Out of this World Science Fiction Classics from Bantam, 1983

In the back of my 1983 copy of Samuel Delany’s Empire Star is this advertisement for Bantam’s “great series of science fiction classics,” full of fancy, terror and adventure.  What is the story with these ads?  Why do some paperbacks have them, and others do not?  Was Delany annoyed that his book contained ads like this?  How were the books chosen for the ad... are these books Bantam is proud of, or are these books they printed too many of and are scrambling to unload?  If Ursula K. LeGuin saw this page back in 1983 would she say, "Awesome, my buddies at Bantam are really working hard promoting my work!"  or would it be more along the lines of, "Cripes, Bantam must really be having trouble selling all those copies of my Earthsea books to the stores."  How many people actually used this "handy coupon" to order books from Bantam?  What percentage of Bantam's gross revenue came from such orders?       

Four of these books are by Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I’ve never read, and three of them are by Warren Norwood, whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am familiar with several of the listed books.

Sundiver by David Brin

I read this in the ‘90s, in fact I think it was the first SF book I read after a few years of avoiding SF and reading mostly history and poetry, the period when I thought I might actually finish grad school and get a degree.  I thought Sundiver was just OK; I liked the sciency stuff of flying into the sun, but wasn't impressed by the murder mystery stuff (the guy with laser eyes did it.)  I never read any more of Brin's fiction, though his critique of Star Wars (that it is elitist and promotes hereditary aristocracy), which I must have read in Slate right after "Phantom Menace" came out, I found very interesting and has stuck with me.  

The Dinosaurs by William Stout, Byron Preiss and William Service

I love this book to death, and have spent many hours admiring the beautiful illustrations.  Stout works in various media and various styles, so even though its dozens and dozens of pictures of dinosaurs by the same guy, each page is fresh and exciting.  I can still remember seeing this in the bookstore in the mall for the first time, and then buying it on a subsequent trip.  The store only had one copy, and it was a little shopworn, but I put a piece of masking tape on the spine and the book is still in one piece, 30 years later.

Harlan Ellison also loved The Dinosaurs, and wrote a gushing blurb-sized review for it in the February 1982 issue of "Heavy Metal," which I learned on tarbandu’s blog, The PorPor Books Blog, back in February of 2012.   There is also an enthusiastic preface by Ray Bradbury. 


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 

As I have said earlier, I don’t think I have read every story included in all the different editions of Martian Chronicles, but I have read many of them here and there, and liked them.  I think Thomas Disch's criticisms of Bradbury (that Bradbury can be too sappy and sentimental) have some merit, but in the same way that I still like Star Wars even though David Brin scores some points against George Lucas, I still like lots of Bradbury's work.  "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in Martian Chronicles, isn't sappy or sentimental at all. 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

This book is on Half Price Book's list of 100 SF books, and its Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it might be good. 

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

I saw the movie of this with David Bowie. I really like Bowie, as a musician and just as an appealing character who livens up the TV screen whenever he appears, and the movie had some memorable images and scenes, but also felt too long and a little too silly.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.

I read this in the mid '90s, when I worked at a bookstore in New Jersey, after graduating college but before moving to New York and starting grad school.  This may have been the last SF book I read for a long time, before the SFless period ended by Sundiver. (Though I read Dave Wolverton's On My Way To Paradise and two Serpent Catch books around the same time.  I enjoyed those books, and remember them pretty well.) I remember very little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, except a vivid discussion of how you shouldn’t try to euthanize a sick cat.  I should probably read A Canticle for Leibowitz again.   

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If you want to join Harlan, Ray and me in gushing about Stout’s The Dinosaurs, or if you want to tell me who Warren Norwood is and why I should know him, or say anything at all about these Bantam books or David Bowie, feel free to do so in the comments.   

The Last of Mr. Norris (AKA Mr. Norris Changes Trains) by Christopher Isherwood

The Last of Mr. Norris is a sort of character study of the wacky title character, an Englishman in his 50s living in Berlin in the early 1930s, and Norris’s relationship with the narrator, a younger Englishman, also living in Berlin.  They first meet on a train, where the narrator, William Bradshaw, quickly becomes familiar with some of Norris’s idiosyncrasies; his vanity, for example, evident in the wig he wears and the arsenal of cleansers and cosmetics he uses daily, and the fact that he always seems to be looking over his shoulder, as if he is being pursued.  Norris also has a collection of sadomasochistic books, and pays prostitutes to whip him and verbally abuse him.

Norris is a mysterious and apparently unscrupulous exporter/importer who lacks business sense and often fails to pay both his creditors and his employees. After those rare times when he makes a successful deal, he immediately wastes his profits on trifles.  Oft times he has to resort to pawn shops and loan sharks to make ends meet, and in the first third or so of the novel he joins the German Communist Party in hopes that the Party will prove a lucrative employer for one who has the sort of contacts he claims to have.  (The best joke in the book is when Norris, on his first mission for the Communist Party, must go to Paris, and books himself a first class trip, assuming the Party is going to reimburse him in full.) 

The crisis of the story comes when Norris asks Bradshaw’s help in setting up a business deal, requesting that Bradshaw lure a German aristocrat and government functionary into an ostensibly chance meeting with a colleague of Norris’s at a Swiss ski resort.  Bradshaw, inordinately fond of Norris, obliges, only later to learn that this was no business scheme, but an espionage operation in the interest of the French government: Norris has betrayed the Communists and is now accepting payments from France to spy on the Party and on the German government.  It turns out that the German government and the Communist Party are well aware of Norris’s perfidy, so Norris flees the country for Latin America, only to be pursued by one of his former employees, a vengeful blackmailer.

I read the novel in a 1945 U.S. edition of Berlin Stories; where it appears under the title The Last of Mr. Norris.  I’m glad I didn’t know the original UK title was Mr. Norris Changes Trains, which eliminates any doubt that Norris is going to betray the Communists.  I knew almost nothing about Isherwood or his work before starting the book (I have never seen “Cabaret,” though my wife will sing those songs on occasion) and one of the things I enjoyed most about the novel was the mystery of what the Switzerland trip was all about and how dedicated to the Communist cause Norris really was; all along I thought there was a chance that Norris was going to turn out to be a real self-sacrificing Red hero.

I thought the novel was just OK.  The style was flat and bland, and I didn’t really understand the tone; was the novel trying to make me laugh, or was it trying to tell me something about decadence, revolution, and/or the difficult lives of people pursuing what we now call alternative lifestyles?  Was I supposed to be amused by Norris and his unconventional and irresponsible behavior, or feel for him and worry that his creditors, the communists, the Nazis, or the police were going to get him?  The three or four pages about street fighting and Nazi oppression made me think I was supposed to take the book seriously, and then the last few pages, which make light of the fact that Norris has been caught by his vengeful employee, were a letdown – the book was just a big joke after all.

After finishing the book I read about it on Wikipedia, and how the book was composed and the changes it went through help explain some of my problems with it.  Also, if I had seen the silly cover to the first British edition I would have not been confused about the tone, but I also wouldn’t have even read the book; I’m not actually seeking out books of humor about radical politics and boot fetishism.

I guess I am giving this one a very marginal thumbs up.  Here I disagree with the critical consensus, which is enthusiastic, and with David Bowie, who counts Mr. Norris Changes Trains as one of his favorite 100 books.