Just because 221B Baker Street is fictional and Middle Earth is not on a tourist guide doesn’t make them declasse for adults; and just because Venus isn’t a swamp doesn’t mean sf set in such an imaginary locale doesn’t make a heckuva fun story.  I’m going to be running an sf selection from Project Gutenberg now and again, and my first one is a fun story for very young readers; or for older ones who want a trip down memory lane. Today’s featured author is Carey Rockwell, a pseudonym that has never been cracked, although some think it may have been more than one writer, and it could actually have been someone associated with Willy Ley, who wrote the first sf book ever admitted for a book report in the Lawton OK public schools (me.) So here is a link to the Project Gutenberg Carey Rockwell entry: dated but not done, so far as I’m concerned. Based on a radio show I listened to as a kid, translated to early TV—here it is…Saturday morning kids’ television at its finest, with, gasp! character complexity aimed at younger readers. I saved my lunch money and went hungry to buy these books. 🙂
Martian Deserts and Venus as a Swamp…
by CJ | Feb 6, 2010 | Journal | 52 comments
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Carolyn, this is SUCH a cool idea!!!!! (No, Jane, you can’t go read it. You’ve got to get Ring up….WAH!) But…but…if they’ve got this, I wonder if they have anything by Manly Wade Wellman! or…Altsheller! I never thought of looking…Wheeeeee (Running to check.)
I thought I was the only person who knew Manly Wade Wellman! In your copious free time, you might also look for Zenna Henderson; another writer who used the “Strange Events in Pre-Modern Times” motif.
Interesting! I found stories by the following SF authors on Project Gutenberg (there are probably many other authors too):
Murray Leinster
Lester Del Rey
Philip José Farmer
Cyril Kornbluth
Robert Sheckley
Poul Anderson,
Alan Nourse
Algis Budrys
Walter M. Miller
Fredric Brown
Marion Zimmer Bradley
H. Beam Piper
Robert Silverberg
Frederik Pohl
Some of these should still be in copyright, but I guess a few individual stories may have been released into the public domain for some reason.
Another site worth looking at is
http://arthursclassicnovels.com/
And at ManyBooks they have some copies of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931.
http://manybooks.net/search.php?search=astounding+stories
Even as CJ hints above , the works of Sir Robert Conan Doyle are there too , And another great author (imo) E. E. “Doc” Smith , well at least 2 of his Sky Lark books are there . Been in and out of the Gutenberg website alot over tha last 7 or so years . Lots of very good reading there .
Oops , Sustitute/Robert/Arthur/ , sorry . JimL
There are some “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” radio episodes here in mp3 format:
http://thethunderchild.com/RadioDrama/TomCorbett/TomCorbettRadio.html
The first Sci Fi book I recall reading was from the bookcase of my 4th grade classroom. As I remember it, a young boy (and maybe a chimp?) climbed into a space ship. The boy landed on a planet where he got put in a cage (my, this is beginning to sound Planet of the Apes-ish, but it wasn’t) and he ate bananas. I have no idea who wrote it and the next year, when I went back to try to find it, I couldn’t.
The first solid Sci Fi book/author I read was Time Traders by Andre Norton, whose work I went on to buy and devour for many, many years (I’ve maybe 30 crumbling paperbacks by her). I adore Time Traders still (I had decided by then to become an archaeologist and that was my anthropological major as an undergrad and study for many years afterwards). In the story, Ross Murdoch – time agent – went back to Neolithic Europe as a Beaker culture trader in an attempt (successful after much drama and fighting) to beat the Ruskies in finding an intact alien space ship. Oh, I so want time travel to go back and experience the past!!!
You are 5 years older than me. I looked at the titles (downloaded two in ePub format). The titles sound awfully familiar, but I’m sure I never heard the radio show. I do think I had heard/seen the Ton Corbett name somewhere. I suspect I might have read some of them, but about the time I began reading sci fi was the summer after third grade–Robert Heinlein stories, maybe summer 1956? Or a little earlier. Those four years made a big, big difference in a lot of things. Probably picked RAH up following my sister’s taste, she is four years older than I am. Third grade was when I really started reading books voraciously as an anti-boredom experience, especially in school, when I should have been doing other things.
E.E.”Doc” Smith,hours in a favorite tree,apples and a salt shaker! Time Traders and Forerunner
Foray,she didn’t write enough for my gluttonous
appetite for the written word. Bless her for all
that she did write!
Another author worth mentioning is Cordwainer Smith (real name Paul Linebarger). His stories have a quality of true strangeness and originality which is unique. There is a real beauty and poetry in his writing, but it’s a bit of an acquired taste. Some people find him unreadable, but others consider him to be among the greatest SF writers ever.
Cat lovers will enjoy The Game of Rat and Dragon, available at Gutenberg. The cats in the story are based on Cordwainer Smith’s own cats. It’s a good introduction to his writing.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/29614
The classic story which brought him to the attention of the SF world is Scanners Live in Vain
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm
It’s debatable which is the best of his stories. I would say it’s between The Ballad of Lost C’Mell and The Dead Lady of Clown Town. The character C’Mell is a genetic mix of cat and human, and based on Cat Melanie, one of Cordwainer Smith’s cats.
A couple of collections of his stories are available in Baen editions, and Amazon has a number of his books and stories.
There is some wonderful stuff out there…..I personally came to love Leigh Brackett (sp?) through a SF Bookclub edition…
Does anyone remember who wrote “Schroedenger’s Cat?”
Gutenberg is terrific! Thanks, CJ! 🙂 😀 😆
Leigh Brackett was one of my favorites. Plus she was a very nice person.
The difference in quality of the Star Wars scripts is directly attributable to losing her from the project.
I only knew her briefly: same with C.L. Moore; but both were people I’d liked to have spent decades knowing.
One also recalls an Andre Norton foreward to a book written by a certain up-and-coming writer that Ms. Norton found to be very good at the craft, and one line that stood out in that foreward was, “I very much wish I could write like her.”
No points for correct guesses, folks.
My first Andre Norton book was “Daybreak – 2250 A.D.”, although nowadays, you mostly find it under its original title, “Star Man’s Son”. It was a terrifying look at what we could do to ourselves (at least, it was terrifying for a very young teen reader).
Aw, heck. As long as we’re all reminiscing:
My first Norton–and the first book I was aware of as SF–was Star Born, which was the first book I ever checked out of the then-brand-new Kalamazoo Bookmobile when I was in fifth grade (fall of 1958, most likely). One of my classmates handed it to me; apparently folks were already thinking of me as odd. Read it, went back for Daybreak: 2250 AD, which I thought (and still think) was pretty extraordinary.
Then headed for my local library, invaded the Juvey section, and found Starship Troopers and one of Del Ray’s Winston books (probably Mission to the Moon). Back for Philip St. John’s Rocket Jockey (I’m pretty sure I figured out it was Del Ray) and Alan Nourse’s Trouble on Titan.
Which apparently set me on my way….
I see Star Born‘s available on Gutenberg. Collected, and into the Reader.
I checked out Andre Norton’s time traders as I liked the premise – looks very good, I will have to get hold of this ….even if it is for the young reader ….
Oh, my — just now discovering Andre Norton! Your idle hours are covered for a *l-o-o-o-ng* time. Although, as an adult, you shouldn’t read too many in a row, or a certain sameness of plot may start bothering you. Many of her YA books are of the “young person becomes an outcast, gets dropped into strange advontures often including animals, psy powers, and frequently underground mazes, evenually triumphs and finds a place to belong.”
I am *not* putting down Norton. I believe I have read them all, multiple times, even the Sword’s Point stories set in wartime Java that are now practically unobtainable. Only, I now find them more satisfactory taken as quick reads between denser volumes.
I’m especially fond of Star Man’s Son and The Stars are Ours (one, which I forget, was my first in 5th grade). Also the Solar Queen books, especially the collaborations she did with P.M. Griffin and Sherwood Smith in the nineties.
And Jack Williamson. Don’t forget Jack Williamson.
I have to say that my favorite Norton’s were Catseye, most of the Witch World series, especially the ones about the were-riders, and the Moonsinger books. However, I also liked her historicals (Opal-eyed Fan, The White Jade Fox, Scarface, etc.). And I remember being deeply upset to find out that, even though her real name was Alice Mary, she was not the Mary Norton who wrote the Borrower series.
Off topic, have you done any script writing? TV, stage, radio?
I would think radio production with sound effects would be fun, but utterly obsolete and no market (audio tapes for long car trips? Still unlikely). Orson Wells would put them together in a few days in the late 1930s (War of the Worlds, etc.) I have the tape, it was good, but you can tell it was a little rushed. Play still worked because it was mostly news broadcasts, so the unpolished quality seemed normal.
My mother listened live. Couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about later; they stated plainly that it was a radio version of the famous HG Wells novel…. That’s what they DID, a series of radio versions of famous works of literature. Plus commercials. But a lot of people tuned in late when a competing show ended, I think.
About writing for Hollywood, the few novelists, playwrites I know had uniformly unfortunate experiences there–1950s through 1970s. Later contacts, mostly production, editing etc. didn’t engender happoy thoughts about the place, some of them had very, very high level contacts and successful print careers, though young at the time. One friend did sell a treatment that was made into a very successful film. And one of my college professors, only 40 in 1966 had hilarious stories to tell about his short (a month’s?) stint as a writer for the Phantom in–maybe–the mid-1950s. [though he has written at least five or six novels and a number of short story collections, the experience may have encouraged him to go to graduate school and teach, for all I know.
GRR Martin seems to have survived well, for at least a number of years, in TV. But he returned to writing fiction for reasons I suppose he can explain best and I can only impute from my prejudices.
Still, I really love good movies. It’s a miracle that they ever can get made out of the process. Again, have you ever been tempted or contacted?
I’ve done some prelim script work. They promised me extravagant money for a 10 page outline, subject to revision. That was the killer clause. They called me repeatedly wanting this change, wanting that change, then new data came in from their market survey and they wanted sf instead of fantasy, could you just tweak it? Oh, but we need a kid in it. Market this week says we need a kid. Never mind that any production work is a year or so away, we’re making weekly, nay, hourly changes because of their market research.
Finally: put in more sfx. More! More! More! They love it. The producers love it!
Then…cost analysis prove the sfx will be horridly expensive.
So they canned the whole project.
I got the price of those alleged 10 pages for what turned out to be a novel sized project, all things considered. It was an adventure, barely adequately compensated financially.
And I am honor bound not to reveal what it was—but it was nice ‘found’ money, while I was doing a regular novel. Just odd. Very odd. They’d arrange meetings with various reps, some of which showed, some of which failed to show. They seemed the most erratic lot I’ve ever tried to work with, including one meeting involving someone flown in from Japan. And then there’d be another phone call, wanting another change.
Again, back to the Andre Norton thread that I started in this conversation: I have long tried to figure out my pleasure with her writing because, frankly, she’s not all that great a wordsmith (I realized a few years ago when re-reading her with an eye to figuring out how to write a novel) and her plots are pretty straight-forward (with repetitive characters?, well, maybe).
When I read CJ for “how to write” I see each major character having, literally, their own voice. Often I’m not quite certain why a CJ character said what they did and have to (happily) pause and pick through the shades of meaning and reference which that character might have in their background. None of this in Andre Norton: she speeds through her plots and her characters march straight-forwardly through their, quite exciting, adventures (perhaps because she wrote to a shorter publishing standard of 200-250 pages/book). But somehow, despite the actual words she selects, Norton develops this marvelous sense of place for each of her books and for years afterwards, I can feel them in my mind.
Swords’ Point books: I’ve never seen a reference other than here to them. I devoured them as a kid. Catseye is one of her top-notch, loner against the world plots quite like the related Forerunner Foray. I think that the first Witch World book is an amazing piece of pacing and plotting. And, I reread the old Solar Queen books once a year or so, I enjoy them so much. For not being a great writer, Norton can still hit the spot.
Andre had a gift for creating a general ‘voice’ so pure and credible that you ended up believing her. Her descriptions were sparse, but evocative: you’d end up supplying your own images, but for that reason, maybe remembering those linked images all the more vividly because they’re your own. And though she went back to the same theme, who *hasn’t* been in a Position where people are trying to arrange your life in a way you suddenly realize you don’t want? Who *hasn’t* wanted to summon up some ability to deal with unwarrantable demands, or wanted to say, “I’m not who you think I am!” She touched that in young people.
I tried to get Andre to drive a few miles and watch a shuttle launch. She wouldn’t. She said she feared it would destroy her muse, to witness the space program in real life. She kept writing her own way, and no question that way worked. Quite, quite a strong-willed woman—trained as a librarian, and living in a personal library mostly of editions of her own books, accumulated over a long, long career. In one sense she is her own story—brought up in a very traditional framework, destined for a job that women in her decade acceptably did; but then taking on a male persona, writing about adventure and spacefaring when there weren’t that many women writing sf or reading it, and pretty well choosing her own path through life.
My favorite old time SF writer is Eric Frank Russell. The earliest SF books I remember reading (although, I am sure that this is not correct, just the earliest that come to mind) would be either This Star Shall Abide by Sylvia Engdahl or Out of this Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. That would have been the school year of 74-75.
Elaine
Norman, OK
In case anyone is looking for This Star Shall Abide, it has just come back into print. It can be found at Amazon or http://www.adstellaebooks.com. A Mobipocket ebook is also available, and more ebook formats are coming.
You guys are going to brush it off, aren’t you? ……
😆 I happen to know. Starman’s Son was one of my absolute favorites.
Ah, acknowledgment! The poster’s ultimate thrill! Thanks, CJ.
😉