Introducing, from ReAnimus Press: PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTE FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY STUDIES (PITFCS) by Theodore R. Cogswell, ed.
Now in both ebook and hardback!
[NOTE: The ebook edition is currently a digital replica edition -- a PDF of the scanned page images of the hardback -- and not an epub/mobi type of typical ebook file. We are working on a typical epub/mobi type of ebook edition, but this is a large, complex book to convert from paper, so this digital replica / PDF approach is our first step, to get it out there more rapidly. The underlying/invisible PDF text is searchable, but still contains many scanning errors. You can read the page images clearly, just as if you were looking at a physical copy of the book. We want to be clear that it's a PDF for the time being. You will be able to download an epub/mobi file when we have it ready. This is in addition to the existing hardback edition, which heretofore was the only format available.] <hr>
PITFCS - Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies
Edited by Theodore R. Cogswell
With an Introduction by Algis Budrys
Before SFWA there was PITFCS--
In 1959 the late Ted Cogswell started a "fanzine for pros" with the mock-pompous title
Publications of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, soon to be known as PITFCS. Its circulation was limited to science fiction writers and editors, and its contents were mostly their letters discussing their own and each other's work. PITFCS quickly became
the place where s-f professionals talked to each other about the problems of the field, both literary and economic.
The discussions were frank, discerning, insightful, humorous, occasionally a little insulting, and even a bit bawdy. PITFCS was where the pros could let their hair down. It lasted only a few years--Cogswell had to give it up in order to write his doctoral dissertation. Then the Science Fiction Writers of America was organized, and SFWA's publications began filling the niche that PITFCS had occupied. PITFCS was short-lived, but has been remembered with joy all these years, and Advent is proud to reprint it now.
Here are letters and essays from such science fiction notables as Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Avram Davidson, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, Eric Frank Russell, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don Wollheim.
(How is the acronym PITFCS pronounced? Don't ask. But if you insist, Tony Boucher tells you in a limerick.)
This volume reprints PITFCS from first issue to last, and adds an index which is perhaps more comprehensive than it needs to be. However, we have omitted most of the typos for which Ted Cogswell was famous. (His motto was "PITFCS are
never proofread.")
Amazing and astounding to note, this is
not a period piece with only historical interest. Most of the problems discussed in PITFCS are still living issues today. It seems the tensions between writers, editors, and publishers don't change.
The issues of PITFCS form a huge book of some 350,000 words (8 1/2 x 11 inch pages of small type in double column), for the delectation of the general science fiction readership.
"This is a spectacular thing--it's like being allowed to sit in as the best writers in SF talk about SF, their craft, themselves and the world at large."
Read. Enjoy.
Lots more new books from ReAnimus Press - see the list at
www.reanimus.com/new