The dark side of the hut, 50 years later - by john sundman
A little story for you, below, dating from nearly fifty years ago, when I was living in a little mud hut in the village of Fanaye Dieri, Senegal, on the edge of the Sahara desert. But first a little housekeeping.
In the first issue of this substack I announced that over the next 8 months I am going to republish my 4 extant novel(la)s, each with a new foreword by a prominent literary/cultural observer:
Those of you who don’t follow professional baseball can be forgiven for not recognizing the phrase ‘a player to be named later.’ In baseball, it is often used by teams announcing trades of players between them before all the final details have been worked out, as in, for example, ‘all star catcher John Biggs has been traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Boston Yankees for a player to be named later.’ Sometimes, as in the instance below, that player turns out to be someone of the stature of Babe Ruth.
I am proud and happy to give our player-to-be named-later a name: he is none other than legendary Scottish SF master Ken MacLeod. Ken will be doing the introductory honors for The Pains, (or as Ken calls it, Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Phillip K. Dick).
