About two years ago, I reviewed Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall. I could not add a link that would allow readers to purchase the book because as far as I could tell, The Fortunate Fall has been out of print for more than twenty years. I was astounded because I had the impression that the book was warmly regarded. The evidence suggests it was warmly regarded by a small number of very vocal fans1.
I tend to expect that many others will love the same books that I do. I have been proved wrong again and again. Books that I love are not reprinted. Even in this era of ebooks, all but a few lucky books come forth like flowers and wither: they slip away like shadows and do not endure. Ah, the sorrows of the reader!
Not to mention the author….
But there is also a certain satisfaction in the quest for the nigh-unobtainable out-of-print volume almost certainly languishing in durance vile (undusted home bookshelf, dingy thrift shop), a volume that deserves to be loved and read. So I am asked “What books should we be striving (futilely) to add to our personal Mount Tsundokus?” Well, since you asked …
Chester Anderson’s 1967 The Butterfly Kid is the first volume in the Greenwich Trilogy. It is without a doubt the finest SF novel in which a collection of futuristic hippies band together to save the world from drugs, blue space lobsters, and the nefarious Laszlo Scott. Anderson and his friend Michael Kurland feature as protagonists. It’s a delightful, light-hearted romp—although apparently not delightful enough, because it has been out of print for decades. The Butterfly Kid was followed in 1969 by Michael Kurland’s The Unicorn Girl and in 1970 by T. A. Waters’ The Probability Pad, both of which are in print.
Liz Williams’ 2004 Banner of Souls is a science-fantasy adventure set in a distant future in which reproduction has been industrialized and affection harnessed, in a bid to control the proles. Also, the souls of the dead power trans-solar portals. It’s a grim story but well told. Why no recent edition?
John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless is one of the two best Heinlein juveniles not written by Heinlein (the other being Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.). A lean, vividly imaged coming-of-age story set on the Moon, it should be a classic of science fiction. It isn’t (or at least, not one that’s easy to track down). Ford died tragically young without having designated a literary executor. The rights to his works reverted to his blood relatives, who seem intent on erasing evidence of Ford’s writing career. While Tor has done a masterful job of keeping their John M. Ford books, The Last Hot Time and Heat of Fusion and Other Stories in print, Growing Up Weightless was published by Bantam and is out of print.
Pamela Sargent edited three Women of Wonder anthologies in the 1970s, then a follow-up duology in the mid-1990s. The five book series showcased speculative fiction by women, from the golden age of SF to the then-present (now distant past; the most recent WoW anthology is even more ancient than Season One Xena: Warrior Princess). In this case, I do know why the books are out of print: obtaining the rights from all of the authors (or their estates) would be a daunting task. It’s a pity, because these were remarkable anthologies.
I mentioned Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile in Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, A Through F, which I read because I had previously reviewed 1979’s Shadow of Earth. While I have some issues with the worldbuilding, the central story—the struggle of a modern woman to escape the brutally patriarchal society into which she was sold by a duplicitous lover—is vivid and memorable. It’s one that could speak to modern audiences, if only they could find a copy.
2001’s Psychohistorical Crisis is Donald Kingsbury’s inventive re-imagination of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. In it, a scholar robbed of much of his memory must navigate the dangerous word of the Second Empire, a world in which Imperial pretensions of a monopoly on the powerful tool of psychohistory are quite false. Psychohistorical Crisis was well-thought-of enough to win a Prometheus Award and yet it seems to have fallen out of print almost immediately2.
Like the previous entry, Pat Murphy’s 1999 There and Back Again reimagines a genre classic, recasting a well-known tale of a reclusive homeowner turned press-ganged burglar from epic fantasy to galactic-scale space opera. Pried out of his comfortable habitat, norbit Bailey Beldon is dragged off through a network of one-way wormholes to a life of adventure he never requested. I thought it was all great fun, but the book is definitely out of print.
Why choose one work by an author when I can see my way to promoting three? Joan D. Vinge’s 1991 omnibus Heaven Chronicles gathers 1978’s The Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt and a prequel, Legacy, which is a merger of the 1976 Media Man and its close sequel, Fool’s Gold. The series is set in the eponymous Heaven’s Belt, a once-prosperous asteroid-based civilization that found out the hard way why a shooting war in an environment where all life-support is artificial and fragile is a bad idea. With a slow, painful decline into extinction a real possibility, the handful of survivors are eager to seize any chance to escape their doom. Set in an early version of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought, Joan D. Vinge’s novel presents desperate characters in a nuanced way, despite which The Heaven Chronicles have been out of print since the early 1990s.
The potential for change is a wonderful thing, however. You might, for example, be disheartened by a cold drizzle while out walking only to be delighted by the distraction of a pack of ravening wolves. Similarly, a book long out of print can very easily become a book which is in print!
Roger Zelazny’s 1975 Doorways in the Sand is not one of Zelazny’s Major-with-a-capital-M novels. It is, however, a perfect minor novel, an amusingly cheerful light confection in which the author never takes a wrong step. Readers liked it enough to nominate it for both the Hugo and the Nebula. It was with considerable surprise that I discovered in 2015 that Doorways in the Sand had been out of print since the early 1990s. I was delighted to learn, therefore, that Farrago Books had finally brought Doorways back into print. There’s always hope! And if not hope, hungry wolves.
1: I call this the Diet Pepsi Effect, from my experiences as Vice (party organizer and shenanigans facilitator) for a theatrical organization. My impression of how many people wanted Diet Pepsi at the parties was wildly off because their apparent numbers were inflated by how very firmly and how often they expressed their desire for Diet Pepsi. (I am using the singular they.)
2: Editor Karen Lofstrom’s note: I have this book. I like it despite the fact that there’s a subplot involving pedophilia and grooming.
Author’s note: Oh, right. It’s also on my list of “What the helling hell, author; or Hikaru Genji is not a role model” books.
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 surprisingly flammable.
My vote (now that the Liaden books are back in print, which shows how old I am because they’ve been “back in print” for a long long time now) would go to Grant Callin’s books, _Saturnalia_ and _A Lion on Tharthee_. They were pretty standard SF, but I enjoyed them a lot, and would have liked to see more from that author. Unfortunately, he seemed to vanish from bookshelves after those 2.
Wow, I actually have a copy of Banner of Souls. I remember liking it when I read it, and my Goodreads review of it bears this out, though I do not remember the details of the book at all. (I read it ten years ago or so!) It’s recent enough that I’m surprised there’s no ebook edition, at the very least.
Note to self: do not get rid of this book!
My own nominees for this list are … multitudinous. To pick out just a few, I’d love to see new editions of Michael Shea’s Nifft books and In Yana, the Touch of Undying. And I have a real fondness for old anthologies, although I know those are supremely challenging — I’d be very happy if I could get eBook editions of, say, Kingdoms of Sorcery and Realms of Wizardry, both edited by Lin Carter, and likewise most or all of Brian Aldiss’ stuff — Galactic Empires 1 & 2, Space Opera, etc., etc. Oh, and I was going to mention all of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes, but I see the first couple volumes, at least, are still in print.
If “Growing Up Weightless” were reprinted under a different title and different author name, and information about its availability spread by word of mouth, would the relatives even notice?
(Alas, yes, I know that this would not be legal.)
I also loved “There and Back Again” and have a signed copy somewhere.
Come one, come all to Toronto. You can spend a delightful afternoon sampling copies of these and many other out-of-priint SFF books in the Judith Merril reference collection at the Lillian Smith library branch on College Street. The griffins at the door will welcome you.
very glad to see this post, especially as I had no idea that there were two WOW books I had never heard of. SF’s short printruns are one reason why I rarely resell SF books I have enjoyed. You can’t always find them again when you need to.
Seconding Saturnalia/Lion on Tharthee, both are great books. Its not often you see great characters like Whitey and Junior in books that really sit on the side of hard SF. My copies are falling apart and I doubt I could ever get better replacements.
Per Pat Murphy, Tolkien’s estate claimed that There and Back Again was an infringement on The Hobbit. While she disagreed, she and her publisher agreed to discontinue publication of the book. This is a shame, all 3 of her “Max Merriwell” books are great. I am especially fond of Wild Angel, I reread it every couple of years.
Phyllis Eisenstein’s Shadow of Earth is a favourite of mine. I love time-travel and alternate universe fiction and this book seems much more real than a lot of it.
The second book in Timothy Zahn’s Conquer trilogy is out of print, I wish it wasn’t
I was just looking around for a copy of “Wizard of the Pigeons” by Megan Lindholm (aka Robin Hobb) and was startled to discover it was out of print. Hugely seminal urban fantasy book – plus surely there are enough Robin Hobb fans that it’s worth bringing it back into print for completists!
I would dearly love an ebook of Caroline Stevermer’s very fine novel When the King Comes Home, which is loosely connected to her better-known A College of Magics and A Scholar of Magics.
(Edit: oooh, Wizard of the Pigeons is a great call! Also, Peter Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song.)
Yesterday I came across John Christopher’s A Wrinkle in the Skin and the Possessors side by side, both seem to be out of print and both have their fans. I was tempted, because the Death of Grass is still in print and packs a tremendous amount of power to this day. In the end I decided that my shelves are too overrrun to take any more books which I might not read.
1) I still have that edition of Doorways in the Sand. Well worth reading.
2) I recently went looking for my copy of The Flying Sorcerers to pull a quote for an article. Can’t find it. It’s out of print. Copies at Amazon start at $75. As a civilization we should be able to do better than this.
I encountered The Butterfly Kid in the early ’90s in my high school library. It was memorably weird, even though I was of the wrong generation to have any particular affinity for or familiarity with hippies, drugs, CIA conspiracies, or any combination thereof (namely, a CIA plot to control subversive hippies with alien drugs that provide reality-bending powers). At the time, my closest referent for the style was Douglas Adams, although a later author in the vein is Rudy Rucker.
Every John M. Ford book. Every John M. Ford book. There ain’t no greater literary tragedy or crime greater than Ford’s family trying to kill their own son’s books. I just want Bezos or Gates or some mega-rich sugar daddy to give ’em a check for a few million for permanent publication rights of all his books and start flooding bookstores with Ford books.
Dr Thanatos: Amazon is often not the best place to look for used books. Bookfinder shows copies of The Flying Sorcerers available for less than $4 shipped (to the US, at least).
However, it’s not out of print, as Amazon will sell you a brand-new paper or e-book for a reasonable price.
I was going to nominate Charles Burnett Swann, but see to my great pleasure that many of his books are back IN print, both in English and in French translation. Yay!
I saw a statistic once — I’m not sure of its provenance — that the works of 95% of authors go permanently out of print soon after the author’s death.
When I saw the title of this post, “The Fortunate Fall” was the one that first came to mind to me, FWIW. I tracked down a copy based on some of those small numbers of vocal fans and became one of them.
@14 See Abebooks https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/the-flying-sorcerers/ – copies available for $3.47
Is The Probability Pad really in print? I just went searching and couldn’t find a way to buy it new. I mean, not that I really want to, but I’m curious.
Tekalynn — Thomas Burnett Swann, you mean? (I think his reputation suffers somewhat because of the rush of short novels he put out in the last couple of years of his life, I suspect because he knew he was dying and wanted to leave as much money as he could to his heir (his sister, I think).) Two early shorter pieces are brilliant: “Where is the Bird of Fire?” and “The Manor of Roses”.
DOORWAYS IN THE SAND is a personal favorite of mine — it’s just lots of fun.
I have to admit I leave RITE OF PASSAGE off my list of favorite non-Heinlein Heinlein juveniles. I find its implied moral view repugnant. (It may be that that was Panshin’s intention, mind you.) But I’d like to see Panshin’s Villiers books in print — they are very enjoyable. Too bad he didn’t finish the series. (And I hope he doesn’t decide to finish them now, because they are books, I think, that had to be written at that time in his life, and in the field’s history.)
The ISFDB entry for the new edition of The Probability Pad.
Anything – no, everything by HM Hoover.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._M._Hoover
Although, in looking for the link, I discovered, to my absolute joy, that her books are available again. Go read This Time of Darkness (https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Darkness-H-Hoover-ebook/dp/B0752H82H9) and ORVIS (https://www.amazon.com/ORVIS-Journey-H-M-Hoover-ebook/dp/B0752DGWHV).
I do note that the publisher of these isn’t the original, which is curious.
Regarding John M. Ford: Fortunately, his family can do nothing to suppress his two outstanding STAR TREK novels, since those were done on a work-for-hire basis, so CBS controls the rights, not Ford’s family. A shame that doesn’t apply to his original work.
In the meantime, is Zenna Henderson still in print? I fear not . . ..
Psychohistorical Crisis is an impressive book, but the essential Donald Kingsbury novel is Courtship Rite (1982), which was nominated for a Hugo Award even though it was his first novel. It’s actually a prequel to another book he’s been working on for, oh, fifty or sixty years.
The novels of Wallace West have, I think, been out of print since the 1960s. The most interesting of them is The Memory Bank (1951, 1961), which might be described as a profound philosophical swashbuckler about an interstellar war among refugees from a destroyed Earth. It’s the kind of book that would be a 2000-page trilogy today, but the 1962 paperback consists of only 127 densely packed pages. Other West books worth reprinting include the Martian romance, The Bird of Time (1936-1953, 1959) and Lords of Atlantis (1960).
@23 Thomas, of course. Apologies.
Doorways in the Sand is my favorite Zelazny book—I think the only one I still reread, after having been a big Zelazny fan in high school. “A perfect minor work” is a perfect way to describe it; in fact I think Zelazny was much better at minor works than major ones. This one is light in tone and construction, but it has interesting and moving parts still. There’s a long monologue from a minor character right at the end that I still love, and is as good as anything else he ever wrote.
My other favorite Zelazny is Roadmarks, also a minor one.
Zelazny’s Doorways in the sand is my favorite of all his works— much re-read.
i can’t believe there isn’t a kindle version of Panshin’s Rite of Passage… I wasn’t a fan of any of his other work, but that one stayed with me.
Along the same lines, how about Doris Egan’s Ivory books, Pauline Ashwell, Unwillingly to Earth, Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords, and Jane Emerson’s City of Diamonds? And Amy Thompson’s books, her trilogy that I vividly remember, as well as the standalone Storyteller, would be nice to see in a new context. I also had a fondness for Marti Steussy’s Forests of Night and the whole concept of elite First In exploration and contact, but it isn’t quite in the class of these others.
For fantasy, I was going to add Rebecca Bradley’s Gil trilogy, but t looks like that is now available if still sadly obscure.
Roger Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. I know everyone loves the Amber stories (and I’m not knocking them) but I love his short stories and non-amber books. A Night in the Lonesome October and Roadmarks are both really REALLY good and make me wish he had gone back to those worlds for a few more books. But they’ve both been out of print for awhile now.
Even if the publishers don’t want to reprint them, I wish the they could make out of print books available as ebooks.
@26–The NESFA collection of Zenna Henderson’s People stories, INGATHERING, is in print and available for purchase. Everything else she wrote, though…
@10., That Zahn book appears to be in print in paperback still. I’ve certainly seen lots of copies, and Amazon has it at list price.
Hmm…as the foundation series by Asimov is one of my favorite series of all time I am very skeptical of anyone trying to redo it. Is the book any good? How much does it change? The central themes and messages of the foundation novels of avoiding cultural inertia at almost any cost spoke quite loudly to me. Also dislike the idea of anything being “not talkable or presentable” in artistic media but certainly can see why a book with a pedophilia subplot didn’t sell well. Surely it didn’t present it as good or even ok right?
I don’t know how well the Psychohistorical Crisis sold or didn’t sell but given that a number of beloved SF series have incredibly problematic subplots about adult men and tweens, I doubt the wife husbandry aspect played a role one way or the other.
Patrick Tilley’s Amtrak Wars is sadly out of print. A big epic fantasy/post-apocalyptic SF/samurai series set in a far future North America, it’s hugely entertaining (if bonkers) and quite unlike anything else in the genre.
JDN@24: Price 44.99, paperback format, reprints the 1970 edition including both cover art and copyright page, new publisher and date of publication not given? ISFDB doesn’t link to the Amazon page in question, but I’d bet a shiny penny that’s someone selling a used copy of the original, and screwing up the listing.
The Ivory trilogy by Doris Egan
The Far Futures anthology edited by Gregory Benford
War Birds by R. M. Meluch
Some of Glen Cook’s book like his Darkwar trilogy, The Dragon Never Sleeps, the Dread Empire books, they were available for a short time from Night Shade via Baen, but I didn’t buy them then, and when Night Shade run into problems, the ebooks vanished :-(
Let me try this again (when I tried to post yesterday, the site was in one of its “won’t admit you clicked Post” moods):
I suspect the problem with The Butterfly Kid is figuring out where the rights landed after Chester Anderson’s passing back in 1991 (per upstream discussion, my guess is that not only wasn’t there a literary executor, there may be no living heirs at all). If anyone knows, it might be Michael Kurland.
My own candidate for this list is 1978’s The Lastborn of Elvinwood by the late Linda Haldeman, published a decade ahead of its time (Ms. Haldeman, no relation to Joe, was very much in the same spiritual and tonal camp as some of the Scribblies, particularly Emma Bull and Patricia Wrede). I count this book a lost and underrated classic, and would very much like to see it and Haldeman’s other two novels back in print — as well as, perhaps, an e-collection of her short stories, because the one or two of those I’ve read are very nearly as amazing.
@39 — It looks like all of those Cook eBooks are currently available on Amazon, at least here in the US.
I’m not in the US, so maybe that’s the reason, but the only Cook ebooks I can see are the Black Company, Garrett files, Instrumentalities and the Tower of Fear
I miss the juvenile novels of Hugh Walters (the impenetrable pseudonym of Walter Hughes), which were a staple of my childhood – I managed to get hold of the first one, Blast Off at Woomera, many years ago, and picked up Expedition Venus when my local library liquidated its stock… but that’s all I have. The Suck Fairy has been relatively kind to these – they never had any pretensions towards being Great Literature to start with, but they’re reasonably fun, they’re well thought out and realistic (by the standards of the day, at least – a juvenile version of the Serious Men With Slide Rules And Clipboards genre of British hard-SF). I’d fall on these with glad cries of joy, if they ever reappeared. Stranger things have happened – the “Kemlo” stories of E.C. Eliot (roughly the same vintage, rather lower quality if you ask me) have recently emerged in e-editions. Maybe there is hope for Walters and his multi-national team of young astronauts yet.
Arthur Byron Cover’s Autumn Angels and Platypus of Doom.
@42 — Yes, that’d explain it. And that’s another challenging thing about eBooks — if you don’t live in a country where it’s licensed, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to get a copy legally. At least with physical books, you can usually import a copy without too much fuss.
@ecbatan: (re <i>Rite</i>) what is repugnant about ~”Everybody is a real person; there are no spear carriers among them?” It’s definitely a character-learns-better story, subset stable-society-is-rotten-at-the-core, but IMO a lot easier to get through to that point than (e.g.) <i>Through a Million Open Doors</i> (another c-l-b story).
Ford’s <i>Casting Fortune</i> also came out from Tor, but ISFDB shows no reprints; it’s two of his Liavek stories, plus a novella that fits the shared world. Has all of his intensity, plus scraps of a wonderful theatrical farce that he never actually wrote.
I was going to note Tepper’s “Marianne” triptych — all of the intensity in small packages, without some of the later obsessions — but I see it’s available as part of an Orion ebook. OTOH, no promises (per @45) that’s readable outside the UK; I don’t know ebook formats.
Oh, another set: Elizabeth Willey’s Well-Favored Man trilogy, that came out back in the early 90s and doesn’t appear to have ever been reprinted.
augh — copied from a text page and didn’t check the format conversion. Moderator please feel free to convert the HTML to Tor’s italics.
And I just checked: Ford’s first collection, From the End of the Twentieth Century, is no longer in print. Unfortunate, as his short work was also excellent.
23. ecbatan,
the Villiers trilogy is in ebook, called New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers.
I would love to see Richard Purtill’s Kaphtu series in ebook.
@46 (CHip137) — Yes, I think maybe that was Panshin’s intention — for the heroine to realize that the society she was a part of, that committed truly vile genocide, was rotten at the core. And it may be my shallow reading (age 14 or so) that missed that — but when I read it, I read it as cheering on the elimination of the somewhat ugly planet …
(I confess my memories are vague.)
I’m not disputing arguments of that nature (though I think maybe even so Panshin was having his cake and eating it too) — just recording why I don’t rank RITE OF PASSAGE with the best of Heinlein’s juveniles, nor indeed with GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS.
Anyway, the notion that RITE OF PASSAGE deserved a Nebula the same year NOVA (and STAND ON ZANZIBAR) was eligible is just mind-boggling.
I’m happy, by the way, when otherwise unavailable texts are available as ebooks, but that said, I still consider them “Out of Print” in that case.
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. A superb fantasy.
The Samurai Cat series, or at least the first couple. I believe the author has reprinted the first one himself, but in trade paperback format with the marvelous illustrations in greyscale instead of colour.
@52/Lorna Toolis: I have long wished Disney would discover Barry Hughart’s book. I want to see the “bridge of birds“!
@53/bmlg: Alas, Mark E. Rogers, Miaowara Tomokato’s biographer, died in 2014. Saying hi to him was something I always looked forward to, when I attended conventions.
@34/dwcole: Like a lot of people who loved the original Foundation Trilogy, Donald Kingsbury was appalled by the way Isaac Asimov continued it, destroying its themes by linking it to his robot series, and so on. Thus, Psychohistorical Crisis is his attempt to continue the original trilogy the right way.
A couple of the forty (mostly positive) reviews of the book on Amazon mention something about a pedophiliac subplot. As best I can recall, a street girl takes the “brain-damaged” protagonist under her wing; and then something something something.
The book also has an unusual problem: the editor, the late David Hartwell, was too big a fan of Kingsbury’s writing. (In fact, the last time I ever spoke to Hartwell, he was asking about Kingsbury.) As a result, he let Kingsbury get away with all sorts of digressions on any topics he was thinking about at the time. Judging from the reviews, some people liked the digressions, while they drove others crazy.
In any case, I would stick with Courtship Rite. I like to say, when Kingsbury writes about men, as in Psychohistorical Crisis, he writes in gorgeous black and white. But when he writes about women, as in Courtship Rite, he writes in technicolor.
“The rights to his works reverted to his blood relatives, who seem intent on erasing evidence of Ford’s writing career”
This is simply not true. His executor was extremely kind and helpful when we wanted permission to reprint his Liavek stories and poems.
It would be good to research claims before making them public.
A major reason for the works of deceased authors going out of print is often the inability of publisher to find out who holds the rights to those works, and the challenges of dealing with heirs who may have no understanding of the publishing business (e.g., asking unrealistic fees) or may have personal reasons for denying rights (e.g. religious or moral objections, or multiple heirs unwilling to cooperate with each other). The takeaway for writers should be, to make sure to have a will and to make sure to designate specifically in the will who inherits the copyrights. It may also be important to designate a “literary executor” to control those rights on behalf of the heirs if they are unfamiliar with the industry, or in the case of multiple heirs where getting all of them to “sign off” may be problematic. As I understand, that was what kept so much of R.A. Lafferty’s work out of print for so long–there were so many heirs that contacting all of them and getting their assent was a most daunting challenge.
Russell H, that’s often true, but based on my experience, it does not apply in John M. Ford’s case.
Beth Hilgartner’s “Colors in the Dreamweaver’s Loom” and “Feast of the Trickster” were two of my favorite books as an early teen; bought used copies recently and was surprised to discover they’d weathered the test of time quite well. Out of print, unfortunately. Also “Wyrm” by Mark Fabi is a Ready-Player-One-esque pop culture tribute opera I adored reading in the late 90s. It is such a bummer to try to recommend a much-loved book to someone only to find they can’t lay hands on it. Hopefully the prevalence of ebooks nowadays means things will remain accessible more readily for the future.
@58–For the record, both “Colors in the Dreamweaver’s Loom” and “Feast of the Trickster” are available in ebook, along with *checks* everything of Hilgartner’s except for “A Murder for Her Majesty”, for some reason, and that one’s in print in paper.
My two favorite out of print authors are Ann Maxwell (who after her SFF start became romance author Elizabeth Lowell) and Gael Baudino.
You can see the romance influences in Maxwell’s books, but the SciFi elements are interesting, and I wish she had finished her Fire Dancer series. Timeshadow Rider is my favorite and I reread it every couple years.
Baudino wrote more fantasy, and it’s hard to pin my favorites of her out of print works, but I think I have to go with her Strands series (even though she hates them now, they have done so much for me). Starts with Strands of Starlight. If I find a complete set at a used book store, I’ll pick them up so I can give them to someone else.
Don’t forget to check out your library for some of these books, there is a good chance you can borrow a copy even if it’s out of print!
Heh. I am reviewing a Maxwell next week…
Bridge of Birds is in print and you can get all three in ebook format omnibus edition,The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox
Heck, I’m trying to track down copies of the juvenile books Heinlein wrote so I can introduce my 12 year old to some classic SF
As a person who only ever purchases books second hand and rereads them enthusiastically, I have been blissfully unaware of this issue. It’s not the place to ride my own hobby horse … but the de-valuing of well-enjoyed books and authors is another symptom of the “modern” economic miracle.
At this point, there’s little reason for anything not to be available in ebook form. It astonishes me that some of my favorite SF is just not available for instant purchase around the world.
Venus Equilateral and other George O. Smith titles. Asimov’s Black Widower series. Mack Reynolds’ complete catalog. Zelazny’s Lord of Light, for gosh sake!
If I were near my bookshelf, I could probably come up with a dozen more examples.
I’ve experienced this problem, notably when I discover an interesting book that’s a later part of a series and try to find the first in line. Information Age, ptah!
I love Zelazny’s books, especially Doorways and Lord of Light. Lucky for me I bought copies of both years ago, making a re-read possible.
BTW, Tor, does it affect insurance rates for a book publisher to employ a reviewer who “is surprisingly flammable?” Not complaining, mind you, I enjoyed the column very much…
If I didn’t still have There and Back Again by Murphy, I’d swear I had dreamed up reading it. It is a great adaption of the tale. SF Book Club had it in catalog at once point, I think.
I’m glad to see Psychohistorical Crisis getting a mention, and I appreciate the note about the Prometheus Award, especially since I nominated it for that award; I thought it was a really brilliant deconstruction of Asimov’s Foundation series, and especially of the problems with a centralized model of social decision making. Even so, I think it’s an even worse loss that Courtship Rite is no longer available. It’s one of my absolute favorite science fiction novels; the scene where Oelita the Heretic confronts her god seems to me to be sfnal in the purest form, and I can’t read it unmoved, any more than I can the climax of Lord of Light (which happily seems to be in no danger of being forgotten).
Help keep the secondhand market alive. Amazon has at least five of these on offer s/h. (Other booksellers are available. :-) )
Michael Scott Rohan – Winter of the World series, and the Spiral trilogy. I particularly love the latter. They are available now as e-books, but still o/p as actual books.
Many of Beth HIlgartner’s books are available in eBook format.
I second (third, fourth?) wanting ALL of Zenna Henderson’s stuff available again. Including the non-People stuff that never got compiled into a book.
(Speaking of which…WHO wrote the short story about a tree being hit by a car…from the *tree’s* point of view? Anyone remember that? It’s been sooooo long, I don’t remember much about it, beyond the tree talking about being “stuck” instead of being able to shift perspective like it was supposed to. I *thought* it was a Zenna Henderson story, but I cannot find it.
Also, does anyone remember there being a difference between either the hard cover and paperback versions of either Holding Wonder or The Anything Box, OR, maybe a difference between the American publication and European? Am I crazy in remembering a couple extra stories in one of the books in the School Library (on Base, in Germany) that weren’t in my copies in the States? I always read them together and it’s been nearly 30 years since I read the ones on Base, so I have no idea which book or what stories.)
It seems the first 3 Witch World Books by Andre Norton are oopat least in the US. Also what the heck is going on with most of David Eddings stuff not being available in the US in ebook format?
I started my site in 2000 and became an Amazon associate about a year later. At that time I went through all the pages and listed every book mentioned up to that point. About 49% were out of print, and it was about the same a year after that when I created pages listing all the Hugo & Nebula awards, including all finalists not just the winners. I haven’t taken the time to do another recount, but more than 15 years later I doubt the percentage has changed much. I have seen a lot of e-books released but not print editions. Good thing I’ve kept a lot of older books, but even if others come back into print I doubt I’ll have the room.
The Thor tax ruling in the 1980s is one of the reasons book backlists became much shorter. I don’t know if it’s still in effect, but at a minimum it changed publisher practice. It affected the price and availability of all books, not just science fiction. I’ve always wondered why we don’t give more favorable tax treatment to books anyway. Here’s an article on the issue from 2005. http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/how-thor-power-hammered-publishing/
Went to the link for Doorways in the Sand and it’s not available from any of the ebook sources.
We (spouse and I) have some of these in our personal collection. Purchased when they were new, and I’m sorry to learn that they’ve gone out of print. We still occasional make humorous references to one another drawn from The Butterfly Kid. Chester Anderson also wrote a fun little risqué piece called The Pink Palace, about the tribulations of a young library student who inherits a cat house.
I adore Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand and went to the trouble of tracking down a hardcover, sadly used, of course. Here’s hoping a new one will be in hardcover.
I’d add Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds. You can get it on kindle, but I would love it in something besides a mass market paperback.
I want to add to my previous comment that though I greatly respect John M. Ford’s writing, and I remember Rite of Passage Fondly, my own top favorite novel-length Heinlein juvenile is Gregory Benford’s Jupiter Project. (I specify “novel-length” because both Fritz Leiber’s “Space-Time for Springers” and Samuel Delaney’s “We, in Some Strange Powers Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” read to me as Heinlein juveniles at short story length, and I love both of them.)
As a public librarian, it is my duty to pop my head in when I see articles like this and remind everyone to stop by their local library and learned about Inter-Library Loan! In my library, as long as a book is owned by another library in the lower 48 states, we can usually get it! Obviously, our transporter technology is lacking so it might take a couple days/weeks to get to you, but you’ve waited this long, right? I live in Maryland and I’ve had comic books sent from California! If a library owns a copy, we will try our best to get it for you!
Just a quick search on WorldCat turned up several libraries with “Fortunate Fall” in their collection!
http://www.worldcat.org/title/fortunate-fall/oclc/961152822&referer=brief_results
And if you like the book, just send Raphael Carter a check afterwards. Everyone wins.
possibly less well known due to the fact she was australian, but MK WREN has the most amazing trilogy in the Phoenix Legacy which has been oop for decades. I have two complete collections in pbk that took me several years to secure.
The Wind in Cairo by Judith Tarr was so rare at some point i had people emailingmebegging to buy my copy that i had listed on Library thing. I think its an ebook now.
i traded some biggles books for a copy of This Interior Life and Point of Honor by Heydt about 10yrs ago :)
sent someone in Ireland a missing book of the cheysuli series too
another sad part of this is that most of our librarians are focused on maintaining a newer collection; books like the ones mentioned above would be casualties, even if they get circulated, simply because of the date. It’s sad to me, as I feel most patrons don’t give a whit about how the cover looks or if it’s a new book or not. One example I would like to throw in here is a book I can no longer find, the comic book (it predates the genteel-sounding ‘graphic novel’ by at least 2 decades, and the frames were set up as comics) that was illustrated by Wallace Wood, et al. on some of the very classic Bradbury tales. It was the very book that hooked me on sci fi when I was just 7 years old. Wishing I could find it for our school library!
#81: Um, M. K. Wren was not Australian – that was the pen name of one Martha Kay Renfroe, and Ms. Wren was probably better known for a mystery series starring Oregon coast bookseller Conan Flagg (also probably OP now; the author passed away a couple of years ago). She lived and wrote in Oregon, and I believe some of her work was recognized with Oregon-based literary awards.
Sometimes what’s out of print is odd. Tomoe Gozen, by Jessica Amanda Salmonsen, is apparently out of print, but the sequel, The Golden Naginata. However, both are available on Amazon from third-party sellers, as is There and Back Again and a number of titles mentioned here.
Nothing useful to add, just happy to see some favorite books mentioned. Love “Doorways in the Sand,” love Barry Hughart’s work, and I reread Gael Baudino’s “Gossamer Axe” every couple of years just for the sheer fun of it.
Emergence by David Palmer would be a good one and would have ben perfect to release when the Hunger Games books were gaining popularity
Louise Cooper’s Indigo series and her Time Masters series
Zenna Henderson’s The People series
I’m in danger of having my paper copies of these books disintegrating
@26 — Yes! Louise Cooper!
I stumbled across an amazing sf book with a female lead in the 90’s in a group home. Cant remember the title or author. Cant find it. It had banned genetic engineering run by aliens that humans avoided like the plague, emotional control implants (that the woman had the remote control to her own, thereby letting her con the pirate captain) and more. It was a trilogy and I’ve never seen them since. Any hints would be dearly appreciated!
@72: You’re looking for “The Direction of the Road” by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve got it in her anthology Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, whose copyright page tells me it originally appeared in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight.
@88 – That would be the Gap Series by Stephan Donaldson. Actually five books (I think). Very well done sci-fi, inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but tough on the main female protagonist.
In Ontario, this often ends with a note from the local library that the only copy they found is in the Merril, whose impressive collection is non-circulating.
81: The Phoenix Trilogy is in print in ebook form. So are the Heydts, which the author has made available for download here.
For years, The Snow Queen was out of print but the sequels were not. This is because until Tor acquired The Snow Queen, it was with Warner, while the others were by Tor.
What I would love to see in print is a complete collection of Vinge’s short work. It would fill one large volume nicely.
@92 — I think that’s a problem with Cherryh’s back catalog as well — at this point, most of the DAW titles are available electronically, but almost none of the other publishers (except for a few titles, such as Heavy Time and Hellburner, where she’s been able to claw back the rights and sell them on her own website).
I’d settle for digital versions rather than print versions of the Cooper, Palmer and Henderson books. I,once a month, go to all the book product pages and click on the want this in digital format link
I had a large number of books mentioned in my collection until 5 years ago – when I gave the lot to a sister and moved… I might be able to get them back, of course if I were so inclined. I have found it odd that so much Heinlein seems unavailable – not that I’m that fussed about his work (with one or two exceptions) but his name comes up so often as an Important Figure of the Past…
MK Wren is a great idea. I never got absorbed in her mysteries, but despite the really dumb politics, her trilogy was an awesome read.
Has anyone thought about Julia Ecklar’s Regenesis? The issues about ecology are even a bit relevant these days. I am vaguely remembering several other environmental sf novels I can’t see on my bookshelf-at least one involving a young girl reinventing bumblebees from scratch, and from an analysis of the ecological niche.
@72:
>>”Speaking of which…WHO wrote the short story about a tree being hit by a car…from the *tree’s* point of view? Anyone remember that? It’s been sooooo long, I don’t remember much about it, beyond the tree talking about being “stuck” instead of being able to shift perspective like it was supposed to. I *thought* it was a Zenna Henderson story, but I cannot find it.”
Sounds like ‘The Direction of the Road’ by Ursula le Guin. IIRC it’s collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
…
As for out-of-print books… I’m pretty sure David Gerrold’s unfinished ‘War Against the Chtorr’ series has been out of print for a long while. Given that the fourth book came out in the early 90s and ended on a massive cliffhanger, this may well be a blessing in disguise. George RR Martin fans don’t know how good they have it…
For those who’ve never read them and find the manly-man titles off-putting: The Chtorr books are kinda-sorta Heinlein pastiches or responses, with a deeply flawed and very much un-manly-man protagonist, much 80s weirdness and a relentlessly downbeat tone. At the same time, they include plenty of fascinating scientific speculation as more is painstakingly learned about the enemy.
Basically, Earth is invaded not by an alien species, but by an entire alien ecosystem from viruses on up to apex predators. Which include, among other things, giant pink furry people-eating worms. The psychological effect of all this on the survivors is… severe.
I read them a few years ago secondhand, and had to resort to skim-reading here and there due to padding, but there’s plenty to enjoy. Fairly gruesome, though. (Also note that some early editions were censored by the publisher.)
The number one reason to track them down is the amazingly detailed and convincing alien ecosystem gradually unveiled in the series. Gerrold asked biologist Jack Cohen (of ‘Science of Discworld’ fame) to help out, and it shows. Especially in the fourth book.
One of the things I love about the Chtorr ecosystem is that the aliens aren’t ‘cool’. That is, they don’t look or act like they were dreamed up by a human artist to a) look awesome and b) scare the heck out of us (unlike, say the xenomorphs from Alien). They’re just Nature doing its thing on some other planet, and are far more disturbing and frightening for that reason. Giant pink furry worms are the least of it, believe me. That fourth book again… gah.
The fifth book has been about a year away from publication for, oh, a quarter of a century now. I suppose the publishers plan to rerelease the whole series when it finally comes out, which is presumably why they’ve never come back into print.
Oops–looks like 72’s question was answered days ago! I swear there were only 75 comments when I posted mine. Clearly my Tor-comment-fu is feeble.
(adds column idea to list)
@97 “Sounds like ‘The Direction of the Road’ by Ursula le Guin. IIRC it’s collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.”
THANK YOU! I have been trying to find it for years! Will go hunt that down and see if it matches my vague memories.
(And, THANK YOU to 89, I think I actually have that book. Haven’t read it in a while, will have to pull it out and see.)
Thank you for pointing out that Joan D. Vinge’s The Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt has a prequel, and that they are together in Heaven Cronicles. Outcasts is really good. Very fond memories of that one. I wonder if there are other works from Joan D. Vinge that could be interesting as well?
You can find a number of these for reasonable prices on ABEBooks.com. I know because based on reading this, I just ordered three of them.
David R. Palmer’s Emergence is one I’d love to read again. Biological bomb war with the Soviets leaves just a handful of modern mutant folks alive in the US. Follow one young lady’s trek across the depopulated US. He has another book about a millionaire manbat who flies off into space that’s also pretty good.
Read Butterfly Kid 15 or 20 times in high school went back at 10 year reunion to from cool library but it was already gone. Sigh.
@97/Zen Shrugs: “The Chtorr books are kinda-sorta Heinlein pastiches or responses, with a deeply flawed and very much un-manly-man protagonist, much 80s weirdness and a relentlessly downbeat tone.”
To be precise, that’s Heinlein in “juvenile“ (YA) mode; and the protagonist, while a Callow Youth who still has a lot to learn, is pretty darn manly, as I recall.
Due to some distinction I can’t remember, our hero is assigned to be part of the purely symbolic honor guard for a live broadcast introducing one of the alien monsters to the public. The night before, in a particularly Heinleinesqe touch, he decides to try out his new weapon, symbolic or not, and finds he was issued the wrong ammunition. As a result, the next day, he is ready when the monster gets loose …
Unfortunately the later books are seriously marred by the inclusion of an est-like therapeutic cult, perhaps an interest of David Gerrold’s at the time, which everybody in the books takes very very seriously, unlike in real life.
I’m so happy that Aqueduct Press released an eBook version of Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords this month!
Delia Marshall Turner– two books– Nameless Magery and Of Swords and Spells, and both excellent.
It is truly a shame (not to mention a disservice to the fans-potential or otherwise– and the authors,) that these classic science-fiction/fantasy novels are sadly long out of print.. Thank you for passing the insight along..
Mandrake by Susan Cooper. A chilling novel about people becoming more and more territorial. If you’re out of place, you’ll get killed. As I recall, there was no explanation of why this was happening.
Does anyone know if Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice is out for print? It’s on sale at Amazon but only second hand from third-party sellers.
Sylvantrails@72, it’s three years later and there’s no way you’re going to read this, but for reference this is almost certainly Le Guin’s _The Direction of the Road_, anthologized in the (IMHO simply amazing) collection _The Wind’s Twelve Quarters_.
@NullNix: Be of good cheer, people earlier in the thread gave them that answer and they certainly were able to find the story.
“Wizard of the Pigeons” and “Cloven Hooves” by Meghan Lindholm has been re-issued with new cover art. I saw the books in the book shop a few months ago.
Any SF in which trees feature prominently is likely to be Le Guin.
@114 — That’s not true in any literal sense.
For example, trees and forests are all over Jack Vance’s work from the Fifties, before Le Guin even began to publish — and then there’s that obscure English academic with four names …
@@@@@ 114, Jim Janney:
Any SF in which trees feature prominently is likely to be Le Guin.
In Mercedes Lackey’s Elementa Magic series, Blood Red and its follow up From a High Tower are both set in the Black Forest.
See also Uprooted by Novik.