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March 28, 2024, 04:44:17 PM

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Yer Edmund Coopers and the like (SCI-FI)

Started by Spoon of Ploff, March 01, 2018, 02:44:36 PM

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Spoon of Ploff

There's yer Azimovs, Stapledons, Lems, Dicks and Wells. Then there's ehhh..

Many many years ago there was a second hand book stall on Sheerness market. Don't go looking for it now.. it isn't there. So at this stall you used to be able to buy paper backs dead cheap, and return them for half your money back once you were done reading them... Happy days...

Anyway. This is where I built up my collection of Edmund Cooper Sci-Fi books. They'd be roughly 200 pages each, and were usually of the 'speculative' type (according to Wikipedia at any rate). In other words 'What if..?' Sci-Fi. Some of the themes could be a little ehhh suspect to say the least. The younger me loved 'em. Here's just a few:



- All Fool's Day. What if the Sun started spewing out a new type of radiation that made everyone who wasn't a mentalist commit suicide?

- The Last Continent. White dudes and Black dudes have a war. Black dudes win but have to live on Mars. What happens when years later they go back to Earth and meet white dudes for the first time in ages?

- Five to Twelve. It's like the Worm That Turned by the two Ronnies... but funny (I think)?

- Who Needs Men? Women and Men have a war. The Women win, and are well into mopping up the stragglers. Our heroine has second thoughts about this after one of the Men gets all rapey with her.

- Kronk. What happens if a scientist invents a STD that removes all violent impulses? Features prepubescent rape gangs.

Okay so I've picked some of the more sensationalist plots he came up with, but still. Has anyone else read these 'classics' from the 60s and 70s..? Or do you know authors of a similar ilk?






JesusAndYourBush

#1
I've read Kronk several times over the years.  At school in English we had to choose a book and read a bit of it aloud to the class, so I chose the bit from Kronk where the crazy guy throws all his money away and helpful passers-by collect it all up and give it him back and he ends up with more than he started with.

A couple of years ago I re-read Kronk, along with two others of his, Transit, and Sea-Horse In The Sky.  Transit is excellent, I'd recommend that one.

I've been slowly making my way through a pile of old sci-fi books.  I do prefer older sci-fi to the more modern stuff.  I like the way older sci-fi writers don't feel the need to try and explain everything by forcing a load of technical sounding jumbo jumbo to justify something.  So for example you can have bases on Pluto and you just have to bloody accept it and enjoy the story whereas a more modern writer will feel the need to justify it with pages of unneccessary guff explaining the propulsion system etc.  A Poul Anderson short story annoyed the shit out of me recently though for spending way too long explaining someone's entry through an airlock when it wasn't relevant to the story for us to know so much detail.  There's another Poul Anderson coming up in the pile so I'll discover if he had a habit of using unneccary detail of whether the airlock guff was a one-off.

Pranet

I've read All Fools Day. Can't honestly remember all that much about it. My cover was different I think. A woman with a machine gun stood in front of a car in a jacket that didn't cover her boobs.

They are selling off some old (mainly 80s editions) sf paperbacks at my local library. All gone apart from piles and piles and Alan Dean Foster. Sat there for weeks.

I can't remember who or where but I recently read something about the problem JAYB describes. About how our expanding knowledge of the solar system is a problem for science fiction writers. He or she was saying that in the old day it was quite easy to plausibly set a story on Mars or wherever. Now, if you want to do that, you need to do a lot of world building, of background to justify it and make it believable to the reader. So writers, having done all that work get attached to their world and don't want to give it up, so end up setting massive sequences of novels in the world they have created. Something like that.

Spoon of Ploff

Quote from: Pranet on March 04, 2018, 10:36:53 AM
I've read All Fools Day. Can't honestly remember all that much about it. My cover was different I think. A woman with a machine gun stood in front of a car in a jacket that didn't cover her boobs.

A friend of mine had a copy with that cover, and I wish I had the same... because... ehh... it would be consistent with the rest of my collection.

I'm conflicted when it comes to the tech mumbo jumbo (we called it Kolvino Mechanics where I came from). It's generally lost on me anyway because I ain't that smart, but I do enjoy it when someone uses it well. Peter Watts for example uses his background in science to great effect (to a thicko like me) in books like Blind Site. A-and I've enjoyed the Expanse novels which used a bit of space science to show how you can go about killing a planet without the need to build a battle station the size of a small moon/big moon/planet.

Is there any love here Harry Harrison? I've fond (if vague) memories of those early Stainless Steel Rat and Death World books... After those it was quite a shock to read Make Room Make Room which is whole levels more grim than that there Soylent Green movie they made from it.

Sweet cover too:




Camp Tramp

Don't read Blind Sight or Echopraxia if you have any hope for humanity.
Great books though.

Alberon

Got into Harry Harrison when the first Stainless Steel Rat book was adapted by 2000AD. I just coincidentally finished the last book in that series which is, sadly, dreadfully awful rubbish. Last novels by authors are rarely great and are often bad.

I've got Transit by Edmund Cooper but it has literally been several decades since I read it so I might go back to it. I'm trudging through Alastair Reynold's latest and while he's returned to the Revelation Space Universe he seems to have run out of steam.

Another book that stuck in my mind which I picked up from a jumble sale is To Challenge Chaos by Brian Stableford. It's about a trip to a planet that exists half in this universe and half in another. I've been meaning to reread that for decades as well.

One of the first adult SF novels I ever bought (brand new for 85p in about 1979) was The City and The Stars by Arthur C Clarke. The first thing I read which showed me the limitless potential of the genre.

The seventies were also the glory days of Larry Niven and his Known Space series. Protector and Ringworld are good novels.

Alberon

Slightly back on track with lesser known authors. I worked through the back catalogue of Doris Piserchia after finding her (well, her books) in another second hand bookstore. She's 89 now and hasn't published anything since 1983, but I'm sure I read a fairly recent interview that says she has several books unpublished.

Spoon of Ploff

^
Ooh.  I've not come across her before. Care to recommend any books in particular?

^^ Yay, my first encounter with the Stainless Steel Rat was 2000AD as well. I always had Carlos Ezquerra's vision of him in mind when I read the books...


Slippery Jim DiGriz earlier today

I stopped reading them after the Stainless Steel  Rat gets drafted... hadn't realized the series had continued.


mothman

I really wouldn't bother with any of them post-.... Gets Drafted. They're not very good. There's another prequel (... Sings The Blues), a post-... For President (... Goes To Hell), and one more I think after that, but I can't even remember what it was called. It's awful though.

Pranet

I don't want to get at the chap, but a late book by Harry Harrison is one of the few books I have ever given up on, it was an alternate history of the American civil war- Stars and Stripes Forever, the internet tells me.

On the plus side I love an anthology he edited with Brian Aldiss called Farewell Fantastic Venus.