With his new book, Tom Purdom is Philly’s own king of science fiction

Broad Street Review readers already know Tom Purdom's work as an illustrious and erudite music critic. What you may not know is that he's also Philadelphia's master of science fiction (SF). He published his first short story back in 1957, and since then he's published several novels and appeared in every major SF magazine as well as a goodly collection of year-end "best of" anthologies.

But because the vagaries of the publishing gods have caused most of his oeuvre to fall out of print over the years, our own Tom Purdom has become one of those legendary genre figures that all the pros know and appreciate, but many rank-and-file SF fans have never quite discovered. His new collection, Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, published by Fantastic Books, remedies that injustice. The volume collects the past two decades of Purdom's science fiction, most of which first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, the field's major short fiction venue since its founding in 1977.

The real science fiction

Purdom's work is SF in its purest, most elemental form. As he notes in the introductory remarks to his stories in Lovers & Fighters, "To me, a science fiction story is primarily a story about people coping with some development that could take place in the future...Many literary commentators seem to think the subjects of science fiction are merely metaphors...For me, starships and aliens are real subjects, of interest in themselves."

Those statements are about as pure a definition of SF as you'll ever find. But while mediocre SF writers (not to mention too many film and TV productions) never get past obsessing over gizmos, gewgaws and alien monsters, Purdom knows that like all literature, SF is still about people — whether they're the superior enhanced post-human variety of "Fossil Games," the bickering time-traveling historians observing the exploits of a Victorian navy anti-slavery patrol in "The Mists of Time," or the fading senior citizen who reluctantly accepts a robotic living assistant in "Bonding With Morry."

Philly's SF lore

Philadelphia's already famous as a town with lots of history, but many people don't realize that it has also played a major role in the history of science fiction. Aside from harboring Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and SF luminaries such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp at various times over the past three centuries, Philadelphia is the birthplace and home to the world's second oldest science fiction fan group, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and of Philcon, the world's oldest science fiction convention. With Purdom's long-time residency, the continued preeminence of Philadelphia in the science fiction literary and cultural firmament is assured.

If your concept of science fiction springs solely from vapid Hollywood superhero movies and space operas, you owe it to yourself to discover the grandeur, the sweep, and the humanity of the genre when it's done right. There's no better place to begin than with Tom Purdom as your guide, and Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons as your passport.

In a resounding affirmation of Purdom's status both in the SF field and in the Philadelphia literary community, the Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Noble at 18th & Walnut Streets has made an exception to its usual policy of not stocking small-press fiction collections, and you can buy his book there. And Geekadelphia has just honored Purdom as a Geek of the Week.

Tom Purdom's Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons is getting plenty of great reviews and recommendations: check out analogsf.com, truereviewonline.com, and librarything.com, as well as raves on Amazon.