Was at Readercon over the weekend. I bought and rapidly devoured The Science Fiction Novel by Basil Davenport, Robert Heinlein, C.<M. Kornbluth, Alfed Bester, and Robert Bloch, More Issues at Hand by “William Atheling, Jr.” (James Blish), and Who Killed Science Fiction?, by a whole stack of SF writers and edited by Earl Kemp. I’d wanted to read these for several years, two of them because they have sections by Heinlein that I hadn’t read.
The Heinlein stuff is interesting. An effort similar to Kemp’s went out many years ago, a questionnaire asking and science fiction film. It was published in Focus on Science Fiction Film, and featured replied from a lot of SF writers, many of whom waxed eloquent over the chance (such as Isaac Asimov and John Campbell). Heinlein responded, but his anwers are so terse that you’d think they were charging him for each reply. In his mind, maybe they were, since it was uncompensated, and detracted from his writing time. It’s surprising that he answered at all.
For Who Killed Science Fiction? (which was apparently Magazine science fiction, which clearly had declined in number and quality, and pretty clearly a lot of it went into paperback sales, however much those questioned denied it), Heinlein wrote fuller answers, but insisted that his name not be used. He was listed as “Anonymous #1”, and I guess it’s only the passage of time that revealed his identity. According to Kemp, Heinlein came up to him after the book’s publication and gave him a back-handed compliment, saying that if he knew how good and serious a work it would turn out to be, he’d have let them use his name. (There was an Anonymous #2 as well – Philip Jose Farmer. I don’t know why he was anonymous). Heinlein’s contribution to “The Science Fiction Novel” was a speech he gave at the University of Chicago in 1957. I assume Heinlein was paid for that one, or liked the prestige of lecturing at a major university.
I picked up a lot of other books, but the two more interesting are A. Merritt’s weird old The Metal Monster. Based on the cover, you’d think it was some post-victorian novel anbout a lost civilzation with a Giant Robot, but it’s really something rather different. My old copy of it has come to pieces, so I was glad to get a fresh copy and finally finish reading it.
The other is Jules Verne’s Travel Scholarships (Bourses de Voyage), the last of Verne’s novels to be translated into English. Since 2000, Wesleyan has been working to get the last holdouts of Verne’s novels translated (the others being *Le Freres Kip, l’Invasion de la Mer, * and Le Superbe Orinoco, all translated in the interrim). This was the last holdout. Actually, there were some other odd ones, such as The Shipwrecked Family (the original draft of what became The Mysterious Island and Journey Through the Impossible (a play, with Captain Nemo and other Verne characters in it) that have appeared in the last decade, as well. As have the first translations of Verne works published posthumously and which his son Michel had altered. The original un-altered versions of these have been translated and published in the past decade as well – The Meteor Hunt, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, and The Golden Volcano.
But Bourses de Voyage is, as far as I know, the last remaining holdout. I like reading Verne that I haven’t read in the summer, so this will be a treat.
