Paul Cook

As always, which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. Furthest, Suzette Haden Elgin (1971) (MY REVIEW)

Diane and Leo Dillon’s cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Coyote Jones, agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, had been sent to a planet so unimaginably distant from the rest of the Federation that it bore the descriptive name Furthest. His mission: to find out why the total body of data about Furthest showed the world’s inhabitants to be absolutely average down to the last decimal place. That data had to be false.

Jones was permitted to live on the planet, but the natives were so wary of him that he could uncover nothing—until he chanced into a personal crisis faced by his young Furthest assistant. The boy’s sister had been sentenced to Erasure, and he wanted Coyote Jones to take the fugitive girl in and hide her.

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1. I bought this themeless hodgepodge anthology for two reasons–the UK 1980 edition has a cool spaceship! And second, it contains Chad Oliver’s generation ship short story “The Wind Blows Free” (1957). MPorcius calls it one of Oliver’s best. As I’ve not been enamored with his brand of SF, I’m eager to try a short story on a favorite theme far outside of his normal anthropological-focused oeuvre.

I’ve previously reviewed Oliver’s The Shores of Another Sea (1971).

2. Sheri S. Tepper is a glaring hole in my SF knowledge. I often explore the back catalog before plunging into the best known novels of an author—The Revenants, her first published novel, is “a long, complex work of SF” according to SF Encyclopedia. I wish it would be a tad more descriptive…. the novel has a fun map which I’ll feature in a Monday Maps and Diagrams post.

3. French post-apocalyptic SF in translation! With an awful cover…

4. Paul Cook is another unknown author to me. His first novel, Tintangel (1981) has a bizarre premise (see blurb below). This might be my next SF read.

Let me know what books/covers intrigue you. Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. A Sea of Space, ed. William F. Nolan (1970)