Arthur C. Clarke

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. CIII (Wilhelm + Clarke + Tucker + Malzberg)

/ Joachim Boaz / 14 Comments

Another Wilhelm to add to my growing stack of her novels and collections—I’ve read and reviewed quite a few recently: Margaret and I (1971), The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction (1968), and Juniper Time (1979)

More Malzberg (Ace Double story collection + discursive SF novel about fandom)—early stuff from his K. M. O’Donnell pseudonym days.

Clarke’s first novel—although my edition does not have the amazing cover I placed in the post (sorry!).

And, the perhaps OK novel, Ice & Iron (1974) by Wilson Tucker.  I really should read his more famous time travel novels first, I have at least two on the shelf….

Enjoy!

1. The Infinity Box, Kate Wilhelm (1975)

(Ed Soyka’s cover for the 1977 edition) Continue reading →

Updates: Recent Acquisitions No. CI (Clarke + Bishop + Varley + Maclennan)

/ Joachim Boaz / 9 Comments

A nice range of SF authors/works!  A Michael Bishop collection containing many of his most famous 70s short stories for my upcoming guest post series….  And a SF juvenile written by Phyllis Maclennan with an intriguing premise (although, as always, I’m very dubious about juveniles in general).  John Varley’s famous novel Titan (1979) seems like a fascinating take on the Big Dumb Object trope. And finally a 50s adventure by the indomitable Arthur C. Clarke.

I am most intrigued by the Varley’s Titan and Bishop’s Blooded on Arachne.

Some of the covers are cringe inducing.

Thoughts?

1. Titan, John Varley (1979)

TTNRPPCRKF1979

(Ron Waltosky’s cover for the 1979 edition) Continue reading →

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. LXXVII (Cowper + Asimov + Clarke + Dickson)

/ Joachim Boaz / 19 Comments

Bargain bins yield some Clarke and Asimov classics I read when I was a teen but never owned….   I remember thinking at the time that Imperial Earth (1975) was one of Clarke’s best novels.  Dickson’s Dorsai! (1960) — I’ve never been a fan of military SF — is a classic I need to get around to reading.  And, my final find was Richard Cowper’s Time Out of Mind (1973).  I was surprisingly impressed with his lighthearted romp of a novel, Profundis (1979).

Thoughts on the books?

1. Time Out of Mind, Richard Cowper (1973)

(Don Maitz’s cover for the 1981 edition)

From the back cover: “As a young boy, Laurie Linton encountered a strange apparition: a ghostly man who urgently mouthed a message: KILL MAGOBION!  Years later, as members of the UN Narcotics Security Agency, Linton and the beautiful Carol Kennedy were assigned a special duty: investigation of a mysterious drug which endowed its addicts with superhuman powers. Continue reading →

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. LXVIII (Varley + Cherryh + Cummings + et. al)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments

Some fun finds!  Perhaps surprisingly, I still haven’t read Clarke’s “The Sentinel” (1951) so I was happy to find it in a collection collated by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest — Spectrum 3 (1963).  Even more appealing are the famous Poul Anderson, J. G. Ballard, and Murray Leinster tales in the same volume…  The entire Spectrum collection (I-V) brings together some fantastic works.

John Varley is one of the important 70s writers that I still haven’t read. Thus, despite the egregious cover, I snatched his collection of 70s stories, The Persistence of Vision (1978)…  I look forward to diving into this one.

Also, C. J. Cherryh was one of my favorite authors as a teen so it’s always nice to come across one of her works I hadn’t devoured yet — in this case, her second novel Brothers of Earth (1976).

1. The Persistence of Vision, John Varley (1978)

(Jim Burns’ cover for Continue reading →

Book Review: The End of the World (1956), ed. Donald Wollheim

/ Joachim Boaz / 12 Comments

(Ed Emshwiller’s? cover for the 1956 edition)

3.75/5 (Good)

 The End of the World (1956) is a highly readable collection of short works by some of the leading figures of the 50s:  Robert Heinlein, Edmond Hamilton, Philip K. Dick,  and Arthur C. Clarke are the most notable contributors.  All the works, including the short by the virtually unknown author Amelia Reynolds Long, have appeared in other volumes but it’s nice to have them grouped according to theme with a quality Ace edition 50s Emshwiller cover.

Wollheim gathers together a fascinating range of accounts of the end of the world — seen through the eyes of aliens, humans from the present viewing the future, the last men on earth surveying the ruins, a robotic bomb who thinks it’s human and “accidentally” triggers the end of the Continue reading →