Vintage Treasures – Page 62

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Ballantine/Del Rey

Wednesday, January 30, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 5 comments

Peter Graham is often quoted as saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. I was reminded of this quote last year while reading Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor Books) when Rich Horton commented that based on Graham’s statement, for him, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was 1972. It got me thinking about what science fiction (and fantasy) looked like the year I turned twelve and so this year, I’ll be looking at the year 1979 through a lens of the works and people who won science fiction awards in 1980, ostensibly for works that were published in 1979. I’ve also invited Rich to join me on the journey and he’ll be posting articles looking at the 1973 award year.

The Locus Awards were established in 1972 and presented by Locus Magazine based on a poll of its readers. In more recent years, the poll has been opened up to on-line readers, although subscribers’ votes have been given extra weight. At various times the award has been presented at Westercon and, more recently, at a weekend sponsored by Locus at the Science Fiction Museum (now MoPop) in Seattle. The Best Book Publisher Award dates back to 1972, although in 1975 and 1976 the Publisher Award was split into paperback and hardcover categories. Ballantine Books won the award each year from its inception through 1977 (winning the paperback for the two experimental years with the Science Fiction Book Club winning the hardcover award). In 1978, when Del Rey was established as an imprint of Ballantine, Ballantine/Del Rey began winning the award. The award was not presented in 1979 for works published in 1978, but when it was reinstituted in 1980, Ballantine/Del Rey picked up its winning streak. In 1980, the Locus Poll received 854 responses.

Del Rey published eight hardcovers in 1979, including Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest, Katherine Kurtz’s Camber of Culdi, Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks, Han Solo at Stars’ End and Han Solo’s Revenge, by Brian Daley, and Dark Is the Sun and The Lovers, by Philip José Farmer. The three trade paperbacks they published included a reprint of Raymond Healy & J. Francis McComas’s landmark anthology iAdventures in Time and Space, the collection The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle, and Lester del Rey’s non-fiction work The World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture. They also published more than 100 mass market paperbacks with several, such as McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves having multiple reprints throughout the year.

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Dreams More Perfect Than Your Own: J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Volumes One & Two

Sunday, January 27, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In the world of science fiction, J.G. Ballard is a Big Deal.

His early work includes the novels The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), and High-Rise (1975), and the seminal collection Vermilion Sands (1971). Outside science fiction, Ballard is also a Big Deal. His 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, loosely based on his experiences as a child in Shanghai during Japanese occupation, was described by The Guardian as “the best British novel about the Second World War” and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale. His influence on modern literature has been powerful enough that “Ballardian” has become a common term, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity…” He died in 2009.

Ballard’s short fiction, virtually all of it SF, is some of the most vital and studied science fiction of the 20th Century. His stories “Souvenir” (1965) and “Myths of the Near Future” (1983) were nominated for the Nebula Award, and his collections — including Passport to Eternity (1963), The Terminal Beach (1964), Vermilion Sands (1971) and Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) — are very highly regarded. In 2006 Harper Perennial published J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories in two thick volumes in the UK; they were reprinted in 2014 by Fourth Estate with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell. There aren’t a lot of writers for whom it pays to read their complete short work; Ballard I think is the exception.

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Embers to Ashes: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Sunday, January 27, 2019 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

Maybe it’s just the times we live in, but I increasingly find myself drawn to narratives of defeat: Confederate military memoirs, histories of the Decline and Fall of This and That, accounts of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow or Custer’s Last Stand. I suppose that’s why this summer, forty years after I blew it off when it was assigned in one of my first college classes, I finally got around to reading Earth Abides.

George R. Stewart’s 1949 post-apocalyptic novel is one of the most famous one-offs in the history of science fiction; it won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951, and in all the decades since, the book has rarely been out of print.

Stewart was primarily an English professor and historian and an only occasional novelist. In his first specialty he wrote books on English verse technique and composition; in the latter his most well-known works are a history of the Donner party, Ordeal by Hunger (1936), and a finely detailed, minute-by-minute account of the climax of the battle of Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge (1959). Storm (1941) and Fire (1948), two novels Stewart wrote before his sole foray into science fiction, show his concern with large, impersonal forces and their effects on the enduring land and the ephemeral creatures that inhabit it. His most famous book takes that scientific detachment and interest in process many steps further, to powerful effect.

Earth Abides tells the story of Isherwood Smith, a young college student who lives in Berkeley, California. When the book begins, Ish is camping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, doing the fieldwork necessary for his graduate thesis, The Ecology of the Black Creek Area, intended to be an investigation of “the relationships, past and present, of men and plants and animals” in the region. The thesis will never be written, though Ish will spend the rest of his life wrestling with fundamental questions regarding the connections between human beings and the natural world they so briefly occupy.

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Interspecies Conflict in a Universe with More Aliens than the Star Wars Cantina: Sholan Alliance by Lisanne Norman

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Covers by Romas Kukalis, Jim Burns (#6) and Chris Moore (#8,9)

There haven’t been many times when it’s better to be a science fiction fan than right now. Big-budget SF is king at the box office and on the small screen, the shelves are groaning with new releases, and truly exciting new authors are appearing every year. But there are a few things I still miss. The humble paperback original (PBO) has become less and less common as more and more top-tier SF appears first in hardcover or trade paperback, and much of it never sees a mass market paperback reprint at all.

I like hardcovers just fine, but it was paperbacks that introduced me to SF, and it’s paperbacks — compact, accessible, and cheap — that still draw in young and casual readers and gradually turn them into fans. More publishers have been turning their backs on paperbacks, and the result is our field has less to offer curious young readers browsing the SF shelves for affordable and enticing titles. And thus, fewer young fans discovering science fiction at all.

But it wasn’t just paperbacks that made me a lifetime science fiction fan in my teens — it was great science fiction series, like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Asimov’s Foundation, Farmer’s Riverworld, Fred Pohl’s Heechee Saga, David Brin’s Uplift Saga, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy novels, and many, many more. DAW is one of few publishers willing to make a significant investment in PBO series, and it’s paid off well for them over the years, with now-established writers like C. J. Cherryh (the Alliance-Union Universe and the long-running Foreigner series), Julie E. Czerneda (the Trade Pact Universe), Gini Koch (the Kitty Katt novels), Jacey Bedford (Psi-Tech), and many others.

For many years DAW’s bread and butter has been extended midlist SF and fantasy series that thrive chiefly by word of mouth. I’m frequently drawn to them just by the sheer number of volumes. You won’t connect with them all of course, but when you find one you like they offer a literary feast like no other — a long, satisfying adventure series you can get lost in for months.

Lisanne Norman’s Sholan Alliance is a perfect example. It only recently caught my attention, after decades of patiently waiting on the shelves. It began with Turning Point way back in 1993, and recently wrapped up with the ninth volume, Circle’s End, in 2017. In between it quietly gathered a lot of accolades. B&N Explorations called it “fast-paced adventure… [with] more alien species than the Star Wars cantina!” And SF Chronicle labeled it “big, sprawling, convoluted… sure to appeal to fans of C.J. Cherryh and others who have made space adventure their territory.”

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Vintage Treasures: Space, Time & Crime edited by Miriam Allen deFord

Sunday, January 20, 2019 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Genre blending these days is very popular. So you have steampunk space operas like RJ Theodore’s Flotsam, SF noir like K.R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit, near-future police procedurals such as Serial Box’s Ninth Step Station, and every conceivable genre mash-up in between. But there was a time when daring to mix genres like science fiction and mystery was exciting and new. One of the first paperback anthologies to try it was Miriam Allen deFord’s Space, Time & Crime, published by Paperback Library in 1964, when I was just six months old. But even then, as deFord rather astutely observes in her introduction, it had been going on quietly in the genre for for time.

I believe it was Sam Moskowitz who praised Caves of Steel, by Frederik Pohl and the late Cyril Kornbluth, for “accomplishing the impossible by successfully combining detective stories with science fiction.”

As a matter of fact, that intermixture is so far from impossible that it has (as this book attests) attracted a great many of the best known writers in both fields. And it is natural that this should be so. Both mystery and science fiction are concerned primarily with X, the unknown quantity. In the mystery story — both the detective and the suspense story — X is the criminal; in science fiction X may be, for example, life on planets other than ours, life in the future, life in an alternate parallel universe, or some other extrapolation of known scientific fact into imaginative probability. The interest in the unknown, but knowable, which moves the mystery story writer moves the science fiction writer as well. In consequence, both writers often turn out to be the same person.

Setting aside that jaw-dropping gaff in the very first line (um, Caves of Steel was written by Isaac Asimov, not Pohl and Kornbluth), Space, Time & Crime is a terrific anthology, with stories from Fredric Brown, Anthony Boucher, Frederik Pohl, Avram Davidson, Ron Goulart, Isaac Asimov, Reginald Bretnor… plus a Solar Pons story August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and a Change War tale by Fritz Leiber. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Phoenix Award

Saturday, January 19, 2019 Rich Horton Comments 6 comments

Ace edition covers by Gray Morrow

Steven Silver has been doing a series covering the award winners from his age 12 year, and Steven has credited me for (indirectly) suggesting this, when I quoted Peter Graham’s statement “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12″, in the “comment section” to the entry on 1973 in Jo Walton’s wonderful book An Informal History of the Hugos. You see, I was 12 in 1972, so the awards for 1973 were the awards for my personal Golden Age. And Steven suggested that much as he is covering awards for 1980, I might cover awards for 1973 here in Black Gate.

And, indeed, 1972 is when I discovered Science Fiction in the adult section of Nichols Library in Naperville, IL. Mind you, I’d already read and loved The Zero Stone by Andre Norton, and read and kind of liked Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C, and read and loved a ton of fantasies such as the Narnia books, The Hobbit, and George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind. But I found all those in the children’s section. When I was 12 two things happened. In my seventh grade class we were introduced to a variety of books via a huge set of large folded cards, each of which had a substantial extract from a book. You were supposed to read the extract and answer a quiz about it, but the real motive of the developers was to try to get kids interesting in reading the whole of some of these books.

I read a bunch of things – Exodus by Leon Uris is one I recall – but I quickly realized it was the Science Fiction that lit me up. Books I recall reading because of that class include The Currents of Space, by Isaac Asimov; Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke; The Universe Between, by Alan E. Nourse; Time is the Simplest Thing, by Clifford Simak; and Galactic Derelict, by Andre Norton. And, of course, to find those books I had to go the adult section of the library. Where I quickly also found other stuff by those authors, and then other authors, and perhaps more important, anthologies. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was a revelation. And so were the Nebula anthologies. And Anthony Boucher’s Treasury of Great Science Fiction. So I was hooked forever.

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Three Miles Around but Infinitely Deep: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Tuesday, January 15, 2019 James Van Pelt Comments 4 comments

Here’s a shout-out for one of my favorite books, Robert Holdstock’s amazing, 1985, World Fantasy award winning novel Mythago Wood. Holdstock’s book dovetailed neatly with my other favorite of that time, David Brin’s The Postman.

I really can’t recommend Mythago Wood enough. In a time when everyone else was echoing Tolkien, Holdstock created a completely different take on fantasy (rural fantasy — if that’s a genre). I loved this story of two brothers, their estranged and absent father, and a patch of wood that was only three miles around but infinitely deep.

Of all the books I’ve read, none has impacted me as strongly at the end as this novel. Endings are hard, so when I read a perfect one, I take notice.

Stylistically, Holdstock nailed it too. I didn’t notice the smoothness and rhythm of his work at first, but on subsequent rereads I paid much more attention to his sentence and paragraph building. He has taught me a lot. If you are looking for an outstanding read to start your 2019, give Mythago Wood a try.

I’m always looking for my next, great novel. Do you have a recommendation of a book that exists in your personal canon of classics?

Vintage Treasures: Stories of the Supernatural by Dorothy L. Sayers

Friday, January 11, 2019 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Stories of the Supernatural Dorothy Sayers-small

Stories of the Supernatural Dorothy Sayers-back-small

I stumbled across a copy of Stories of the Supernatural in a paperback collection I acquired a few months ago, and fell in love with it immediately. Partly it’s the great table of contents — eleven classic tales of supernatural horror by E. F. Benson, Arthur Machen, Saki, Charles Dickens, W. W. Jacobs, and others. And partly it’s the early 60s, breathlessly over-the-top marketing copy (“Read it in the daytime… and hope your blood will unfreeze by the time the terrors of the night steal in.”)

But chiefly it’s the knockout cover by Richard Powers. Huge swatches of color, giant staring faces, and a dark backdrop reminiscent of deep space… that’s classic Powers all right. I don’t know what it is I find so deeply satisfying about settling down in my big green chair with a vintage paperback anthology from a great editor, but whatever it is, the feeling is significantly amplified by a Powers cover.

Speaking of great editors, the one on duty here is Dorothy L. Sayers. She had a surprising assortment of genre anthologies to her credit, such as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928) and its two follow-on volumes. Two of her later paperback anthologies, Human and Inhuman Stories (1963) and Stories of the Supernatural (1963), both released posthumously, were selections from her massive 1929 anthology The Omnibus of Crime, a 1,177-page Harcourt hardcover. I’m very glad I found Stories of the Supernatural, but I’m even more pleased that it led me to discover The Omnibus of Crime, which is a truly monumental survey of early crime fiction (even if it doesn’t have a Power cover).

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

Thursday, January 10, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 6 comments

The Analog Award was launched in 1979 for works published in the magazine in the preceding year. The Best Cover category was added in 1980, so this was the first year the award was presented. The award has been given every year since then with the exception of the year covering works published in the magazine in 2002, when the award was replaced, for one year only, with a cover artist award, when it was won by David A. Hardy, who painted two covers for the magazine (May and December issues).

Paul Lehr painted the cover for the first installment of John Varley’s four-part serial for the novel Titan, which ran from the January to the April issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.

The artwork from the January 1979 issue of Analog seems to depict the spindle that runs up the center of the torus moon discovered in orbit around Saturn. The tower looks like a mixture of organic parts, wires, and high tech platforms growing out of a small globe and inside a massive dome. The night sky with other moons of Saturn can be seen through windows and a rainbow-like arc stretches behind the tower.

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Andre Norton Wrote Scarface

Wednesday, January 9, 2019 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Andre Norton wrote Scarface.

No, no. Not the Al Pacino gangster classic directed by Brian De Palma. I mean the 1948 pirate novel, whose full title is Scarface, being the story of one Justin Blade, late of the pirate isle of Tortuga, and how fate did justly deal with him, to his great profit.

Scarface was published early in her career. Like, very early. It was her fifth novel, written four years before her first science fiction novel, Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D (1952), and decades before she became the first female SFWA Grand Master in 1984. But it was very well received, getting a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, among other accolades, and eventually being reprinted in a beautifully designed paperback edition from Comet in September 1949 (above). The Comet paperback was copiously illustrated by Lorence Bjorklund — see below for a sample of some of the eye-catching interiors.

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Black Gate

Adventures in Fantasy Literature

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Category: Vintage Treasures

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Ballantine/Del Rey

Wednesday, January 30, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 5 comments

Dreams More Perfect Than Your Own: J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Volumes One & Two

Sunday, January 27, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Embers to Ashes: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Sunday, January 27, 2019 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

Interspecies Conflict in a Universe with More Aliens than the Star Wars Cantina: Sholan Alliance by Lisanne Norman

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Vintage Treasures: Space, Time & Crime edited by Miriam Allen deFord

Sunday, January 20, 2019 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Phoenix Award

Saturday, January 19, 2019 Rich Horton Comments 6 comments

Three Miles Around but Infinitely Deep: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Tuesday, January 15, 2019 James Van Pelt Comments 4 comments

Vintage Treasures: Stories of the Supernatural by Dorothy L. Sayers

Friday, January 11, 2019 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

Thursday, January 10, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 6 comments

Andre Norton Wrote Scarface

Wednesday, January 9, 2019 John ONeill Comments 7 comments