Purchases

What do these four paragraphs have in common?


“He awoke and did not know where he was.”

“ ‘Everybody all set?’ Young Ross Jenkins glanced nervously at his two chums. ‘How about your camera, Art? You sure you got the lens cover off this time?’ ”

“It is written in the Eternal Scripture that one should come to whom the Tower would yield her secret. For untold billions of years hath the Tower guarded her Mystery, aye, since that the Children of Aea set forth from this Galaxy and returned to that place from whence they came in the Beginning, even to that strange region called The Fire Mist which lieth beyond the Universe of Stars.”

“Once upon a time there was a sane scientist who had an ugly daughter.”


Give up?

They are the opening paragraphs of four paperback SF books I bought today while the whole family did their Black Friday shopping out here in PA.

The first is from The Stone God Awakes, by Philip Jose Farmer, a really, really talented writer who should be more famous than he is. Meaning, outside of SF circles. About a scientist who is “accidentally petrified” and awakes a few million years later on a completely alien Earth. This’ll be the fourth book of his, I think, that I will have read. So far, each one gets better than the previous. I hope the trend continues.

Any guess on the second paragraph? That word chum should be a huge clue. You know it’s from the Golden Age of SF, probably 1950 or earlier, so it’s got to be, well, any educated guess would have to name Heinlein. And that guess would be right. Rocket Ship Galileo, though aimed at a “juvenile” audience, should be a quick, fun read, and it’s one that I don’t recall getting to when I was a juvenile. Had a great time reading his similar Red Planet, which I read twice three years ago as a writer’s exercise type thing.

The next paragraph, about Eternal Scriptures and Fire Mists, is a guilty pleasure. Something so bad that it’s gotta be good: The Tower at the Edge of Time by Lin Carter. He was a writer whose heydey was in the 50s through the 70s, specializing in those short, “exotic” fantasy paperback tales. You know, some Conan-like dude with a scantily clad babe splashed upon the cover. My dad had a couple of these books I read as a kid, and about ten years ago I finally found one in a used book store. Kinda like an Arabic Tolkien, but not as good as that might sound. Still, should be a quick, fun, guilty read.

The last comes from the book that I’m most excited to read. It’s called Atoms and Evil and is a short-story collection by Robert Bloch, the guy who wrote the book Alfred Hitchcock snatched up and filmed called Psycho. Don’t know much about it but it looks like some creepy mesh of horror and SF. Very, very interesting …

Since I’m hooked on these George R. R. Martin epics, and each is a thousand pages long (I’m 300 pages in to the second one of four written to date), I think I’ll start these paperbacks once I finish Mailer’s book. So, lotsa reviews in the near future.

We might go back in to town (a different one, that is) tomorrow. Towns are like a half-hour driving distance from each other around here. If so, well, I may be forced to scope out another book store. Never know what treasures may be found …