Carl Brandon, 4/2019

Trade paperback (16.00) and pdf ($8.99) (all proceeds go to the Carl Brandon Society, which promotes discussions on race at conventions and conferences, and through its support of the Parallax and Kindred literary awards, and the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund), available here:
https://tinyurl.com/CarlBrandon
https://tinyurl.com/CarlBrandonPDF

CARL BRANDON book contains: "The Fake Fan: Carl Brandon" by Terry Carr; "The Cacher of the Rye" by Carl Brandon; "Kvetcher on the Racists" by Carl Brandon 2.0; "Racism & Science Fiction," by Samuel R. Delany; and a complete Carl Brandon bibliography.

Terry Carr recounts the invention of an imaginary black science fiction fan named Carl Brandon, one of the field’s most (in)famous hoaxes. In addition to Carl Brandon’s complete history, this volume includes his J.D. Salinger parody, "The Cacher of the Rye;" a more current parody by Carl Brandon 2.0, "The Kvetcher on the Racists;" and an essay by Samuel R. Delany, "Racism and Science Fiction.” To quote Carr: "In the late fifties, several of the fans of the Bay Area…presented fandom with a new fanwriter who was quickly acclaimed as one of the best writers around and who was, not incidentally, the first prominent fan who was black.” Read the book for more of this fascinating tale.

Carl Brandon’s The Cacher of the Ryewas first published as a serial in the fanzine, Innuendo, 1956–1957. SF3 published it again in 1982, within a spiral-bound chapbook that I designed, celebrating Terry Carr, Guest of Honor at WisCon 6. So this newest version is actually the second time I designed this book. The 1982 version was produced using a not-so-state-of the-art photographic Compugraphic typesetter. The operator (me) was able to set only one line at a time, with no opportunity to edit previous text once the line had been set. And needless to say, there was no saving of electronic documents on such a machine. So this reincarnation of Carl Brandon was re-created with the assistance of optical character recognition software. The book has been long out of print. My aim was to revive it in order to preserve its invaluable historical view of SF fandom and race during the 1950s. Terry Carr died in 1987, much too young, and Carol Carr generously granted permission to reprint the book.