JUST A QUICK UPDSTE: I've done the guest editorial on this week's edition of "The StarShipSofa". The "editorial" is centered on this post but expands a bit...Stop by and have a listen: http://www.starshipsofa.com/20100223/aural-delights-no-122-michael-f-fly nn/
An interesting point is being made with respect to bringing the science fiction community up to date by making s.f. podcast sites, specifically The StarShipSofa.com, eligible for the reader-centric Hugo Awards. The distinguished science fiction scholar and writer Dr. Amy H. Sturgis makes a compelling case at http://eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com/284404.html.
Pause here for a moment: If you don't know what the Hugos are, I point to you Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Awards
Of course, if you don't know about the Hugos, you probably aren't reading this anyway.
The world of podcasting -- and if you don't know what that's about you really aren't here, now are you? -- is not exactly new but it's not that old, either. By now, a dedicated fan can hear, on demand, pretty much anything he or she wants to find. Many sites provide original material, written, produced and narrated and 'cast specifically for the site.
With regard to science fiction/fantasy/horror, the number of these audio sites is growing. So far as the number of 'customers' alone, the larger podcast communities probably rival, if they not yet outstrip, the ink on paper magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, and others.
I want to emphasize the use of the word "community" in the 'graph above. While readers of specific magazines fall roughly into a loyal readership, podcasts generally spawn community. This is a rough echo of the way that the early fanzines and pro-zines created core groups of readers and followers in the 30s and 40s of the last century (God, isn't it fun to say that!).
The podcast communities echo the groups that gathered in the 20s and 30s around such figures as H.P. Lovecraft and pals. They are a shadow of the "Futurians," a group of science fiction fans-cum-writers-cum-agents and editors-cum-publishers who formed the soul of the Golden Age of Science Fiction of the 40s. People such as Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Virginia Kidd, Judith Merrill, Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, James Blish, Jack Gillespie, Cyril Kornbluth and others were the Futurians.
I emphasize again: these core groups, communities certainly, families if you will, gathered in single cities or in regions. Some outlanders, such as Ray Bradbury who, though born in the Midwest, grew up on the West Coast, speaks of making the epic road trip from LA to New York, to meet with the members of the Eastern fraternity, the Futurians. They gathered, hung together, drank and sang songs together over kitchen tables and, together and apart, made some great literature in the wake of their communalizing (you might also want to have a read at: http://jophan.org/mimosa/m29/kyle.htm).
The pace is quicker now. With StarShipSofa, Escape Pod and the like, the community happens globally. While the community of the StarShip isn't necessarily as personal as the Futurians', it is moving things at a faster pace. While Ray may have motored LA to NYC to gather once every now and again with his pals, I've met face to face only once with a fellow Sofanaut, the wonderful Diane Severson Mori, who, raised in Wisconsin, now lives in Germany and is married to an Italian nuclear engineer. I met DIane and her husband while they were visiting Chicago. But I knew Diane quite well by the time we met. I'd heard her read, we'd talked -- and seen each other -- via Skype. She knew me from my writing, my narration of my own and other people's work and from the forums on the StarShip. I know at another leg of that trip, Diane visited the founder of the StarShip, Tony C. Smith at his home in the north of England.
I mention this to point out the fact that the relationships between Diane, Tony, myself and dozens of other Sofanauts were already of long-standing duration.
Let me point to one exemplar: Spider and Jeanne Robinson are icons of contemporary s.f. Jeanne has cancer, a nasty form of biliary cancer which has drained the Robinson's finances. World-wide, the community has come to their aid. This past Christmas, the StarShip produced an original piece of long-form fiction which it auctioned off in an ink-on-paper one-off book and sold hundreds of .pdf downloads of the story with original illustrations by Sofanaut regular sketcher, Skeet Scienski, and raised quite a few thousand dollars for the Robinsons. Not huge amounts of money as cancer care goes, but certainly something that a family, a community would do for one of its own.
My point is, the podcast sites are the matrix around which families, community, continues to grow. This echoes the past.
The Futurians, by the way, continue through to the present. That batch of happy fans and pros are linked to most of the writers/editors/publishers working in the business today. Writer, Donald A. Wollheim became publisher Donald A. Wollheim whose name continues today as DAW Books. Author Gene Wolfe's agent is at the Virginia Kidd Agency, who continue to represent many of the premiere names in sf. While Virginia Kidd passed away some time ago, her home is still the office for the agency that bears her name. That house was a physical home away from home for the Futurians for whom Ms. Kidd's living room and kitchen was the hearth around which those writers literally gathered. Her husband, James Blish and his pals, Isaac Asimov, Fred Pohl and a couple dozen more of the iconic writers of that Golden Age all peopled that still in-use home office in woodsy Pennsylvania.
What is happening here, on-line, may not spark as many marriages, divorces, pregnancies, as did the communities of the past, but the voices that are coming out of these little internet tubes are beginning to change the form of fiction-making. One might even say, what is happening here gets back to the root of writing: the telling of stories around a fire.
I think the Hugos need to take a good look at the podcasts and begin to honor those in the medium.
Posts
As Tony C. Smith, the captain of the Ship says, "I'm chuffed."
I've got work to do but all thirteen stories have been stuck together, all the postscript notes are done. I'm taking most of a day off and then, back to work tomorrow. 
A long time ago I took a roadtrip with a writer-chum. Not a long trip as such things go but it was a solid two days of non-stop roadriding America, from the heartland to the old home-country, the East, the old East, New England. Rhode Island. I drove through most of the night on two pre-trip days of no sleep, much work and gallons of coffee. By morning and Providence I had terminal chatters, my eye-balls were flickering in and out of some kind of worldless place full of sand and I couldn't sleep for trying.
So you've now found from whence the title comes. Here's a little about the thing itself.
So now I'm putting together a collection of my own stores. Drink for the Thirst to Come will be one within it.
There it is. The site is at www.SantoroReads.com. It's a simple site. The purpose of it is to let people -- authors, publishers and agents -- know that I can be had, I'm available, price to be discussed.
In the next week or so, I'll be launching a new website. Not a replacement for this little blogish thing -- to which I've become emotionally attached over the last few years -- but this one will be an advertisement for myself (thank you Norman Mailer). Specifically, it will be to pimp my talents as a reader of my own and other people's books.
This is the piece that won the Flash Fiction Contest at the World Horror Convention in Toronto in 2007 -- the one Marty Mundt didn't enter -- so this is the DREAM's second award. Maybe I actually ought to try to sell it. That above? That's me, 50 pounds ago and reading, as they say, like a motherfucker to get THEN JUST A DREAM read under the time limit.
I'd worried about it ever since the StarShip's editor Tony Smith told me he was mailing it to me to put hands to and autograph. Our postal service in the universe of 60657 is dodgy to say the least. Most things intended for my block seem to find their way into my slot on the expectation that I'll do the delivery. This, of course, is only my perception since many things intended for me seem to find their way into other people's slots and, eventually, get delivered to me with nasty notes wondering why the final delivery Samaritan should have bothered.
I've looked at it. I've loved it. And, soon, I'll sign it.
That's it. I'm finished. I can now return to the novel, I can stop hauling my 'puter around with me. I can stop being a mumbling freak, I need not write and edit on the 'L' and bus. I don't have to lock myself in my office at lunch.
Forgive the sleazy images on this one and the brevity of the entry but I just received my copy of the hardback edition of STARSHIP SOFA STORIES, Volume 1. Very nice-looking book. With stories by Gene Wolfe, Joe Lansdale, Michael Moorcock, Spider Robinson, Elizabeth Bear...lot more. I'm in there with LITTLE GIRL DOWN THE WAY.
and not to mention this...
