Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Science Fiction 8 - Chapman, Clarke, Compton, Cowper & Crowley

To finish off authors whose names begin with a "c" here is an odd assortment of the above mentioned authors.

First Stepan Chapman's Troika - truly one of the weirdest books I've ever read. It was sent to me by Jeff VanderMeer several years ago. It is one of those rare Ministry of Whimsy books.

chapman_troika
Next, the sole copy of an Arthur C Clarke book I have in my possession - The Fountains of Paradise.

clarke_fountains
Richard Cowper is a British writer and I was very fond of his Road To Corlay trilogy, sort of post apocalypse science fiction/fantasy. The first two books have lovely Don Maitz covers.

cowper_road cowper_tapestry cowper_kinship

This collection of short stories by Cowper also has a terrific cover by Don Maitz.

cowper_ships

D G Compton's Synthajoy somehow found its way into my collection. The cover is slightly psychedelic - try scrolling up and down and the circles spin.

compton_synthajoy

And lastly, to wind up the ''c's", John Crowley's early science fiction novels. John Crowley is one of my all time favourite writers and I first discovered his books with the SF novel Beasts in the mid 1970s. From then on I collected pretty well all of his works. I do indeed have a first edition copy of Little, Big on another bookshelf, and have prepaid for a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition, finally due this year, which is sure to be a very fine example of bibliophilic eye candy. For this entry however I will only display mass market paperbacks of The Deep, Beasts, Engine Summer and Great Work of Time.

crowley_deep crowley_beasts
crowley_enginesummer crowley_greatwork
Next - Phillip K Dick, Samuel Delaney etc.

2 comments:

Ian Sales said...

...and have prepaid for a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition...

Snap. Happily, I bought it at a time when the £ was very strong against the $. I'm looking forward to finally seeing it.

I have quite a few Crowley first editions myself - all of them except The Deep and Little, Big, in fact.

Anne S said...

Well I can't remember what the Aussie dollar was against the US dollar - low, I suspect - when I first paid for the numbered edition in 2005. But that edition is now worth $50.00 dollars more than I paid for it, so I guess I'm winning in the currency stakes.