ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who? If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised. What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, st...
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PIRATING THE PIRATES
DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN
THE 21ST CENTURY SHAMAN
THE 21ST CENTURY SHAMAN Alternate Medicines and the Scientific Method by Norman Spinrad Written over a decade ago as a proposal for a book that never got written but all too pertinent to the era of the coronavirus There are many medical systems on this planet, some of them ancient, some of them new, more of them that not based on metaphorical systems. Only “Western” or “alliopathic” medicine is based on rigorous science. But many of the traditional non-western systems cure some conditions cure some conditions but not others. Many of these cures work in practice, but not in theory. That is they do work, but not for the reasons the theory behind them conte...
THE SLOW DEATH OF THE ENGLISH SHORT STORY
Here is another freebie short story, A GAME OF TELEPHONE. I just had the impulse to write it without thinking where to submit it. There seem to be only 3, science fiction magazines left, a couple of crime magazines, and The New Yorker. The only offline paper magazines regularly publishing short stories of any kind. And what I had written just for the fun of it was not science fiction or fantasy or a crime story. So I had no choice but to submit it to The New Yorker, not really believing they would buy it, which they didn't. So there was no place left to send it, and I let it lay until I got the idea of posting stories on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE as free one time non exclusive gifts, if you can sell a story to a magazine that counts because so few are left, let it at least let be read here while not giving away first exclusive publishing rights. So here it is. Reading it again, I réalise it would make very cool half-hour radio play. But alas, t...
BUG JACK BARRON SCREENPLAY NOW ONLY $3.00
I'm still offering my original screenplay for BUG JACK BARRON, called “One of the 100 greatest films never made,” on Amazon after 4 decades, but I'm now reducing the price to $3.00 because the important thing for me is to have this screenplay widely read. BUG JACK BARRON Original Screenplay for $3.00! This is the orginal screenplay adaptation of BUG JACK BARRON I wrote way back in the 1970s under an indie option which never got picked up. Several options later, BUG JACK BARRON, the novel, was optioned by one Gary Weis, who sold the option to Universal. With the option running out, Universal exercised it, that is, bought the rights to make the film, for Costa Gavras, with a screenplay by Harlan Ellison. For whatever reasons, they didn’t like the Ellison screenplay, or several others, including this one. Costa Gavras fell out of the project, and the film has yet to be made, though many, many directors, and producers have tried to get the the rights from U...
VIVA LA FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA
VIVA LA FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA It started with my then agent telling me that a Mexican publisher wanted to publish BUG JACK BARRON in a cheap Mexican edition for a small advance. BUG JACK BARRON had been published in Spanish, but not in Mexico, since, like English language rights split between the US and Britain, Spanish language rights are generally split between Spain and Latin America. I shrugged, and said okay, not knowing much more about it, except that it was Paco Taibo, who I knew years ago, was making the deal, and I didn't think much more about it then. But then Paco asked me to come to Mexico City for the book launch, which was also going to be the launch of a new collection of the overall publisher, La Fondo de Cultura Economica. What is that ? I asked, and Paco told me the brief version. La Fondo de Cultura Economica is a non-profit publisher subsidized by the Mexican government which publishes 500 books a year, distr...
QUARANTINE by Norman Spinrad If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one. Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was ...
English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English
English commercial for OSAMA THE GUN--cause celebre in French, currently unavailable in English Watch the original English version of the commercial for the French translation, OUSSAMA, featuring Norman Spinrad: http://youtu.be/JYhWG-QSyc0 And if that grabs you, download and read the portion of the novel free, from Scribd. If you're a reader, who then wants to read the whole thing, about all you can do now is shout out loud and spread the word. http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion If you're a publisher, the rights are available from Carole Saudejaud, in charge of rights for Fayard in France because world rights were sold to Fayard due to lack of courage at the time by American publishers: csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr But electronic copies of the whole novel maybe be had directly from Norman Spinrad if you are a reputable publisher, critic, or journalist: ...
Mr. Spinrad,
ReplyDeleteI've been a huge fan for a while. Don't know if you recall, but ten years or so ago, you were looking for a new apt in Paris and I sent you the info of someone (a woman named Portia) who worked for the French govt to see if they could help.
In any regard, I'm trying to contact you for the purpose of doing an interview over the internet, via Vokle. It's a video format similar to your video blogs.
You can contact me at tom@thetomgulleyshow.com. I'll be happy to speak with you. Unless I'm done in by a Giant Flying Vampire Toad.
Tom G.