — I wonder which I am, culture giver or trickster? Could I be both? Why not? I know how they felt when they decided, Hey, enough of this formless nadaness! Let’s tear this monster/paint blob apart! (p2-3)

It becomes clear later that Pablo is, as he suspected, both culture giver and trickster. In particular the loner Pablo continually voices the trickster’s absence of respect for society, whether in small groups, through the justice systems, or in the Space Culture Project. In the latter Pablo rails against the Director as “An icon-maker rather than an iconoclast. No wonder we didn’t get along.” (p83)

One of SF’s favourite toys is the neologism, from raygun to cyberspace SF has modified language to tell its story but I struggle to think of any writer who has made language so distinctly his own the way Hogan does. (He even creates the wonderful “nuevofangled cyberpsychoautonomoelectromagneticneuroextrasensorywhatchamacallit.” p210) The Spanglish vocabulary not only gives Pablo cultural depth but contributes in classic trickster fashion to subverting the otherwise standard First Contact story. In his hands the toy is a weapon, reflected by the Picasso quote Pablo has tattooed: “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.” (p25)

Writing in SFEye Hogan said of himself:

Growing up as a Chicano, I often found it easier to identify with aliens, mutants and other sci-fi thingies than with the white people who were supposed to be destined to conquer the galaxy.(Greasy Kid Stuff From Outer Space, SFEye 11, December 1992)

That outsider feeling has translated in Pablo into the man who can communicate with the Sirens when they have mentally destroyed others because of the artistic perspective and because of that identification more with the alien than society. In Cortez on Jupiter Ernest Hogan challenges the Heinleinian vision of space conquest, the prevalent Manifest Destiny of Space Exploration that lingers on. The ‘heroic’ first man to lose his mind to the Sirens is Phil Hagen.

a typical nondescript astronaut — not even the fact that he was black and raised in Brazil made him much different from the sterilized whitebread spacemen of the mid-twentieth century. He was all hard-edge haircut and close shave all the way down to the convolutions of his brain. (p27)

That sounds like Starship Troopers‘ John Rico to me, and the last line of that paragraph reads: “I can’t even recall anything he ever said that interested me.”

Cortez On Jupiter takes a conventional mainstream SF idea or two as its plot, hence the SFE suggestion that Hogan isn’t doing anything radically original, but in warping language as Pablo does “I really don’t care what language they’re from — I just use ‘em when they fit.” (p9) Ernest Hogan satirizes swathes of SF that went before. 

Historically, Hernan Cortez defeated the Aztecs in part through his relationship with a woman who interpreted for him. Pablo is a very different Cortez, but his return from the Sirens is facilitated by fellow artist Willa translating his thoughts. Multi-faceted synaesthetic communications assimilate Pablo and the Sirens where the establishment protocols all failed. Hogan convincingly offers SF a new, post-Anglo paradigm. Pablo’s linguistic exuberance and artistic questing highlight and challenge the media obsessions and the cultural establishments of today both real and as more commonly portrayed in SF.

Cortez on Jupiter is a frequently very funny novel but one with a serious heart. His story may be closest to Alfred Bester, but his freewheeling hi-NRG word mashups and sharp wide-ranging satire owe as much to Ishmael Reed. Twenty years on I still know no writer in SF consistently doing what Hogan does with language to document, shape and comment on colliding cultures.

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

Rave Review of Nebula Award Nominated SF Novel Autumn Angels By Arthur Byron Cover From Revolution SF

(from the Official Arthur Byron Cover site)

Check out this rave (and then some) review for Arthur Byron Cover's brilliant Autumn Angels - out now in a brand new author-author-authorized new edition from Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press - by Ivan Lerner, from Revolution SF

At one point during Autumn Angels, the lawyer, one of the novel's three main characters, says, "In a world where anything can happen, rest assured, it will." This, coupled with his "But what's the use in being alive if you can't mingle with people no good for you?" fundamentally sums up in a metaphorical nutshell this fantastic and unfortunately nearly forgotten work of satirical fantasy.

One of my favorite novels, Arthur Byron Cover's Autumn Angels is one of the wildest and weirdest books to be printed. One critic has referred to Cover as a "rock 'n' roll James Joyce," which is very nice, but an almost left-handed compliment. While definitely one of the "great works of Western Civilization," how many people have actually had the fortitude to finish Joyce's Ulysses, yet alone Finnegans Wake? Autumn Angels is a breeze and a hoot to read, and if you don't catch all of Cover's playful references (and there are many), don't worry. They all exist with a specific purpose in the novel itself; it doesn't matter if you don't know that the godlike man with no name is a allusion to Clint Eastwood's character in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, or that the insidious oriental doctor is Fu Manchu, or the talking blood-drinking flowers from the planet of the Ebony Kings are referring to the human-eating plant from The Little Shop of Horrors. There's even a reference to the old commercials of infamous L.A. car dealer Cal Worthington -- talk about obscure! 

Of course, catching and recognizing these references is loads of fun, but some characters, like the aforementioned Ebony Kings, are solely creations of author Cover's fevered imagination. So I think it is beside the point to simply reducing this witty and marvelous book to the status of "just a game." Autumn Angels is not some joyless post-modern wankfest where the author is showing off his grad school degree and his ability to construct convoluted sentences that only exist to satisfy his perverse desire to torment an unfortunate audience. Autumn Angels is beautiful weirdness that needs to be read, written in a clean and direct style, that tells the almost-existential story of how three godlike miscreants try and re-introduce depression to the race of godlike men.

The following quote is from Harlan Ellison's almost frenzied introduction to the book's 1975 Pyramid Books paperback edition (the novel was the second in Pyramid's "Harlan Ellison Discover Series"). The fab Mr. Ellison wrote this about 26 years ago, but it still directly pinpoints the novel's positives: "It is a great many things, most of them silly and funny and memorable…" 

It takes the materials of everyday entertainments-pulp heroes, movies, comics, detective stories-and transforms them. It melds them into a gestalt that is fresh and different and entirely meaningful… I take Autumn Angels and its brilliant young author very seriously… And despite the seeming silliness of the story, it is a profound and singular examination of some of the basic questions that confound us today: the meaning of our existence, the value of pain, the rationale for the search of individual destiny. And Autumn Angels speaks directly to the value of role-playing in our society; it says something lucid and fresh about the value of persona, the need to be other than what we seem, the need to seem to be other than what we are. 

Nominated for a Nebula upon its initial release ("When I told my father it had been nominated for the best SF novel of the year, he said he'd have to read it again -- he was more a Louis Lamour fan," says Cover), the book takes place eons in the future, at some point long after the bems (who are eventually brought back to earth and the story) have granted godlike powers to the race of "mere man." People no longer identify themselves by name but by character (or persona or archetype, if you will): our three misfit protagonists are the lawyer, the demon and the fat man (who is, according to Ellison, modeled after Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon).

The demon and the lawyer (who is the book's most fallible and "human" character, and a great audience surrogate) are fed up with the stagnation of the race of godlike man ("the routine of life was rarely broken," writes Cover), and are trying to convince the great mover-and-shaker, the fat man, to help them on their quest:

"Without depression, [asks the demon] what good is happiness? These days happiness is no longer a goal, but merely another state of being. As for myself, I find no joy in seeing other people happy. The race of godlike man has become lazy. The only ambition is for fame and glory. There is no striving for unobtainable goals. There are no adventures. And may I remind you that our very identities come from our past? Why shouldn't they come from our own culture, our own present? And what is our future?"
The fat man rubbed one of his chins. "I do not care for your goals. I, for one, am completely satisfied with things as they are." 

"And for eons," said the lawyer, "you have been concerned with petty intrigues. Why, a man with your skills in the old days would have fought and schemed for a planet, for a solar system, for more! Your skills are wasted on this dreamless planet. With the return of depression will come the return of dreams, of hopes for better times. All godlike men will be searching for something, and then your skills will not be wasted. You will be at the top of a young and worthwhile race." 

The fat man is convinced ("I like the way you two come right to the point," he chortles to his co-conspirators), and becomes the trio's de facto leader. However, even with his great powers (and the assistance of the shadowy gunsel, the fat man's henchman; based on Elisha Cook Jr.'s character in The Maltese Falcon -- remember him?), this crazy troika fails miserably, with an angered godlike mankind stripping them of their collective fame and glory.

Shamed and shunned, the friends eventually realize that this state of disgrace actually can be a boon: being out of the public's eye, now they can really do whatever it takes to bring back depression! Cover writes, "These three possessed a confidence alien to all other godlike men… despite their godlike powers, they resembled mere man in that they would let nothing stop them, even if it meant their doom."

Along the way, among a multiplicity of other oddities, we are treated to a day in the life of the duck (versus the cigar-smoking frogs), a wonderful and exciting basketball game between the lawyer and the fat man before the fuzzy ("yet boring," describes Cover) little balls of Sharkosh, the painful odyssey of the sad crawling bird, and a death duel between the godlike man with no name and the lonely hawkman where the loser ends up in the anti-matter universe. Despite its length (the Pyramid paperback is only 190 pages), Autumn Angels is a fantastically dense book.

Meanwhile, Cover is wonderful at supplying hints and traces of the growing friendship between his three godlike outcasts, especially with the in-jokes and playful teases of one to another. The demon and the fat man become roommates, and delight in teasing the lawyer about his obsession with pigs and his unrequited love for his never-seen girlfriend "Kitty" (which might be a sly jab at most males' pursuit of "pussy"). Soon the reader feels honored to be included in the shenanigans and strange logic of this insular trio, as if you were watching a good Marx Brothers' film.

He plunges us into a unique and original world, and has the faith that we'll keep up. Like one of the better magicians, the author works hard to give the audience the feeling that they're in on the gag, while using delightful sleight-of-hand to keep surprising them. Cover's dialog is witty and sharp, his descriptions are clear and imaginative, and his plotting is masterful. A fantasy for adults (rather than yet another adolescent power trip wish fulfillment testosterone fest), Autumn Angels evokes the smart playfulness of a Rudy Rucker, a Philip Jose Farmer or a Kurt Vonnegut. Fans of the work of comic book author Alan Moore (especially his Watchmen, Top Ten or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series) should really express an interest in Cover's work.

If I might appropriate Terry Southern's statement about Tom Wolfe, Arthur Byron Cover needs to be showered with money and other fine things. Attracted by the Pyramid paperback's beautiful Ron Cobb cover, I discovered this book back in the late-1970s in a used bookstore in the basically illiterate section of Brooklyn where I grew up. Since then, I've read Autumn Angels at least five times. I love this book so much that every time I'm in a used bookstore, if I find a copy of it, I buy it. I've found copies in used bookstores in Aspen, Colorado, Chicago and London, England. I'm not sure why I do this (either I'm trying to preserve copies for future generations or else this is one of the few times I'm willing to be transformed into pure collector scum), but I guard my copies jealously, only giving (as opposed to lending) one copy away so far.

The novel initially "began as a short story for an original anthology series that was cancelled," Cover told me recently, "but by then I was wondering what should happen next. I really had no idea how to write a short story, much less a novel, so I was faking it." 

Cover states that the novel got published through "Nepotism. Harlan Ellison had made a deal with his publisher to edit a series of books. I was bothering him a lot in those days and he told me he would look at something. When he did, he figured it was okay and he would edit it. The second time he read it, with an eye toward what editorial work it needed, he thought it was the worst piece of dreck he'd ever suffered through… The charitable way of putting it is that he was unwilling to suspend his disbelief for it. Fortunately for us both, the third time around something clicked and his opinion became somewhat more favorable, which is sort of a quiet thing to call any feeling Harlan might have." (See Ellison's quote above.) 

Unfortunately, critical and financial response to the novel was poor. "Except for a few who really didn't like it, it was pretty much ignored by what passed then for a literary science fiction establishment," says Cover. "The arts are a profoundly Darwinistic enterprise. When you look at what my then-contemporaries were writing, particularly those who have gone on to lucrative careers in writing commercial SF, you should thank Harlan for giving the work the benefit of the doubt when he doubted it the most."
Although a fabulous fantasist, Cover is quite earthbound when it come to the realities of the contemporary publishing industry. "I run a bookstore [Dangerous Visions in Southern California; www.readsf.com]. [Ordinary] SF books are a common product. Every literary trend that has ever existed now exists in the cultural matrix in some form or another, and even co-exists with artistic sensibilities once thought to be mutually exclusive. The trends of the past will be the trends of the future, but while the field [remains] dominated by middle-class writers and a middle-class audience (insiders as opposed to those who once believed themselves outsiders, whether or not they actually were), the era of dependable literary conceptual breakthroughs is history. You never know though. For years I've been saying the bottom will drop out of the Stephen King collectible market. Ten or twelve more decades, and I might be right." 

A new print editions can be ordered right here on Amazon. Take a risk, order Autumn Angels today.

Read Arthur Byron Cover's Fantastic Nebula Nominated Autumn Angels - For Just $3.99

Performative Utterance On Fan-Favorite Author Jody Scott's Passing For Human

(from the official Jody Scott site)

Check out this very nice review of Jody Scott's Passing For Human, courtesy of Performative Utterance.

The brand new edition of Passing for Human will be out shortly from Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press

The fantastic travelogue has been a literary staple since the Iliad at least, and as a means of turning a satirical mirror on society’s failings one of the most frequently adopted. Think of Gulliver’s Travels for instance, and all its subsequent copies. Feminist SF has used this model to explore lands from Herland to Whileaway most effectively. 

In Passing For Human Jody Scott takes a slightly different tack by telling her story from the distorted viewpoint of a Rysemian alien, Benaroya, on an anthropological research visit to Earth in the 1970s. Benaroya is, however, apparently amoral, pleasure focussed and careless. She doesn’t seem to like the ‘Earthies’ as from the start she is condescending, sneering and labels humans primitive ‘bushmen’ on a ‘savage backwater.’ 

To visit Earth Benaroya has had to transfer from her giant dolphin-like Rysemian form into one of a choice of human simulacra. When we first meet her she is a faithful copy of Brenda Starr the intrepid girl reporter of comic strip fame. Later she will be Emma Peel and most significantly Virginia Woolf. Her fellow Rysemians will include Abraham Lincoln, Heidi’s Grandfather and General George S Patton. Support drones are modelled on Richard Nixon. Whilst on Earth Benaroya really just wants to have fun, experimenting with the limits of the Brenda Starr form initially, in a road race that leaves several humans dead and a half-naked Starr in custody, where her lawyer is unable to resist sex with her. 

On her return to her shipworld Vonderra, Benaroya is informed of a threat. Another alien, the Sajorian Scaulzo is about to invade Earth and Benaroya must prevent this. The Sajorians, we are told, are the only truly psychopathic race to have achieved interstellar travel. They are reminiscent of Klingons in that respect, but are explicitly compared to humanity. Scaulzo himself is referred to by Benaroya as The Prince Of Darkness early on, and later, when captured as Woolf she muses on whether it is wrong to ‘fall in love with the Prince Of Darkness.’ 

Passing For Human has a plot, the prevention of Earth’s destruction, and Benaroya’s learning about humans and herself, but plot is not really this novel’s focus. Events happen apace, with absurd leaps, and devices such as the assorted ‘identities’ Benaroya adopts are not really explored in any typical SF manner. As a whole, despite its aliens, spaceships, super weapons and so on, Passing For Human doesn’t look like a lot of SF these days, being unconcerned with plausibility, plot cohesion or real characterisation. The novel leaps along with an energy and a disregard for convention that reminds me a little of genre outsiders like Barry Malzberg and possibly Josephine Saxton in that this reads like a romp through the Collective Unconscious. A closer comparison might be with the early novels of Ishmael Reed who shares with Scott a vitriolic contempt for seemingly all and everything, sniping and satirising hilariously along the way.

Yet the California scenery was ever so pretty. There, just ahead, was some sort of fabulous monument. What could it represent? Aha: a giant taco 80 feet tall, oozing lettuce, bits of cheese and tomato and a thick purple goo, possibly plum jam. She’d seen ever so many pictures in magazines. But the monument was made of plastic! Oh, how inventive. And the sweet, little bushmen were lining up to get small, hot duplicates of the hot food product. 

Benaroya felt a pang of excstasy, this trip was going to be thrilling. 

Even amidst action scenes Scott doesn’t let up on her targets: 

‘Emma Peel admired Boolabung hugely. Her Captain was a real man, macho as all get-out, never whimpering or complaining.’ 

As Emma Peel she is later picked up hitch-hiking by a gangster who asks why she is out on the road: 

‘I’m an anthropologist. On vacation.’ 

‘Study Indians and that kind of thing?’ 

She tittered. ‘You might say I try to relate in a meaningful, concerned way to autochthonous bipeds in general.’ 

‘A little girl like you with a big job like that,’ he marvelled. Benaroya pondered this slippery remark and concluded it was the ordinary Earthie belittler camoflaged as a compliment. 

The rapid non-sequiturs Scott puts into Benaroya’s mouth and her aside justifications combine sharp jabbing observations and great humour. Those who seek to deride feminist SF often suggest that it is too serious, po-faced, but Jody Scott’s wild imagination, seemingly scattershot but tightly controlled, makes Passing For Human an absurdly comic romp of unexpected juxtapositions and witty asides.

Being satire this 1977 novel does show its age perhaps more readily than some of its contemporaries in places, but as so little has changed in many respects its jibes at patronising men, the worship of commercialism and other areas still contain truths. Along with its loose sequel I, Vampire Jody Scott has left SF with two provocative, compassionate, and thoughtful short novels. Her style will certainly not be to everyone’s liking, as I said, these aren’t traditional SF at all, but they are good examples of what SF can do when it steps out of its comfort zone, and of how women’s SF can challenge the genre assumptions by challenging its tropes and its language. Take a look, see what you think.