Black Gate

One of the reasons I like to buy collections is that they frequently come with books I’m not looking for. Like this copy of John Rankine’s 1969 paperback Moons of Triopus, with its trippy Richard Powers cover.

I didn’t need to tell you I wasn’t looking for this book. No one on Earth is looking for this book. If there’s a forgotten novel in the canon of 20th Century science fiction, it’s John Rankine’s Moons of Triopus. No one is looking for John Rankine, either. He never existed. ISFDB tells me “John Rankine” was a pseudonym for David R. Mason, the British writer who wrote a zillion SF novels between 1966 and 2003. Has anyone out there read Moons of Triopus? Anyone other than Rich Horton, I mean.

Well, it doesn’t matter. The book is in my hands, so it’s my responsibility now. If Black Gate has a purpose, it’s to explore strange new worlds and seek out neglected SF and fantasy books. My duty is clear; I have to give it a try. The description on the back talks about newly found planets, constant danger, colonists, ominous answers, and “the fate of the galaxy!” Doesn’t sound too bad. Wish me luck.

Moons of Triopus was published by Paperback Library in November 1969. It is 157 pages, priced at 60 cents. The cover is by Richard Powers. It was out of print for 44 years, until it was released in digital format by Golden Apple in October 2013. I got my copy as part of a lot of 42 books I bought on eBay for $9.50. Turned out to be a good deal.

Robert Sheckley wrote over two dozen novels before his death in 2005, but he’s best remembered today for his short fiction, gathered in some 20 collections between 1954 and 2014. He has a fine reputation for a sharp wit, idiosyncratic style, and offbeat sense of humor, and that’s kept some of his most famous collections in print for years — including The Robot Who Looked Like Me, originally published in the UK in 1978, reprinted by Bantam in the US in 1982, and still in print over three decades later.

The Robot Who Looked Like Me contains thirteen stories, including the title story, originally published in Cosmopolitan (!) in August 1973. It’s not at all the kind of story I’d expect to find in Cosmopolitan, but maybe things were different in the early 70s. Very, very different.

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Today’s Vintage Treasure is a fine example of a recently extinct species: the mass market anthology.

Allow me a moment to mourn the loss of this beautiful and now-vanished creature. In days gone by, mass market anthologies thundered in vast herds across bookstore shelves, terrorizing lesser tomes. A single bookstore ecosystem could support a vast number of anthologies with a spellbinding array of thematic plumage, from horror to romantic fantasy to sword & sorcery and far future SF. In recent years, publishers such as DAW kept a dwindling number of anthologies alive in captivity for breeding purposes, but these efforts generally resulted in weak-blooded specimens about cats and unicorns. Today, the only relatives of the mass market anthology that survive are its larger cousins, the trade paperback and small press hardcover.

But not so long ago this creature strode proudly across the publishing savannah, introducing the curious to new writers, helping readers discover a wide range of different voices they might not otherwise encounter. The one I want to talk about today is the 1984 Ace paperback Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg.

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