Black Gate

Merchanter’s Luck (DAW, 1982). Cover by Barclay Shaw

I haven’t covered many C.J. Cherryh novels in my ongoing Vintage Treasures project, and that seems like a serious oversight. Cherryh was a constant presence on the paperback racks in my youth. She sold her first novel Brothers of Earth to Donald A. Wollheim at DAW in 1975; since then she’s published more than 80 science fiction and fantasy books, including the most ambitious and successful first contact saga in science fiction, The Foreigner Series. Volume 21, Divergence, arrives in hardcover next week.

I recently picked up a copy of the author’s 1982 paperback original Merchanter’s Luck, and I thought it would be a good place to start. It’s the first novel in her Company Wars saga, set in the Alliance-Union universe where humanity has split into three space-faring power blocs: Union, the Merchanter’s Alliance and Earth. I remembered Jo Walton’s Tor.com review of Merchanter’s Luck from a decade ago, enticingly titled “A girl on a haunted spaceship.” Here’s an excerpt.

Ben JB and I were talking about Gothics, and Ben JB asked if you could have a Gothic on a spaceship. My immediate response was Merchanter’s Luck, a 1982 novel by C.J. Cherryh. It has a girl and a haunted spaceship and a mysterious man with lots of secrets in his past. But on re-reading it, I have to admit that it doesn’t quite work as a Gothic… Allison is far from a gothic heroine — she’s empowered, and most of the time in the novel she is the one in the position of power. She goes onto the spaceship and goes into abandoned cabins, full of the possessions of the dead, but she doesn’t go alone. She’s not virginal, not isolated, and never helpless…

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So Bright the Vision by Clifford D. Simak (Ace, 1976). Cover uncredited, but likely Michael Whelan

Over the last few weeks I heartily enjoyed writing a pair of lengthy articles on the way Berkley Books packaged and marketed Poul Anderson in 1976-79, and Ace Books did the same thing with Robert Silverberg in 1977. I think I had so much fun because it allowed me to indulge in my favorite past time (obsessing over old paperbacks) for hours, and dress it up as legit research. Yes, I did relentlessly track down every single Poul Anderson paperback published by Berkley in the 70s, including The High Crusade, even though I already had four editions of that damn book. But I did it for science. Well, paperback science. Which is totally a thing, and not a form of hoarding or mental illness or anything. Look, I have these scholarly articles to prove it.

In any event, my thoughts have now turned to what author/publisher combo I should examine next (for science, naturally). There are lots of possibilities of course, but ideally it should be a terrific writer, paired with a cover artist who knocked it out of the park. And the more I think about it, the more I think it should be the four Clifford D. Simak paperbacks published by Ace in a single month in September, 1976.

Simak had been a steadfast earner at Ace for decades, but despite having many of his titles in their back catalog, they’d never done any author branding for him. When the Ace editorial team simultaneously secured the rights to a set of Simak reprints in 1976 — City, So Bright the Vision, The Trouble with Tycho, and Time and Again — they gave him a consistent cover design for the first time, and paired him with a young 26-year old up-and-coming artist named Michael Whelan, who’d done only four previous covers for Ace in his short career.

Needless to say, Whelan did indeed knock it out of the park, delivering iconic illustrations for all four books. Well unofficially, anyway. Because while the cover art for the sole collection in the set, So Bright the Vision, is clearly by Michael Whelan, officially the cover artist remains unidentified.

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To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg (Sphere, 1977). Cover by Peter Elson

I’m on something of a Robert Silverberg kick. It started when Mark Kelly reviewed Silverberg’s early novel Collision Course for us back in April, one of the first SF novels I ever read, and in a haze of nostalgia I ended up taking an extended look at all six Silverberg novels packaged up by Ace in that magical year of 1977. More recently I’ve been collecting some of his earlier books, and finding all kinds of interesting artifacts, like the 1969 anthology Dark Stars, and the 1967 fix-up novel To Open the Sky, assembled from five novelettes originally published in Galaxy magazine.

To Open the Sky is the saga of two religions that emerge in the 21st Century, both of which worship technology and atomic power. Over nearly a century the mysterious origins of both religions, and the secret ambitions of their founders, are gradually revealed. It’s the kind of epoch-spanning, tech-focused SF that isn’t written any more. Here’s an excerpt from my favorite review, a short but insightful piece by Thomas M. Wagner at sff180.

A fine example of pre-1970s Bob Silverberg, To Open the Sky is the absorbing story of an overpopulated and economically depressed world clinging to the outcome of a religious schism for its salvation. But is the schism itself a pure public relations ploy, a staged affair whose intricacies are known only to its elusive and enigmatic founder?…

Silverberg effectively constructs a narrative on an epic scale — nearly a century of time between 2077 and 2164 — within a taut 200 or so pages, demonstrating once again that the present-day tendency towards bloat in SF and fantasy publishing is not necessarily the only way to convey big ideas set against a big canvas. Noel Vorst is the founder of a new religious movement rooted squarely in science. Though there is plenty of spiritualist window dressing to appeal to the emotional needs of the disaffected, the promises of the Vorsters are materialist to a fault. There is the promise of potential immortality, as well as the ultimate colonization of the stars, both unfulfilled so far due to limitations of technology.

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