RE: Stan Goff's real page

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of viveka

--snip--

  >Besides, everyone knows people in the military
don't buy books.<

Maggie


David McDonald responds

I have a very good friend whose road into the world of writing science
fiction professionally came through military science fiction, specifically
alternate history military science fiction. He teamed up with a guy whose
entire writing career, or most of it, is based on military science fiction.
A mainstay of their readership is people in the armed forces.

When not at war (and perhaps even then, since war is pure terror alternated
by enormous periods of suffocating boredom) soldiers are often big readers.
They have a lot of time to kill and often not a lot of ways to kill it. They
are often in places where culture is rather sparse. They are all literate.

A few years ago the person my friend teamed up with feared that the newer,
smaller army might mark the end of his military science fiction career, so
important is army readership to profitability of the genre.

To see the possibilities of this genre in the hands of a socialist, I
recommend "Mother of Demons" by my very good friend Eric Flint, still in
print and available at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=s_sf_b_as/104-32467
40-5952735