My local Oxfam bookshop sets a high standard for the condition of the books it sells, with concomitantly high prices, at least for a charity shop; indeed, I think the underlying aim is to make people forget they’re in a charity bookshop. What happens to donations which aren’t in (let’s say) VG+ condition or better, I’m not sure, but they aren’t likely to go on the shelves.
One area where they make a partial exception to this stern policy is science fiction; there is a market for well-loved sf paperbacks and sun-bleached and age-spotted sf hardbacks, and the shop isn’t too proud to cater to it.
Which is how, several years ago, I came into possession of the £10 Box: an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979. It’s not a complete run by a long way – the SFBC issued 150 books in that period – but it’s an interesting scoop from a very productive period for sf.
Once I’d got the box home, all that remained was to read – or in several cases re-read – the books, and maybe put down a few notes about them as I went along. Not a difficult task, but getting around to it turned out to be more challenging than anticipated. It may give some idea of just how long this one has been on the ‘pending’ list if I tell you that my original plan was to post my book reviews on rec.arts.sf.written.
Still, we’re here now.
This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of twenty short posts, each reviewing two books reprinted by the Science Fiction Book Club between 1968 and 1979.
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction SFBC 131
(no editor’s details are given in the book, but other editions are credited to Ms Merril)
A collection dated 1966, of eight short stories by seven authors, including one by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and another by Arkady alone (the Strugatskys are the only name familiar to me).
Science fiction writers working under Communism plainly couldn’t explore political or dystopian themes as freely as their Western counterparts; perhaps as a result, most of the stories here show a doggedly single-minded focus on elaborating a science-fictional conceit, either a philosophical issue or a hard-science trope, and in either case pitched a long way from any possible contemporary relevance.
Some of the more philosophical stories have the donnish, lumberingly playful quality of Stanislaw Lem’s earlier work (indeed, one story here is dedicated to Lem, “in memory of our argument which will never be resolved”); others take a trope such as the effects of relativistic time dilation and run with it, often ending by taking the story in fantastical directions that recall Western sf of an earlier period. I don’t know what editorial processes these stories had gone through, back in the USSR, but I suspect it was fairly light-touch; in a few cases there was a definite sense of an author making things up as he [sic] went along, science and all.
On the positive side, Ilya Varshavsky’s squib on the theme of “what if robots did exactly what we told them?” raised a smile (and I dare say it was a new joke back then); Arkady Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” is a neatly-turned vignette about humans, aliens and animals (not necessarily in that order); and Anatoly Dneprov’s “The Purple Mummy” features remote 3D printing, which is pretty good going for 1966.
Not great sf, but an intriguing memento of a long time ago in a union of socialist republics far, far away.
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth SFBC 133
Originally published in 1967, this novel seems to have been resistent to naming: it was also published under the title Down to Earth, while the titles of foreign-language editions translate as “The Mysterious Force”, “Death of a Robot” and “Killer on the Asteroid”. Only one of the five gets anywhere near to the plot of the book – and it isn’t “Antic Earth”. (Antic Earth? Your guess is as good as mine.)
Anyway, it’s not very good. Charbonneau wrote Westerns as well as sf, and that’s basically what we have here: in an isolated outpost (a base on an asteroid), a brave man battles with fear and self-doubt to protect his wife and family from the perils of the frontier (space), culminating in a confrontation with a former rival (astronaut) now driven mad by jealousy.
The book does feature one unusual plot element, which could have been taken in some interesting directions. To stave off cosmic cabin fever, the family live surrounded by lifelike 3D projections of scenes on Earth, which makes the base more attractive to a homesick astronaut but ironically makes it easier for an intruder to go undiscovered. Charbonneau makes a lot of this, but he’s inevitably unable to say much about how it would actually work, while his take on the psychological effect of living in a fake reality doesn’t go much beyond “it gets boring after a while”.
[spoilers follow, in the unlikely event you want to avoid them]
Oh, and in the last few pages we learn that the Earth had been destroyed in a nuclear war shortly before the action began. Sorry about that. This news puts the rival astronaut’s incursion into context, but it also means that a few dozen scattered frontiersmen (of the Space Corps), guarding their own outposts across the inner solar system, are now the future of the human race. And ‘frontiersmen‘ is the operative word. The last page of the book features the following deathless dialogue. (Dave is Our Hero, Kathy his 18-year-old daughter and Jackie her age-unspecified kid brother.)
He turned to Kathy. “It may not be as bad as it looks, kitten. We’ve been forgetting that there are a lot of younger men in the Space Corps out there. And very few women. We have a prize that will make them cultivate us once they have some time to think about it.”
“What’s that?” Jackie demanded.
Slowly, Dave smiled. “The prettiest girl in space. I’ve an idea that Emergency Landing Station No. 17 is going to have to get used to receiving more visitors than we’ve ever seen before!”
Ugh.
Antic Earth: a forgotten novel, and rightly so.
Workers’ Playtime 