The latest installment of Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics focuses on the May, 1960 issue of My Greatest Adventure, one of DC’s anthology comic books of science-fiction shorts.

Included in the issue are such stories as “We Were Ruled By The Emperor-Beast,” “I Fought The Sonar Creatures,” “I Became A Human Space Ship,” and more, featuring bizarre invading aliens, an atomic transmutator that converts sounds into colors and force, and a tunnel through the center of the Earth that manages to ignore the existence of the planet’s molten core.

In other words, really bad science fiction. And yet also somehow quite lovable. In fact, much of yesterday’s bad science fiction has become strangely lovable. (more…)

Think you have what it takes to design a cover for a limited edition of J.G. Ballard’s Crash?

Times Online and Harper Collins have teamed up for a competition timed with the release of Ballard’s latest autobiography, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, which will be published on February 4, 2008.

Ballard himself will pick the winner from among the six finalists chosen by the Harper Collins design team.

Unfortunately, the competition is only open to residents of the UK and Ireland aged 16 and over. But those of you currently eligible—or thinking of relocating to become eligible—can find the details of the competition here.

But how times—and The Times—have changed! As you can tell from the complete review the same publication gave to Crash back on June 28, 1973 …

The Times just published its list of the men and woman who compose the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. While we could debate each writer’s specific ranking, since I’m sure we all have particular favorites we’d like to move up the list (or in the case of certain writers, down), the choices appear fairly intelligent for once. I usually get angry quite quickly when skimming such lists, but in this case, my initial reaction was acceptance, rather than anger or denial.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind after I examine the complete list more fully.

The top 10 are:

1. Philip Larkin
2. George Orwell
3. William Golding
4. Ted Hughes
5. Doris Lessing
6. J. R. R. Tolkien
7. V. S. Naipaul
8. Muriel Spark
9. Kingsley Amis
10. Angela Carter

Larkin surprised me in the #1 spot. Even though I love his poem “This Be the Verse,” and quote it often, I hadn’t realized he was quite that highly regarded over on the other side of the pond.

As for other writers on the list, I anticipated that Roald Dahl (#16) and J. G. Ballard (#27) would be there, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Mervyn Peake (#18) and Michael Moorcock (#50) made it as well.

Had he still been with us, Isaac Asimov would have turned 87 three days ago. Well … at least, that’s when he would have celebrated it, as he was never really sure of the exact date.

As he put it in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, “It could not have been later than that. It might, however, have been earlier. Allowing for the uncertainties of the times, of the lack of records, of the Jewish and Julian calendars, it might have been as early as October 4, 1919. There is, however, no way of finding out. My parents were always uncertain and it really doesn’t matter. I celebrate January 2, 1920, so let it be.”

So, in honor of that maybe/maybe not birthday, let’s step into the Wayback Machine. Here I am, visiting Doubleday’s Park Avenue offices to interview Isaac back in the ’70s for my high school underground newspaper. Click through the image for a better look at Isaac, garbed in his customary bolo necktie. I, unfortunately, can be seen wearing a puka shell necklace, which I guess I thought was cool back when I was 16 or so. At least I wasn’t wearing a headband!

I’ve just been quoted extensively in an article by Carol Pinchefsky that went live today over at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Carol interviewed me at last year’s World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs for a piece which would eventually be titled “Is There Nepotism in Science Fiction?” Go read it, and not just because you know me. Because that, after all, might be considered nepotism.

Interesting quotes there from David Hartwell, Stanley Schmidt, Susan Allison, Jay Lake, and others. And me. But more important than anything I might have to say on the matter is what Damon Knight once said:

I was a little shocked once, in the early fifties, when Tony Boucher mentioned casually that in a recent issue of F&SF, there was only one story that he had bought solely because of the author’s name. I thought that was one too many. Famous names may help sell a magazine; they don’t always, but if they do, it’s because those writers have written good stories in the past. Every time you publish a poor story by a famous writer, you diminish the value of that name and defeat your purpose.

I’m not sure when Knight said that, but it certainly still remains true today.

Nora Roberts took the top spot on the Mass Market Paperback Bestseller list in the December 10, 2007 Publishers Weekly with her novel Blood Brothers, which was to be expected. But what I didn’t expect to see was a brief sidebar that said “Roberts is the most prolific writer ever.”

That couldn’t be, could it? I knew that Roberts had probably written 200-250 novels, which might make her the most prolific author of the past 20 years, and if the claim has been qualified in that way, I’d have had no problem with it. But the most prolific writer ever? Wouldn’t that be Georges Simenon, who wrote more than 500 books?

A search of the Web turns up this list, originally published in one of the People’s Almanac volumes between 1975 and 1981. Georges Simenon is indeed there, but even his astonishing output, shown as 500+, turns out not to get him a rank higher than #9. The most prolific author, according to this list? Mary Faulkner, who wrote 904 novels under six pen names, including Kathleen Lindsay. Did Nora Roberts really break this record?

Her own site doesn’t answer the question. We’re told that “She’s had 147 New York Times bestsellers including 18 written as J.D. Robb and one written together with J.D. Robb,” but I can’t find the number of total books there. This list credits Roberts with 197 novels. I don’t mean to denigrate her accomplishments, since that certainly is an impressive number, but it isn’t even enough to put her in the top 20, since L. T. Meade needed 258 books books to her name to occupy that spot.

Anyone out there have an idea on what basis Publishers Weekly made this claim, and who’s truly the most prolific of them all?

As the year comes to an end, I’ve just learned about a positive review of one of my short stories that appeared in The Zone. Mario Guslandi has extremely kind things to say there concerning “The Awful Truth About The Circus,” published earlier this year in Zencore!:

To me, the best story in the book is by far “The Awful Truth About The Circus” by Scott Edelman, an extraordinary, insightful tale of loneliness and despair, in which the disappointments of life affect a small-town young girl.

A nice parting gift from 2007 in the year’s final few hours.

I dreamt last night that I was wandering a science-fiction convention, and it must have been a big one, because all of the usual suspects were there. As I walked back from a lunch with Jack Dann, along the way we bumped into Connie Willis, John Kessel, Adam-Troy Castro, Melissa Anna Singer, Sheila Williams, and many others. There was lots of loud conversation and much picture-taking.

The only odd thing about the dream was that when I ran into Marc Scott Zicree, he didn’t appear as his usual clean-cut self. Instead, he had long, wild hair, as if he hadn’t cut it in years, and he was dressed like a stereotypical ’60s hippie. We joked about how much he had changed since I’d last seen him, and I asked him where he’d stashed his VW van with flowers painted on the side.

Now why did my subconscious do that to a nice guy like Marc?

Central Connecticut State University has released its annual list of America’s Most Literate Cities. The study judges literacy by analyzing newspaper circulation, the number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

This year’s top 10 are:

Minneapolis, MN
Seattle, WA
St. Paul, MN
Denver, CO
Washington, DC
St. Louis, MO
San Francisco, CA
Atlanta, GA
Pittsburgh, PA
Boston, MA

So we now know that Minneapolis is #1 in literacy, and Salt Lake City is #1 in DVD purchasing.

But I’m still don’t plan on moving to either zip code.

I just finished the February 2008 Asimov’s, and want to put in a plug for what I thought was the issue’s stand-out tale, James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story.” There are other excellent stories to be found there, but this moving tale, filled with a strange sense of wonder, was my favorite.

Since the blogosphere is abuzz at the moment with news of the shortage of possible nominees for the Nebula Awards, I figured I should recommend that you all track this one down. Go forth and read!