Old Mars ToC released

George R.R. Martin has released the table of contents for Old Mars, an anthology of stories set in the Mars of Bradbury, Burroughs, and other great writers of the science fiction of my youth. The anthology will be out in October, and I will have a story -- The Ugly Duckling -- in it.

I wasn't supposed to be in Old Mars. I hadn't originally been invited, but when someone dropped out just before deadline, Gardner asked me if I could fill in. I reread The Martian Chronicles for the first time in nigh on fifty years and wrote a story I thought fitted Bradbury's elegiac mood. Gardner and George liked it and bought it.

Coincidentally, yesterday when George was putting out the ToC, I got an email from Gardner to let me know that when the text came back from the proofreader, there was a note at the bottom of "The Ugly Duckling": "Beautiful, beautiful story. Brava!"

I'll take my reviews wherever I can get them.