Black Gate

Inside cover of The Odyssey of Homer by TE Shaw (1945),
showing the wanderings of Odysseus

I bought a book last week from a bookseller on Instagram, the first time I’ve ever done that.  It was a copy of T. E. Shaw’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  Yes, that T. E. Shaw, Lawrence of Arabia.

The book is old, beat, and tired. It’s probably a twelfth printing, depending on how you count such things, but what caught my attention was that the seller had included a photo of the previous owner’s signature, Guy Davenport, Jr., and the signature was dated 1945.

Did this copy of the book belong to Guy Davenport, a minor but very interesting science fiction writer who won a MacArthur fellowship in 1990? I bought the book and then started to research.

I’ve found nothing conclusive, but everything points in that direction. Davenport was named after his father Guy Mattison Davenport and was, in fact, a Junior. Davenport would have been 18 years old in 1945, just the right age to read the book in either his first year of college or his last in high school. He taught for 27 years at the University of Kentucky and lived in Kentucky for another 15 years until his death in 2005, so the book turned up in the correct geographical location.

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Threats… and Other Promises (Baen, November 1988). Cover by E. M. Gooch

Vernor Vinge is one of our greatest modern science fiction writers. He’s widely credited with introducing the singularity into modern parlance with his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times, for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, and his novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” and “The Cookie Monster.”

His first short story collection True Names … and Other Dangers appeared in 1987; it was followed quickly by Threats … and Other Promises in 1988. Both were paperback originals from Baen, and both were nominated for the Locus Award for Best Collection. The latter is remember today chiefly for the novella “The Blabber,” the first story in Vinge’s celebrated Zones of Thought universe, setting for much of his most popular fiction. I first learned about it from Alan Brown’s insightful review at Tor.com, here’s the bit that grabbed my attention.

“The Blabber” describes a human colony world settled by emigrants from the American Great Lakes region. Both Earth and this new colony are located in the “Slow Zone,” a region where travel and communications are limited to the speed of light, and superhuman intelligence is impossible. Beneath this region, in the “Unthinking Depths,” even human-level intelligence is impossible… The fringes of the galaxy are the “Beyond,” where the speed of light is no longer a limiting factor, and superhuman beings and intelligences live.

In “The Blabber,” the human colony, located just within the Slow Zone, is visited by a trading expedition from the Beyond, looking to trade advanced technology for cultural artifacts from the humans. The story is a bravura effort, mixing thoughtful scientific extrapolation with wonders that would be right at home in the space opera tales of science fiction’s pulp era. Vinge found a way to escape the bounds of rigid extrapolation, but in a way that was internally consistent. There is a joy and sense of wonder in “The Blabber” that I had not seen in Vinge’s work before. So when I heard that A Fire Upon the Deep would be set in that same universe, I looked forward to it with great anticipation. Anticipation that was rewarded in abundance.

If you’re like me and you like to sample authors with short fiction first, Threats…. and Other Promises is a great place to start. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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The Sky Is Filled with Ships (Ballantine Books, 1969). Cover by Jerome Podwil

Richard C. Meredith died tragically young in 1979, at the age of 41. He left behind a body of work that’s still read and discussed today, including the Timeliner trilogy, We All Died at Breakaway Station (1969), which John Clute and Peter Nichols at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction call “a bleak, well-crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a scarred cyborg crew must withstand both external alien enemies and the devils of introspection,” and Run, Come See Jerusalem! (1976), a complex and effective alternate history set in a world where the Nazis were victorious.

Although he sold his first stories to Fred Pohl at Worlds of Tomorrow in 1966, rightly or wrongly I still think of Meredith as a Campbell writer. He bought his first copy of Astounding at the age of 13 and became an instant fan, faithfully purchasing every issue until John W. Campbell passed away in 1971.

Meredith’s debut novel was The Sky Is Filled with Ships, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1969 with a striking cover by Jerome Podwil. It was selected to be part of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” digital reissue campaign in 2013, and that put it in the hands of a lot of modern readers. I was surprised to see that it held up well with them, and enjoys an impressive 4.51 rating at Goodreads. BJ Haun’s 4-star review is fairly typical.

The Sky is Filled with Ships might be my favorite book to come out of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” campaign thus far. It’s an interesting little story that has some action, some space battles, some intrigue, and maybe a couple too many melodramatic bits.

The Sky Is Filled with Ships is 184 pages, and was originally priced at 75 cents. It has been out of print since 1969, though it’s available in ebook formats from Singularity & Co. See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.