Because of these several impediments, as well as other technical difficulties, you will find typos and occasional replication of text. In our humble opinion, typos show that the logs are of *live* chats, not canned interviews, and minimal editing of these logs has taken place.

[Cybling] Welcome to Chicon, John.
[Ryan] Hello
[Cybling] John, you're the proprietor of Fossicker Press?
[Cybling] Can you tell us a little about that?
[Costello] Okay.
[Costello] Yes.
[Costello] I translate Russion SF and since no one else seems....
[Costello] to want to publish it...
[Costello] I'm publishing it myself.
[Cybling] Excellent!
[Costello] Comment...expensive.
[Cybling] So your press only does Russian SF.
[Costello] Yes.
[Costello] So far.
[Cybling] You commented...expensive? How so?
[Costello] It costs $1,000 to bring a book up on an on-demand printer.
[Costello] And the book is $15.00 paperback, $25 hardback, then it has to be advertised.
[Costello] In Worldcon promos and books...
[Costello] you have to go around to conventions and promote it...
[Costello] you have to visit dealers rooms and get the dealers to carry it.
[Costello] And you have to send review copies out. And hope that they will...
[Costello] ignore that it was produced by an on-demand printer.
[Cybling] So there's not that much demand for Russian SF?
[Costello] There was, back in the 70's, McMillan produced the Soviet...
[Costello] SF series. They had to...
[Costello] it was part of a larger contract, so they only produced it for Libraries.
[Costello] If you want to find copies of the Stiugatsaies books...
[Costello] or Kirbulychev books...
[Costello] you have to go to libraries or rare book stores.
[Cybling] What authors do you have available right now?
[Costello] So far...
[Costello] Kirbulychev Bulychev...
[Ryan] Russian... Hmmm...
[Costello] the next book will also be Bulychev...
[Costello] the third book will be an anthology of various writers...
[Costello] some of whom started during the soviet period, some during glasnost...
[Costello] and some who weren't able to print at all.
[Costello] Also I have Kirbulychev's political fiction which he hid from the authorities for 30 years...
[Costello] so he didn't have to spend 7 years in a concentration camp.l
[Costello] The first book...is available on Amazon.com
[Costello] it's THOSE WHO SURVIVE, and it's both hard back and paperback.
[Costello] Again, it's on-demand.
[Costello] Which means that the book is printed individually per order on a xerox machine, but it looks...
[Costello] identical to a webpress production.
[Cybling] Folks...do you have some questions for John?
[Fenrir] um
[Fenrir] No?
[ant] In the original Russian or translated into English
[Ken_of_the_White_Crane] Do you contact most of your writters in Russia or do most of them come here?
[Costello] It's in english.
[Costello] You can buy the book in russian, but then you have to spend...
[Costello] 2 years learning basic russian and get a complete dictionary...
[Costello] and even then, there are some things that are in the book that aren't in any...
[Costello] dictionary at all. For some reason...
[Costello] Russian dictionaries exclude particular words which are not considered...
[Costello] high tone enough...for example, the word for ....
[Costello] stage makeup is not in the dictionaries.
[Costello] Ken...I use the internet to contact.
[Costello] It has replaced postage for most purches. Bulychev still uses..
[Costello] a manual typewriter, but everyone else is into PCs and the internet.
[Ken_of_the_White_Crane] Do you have to translate it or do they?
[Costello] To get a look at the Russian SF internet sites, it is www.rusf.ru
[Costello] Most of the sites are straight russian, but they look just like normal internet sites..
[Costello] and you can move by clicking...some have translations.
[Costello] The Stiugatskies' have a english site as well.
[Costello] Also check out the fan club Solaris in Perm as in the Permian...
[Costello] They have an english site as well and are very friendly.
[Ken_of_the_White_Crane] I'm sorry.. I meant, when they send you a manuscript.. do they send it to you in Russian or English?
[Costello] I translate...I translate those who survive.
[Costello] I have received text in english that is almost printable, text in english which reads horribly,
[Costello] and russian originals.
[ant] Is the standard of writing very high?
[Costello] There is also the maxim moskhow library, which is an online library of russian language...
[Costello] sf and literature much much more than just SF as well as American SF translated into Russian...
[Costello] and sometimes in the original.
[Costello] Which is where I can get copies of stories and books that I don't have the paper copies to.
[Costello] All my translation is by permission...
[Costello] and I have contracts with the writers.
[Costello] Ant... It used to be superb...
[Costello] very few people got printed. There were wars over paper and access to printing presses.
[Costello] In the late soviet period, it was extremely political. The state publishing houses...
[Costello] produced 100,000 copies of a book on average...
[Costello] and never reprinted it.
[Costello] It they wanted to kill the book, like they tried to kill books by the Stiugatskys-Hard To Be A God --
[Costello] they will print 10,000 or 5,000.
[Costello] Now printing is a private enterprise, the publishers produce 10 to 20 thousand copies...
[Costello] and reprint.
[Costello] The quality of writing varies just as in the US. It used to be...
[ant] Thanks, I will try them.
[Costello] you could not find a typo or mis spellign in a Russian book...
[Costello] because there were so many levels of editors and censors.
[Costello] Now, you can.
[Ryan] Heh...
[Costello] It is very annoying to a translator to have to try and figure out a particular word...
[Costello] which should be something but is spelled very differently, and you have to worry...
[Costello] is it a typo or something you've never encountered before.
[Cybling] John...what is the main difference between Soviet/Russian SF and our western version.
[Costello] Politics.
[Costello] In american SF, the evil communists are out to conquer the world...
[Costello] they have fled into space, and now oppress some poor other planet...
[Costello] In Soviet SF, the evil capitalists have fled into space...
[Costello] and are now exploiting the workers of a peaceful, formerly socialist planet...
[Costello] they have overwhelmed.
[Costello] There
*was
* a state ideology like a state religion that predicted one future...
[Costello] and if you did not agree with it or approve of it...
[ant] Siberia printing works!
[Costello] Like Kir Bulychev, you didn't publically go against it.
[Costello] Kir was very daring in not writing stories about heroic Kommunists.
[Costello] Who were always right and knew all the answers and were insufferable prigs.
[Costello] He got away with it. Because he was really an academic, a specialist in medeavil Burma, named Igor Mojeiko.
[Cybling] Folks...do we have any questions for John about Russian literature...
[Cybling] or the problems with running a small on-demand press?
[ant] Is it more hard sci fi than Fantasy?
[Costello] Soviet SF was hard SF...
[Costello] and political SF. Fantasy was limited to a book called the..
[Costello] Wizard of The Emerald City.
[Costello] Which was really a translation of the Wizard of Oz.
[Costello] The Russians discovered modern fantasy with Tolkien.
[Costello] Tolkien wasn't totally published until after the fall of communism. Now they have..
[Costello] Heroic fantasy, weird tales like science fantasy, dragons...
[Costello] lots and lots of dragons...
[Ryan] Where would someone even get Russian books written in the US? I don't see too many Russians around.. at least not around here... Where does most of the demand come from, specifically?
[Costello] wizards and mages, who outnumber the hard SF books.
[Costello] One author Nikolai Basov who started doing hard adventure sf, put on his website Question: What do you want?
[Costello] Hard SF or Fentezi? The vote was 60% for Fentezi.
[Cybling] We have time for one last question over here...Ryans.
[Costello] Russia, Boston, New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
[Costello] Harvard Library...
[Costello] maintains a major collection of it. There are lots of russian immegrants on the east coast and in Boston.
[Costello] The bookstore is called, Lavka Chitatelya
[Costello] Mostly it is New York. I can get them on the internet from New York.
[Cybling] folks...be sure to visit John's website for more information.
[ant] Does your publishing co. have a website. I live in South Africa
[Cybling] let's thank John for joining us today!
* Cybling applauds
[Cybling] You can order his books through Amazon Com and his email address...
[Cybling] is bigger@gis.net
[Cybling] He'll be there next week.