Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot
by Reginald Bretnor

“I loved the Feghoots and wish I could do a blurb for you. But I decided a few years ago to go out of the blurb business, on the grounds that if I said yes to one publisher, I’d have no good reason for refusing another, and then there would be no end to it. Sorry.” —Science Fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg

Between 1956 and 1992, under the name Grendel Briarton (an anagram of his real name), Reginald Bretnor wrote 122 very short sci-fi stories about Ferdinand Feghoot, a time-traveling, galaxy-hopping emissary from the Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of History. Using a device known only as )(, Feghoot visits and solves the problems of historical figures and intelligent beings on other worlds. Each story is an elaborate setup for an awesome/awful pun. They became an art form: “A feghoot . . . is a humorous short story or vignette ending in a pun (typically a play on a well-known phrase), where the story contains sufficient context to recognize the punning humor” (Wikipedia). They’ve been out of print for 30 years. This new edition contains all of Bretnor’s original Feghoots plus his essay “On the Proper Perpetration of Feghoots”; a foreword by Dean Smith, who worked with Bretnor in the last year of his life; and a bevy of illustrations old and new.

“This collection of the infamous Feghoot stories, bits and pieces of which were first revealed to (or perpetrated on) me by Tim Powers some 50 years ago, should be, to my mind, mandatory reading. Maybe not all in one swallow, but savored. You’ll find it on a shelf in my library between the Waterfront Edition of Liverpool Jarge and the as yet to be collected Witticisms of William Ashbless. I say buy this edition of Feghoots in order to ward off future regret and lamentation.” —James P. Blaylock

Most of the Feghoots originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Isaac Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine, The Baker Street Journal, Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Venture Science Fiction Magazine. They were initially collected in the book The Compleat Feghoot (Pulphouse, 1992). They are used by permission of John Betancourt, the owner of the Reginald Bretnor copyrights.

Cover illustration by Tim Kirk. Color by Anton W. Blake. Banner by Alex Ensign.

Release Date: December 3, 2024
Price: $14.99 retail, $12.99 through our site
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