Search Results for: book club

Vintage Treasures: The Aliens Among Us by James White

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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…

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We Have Launch: Arthur C. Clarke’s Prelude to Space

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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…

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The Art of Author Branding: The Ace Robert Silverberg

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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…

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A Scientist’s Science Fiction Novel: Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud

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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…

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Vintage Treasures: Beyond the Beyond by Poul Anderson

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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…

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New Treasures: Made To Order: Robots and Revolution edited by Jonathan Strahan

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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…

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Goth Chick News: C2E2 and a Goth Chick Wannabe… The Sequel

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A couple weeks ago I was startled by a knock on my window. As curiosity got the best of me, I discovered a raven pecking at the glass with a note tied around its leg. My first thought was, “Winter is Coming.” My second thought was, “Evil Hogwarts?” Turns out the second was a lot closer, it was from Goth Chick. I unwrapped the little scroll and read the following…. Apparently to maintain her standing in the Goth community, she’s…

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Stories That Work: “It Never Snows in Snowtown” by Rebecca Zahabi, and “Dust” by Edward Ashton

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F&SF cover art by Bob Eggleton Ray Bradbury caused the ruckus first with The Martian Chronicles, but I also blame Eric Frank Russell’s Men, Martians and Machines, and Anthony Boucher’s A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Before those three books, I only read novels — short ones to be sure — like Tom Swift and Tom Corbett and anything that the Weekly Reader Book Club featured in their regular catalogs. After reading Bradbury, Russell and Boucher, short stories hooked me. They…

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The Boxed Set of the Year: American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s edited by Gary K. Wolfe

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Cover by Paul Lehr Gary K. Wolfe is one of my favorite Locus columnists. He also reviews science fiction for the Chicago Tribune and, with Jonathan Strahan, co-hosts the excellent Coode Street Podcast. But more and more these days I think of him as an editor. He edited the Philip Jose Farmer retrospective collection Up the Bright River (2011) and, even more significantly, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s: A Library of America Boxed Set (2012), a massive 1,700-page,…

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The Case Against Environmental Exploitation: The Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison

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The Deathworld Trilogy, Science Fiction Book Club edition (1974). Cover by Richard Corben James Nicoll recently reviewed Harry Harrison’s The Deathworld Trilogy on his blog, saying “The Deathworld books haven’t aged badly. They were dire in the 1960s and they are still dire.” I still have fond memories of the first book in this series (which may or may not be dispelled by a reread). For one thing, it really made a case against hyper-militarism and environmental exploitation. Because it’s…

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