I want to thank everyone for some great ideas for fake book covers. I love taking small (4x6") skinny paperbacks on vacation, because I can slip them in a pants pocket.
Since most of those that size are vintage, and short stories work well when you’re on the road and don’t know when you’ll next get to pick up the thread of a long story, I usually end up with an old compendium of suspense/horror/sf short stories.
Now, Alfred Hitchcock collected great authors into tiny books, but they have titles like “Tales My Mother Never Told Me” with a awkward Young Alfred dressed like a Victorian baby boy on the cover. I’d be embarrassed to be seen reading that.
So I’ve been Photoshopping new covers. Some with complex collages on the cover and plenty of reviews and quotes on the back.
If you see me next week at a sidewalk café in Dubrovnik, I’ll be perusing ’How I Scaled the North Face of the Megapurna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks’.
(from the Hitchhiker’s Guide…)
…and Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens.
(the well-known Dutch author with two k’s).
In Stephen Tall’s “The Bear with the Knot in His Tail,” a pretty good sf first contact tale I found in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 20th Series ed. by Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday & Co. 1973), are references to two books: Dr. Roscoe Kissinger, A Different Evolutionary System, a scientific tome about the very different lifeforms of Cyrene IV, and Dr. Johannes “Johnny” Rasmussen, The Log of the Stardust (ISC Annals, Vol. 72, A.D. 2119), an account of the voyages of an Earth starship.
EMPEROR OF THE ASTEROIDS
THE BUILDERS OF MARS
FIGHT FOR THE STARS
THE TWILIGHT OF TERRA
SAVIOR FROM SPACE
THE MASTER -RACE
THE THOUSAND YEAR RULE
THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
TOMORROW THE WORLD
In Rorschach by Tom King, Jorge Fornes and Dave Stewart, a graphic novel sequel to Watchmen, the actual cartoonist and graphic novelist Frank Miller appears, and mentions his pirate-themed comics Dark Fife and The Dark Fife Returns. In the Watchmen 'verse, pirate comics are very popular, since actual superheroes and supervillains exist, so Miller apparently never created The Dark Knight Returns.
The Unstrung Harp by Edward Gorey. The protagonist Mr. Earbrass “has been meaning to finish it ever since he began it two years and seven months before, at which time he bogged down on page 33.”
I recently learned that there are two - well, call it one and a half - examples in Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby. The novel’s short poetic epigraph is attributed to Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, who is himself a minor character in This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s earlier novel.
Later, Tom Buchanan praises The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, a book warning about how white civilization was under threat worldwide. Fitzgerald was making a veiled reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s actual, similar racist book The Rising Tide of Color.
In Tea Obreht’s near-future coming-of-age sf novel The Morningside, there’s a passing reference to a poetry collection, Moonlight, by the relatively famous poet Benjamin Bowen.
Please forgive me, this is a fictional film, not a book. But in a book by Lee Killough the two main characters, police officers, are investigating a murder and they visit a guy for some information. This character collects old movies and revamps them to play on modern tech. (The book is set around the 2080’s) One “old” movie mentioned is Dying Thunder and it’s supposed to be about the last Le Mans race run on wheels.
The book’s title was Qadgop the Mercotan. The Arisians redacted it extensively, due to their concern about the Eddorians using the information contained therein to deduce that I was also a second-stage Lensman. Only one brief paragraph remains extant:
“Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…”
More had been written about me and Cynthia and our kids, but we’re keeping all that to ourselves. Also, I’m no longer a Lensman because I ended up eating my lens one unfortunate night, after running out of neutronium and cheese. Good did come out of that, as it got me to join Neutronium Anonymous (NA).
A 30 year old cheddar. And some nice 6 year old swiss. Both are awesome with neutronium. But whenever I start eating neutronium, I never know what I’ll do or when I will stop. Hence the NA.
Fortunately I am not powerless over fine aged cheeses.
Mentor’s more of a ‘billiard ball universe’ kind of group entity, doesn’t seem to get the whole quantum/chaos theory stuff. Brolenteen is more flexible when detached from their hive mind. But I still couldn’t get a replacement lens.