We’re talking about books disappearing: books originally printed only in paperback—and books that are no longer in issue. I’m going to be listing, among others, people I knew personally, and series I’d expect an sf fan to have read, or looked at, or have some familiarity with.
Let’s start with:
Clifford “Cliff” Simak: City.
Gordon R “Gordie” Dickson. The Dorsai stories.
Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity
Lin Carter. Sword and sorcery…from the Old School.
Poul Anderson: many, many, from SF to near-historical.
Robert Howard. Conan, Kane, Kull.
C.L. Moore: many stories.
Leigh Brackett: many stories.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan, John Carter of Mars
Joe Green: Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
Anthony Gilmore: Space Hawk.
Andre Norton: the Witchworld, et al; and Star Man’s Son.
Jack Vance: the Dirdir, the Pneume, etc.
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven as a team, the hell books.
Larry Niven: Ringworld
Joe Haldeman: the Forever War
Abbey and Asprin: Thieves’ World (give CC time)
Marion Zimmer Bradley: Darkover novels.
Anne McCaffrey: the Pern novels.
Roger Zelazny: Dilvish the Damned [story], Lord of Light, the Amber stories, Damnation Alley.
The point being—most of the younger people coming in may not even have heard of these.
Name more of the ones that are harder to find in print now.
I still have the first six McCaffrey Pern novels; the later ones didn’t survive the latest pre-moving cull, and neither did Ringworld (in a 1990s UK edition). It’s been such a scramble that I can’t remember now which of the rejects went to the used bookstore and which to the thrift store. I have a C. L. Moore collection that I picked up on your recommendation a few years back, and two battered used book-club volumes with the first five Amber novels. That’s it for your list, I think.
I’m afraid even a lot of the more current stuff is going to fall by the electronic wayside, with e-rights being so complicated. Not the authors’ fault, of course, but it grieves me a little when I find, for example, that volumes 1, 3 and 4 of a series I’d like to read have e-editions but volume 2 doesn’t.
I’ll add —
Brian Aldiss — Starship
Anthony Boucher — The Compleat Werewolf
Leo Frankowski
James Gunn — The Joy Makers
David Gerrold — The Flying Sorcerers
Henry Kuttner!
Adam Lukens
Roy Meyers’ “Dolphin” trilogy
Robert Silverberg
Oh, yes, Katherine Kurtz! I have the first Deryni books.
Seeing some of these names reminds me that my grandfather had a bunch of ragged old paperback SF books. I never learned where he got them, but I recall he had something by Andre Norton that was so old, the cover blurbs referred to Ms. Norton as “he.” The book came out before most people knew the author was a woman! These books all sold for 50 or 75 cents. Wish I still had them.
Andre Norton, in addition to deliberately choosing a gender neutral pen name, first started writing as Andrew North (I believe I have the surname right). I think s/he started publishing in the 1930’s… cue Wikipedia: ah yes, her first novel was in 1934 and she also apparently wrote as Allen Weston, something I never knew.
I tore through those first four Deryni books while I should have been writing term papers in college. I still remember reading High Deryni on my dorm bed while desperately having to go pee, but not wanting to put the book down!!
I’d recommend nearly any of Andre Norton’s books, but special favorites include: Star Man’s Son / Daybreak 2250 AD; The Iron Cage; The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars; Beastmaster (not the 1980’s film, which I also liked) ; The Jargoon Pard; her fine Solar Queen series. I’ve seen an ebook claiming to contain her complete works, but I believe it does not have everything she wrote.
I’d love to get Gordon Dickson’s fun Spacepaw / The Right to Arm Bears books in ebook format. So far, I have not found any of his books in ebook form. I’d add Masters of Everon; In Iron Years; and his Dragon and The George series.
L. Sprague De Camp. Lest Darkness Fall.
Pierre Boulle. La planète des singes. (Planet of the Apes, from which the first movie was heavily adapted.)
H. Beam Piper. Especially his Fuzzy books and a short story, “Somhulva.”
Vonda McIntyre. Especially Dreamsnake, but any of hers I’ve read have been good.
Earth Abides. — I can’t recall the author’s name.
Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors; by Anne McCaffrey, IIRC. The two books were about a team sent to a planet with dinosaurs, but the story was about the intrigues by a rival force. Another book I haven’t read since my early teens had as a main char. a young man of mixed Scots and American Indian heritage, a colonist of another planet. I can’t recall the title at the moment. I believe she was the author.
The Stainless Steel Rat
The Voyage of the Space Beagle. (Coeurl? Coeurl?)
David Gerrold wrote a Star Trek novel about a generation ship, which had been submitted for the Original Series but never produced. The Starless World. (I think that’s the one.) The Coeurl makes a guest cameo.)
This topic deserves more thought, listing more books. Some, I have seen a few ebooks by their authors or the books themselves as ebooks, but a great many are not yet in ebook form and AFAIK have not been republished in hb or pb printed book form. Yet they are good books from SF&F authors of the 50’s through at least the 80’s and beyond. I *know* I’m leaving out many that I’d say are great reading.
I have thankfully seen more of Robert Heinlein’s and Alan Dean Foster’s books appearing as ebooks.
(OK, be it resolved, I’m putting together another bookshelf this weekend or coming week so I can unbox some more of my books.)
George R. Stewart – Earth Abides.
Gollancz/Millennium have saved 73 brilliant ones from oblivion in their SF Masterworks series from 1999 onwards. They seem to try to keep them in print.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
Oh! Also James White’s series of medical space station books. These had all sorts of strange alien biology and psychology, and the human and alien medical staff had to discover as much about the aliens’ thinking as their physiology. I know there were two different writers who had medical alien books; both were good at it.
Tailchaser’s Song by Tad White.
The Time Traders series.
Two juvenile / young adult novels:
Alexander Key. The Forgotten Door.
Star Dog. — I don’t recall the author’s name; the last name may have been Holt.
Alan Nourse.
As a kid I read my uncle’s copy of Slan by Alan E. Nourse, one of those old, 1950’s paperbacks tucked in his bookshelf. One of sci-fi’s great books!
Oops, reading some of the older comments, they mention Van Vogt… and that he was the author of Slan, which I now vaguely remember. It would also explain why Norse never was a Slan-like read when I sought out “other” books by him.
Earth Abides: George Stewart, just happened to have a copy on the shelf behind me. Right beside Lucifer’s Hammer and The Last Man on Earth. See a theme there?
BlueCatShip: The H Beam Piper story — do you mean ‘Omnilingual’? It’s about archaeologists on Mars, and how they decode an alien language 50,000 years dead. ‘Sornhulva’ is one of the words in the language.
I love that story, and I don’t own a copy, which bugs me. I’ve read the work that inspired it — the decoding of Linear B, back in the early ’50’s. Piper gets the science right, which is part of why I love the story.
Timothy Zahn uses the same basic ideas in his novel SPINNERET. I’ve always wondered if he was inspired by Piper’s story, by the original research, or by something else.
Most of the classics I read in the 70’s, as library loans, so most of them I don’t own. What I do own is a stack of 50’s Galaxy, whole years, including a short run (about 18 months, in 1959 and into 1960) when there was a Swedish edition/translation – those are hand bound, four issues in each volume, by my dad. They acted as kind of a gateway into the SF world (and might be one reason I’m more into “hard” SF than fantasy).
Is there anything like that nowadays, or are all authors putting out their short stories in disjointed hard-to-find efforts, on the web? I’m not talking anthologies or collections now but more of a regular magazine…
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
http://www.asimovs.com/2010_10-11/index.shtml
are two magazines that still survive.
I read Voyage of the Space Beagle, also Stranger in a Strange Land and The Martian Chronicles when I was, oh, in the 5th and 6th grades and those books were huge WOW! moments for me. Why, these are MUCH better than Judy Blume! I began to feed upon Andre Norton and Poul Anderson and am not yet sated. Everyone has mentioned such great books, many of which I have not read yet, and I’m sad because I feel guilty about reading things that are not my college textbooks while class is on. I need to finish this bloomin’ degree so that I can READ.
At ManyBooks they have 17 issues of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931. They are available for free download in various formats.
http://manybooks.net/search.php?search=astounding+stories
And at the Internet Archive, if you search for ‘Amazing Stories’, you’ll find about 9 issues from the 1940s and 1950s, available to download or read online.
I only discovered Fritz Leiber–the most awarded author of Sci-Fi and Fantasy! –when I came across a C. J. Cherryh interview for Interzone, in which Fritz was cited as a leading influence. And I came across C. J. Cherryh via a display of Tripoint, when casually browsing the shelves of a local library branch. So it’s not too alarming, that many of the younger readers, are not familiar with the names cited and/or a myriad of others.
For time travel enthusiasts, David Gerrold’s “The Man Who Folded Himself” is a classic.
It’s short and easy to read, but it takes a totally unflinching look at the paradoxes of time travel.
It was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, but the writing and the character (only one character!) were not really good enough to win. Still the ideas are thought-provoking and entertaining enough to make it indispensable reading for anyone who enjoys time travel.
Since Harlan Ellison rates him highly, there’s Paul Di Filippo to add to the list.
How about Connie Willis for time travel? Doomsday Book for solemn, To Say Nothing of the Dog for a lighthearted romp. I’ve not read Blackout, it’s the first half of a set and the second one will be available in October, so I’ll read them together.
Haven’t read CJ’s latest either, I save cliffhangers and read them when the sequels (and hopefully, resolutions) become available.
I’ve actually read quite a few of the titles listed above, which surprises me; I read a lot, nonfiction and fiction, so science fiction is only a percentage of the total. On the other hand, I’m pretty old (70+) so I’ve had more reading years to enjoy than some!
A number of Andre Norton are available from Baen Webscriptions, and others are on Gutenberg. I just finished listening to Plague Ship from Librivox.org (volunteers making audiobooks of public domain works. Of course, in a box somewhere I think I have just about every Norton written, including The Prince Commands, but sadly not the Sword’s Point group.
Anybody read THe Beasts of Kohl by John Rackham (an Ace double with A Planet of Your Own by John Brunner)? Both great stories. Brunner is fairly unknown now, I think — a pity. The Avengers of Carrig was another good one of his.
Andre died in 2005. There is no way her books are public domain. They won’t be until 2080. And I don’t immediately recall her ever selling a book to Baen. I am troubled by this report.
There are 14 Nortons on Gutenberg. I assumed that for some reason the copyrights on these didn’t get renewed so that they became public domain. Certainly the site says that they are “public domain in the United States.” http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/n#a7021
The Baen books are several omnibus 2-in-1 reprints. There are 16 so far, published one or two per year since 2000.
I know I have The Forever War and Ringworld – mine is the first edition, where Earth is rotating backwards. (“Oops” would have been Larry’s reaction, most likely, as it was when it was pointed out that the San Bernardino Mountains are way east of JPL, not west, as he wrote in another novel.)
James Schmitz is in my collection, in volumes. And Anvil.
Here’s the Baen Books page link for Andre Norton. I haven’t contacted them, but it looks as though it would be legitimate, and I think they are honorable people.
[url]http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=anorton[/url]
Marcus
http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=anorton
Looking at Baen Books web page, they say that books for the free catalog were selected by the authors. I currently found only 2 of Andre Norton’s books on the free page, and none of C. J. Cherryh’s, although both authors have trade, paperback, and ebook editions in the “paid” catalog.
Marcus
That sounds better: so she or her estate was dealing with Baen for pay. That’s good. Baen was one of the very few houses that actually wrote in language asking for e-rights before e-books existed. That’s why you have to read contracts very carefully. I only wrote one novel for them, which was Paladin.