While but a callow youth, I subscribed to the Science Fiction Book Club. The club, wise in the ways of procrastination, would send each month’s selection of books to subscribers UNLESS the subscribers had sent the club a card informing the SFBC that one did not want the books in question. All too often I planned to send the card off, only to realize (once again), when a box of books arrived, that intent is not at all the same thing as action.1
Thus, I received books that I would not have chosen but, once in possession, I read and enjoyed them. All praise to the SFBC and the power of procrastination! Here are five of my favorite unintended reading experiences…
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner (1972)
Regardless of how prolific or well known an author might be—and Brunner was very prolific—or how widely read a reader is, for each reader there has to be a first novel from any given author. I’d never heard of Brunner and the cover of this book did not appeal.
Thanks to my inability to send mail promptly, the hardcover arrived nonetheless.
Brunner was rarely what one would call a cheerful author and the quartet of books to which this belonged, each addressing a different Big Issue of the era, was no exception.2 The Sheep Look Up is a contender for the bleakest of Brunner’s major books. In it, humans wrestle with the problem of environmental degradation—or more exactly, the problem that while not doing anything was a recipe for extinction, actually doing anything about it might be economically inconvenient in the short term. I think we’re all agreed that short term economic disruption is the worst possible outcome.
Not to spoil the book, but humanity does not win any medals for collective prudence in The Sheep Look Up. On the plus side, having read Sheep, I wanted to read more Brunner. On the plus plus side, having read Sheep, pretty much everything else he’d published seemed upbeat by comparison.
***
Three Hainish Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin (1978)
Because Waterloo Public Library consigned all of Le Guin to the children’s section and because the first book of hers I looked at was an Earthsea I didn’t particularly grok, I was under the impression she was an author of juvenile fantasy novels. I wanted rockets, so no Le Guin for me! Until a certain card failed to go into a post box and this omnibus arrived.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Le Guin wrote science fiction about alien cultures divided by gulfs of space and time.
- Rocannon’s World is about an effort to confound interstellar imperialism.
- Planet of Exile concerns a community of humans on a world not particularly suitable for human occupation.
- City of Illusions recounts an amnesiac’s quest on Shing-occupied Earth.
These books are early Le Guins; they are much less polished than her later works. But they were intriguing enough to get me to try her other books.
***
Riddle of Stars by Patricia A. McKillip (1979)
Teen me strongly preferred proper science fiction, with its entirely plausible telepathy, faster-than-light travel, and orthogenesis rather than implausible fantasy. I would never have chosen to buy a McKillip book, no matter how many World Fantasy Awards she won. Sure, awards, but this was—ack! thbbpt!—fantasy. But sloth and procrastination sent the Quest of the Riddle-Master trilogy heading my way.
The omnibus contains all three volumes of the story: The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977), and Harpist in the Wind (1979). Plot: Prince Morgon of Hed, a prince of a minor holding who has intellectual ambitions, discovers he has inadvertently become engaged to Raederle, the second most beautiful woman in the world. Dire consequences follow and the stakes escalate. All is told in an elegant style that was completely wasted on a Canadian teen who thought Harry Harrison’s prose was the bee’s knees. I have since repented.
***
Triplicity by Thomas M. Disch (1980)
Not having read Disch, I gathered from magazine reviews that he was a suspiciously literary SF author, the sort of self-admitted New Wave writer who probably didn’t even own a slide rule. I might have steered a careful path around Disch except, as you may have guessed, I probably would have neglected to send in that card even if I had known that I would be beheaded if I didn’t. Youthful heedlessness!
Triplicity offered a selection of early Disch novels: Echo Round His Bones (1967), The Genocides (1965), and The Puppies of Terra (1966).
- The first involves a man discovering the hard way that teleportation has some undocumented, undesirable side-effects.
- The second is a bleak tale of gradual human extermination as an unnoticed side-effect of alien appropriation of Earth.
- The third concerns a humanity liberated from oppressive free will by alien overlords.
The last book reminded me of John Sladek, whom I did like, so I started collecting Disch’s fiction. I made an exception for the uncultured fellow, who probably would not have known the differences between Picketts and Keuffel & Esserzs.3
***
Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials by Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Ian Summers, and Beth Meacham (1979)
This is an art book. While I had no animus towards art, I also didn’t collect it. Not that my tastes mattered as long as that little response-requested card was gathering dust somewhere.
Barlowe and Summers (as well as editor Beth Meacham, who provided the text for the book but wasn’t listed as an author until the second edition) offered an assortment of aliens as interpreted by the artist. Many were familiar from books, thus giving me the pleasure of figuring out exactly what the artist got wrong (must follow the text!). Other aliens had featured in books of which I had never heard. As a result, my list of books to hunt down and buy got that much longer.
***
Serendipity in book purchase (or perhaps I should say acquisition) can arrive in different ways. I’m sure that some of you have ended up with books that were not deliberately chosen but were nevertheless enjoyed. Feel free to tell us about them in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]In my defence, sending mail was more complicated than it would have been for most of you. We lived on a farm. At that time the postal service did pick up mail from a rural mailbox but…one had to have a mailbox, which we did. Then one had to actually mount the mailbox on a post at the end of the driveway, which somehow never happened. So we had to mail things in town. Which required remembering to take things into town. So complicated.
[2]“The Shockwave Rider” does at least leave open the possibility that things might get better.
[3]Slide rule brands. (Picketts are better.)
My Robertson Davies collection exists because my grandmother bought What’s Bred in the Bone thinking it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being and consigned it to her guest room, where I picked it up and read it.
I loved me the Riddle-Master books!
Barlowe’s Guide looks right up my alley. I must see about getting it.
Been there, done that, got the copy of The Illearth War. It was a much better introduction to Donaldson than Lord Foul’s Bane would have been because the sympathetic protagonist didn’t accidentally rape anyone in it.
I was in college, at a college con, and wanted a con T-shirt. I was at the auction, and was reading a friend’s copy of _Paranoia_. I made the mistake of bidding while inattentive. When I went to pick up my T-shirt and pay, I discovered that they’d thrown in several Avon paperbacks, including Zelazny’s _The Doors of his face, the lamps of his mouth_ (short story collection) (my introduction to Zelazny), and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ _Denner’s Wreck_ (my introduction to LWE), as well as some other stuff. Definitely unintended, but I don’t regret it at all!
I touched the screen of my phone in the exactly wrong place at the wrong time and accidentally purcased the entire Tomes series of books by Honor Raconteur (two books at the moment). There was no immediately available Undo button, and I decided to give the books a chance.
I loved them and am eagerly waiting for the third one that’s supposed to come out this year.
(I do wish Honor Raconteur had a stronger editing team.)
I too was a Canadian teenager who loved science fiction and thought I was too good for fantasy; I wanted to hear about things scientists/engineers might research, not magic. Fortunately, that era exhausted itself and ended up sandwiched between periods of open-mindedness. For one thing, it became obvious to me in my late teens that I still loved my favourite fantasy novels from childhood, especially urban fairy tales; there was no reason I needed to keep the entire genre at such a distance.
One of these favourites was also a memorable example of getting something to read by accident. One of the most exciting things about elementary school (in my case, in the 1990s) was the monthly book-order form from Scholastic. A whole catalogue of books, and you could order as many as your parents allowed, and then they’d just show up in a box mailed to the classroom and would get divided up among the students. I just about lost my mind with glee every time this happened. However, there was one disappointment. At one point in first grade, one of the books I’d ordered did not arrive; it had unexpectedly become unavailable. In order to apologize, Scholastic had picked out another book from the catalogue and sent copies of that instead. And a letter explaining the situation.
Well! Six-year-old me was a bit insulted. If I’d wanted this other book, I’d have asked for it in the first place. I was supposed to assume this was a satisfactory substitute? To make matters worse, the cover was an old-fashioned illustration that made the story look a bit dull. Anyway, being six, I spent a bit of time sulking ungratefully and determinedly ignoring the book that had been forced on me.
But I was a kid who loved to read, and it was a book, and I owned it whether I wanted to or not. So I was probably going to pick it up sooner or later. This was Betty Brock’s No Flying in the House, and it taught me a lesson. I mean, the setting was a bit retro, sure, but that was just the backdrop to a very lively fairy tale – and it didn’t shy away from some deep questions, either. I loved the book, and I hadn’t been able to predict that I would.
I owned that copy for nearly a decade, and replaced it at 15 only because the older one was falling apart (and because I found a copy of a newer edition for a couple of dollars at the remaindered bookstore that used to be in the Rideau Centre in Ottawa).
I don’t remember which book I’d ordered from Scholastic and didn’t get, but I don’t think I would have discovered this one on my own!
@james Davis Nicoll
I disagree; K&E, not Pickett.
I think we can both agree, however, that bamboo ones were best.
—-
Since I never joined SFBC (my parallel was the Musical Heritage Society. I would never have heard of Sorabji had I not been equally incapable of sending in the refusal cards. Since I was living in a suburb, I had less reason than JDN), I usually didn’t have this experience of serendipity, except when I was particularly desperate and grabbed something from whichever local library I could visit that day (one of the nice things about living in Connecticut is that I can walk into any of the town libraries and walk out with a pile of borrowed books)
@@.-@ daha
The Lord Foul books had a sympathetic protagonist? I missed that in all of Covenant’s whining (not to mention Donaldson’s gushing adjectives)
My best combination of procrastination and slow mail delivery resulted in receiving a copy of CJ Cherryh’s first Chanur book, The Pride of Chanur. A certain stubborn streak and a fortuitous lack of schoolwork enabled me to read it, repackage it, and send it back, spiteful cuss that I was (… am).
“having read Sheep, pretty much everything else he’d published seemed upbeat by comparison.”
I take it this means you read Total Eclipse?
I have but I always confuse it with Bedlam Planet.
I too was a member of the SF book club – possibly two times. And like you, getting mailed weird books by the club resulted in discovering new authors.
Not that I really remember any of them.
To be honest, I think when I signed up I tended to get x-books-in-1 sets (out of a desire to save money and get more for my buck), so I think I picked up a few new authors that way. I don’t remember if I really knew who Zelazny was before I got the 5 books in 1 set of the Amber books from the SFBC, but I certainly knew who he was after it.
Raederle was just the second most beautiful woman in An, if memory serves.
The Sheep Look Up is quite possibly the most depressing book I’ve ever read (I’ve been reading for almost 70 years & I read 4-5 books/week, so that says a lot).
@7, Oh yes, I still recall the joys of the Scholastic books catalog!
I also recall No Flying In The House. I’ve got to find myself a copy someday.
@14, That’s right, Raederle is officially the second most beautiful woman in the Three Portions of An. When asked who is the most beautiful Raederle answers promptly that it’s Mara Croeg ‘The Flower of An’. Coming in second in the All An beauty contest doesn’t seem to bother Raederle in the slightest.
#2
> I loved me the Riddle-Master books!
My rule of “buy anything by Patricia McKillip” hasn’t steered me wrong yet. It started with the Riddle Master books, don’t remember where I picked the first one up, could be the very friendly and helpful librarian in Sundsvall, Sweden, with his private stash of SF&F books in English for the interested patron or the also very friendly and helpful people at Uppsala English Bookshop (well deserved London Book Fair winners of as the International Excellence bookstore of 2018).
I didn’t know then what made me like them so much but aside from all of the rest I think it is here use of language that really sets her apart (take that as you will from a second language English speaker).
I wish I had a complete list of Scholastic books. The one on isfdb looks incomplete.
RIP the Science Fiction Book Club, you are much mourned.
My intro to Barlowe was his Inferno and Brushfire books. They are also art, but they explore persons and places in Hell (drawing from the structures in Grimoire of Honorius) and the accompanying text is fantastic. He later expanded on these concepts in his fiction book God’s Demon. Can’t recommend his stuff highly enough.
@9 Dr. Thanatos
Yes, it was a sympathetic protagonist, his name was Mhoram son of Variol….
The Sheep Look Up is the one Brunner I cannot reread.
Pickett put people on the Moon, K&E built The Bomb. That said, when I acquired a 20″ Log-Log Duplex Decitrig last spring[1], it scratched an itch I have felt from the first time I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
The Faber-Castell 2/83N Novo Duplex is probably the Cadillac of slipsticks, though.
[1] The early stages of the current unpleasantness seemed to leave lots of people feeling in more need of money than their old slide rules, allowing me to snarf up quite a few of various makes and types on Internet auction.
Which other Brunner stories make up your quartet? I can imagine Stand on Zanzibar and maybe The Jagged Orbit, but I don’t see The Shockwave Rider (published a few years later) going with them — to me it pairs with The Stone that Never Came Down in approach, while being perhaps even more optimistic in not requiring a superhero to rescue us.
I think you had better luck with the SFBC than I did; I remember getting Stand on Zanzibar (and volume 1 of the Boucher Treasury (the library had had volume 2) hooray for Rebirth (fka The Chrysalids), but I also remember various Boyd and Anthony books and the time it took to disentangle from their attitudes towards women.
Fie on all your linear slide-rule brands; I’m still kicking myself for not keeping my Kane E6B even if I haven’t had a use for it in decades. Compact because it was circular and it included a vector calculator.
@24: I haven’t got an E6B, but I do have an Effects of Nuclear Weapons round slide rule.
Following on from the mention of being young enough to enjoy Harry Harrison’s writing, my surprise book was Isidore Haiblum’s _Interworld_. I was a careless teen looking for more _Stanless Steel Rat_ books and, well, it was right next to them on the bookstore shelf.
It wasn’t was I was expecting, but it was very enjoyable (Raymond Chandler-esque quipping detective, in a parallel-universe hopping storyline? What’s not to like?)
I’ve got a K&E, but I inherited it from my uncle (I’m about 3 years too young to have used a slide rule with intent).
The Sheep Look Up is bleak – and so is Total Eclipse (which suggests that it’s not just humanity that is fatally flawed, but all intelligent life).
Stand on Zanzibar shows faint signs of hope (it’s embarrassing that Shalmaneser is needed to save us from ourselves, but I’ll take what I can get)
Shockwave Rider is positively giddy with hope by comparison – people might still screw it up, but that odds are evenish.
Courtesy of SF Book Club, I discovered Joy Chants’ “Red Moon and Black Mountain” and E.R. Burroughs Mars novels. (With Frank Frazetta covers). Opened the door. Amazing!
Brunner’s quartet each deal with a different Big Issue of the era: Stand on Zanzibar is overpopulation, The Jagged Orbit is social breakdown/violence, The Sheep Look Up is environmental degradation, and The Shockwave Rider is Future Shock.
Brunner was a real favorite, from the Lovecraftian Atlantic Abomination to Squares of the City. But Stand on Zanzibar really knocked me out, so I was chomping at the bit before The Sheep Look Up hit the stores. Even after all these years, I still can’t decide if Zanzibar or Sheep is better, but Sheep may be the most prescient science fiction ever published, even surpassing PKD & JG Ballard. (Obviously, I’m a committed pessimist.)
I’d read the Disch novels when they first came out. I didn’t know that SFBC did an omnibus, although I was familiar with many of their other omnibuses, omnibusi, whatever.
(8) I’ve used both, but my father and I both ended with K&E – in mahogany. $40 in 1974, when an HP45 was $350 to 400. I still pull it out when I want fractions.
#19, jmeltzer: “RIP the Science Fiction Book Club, you are much mourned.”
SFBC is apparently still in operation. Looking at the current website, the recently published PERSEPHONE STATION by Stina Leicht is one of their current offerings.
No idea how many members they currently have, but rarely hear any buzz about SFBC these days. After Ellen Asher left as SFBC’s Editor, the selections became less appealing to me, prices rose, and its procedures became more complicated, I started ordering less and less. I think around 2012-2013, after about a 2-year period when I hadn’t ordered anything, the monthly brochures stopped coming. Haven’t felt any compelling reason to rejoin since then.
Ah yes, now I remember Mhoram. In my memory he tends to get lost in all the “leper outcast UNCLEAN!!!!!”
I got my copy of Riddle Master the same way James did, and still have it, carefully held togather with tape.
Neglecting to send in my refuse card got Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach, one of the best mistakes i ever made.
I read Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials in 1979 when I was a junior in high school. For me, it sparked an intense desire to read non-Star Trek science fiction.
I too got Serpent’s Reach that way!
I remember watching the Childhood’s End miniseries and being so disappointed that the series’ Karellen didn’t resemble Barlowe’s Karellen.
To a mathematician, thinking about doing something is just as good as actually doing it, but the Post Office takes a different view. I got introduced to Disch the same way. Also John D. MacDonald, a one-volume set of Wine of the Dreamers, The Ballroom of the Skies, and The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything. Yet another oops got me The Stainless Steel Rat.
I seem to recall authors complaining about the SFBC, but it got them in front of a bigger audience than they probably would have had otherwise.
SFBC was one of my joys of high school in the mid to late 80’s . I also still have a copy of Barlow’s and the Riddle Master omnibus. Mine must be second edition the cover is navy blue. I know I ended up with a couple of books by mistake but aren’t sure which ones anymore. I had more trouble remembering to send in the card for the Columbia house DVD subscription than the one for books. It’s how I ended up with season 1 of Heroes. I know my uncle the civil engineer has a slide rule or he used to but other than him I’ve only seen them in movies. We could occasionally use calculators and I never made it past Algebra and Geometry in school. I was a English, Social Studies, History kind of kid.
The two advantages of slide rules are that they don’t need batteries and they give the users a better appreciation for orders of magnitude. The disadvantage is that they get increasingly difficult to use as one’s vision degrades.
—-
I have found that Stephen Baxter was far from optimistic about humanity’s future.
Deployments are a great time to stumble upon books you might have otherwise ignored. Morale, Welfare, and Recreation centers always have bookshelves with some free books that are donated and/or swapped out. One for me was The Shadow of the Lion by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer. Found it on FOB Liberty, Baghdad in 2006. I hadn’t read anything by any of them, but what a pleasant surprise. For those that are interested, it spawned a number of sequels. Alternate history in Venice circa 1530s with magic, religion, intrigue, politics, warfare, etc.
When I was in high school in the early 1970s, the school had about 8 feet total of SF&F shelves (for 1500 students). My parents said book clubs were snake oil, so libraries were all I had. (Plus my parents’ shelves: hundreds of mysteries and some epic historical-sex-and-violent-death bestsellers.)
Brunner seemed heavily represented in the school library and I don’t recall any classics… imagine a collection of the genre that included only books published 1968-73. I concluded that SF was intellectually interesting but very depressing. I didn’t come back to it for years.
My high school was the beneficiary of someone who subscribed to the SFBC; every month there were new books. I discovered Zelazny that way when I’d run out of SF and figured that while a title with Avalon in it implied fantasy, putting Guns next to it meant it probably wasn’t Extruded Fantasy Product.
I was also a victim of the SFBC marketing scheme but soon realized that to be rid of it all I had to do was fail to pay the bill they would continue to send to me years after the fact. It became apparent, early on, that many of their offerings would end up at the local thrift store anyway so if I were so inclined I could always obtain copies for a fraction of their list price. Like many other prepubescent kids of my era, Science Fiction was my religion and fantasy was naught but its illegitimate heir. That was until I was recommended Mary Stewart’s “The Crystal Cave”, the first of her Arthurian series. Although it was classified as fantasy, the writing style and cohesive internal consistency of the tale kept me immersed and eager to finish the series. From there I was to encounter Vance’s “The Demon Princes” and Anthony’s “Apprentice/Adept”. My first slide rule was inspired by Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones” because the father insisted that his children develop their mathematical skills from first principles so they would have a recourse when technology failed. I could appreciate the beauty and artistic esthetic of the device but my own numbers handicap prevented me from ever getting any use from it.
I don’t remember which unwanted SFBC books I accidentally bought I ended up liking — but I do remember accidentally buying the entire first Thomas Cov enant trilogy. I have still never read those books — and I don’t plan to!
The only Brunner I know is his The Traveller In Black stories. Do not express a wish within hearing of the Traveller. Trust me on this.
When I got my first job as a kid, I joined the SFBC to get the promotional copy of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. (Our local library only had Second Foundation). I was terrified by the requirement to buy four books, so I resolved to buy the first four that came up, regardless. The very first one was “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”. That is a strange book.
With Barlowe’s Guide, for the very first time, I shouted, “YES! At long last: *THAT’s* a Pierson’s Puppeteer!” (I only wish he’d also drawn a Kzin instead of a Thrint.)
Although I graduated from high school a bit earlier than many of the commenters, I must admit that the SFBC’s “send in the card or else” policy introduced me to a few authors I wouldn’t otherwise have read. My intro to McKillip came when one of the publishers sent me a box of review paperbacks; in the ’70s I got quite a few that way. I was already familiar with many of the authors mentioned here (not just because I was older, but because I read voraciously, often 14-20 books a week–and SF/F was my religion).
Although I did enjoy the Wounded Land itself, I have to agree with Thanatos–“Leper Outcast Unclean” became so fricking annoying I stopped reading Donaldson entirely and haven’t picked anything up by him in decades.
Because I’m “into” SF/F art, I was familiar with Barlowe before the book came out, and I’m still chuffed at how well some of those aliens were depicted.
My luck with SFBC accidents was not nearly as good as yours. I got things like Our Friends from Frolix 8. But then, I got all those Brunners with intent.
The Club’s no longer what it used to be. I first joined in 1971. My first book was Joy Chant’s Red Moon Black Mountain, and I’m deeply ashamed to say, although I still own it — I’ve never gotten around to reading it!! I stayed with the club until I moved out of my parents’ house in 1978-79, rejoined later, quit when moved to a new city to continue a twice-interrupted college education, joined again, quit again on getting married in ’91, then rejoined 15 years later. Eventually, the Club stopped focusing on SF/Fantasy and the occasional Horror book, stopped producing those wonderful omnibus volumes, ceased producing the original-to-the-Club anthologies, offered fewer and fewer new titles, and became less important to me and much more like traditional mainstream clubs. I quit, probably for good, last year, as Amazon got things quicker and slightly lower in price. But oh, I loved looking through those old catalogs, always finding 6 or 7 or 10 books I knew I’d eventually get when I had the money. I still have just about every book I ordered through the Club, and over the years, the many I have read have given me immense satisfaction. Harlan Ellison signed my SFBC copy of Dangerous Visions, at a World Con in either ’73 or ’74, and although the cheaper binding is falling apart, it remains among my most-prized SFBC books.
My best friend’s father was a former member of the SFBC, and decided to get rid of his collection. Over the summer I got to go through and select any and all of the ones I wanted to keep. New acquisitions include Three Hannish Novels by LeGuin on this list. I didn’t see The Sheep Look Up (thought now I want to read it), but did get some others by John Brunner.
Not Sci-Fi, but one of my favorite books I never meant to read is Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. I’ve never read any of her poetry but was intrigued by a used paperback of this published journal. More recently (also not Sci-fi), at the beginning of the pandemic my landlord gave everyone a copy of A Gentleman in Moscow, which was a fantastic read but not one I would have ever picked up for myself.
I miss SFBC so much. I know it still has an online presence and once in awhile I go there and look around but have never rejoined. I’m pretty sure the brochures were half the fun, not to mention getting 6 books for $1.00 and shipping when you joined. The brochure was also easier to search than their online catalog. The Riddlemaster trilogy is, I believe, one I also got accidently through procrastination but quickly became a favorite. (I also miss the Quality Paperback Book Club, which I ordered from frequently. I never actually quit that one, it just got subsumed into the Literary Guild Book Club. I get their emails regularly but I don’t think I’ve ever bought from them.)
Also – I loved No Flying in the House as a kid! I was even thinking about it recently but couldn’t remember the name. I wonder if I still have my copy.
You took me on a wonderful trip through my own memories. I believe I read all of those books and got most of them the same way you did except Sheep. Now I’ll have to track down a copy and read it. I still average a new book every 3 days and have to read electronic books because physical ones take up too much space and cost too much. I’m 62, work full time, and will stave off the evil devil Alzheimer by keeping my mind as sharp as I possibly can and reading is a great and wonderful way to do that. Thank you for sharing your memories of SFBC … I haven’t thought about them in YEARS, but loved that club! Oh, by the way … the greatest book I ever got that I didn’t want … Star Dance by Spider Robinson.
@52) I have heard that Red Moon and Black Mountain is very good. But I also haven’t read it! And I got Again, Dangerous Visions as part of my bonus for joining the club. My copy is also falling to pieces.
I haven’t read all of these yet, but I hope I enjoy them as much as I did the article. Here’s to procrastination!
I became interested in SF when I found Asimov’s short story collections in paperback (for, I think, 75¢ each). I got into the SF book club at some point in my early teen years, after my parents had agreed that SF was relatively “clean” (they were worried about my getting my hands on something that would distort my personality).
Well, when I got into the club, six books for hardly any money, I went for the most bang for the buck (or one cent); I went with collections with the largest number of stories. Perhaps you can see this coming…
So my first order included, in addition to a James Blish collection, the first Dangerous Visions. After a while, my parents got around to checking out the books their child was reading. (Two stories involving Jack the Ripper, and one involving a graphic rape scene in DV, and that’s just what I can recall offhand.) So we had a Serious Talk. The result was that I got to keep the DV (my parents were not inclined to censor, and the horse had long left the barn anyway) but was urged to be much more careful about my choices thenceforth.
@@.-@ daha
“Accidentally”? I finished the book but never touched another Donaldson (also, I thought it read as second-rate Tolkien).
@15 John Fiala
I also bought that 2 volume five book Amber collection which was my introduction to Zelazny. I stil have them, about 45 years later.
I may have ordered the first Shannara book through the club, but discarded it upon completion. I’d read LOTR several times a year during the 1970s, so I recognized Terry Brooks’ work as a rip-off of Tolkien immediately.
@41 et al
Diminishing eyesight is why I love my 6′ classroom demonstrator K&E slide rule.
I picked up that same copy of the Riddle-Master trilogy; it’s about four feet to my right as I type this. The binding is definitely handle-with-care and the dust jacket spine is all but bleached out, but it’s stood up to a fair bit of rereading and several moves.
I also have the book club editions of the first and second Chronicles of Amber; like many of us, I was drawn to the most-bang-for-my-buck collections and all-in-one editions.
I think my first “unwanted” SFBC book that I still have is The Fires of Paratime, by L.E. Modesit. The second one was Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis, though :<)
Nice article. I read Sheep straight thru one night until dawn.
Was that a Bill the Cat reference in there (ack)?
I have a story related to the accidental book reads. I got a pile of, lets say, lesser known books from SciFI book club one time. You know the ones that have two books starting from opposite covers. I HATED one of the books (whose title I can’t remember). Set on Mars, where Mars was essentially a gulag for political prisoners and undesirables. Colonists/prisoners had to essentially create a society out of whatever they could scrounge from infrequent supply and prisoner dumps. Started with a dust storm that kept the newly arrived prisoners trapped in their ship and many dying. As I said, I hated the book. Wasn’t particularly impressed by the story and thought the ‘society’ that was described was just stupid. Until the last paragraph of the book. Turns out, the colonists kicked up a ‘dust storm’ each time a ship landed to let nature and Darwin take it’s course on the newbies. So, now I try to read books all the way thru, just in case :)
When I was 8, my parents gave me a subscription that sent me 4 books over the course of the year, so exciting. (no SF, sadly, but I still have my copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, one of the best children’s books ever).
I joined the SFBC in my teens and also never got around to cancelling any books. I recall a lot of anthologies and was introduced to John Brunner as you were. I wish someone would publish omnibus editions of all his SF–even the not so good stuff.
64: Sounds like a job for NESFA!
I read The Sheep Look Up, about that time. Not from the SF bookclub, though I was a member, but because the cover was intriguing. I then read everything I could get, which wasn’t much when you have to rely on Waldenbooks.
But things I DID get from the bookclub: George R. R. Martin’s early novel Dying of the Light. Again, Dangerous Visions, which prompted a search for Dangerous Visions and a decades long search for The Last Dangerous Visions before learning that it was the Book on the Edge of Forever. Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside which hit me like Flowers for Algernon. Dune. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.
I forgot that postcard all through high school, and it only ended when I went to college and had to slash expenses.
Triplicity was my accidental introduction to Disch too to whom I came to a state of admiration and adoration. Even when his writing felt considerably over my head, it was worth the “what the hell is going on here” head trip. Both my boys received copies of Camp Concentration as going off to college gifts. And it was from SFBC that I got Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions which introduced me further to the world of science fiction beyond Heinlein, Asimov and the rest of the early grand masters. I have both copies still, signed by Ellison on the book tour where he sat in bookstore windows and wrote.
@63: AFAIK the SFBC never published works in the back-to-back flipped format; perhaps you’re thinking of Ace Doubles? Many were dreadful (and some good ones were carved to fit a page count), but they also had (e.g.) Le Guin’s first two ~novels, some great Simak novelettes, and Mack Reynolds before he jumped the shark. I can’t guess from this distance how much of the quality problems were Wollheim’s pulp-derived tastes vs the raw requirement to publish a certain number of titles per month. I don’t remember their being offered by subscription like SFBC, but they frequently had a page or more of other titles offered by mail order.
@65: As a citizen(?) of the Commonwealth, would you be willing to help with rights issues? One of the reasons my project to do a Ballantine festschrift (when they were Worldcon guests in 1989) failed was my utter failure to find who had the rights to John Wyndham, who at that time had been dead for almost as long as Brunner has now; finding rights owners in-country is hard enough, but consulates seem unwilling even to assist.
I picked up The Hobbit in my elementary school library because, foolish and inexperienced as I was, the synopsis on the back led me to believe it was the inspiration for the Shrek movie that had just come out.
Ah yes, the tangled joys of SFBC and procrastination LOL!!!!
I have long since lost track of how many books I got ‘by accident’, and either loved or re-gifted but among them was the accidental original Dangerous Visions (which rapidly became a secret treasure kept diligently out of my mother’s sight) and then the deliberately ordered Again Dangerous Visions (likewise kept out of sight) ;-)
The Thomas Covenant books I discovered on my own at the library, so happily they didn’t cost me anything but my time and cringing brain cells. Pretty sure I only kept reading because I was convinced it would lighten up and have some sign of hope…..one of my first major downer reads. At least the wildly shifting weather kept it interesting – made Jumanji’s rainy season look like child’s play ;-)
As for depressing reads, nothing could have prepared me for some of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune crap. Put me in a semi-suicidal funk before it dawned on me that it was the books, not my life that was the problem – bleah!
My tastes were getting refined, augmented, tested and rocked, and I relished the experience!
Ah those were the days LOL
If you like Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, another you might like is After Man: A Zoology of the Future by Dougal Dixon. Interestingly speculative and amazing art!
Pickett slide rules are aluminum (soda can was the derogatory term). I have a smooth bamboo K&E (Keuffel and Esser, I may be spelling it wrong) that feels so good in my hands. Showed my granddaughter my K&E last week, but did not do a good job of explaining how to use it. I was pleased that I knew where to find it. We discussed how calculators cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars when I was in college; they were prohibited since few could afford them.