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George Alec Effinger Live! from Planet Earth

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I'd read very little George Alec Effinger before I picked up this book, and what little I had read -- correct me if I am wrong -- was a novelization of the short lived "Planet of the Apes" TV series that I found down at the library in seventh grade. Little did I know that the man's original works -- the copyrights for which, bizarrely, a Louisiana hospital tried to claim as its own when Effinger owed them for medical bills -- far outstripped the tie-in work he accepted (as it turns out, he did tie-in work to frustrate creditors like the hospital, who could not try to repo the copyrights of others).

In the roughly two dozen tales that comprise "George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth" (Effinger had suggested something shorter but just as snazzy -- "The White Album," for example), this brilliant satirical writer takes on war, racism, politics -- all the usual oxen fit for a goring, and not only does he roast them to a turn on the barb of his tremendous wit, he marinates them with a delicious blend of compassion and ruthlessness. The collection even gathers his "O. Niemand" stories, in which he imitates --faultlessly -- the themes and styles of a half-dozen great American writers, from Mark Twain to James Thurber to Flannery O'Connor. These tales are set in a domed city called Springfield, located on an asteroid in deep space, and one can only wonder whether, if he had lived long enough, the man who tracked Don Marquis' Archy (of the Archy and Mehitabel adventures, told by a cockroach in vers libre) to his asteroidal Springfield, might not also have paid a visit to some futuristic, but still crude and humorous, version of The Simpsons. Now -that- would have been sci-fi heaven, and a satire lover's dream come true, and if anybody would have had the flat-out red-pepper gumption to write such a tale it would have been George Alec Effinger.