Foreword
498 Words
Foreword
Yeah, Dr. Albert Wendland knows how to write.
I first met him when I was invited on-board as adjunct faculty for Seton Hill University’s MFA program in genre fiction a few years ago. A professor at the university, he wasn’t quite what I’d expected. No goatee or pipe, no elbow patches on his tweed jacket or golden retriever at his feet, no fire in the fireplace or absent-minded searches for lost pens, none of those usual endearing traits of your stereotypical professor of English. Instead, I found myself shaking the hand of a young, young and ruggedly handsome type with an infectious grin, dynamic manner, and the piercing eyes of a guy interested in everything—a Renaissance man with the insufferably bad manners to be accomplished, smart, and impossibly good looking.
Not, as I say, what I expected at all.…
Al Wendland didn’t start out to be a college prof. Turns out his first love was science fiction, his first books those by the immortals: Heinlein, Clarke, Anderson, and others. Determined to follow in their hallowed steps, he started by majoring in physics, intending to become an astronomer by day and an SF writer by night. Perhaps someone should have pointed out along the way that it’s easier to observe the stars at night… but it didn’t matter because then that Renaissance thing kicked in and he added English to his list of majors, which led to him teaching literature at Seton Hill University. A few years later, he co-founded that university’s MFA program in genre fiction.
Wait—genre fiction? Romance novels and fantasy and westerns and crime drama and horror and… and—oh, merciful God!—science fiction?
I was stunned when I learned the program existed. There has long been an ivy-walled dichotomy, you see, between genre fiction and what academia is pleased to call serious literature…important literature…even—dare I say it?—legitimate prose. Writers of mere genre fiction…the tradesman’s entrance is at the rear.
What the academics forget, however, is that writers have a hell of a time making a living with the 21st Century equivalent of Moby d**k. I’m not knocking the classics by any means, but the people who write genre fiction are first and foremost entertainers, not academics, not “observers of the human condition,” and, with a very few exceptions, generally are not professors of English literature. For their part, the public may read Hemingway or Stein or Faulkner for fun, sure…but then for sheer entertainment and the wonder of ideas there’s Heinlein and Clarke and Anderson and…yes, Wendland.
You see, Al practices what he teaches. Not only does he know Hemingway and Faulkner and the human condition, but he can also tell a whopping good story. The man is an entertainer; he can write.
And here’s the proof. You have before you The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes, and it is genre fiction…a science fiction novel, in fact, and unabashedly so. Inside are alien worlds and titanic space habitats and a brilliant and paranoid hero, all skillfully blended together with long-vanished galactic secrets.
Science fiction…good science fiction, by a college professor of literature who loves good SF. Enjoy.
I promise that you will be entertained.
William H. Keith
January, 2014
- Writer
