The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey

…who can think, organize those thoughts and express them coherently in writing.  I just discovered another very interesting blog by one James Wallace Harris: Auxiliary Memory.  Along with (one of) his companion site(s) The Classics of Science Fiction, these represent all that is good in SF.  Sharp and insightful analysis expressed in a logical and eminently digestible way.  I’m going to nab a term from my good friend Adrian the Sesquipedaustralian, and refer to myself as “a crackpot wordsmith with a poor grasp of what constitutes good narrative structure or flow.”  Or probably more accurately I have the ability to painstakingly add bare coherence to a stream-of-consciousness rant that flows like molasses.

Anyway, it’s well worth checking out James W. Harris – I put him over in the links section on the right.  Some great reading there.

In other news, I scored a near mint copy of The Thirty-First of February by Nelson Bond.  Well, the seller described it as such.  We’ll see when it arrives.  A dust jacket for Sixth Column, which I recently reviewed, went for $56 on eBay yesterday, an inferior dj to what’s on my copy too.  Interesting.  Also, my Gnome collecting friend Christophe discovered that he has a book plate in his copy of The Dawning Light.  Not especially interesting, apart from the fact that it’s from the same personal library as my copy of The Survivors!!  How about that??  If he sends me a pic, I’ll post it.

I’ve been mulling over how to handle the review for The Complete Book of Outer Space.  It’s a fiction book, or really a combination of fiction and speculation.  The content doesn’t really lend itself well to a conventional review, so I think what I’ll do is pull a page or two from the book every so often.  There is some interesting stuff in there, especially about how they imagined space travel and exploration.  Remember, this came from the viewpoint of 1953.

This has been too long with no pretty pictures.  Here’s a sample from ‘Outer Space’

This entry was posted on March 31, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Nelson Bond, Sixth Column, The Complete Book of Outer Space, The Thirty-First of February. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.