Some New Books - January 2016

I haven't bought any new SF books in ages now, but, with Christmas behind me and a few quid spare in my pocket, I took the notion over the past couple of weeks to trawl Ebay.co.uk for some books. Actually, none of them are "new", as there's not a lot of modern SF that I enjoy, with the exception of some anthologies of short fiction and a very narrow range of authors and sub-genres. But I did find two second hand/used anthologies of classic Golden Age stuff, which is much more my kind of thing, one collection of Isaac Asimov's fantasy stories, essays and articles, and, finally, one "Best of the Year" SF anthology, from 2007.

• SCIENCE FICTION: THE BEST OF THE YEAR 2007 EDITION edited by Rich Horton (trade paperback, Prime Books, Germantown MD, US, 2007, ISBN-10: 0-8095-6297-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-8095-6297-8)
• MAGIC: THE FINAL FANTASY COLLECTION by Isaac Asimov (Paperback, Voyager, London, 1997, ISBN: 0-00-648203-1)
• GREAT TALES OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg (hardback, Galahad Books, New York, 1991, ISBN: 0-88365-772-4)
• THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Kingsley Amis (Large Format Paperback, Penguin Books, 1983, first published by Hutchinson & Co., 1981)

The SCIENCE FICTION: THE BEST OF THE YEAR 2007 EDITION trade paperback is a nice anthology of reasonably recent (less than ten years old) stories, twelve in all, five from Asimov's SF Magazine, two from F&SF, and the other five from five different sources both magazines and books. I haven't read this one yet, but there are a few authors in it that I usually like (Robert Reed, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Watson, Robert Charles Wilson), and Rich Horton rarely puts together a bad "Best SF" anthology.

MAGIC: THE FINAL FANTASY COLLECTION is a single-author collection of Isaac Asimov's fantasy (as opposed to SF) short fiction. It's also notable for collecting a number of Asimov's essays and articles about fantasy and other subjects. It's a bit of a strange one, this, although I found it an interesting mix of articles and fiction. And Asimov's fantasy is just as logical as his science fiction, with its own strict internal rules and limitations, which made it easy for me to read, despite the fact that I'm not a huge fan of reading fantasy.

GREAT TALES OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION is a cracking anthology of classic Golden Age SF put together by the ever-reliable trio of Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg. Nine stories in all, almost all of them published in Astounding during the 1941-1947 timeframe. Some of the biggest names in SF are in this one - Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, C.L. Moore, Ross Rocklynne, A. Bertram Chandler, T.L. Sherred - and with some of their most classic stories.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION edited by Kingsley Amis is another cracking anthology, with a completely different group of stories and authors to the previous anthology. Only Asimov appears in both, but with different stories. And there are seventeen stories in this one, almost twice as many as the other anthology. Aside from Isaac Asimov, we've got Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Cordwainer Smith, H. Beam Piper, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Anthony Boucher, James Blish, Robert Sheckley, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Jerome Bixby, F.L. Wallace and Philip Latham. That is a hugely impressive line-up of SF author talent with some of their most classic stories.

The Kingsley Amis anthology is a completely different kind of book to the other one edited by Asimov, Waugh and Greenberg. I wouldn't really consider it a real "Golden Age" anthology at all, as the stories are from the 1950s and 1960s (there's even one from 1979!), rather than the 1940s (the actual "Golden Age of SF" is usually considered to be circa 1938-1950, when Campbell's Astounding ruled the roost unchallenged, and before the appearance of F&SF and Galaxy). The stories are therefore slightly more sophisticated than those in the other book, with much less of an emphasis on stories from Astounding, and a much higher percentage coming from F&SF, Galaxy and other sources. The stories are of the highest calibre, and the only criticism I would have is none of them actually qualify as "Golden Age" SF, as they come from a later period, and there are several of the 1960s stories that even come dangerously close to belonging to the New Wave. I guess Amis' interpretation of "Golden Age" SF is a bit different to the rest of us, and maybe a bit more of a personal one. :)

All in all, a nice little batch of books. I've gotten the bug back again for hunting down SF books. I must get back on Ebay to see if I can find a few more classic anthologies.

THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF LUCKY STARR by Paul French (Isaac Asimov)

Last time out, I listed some of the SF novels that I picked up recently, among them two of Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr juvies that he wrote back in the 1950's under his Paul French pseudonym. Well, that set me to searching for the only single-volume omnibus of all six Lucky Starr novels, which I found on Amazon. It's quite hard to come by, being out-of-print, and quite expensive. But I took the plunge and bought it, and it arrived by mail in double-quick time.

So what've we got? Let's look at the details:

 

TITLE: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF LUCKY STARR
AUTHOR: Paul French (Isaac Asimov)
CATEGORY: Novel
SUB-CATEGORY: Omnibus
FORMAT: Hardback, 701 pages
PUBLISHER: Science Fiction Book Club, in association with Doubleday & Co. Inc, New York, 2001
ISBN: 0-7394-1941-2

CONTENTS:

• Introduction to the Adventures of Lucky Starr
• Introduction to the Further Adventures of Lucky Starr
• David Starr - Space Ranger (1952)
• Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953)
• Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954)
• Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956)
• Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter (1957)
• Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958)

The reason for the two introductions is that the books were released in two volumes back in 1985, with a different introduction for each volume. So both introductions have been republished in this single volume. The introductions alone are very interesting, and give some nice insights into Asimov's thoughts on his old juvies from a vantage point of thirty years later.

Asimov spends much of both introductions, explaining, almost apologizing for how wrong he got the planetary science in his novels. I found all of this very entertaining, but, in effect, totally unnecessary. He wrote those books according to the knowledge that science had in the early 1950's, from telescopic observations of the planets, before the radar imaging and planetary probes of the 1960's and 1970's made that old knowledge totally obsolete.

Sure, the planetary science is in those books is wrong and way out of date. Hey, so what? All planetary science before the Mariner space probes and those that followed is hopelessly out of date. There are no oceans on Venus, and it is a boiling, poisonous, high-pressure inferno to outdo any religious visions of hell. There has never been any advanced life or civilizations on Mars, no canals, and only an extremely thin, cold atmosphere. Mercury does not keep one side only to the Sun, Saturn's rings are radically more complex, and the lunar families of both Jupiter and Saturn are much larger than they ever suspected back then, and the lunar ecologies of both planets much more complex than they could ever have imagined.

But you know what? I don't give a hoot. That kind of thing has never bothered me too much, any more than the "wrong" planetary science in the books of earlier "greats". I just shunt these Lucky Starr stories into the same alternate solar system where all the mythical planets of great earlier writers reside. Asimov is in some great company there: Stanley G. Weinbaum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Edwin Lester Arnold, C. S. Lewis, Raymond Z. Gallun, P. Schuyler Miller, Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, Clark Ashton Smith, John Wyndham, Frederik Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Ed Hamilton, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein and many, many other giants of the genre. These earlier solar system tales exist in their own little continuum, untouched by cold, hard, modern scientific facts. Nor should they be.

I first read most of these novels (all except Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus and Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury) way back in my early teens, usually on loan from local libraries. These were the classic NEL (New English Library) UK paperback editions, with those beautiful covers. Even now that I have the hardback omnibus, I still want to pick up those paperbacks in good condition, just for the covers.

I've been reading a little of the first novel in the series, and the writing holds up surprisingly well today. I think I'm going to really enjoy reacquainting myself with David "Lucky" Starr, Bigman and the rest in these fun books.

Recent Purchases: Some New and Old SF Novels

I've picked up a few books recently, so I'll list them, a few at a time. Starting off firstly with the novels. Two new purchases from Amazon.co.uk, and two old/used books from local car-boot sales.

• SATURN'S CHILDREN by Charles Stross (paperback, Orbit Books, London, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-84149-568-2)
• NEPTUNE'S BROOD by Charles Stross (paperback, Orbit Books, London, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-356-50100-0)
• PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS by Isaac Asimov (Paperback, NEL, London, 1973, first published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, 1953, as LUCKY STARR AND THE PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS by Paul French)
• OCEANS OF VENUS by Isaac Asimov (Paperback, NEL, London, 1974, first published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, 1954, as LUCKY STARR AND THE OCEANS OF VENUS by Paul French)

The two Charles Stross books were bought new from Amazon.co.uk. These two books can be considered a pair, or loosely connected series, set in the same post-human "universe" (but many centuries apart) where humanity's "children" seem intent on recreating the worst mistakes of both our dodgy societies and our nasty individual behaviour. Both novels can be classified as "thrillers", set in the above-mentioned SF scenario.

The first book of the two, Saturn's Children, is set within our solar system, only two hundred years after the death of the final natural human, whilst the follow-up novel, Neptune's Brood, is set five thousand years later, and against an interstellar background, although constrained by STL travel and real physics. Both books are of the Hard(ish) SF/New Space Opera sub-genre of SF that I like so much, and Stross writes excellent New Space Opera fiction, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to enjoy them. I'll leave commenting on the plots of either novel until a later date, as I haven't read them yet.

The two Isaac Asimov novels are part of his "juvenile" or Young Adult (YA) SF&F Lucky Starr six-book series, written back in the 1950's under his "Paul French" pseudonym (Pirates of the Asteroids is Book 2 in the series, and Oceans of Venus is Book 4). I read all of these books back when I was a kid, and they were an important part of my formative years as a young SF reader, leading me directly onto reading Asimov's more adult SF works. As the series was written back in the Fifties, long before the first space probes gave us the first true images of our planetary neighbours, giving us a wonderful glimpse of one of those SF alternate "solar-system-that-never-was" continuums that fascinate me so much.

Unlike the two Stross novels, these two books are much older, used or second-hand copies, and were picked up recently at a car-boot sale for next-to-nothing. Both books are in quite tatty, strictly "readers-only" condition. They are definitely not collectible copies, so, ideally, I'd love to pick up pristine copies (or at least much better) of these two books, and every book in the series (if possible), as these are the classic New English Library (NEL) UK editions with the gorgeous cover artwork that I read way back when I was a pre-teenager.

I know that an omnibus collection of the entire six-book series, The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr, was released back in 2001 (although it's apparently now out-of-print and quite expensive to buy), but I'd like to track down decent condition copies of the six 1970's NEL paperback UK releases, just for the lovely covers, and because they will bring back so many great childhood memories. :)

SCIENCE FICTION edited by S. H. Burton

TITLE: SCIENCE FICTION
EDITED BY: S. H. Burton
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
FORMAT: Hardback, 245 pages
PUBLISHER: Longman, The Heritage of Literature Series, London, 1967.

CONTENTS:

• Introduction by S. H. Burton
• "Requiem" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1940)
• "A Present from Joe" by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1949)
• "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" by Ray Bradbury (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1949, as "The Naming of Names")
• "Protected Species" by H. B. Fyfe (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1951)
• "The New Wine" by John Christopher (Fantastic Story Magazine, Summer 1954)
• "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1941)
• "The Windows of Heaven" by John Brunner (New Worlds, May 1956, as "Two by Two")
• "Youth" by Isaac Asimov (Space Science Fiction, May 1952)
• "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke (Infinity Science Fiction, November 1955)

This is an unusual little book, a very small hardcover, only the size of a paperback. It's also interesting in that it was published as part of Longmans' prestige "The Heritage of Literature Series", rather than as a commercial SF paperback or hardback. This series seems to be more of an academic line, covering not only science fiction, but detective fiction and general short fiction. Very interesting.

It's a fairly short anthology, and there are a few classic, well-known stories by big name authors, which have seen publication previously in many anthologies and single-author collections - Heinlein's "Requiem", Bradbury's "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed", Asimov's "Nightfall" and Clarke's "The Star". It's always nice to re-read these excellent stories, especially if you haven't read them for a while.

There are also several stories, by familiar authors, which are not so well known - Asimov's "Youth", Russell's "A Present from Joe", Brunner's "The Windows of Heaven" and Christopher's "The New Wine". And finally, there is also a story by an author with whom I'm totally unfamiliar, although I have seen his name in old magazine listings - H. B. Fyfe's "Protected Species". I haven't read this one (or anything by this author) before.

I've started reading this anthology with the least familiar, so right now I'm part way through Fyfe's "Protected Species", which is quite a good story, at least so far. It'll be interesting to see where it leads. After that, I'll move onto the other stories that I haven't read before, although the author's ARE familiar to me - Russell, Brunner and Christopher. And I'll finally finish off by re-reading the biggies from Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and Bradbury.

As this anthology is short, it shouldn't take me very long to finish it. I'm off to read the rest of "Protected Species"...