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10 most recent posts

           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, states everywhere--be elected by the  people their police are mandated to protect and serve. Open elections with
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PIRATING THE PIRATES

                                                                                                             by Norman Spinrad                                                     The Death Spiral of the Publishing Death Spiral revisited I had no idea that I was going to write this until some of the people commenting on THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL put two ideas in my head: First, many people suggested I put my backlist books on ebook publishing sites.  I googled round and about and found that Amazon offers the best deal.  All Amazon requires you to give them is non-exclusive rights to sell your ebook in their proprietary format for Kindle.  So that much indeed is a no-brainer, since these are rights you can’t do anything with anywhere other than Amazon, and they tie up nothing else. Furthermore, you set your own sale price, and Amazon pays you 70% of the sale price if you allow them to adjust it as they might see fit, and 30% if you want to lock in your own price. So far, so
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DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN

                                           DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN                                               The Bluegrass Song                                    Just in time for the impeachment!  Whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate for President is welcome to use it as their theme  song. Free of charge! Pro bono! DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN    click here
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THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL

                    THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL                              by Norman Spinrad                 (a presidential platform for a  non-existent campaign)          “Things are more like they are now than they ever have been before.”                                                        --Dwight Eisenhower  “They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.                                                          ---Norman Spinrad,                                                             GREENHOUSE SUMMER What supposedly began in 2008 and was or still is so-called “Great Recession” was or still is not primarily a recession nor did it begin with the fiscal crash of 2008.  One might trace it back to the post-World War II reaction to the New Deal, one might trace it back to the invention of the steam engine and the resultant Industrial Revolution, but to arbitrarily bring the beginning of what is now being called “The New Normal
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NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE launch manifesto

                               The NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE launch manifesto                                                                                                                             and a complete free story                                                WATER WORLDS  As the open says, I'm done many things, have many interests, and this relaunch of what amounts as to a new iteration was once  a blog into a full website entirely created and managed by me is something new and indeed an experiment.  NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE is a website, but my Facebook posts will be a kind of part of it too.         Facebook can and is being used as a kind of blog.  I can post something on it like this on the so-called Facebook "News," which of course is not really news per se, and anyone on Facebook at the time can read it, like it or dislike it with a click these days and with emojis, can comment or not, and I can comment ot not, and a string of conversation wi
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WHAT DOESN'T KILL LOVE MAKES IT STRONGER

                                    WHAT DOESN'T KILL LOVE MAKES IT STRONGER Dona Sadock and I have lived a half century long love affair and counting, and not a simple or conventional one.  We met at a literary conference in Milford Pennsylvania in 1965.  I had just published my first novel and was on my way from New York to California on a great road adventure, she was going to go to Europe. It was not love at first sight for me, it was love at first conversation. When the conference was over, I told her to get in the car with me, not really believing she would, and she didn't. I ended up chasing her back and forth between California and New York, never exactly catching her, but our destiny together had begun. As lifelong best friends, even while married to other people, as sometimes lovers living together, bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles for both of us, and Paris for me. In September of 2001, I was living in Paris even while I was Presiden
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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, distributes the books of other publ
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BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE

BUG JACK BARRON & THE LAST HURRAH OF THE GOLDEN HORDE                               a comparative ebook experiment                             For some time now, I’ve been exploring and experimenting with the exfoliating frontiers of ebook publishing--the business end, the hardware end, the software end. You can read all about it on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE--the complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL and THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS IS NOW.  (http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/) But on the experimental side of the business end, I’ve been experimenting only with do-it--yourself, and confining myself to titles with computer files I could lay my hands on by hook or from crooks.  Meaning whatever I didn’t write on a computer or couldn’t find a scanned pirated version of could not be made available. But that meant that BUG JACK BARRON--denounced on the floor of the British Parliament, the basis of a famous unmade movie in Hollywood held captive by Universal, more or less in continuous
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