I haven’t done as much writing as I should but I have kicked it up a notch on the reading in the last month. Yesterday, I bummed through a paperback edition of a 1962 Y. A. anthology “Teen-Age Outer Space Stories” (Lantern Press, edited by A. L. Furman.) I remember this type of anthology; several stories from Boy’s Life Magazine, several others, none by authors even I recognized. (Probably one of Heinlein’s Boys Life tales would have cost too much!)

Most of the stories haven’t aged as well as one would think, but there was one delight: “Flying Teacup.” I found nothing about the author, Fred Gohman and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists no more credits, other than several editions of “Outer Space Stories” (as it was renamed.) http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34638

“Flying Teacup” is told in first-person by young Kenny who lives near a classic whacky inventor. Any more would spoil this charming, lighthearted story. Just one more bit of information; that particular outer space story takes place largely on Earth.

The story is worthy of being reprinted in a contemporary anthology of comic science fiction, and there have been plenty of those!

As for the rest of my reading, I read a few short stories in the Greenberg co-edited anthology tie-ins with the Superman, Batman and Dick Tracy movies of several decades ago. As well as part of C. W. Grafton’s novel “The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope,” several of the stories in “The Women of Weird Tales” (Valancourt Books) and some of an anthology of the late Mike Resnick’s collaborations with Lezili Robyn: “Soulmates.”