While I have been travelling, talking, touring, reading, writing, editing, and listening to great music these past few weeks, Puppygate has continued to fester, growing ever uglier.

In one of the more recent developments, the Rabid Puppies and some of their allies and fellow travellers have declared a boycott of Tor Books. I say “Rabid” here because Beale is backing the boycott, while Larry Correia says the Sad Puppies are not boycotting anyone… though Correia and some of the other Sads certainly seem deeply sympathetic to the boycott.

I am not, needless to say. Neither is most of fandom.

Which makes this a perfect time to BUY SOME TOR BOOKS!!

You can do that at your local bookstore, of course, or from your favorite online bookseller. There is an incredible range of great SF and fantasy to choose from in the Tor catalogue. Tor won the “best publisher” award in the recent LOCUS poll, for like the twentieth year in a row; there’s really no other publisher in a field with a backlist to compare, whether you are looking for epic fantasy, space opera, military SF, literary SF, Hugo winners, Hugo losers, or what have you.

And, hey, you can even buy some AUTOGRAPHED Tor books by me. My Wild Cards series is published by Tor, as it happens, and we have signed copies of INSIDE STRAIGHT, BUSTED FLUSH, SUICIDE KINGS, FORT FREAK, and LOWBALL available through the Jean Cocteau… along with hardcovers of our award-winning anthology, DANGEROUS WOMEN, also published by Tor. You can find them all at the cinema bookshop, here: http://www.jeancocteaubooks.com/

So if you would like to strike a blow for free speech and decency, and support all the good people at Tor, go ye forth and buy a book today… from the Cocteau, or Amazon, or anywhere… and let your voice be heard. You’ll get some damned good reading out of it too.

Parris and I spent the weekend in Chicago (one of my favorite cities), hanging around Soldier Field for the last three performances of the Grateful Dead, the Fare Thee Well shows.

(I went in disguise, forsaking my usual Greek fisherman’s cap for a series of baseball caps, but somehow people recognized me anyway).

What can I say? Amazing shows, and the end of an epoch. I felt privileged to be there. And the music… well, words can never truly capture the feel of great music, as I discovered long ago when I wrote my rock novel, THE ARMAGEDDON RAG.

It was the RAG that brought me to my first Dead show, back in the 1980s. There was a time when the late great Phil DeGuere, the writer/ producer who brought me out to LA to write for THE TWILIGHT ZONE, hoped to make a feature film of the RAG, working with the Dead. That never came to pass, but it did get us backstage at many a Dead show.

Phil is gone now, alas, and so is Jerry Garcia, Cap’n Trips himself… and now the remaining members of the Dead have played their final shows together. But the memories will Not Fade Away, and the music will live on as long as people listen to rock and roll.

You will be able to buy a boxed set of those three last shows, I understand. Don’t hesitate. They were amazing performances.

Meanwhile, here’s my favorite Dead song (a hard choice, since I love so many)… from a 1980 show at Radio City Music Hall (not one I attended, alas):

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