“The Bay Area includes some people who are really interested in the moon, and they helped me with [Red Moon]. In the first scene there’s a landing on the moon where their shuttle touches down while going something like 8,000 miles an hour – this is like a launch rail take-off, but in reverse. That was their idea. I never would have thought of that, because you have to hit the rail with just a couple centimeters tolerance for error. They told me that in a vacuum that wouldn’t be hard, and I thought, ‘Whoa. That would be one scary landing.’ It made for a fun way to start.”
— from Kim Stanley Robinson: The Good Anthropocene, an interview in Locus
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Luis Ortiz is editor and publisher at NonStop Press […] with his new book he has surpassed himself. This immensely valuable and entertaining volume — purportedly the first of several — captures for posterity a chronologically delimited slice of the subculture of science-fiction fandom — currently dying or healthy; vanished or extant? — in such a manner that even those folks who have no prior inkling of the subculture — assuming they possess a modicum of curiosity and intelligence — should still be able to completely grok the subject matter and derive amusement and pleasure and wisdom from this richly annotated compilation. Although there have been earlier books which charted some fannish currents and waves — Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm; Harry Warner’s A Wealth of Fable; Ted Cogswell’s Pitfcs: The Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies — books which Ortiz acknowledges and cites, there has never, to my knowledge, been a survey like this one which vividly illustrates the topic with actual writing samples, derived from Ortiz’s incisive survey of over four thousand fanzines.
