wings of fame | It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

March 5, 2016
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March madness

Well, not strictly March – after all, we’re less than a week into the month. Some of the following were bought during February. Obviously. So far this year I’ve managed to chip away at the TBR, by reading more books than I’ve bought each month… but I think I might have a bit trouble doing that in March. Especially since it’s the Eastercon at the end of the month… Oh well, never mind. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading them all. One day…

Some first editions. I’m not a huge fan of Wolfe’s novels, but PS Publishing recently set up a discount website, and they only wanted £6 for a signed and numbered edition of Home Fires. That’s also where I bought Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God. For £4. Bargain. I recommend visiting PS2. Other Stories I’ve been eagerly awaiting for more than a year as I am a fan of Park’s writing. Murder at the Loch is the third of Eric Brown’s entertaining 1950s-set murder-mysteries. And my mother found J: A Novel for me in a charity shop.

Aeroplanes… I’ve been picking up copies of Wings of Fame whenever I see good condition copies going for a reasonable price on eBay. Now that I’ve finally found a copy of Volume 9, I have eighteen of the twenty volumes. I’ve also been doing the same for Putnam’s Aircraft Since 19– series, although I forget why I began buying them in the first place. And with Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft Since 1913, I now own sixteen of them. X-Planes of Europe and X-Planes of Europe II I saw on Amazon, and I’m fascinated by the aircraft designed during the Cold War which didn’t make it into production.

Some of yer actual science fiction. Invaders is an anthology of genre fiction by literary fiction writers; I’m reviewing it for Interzone. Patchwerk was given to me by the author; I wrote about it here. The Price of the Stars I bought to review for SF Mistressworks (it has a male co-author, but that’s no reason to ignore it). Sargasso I found in a charity shop, and looks to be a techno-thriller potboiler about an Apollo mission. And finally, Aphrodite Terra is a thing at last – a paperback thing, that is; it’s been an ebook thing since the middle of December (although Amazon have yet to figure out the two editions are of the same book…).

I bought a couple of these Anatomy of the Ship books as research for A Prospect of War back in the day, and ended up picking up copies whenever I saw them going cheap on eBay. Like The Cruiser Bartolomeo Coleoni and The Destroyer The Sullivans. I have more than a dozen of them.

Finally, some translated fiction, some Malcolm Lowry, and a Lawrence Durrell. I read Munif’s Cities of Salt a couple of years ago and thought it very good, so I picked up the second book of the trilogy last year, and now I have the final one, Variations on Night and Day. I recently read Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition, also part of the Canadian Literature Collection series, and the first time Lowry’s “lost” second novel had seen print. So I decided to get these two critical editions, also published in the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Literature Collection series – The 1940 Under the Volcano (I’ve read Under the Volcano, the final published edition, of course), and Swinging the Maelstrom (which I read under the title Lunar Caustic, but which was apparently a version cobbled together posthumously from a number of different manuscripts). Finally, Pope Joan is for the Durrell collection. Not an easy book to find in this edition.

June 13, 2015
by iansales 1 Comment

Retail therapy

There are many different forms of retail therapy. Some people buy shoes, some people buy clothes they wear once and then abandon in their wardrobe. I buy books, often hard-to-find secondhand books – and, yes, it may well take me years before I get around to reading them, but never mind. Here is the latest batch…

Two books about aircraft. I pick up copies of Wings of Fame when good condition ones appear on eBay. I now have all but four of its twenty-issue run. The Handley Page Victor was one of the most iconic-looking of the Cold War bombers, and there were quite a few that looked pretty iconic. I remember seeing a simulator at some RAF exhibition many years ago. Urban Structures for the Future, on the other hand, is architecture – futurist architecture from 1971, in fact. I saw it on eBay and couldn’t resist.

And from the air to beneath the sea. Project SEALAB is a 1966 junior book about the US Navy project to study living at the bottom of the sea, which ended in tragedy with SEALAB III. I wrote about it here. Diving for Science is, as the cover states, a history of deep submersibles, and Farming the Sea is about living, and farming of course, underwater.

Two more installments in a pair of Cinebook series, both translated from the French. The Septimus Wave follows on from an earlier book, The Yellow “M”. Châtelet Station, Destination Cassiopeia, however, is the first of a two-parter. They are volumes twenty and nine in their series respectively. I wrote about both of them here.

Sisters of The Revolution I backed on kickstarter, and though it took a while to appear it looks like it was worth the wait. It’s an anthology of femininst sf by women writers, and it contains a few favourites. Hearing Voices is an anthology of fiction reprinted from Litro magazine and includes my story of Space Age fashion and Apollo astronauts, ‘The Spaceman and the Moon Girl’. The Language of Power is the fourth – but not the last, one hopes – in Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. I noticed copies were getting a bit scarce so I thought it time to pick one up.

Despite the fancy cover design, Poseidon’s Wake is the final book of the Poseidon’s Children trilogy. The Lady from Zagreb is the tenth Bernie Gunther book from Philip Kerr, who’s now churning out novels like a machine. Gilead is a signed first edtion.

And while I’m at it – this, Gollancz, is not how you do a trilogy. Two books that match and then… seriously?

June 27, 2014
by iansales 2 Comments

Bibliomania, or another book haul post

I have an unfortunate habit of jollying myself up by buying books. I suspect I’m not alone in this. And while some of my purchases can be justified – I’m a writer, I need these books for research – others are just because I want to read them… And then they sit on my bookshelves for a decade before I finally get around to reading them. It may be even longer for some…

Three for SF Mistressworks. I forget where I stumbled across mention of Brenda Pearce – perhaps someone mentioned her on Twitter? Anyway, she appears to be well and truly forgotten, so I immediately tracked down Worlds for the Grabbing, the second of her two novels. I thought Memories and Visions was a critical work when I ordered it, but it proved to be a women-only anthology, containing a number of well-known names, such as Laurell K Hamilton (her second short story sale, it’s not even in isfdb.org), L Timmel Duchamp (her first fiction sale), RM Meluch and even Lorraine Schein (who will appear in my mini-anthology, Aphrodite Terra). In the Chinks of the World Machine is an important critical work on feminist sf, published by The Women’s Press in 1988.

Some books for the watery research shelf. The Deepest Days was a lucky find – it’s about Edwin Link’s Man in Sea project by the diver, Robert Sténuit, who spent 24 hours on the floor of the Mediterranean and so became the world’s first “aquanaut”. Exploring the Deep Frontier is a ginormous coffee-table book by National Geographic, which I think was published to accompany a television series. And Stalin’s Gold is about the salvage operation in 1981 to recover 4.5 tonnes of gold from HMS Edinburgh, which sank in 1942 carrying part-payment from the USSR to the allies for supplies. The ship lay in 245 m (800 ft) of water, just north of Kola Bay.

I’ve been picking up issues of Wings of Fame on eBay when I see new copies going for a decent price. Only twenty issues were published, and I now have twelve of them. Our Space Age Jets I found on eBay and I just couldn’t resist the title.

I was in a charity shop, and I found three DH Lawrence paperbacks, all in the same design: white, with Lawrence’s name in orange, and a photograph square in the middle of the front cover. I already had three the same back home, so I thought, these will make a nice set. A bit of research and I discovered that Penguin had published twenty such paperbacks between 1970 and 1977, not just the novels but also short story collections and non-fiction. So I’m going to collect them. John Thomas and Lady Jane, The First Lady Chatterley and The Mortal Coil and Other Stories were from the charity shop; Three Novellas: The Ladybird / The Fox / The Captain’s Doll and The Woman Who Rode Away I found on eBay.