NY: Signet, 1982.
Early in his career, King, the modern master of suspense and horror fiction, felt the need for an alter ego through whom he could tell stories of a content and in a style he didn’t feel comfortable doing under his own name, and so he created “Richard Bachman.”
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.
I first read this one shortly after it was published, when I was in junior high, and it’s still one of my two or three favorites among Heinlein’s novels. This was also his “fastest” novel — written in thirteen days after his wife unintentionally gave him the title, based on a cat/snow incident exactly like that described in the opening of the book.
NY: Ace, 1968.
Panshin has never made it to the first rank of SF authors, really, though this novel — his first, though it took him a decade or two to get it published — was recognized almost immediately as a “classic,” whatever that might mean. It’s a couple of centuries in the future and mankind is now divided between those who live on a dozen asteroid-size Ships and those who descend from the colonists dropped by the Ships on a hundred or so planets (the “mudeaters” as they often are unkindly referred to on the Ships). Earth itself is gone, having committed suicide-by-overpopulation.
NY: Morrow, 1993.
Kress is one of the best science fiction novelists around and has been for a couple of decades. So, even though she’s won several serious awards, it’s a puzzle why she’s not better known. Perhaps it’s because she writes not space opera and shoot-‘em-ups, or interminable fantasy series, but novels of the mind that deal with actual science. Her books assume the reader will make the effort to think about what she’s saying. And perhaps that says something depressing about the SF market these days.
NY: Signet, 1982.
While working through the sf shelves recently at my local used paperback bookstore, I came across a stack of barbarian-adventure novels by the late Robert Adams from the 1970s and ’80s. They’ve been out of print for some time and, frankly, I’d forgotten all about them. The “Horseclans” series (of which this is the first installment) (more…)
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
