" In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again"

Arthur C. Clarke Against the Fall of Night

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Saturday, December 9, 2017

JoyLeg by Ward Moore and Avram Davidson


  A rather unappealing cover by Ed Emshwiller for the 1962 edition, that did not encourage me to read this novel. (cover image from ISFDB)


One day while visiting my SF buddy Doug he suggested I try JoyLeg by Ward Moore and Avram Davidson. Doug and I both share an admiration for many of the same "golden age" writers. But we also diverge in many areas, I am not a huge fan of alternative history while Doug enjoys books like Turtledove's Guns of the South. He has recently been reading David Weber's Safehold Series which I will never agree to read. He did convince me to reread the Foundation Trilogy for the first time in over 40 years and I enjoyed it. Since Joyleg was one short book compared to Weber's nine volume and growing opus I though I could at least start it. Did I mention that I also dislike satire? 

I was pleasantly surprised. Joyleg begins in Washington when two members of a congressional committee discover that a veteran living in Rabbit Notch Tennessee, one Isachar Joyleg is receiving a pension of some 11 dollars a month, and has been for a considerable period of time. So long that the committee is not clear on exactly which war Joyleg is a veteran of. Republican Congresswoman Lucinda Habersham is convinced the duration of the pension indicates fraud, Democratic Congressman Tully Weathernox that the amount indicates a miscarriage of justice. Both represent Tennessee and are determined to get to the bottom of the mystery that is Isachar Joyleg. Accompanied by Habersham's aide Martha Forsh, they set out for Rabbit Notch. The journey itself is a trip through time as they venture into increasingly uncharted areas of rural Tennessee. They travel by a somewhat antique train to Bountsburg then from there to Sevier via a hired vehicle that appears to be a variation of a Stanley Steamer. Once in Sevier they learn several things, that no one travels to Rabbit Notch, that the inhabitants of Servier have not seen Joyleg for generations, and that the inhabitants of Rabbit Notch are considered odd even by the somewhat idiosyncratic inhabitants of Bountsburg and Sevier. They also learn that any further progress will involve waiting for one Caesar Augustus Praiseworthy, an inhabitant of Rabbit Notch (and one of the few to venture out of the Notch) to arrive in Servier with his team of donkeys.

The novel itself only uses one science fictional or fantastic component to propel the story. Rather the authors use the novel to take a light hearted look at politics on many levels from the party politics of the United States to the wider brinkmanship of the Cold War world. They also use the character of Joyleg to present an alternative version of American history stripped of romanticism surrounding key events and the lionization of political figures. That said the satire is relatively low key rather than heavy-handed. I must admit I felt the characters of the two congresspersons could have been better developed in light of the resolution but I really liked the way the authors treated the gossip columnist Jill Brittin who morphed from a cardboard stereotype in the first chapters to a savy political insider by the end of the novel. I also enjoyed the all too brief examination of the economy of Rabbit Notch.

I am always curious when I read collaborations as to which authors wrote which parts. While I have no evidence I like to think that, based on their body of work in general, 
Ward Moore, who penned the important alternative history novel of the Civil War Bring The Jubilee  brought the historical component and that Avram Davidson who wrote the lovely Hugo winning Fortean rumination Or All the Seas with Oysters might have supplied the satire, but who knows.

Overall Joyleg was an enjoyable read, while it was by no means a straight forward science fiction plot, it was a lovely if unexpected time travel story just not in the traditional sense. 

For another review I recommend Robert Wilfred Franson's which can be found here.



Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Golden Age Optimism and the Lords of the Starship

  "Yes,"Getting the country back on its feet," is the usual phrase. Although I am, at times, quite confounded as to how I am to recreate a world that I know nothing about and one which might"—Limpkins's voice dropped slightly—"exist only in legend." (15)

"But the ship's primary purpose will not be one of simple transportation, but that of a Cause, the thing about which all of the dormant hopes of our nation can crystallize.
"And here is the trick: the ship will betray the people for their own good."(26)

Lords of the Starship

As I enter my 60's, I realize I have been reading SF for what must be approaching 50 years. I started with SF intended for children in my school library in Windsor. Titles that spring to mind, John Keir Cross's The Angry Planet or Miss Pickerell On the Moon, she also goes to Mars. I graduated to Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov's robots and Ray Bradbury, who I loved, still do, but even then he was a bit of an outlier, what after all was I to make, as a white kid who lived across from a Detroit in flames, of "The Black and White Game" (1945) from The Golden Apples of the Sun.

 Even at the time many of the titles were old, although I was oblivious to this, even after reading Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo with its Nazi base on the moon. I did not realize that these books and their visions of the future were often 15 to 20+ years old. SF was by no means my only reading, as a geeky kid, books were a refuge, myths, mysteries, historical novels aimed at teens, adventure stories, even the occasional sports novel were gist for the mill, although SF has remained my greatest love.

As I look for like minded enthusiasts on the web, I have been interested in reading about their youthful experiences with SF. One I found was the late Bud Webster, who I have mentioned before on my blog. A link to his columns on SF authors and anthologies appears under Handy Resources, I recommend starting with Anthopology 101: The Best of Time and Space



"But the library was sanctuary for me. Nobody would chase me, nobody would yell at me, and best of all, nobody there would rag me for reading books. I'd have stayed there forever if I could have. It was quiet, cool, and it's where I became addicted to books, both as artifacts and because of the content.

I was probably all of nine years old when I first found the thick, heavy collections of stories edited by Conklin and Healy & McComas for the first time. But there they were, that pair of behemoths: Adventures in Time and Space (ed. Raymond J. Healy and Francis McComas, Random House 1946) and The Best of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin, Crown 1946). They changed my life, and without a doubt altered the way I read science fiction, and I wasn't the only one."

Another fellow reader is  James Harris with his blog Auxillary Memory and his great lists of SF by the decade. I have enjoyed many of this posts but I think his post, Who Still Reads 1950's Science Fiction is a great start, capturing his thoughts on SF. His comment 

"The kind of reader I’m trying to identify is different. Science fiction was their childhood religion, born again into faith in the future, like the theological have a faith in the past. " 

is one I want to discuss more in a future post.

https://auxiliarymemory.com/2016/07/12/who-still-reads-1950s-science-fiction/

But the main impetus for my current post is a post by Ralph E. Vanghan, discussing the effect reading Lords of the Starship by Mark S. Geston had on him. What struck a chord with me was this quote,

"At the time, I was a futurist. I did not really think I would see flying cars by the Year 2000 (though I hoped so), I did believe that the ills of the world would be solved through technology and science, that starving millions would be fed by scientific farming, that the world would embrace peace once everyone's standard of living had been raised by ubiquitous technology and that the the frontier of human experience would be expanded by colonization of the solar system and journeys to the stars beyond. Unfortunately, the future turned out not to be quite what I had envisioned. I'm no longer a futurist, not even much of an optimist anymore, and quite often I find myself thinking, Where are we going so fast"



http://bookscribbles.blogspot.ca/



I don't think I considered SF my childhood religion, and like Ralph I did not have a time table for the delivery of my flying car but like Ralph i did think science and technology would begin to improve the lives of people worldwide. That a rational approach would break down the barriers of social status, nationalism and race. This idea could be found in science fiction. Arthur C, Clarke was one of its greatest proponents, in the Deep Range we not only farm the oceans, but learn a deeper connection to other species. In his non-fiction books like The Exploration of Space or novels like The Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust mankind begins the often perilous exploration of the solar system. 



But the SF I read was not always a literature of optimism, Heinlein saw us repeating the errors that lead to the American Revolution in The Red Planet, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and a personal favourite Between Planets, even in his more optimistic Farmer in the Sky, the colonists on Ganymede discuss the fact that the overpopulated Earth will want to send too many new colonists, but are told that the inevitable war on Earth will prevent this. Like many SF writers, Andre Norton embraces a cyclical view of history, with civilization repeatedly rising and falling. In Star Rangers the Galactic Empire is collapsing. Nuclear war has occurred in both Sea Siege and Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. The Stars Are Ours sees a persecuted band of "Free Scientists " escape a tyrannical police state for space and even when we get out into the universe we are relegated to acting as mercenaries in Star Guard.
  
In Asimov's Foundation, the most optimistic outcome is a Dark Age lasting 1,000 years rather than 30,000 years and Lathan Devers the trader, instrumental in saving the Foundation, in Foundation and Empire, later dies in its slave mines. Ray Bradbury offers us the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 or the Mars of the Martian Chronicles in which, in a parallel to the settling of the Americas, the native Martians are eventually wiped out by contact with the Earthlings, who then launch a nuclear war on Earth.


My feeling of optimism, now largely lost, came from the world itself. My wife a few years younger than myself and also a SF reader said the same thing when I asked her. My father and my uncles on both sides of the family had gone from poor farm boys in the depression, into military service in WWII, and had come home to steady jobs in the trades or factories of southern Ontario. (Canada also had a version of the GI bill which provided money for education, low-cost mortgages and  businesses loans.)


  The interstate highway system in the USA started in 1956 and similar infrastructure projects were carried out in Canada. The post war economic expansion lead to sustained economic growth, high levels of employment, the expansion of the suburbs and what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Capitalism. (see link below) Vaccines and improved public health practices and screening meant polio, TB and more exotic diseases like smallpox were eradicated or at least controlled. (I spent a year as an infant in a sanatorium being treated for TB, this was a big deal) Yes there were the race riots of 1967 and the Vietnam war, but also the anti-war and civil rights movements and even a bit of environmental consciousness (in elementary school I wrote an essay on the pollution of Lake Erie). In Canada, 1967 was the Canadian Centenary featuring the Expo 67 World's Fair. (One year later my wife's family would move into their new house, which actually had running water, another big deal during winters in the Canadian Prairies). 


  The first news event I remember watching on TV was the landing of Alan Shepard after his suborbital flight in May 1961 as part of Project Mercury, and I had a plastic space centre with rockets, a launch pad and missile launching platform. How and Why books told us about the sciences.  We could collect cards from tea leaf packages with pictures about trees, birds, animals and the exploration of space and the oceans. The world, even the solar system was our oyster. A rational approach and advances in science and technology would lead us to a bright future. Things were not perfect at that time, not in North America, and certainly not in the world. But the way seemed clear. 

Now that short period of unsustainable prosperity after WWII has engendered some oddly selective nostalgia on the part of a lot of people and the possibility for a bright new science-fictional future seems more remote every day. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_economic_expansion

SF may have shown me a variety of possibilities, both good and bad, but it was the apparent progress we were makings as a race that gave me hope for the future.

"he learned of asphalt roads that had once covered the world, and of the vehicles that had carried man upon them; ships that dived into the seas, and ships that had carried other men on some few faltering steps towards the stars, before there was no more time for such things." (40)

Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, by Mark S. Geston

This might have been he future we envisioned but with bigger televisions.

http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166983919784/futurehouse?utm_campaign=SharedPost&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=TumblriOS


In Part Two I will give my thoughts on Lords of the Starship by Mark S. Geston.




Wednesday, October 25, 2017

London Trip 3, Waterstones, New Arrivals



Waterstones is a UK bookstore chain, similar to Chpaters/Indigo Books here in Canada. However there is one main difference from most chain outlets, each store may have slightly different holdings. The store near our hotel, described (by them) as " Waterstones Gower Street is Europe's largest academic/specialist range bookshop." is housed in a beautiful old building it had new books, including a large SF section with second hand SF paperback titles interfiled, a large section of used Penguin books on the main floor, and antiquarian books and an art gallery in the basement.



I began my collecting with Arkham House books, and while I have not purchased any of their older titles for a number of years, I could not resist The Traveling Grave by L.P. Hartley. Today Hartley is probably best known for the quote "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." from his mainstream novel The Go-Between published in 1953.


Arkham House, 1948, cover by Frank Utpatel.

I also could not resist The Purple Cloud, by M.P. Shiel, (who had several short story collections published by Arkham House) This novel of the end of the world is credited as the basis for the 1959 film, The World, the Flesh and the Devil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_Devil_(1959_film)


World Publishing Company 1946 (1901), cover by Soshensky

Upstairs I found several paperbacks, including another Ian Miller.

The wrap-around version, 


A Merril anthology, 1959 with a beautiful Richard Powers cover. 

My friend Doug has been recommending Schmitz, 
this edition is from 1979, cover by Tim White.


Sunday, October 22, 2017

London Trip 2, SKOOB BOOKS, New Arrivals



More goodies from Skoob books.

I loved Niven's Gil Hamilton of ARM short stories, so I was 
excited to find he had done a novel. But I found it overly 
complicated for the length, with a poorly developed ending. 
But this Orbit edition has a great cover by Peter Jones.


A version of the full wrap-around cover photographed by 
the Unsubscriber can be found here.



The City of the Sun. 1980 cover by Tim White


I have read Shaw excellent short story "Light of Other Days"
so I grabbed this book on "slow Glass", cover uncredited.


How could I resist, Dick and a tentacled horror, 
cover by Gino d'Achille.


This copy of the Star Surgeon which Helen found for me, 
has a great but uncredited cover illustration. 


I loved everything about these two Pan editions, especially
the covers which are sadly uncredited.




No matter where I go Frank is there. 
The Dragon in the Sea, NEL 1969, cover Bruce Pennington.



Wrap-around version; 

I was hoping I might find copies of Ian Miller's covers for 
Lovecraft's books but I am very happy with this Herbert.
The Unsubscriber has published a number of posts
on his love for the cover art of Ian Miller. This link
contains a photo of the full wrap-around version of this title.





Monday, October 16, 2017

London Trip 1, SKOOB BOOKS, New Arrivals


We are back from a lovely trip to London. I stated before I left that I hoped to find some SF Penguins, however while I found a lot of older Penguin books for sale, I did not find many of the specific titles or cover artists I hoped to find. I also did not find any SF titles from the British SF publishers Digit or Badger books. While we did visit a number of interesting used book stores, only one, the wonderful SKOOB Books had an extensive SF section. You go in the main floor entrance and down the stairs and yeah!! books. After 3 or 4 visits, it was not far from our hotel, I had amassed a large number of British editions to bedevil my efforts at packing, along with the heavy guides and art books from the museums and galleries we visited. Thank you Helen for the photos of the shop.



http://www.skoob.com/

While this will probably stretch to several post, lets start with some highlights. If you had asked me to list some paperbacks I hoped to find, the first two (below,) could well have been one and two on the list.


I have long lusted after this Bruce Pennington cover for Space, Time and Nathaniel from The New English library edition, and the stories I have read so far have been very good,


Many years ago, when I was more of a SF reader and less of a collector, a very good friend, (now sadly deceased) gave me a copy of Solar Wind a book on the SF stylings of Peter Jones and I have loved Jones' gaunt skull-faced aliens ever since. This is the Jones cover I particularly wanted and I know I will think of Rod whenever I pick it up.


This Boyd title with a cover by Peter Cross, was a book I hoped to find and The Kraken Wakes is my favourite Wyndham. Cover by Denis Piper


Another book I wanted the minute I saw the cover, in this case on the blog of the Unsubscriber.
https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/14/from-the-library-of-the-unsubscriber-no-19-cover-oddities/
The cover artist is uncredited, any ideas?


I had never seen this edition of The Sirens of Titan (fifth impression, 1975) with a cover by Jim Burns but I knew I was bringing it home the minute I picked it up. 



To see the cover in it's full wrap around glory try

Friday, September 29, 2017

New Arrival; The Death of Grass by John Christopher


I always am looking for several SF books with covers I consider particularly striking, the Richard Powers cover for Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human for example. So while researching Penguin SF for my earlier posts I took one more search for a reasonably priced copy of The Death of Grass by John Christopher with this impressive cover by John Griffiths. This time however I found one in Winnipeg and this particular search is over.

Another article on the joys of Penguin SF from The Guardian.


Penguin shows off its SF covers
"One of my particular pleasures is poking around secondhand bookshops to find vintage science fiction books (I recently picked up a 1980s Harry Harrison novel purely because of its jacket, which features a monster-sized dolphin with a mouth of very sharp teeth). So, stumbling across this labour of love and beauty – a website exploring the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin between 1935 and 1977 – thanks to the Penguin blog means that I've just spent much of my morning plumbing its depths."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/may/07/penguin-science-fiction-covers

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Penguin Books 3 (Pelican Books, the history) The Exploration of Space, Arthur C Clarke, 1958.

 In 1936, Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, overheard a woman at a bookstall in King’s Cross station asking for ‘one of those Pelican books’. Presumably she meant a Penguin, but Lane, concerned that his competitors might snatch up bird names, decided to launch a new flock of non-fiction books. The Pelican imprint was born."


And thus an imprint for non-fiction books was born."


"In 2014, after nearly three decades in retirement, Pelican was reborn. In its new incarnation Pelican continues the same mission: to publish truly accessible books from authoritative and award-winning writers on a wide range of essential subjects. Pelicans are for those topics you are interested in, but feel you don’t know enough about, whether it’s architecture or the brain, evolution or Islam. You can expect many more Pelicans to take flight in 2015 and beyond."

https://www.pelicanbooks.com/about

To acknowledge the  Pelican re-launch The Guardian published a great overview of the Pelican imprint.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/25/pelican-books-take-flight-relaunch


"The volumes came thick and fast, and were classy. In the 10 months between August 1958 and May 1959, for instance, Pelican titles included Kenneth Clark's study of Leonardo, Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, The Exploration of Space by Arthur C. Clarke."









Monday, September 25, 2017

Penguin 2, Dystopian novels, 1984 by George Orwell at the Barbican, Interesting links






Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker (link below) discusses the current crop of dystopian fiction as well as providing a brief survey of the field overall. She offers a distinction between dystopian novels versus apocalyptic novels that I found quite interesting. 

"Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man,” is a dystopia (on the island, the pursuit of equality has reduced everyone to living in caves), but Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, “The Last Man,” in which the last human being dies in the year 2100 of a dreadful plague, is not dystopian; it’s merely apocalyptic."

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in describing John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar states "The Dystopian vision of this complex novel, much of which is set in an exemplary New York, rests on the assumption that Earth's population will continue to expand uncontrollably (see Overpopulation)."

They go to describe Brunner's further novels, The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider as

"Three further novels, all with some of the same pace and intensity, make together a kind of thematic series of Dystopias."
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/brunner_john

Lepore's article has left me pondering whether Brunner's novels are indeed dystopian or apocalyptic or both. I have not decided yet. Your thoughts? In this article she offers a good overview, as well as examining dystopian fiction in terms of our current reality. An interesting read for SF buffs.

New Yorker,
A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction

What to make of our new literature of radical pessimism.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction

In an earlier post (link follows) I noted that we were a bit sad that we would just miss a show of SF related items called Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction being held at the Barbican in London in Sept. In researching my series in Penguin Books I found out that Penguin has released four books, to be sold only through the Barbican shop, with Barbican related covers, to commemorate the show, they are 1984 by George Orwell, The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. (see the covers at the shop link below). While we missed the show, we do hope to be able to visit the shop, time and our energy level permitting.


http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.ca/2017/06/into-unknown-journey-through-science.html

https://shop.barbican.org.uk/collections/books



Sunday, September 24, 2017

Penguin SF



My wife and I are planning a trip to London shortly and I have been hoping that I will be able to pick up some SF titles while I am there. One thing I wanted to do was look at which Penguin SF titles I already have and which titles I would like to look for in the London bookstores. 

It was also a great excuse to present some of the titles I already own. A quick look at the titles displayed at the link below, will demonstrate that the art directors for Penguin Books have embraced a number of different strategies, since they started publishing SF in 1935 with Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

My earliest Penguin in actually a television script for The Quatermass Experiment published in 1959. As Penguin frequently reprinted with the same covers it is good to look at the copyright page if you want first editions (thus). I am hoping to find some earlier novels, maybe even Erewhon?

A great resource for my search has been

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/ .

For a look at some of the travails and triumphs of a collector of Penguins SF titles I recommend searching the Penguin posts on theunsbcribedblog

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/03/a-plethora-of-penguins-part-one/

For some general remarks on collecting Penguins including the SF titles, this article in the Guardian is good.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/30/penguin-books-turns-75-anniversary

The Quartermass Experiment, (above) has the horizontal orange and white triband covers I associate with Penguin Books.

Here the triband is now vertical. Limbo 1961.


It gets a bit more stylish below, After The Rain, 1958, cover illustration by Quentin Blake.


Then we also have a movie tie-in complete with scary kids.


The World in Winter, 1965, with a cover illustration by Bruce Robertson.


I have read a number of Hoyle's novels with The Black Cloud being my favourite so far. This cover, where the designer played with the iconic orange in creating a unique image, is one of my favourite Penguins.


A number of illustrators have done the covers for a series of novels by the same author. Here is one of the covers Peter Cross did for a novel  by John Boyd, I would love to find a copy of Boyd's  The Pollinators of Eden. I am hoping to find Penguins with covers by artists Alan Aldridge, David Pelham, Peter Tybus and Peter Goodfellow, and authors like Philp K. Dick, Frank Herbert and some of the Penguin anthologies.


Some of my favourite Penguin covers  are illustrated by Peter Lord, where the central image intrudes into the white border, in this series of novels by one of my favourite author John Wyndham. I will be looking for more of these.


And Penguin had done a number of paperbacks there the illustration covers the entire field.