The Worlds of Joe Shannon

Robinson, Frank M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503042049 ISBN 13: 9781503042049

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Strumming a harp while floating on a white cloud might be Paradise for some people, but it would bore others stiff. Given an unlimited chance to choose your ideal world, what would you specify—palaces or log cabins? I'll take beer, son, and thanks again for the offer. As you can see, I'm kinda down on my luck. I know what you're thinking, but I'm not really on the bum. I usually make out all right—nothing fancy, mind you, but it's a living. Odd jobs in the winter and spring, follow the harvests in the summer and fall. Things are slack right now. You? Electronics, huh? Used to know a fellow in electronics.... His name was Joe Shannon, used to work for Stellar Electric up in Fremont. Young fellow, not more'n twenty-five or so. Rail thin, wispy hair, serious look—you know, the one suit, absent-minded type. Joe was a brain. A triple-A, gold-plated, genuine genius. Had a wife named Marge. Not beautiful but pretty and a nice figure and a cook you never saw the likes of. Like I say, she was married to Joe but Joe was married to his work and after you'd been around a while, you could tell there was friction. But that ain't the beginning.

About the Author:

Frank M. Robinson (1926 - 2014) was an American science fiction and techno-thriller writer. After moving to San Francisco in the 1970s, Robinson, who was gay, was a speechwriter for gay politician Harvey Milk; he had a small role in the film Milk. After Milk's assassination, Robinson was co-executor, with Scott Smith, of Milk's last will and testament. Robinson was the author of 16 books, the editor of two others and has penned numerous articles. Three of his novels have been made into movies. The Power (1956) was a supernatural science fiction and government conspiracy novel about people with superhuman skills, filmed in 1968 as The Power. The technothriller The Glass Inferno, co-written with Thomas N. Scortia, was combined with Richard Martin Stern's The Tower to produce the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno. The Gold Crew, also co-written Scortia, was a nuclear threat thriller filmed as an NBC miniseries and re-titled The Fifth Missile. He collaborated on several other works with Scortia, including The Prometheus Crisis, The Nightmare Factor and Blow-Out. More recent works include The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991) and an updated version of The Power (2000), which closely followed Waiting (1999), a novel with similar themes to The Power. His novel The Donor is a medical thriller about organ theft. In the 1970s, Robinson started seriously collecting the vintage pulp-fiction magazines that he had grown up reading. The collection spawned a book on the history of the pulps as seen through their vivid cover art: Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (with co-author Lawrence Davidson). He attended numerous pulp conventions and in 2000 won the coveted Lamont Award for lifetime achievement at Pulpcon.