Christmas = gift cards = more science fiction books, and a few my dad had procured for himself appeared miraculously in my pile — I’ve decided to break down the clump into manageable four book posts.
And of course, I wish you all a good sci-fi book hunting/reading year!
Enjoy!
1. The Santaroga Barrier, Frank Herbert (1968)
(Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1968 edition)
I’ve read a substantial number of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune Continue reading
Here are my favorite films and science fiction novels I’ve reviewed this year (and some other interesting categories) with links to my reviews….
Watch them! Read them! Gaze at them! (the array below….)
The World Inside (1971), Robert Silverberg (REVIEW) 5/5 (Masterpiece)
Silverberg’s The World Inside is a fascinating take on the theme of overpopulation — what if society was organized towards a single goal, propagation? What would society look like? What position in society would women occupy? Men? What would cities look like? Hallways? Rooms? Institutions? What happens to those who don’t fit in? Or, can’t have children?
The Unsleeping Eye (variant title: Continue reading
Half-Price Books in Dallas, Texas (its first location!) = bliss.
9 books = only 12 dollars. (curtesy of my girlfriend’s parents’ pre-Christmas gift)
What an amazing haul — and if I had known they were only going to be twelve dollars I would have picked up nine more. Lots of Silverberg from his glory years… Generation ships… City building machines… Weird psychic forcefields out beyond Pluto… Vietnam army camps experimenting with intelligence enhancing (and death inducing) syphilis strains…
1. Camp Concentration, Thomas M. Disch (1972)
(Uncredited cover for the 1971 edition) Continue reading
I somehow forgot to post these four…..
Because I thoroughly enjoyed James White’s The Watch Below (1966) I procured his first novel, The Secret Visitors (1957). My expectations are low….
Despite the egregious cover of Silverberg’s The Masks of Time (1968) (“white firmament congregating, emanating?, from floating man’s manhood,” or, “Ball Lightening” as a particularly witty individual posted on Good Show Sir after I submitted the cover), I’ve found that virtually everything that Silverberg wrote in the late 60s and early 70s is on the whole top-notch so I couldn’t help but pick up a copy.
I’m no Asimov fan but I found an old copy of The Currents of Space (1952) at my parents’ house and purloined it — I read it when I was 12 so it has intense nostalgic value, one of my first science fiction books!
1. The Currents of Space, Isaac Asimov (1952)
(Uncredited cover for the 1953 edition)
It’s not every day that a signed D. G. Compton novel arrives free in the mail. About half a year or so ago Ian Sales (check out his amazing blog) hooked me on D. G. Compton’s works and ever since I’ve grabbed as many as I can find on used book stores shelves and I’ve written a slew of reviews (The Unsleeping Eye, The Quality of Mercy, The Steel Crocodile, Synthajoy, The Missionaries). I made a comment on one of his D. G. Compton posts — a few days later a SIGNED copy of Compton’s Scudder’s Game (1988) (below) arrived in the mail!! Ian, thanks again and keep up the uncovering of underrated 60s/70s sci-fi authors!
The others, well, the covers are gorgeous! Two Richard Powers covers (the C. M. Kornbluth short story collection and the Conklin edited anthology). I must confess that the Hunt Collins purchase was impulsive — in part due to the vibrant 50s cover by Bob Lavin.
I apologize for the recent absence of book reviews — due to the approaching end of my last semester of graduate course work I’ve been pressed for time. I have reviews for Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), James White’s The Watch Below (1966), and Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968) in preparation.
Enjoy!
1. The Explorers, C. M. Kornbluth (1954) (MY REVIEW)
After a long time without purchasing books I’ve published two Recent Acquisition lists in quick succession! Visiting parents = free books + many thanks. The haul wasn’t the best but I left with a fun selection of works by Andre Norton and Robert Silverberg.
Some of the covers are great (especially Norton’s Sargasso in Space)!
Enjoy!
1. Star Born, Andre Norton (1957)
(Virgil Finlay’s cover for the 1957 edition) Continue reading
Over the last months I’ve restrained myself from impulsive science fiction purchases considering the massive pile of books I still need to read — however, a stop at Half-Price books while visiting my nostalgic onetime home of Austin, TX was too good to pass up.
And lo and behold, I procured a first edition Philip K. Dick novel with a gorgeous Jerome Podwil cover, an underrated novel by James White, one future pastoral vision by Simak, and a collection of short stories (Malzberg, Herbert, Lafferty, Silverberg, Scortia, Ellison) edited by Elwood about future metropolises — a wonderful edition to my collection considering the plethora of sci-fi city related cover art posts I’ve written as of late (Elevated Cities Part I, Part II, Richard Power’s Surrealistic Cityscapes).
Enjoy!
1. The Crack in Space (1966), Philip K. Dick
(Jerome Podwil’s cover for the 1966 edition)
Michael (2theD), one of my friends whose reviews on Amazon I’ve been compulsively reading, has just started a review blog (on blogspot) called the Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature.
(the titles above are a small sample of the works Continue reading
A few fellow History grad students and I (and two or three from various departments — Gender Studies, English) have cobbled together a science fiction reading group list for this fall and spring: mainly social sci-fi by female authors along with a few random gems by Ballard (The Drowned World), Silverberg (The World Inside), and Delany (Nova). I wasn’t going to buy any sci-fi books this semester. I promise. That is before we formed our reading group! So, I had to pick up the few works on our list that I didn’t already own.
What a haul!
1. The Drowned World (1962), J. G. Ballard
Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 