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Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

Tor Doubles: #3 Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead

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Cover for Born with the Dead by Ron Walotsky
Cover for The Saliva Tree by Lee Edwards

Tor Double #3 was originally published in December 1988.  The two stories included are Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with Les Edwards providing the cover art for The Saliva Tree and Ron Walotsky painting the cover for Born of the Dead.

The Saliva Tree was originally published in F&SF in September, 1965. It won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Seiun Award.

Set in the mid-1890s, The Saliva tree is the story of Geoffrey Rolles, a young gentleman of leisure in the East Anglian village of Cottersall. His head filled with socialism, he has embarked upon a correspondent with H.G. Wells, one of England’s preeminent socialists of the time. He has also taken an interest in local farmer Joseph Grendon, who has demonstrated his forward thinking ways by installing an electric generator on his farm.

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Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

Tor Doubles: #2 Greg Bear’s Hardfought and Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point

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Hardfought cover by Tony Roberts
Cascade Point cover by Tim White

This Tor Double has the distinction of containing two stories which were both nominated for the Hugo for Best Novella in 1984. Zahn beat out Bear for the rocket, as well as works by Hilbert Schenk, Joseph H. Delaney, and David R. Palmer. Bear wouldn’t go away empty-handed, however, since his story “Blood Music” won the Hugo for Best Novelette that same year (beating out works by Kim Stanley Robinson, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, and Ian Watson). Published in November of 1988, the cover for Hardfought was painted by Tony Roberts. The cover for Cascade Point was painted by Tim White.

Cascade Point was originally published in Analog in December, 1983. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. The story placed second in the Locus poll and the Analog Readers Poll.

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Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

Tor Doubles #1: Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars

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Meeting with Medusa cover by Vincent di Fate
Green Mars cover by Vincent di Fate

Tor Double #1 was originally published in October 1988.  This volume marked the beginning of the official Tor Double series. The two stories included, Arthur C. Clarke’s Meeting with Medusa and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars complement each other, although by doing so, Green Mars also points out a weakness of Meeting with Medusa. The volume was published as a tête-bêche, with both covers were painted by Vincent di Fate.

Meeting with Medusa was originally published in Playboy in December, 1971. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award, winning the latter, as well as the Seiun Award.

The novella opens with Captain Howard Falcon commanding a massive airship, the Queen Elizabeth IV, over the Grand Canyon. A collision with a drone camera causes the ship to crash, killing nearly everyone on-board, including the uplifted chimpanzees who served as part of their crew. Although horribly injured in the crash, Falcon survived and spends years regaining his ability to function, eventually returning to his job as a pilot with an audacious plan.

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Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

Tor Doubles: #0: Keith Laumer’s The Other Sky and The House in November

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The Other Sky cover by Thomas Kidd
The House in November cover by Mike Embden

Between October and December of 1969, Keith Laumer’s novella The Seeds of Gonyl were published as a serial in the magazine Worlds of If. The story was published the following year in a hardcover by G.P. Putnam & Sons under the title The House in November, and in 1971 as a paperback by Berkley Medallion.

In 1981, Tor reprinted the novel as part of its “Jim Baen Presents” series, but, apparently deeming the novel too short, it paired it with Laumer’s story “The Further Sky,” which had originally be published in the December 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. That story had also undergone a name change and appeared as “The Other Sky” in various reprints, including its appearance with The House in November.

When Tor Books reprinted the volume in 1985, they included a shield on the cover identifying the book as a “Tor Double.” This book may possibly have been created as a dry run or proof of concept for the eventual Tor Double line.  The cover for The Other Sky was provided by Thomas Kidd and the cover for The House in November was provided by Mike Embden, although their credits are reversed on the copyright pages.

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Tor Doubles: An Overview

Tor Doubles: An Overview

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Tor Doubles

In October of 1988, Tor Books released the first Tor Double, a volume that reprinted Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novella Meeting with Medusa with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novella Green Mars. Over the next thirty-five months, they would publish a total of thirty-six books in the series.

In general, there was little to link the two short stories that were published in each volume, although in 1990, Tor experimented with the publication of four Tor Doubles that included a classic story, by authors including C.L. Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, Leigh Brackett, and Roger Zelazny, with original stories that were set in the same world. The following year would see addition original stories published in the series.

Similarly, most of the volumes contained stories by two different authors, however four of the books published in 1991 were single author collections, with two stories each by Gordon R. Dickson, Mike Resnick, Damon Knight, and Fritz Leiber.

Modeled after the Ace Doubles series, the books were initially published in a dos-a-dos format, with each story getting its own cover and bound upside down in relation to the other book, so neither story was first (although the presence of an ISBN code on one side had a tendency to make it feel like the “back” of the book). The four volumes that included sequels were published with a single cover and beginning with volume 27, which included Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith, all the volumes were published in the more traditional format.

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