Newest Acquisitions

Every two weeks or so I buy two or three cheapie paperbacks. It's an addiction, a positive one, I hope. It only takes me a couple of hours to read through each, and it provides fabulous escape from my humdrum monotonous existence. Plus, I like to think they make me a better writer.

Thing is, I've been stuck reading these two Zane Grey books over the past month. If I'm reading a book longer than a week, I start to get itchy. Hopper in me, I guess. But I wanted to get these two Grey books under my belt so I can visit the Zane Grey museum a coupla miles from my parents' home. Man, I just realized the geekiness of that last sentence, but, so be it, be it so.

Anyway, I've picked up five science fiction paperbacks over the past month. Dying to read them, unsure which to start first. Perhaps you can help? Worse comes to worse, I'll have my daughter pick one, though she usually picks the one with the best artwork on the cover (she's only six, so she can judge books by their covers). I have an idea in my head, so it might not even be one of these five. We'll see. I have to pick one later today. Else my head will 'splode.

Here's what I picked up and why:


Neverness (1988) by David Zindell. A 458-page portal into another world, comparable to Frank Herbert's Dune if the jacket is to be believed. Jackets aren't to be believed, so I based my purchase on that old SF compendium I had ranking the top thousand or so novels and anthologies out there. Neverness made the list, so it made mine. Not a book to be read in a few hours, though; I'm parring myself ten days for it.

Iceworld (1953) by Hal Clement. Cycle of Fire changed my mind about Hal Clement. This book should confirm my new opinion or unmask it for an imposter. We'll see, but I'm reallllllly excited to crack this one. Clement is a no-nonsense bare-bones world-builder probably diametrically opposed to the Zindellian work above. At least, that's the way it seems to me now.

Venus (2000) by Ben Bova. Bova's a long-time famous editor, a shaper of SF the way we know it (or knew it twenty or thirty years ago). Around the turn of the century he made a literary tour of the solar system, each book a tour-de-force of exploration about one of our planets. How to get there, why to get there, what goes wrong on the way, what goes wrong while we're there, etc. I read Mars sometime in the late 90s and was impressed, though a tad put off by the whiff of PC I detected. Or maybe I'm being curmudgeonly. Don't know for sure, so I'm looking forward to this one.

First Voyages (1981), ed. by Knight, Greenberg, and Olander. This anthology of twenty short stories takes us back to the early - well, earlier - days of SF. Included are selections by Heinlein, Sturgeon, Anderson, Smith, Dick, Aldiss, Ballard, among others. They advance chronologically from 1937 to 1962. This one should be fun. Maybe put away two or three stories a night.

Janissaries (1979) by Jerry Pournelle. Guilty pleasure.  Why?  Well, for one, there are Roman soldiers riding centaurs on the book's cover. Don't know nuthin' about anythin' with this, 'cept that it looks like a cross between the Bay of Pigs and Mars Attacks.

So there. My ace in the hole is a short 1953 novel called Shadows in the Sun by Chad Oliver, which has intrigued me simply by being so secretive about its plot. From what little I can glean from the back cover, it seems very Invasion of the Body Snatchers-ish. But we'll see. That's most of the fun of reading these dang things.