Black Gate

This Immortal (Ace Books, September 1980). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Two weeks ago I dashed off a Vintage Treasures piece on Larry Niven’s first collection Neutron Star, the first I’d ever done on Niven, and it helped me realize that there are several other major writers sorely underrepresented in these pages. Near the top of that list is Roger Zelazny, one of the most important fantasists of the 20th Century, and the man behind much of the work that turned me into a lifelong science fiction reader.

So today I’d like to talk about This Immortal, Zelazny’s first novel, published as a paperback original in July 1966 by Ace Books. It was the work that cemented Zelazny’s reputation as one of the finest genre writers of his generation, and it tied with perhaps the most famous science novel of all time — Frank Herbert’s Dune — for SF’s highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
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Neutron Star (Ballantine Bools, April 1968). Cover artist unknown

As I was preparing last week’s Vintage Treasures article (on Poul Anderson’s Fire Time), I realized that the next book on deck was Neutron Star, by Larry Niven, one of the most important science fiction collections of the 20th Century. And I simultaneously realized we’ve never done a Vintage Treasures feature on Niven before, a pretty serious oversight. (For comparison purposes, as I was assembling reference links at the bottom of my Fire Time piece, there simply wasn’t room to include the dozens of articles we’ve written on Anderson.) In fact, other than a pair of reviews by Fletcher Vredenburgh, two blog posts on Convergent Series by Steven Silver, and a note on the 1973 Skylark Award by Rich Horton, we’ve had virtually no coverage of Niven at all on Black Gate.

I’m to blame for this. Niven is, unquestionably, one of the most important science fiction writers alive today. But I was never a fan of his novels (I made two attempts to read his classic Ringworld, before giving up for good in the early 80s). His short stories, however, are a different matter, and I’m very glad to finally have the chance to discuss his first collection, the groundbreaking Neutron Star, first published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in April 1968.

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Fire Time by Poul Anderson (Ballantine Books, November, 1975). Cover by Darrell Sweet

Poul Anderson was a terrifically prolific and popular science fiction writer, in a way I don’t think it’s possible to be today. I mean that in the sense that, yes, he wrote a lot of books — a ridiculous number of books, really. He published hundreds of novels and short stories in his lifetime. (How many, exactly? I have no idea. No one knows. Modern counting methods have failed us. Though there are studious attempts online, and I find this one at Book Series in Order particularly handy.)

But more meaningfully, I mean that every visit to the science fiction section of a well stocked bookstore for the first few decades of my life presented you with dozens of titles by Poul Anderson. Yes, he wrote a lot of books, but unlike most writers his books remained in print — often for decades. He was a reliable presence on bookstore shelves the way Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein were, or J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King are today. In other words, he was a midlist writer who was treated like a bestselling author, and that never happens any more.

I read a lot of Poul Anderson as a result (a lot of folks did). But one book that escaped me, though I was always interested, was his 1974 SF novel Fire Time.

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