Cover Reveal: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends, edited by Richard Wolinsky

Cover Reveal: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends, edited by Richard Wolinsky

Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends (Tachyon Publications, September 2, 2025). Cover by Yoshi Vu

At Black Gate, we’re all about science fiction legends. Specifically, science fiction legends who appeared in paperback in spinner racks in the 70s and 80s. Or pulp magazines. Or wrote adventures at the dawn of the role playing industry. You know what, forget all that. We’re not picky.

What makes a true science fiction legend? This is the sort of thing that’s hotly debated on social media, and at science fiction conventions, and in lengthy blog posts titled “Towards a New Science Fiction Canon, Because Yours is Old and Stupid.” But recently, public opinion has shifted. To be a science fiction legend, the most important criteria is that your name looks good in green font on a 50s CRT monitor, preferably in a cool underground bunker. Exactly like the cover of Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends, the upcoming book from Richard Wolinsky and Tachyon Publications.

I’ve spent long hours staring at this cover (by the marvelously talented Yoshi Vu), and the more I do, the more I’m convinced I’m right. Just look at those names. Look at how cool they are! Roger Zelazny, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, Jack Williamson, Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Anne McCaffrey, William F. Nolan, Terry Carr, Frederik Pohl. Right now you’re shaking your head, but you know I’m right.

Those glowing green names don’t just constitute a comprehensive list of true science legends. Coincidentally, they also happen to be included in this fabulous book of interviews. Don’t take my word for it; here’s the press release to show how right I am.

In this collection of candid interviews, more than fifty legendary authors swap fascinating — and sometimes controversial — anecdotes about the Golden Age of science Fiction (1920–1960). With such guests as Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert, and many more, here are the wild personalities, sparks of contention, and vivid imaginations that made science fiction thrive.

Today, depictions of aliens, rocket ships, and awe-inspiring, futuristic space operas are everywhere. Why is there so much science fiction, and where did it come from? Radio producer and author Richard Wolinsky (Probabilites) has found answers in the Golden Age of science fiction.

Wolinsky has interviewed a veritable who’s who of famous (and infamous) science fiction publishers, pulp magazines, editors, cover artists, and fans. The interviews themselves, which aired on the public radio show, Probabilities, span more than twenty years, from just before the release of Star Wars through the dawn of Y2K. The result, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, is ultimately a love letter to fandom.

See? I told you.

I’m not familiar with Richard Wolinsky, but it’s clear that I should be. He cohosted Probabilities, a half-hour public radio program devoted to science fiction, mystery, and mainstream fiction, which aired in San Francisco for nearly twenty years, from 1977 – 1995. After he took the program solo in 2002 he renamed it Bookwaves, and that incarnation is still running.

Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends belongs on every serious science fiction bookshelf. It definitely belongs on mine, anyway.

It will be released from Tachyon Publications on September 2, 2025. It is 256 pages, priced at $18.95 in paperback and $11.00 in digital formats. Get more details and order copies directly from the publisher here.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

9 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Eugene R.

I am pleased to see that the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” has been exploded out to 1920-1960. To this day, I am still incredulous that the “official” definition of the GAoSF is 1938-1946. Seriously? Admittedly, I came of age when 1950s SF was being reprinted and anthologized in the 1960s, so I am biased. But seriously? 1938-1946?

And I do appreciate reading about and of the legends of literature, among whom I gratefully would place Mr. Louis L’Amour. Just not sure if sf/f is his part of the cattle ranch, though, even after reading The Haunted Mesa.

K. Jespersen

Not sure if it explains Mr. L’Amour’s inclusion, but I’ve heard him credited with making it OK to make weird west be sci-fi west, rather than just spooky west. Sure, there were sci-fi west books before “The Haunted Mesa,” but there were a lot more after the reigning emperor of the western decided to publish one. “Briscoe County Jr.” and Bruce Boxleitner’s “Frontier Earth” series probably wouldn’t be quite what they turned into without L’Amour’s tacit approval of the combination.

Michael J. Walsh

Here’s an observation:

“Certainly 1938-1946 was a period of astonishing activity (among comparatively few writers), the time when most of the themes and motifs of sf were taking their modern shape, which in some cases proved almost definitive and in others continued to be reworked and modified, as is the way of genres.”

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/golden_age_of_sf

Paul Connelly

I don’t think there were any CRT computer monitors in the 1950s. More like the mid-1960s was when those appeared, although CRTs may have been hooked to computers to display graphs and plots (not text) a little before then. And they only really took off in the 1970s. The CRTs were still just stuck in televisions (the hot new product!) in the 1950s.

William H. Stoddard

Don’t forget oscilloscopes! The Heathkit oscilloscope was one of their best sellers during their post-WWII heyday.

Paul Connelly

Prediction is difficult, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra said. And memory is tricky, especially about the past. I think of the green CRT text as a 1970s thing, but if so it may have been very late into the decade. The VT05 and VT52 were white text on black screen, when I look up images now. The VT220, the perfection of text computer terminals, gave you the option of white, yellow or green text on a black background, and various personal computer monitors had the green text, but I think we’re mostly into the 1980s by then. Tektronix oscilloscopes and graphical plotters had green foreground color, if I am recalling correctly. But a lot of things I lived through get placed in other decades by younger folks now–like half of what people now attribute to “the ’60s” are events or cultural fads from the early 1970s instead. It’s almost enough to make one believe that culture and tech significantly change mid-decade more often than how we remember those changes occurring.

Eugene R.

Excellent point about the looseness of memory and of definitions for time/era/period. I have seen “The Sixties” defined as the rise and fall of the Counterculture, which usually dates from the start of the Kennedy administration (1961, ushering in Camelot) to the fall of the Nixon administration (1974, chopper ride outta town). So, sure, the early ’70s are part of The Sixties. If you squint enough.

9
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x