Casinos vs. Casinos

Who's funding all the anti-casino ads in Maryland this election year? Casinos in West Virginia, reports Slate.

My latest Appalachian Independent article ...

... has been posted: "Veteran Congressman Helps Dedicate New Sustainable-Energy Lab." It includes my brief interview with U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., about his prospects in next week's election.

1962: It was a very good year

Although I don't see it on the World Fantasy Convention's current schedule, the organizers at one point considered a retrospective panel on the fantasy books of 1962 -- which had become classics, which await rediscovery, and so forth.

This inspired me, with the help of the invaluable Internet Speculative Fiction Database, to come up with this partial list of the fantasy books of 1962 (including science fiction as a subset of fantasy, of course). It was a very good year!

All hail to the five writers on the list (that I know of) still Among Those Present -- honored friends and colleagues, all.

• Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
• Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse
• J.G. Ballard, Billennium
• J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
• J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time
• J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere
• Robert Bloch, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones and Labyrinths (first English translations of these collections)
• Ray Bradbury, R Is for Rocket
• Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
• John Brunner, No Future in It
• Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Avram Davidson, Or All the Seas with Oysters
• Samuel R. Delany, The Jewels of Aptor
• August Derleth, ed., Dark Mind, Dark Heart
• August Derleth, Lonesome Places
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Harlan Ellison, Ellison Wonderland
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Russell Kirk, Old House of Fear
• Russell Kirk, The Surly Sullen Bell
• Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• John D. MacDonald, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything
• Katherine MacLean, The Diploids
• Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman
• H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy
• Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Wonder Effect
• Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (first, posthumous publication, 50 years after Twain’s death)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night