I have wanted to read Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 The Big Clock, the novel made into the great Ray Milland film of the same name, for years and years.  To my great delight, about eight or nine months ago I finally found an early 1960s printing at good ol’ Curious Books in East Lansing.  A few days ago, I got around to reading it...and somehow I remembered about Goodreads.com, and I did a review there, which I hadn’t done in two and a half years.

Originally, I was going to link and post the review in my blog, as I’ve done with others, but then I got an even better idea: Why not make a new page in the “My Writings” area that’s specifically for my occasional Goodreads reviews?

OK, so I did it.  Ta daaaaa.  Later reviews will be posted on the blog, hopefully, but for this one I’ll simply link to my new page.  Click there, and then just use the alpha-beta system to find The Big Clock​.

Hope you enjoy,

Rafeeq

As July draweth to a close, I suddenly realize that the last month and a half has been pretty busy in terms of updates to my Heinlein cover art galleries.  In addition to new-to-me editions of books like Waldo and Magic, Inc., Orphans of the Sky, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Time for the Stars, and Podkayne of Mars, I also have come across quite a bit of things from magazines.

I picked up reprints of “Water is for Washing,” for example, a Heinlein review of a Willy Ley text in the July 1944 Astounding, an article in the 28 May 1949 Saturday Review of Literature that discusses Heinlein pretty prominently, “Tenderfoot in Space” serialized in Boys’ Life in 1958, a reprint of “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna” in its original 1948 Saturday Evening Post, and “No Bands Playing” from the December 1973 Vertex.

And beyond these...  Well, at last I also acquired some rather rarely found things as well: “Cliff and the Calories” from the August 1950 Senior Prom, where in this girls’ magazine he is bylined only as “R. Heinlein”; “The Long Watch” in the December 1949 issue of the American Legion Magazine; and the extraordinarily elusive “My Object All Sublime,” published under the Lyle Monroe byline in the February 1942 issue of the peculiarly titled Future Combined with Science Fiction.  “My Object All Sublime,” by the way, is one of the early “stinkeroos” that was never, ever, ever reprinted until the big $1,500 leather-bound Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s complete works, and it was great to read it in the original nearly 80-year-old pulp.

Of all the aforementioned, I’m not sure whether  “Cliff and the Calories” or “My Object All Sublime” is rarest, but “The Long Watch,” originally released as “Rebellion on the Moon,” is perhaps my favorite.  This rousing and yet poignant tale of an upright young officer who receives a fatal dose of radiation while disobeying a direct order and thus preventing his superior from using deterrent rockets to stage a putsch that would enslave the world, then sits there calmly smoking his last cigarette before the chattering Geiger counter, thinking of his wife, and of his baby girl being able to grow up in freedom, while the patriots of American history gather close in the final moments of his watch, always literally gives me goosebumps.  This is the one I will picture now.

Rafeeq

Although a jillion copies of The Saturday Evening Post have been printed, it can be strangely difficult to find a 1947 or 1948 copy with certain Heinlein stories.  ​“The Black Pits of Luna” is one for which I had been keeping my eye peeled for quite some time, but I just never encountered one...until a couple days ago.

Shipping was astoundingly swift, and the magazine is good-looking.  Now the cover and the lovely Fred Ludekens interior painting both are scanned to the “Pulp Magazines” page of my “Heinlein Cover Art” galleries.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

Every now and then ​I’ll run across an auction with some realllllllly nice SF art, but the popular stuff always ends up being really pricey, doesn’t it?  I mean, when you see the original Frank R. Paul painting for “The Asteroid of Death” or one of the original Ed Emshwiller paintings for Have Space Suit—Will Travel when first serialized in F&SF...well, it’s gonna cost.  The bidding just goes up and up and up, and one can only watch with a vague longing.

Well, recently I came across the original Steele Savage painting that was used as the cover for the 1971 Ace printing of Heinlein’s 1956 Scribner’s juvie, Time for the Stars.  The piece is stylized and bold, as his work from that period tends to be, and it’s rather pretty in its own way.  I had a couple extra shekels in my pouch from that coronavirus stimulus check, and I really wanted to help out the economy by keeping everything in flow, so...win-win, especially when bidding wasn’t too deadly.

In any event, I finally received this nifty piece, and its image now is scanned to the “Scribner’s YA/Juveniles” page of my Heinlein cover art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Not too long after I picked up that nice copy of the February 1951 issue of Galaxy with Bradbury's pre-Fahrenheit 451 "The Fireman," I happened to see an auction of books and comics and whatnot that contained, among many, many other things, the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy that serialized the full novel after its original 1953 printing...

Hmm, thought I, these might be nifty things to pick up...  Still, trying to be a responsible shopper, I poked around the internet to see if any other copies were for sale and if real money was being asked for them.  The answers were Yes and Definitely yes.  I approached the auction with a bit of trepidation, though.  That is, the first few bids were lowish, tantalizingly suggestive of a possible bargain.  In an auction, however, it's easy to see something that starts out as a deal rapidly become a hole into which you suddenly realize you threw, ahem, maybe a little too much money.  This is doubly the case when it's not a single item you're after but two or even three related ones...any single one of which rather falls flat when purchased alone.  What happens if you get #1 for a decent price, after all, but someone else really wants #2 and the price on that one doubles or even triples...?

The opening of the final stage of the auction was nerve-wracking, but bidding was not too bad, and I was able to get these three magazines for a sum I thought was at least halfway tolerable.  I mean, I wouldn't want to spend that much on books every week, but sometimes you have to splurge a little on a really nice piece of literary history, don't you?  Don't you...?

In any event, I received these three great pieces of Bradbury history, and now the apropos artwork is scanned to the "Pulp Magazines" page of my "Other SF Art" archives.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Before Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 as a novel in 1953, it originally appeared in a novella only about half that size in Galaxy​ in 1951.  I had known this for a good 40 years, having read Bradbury's account of the process...but only recently did I find a copy that wasn't prohibitively expensive.

Naturally, I bought it.

I scanned the beautiful Chesley Bonestell cover, an unrelated but gorgeous piece of art.  I scanned the interior art for "The Fireman" as well.  All now are posted to the "Other SF Art -- Pulp Magazines" page of my web.

And then I read the Bradbury.

How does it compare with the fuller Fahrenheit 451?  Well, "The Fireman" is much smaller and faster, not nearly as polished, and the reader is always thinking, "Oh, but where's--?" or "Is he gonna say--?"  The piece is a fascinating historical artifact, but quite a rough draft for those of us used to the novel.

Montag's first name is Leonard--no Guy Fawkes-ism yet.  Faber has a first name, too.  Beatty is Leahy.  Yet despite the 2052 date in the first page, unlike in the novel, the setting is more reminiscent of the time of writing, with no full-wall televisions yet, just actual TV sets and radios and even crap-magazines.  There's no green bullet from Faber, so we just plain old don't see him again until after the showdown.  Interestingly, Beatty's lecture over Montag's sickbed is just a teeny bit more specific on the "minority pressure" aspect than in the novel.

Once Montag reveals the books to Millie, he gets her--amazingly, to our minds now--to agree to daily readings, with him trying to teach her.  Montag actually is a tad bloodthirsty in a couple of places where thinking about the revolution, less diffident than in the more slowly unfolding novel.  And the Hound--  Why, the Mechanical Hound doesn't appear until almost the end!  There are no creepy firehouse growlings, therefore, no offhand mention of suicide by Hound, no electronic snuffling under Montag's door.  And it's called the Electric Dog, fer God's sake...  Wow.

Still, the novella is definitely worth the read.  And at least here you may enjoy the visual art as well!

​Rafeeq

A while ago I had scanned a few pieces of neat Frank Frazetta art from hardcover copies of a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels and put them in my “Other SF Art” gallery.

Over the past year, though, I also found myself picking some other interesting hardcovers of the 1940s and ’50s, including first editions—signed!—of Jack Williamson’s classic Darker Than You Think and, more recently, Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier and Dreadful Sanctuary.

​Well, this seemed to call for a new page, didn’t it?  Maybe one specifically called “Vintage Hardcovers”?  At last, therefore, this page is up, and it has some really nice old art by J.A. Donnell and Edd Cartier.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq

​In the past couple of months I’ve picked up a number of nifty pieces for my “Heinlein Cover Art” galleries.
 
At the wonderful Dawn Treader bookshop of Ann Arbor I got a quaint Steele Savage cover for Red Planet—a painting that unfortunately does not catch the three-leggedness of Heinlein’s Martians as Darrell K. Sweet of course does—and a few more things.  On ye olde internet I also at last found the March 1959 F&SF with “ --‘All You Zombies’.”

In addition, I was able to pick up even rarer things like the April 1941 Astonishing Stories with “Beyond Doubt,” the May 1940 Super Science Stories with “Let There Be Light” (pictured here), the November 1941 Super Science Stories with “Lost Legacy,” the March 1942 Astonishing Stories with “Pied Piper”…and a few more paperbacks I can’t quite recall.  I also finally got my own copy of the June 1952 Popular Mechanics showcasing Heinlein’s then-futuristic house.
 
Oh, yes—and I posted some gorgeous Frank Frazetta art from Edgar R. Burroughs’ Barsoom novels in my “Paperbacks, Etc.” gallery.
 
Enjoy!
 
Rafeeq

I was on the prowl for some more nifty Heinlein recently, and I picked up a cool 1953 copy of The Man Who Sold the Moon with the classic original Hubert Rogers cover art, plus a first edition Assignment in Eternity with a gorgeous Ric Binkley cover showing the domed lunar hideout of the villainous Mrs. Keithly of “Gulf.”

This has become one of my favorite Heinlein covers, and of course both of these are now posted in the Collections/Anthologies page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Enjoy!

Rafeeq

Recently a friend of mine was in Germany, and she kindly picked me up a neat German-language copy of Sixth Column.  Danke, mein fraulein!

Originally the tale was serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction, in January, February, and March of 1941 under the Anson MacDonald byline, of course, and scans of the Hubert Rogers cover art and Schneeman interiors can be seen in the Pulp Magazines page of my Heinlein Cover Art galleries.

Afterward the piece was published in book form in 1949, under this title and also as The Day After Tomorrow.  In any event, the cover art for this version of the book, like the others, is posted in my Earlier Adult Works page.

Enjoy!

​Rafeeq