I’m pleased to announce that All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories made the Locus Magazine 2004 Recommended Reading List. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around? I want my 20th-century schizoid art. Live veiled Amazons. And there’s ELIZABETH BEAR up there on the video screens over his head in letters two feet high. Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the ultimate fate of the universe lately. And damn William James and Geoffrey Sonnabend for being born half a century apart, anyway. Must. Destroy. Ivan. Tribble. I was going to move anyway. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said? In other words, as long as I’m in trouble I may as well compound it.

(Concept kinda-sorta stolen from Mr. Schwartz. I think his madness might have had method in’t, though, unlike mine.)