I've been a Richard A. Lupoff fan for some time. In fact, I knew Lupoff before "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys On Little Old New Alabama" became the vastly inferiorly titled Space War Blues.
And I suppose (reconstruction, not memory) that that is where I first ran into Lupoff: on the pages of Harlan Ellison's 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, wherein "With The Bentfin Boomer Boys On Little Old New Alabama" first appeared. And what a story that was. In fact, the story had such a powerful effect on me that I began to write my own science fiction novel, The Lone Cry of a Wolf, as an independent study project in my senior year of high school, and the voice I was writing in was most definitely strongly influenced by Lupoff's story.
Or maybe I first ran into Lupoff in the pages of All in Color For a Dime, which he co-edited with Don Thompson (1970) . . . but if I did (that is, if I didn't read that book later on), I don't think I really noticed the editor. I was in it for the comic books. And the Harlan Ellison essay included in that book.
At any rate, after Again, Dangerous Visions, I found and read Into the Aether (1974) and enjoyed that Steam Punk before there was Steam Punk novel quite a bit, and of course I was on board for the novel publication expansion of "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys On Little Old New Alabama," Space War Blues in 1978. At some point after that I picked up Lupoff's first novel, One Million Centuries (1967) . . . though I never did get around to reading it. And I'm pretty sure that I bought his Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1965) after that because of Lupoff, not because of ERB--since I'd neither read nor cared to read ERB at that time. I don't know if I actually read the book then, though. But if I did, I am sure it didn't affect me the way it did when I read it just a few days ago. (Not the same copy. That first copy had a lovely Frazetta cover, Tarzan from the back, his arms pumping in a "look at these guns" pose, obviously bellowing his victory cry into the jungle while an ape and a leopard look on. The copy I just finished reading also had a Frazetta cover, but it was garish and red and the figures looked incomplete . . . and was previously used on the Ace 1963 version of The Beasts of Tarzan, which seems kind of weird.) Because reading it--or possibly re-reading it--really put me off of Richard A. Lupoff.
On the one hand, Master of Adventure does a pretty good job of going through the Burroughs oeuvre . . . at least as it existed at the time of the book's publication. I want more detail than it gave me, so I am planning to read the much longer (two volumes, in fact) Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan by Irwin Porges in the near future. But Lupoff's attitude here was execrable. The primary purpose of his book seemed to be to show what a clever little monkey he was by throwing feces as Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suppose he thought that he was being "fair and balanced," but the truth is that he was being snide and supercilious. I definitely wouldn't recommend this book to a Burroughs fan. And I'm sorry to say, but I think it ended my status as a Lupoff fan. Guess I'll never get around to One Million Centuries now.
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