Interim memo

 

I had nothing to do with it, officer. I have a brass-bound alibi. I was elsewhere when Future Life magazine gasped its last. All I know for certain is that the kids who buy the companion magazine, Starlog, were more interested in reading silly ass articles about how Star Trek phasers make that funny noise than they were about advances in science or how to prevent pollution or what life might be like on the planets circling Proxima Centauri. And so the excellent staff of Future Life—Bob Woods, Barbara Krasnoff, Laura O’Brien and a host of others during the year I wrote these first twelve columns—were informed by the publisher that, sadly, uplifting the mentalities of kids drunk on SFX and Hollywood hype was a chore no longer in favor with the rabble. And Future Life vanished. The column lay dormant for five months, and then I was solicited to continue it in the L.A. Weekly (all of this, in greater detail, in the afterword to this book). For my first column in the Weekly, because events subsequent to its having been written the previous July had provided me with additional, contemplative material, I recycled the final Future Life column, my twelfth, as two installments, which became 12 and 13. This makes for some small confusion among archivists; but if they didn’t like being befuddled they’d have become shoe salesmen or poets. So this is the transitional column.