Ten years ago, the Toronto International Festival of Authors announced their tribute to the author, anthologist, and all-round science fiction icon Judith Merril. So, I bought myself a ticket and started looking forward to an evening’s reminiscences of futures past from a parade of cranky old Futurians and other SF luminaries. In that I was not disappointed, but I was entirely surprised by her great standing among Canada’s so-called “mainstream” authors and her work with The Writers’ Union of Canada. Pierre Berton and John Robert Columbo were there. Margaret Atwood composed an ode for the souvenir programme. Dennis Lee wrote of their days together at Rochdale College and the first home in Toronto for what would become the largest collection of science fiction in Canada, and quite possibly the world. I bring this up now because, ten years later, and four years after her untimely death, comes the release of her memoirs, long awaited and forever thwarted by a most famous case of writer’s block, finished finally by her grand daughter, Emily Pohl-Weary . . . and also because someone has posted the speech Spider Robinson gave that autumn night back in 1992.
Quick! Is Ray Davies still 