alternate SF writers

[sergebroom]

I had the TV on to the "Swing & Singers" music station on Sunday and, upon seeing a picture of an older Benny Goodman, I was reminded of A.E van Vogt. If I could write fiction, I'd ask "What if van Vogt had been a Big Band musician?"

Come to think of it, an excellent(1) subject for an anthology would be Alternate SF writers: what if this or that famous SF writer had gotten into some other ocupation? Heck, if, as TexAnne pointed out, the anthology "Alternate Presidents"(2) can have story "Ike at the Mike", wherein Eisenhower instead became a Big Band leader, and one where Fidel Castro instead turned into a baseball player in San Francisco, why not one where Asimov became a customed costumed crimefighter? Heck, he looked like Clark Kent in his youth.

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(1) If I may humbly say so.

(2) Edited by Mike Resnick for Tor in 1992, which means it's out of print, and would you part with your copy?

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Howard Waldrop's "Ike at the Mike" is wonderful, but it didn't appear in the Mike Resnick-edited original anthology Alternate Presidents. Resnick's book was published by Tor in 1992. (I was the in-house editor.) Waldrop's story was published in Omni in 1982.

The anthology you're dreaming up was actually co-edited by me and Mike Resnick and published by Wildside in 1997. It's called Alternate Skiffy, it's still in print, and it would have been the perfect venue for your "what if A. E. Van Vogt had been a big-band leader" story.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Customed? What customs are you thinking of, Serge. Tea at four o'clock, perhaps?

Evil cackle

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Did Union Jack go for Tea Time? And what about Big Ben?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the correction about Waldrop's story. Another correction is that, while TexAnne is the one who brought up that tale when I mentionned the Goodman/van Vogt idea, the connection to Resnick was brought up as a possibility by Paula Lieberman as a possibility, not as a fact. That sounded familiar to me and so became 'true'. There is great peril in having been a reader of SF and about SF for decades. Disparate bits of information become conflated.

Thanks also for the reference to Alternate Skiffy. I'll look for it at Berkeley's Dark Carnival when I go to the Bay Area the week of March 15. I am quite curious about the premises of the stories. After all, can you imagine your life as anything but an involvement with SF? I can't see myself without SF. Heck, we both grew up in a time when it was not cool to read that stuff and yet we were inexorably drawn to it. For us not to have SF in our lives, we'd have had to be different persons with the same name.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

One more thing... Now I'm not sure if there was a Castro tale in Resnick's other anthology. Again, the conflation of memories. I was beginning to wonder if I had imagined reading about an SF story where Castro became a baseball player. (His love of that sport even made it in the Martian Manhunter's graphic novel "American Secrets".) I googled a bit this morning and found that, not only did Bruce McAllister wite a story on the subject, but that others have had a... dare I say it?... field day with the premise.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Big Ben would go on strike exactly on the hour. Union Jack, of course, would lead the strike.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

How about The Return of William Proxmire?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I had come across that story's title before, but never quite knew what it was about. I'm not sure the premise really is believable, but, it's nice to think of Proxmire's nefarious plans being foiled.