Subterranean Press to reprint “The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes”, a fairy tale by Harlan Ellison

As I announced back in January 2009, Subterranean Press is reprinting “The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes” (2000), a fairy tale by Sci-Fi curmudgeon Harlan Ellison. Ellison's tale will be bound with ten other stories in Subterranean's Son of Retro Pulp Tales, a forthcoming, limited edition anthology edited by Joe R. Lansdale and Keith Lansdale. Continuing in the vein of the award-winning Retro Pulp Tales (2006), the forthcoming Son of Retro Pulp Tales contains “everything from Lovecraftian monsters to demons to hardboiled shootouts to plain ole unchained oddness" and will be published this summer.

Here are the opening lines of Ellison's Martian fairy tale:

Once upon a time, in a golden kingdom far away, a kingdom dreaming of never was but should have been, on an especially lovely day, a most exceptionally comely blonde princess, with eyes the color of skies toward which the noblest eagles yearn, chose to take a leisurely stroll at the veriest verge of the vast grounds bounding her father’s palace. ...

Pictured above: No, not Jack Kerouac, but Harlan Ellison!