Space War Blues

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Space War Blues is a 1978 science fiction paperback novel by Richard A. Lupoff. The introduction was written by Harlan Ellison. The book was published by Dell SF, an imprint of Random House.

Space War Blues is a longer version of With The Bentfin Boomer Boys On Little Old New Alabama, one of the short stories in Again, Dangerous Visions.

Ellison had chosen Bentfin Boomer Boys for the new wave anthology Again, Dangerous Visions for Lupoff's wild experimental prose. The novel extrapolates a future where the South rises again across several systems and deals with an unfolding war between whites-only and racially integrated planets (the back cover teaser reads "Man's questing nature conquered space...then his eternal stupidity turned it into a living hell...").

By the time of publication the novel was almost ten years old and Lupoff, while glad to see it finally reach print, was also very open to changes in the book's title (originally New Alabama Blues, New Alabama Spacewar Blues, and when the artist drawing the cover complained the title was too long, Space War Blues. A previewer of the manuscript for Dell described the book as "unutterable bilge" and claimed the only intelligible part was a little prefatory note by an imaginary "Uncle Dudley." Oddly Dell then asked to drop that part from the book, and again Lupoff agreed, not much caring at this point as long as it got published.