Northwest of Earth -- C. L. Moore When I was a wee lad, my father told me stories of his childhood growing up as the first-born of immigrant parents, in the depths of the Great Depression. One of his greatest pleasures, on the rare occasion when he had a dime in his pocket, was to run down to the local news stand and buy his favorite Pulp magazine, "The Shadow." He told me how the writers for "The Shadow" and the many other Pulps were paid such a low rate per word that they would need to sit banging on their typewriters non-stop to keep from starving. Needless to say, that gave me visions of forests clear-cut to fuel a mountain of shitty, disposable prose. The impression that stuck with me was that genre fiction of the era of the 20s and 30s was something to be avoided. Still, through the years, I'd read authors I greatly respected talk about how the Pulp mags were full of fabulous writers who inspired them to become authors themselves. I figured their memories...