Free Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson

1947, and bought by the same taxpayers for the State University Library system, from which I ultimately stole it, leaving behind five identical copies none of which has ever been checked out. It is an 800-page study of the ruffed grouse, a bird so stupid you can blow out the brains of one without disturbing the one next to it. It took six men to write, and one of the men later produced a 400-page sequel. I take it down from the shelf whenever I’m feeling especially useless and futile, and pore over the maps and graphs and close-ups of grouse droppings, and I feel better.
    At long last I’ve found a companion volume.
    If you’re an English major who believes you must know the man to properly read and evaluate his works (don’t laugh-I was one once) then by all means pick this book up-if you can (little joke there). If you’re an Ashley user, I should advise you that the binding is damnably difficult to destroy, and it’s too big to use all at once. If you’re H.P. Lovecraft, let me know what you think of it.
     
    And so opens 1975 in the SF publishing world. Me, I think I’m going to get back in the time-capsule and get some sleep. Wake me up when Heinlein’s next book comes out, will you? Thanks.
     
    Also concerning “Spider vs. The Hax Of Sol III”:
    God, that hurt to proofread.
    One flnal word on this column. Since its publication I have had an opportunity to apologize privately to L. Sprague de Camp, an apology he most graciously accepted; I would like to do. so now publicly. When I first met that worthy gentleman, he suggested with exquisitely gentle politeness that perhaps I had been a trifle harsh in reviewing his Lovecraft biography. I suggest that what I was was a horse’s ass. To heap scorn and abuse on a book one doesn’t happen to be excited about, on the grounds of its thoroughness, is the mark of an amateur playing to the bloodthirsty. One of the major agonies of reviewing is that you cannot recall an opinion which later reflection reveals to be fatheaded. There isn’t enough time for anything but snap judgements, and often you end up regretting them, and there’s no practical way to retract them. Writing a book gives you time for reflection: a year after you mail off the manuscript, they mail it back copy-edited and you re-read it carefully, changing what now strikes you as imprudent or ill-advised. Six months later you get galley proofs-again you can make sure that’s what you meant to say. A few months after that, people are reading it-and there’s still time to make changes for the paperback edition.
    A book review column, is always due last week. You hammer it out on horseback, race to the post effice, nap on the doorstep for a few hours until they open up, mail the manuscript-and then the next time you see it is the same time everybody else does, in print. It generally has not been copy-edited; all your mistakes and syntactical horrors are intact and the typesetter has suggested some of his own. It contains opinions you cannot imagine yourself having entertained, let alone expressed, and if you sit down right now and dash off a letter to recant or clarrfy it will see print five or six months from now; half the readers won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’s too late.
    This Is the only time I’ve ever had an opportunity to retract something I said in a column, and it feels good.
    No one interested in the life of H.P. Lovecraft should be without Sprague de Camp’s definitive biography.
     
    Ironíc update: Stan Schmidt, whom I praised in this first column, is now my employer. “Doc” Schmidt recently became editor of Analog, for which magazine I do quarterly book reviews. Funny how things work out.

DOG DAY EVENING
    It absolutely had to happen. I mean, it was so cosmically preordained-destined-fated flat out inevitable that I can’t imagine how we failed to be expecting it. Where else on God’s earth could Ralph and Joe possibly have ended up but at Callahan’s