James Nicoll Reviews

Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies edited by Theodore R. Cogswell (December 1992)

In 1959 the late Ted Cogswell started a ​”fanzine for pros” with the mock-pompous title [i]Publications of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies,[/i] 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 [i]the[/i] 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.

(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 [i]never[/i] proofread.”)

Songs for the Shadows by Cheryl S. Ntumy (November 2024)

our feelings are of no consequence.

Shad-Dari has escaped her past, her dreams now in reach. An excavator of the valuable old sounds of Órino-Rin, she steals tiny, unheard fragments of the sacred songs to erase the painful echo of her home planet, Ekwukwe. In one rebellion too far, she sets off a chain of events that severs her from time itself, forcing her, without another way forward, to face her past.