Re: RARA-AVIS: Westlake

From: foxbrick (foxbrick@yahoo.com)
Date: 05 Jan 2009

  • Next message: jacquesdebierue: "Re: RARA-AVIS: Westlake"

    --- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "jacquesdebierue"
    <jacquesdebierue@...> wrote:
    >
    > --- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Ron Clinton" <clinton65@> wrote:
    > >
    > > ANARCHAOS was always one of my favorite penname books*...it reads
    like
    > > Parker in space.
    >
    > That's got to be one of his craziest inventions...

    That's a kind way of putting it. As I've noted at length on Ed Gorman's blog, this is easily and by far my least favorite Westlake, since it so blatantly misrepresnts even the worst of the anarchist figures, much less the best of them, he cites as the progenitors of the insane society portrayed here (a colony of Parkers on another planet).

    Todd Mason (who can certainly recommend the rest of TOMORROW'S CRIMES, even if "The Spy in the Elevator" isn't top-notch, though better than Westlake himself described it in a famous open letter to what he felt were the inept and foolish science fiction editors of the time...most of the rest of the contents were published after that letter, and those published in the '60s usually under the self-mocking Curt Clark pseudonym. That letter was published in Pat and Dick Lupoff's major fanzeine XERO, and reprinted a few years back in THE BEST FROM XERO volume)



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