It’s been a blast guest-blogging here at Tor.com. I’d like to thank you, the readers who put up with me here, whether or not you wind up buying my book (hint… The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown). I’d like to thank all those who commented and re-tweeted and linked on their blogs. (In fact, if it hadn’t been for “Blarg,” I’d never have learned how wrong I was in thinking that there was ever a Nazi threat against the U.S., Britain or France, so there’s that.) And I’d like to thank you for being a fan of science fiction.
My book may be about some of the heroes of the Golden Age—Heinlein, de Camp, Asimov, and yes, old L. Ron Hubbard—but it’s also about the fans who embraced them. The birth of a genre is really a two-sided coin. There are the creators, and there are those who appreciate. The story of those who eagerly awaited each pulp issue from month to month, who founded the clubs, who got together with others to write their own because they couldn’t frickin’ wait a whole month for their fix, is as much a sub-plot as Cleve Cartmill’s reveal of Atomic Bomb secrets pre-Manhattan project. Because I can’t tell the story of science fiction fans without talking about our ancestors, the first fanatics, the ones who gave the glow to the Golden Age.