The Science Fiction Book Club’s Things to Come bulletin, March-April 1957 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, shortly after I discovered the wonder of science fiction digests. I remember the bulletin of the SFBC, Things to Come, arriving in our mailbox every month,…
Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys; First Edition: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960. Cover art Richard Powers. (Click to enlarge) Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys Fawcett Gold Medal (176 pages, $0.35 paperback, 1960) Cover art Richard Powers Algis Budry’s 1960 novel Rogue Moon is an unusual book. It’s relatively short, even for SF novels of its era. It’s heavily character focused. And while it deals with a fascinating mystery concerning an alien artifact, on the Moon, it’s also about the bureaucracy behind…
Day 5 of Fantasia began for me by watching Simon Barrett give bad career advice. Barrett’s the writer of horror movies such as The Guest and You’re Next, and he took questions from an online audience for what turned out to be more than two hours in a self-effacing discussion about how the modern movie industry works (or fails to), and how aspiring filmmakers can prepare themselves for entering that world. It was a funny, detailed, and generous discussion, which…
The Stochastic Man (Warner Books, 1987, cover art by Don Dixon) Back in May I started a Vintage Treasures post about Robert Silverberg’s 1975 novel The Stochastic Man, and it wasn’t long before I’d unearthed nearly a dozen different editions. Pretty soon I got distracted comparing the art and author branding for each, and that led me down a deep rabbit hole that ended up with a very long article titled The Art of Author Branding: The Paperback Robert Silverberg. That was fun,…
The Aliens Among Us by James White. Ballantine Books, 1969. Cover by Paul Lehr I’ve read very little by James White, and that’s a serious oversight. White was an Irish SF writer who’s not very well remembered today, but he was a big deal in SF circles in the 80 and 90s. He began writing professionally in 1953, and published some 20 novels and five collections in a career than spanned nearly five decades. His last novel Double Contact appeared in…
Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke; First Edition: World Editions, Inc. (Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #3), 1951 Cover art by Bunch (click to enlarge) Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke World Editions, Inc. (Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #3) (160 pages, $0.25 in magazine digest format, 1951) Having in my two previous columns here covered Isaac Asimov’s first proper novel (Pebble in the Sky) and Robert A. Heinlein’s first-written novel (For Us, the Living), it’s appropriate now to revisit…
The Ace Robert Silverberg: skewed titles and unclutterd art. The Seed of Earth, The Silent Invaders, Recalled to Life, Next Stop the Stars, Collision Course and Stepsons of Terra. All from 1977. Covers by Don Punchatz If you cruised the bookstore and supermarket racks in the 70s and 80s for science fiction paperbacks, Robert Silverberg was everywhere. I mean, everywhere. It wasn’t just that he was enormously productive — that was certainly true. But his books remained in print, or were returned to…
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle First Edition: William Heinemann, 1957. Cover by Desmond Skirrow (click to enlarge) The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle William Heinemann (251 pages, £1.50 in hardcover, 1957) Fred Hoyle’s 1957 novel The Black Cloud was the first novel by the renowned, perhaps now forgotten (because his big ideas turned out to be wrong), astronomer of the mid-20th century. It’s still his most famous, and likely best, novel, out of some nearly 20 novels he would…
Beyond the Beyond paperback original (Signet first edition, August 1969). Cover artist unknown. When I pick up an old paperback these days, it tends to be an anthology or collection. There aren’t very many published nowadays, and I miss them. So naturally I’m reading many of the old paperbacks I missed out on in my youth. One of my recent favorites is Beyond the Beyond, a thick collection of six stories by Poul Anderson. Anderson was one of the most…
Cover by Blacksheep UK A new anthology by Jonathan Strahan is always an event. He’s been editing Year’s Best volumes since 2003, for ibooks, the Science Fiction Book Club, Night Shade, and Solaris, and just announced the contents of the first volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction from Saga Press (if that Facebook link doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it; I’ll cover it in an upcoming Future Treasures post). He also edited the groundbreaking Infinity series for Solaris, seven volumes…