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Vintage Treasures: Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Vintage Treasures: Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

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Orphans of the Sky (Ace Books, 1987). Cover by Carl Lundgren

Robert A. Heinlein never really did it for me. Even in my teens, when I was devouring any science fiction between covers, I didn’t get the appeal. I never read his juveniles, and I bounced hard off of Friday. I found Stranger in a Strange Land dull and unbelievable, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress resisted every attempt I made to get past the first 20 pages.

Why’d I make so many attempts? Because the first Heinlein I ever read, the slender paperback novel titled Orphans of the Sky, was a slam-bang adventure tale set on a six mile-long spaceship that twisted my head around. It was packed full of interesting characters and genuine surprises, and fit in well with the pulp SF by Asimov, Charles R. Tanner, and Edmond Hamilton — and movies like Star Wars and Alien — that was filling my head up at the time.

Orphans of the Sky fit the mold of pulp SF because it was pulp SF. It was originally published (as two separate novelettes, “Universe” and “Common Sense”) in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 and follows the adventures of Hugh Hoyland, a scientist’s apprentice on the enormous generation ship Vanguard, whose inhabitants have long since forgotten their origins. When Hugh is captured by mutants and begins to learn the true nature of the Vanguard, he leads an onboard mutiny that changes the fate of everyone.

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The Art of Things to Come, Part 2: 1958-1960

The Art of Things to Come, Part 2: 1958-1960

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The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, featured in the
September-October 1960 issue of Things to Come. Art by Virgil Finlay

As I mentioned in Part One of this series, like tens of thousands of science fiction fans before and after me, I was at one time a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (or SFBC for short). I joined just as I entered my teen years, in the fall of 1976.

The bulletin of the SFBC, Things to Come, which announced the featured selections available and alternates, sometimes just reproduced the dust jacket art for the books in question. However, in many cases the art was created solely for the bulletin, and was not used in the book or anywhere else. Nearly all of the art for the first 20 years of Things to Come is exclusive to that bulletin, and as a result hasn’t been seen by many SF fans. In this series, I’ll reproduce some of that art, chosen by virtue of the art, the story that it illustrates or the author of the story. The first installment featured art from 1957 and earlier, while this installment covers 1958-1960, presented chronologically.

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L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series #3: Ozma of Oz

L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series #3: Ozma of Oz

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I’ve been doing more reading with my 10-year old niece and book 3 of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series was a real treat. While I’d seen the Wizard of Oz of course, Ozma of Oz was the first book I’d read and luckily it can be read entirely fine with nothing more than the 1939 movie as an introduction. This book was also my introduction to the otherworldly art of John R. Neill.

Ozma of Oz was published in 1907, and as I’ve noted in my previous posts, L. Frank Baum’s series is really the first major American fantasy world. The story begins with Dorothy travelling with Uncle Henry on a steamer to Australia. A storm picks up and Dorothy is washed overboard.

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Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award Stories 17 edited by Joe Haldeman

Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award Stories 17 edited by Joe Haldeman

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Nebula Award Stories 17 (Ace Books, 1985). Cover by Jeffrey Ridge

I’ve covered a few noteworthy anthologies here in the last few weeks, including Isaac Asimov’s surprising Tin Stars, and Donald A. Wollheim’s excellent 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. It’s sharpened my appetite for good anthologies, and when I found Nebula Award Stories 17 in a small collection of vintage paperbacks I bought in eBay last month, I knew I’d found my next weekend read.

The Nebula Awards anthologies have been published continuously for over five decades, ever since Damon Knight launched the series in 1966 to raise money to fund the Nebula Awards for the Science Fiction Writers of America. Volume 17 was the first (and only) one to be edited by Joe Haldeman, who by then had won a Nebula for his groundbreaking novel The Forever War (1975), and would win it again for the novella “The Hemingway Hoax” (1990), the short story “Graves” (1993), and the novels Forever Peace (1998) and Camouflage (2004).

Nebula Award Story 17 appeared in hardcover in 1983, but wasn’t published in paperback by Ace until 1985. It contains stories still remembered warmly today, including William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” made into a Keanu Reeves film in 1995, Poul Anderson’s Hugo and Nebula-award willing novella “The Saturn Game,” Michael Bishop’s Hugo and Nebula nominee “The Quickening,” an excerpt from Gene Wolfe’s classic novel The Claw of the Conciliator, and a lot more. There are two stories from Terry Carr’s Universe 11, two each from Omni and F&SF, and the rest from magazines and anthologies like Asimov’s SF, Analog, and More Wandering Stars. Here’s the complete TOC, and a look at some of the magazines the stories originally appeared in.

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Eternity vs. Infinity: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

Eternity vs. Infinity: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

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The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov; First Edition: Doubleday, 1955.
Cover art Mel Hunter.

The End of Eternity
by Isaac Asimov
Doubleday (191 pages, $1.95, Hardcover, August 1955)
Cover art Mel Hunter

Just as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, which I reviewed here last time, was one of the latter novels of Clarke’s early period (which I defined as everything from his first novel Prelude to Space in 1951 to 2001 in 1968), so is The End of Eternity one of the latter novels of Isaac Asimov’s early period (which I’ll define as everything from his first books I, Robot and Pebble in the Sky in 1950 through the 1960s, before Asimov “returned” to writing science fiction with the first of his later novels, The Gods Themselves, in 1972). (We can see that Asimov’s and Clarke’s early and later periods were virtually contemporaneous, since Clarke also “returned” to SF with Rendezvous with Rama in 1973.)

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A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

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The 4-volume Quark anthology series, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker
(Paperback Library, 1970-71). Covers by Russell FitzGerald, Ira Cohen, Roger Penney, and Martin Last

These four volumes of Quark came out in 1970-71. The publisher killed the Quark enterprise after a year mainly because they weren’t selling, but also because of a really ill-thought-out review that Ed Bryant, who had a story in the first issue, wrote about the journal, in which he praised Marilyn and me, but went on and on about what a schlock publisher Paperback Library was.

Ed eventually submitted a novel to Paperback Library, and I happened to be in the office just after it came in. Cathy, our editor showed me his cover letter and read me her rejection note. His letter began, “You probably never heard of me, but I am an SF writer and…” Her answer back started off:

Dear Mr. Bryant,

You sell yourself short. I’m very much aware of who you are. What I don’t understand is why you hope to be published by a publisher you consider…”

and a), b), c) and d) she quoted back to him all the scurrilous things he had written about Paperback Library in his review. I felt sorry for Ed. He’d been my student at Clarion a few years before. But Ed’s was the review that made the publisher, Hy Steerman, decide that he couldn’t win for losing, and scuttled the paperback journal after the fourth issue.

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Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

I’ve been on something of a Don Wollheim kick recently. I looked at his 1989 Annual World’s Best SF two weeks ago, and last week I explored a collection of 30 DAW paperbacks he published in the 70s, including two rare Imaro volumes by Charles Saunders.

We’ve examined a few of Wollheim’s older anthologies in the past, but I couldn’t recall writing about one of my personal favorites, Swordsmen in the Sky, his hugely influential 1964 collection of science fantasy tales by Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, and others. I scanned the cover, drafted a quick piece, and checked for previous references to it — and that’s when I discovered a delightful review by none other than Charles Saunders himself, published right here at Black Gate, in the very early days of the BG blog. Here’s a taste.

Two of the stories Wollheim selected — Poul Anderson’s “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” and Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon that Vanished — are classics in the sense that they continue to fascinate with each re-reading, even though they were first published in 1951 and 1948, respectively. Anderson’s story is set in a far-future Earth that no longer spins on its axis, with Celtic culture surviving that catastrophe. Were it not for the scientific explanation for the seemingly magical power of the lead character’s bagpipes, “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” would qualify as sword-and-sorcery…

“The Moon that Vanished” is set on Brackett’s version of Venus, which was probably the best of all the fictional imaginings of that planet before space probes revealed the lifeless and hellish face hidden beneath its clouds. This story of a quest not for gold but godhead has proven more than equal to the test of time. Take away its interplanetary aspects and this story, too, is pure fantasy, if not sword-and-sorcery.

“People of the Crater,” by Andre Norton, takes place in one of those remote corners of our planet that will never show up on Google Earth. The titular crater is located in an unknown, mist-shrouded region of Antarctica, filled with strange creatures, sleeping gods, and magical science….

I was 18 years old when I first spotted Swordsmen in the Sky at the local train station’s book-rack during the year the anthology was published. The forty cents needed to purchase a copy jingled in my jeans. My sense of wonder was primed for fulfillment. Little did I know that the little paperback I carried out of that station would be a precursor not only to many other books I would subsequently read, but the ones I would write as well.

I have to tell you, it was a wonderful surprise to stumble on a forgotten BG contribution from Saunders, so recently after celebrating his work here. Read the while thing right here.

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Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks?

Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks?

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Would you spend $44 on these 30 vintage DAW paperbacks?

I buy a lot of paperbacks on eBay.  I mean, a lot. But believe it or not, I don’t spend a lot of money. I’ve gotten in the habit of buying small collections; because shipping costs work out better and I spend much less per item. I haven’t done the math recently, but I budget anywhere from $0.25 to $0.50 per book when I go hunting, and usually stick to it.

Of course, there are plenty of expensive paperbacks on eBay. Crazy-priced paperbacks, if you want to go looking for them. But eBay is also a clearing house for hundreds of individuals dumping collections en masse, often with very little description, and if you’re willing to dig a bit and take a chance, you can find bargains every day of the week. (And every hour of the day). In fact, eBay has become my go-to site for bargain-basement vintage paperback collections. Someday collectors will stop dying off, and their put-upon spouses will stop dumping their collections on auction sites at rock-bottom prices as they clean out the attic, but today is not that day.

I can’t remember the last time I spent more than $25 for a lot of paperbacks. But last month I scrambled all over myself to hit the buy button on the lot above: 30 vintage DAW paperbacks priced at $44.

Sure, I love DAW. And I’m happy to welcome all these books into my collection, But if you look carefully, you’ll see exactly why I wrecked my monthly collecting budget to acquire these books — and would’ve been happy to spend a lot more. I didn’t buy this lot because it’s a fine assortment of books (though it is). I spent the money because of one author, and one author only. Do you know which one?

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A Modest Little Magazine: Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff

A Modest Little Magazine: Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff

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Assorted issues of Whispers, 1973-87. Issues #1, 2, 4, 9, 13-14, 15-17, 17-18, 19-20, and the final issue, 23-24.
Covers by Tim Kirk (1,3), Stephen Fabian (2,9,13-24,23-24), John Stewart (13-15,16-17), and Kevin Eugene Johnson (19-20)

When I started Black Gate magazine, I drew inspiration from small press magazines of the 70s, 80s and 90s that I deeply admired. It was a a fairly short list, but it included W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook, the Terminus Weird Tales edited by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt and Darrell Schweitzer, and Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers.

Whispers was near-legendary by the late 90s, when I was getting serious about starting my own magazine. The last issue had been published in 1987, but in its 15-year run it published original fiction and poems by Stephen King, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Karl Edward Wagner, Roger Zelazny, Michael Shea, Manly Wade Wellman, Ramsey Campbell, William F. Nolan, David Drake, Ellen Kushner, Steve Rasnic Tem, Carl Jacobi, Hugh B. Cave, Phyllis Eisenstein, Joseph Payne Brennan, Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, Glen Cook, Charles L. Grant, Gerald W. Page, Lisa Tuttle, Richard A. Lupoff, Janet Morris, and many, many others.

It also published original artwork by many of the greatest horror and fantasy artists of the 20th Century, including Michael Whelan, Stephen Fabian, Lee Brown Coye, Allen Koszowski, Vincent Di Fate, Charles Vess, Hannes Bok, and numerous others.

One of the many inspirational things about Whispers — apart from its phenomenal success — was that it was virtually a one-man operation. Stuart Schiff grew his tiny magazine from humble beginnings as essentially a slender black-and-white fanzine in 1973 into one of the most influential horror mags of the century, with a spinoff line of paperback anthologies, limited edition hardcovers, magazines supplements, and of course a Best of collection.

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