Black Gate

I’ve been buying up back issues of Science Fiction Eye, one of the better SF review zines of the 90s. SF Eye had a marvelous stable of hot young writers, including Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Paul Di Filippo, Pat Murphy, Gary Westfahl, Tony Daniel, Charles Platt, John Shirley, Jack Womack, Elizabeth Hand, Mark Laidlaw, and many others. I thought I’d enjoy revisiting the cutting edge genre journalism I found so thought provoking two decades ago, but what I really find entertaining this time around is the high quality reviews. Especially coverage of now-forgotten books like Colin Greenland”s Take Back Plenty (1990) the opening novel of his gonzo space opera trilogy featuring Tabitha Jute. Here’s a snippet of Sherry Coldsmith’s excellent review, from the Winter ’91 issue, which I bought on eBay last month for $7.50.

Take Back Plenty is a raid on the traditional space opera, a coup at the galactic palace. Its author has poked through the rubble of pulp SF, looking for the genre’s mermaids and Marie Celestes. Greenland’s pickings include a fecund Venus that chokes with unconquerable jungles, and an arid Mars scarred by canals. More modern tropes are also put to use: cyberjacks, talking corpses, titanic tin-can inhabitants that circle the Earth. Greenland has chucked away anything that requires scientific veracity and kept anything that possess mythic dazzle.

The protagonists are as fascinating as the background. Tabitha Jute is the owner-operator of a space vehicle, the sentient and personable Alice Liddell. These two soul sisters of the Sol system get into love and trouble in a world that Is a surreally logical as the one the bedeviled Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Take Back Plenty won both the British Science Fiction and Clarke awards for Best Novel; it was followed by two sequels, Seasons of Plenty (1995) and Mother of Plenty (1998). Greenland’s last two books, Spiritfeather (2000) and Finding Helen (2003) appeared only in the UK. You can read Coldsmith’s complete review of Take Back Plenty (and the tail end of the enthusiastic notice of Crichton’s Jurassic Park) here — page 1 and page 2. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Samuel R. Delany is one of the greatest science fiction writers alive today. He got his start when his wife Marilyn Hacker became an assistant editor at Ace Books under Donald A. Wollheim, and helped him publish his first novel The Jewels of Aptor as an Ace Double in 1962, when he was just 20 years old. Since then he’s won virtually every award our field has to offer, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. In 2013 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him a SFWA Grand Master.

I’ve steadfastly collected the various paperback editions of Delaney’s books over the years, including his classics The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968), Dhalgren (1975), and Triton (1976). I believed (rather reasonably, I thought) that I had all of his major work. So earlier this year I was more than a little surprised to stumble on one I never knew existed: The Bridge of Lost Desire, a 1988 collection of three fantasy novellas from St. Martin’s Press.

The Bridge of Lost Desire is the fourth and last volume in Delany’s Nevèrÿon fantasy series. Unlike his science fiction novels, the Nevèrÿon books were never particularly popular, and have been out of print for over two decades. The first three were published as paperback originals by Bantam Books between 1979-85, with gorgeous covers by the fantasy artist Rowena. The Bridge of Lost Desire was first published as an Arbor House hardcover, and reprinted in what I can only assume was a poorly distributed mass market paperback edition by St. Martin’s Press in 1988.

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We’ve spent a lot of time here at Black Gate celebrating Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line from 1974-88 (The Best of Eric Frank Russell, The Best of Fritz Leiber, etc.); nearly two dozen paperback originals reprinting early short stores by C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, John W. Campbell, Philip K. Dick, Fredric Brown, Murray Leinster, Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, and many others. The series was the equivalent of a Masters-level course in science fiction and, taken as a whole, formed an essential library of 20th Century SF. The entire series, including all the reprints, is cataloged at IMDB. None of the volumes have been reprinted since 1988, and there are no digital versions, but the series was popular enough that copies are easy to find and not particularly expensive. (See below for a handsome set I bought last month for $40).

Lester del Dey wasn’t the only publisher to see the value of a line of Best of collections, of course. Donald Wollheim more or less pioneered the idea with The Book of  A.E. van Vogt (DAW Books No. 4, 1972) and The Book of Brian Aldiss (No. 29, 1972), and followed with nine more from Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, and Andre Norton. Like most early DAW efforts though, these were slender volumes; they’re also not as numerous, and the packaging isn’t nearly as attractive as the Del Rey books, so they aren’t as collectible.

There was another publisher who gave del Rey a run for his money, however. Between 1976 and 1980 Pocket Books produced nearly a dozen substantial collections showing off the science fiction authors in their catalog, including Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, John Sladek, Keith Laumer, Damon Knight, Poul Anderson, Barry N. Malzberg, Mack Reynolds, and Walter M. Miller.

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