“Will I, Your Holiness?”
“Indeed you will,” said the Pope. “And you shall surely fail.”
“Will I?” said the Cardinal.
“In that, at least, I am infallible,” said the Pope, and she laughed.
We all made of mud, floating ocean crud.
So considering where we come from, we haven’t done so bad.
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Also by Norman Spinrad
Novels
The Solarians (1966)
Agent of Chaos (1967)
The Men in the Jungle (1967)
Bug Jack Barron (1969)*
The Iron Dream (1972)
Riding the Torch (1978)*
A World Between (1979)
Songs from the Stars (1980)
The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)
Child of Fortune (1985)
Little Heroes (1987)
Russian Spring (1991)
Pictures at 11 (1994)
Journals of the Plague Years (1995)
Greenhouse Summer (1999)
He Walked Amongst Us (2003)*
Collections
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)*
No Direction Home (1975)
The Star-Spangled Future (1979)
Other Americas (1988)
Deus X and Other Stories (2003)
Non-Fiction
Science Fiction in the Real World (1990)
* Not available as an SF Gateway eBook
Dedication
For JEAN DALADIER
Norman Spinrad (1940–)
Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1940. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad’s work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in France, where he now lives.
For more information see www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/spinrad_norman
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Norman Spinrad 2003
All rights reserved.
The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11737 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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