A varied lot for sure…
One of the more intriguing is an anthology of nuclear themed SF containing stories by Sturgeon, Merril, Ward Moore, Ellison, Wilhelm, Spinrad, etc.
A Michael Moorcock novel An Alien Heat (1972)—I’ve had little luck with his SF in the past so hopefully this bucks the trend.
A fun 50s vision by Frederic Brown…
And an unknown quantity in Rosel George Brown’s Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue (1968). I’ve wanted to read her short stories for quite a long time but wasn’t going to pass up her most well known work.
Thoughts?
1. Countdown to Midnight: Twelve Great Stories About Nuclear War, ed. H. Bruce Franklin (1984)
(Vincent Di Fate’s cover for the 1984 edition)
From the back cover: “NUKE TIME. We are a people grown up in the presence of an ultimate weapon, the nuclear bomb. This creation of the 20th Century science has become the obsessive problem behind all social thinking. Yet all projections of this problem are by definition science fiction. Nuclear war has not happened, yet some startling books and films, future-fiction by necessity, have riveted the world’s attention. H. Bruce Franklin has gathered together twelve of the finest science fiction stories about the nuke problem. As he writes in his introduction: “Science fiction does give us some unique insights into the sources, dangers and dimensions of the nuclear menace. But since science fiction helped us get into this mess, perhaps it is not asking too much of it to help us find our way out.” In this book are presented some solutions, some projects, and more than a little hope.”
2. Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue (variant title: Sibyl Sue Blue), Rosel George Brown (1968)
(Hoot von Zitzewitz’s cover for the 1968 edition)
From the back cover: “THE FUZZ: VINTAGE 1990. When Sibyl Sue Blue, unique police sergeant of the future, smokes a benzale cigarette, she has a strange dream about the disappearance of her husband on the mysterious planet of Radix. So she pulls of her wig, rouges her knees, and goes off to Radix with the sinister millionaire Stuart Grant, and crew, in his space ship. She finds her husband there, horribly transformed, and is in great danger of the same fate herself, unless she can get back to Earth in time. But this presents difficulties, because only Sibyl and the loathsome Dr. Beadle are in any shape to fly the ship, and neither one of them has ever done it before…”
3. An Alien Heat, Michael Moorcock (1972)
(Sue Greene’s cover for the 1973 edition)
From the back cover: “Earth of the remote future—technology has advanced to the point where death no longer exists, birth hardly at all, and sex is a dying interest. The remaining population is rich, decadent, and bizarre. Nature is landscaped into artful parodies, skies are tinted by artists, snow falls on the tropics, and space travelers occasionally call. This then is the backdrop of a society where anything can, should, and usually does happen—delightfully comic fantasy but also a sharp social satire in the tradition of Anthony Burgess, Oscar Wilde, and H. G. Wells.”
4. The Lights in the Sky are Stars, Fredric Brown (1953)
(Uncredited cover for the 1963 edition)
From the back cover: “The year is 1997. The Man is Max Andrews. He has known the wonder of rockets blasting off into space—the terrible joy of conquering the unknown. He has tasted the dry alien air of Mars, and has helped others reach Venus and the Moon. He is a man who lives only to touch the stars—a man who will not be stopped by the timid and the envious—the earthbound who would keep him from the lights in the sky.”