August | 2012 | Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

(Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1973 edition)

3.25/5 (Average)

Nominated for the 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Clifford D. Simak’s A Choice of Gods (1971) is a flawed but intriguing novel. Simak’s renowned for his original anti-technology pastoral visions. His science fiction (replete with unusual aliens) is more likely to intersect our future world in the environs of the rural farm, the depopulated/gutted earth covered with forests or an isolated Native American tribe than an urban dystopia, trans-galactic spaceship, or distant planet. The more famous examples are his Hugo winning Way Station (1963), deserving of at least some of the effuse praise it receives, and City (1952), rightly considered a classic.

Simak’s favorite themes are on show in A Choice of Gods including what happens to robots, whom Simak portrays as almost human but with a programmed need to Continue reading →

(David Davies’ cover for the 1968 edition of The Syndic (1953), C. M. Kornbluth)

Occasionally I dabble in the incredibly esoteric and artistically painful. Apparently in the 60s and the early 70s — heralded by the artist David Davies — there was momentary interest in sci-fi covers constructed from manipulated photographs of store window mannequins, dolls, wire contraptions vaguely suggesting spaceships, toy spacemen, wooden artist mannequins dressed in clothes/wigs, and copyright violating models of the Star Trek: The Original Series Enterprise NCC-1701.

Unfortunately, most of the covers I’ve discovered are uncredited — they might all be the work of David Davies. Internet Speculative Fiction Database has seventeen of his covers listed but I suspect that he made many many more — I’ve gone ahead and credited a few Continue reading →