Odyssey, the 61st British Eastercon at Heathrow, saw the launch by NewCon Press for the first time in English of my erotic SF satire Orgasmachine after a mere 40 years or so (although I did revise it a couple of times in the interim). There’s a Signed Limited Edition with, as extras, an Erudite Erotic Essay, “Beware the Pedicating Tribads!”, prompted by my discovery of a hilariously absurd classical sextext in an antiquarian bookshop in Stow on the Wold, not far from mountains of imported Italian nougat the size of wedding cakes, also 6 pages of related comic strips by Judy Watson in the style of late 1960s Japan – and there’s a paperback edition with one comic strip (not this one):
Along with a new NewCon Press anthology, we also launched Constable & Robinson’s new Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories edited by Ian Whates and myself; and here Big Ian and Little Ian struggle to cope with the surge:
I also co-hosted with Donna Scott the BSFA Awards ceremony, during which “The Beloved Time of Their Lives” – one of the tales in The Beloved of My Beloved (NewCon Press) by me and Roberto won as Best Short Fiction for 2009, the first time that an Italian (or any non-anglophone European, I believe) has won the British award; and I myself haven’t won it for the past 33 years. Thus surrealistic translinguistic synergy is good, and so is NewCon Press. Here Al Reynolds is on stage as presenter, while Roberto says words of acceptance:
Afterwards Roberto and I explored the Cotswolds, where we found some elephants.
PS !!! November 2022: Some 20 years after the first Japanese publication of my Orgasmachine, a different Tokyo company — Ta-ke Shobo — has republished the novel in a nifty illustrated edition. Other “O” books from my library welcome the new arrivals…
