Rosewater. Trout would subsequently make cameo appearances in several more of my books, and in 1973 would star in Breakfast of Champions. Persons alert for wordplay noticed that Trout and Theodore Sturgeon were both named for fish, and that their first names ended with “ore.” They asked me if my friend Ted had been my model for Kilgore. Answer: Very briefly, and in a way. Kilgore, like Ted when we first met in 1958, was a victim of a hate crime then commonly practiced by the American literary establishment. It wasn’t racism or sexism or ageism. It was “genreism.” Definition: “The unexamined conviction that anyone who wrote science fiction wasn’t really a writer, but rather a geek of some sort.” A genuine geek, of course, is a carnival employee who is displayed in a filthy cage and billed as “The Wild Man from Borneo.” Genreism was still rampant in late autumn, 1958, when I was living in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod, and Ted and his wife Marion had just rented a house near the water in Truro (also on the Cape), no place to be when winter came.
What do You think about A Saucer Of Loneliness (2013)?
