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July 23, 2010

Good Things Come in Pairs

This month’s entries feature things in pairs.

First up is a book by a pair of writers that have been called the greatest writing duo in science fiction history: Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl. Before his tragic early death at age 35, Kornbluth managed to co-author a half-dozen novels paired with Pohl (who is still blogging strong at 90+), the second of which was published in 1954 and titled Search the Sky.

In his short career, Kornbluth also managed to pair with the grand dame of sf, Judith Merril, to produce a couple novels using the pseudonym Cyril Judd. Their first collaboration, published in 1952, is our second entry this month and is titled: Outpost Mars.

The next entry features a pair of stories by the best known name in sf, Robert A. Heinlein. Waldo: Genius in Orbit features the stories Waldo and Magic, Inc. These stories are usually found published together under the same title (Waldo and Magic, Inc.), but I guess Avon wanted to be different, so changed the name for their paperback.

The final two entries are paired together as the opposing sides of the Ace Double featuring A.E. Van Vogt’s Empire of the Atom and Frank Belknap Long’s Space Station #1. The cover art of these two books feature another great pairing as well: the two Eds. Cover artists Ed Emshwiller and Ed Valigursky are two of our top favorites, and probably painted more covers for Ace Doubles than any other two artists combined.

June 29, 2010

Another Five for June

This month, Raymond Z. Gallun returns with a second entry in the SFPB database with another of the Ballantine/Del Rey “Best Of” series making it number 14 in our collection so far (we’ve got more coming).

Harlan Ellison makes his first appearance in our database with Ellison Wonderland, a collection of 16 short stories. Skidoop, Ithk, Gnomebody, and Helgorth Labbula are just a few of the crazy characters depicted in artist Victor Kalin’s cover.

We’ve mentioned before how much we love those colorful type styles from the 1960s, and this copy of James Blish’s So Close To Home from 1961 is a fantastic example of what we mean.

Stargate is such a popular sf series that we thought people would be interested to know it wasn’t the first. Ms. Andre Norton wrote about this one in 1958, 36 years before the 1994 Spader/Russell film of the same name.

And last, but by no means least, is The Wonder War by Laurence M. Janifer, another first-time author in the SFPB database, which boasts another fantastic cover by Ed Emshwiller that is just bursting with color!

May 30, 2010

A Quintet of Firsts

We’ve just added five new books to SFPB, each of them from an author who appears in our database for the first time!

Jeff Sutton imagines an Apollo mission to the moon in Apollo at Go, written six years before Apollo 11’s historic flight.

If you like little, green aliens, you’ll love Ralph Brillhart’s cover illustration for H.B. Fyfe’s D-99.

And if you love robots like we love robots, you’ll love the cover of Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen written by Cybermen co-creator, and Doctor Who series writer, Gerry Davis.

Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey brings us another brilliant, graphic cover design by the inimitable Richard Powers.

And, finally, there is The Planet Strappers written by an author with one of our favorite names in all of science fiction, Raymond Z. Gallun (pronounced Galloon — like balloon). This was another book that we found stashed away in our book shelf. I really need to go through all those books again and see if there are any other treasures hidden away there….

April 1, 2010

12 More Books

No foolin’, we’ve added 12 more books bringing the total in our database up to 275! Among those added are several more in the “Best of” series published by Ballantine Books in the late 70s. These books collected many of the best stories from some of the best known names in the first half-century of science fiction writing. Included in this update are Eric Frank Russell, Hal Clement, Henry Kuttner, John Campbell, Lester Del Rey, and Murray Leinster.

Along with those author-specific collections, we’ve also added a couple more multi-author anthologies: 5 Unearthly Visions and Mind Partner, as well as a terrific old 25-cent copy of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and Williamson and Gunn’s Star Bridge from good-ol’ Ace Books. We also dug up the first of Murray Leinster’s Joe Kenmore novels, Space Platform, to go along with its sequel, Space Tug, already in our database (twice, in fact).

Speaking of digging things up, we found a copy of Lester Del Rey’s classic novel of the nuclear age, Nerves, tucked away on our shelves. Whenever we get new books, the first thing we usually do is scan them and stick them in the “to be retouched” folder (there are hundreds of books in there currently), but somehow this little beauty slipped by and ended up on the shelf. I wonder how many other books are in there that we forgot about….