james_davis_nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-07-07 02:06 pm
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-07-07 02:06 pm
Entry tags:
The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1967
List and price comment courtesy of Andrew Wheeler
1967 -- when the standard club price went from $1.00 to an amazing $1.49!
1967 was a very important year up here in Canada:
January EARTHBLOOD by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown
I remember reading a reprint of this in the 1970s and not caring for it but frankly so much time has gone by that I can not remember why. Maybe humans could crossbreed with aliens or something, I know that always irritated me back then.
If memory serves, Baen is going to/has reprint/ed this.
February THE ARTIFICIAL MAN by L.P. Davies
Don't know this one
March THE LITTLE PEOPLE by John Christopher
Or this one
April THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW by Robert A. Heinlein
But this one was pure gold. It includes
Introduction (Damon Knight)
Life-Line
The Roads Must Roll
Blowups Happen
The Man Who Sold the Moon (novel)
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Space Jockey
Requiem
The Long Watch
Gentlemen, Be Seated
The Black Pits of Luna
It's Great to Be Back!
We Also Walk Dogs
Searchlight
Ordeal in Space
The Green Hills of Earth
Logic of Empire
The Menace from Earth
If This Goes On-- (novel)
Coventry
Misfit
Methuselah's Children (novel)
OK, there are some duds in here (Gentlemen is minor and Roads got an old customer of mine to drop RAH forever) but you get three novels, two pretty good, for a couple of bucks and some of the shorts aren't bad either. The only other thing that should have been in here is Orphans of the Sky, so all of the Future History novels RAH wrote* would be in one place.
It seems churlish to point out at least one of these stories is used as background in a novel set in a non-Future History setting (Space Cadet had something very like the Long Watch, as I recall) and that it is very very difficult to reconcile "We Also Walk Dogs" with the rest of the FH.
* Lah lah lah I can't heeeaaarrr youuuuuuuu.
May FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury
This is one of the few things I have read by Bradbury that I will willingly reread for free. This has as its protagonist a man whose job it is to find and burn books, lest the people who read them make their neighbors uncomfortable with nonconformity.
June THE KILLER THING by Kate Wilhelm
I missed this. I think we lost Wilhelm to mystery. The bastards probably did something underhanded like buy her books and pay her money for them.
July COLOSSUS by D.F. Jones
This is the classic story about the project to built a mighty computer to run America's half of the Cold War and how it and its opposite number on the Soviet side came up with a final solution for the problems of the US/SU conflict.
Summer THREE NOVELS by Damon Knight
Contains
The Dying Man
Natural State
Rule Golden
I have only read the third one, which features a nonviolent alien sharingthe gift that deters violence in his society with Earth. Pretty sure the years after the story has an extinction event the magnitude of the one at the end of the Permian.
August THE TIME HOPPERS by Robert Silverberg
I think I read this but don't recall what it was about.
(googles)
Nasty crowded dystopia as seen by a mid-level bureaucrat.
September PSYCHOGEIST by L.P. Davies
Missed this one.
October ELEMENT 79 by Fred Hoyle
And this one.
[This is the gold asteroid one, isn't it?]
November THE EGG-SHAPED THING by Christopher Hodder-Williams
And this one.
December DANGEROUS VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison
But I have -this- in paperback.
Contains:
Auto-Da-Fe (Roger Zelazny)
Aye, and Gomorrah (Samuel R. Delany)
Carcinoma Angels (Normad Spinrad)
The Day After the Martians Came (Fredrik Pohl)
The Doll-House (James Cross)
Encounter with a Hick (Jonathan Brand)
Ersatz (Henry Slesar)
The Escaping (David R. Bunch)
Eutopia (Poul Anderson)
Evensong (Lester del Rey)
Faith of Our Fathers (Philip K. Dick)
Flies (Robert Silverberg)
Foreword 1: The Second Revolution (Isaac Asimov)
Foreword 2: Halan and I (Isaac Asimov)
From the Government Printing Office (Kris Neville)
Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird (Sonya Dorman)
Gonna Roll the Bones (Fritz Leiber)
The Happy Breed (John Sladek)
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister
(Theodore Sturgeon)
Incident in Moderan (Chris R. Bunch)
The Jigsaw Man (Larry Niven)
Judas (John Brunner)
Land of the Great Horses (R.A. Lafferty)
Lord Randy, My Son (Joe L. Hensley)
The Malley System (Miriam Allen DeFord)
The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice (Howard Rodman)
The Night That All Time Broke Out (Brian W. Aldiss)
The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World (Harlan Ellison
and Robert Bloch)
The Recognition (J.G. Ballard)
Riders of the Purple Wage (Philip Jose farmer)
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison (Carol Emshwiller)
Shall the Dust Praise Thee? (Damon Knight)
Test to Destruction (Keith Laumer)
Thirty-two Soothsayers (Harlan Ellison)
A Toy for Juliette (Harlan Ellison & Robert Bloch)
What Happened to August Clarot? (Larry Eisenberg)
Even given that I read this under the worst possible circumstances (the day I was scheduled to undergo a painful and irrationally terrifying dental procedure, about an hour of which was spent in the dentist's waiting room listening to the shrieks of a 4 year old who had badly burned his mouth chewing through an electrical cord some months previously, who was even worse than I was wrt dental work thanks to his reconstructive surgery) I remember a lot of these.
The idea was to shake SF up a bit at a time when it had become pretty conservative and dull. It's not the array of SFnal shock jocks like Farmer or Spinrad you might expect, either: look at the Anderson* and the Laumer, the del Rey and the Leiber. Despite the fuss surrounding the third book in this series I'd say this still stands up, especially if one considers when this was written.
* Imagine living in a mileau so dull that the *shocking* and *startling*
revelation about the protagonist is that he is gay.
Compare and contrast the use of lesbians in Oath of Fealty and _Island in the Sea of Time_ [both by arch conservatives], for an idea of how things have changed.
[Pournelle used lesbians to scare his fans, Stirling to titillate them. Although the character in Island isn't as fanservicey as one might expect from SMS.
I completely misremembered the Anderson or forgot what it was about; the reader is supposed to be revolted by the revelation that the protagonist is gay. I can't help but wonder if the Bay Area was the best place Anderson could have settled.
Sadly, I made the mistake of trying to reread this work. Nothing ages faster than edgy SF]
1967 -- when the standard club price went from $1.00 to an amazing $1.49!
1967 was a very important year up here in Canada:
January EARTHBLOOD by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown
I remember reading a reprint of this in the 1970s and not caring for it but frankly so much time has gone by that I can not remember why. Maybe humans could crossbreed with aliens or something, I know that always irritated me back then.
If memory serves, Baen is going to/has reprint/ed this.
February THE ARTIFICIAL MAN by L.P. Davies
Don't know this one
March THE LITTLE PEOPLE by John Christopher
Or this one
April THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW by Robert A. Heinlein
But this one was pure gold. It includes
Introduction (Damon Knight)
Life-Line
The Roads Must Roll
Blowups Happen
The Man Who Sold the Moon (novel)
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Space Jockey
Requiem
The Long Watch
Gentlemen, Be Seated
The Black Pits of Luna
It's Great to Be Back!
We Also Walk Dogs
Searchlight
Ordeal in Space
The Green Hills of Earth
Logic of Empire
The Menace from Earth
If This Goes On-- (novel)
Coventry
Misfit
Methuselah's Children (novel)
OK, there are some duds in here (Gentlemen is minor and Roads got an old customer of mine to drop RAH forever) but you get three novels, two pretty good, for a couple of bucks and some of the shorts aren't bad either. The only other thing that should have been in here is Orphans of the Sky, so all of the Future History novels RAH wrote* would be in one place.
It seems churlish to point out at least one of these stories is used as background in a novel set in a non-Future History setting (Space Cadet had something very like the Long Watch, as I recall) and that it is very very difficult to reconcile "We Also Walk Dogs" with the rest of the FH.
* Lah lah lah I can't heeeaaarrr youuuuuuuu.
May FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury
This is one of the few things I have read by Bradbury that I will willingly reread for free. This has as its protagonist a man whose job it is to find and burn books, lest the people who read them make their neighbors uncomfortable with nonconformity.
June THE KILLER THING by Kate Wilhelm
I missed this. I think we lost Wilhelm to mystery. The bastards probably did something underhanded like buy her books and pay her money for them.
July COLOSSUS by D.F. Jones
This is the classic story about the project to built a mighty computer to run America's half of the Cold War and how it and its opposite number on the Soviet side came up with a final solution for the problems of the US/SU conflict.
Summer THREE NOVELS by Damon Knight
Contains
The Dying Man
Natural State
Rule Golden
I have only read the third one, which features a nonviolent alien sharingthe gift that deters violence in his society with Earth. Pretty sure the years after the story has an extinction event the magnitude of the one at the end of the Permian.
August THE TIME HOPPERS by Robert Silverberg
I think I read this but don't recall what it was about.
(googles)
Nasty crowded dystopia as seen by a mid-level bureaucrat.
September PSYCHOGEIST by L.P. Davies
Missed this one.
October ELEMENT 79 by Fred Hoyle
And this one.
[This is the gold asteroid one, isn't it?]
November THE EGG-SHAPED THING by Christopher Hodder-Williams
And this one.
December DANGEROUS VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison
But I have -this- in paperback.
Contains:
Auto-Da-Fe (Roger Zelazny)
Aye, and Gomorrah (Samuel R. Delany)
Carcinoma Angels (Normad Spinrad)
The Day After the Martians Came (Fredrik Pohl)
The Doll-House (James Cross)
Encounter with a Hick (Jonathan Brand)
Ersatz (Henry Slesar)
The Escaping (David R. Bunch)
Eutopia (Poul Anderson)
Evensong (Lester del Rey)
Faith of Our Fathers (Philip K. Dick)
Flies (Robert Silverberg)
Foreword 1: The Second Revolution (Isaac Asimov)
Foreword 2: Halan and I (Isaac Asimov)
From the Government Printing Office (Kris Neville)
Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird (Sonya Dorman)
Gonna Roll the Bones (Fritz Leiber)
The Happy Breed (John Sladek)
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister
(Theodore Sturgeon)
Incident in Moderan (Chris R. Bunch)
The Jigsaw Man (Larry Niven)
Judas (John Brunner)
Land of the Great Horses (R.A. Lafferty)
Lord Randy, My Son (Joe L. Hensley)
The Malley System (Miriam Allen DeFord)
The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice (Howard Rodman)
The Night That All Time Broke Out (Brian W. Aldiss)
The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World (Harlan Ellison
and Robert Bloch)
The Recognition (J.G. Ballard)
Riders of the Purple Wage (Philip Jose farmer)
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison (Carol Emshwiller)
Shall the Dust Praise Thee? (Damon Knight)
Test to Destruction (Keith Laumer)
Thirty-two Soothsayers (Harlan Ellison)
A Toy for Juliette (Harlan Ellison & Robert Bloch)
What Happened to August Clarot? (Larry Eisenberg)
Even given that I read this under the worst possible circumstances (the day I was scheduled to undergo a painful and irrationally terrifying dental procedure, about an hour of which was spent in the dentist's waiting room listening to the shrieks of a 4 year old who had badly burned his mouth chewing through an electrical cord some months previously, who was even worse than I was wrt dental work thanks to his reconstructive surgery) I remember a lot of these.
The idea was to shake SF up a bit at a time when it had become pretty conservative and dull. It's not the array of SFnal shock jocks like Farmer or Spinrad you might expect, either: look at the Anderson* and the Laumer, the del Rey and the Leiber. Despite the fuss surrounding the third book in this series I'd say this still stands up, especially if one considers when this was written.
* Imagine living in a mileau so dull that the *shocking* and *startling*
revelation about the protagonist is that he is gay.
Compare and contrast the use of lesbians in Oath of Fealty and _Island in the Sea of Time_ [both by arch conservatives], for an idea of how things have changed.
[Pournelle used lesbians to scare his fans, Stirling to titillate them. Although the character in Island isn't as fanservicey as one might expect from SMS.
I completely misremembered the Anderson or forgot what it was about; the reader is supposed to be revolted by the revelation that the protagonist is gay. I can't help but wonder if the Bay Area was the best place Anderson could have settled.
Sadly, I made the mistake of trying to reread this work. Nothing ages faster than edgy SF]
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-07-07 08:00 pm (UTC)(link)Agreed. "Space Cadet" describes the character from Long Watch both by name and by description of his actions, and it's very hard to reconcile Space Cadet with the FH.