About this item
Norman Spinrad, a National Book Award finalist for his short fiction collection The Star-Spangled Future, has now written The People's Police, a sharp commentary on politics with a contemporary, speculative twist. Martin Luther Martin is a hard-working New Orleans cop, who has come up from the gangland of Alligator Swamp through hard work. When he has to serve his own eviction notice, he decides he's had enough and agrees to spearhead a police strike.Brothel owner and entrepreneur J. B. Lafitte also finds himself in a tight spot when his whorehouse in the Garden District goes into foreclosure. Those same Fat Cats responsible for the real estate collapse after Katrina didn't differentiate between social strata or vocation.MaryLou Boudreau, aka Mama Legba, is a television star and voodoo queen -- with a difference.
About the Author
IRON AND CHROMIUM--a restrospective review in The Los Angeles Book Review byAlvario Zinos Amaro
NORMAN SPINRAD'S WORK has, over the last fifty years, elicited responses that range from "depraved, cynical, utterly repulsive" (Donald Wollheim) to "delightfully bonkers" (Thomas M. Disch) and "extraordinary" (Ursula Le Guin) . Perhaps my favorite characterization of Spinrad is by Isaac Asimov, who, in somewhat of an understatement, observed that he "constantly displays the courage to be different." I'd like to illustrate this career-defining search for innovation by examining five of Spinrad's key novels, ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s, all newly available courtesy of ReAnimus Press.
Revisiting Spinrad's work, I was struck by his chameleonic shifts of voice, style, and pacing. Consider, for example, the following two passages:
Oh, you so right, baby! So here I am, dragging my dick along First Avenue, right back in the whole dumb scene I kissed good-bye six years ago. Sara, you stoned when I get there, I'm gonna beat the piss out of you, so help me.
- Bug Jack Barron
Against the will of self-esteem's desire, I could not fail to acknowledge that the true chasm between us lay both below and beyond the moral realm of ethical esthetics. Indeed, her ruthless dedication to her one true grail, proceeding as it did from a single absolute axiom to an entirely unwavering pursuit of this axiomatic higher good, might be said to be at least formally superior to my chaotic involutions.
- The Void Captain's Tale
I was also surprised to learn that Spinrad, who is often reductively labeled a "New Wave" writer because of his association with Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, and other writers like Thomas M. Disch, Samuel R. Delany and Pamela Zoline, got his start by publishing three stories in John Campbell's Astounding (renamed Analog by the time Spinrad appeared in its pages) . Those three pieces, gathered with other early notable work in the collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970) , reveal a solid grasp of relativistic space travel and other rigors of "hard SF" that one doesn't normally see associated with Spinrad. They also highlight thematic preoccupations that reappear often throughout his fiction: displacement and alienation, which for example lead Ben Ezra to muse that life aboard a starship is "fit only for Gypsies and Jews" ("Outward Bound") , and questions of ethical responsibility, ontology and solipsism ("Sometimes I forget that I'm crazy, and then I become crazier. A neat paradox, no? " asks Miklos in "The Last of the Romany") .
Given Spinrad's wide spectrum of literary approaches and broad philosophical concerns, the question becomes: how do we evaluate the work in any meaningfully un
