Richard Wolinsky is joining us today to talk about his collection of interviews. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!: Interviews with Science Fiction Legends
Richard Wolinsky, editor
“Amazing, astounding, fantastic – and ingeniously organized and edited.”
–Jonathan Lethem
In these highly-candid radio interviews, more than fifty legendary, larger-than-life personalities trade anecdotes about the Golden Age of science fiction. Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert, and many more, depict the wild personalities, sparks of contention, and vivid imagination that made science fiction thrive.
What’s [author’s] favorite bit?
The book exists because of a really weird competition. I was both an important part of said competition, but also on the sidelines.
So let’s go back almost fifty years. It’s the late 1970s and my housemate Lawrence Davidson and I have started doing science fiction and fantasy interviews on KPFA in Berkeley. Between the two of us, I was the guy who’d read the book for the interview; Lawrence (or LD or Larry, as we called him back then) would look up the history of the author. Larry would set up the interviews through his contacts at Cody’s bookstore, and I’d make sure the studio was available (I was a paid employee at KPFA doing other work) and then afterwards, I’d head into the editing booth and turn the conversation into a radio show.
‘
Larry was also friends with science fiction author (and Hugo winning fanzine editor) Richard (Dick) A. Lupoff, and the two of them became obsessed with the pulp writers and editors of the past. It probably started with a guy both of them knew, and I would spend some time with, the great fantasy author Fritz Leiber. I remember the three of us heading over to his small place on Geary Street in San Francisco where he regaled us with tales of working in the pulps). Fritz had this deep amazing voice, hypnotic in its own way.
I really don’t know how the competition began. Was it Larry discovering that the great science fiction author of the 1920s, Stanton A. Coblentz, was alive and well somewhere within driving distance of the Bay Area? Or was it Dick, on a trip down to the L.A. area, focusing in on Forrest J. Ackerman. So Larry would discover that Raymond Z. Gallun lived on Long Island – or more importantly, that Harry Bates, the first editor of Astounding Stories was somewhere in New York. Dick would counter that the great Howard Browne was in driving distance. Or that Frank Belknap Long lived in Manhattan.
An aside: I was in New York in Chelsea interviewing Frank Belknap Long in an ancient apartment, having been given notes by Dick and Larry and being told, “You’ll be fine.”
I had a cold. It was the dead of winter. Freezing. Long’s apartment opened on a long corridor filled with rubbish. The Longs had a German Shepard. It was obvious from the bathtub they didn’t walk him. We conducted the interview in the hallway, sitting on a steamer trunk. Frank was dapper, in a newly pressed suit that looked thirty years old, or more. Somewhere in the distance, in the apartment proper, was Frank’s wife, Lyda, trilling “who is it?” when I arrived. “Dear, it’s for me,” was the response. The tape ends with Lyda, again trilling, “Come here, I have something to show you,” and is followed by a noise that if you didn’t know better, sounding much like Cthulhu had found another victim. In reality, I went back there and she handed me a note to give to Dick Lupoff’s wife, Pat. Lyda’s coloring was gray, topped by a bright orange Lucille Ball fright wig. The note was a bunch of scribbles.
Two follow-ups on that. The first was that after I said goodbye to the Longs, I took a subway uptown where I met my dad, and we watched Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Quite fitting. The second is that when I tried giving Lyda’s note to Pat, she made a face and marched straight to the garbage.
The competition went on. Dick found E. Hoffman Price somewhere south of San Francisco. He had some gargoyles created by, I think, Clark Ashton Smith. Larry countered with Charles D. Hornig, a seventeen year old pulp editor in 1940, now a CPA — and soon Larry’s CPA. It got weirder. One of them found Ed Earl Repp, who wrote more pulp stories than anyone else in the ‘30s and vanished without a trace after World War II. I remember when Dick found Frank K. Kelly. Kelly wrote only a handful of stories, nearly all of which were prescient.
The thing was, I was a modern science fiction reader. I had never heard of half these people. Though it was cool to ask Isaac Asimov his take on Ed Earl Repp (he thought it was a cautionary tale: even the most prolific writers could disappear without a trace). But Larry and Dick were having a blast. If the writer was alive, the pulp detectives would find them. And they didn’t always have to be in the science fiction field. Larry dug up a couple of western writers from the old days; Dick countered with mystery editors. Some pop up briefly in these pages.
I wondered at the time what these old writers and editors (nearly all male, and all white) would mean to radio listeners, the KPFA audience with its clear leftist political bent. Now almost half a century later, the current listeners want me to keep digitizing and editing, and the interviews have become quite popular: a look into an age of publishing and writing that no longer exists. For me those tapes are a slog. Larry and Dick were too deferential, too awed to say “move closer to the microphone.” There are wives chattering in the background, dogs yelping. Echoes from hell. Interruptions. I may have found a young tech guy who wants to fix things. I really want to get the Frank Belknap Long interview in shape, including the ending.
My favorite bit, though is that all of this happened because Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson were able and willing to seek out people who were often very hard to find, and pin them down for interviews – and in some cases, these were the only interviews recorded. It’s an archive that can never be duplicated.
LINKS:
BIO:
Richard Wolinsky co-hosted and produced Probabilities, a half-hour radio program devoted to science fiction, mystery and mainstream fiction, from 1977 to 1995 on KPFA-FM. He took the program solo in 2002, renamed it Bookwaves, and it is still running. Along the way, he has spoken with most of the English-speaking world’s leading authors, including Peter Carey, Joseph Heller, William Kennedy, Margaret Atwood, Anne Rice, Gore Vidal, James Ellroy, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow, and many others. Wolinsky’s interviews have been published in numerous venues, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Heavy Metal, Mystery Scene Magazine, and in such books as Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, The Louis L’Amour Companion, and Macabre II: Stephen King & Clive Barker. Wolinsky was born and raised in New York City and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1978.