Black Gate

I enjoy collecting vintage SF and fantasy paperbacks of all kinds. But I get the most pleasure out of the Ace Doubles.

The Ace Doubles have a lot of things going for them in terms of raw collectibility. They were edited by Donald A. Wollheim, one of the most accomplished editors our genre has ever seen, and the authors in their stable reads like a Who’s Who of major talent of the era. Best of all, they had some really terrific covers, including some truly iconic SF images.

Of course, even among the Ace Doubles, some are more collectible than others. Certainly the early novels of Philip K. Dick are near the top of the list, as are novels by Asimov and Dean Koontz. But speaking as someone who’s bought and sold Ace Doubles for many years, I think Harlan Ellison’s A Touch of Infinity (paired with The Man With Nine Lives) may be the most in demand.

Lots of reasons for this. Ed Valigursky’s classic cover, featuring a spacesuit-clad future person hiding in the rubble from invading flying saucers, clearly didn’t hurt. 54 years after this book went on sale, I still want to find out what that’s all about. A Touch of Infinity is also Ellison’s first short story collection and that alone makes it remarkable. And the novel on the flip side, The Man With Nine Lives, has never been reprinted… so if you’re an Ellison collector, this is the only way to get it.

On top of all of that though, this little book is simply a pure slice of 60s nostalgia. It’s a way to transport yourself back half a century, to a time when science fiction was still fresh and new; when Harlan Ellison was an unknown name, a hotshot young writer with only two previous books to his name; and when a mainstream publisher still tried their best to package his singular voice as typical paperback SF.

It wasn’t long before books by Ellison became a major event in the genre, so his first humble releases have a unique appeal to collectors — almost as if he were appearing in a secret identity.

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Last week, I was talking about Paul O. Williams’s The Pelbar Cycle,  which generated a comment about the changing nature of the apocalypse. After all, nowadays we hardly ever see that word without “zombie” in front of it. As my commentator noted, the idea of a nuclear apocalypse largely disappeared after the 1980s. Perhaps this is a natural outcome of the ending of the Cold War – with the two big nuclear powers no longer at odds with one another, the threat of nuclear war effectively disappeared.

Or did it? It’s not a plot point for any of the books, so it’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the events of The Pelbar Cycle follow both a natural and a nuclear disaster. The (then) big two nuclear powers knew that an impending meteor strike would look like nuclear events and agreed not to react, but other, smaller nuclear nations either weren’t aware, or didn’t believe, and they did react, bringing about the world that Williams describes.

That didn’t happen in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s phenomenal Lucifer’s Hammer (1977). In their case (again, no real spoilers here), the apocalyptic event is a comet strike and the nuclear powers refrain from “mistaking” it for an attack. There’s plenty of politics in the story, but it’s the politics of survival and not so much the politics of war.

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