Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020)

Richard A. Lupoff, Dick Lupoff, former co-host of “Probabilities” and “Cover to Cover” died on October 22, 2020 at the age of 85. This podcast is dedicated to his memory and features a live radio program recorded in July, 1992 in which he, Richard Wolinsky and mystery author Shelley Singer review various books they’d read in the previous month.

Richard A. Lupoff began his career as a writer creating a science fiction fanzine, Xero, which won a Hugo Award in 1963. He began his official writing career with a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a first novel, One Million Centuries, in the early 1960s. Over the course of a very long writing career, eventually, over sixty books carried his byline, many of them science fiction novels, short story collections, and mystery novels. He also edited a still unsurpassed history of early comic books, All in Color for a Dime. Other novels include Space War Blues, Into the Aether, Sword of the Demon and The Comic Book Killer. His short story, 12:01, became a Showtime short film and was later expanded into a full-length television movie (and was most likely the inspiration for the classic film, Groundhog Day).

Starting in 1977 on KPFA, he helped create a large body of work that included most of the best-known science fiction and mystery writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and his work digging up interviews with old pulp writers and editors remains, to a large extent, the only body of work of its kind.

Probabilities began with a one-off one-hour program called Probabilities Unlimited,  with Lawrence Davidson in the first show hosting Richard Lupoff and Michael Kurland, with Richard Wolinsky at the controls. After several months, and after Richard Wolinsky became co-host, it became a regular weekly, half-hour program called simply Probabilities, which aired until 1995. Richard A. Lupoff joined the show as co-host in 1979.  Lawrence Davidson left in the mid-1980s. In 1995, the show relaunched as part of the Cover to Cover series of strip programs. By that time, it was known informally as the Richard and Richard Show. Richard Lupoff departed in 2001 to focus on his writing career. Among the notable authors interviewed by the two Richards were such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Gore Vidal, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut.

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