The Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination

'The Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination' by Howard Chaykin and Byron Preiss

Bester's 'The Stars My Destination' is one of the few 'Old School' SF classics that really lives up to its 'classic' status. 

First published in 1956, the novel borrows its plot from 'The Count of Monte Cristo' :

In the aftermath of an unprovoked attack on the spaceship Nomad, crewman Gully Foyle survives among the floating ruins of his vessel by outfitting a storage locker as an emergency survival compartment. Foyle, clad in his spacesuit, desperately scavenges oxygen canisters and tins of food and water from the wreckage, hoping to survive long enough to be rescued. 

Foyle is in his 171st day aboard the Nomad, when he espies an approaching vessel. Rescue is within his reach...or so it seems....

'Stars' has a very 'modern' approach to its prose style, plotting, and characterization, which made it stand out from the wooden material being churned out in the late 50s by Arthur Clarke, James Blish, and Isaac Asimov (among others).

Throughout the 70s, editor and author Byron Preiss (1953 - 2005) was active in publishing illustrated editions of sf mass-market and trade paperbacks. One of his ventures involved a small New York City publisher named Baronet, who in the late 70s released 'The Illustrated Harlan Ellison' and 'The Illustrated Roger Zelazny', as well as the illustrated 'The Stars My Destination'.

The publication history of 'Stars' is complicated. In July 1979 Baronet released 'The Stars My Destination, Volume One: The Graphic Story Adaptation' as a trade paperback and as a deluxe-edition hardcover in a slipcase, with an empty slot preserved as a space for the planned volume 2. 

Excerpts of Volume One and Volume Two were published in Heavy Metal magazine; the November 1979 issue featured the first chapter of Volume Two, which I've posted below.

Unfortunately, Baronet went out of business soon after releasing Volume One, and the draft of Volume Two sat in a warehouse in Queens, New York, for 12 years until Carl Potts, editor of Marvel's 'Epic Illustrated' magazine, expressed an interest in publishing a complete edition of the book.

After further labors by Preiss, the Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination'  was released in 1992 by Epic.

 

Readers interested in picking up a copy can find it at amazon.com and eBay  for affordable prices, but take care that you purchase the 'Complete' version, as opposed to Volume One (which shares the same cover).

If you've never read Bester's novel, the Chaykin / Preiss edition is probably the best way to take it in. While the graphic story is abridged, the quantity of excised text is very minor, and the full flavor of the novel is well retained. 

Chaykin's illustrations are an able interpretation of the visual images described in the text. Their variety and quantity are impressive, particularly in light of the fact that they were done in the era prior to the advent of computer - assisted graphics.

Book Review: 'The Slaves of Heaven' by Edmund Cooper

2 / 5 Stars

'The Slaves of Heaven’ was first published in 1974; this Berkley paperback (156 pp) was issued in April 1975. The striking cover artwork is by Paul Lehr.

The novel opens with an entirely gratuitous sex scene (!) that will probably generate unease, even queasiness, among those modern-day readers unprepared for the more…. liberal …..standards for such material that existed in the 60s and 70s.

The narrative is set on Earth, centuries after WW III has destroyed civilization. Mankind is reduced to nomadic bands of stone-age tribesman, who regularly engage in combat for prime real estate, and access to females.

Berry is Chieftain of the Landos tribe, and unusually bright. When Berry hears rumors of a strange tribe called the Night Comers, who abduct women from sleeping campsites during the nighttime hours, he decides to set up a primitive alarm system around the confines of his camp. As far as Berry is concerned, should the Night Comers target the Landos tribe, they will be met with violence.

On a frosty night, the Night Comers do indeed visit the Landos tribe, and Berry’s preparations are for naught, as the Night Comers are seemingly invincible. 

Stunned and disheartened, Berry pursues the kidnappers and their female captives.

When Berry discovers the origins of the Night Comers, what seems to be an unusual act of kidnapping morphs into something much more profound....and a savage tribesman from the wastelands of Earth will find the fate of Mankind in his hands….

Edmund Cooper wrote quite a few sf novels during the 70s. Some of these were well-written (The Cloud Walker comes readily to mind), and can well stand alongside the more lauded novels of the era.

Others were simple pulp fictions, designed to earn the author a living. ‘Slaves of Heaven’ falls into the latter category. Cooper (like his US contemporary, Robert Silverberg) regularly wrote softcore porn novels to supplement his income, and ‘Slaves’ comes across as one of these novels, given a hasty re-working for the sf market.

The novel is suffused with a sly, almost self-parodic air. Berry, being a barbarian, uses a determinedly stilted manner of speaking, a manner of speaking that is devoid of the use of contractions. To top it off, Beery can’t help couching most of his dialogue in the form of aphorisms and platitudes, straight out of a script for a Kung Fu episode. Readers will need to prepare themselves for a steady diet of passages such as these:

“Chief, a wise man does not seek death unless he is in great pain. Only fools seek death to solve their problems.”

“The fire-talk is ended,” said Berry. “I command you to take the body of Oris to lie with those who died this day in defense of the clan. Tomorrow- whatever the day brings forth – we shall travel. I have spoken.”

‘Slaves of Heaven’ is a fast-moving and reasonably engaging adventure novel, but nothing more than that.

Heavy Metal magazine September 1982

'Heavy Metal' magazine September 1982

It’s September 1982, and on FM radio, Pete Townshend’s solo album ‘All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes’ is in heavy rotation.

The single ‘Slit Skirts’, still one of Townshend’s best songs, gets the video treatment on MTV. It’s a welcome relief from all the Joan Jett and Toni Basil videos…..and it's a great video, with plenty of New Wave visual style, including the noir-ish lighting effects, and the tee shirts with Asian ideographs printed on them worn by some of the band members. 

Also noteworthy is the video from another 'Chinese Eyes' track, 'Face Dances Part 2'. The crude animatronics featured in the video are genuinely........ disturbing....

The September issue of Heavy Metal is on the stands, featuring a front cover by Michael Gross, and a back cover by Berni Wrightson.

This is one of the better HM issues of the year.

The Dossier features the usual opinionated content…. Lou Stathis, in his ‘Rok Music’ review, takes aim at guitar-centered performers, with some praise for Tom Verlaine, Ritchie Blackmore, Phil Manzanera, and the San Francisco band ‘Toiling Midgets’. There are some Midgets songs available at YouTube; standard-issue L.A. region punk tunes.

Other Rok critics in the Dossier: Jon Tiven castigates Van Halen, declaring them already washed up with the release of Diver Down. And Merle Ginsberg waxes enthusiastic over 'dissonant' art-rock, typified by newcomers Sonic Youth, and their '...urban mutant sound', and a group called Red Decade, founded by an artiste named Jules Baptiste. 

HM editorial staffer Brad Balfour demonstrates he can write as badly as Stathis, Tiven, and Ginsberg, declaring that the group Material "....is more assiduously steeped in a proto-apocalyptic ethos." What exactly this means, is not at all clear, but hey, it sounds very knowledgeable......

There is a brief but very readable interview with sf author Thomas M Disch, who looks suspiciously similar to Robin Leach.

And a laudatory examination of the artwork of the video game ‘Tempest’: my favorite game of the arcade era, in fact. 

The comics section of the September issue provides continuing installments of Corben’s ‘Den II’, Wrightson and Jones’s ‘Freak Show’, Duillet’s ‘Yragael’, ‘Zora’ by Fernandez, and ‘The Voyage of Those Forgotten’ by Christin and Bilal.

Richard Lupoff contributes an essay, ‘Barsoom !’ that examines the continued success of Burroughs’s ‘Mars’ novels on the pop culture consciousness. Ably illustrated by Clyde Caldwell, whose artwork verges on just the right note of self-parody, this essay is enjoyable reading.

There is also another installment of Jeff Jones’s ‘I’m Age’, a strange, one-page-at-a-time series that features a nude woman talking to herself, as well as to the flowers. Why editor Julie Simmons-Lynch persists in running this strip is not at all clear; ‘I’m Age’ is too creepy to be titillating fodder for the stoners making up most of the Readership. Revelations about the underlying psychology of ‘I’m Age’ came later, in the late 90s, when Jones decided to undergo a sex change operation to become a woman (‘Catherine Jones’)… !

Perhaps the best piece in the September issue is ‘Object’, a black and white contribution from New Zealand’s Mike Hinge (1931 – 2003). I’ve posted it below.

I have previously posted one of Hinge’s amazing color comics, ‘….Rears Its Ugly Green Head’, a collaboration with Neal Adams, from the July 1979 issue of HM. ‘Objects’ is just as distinctive and imaginative.

Unfortunately, the bulk of Hinge’s graphics work has never been compiled, save for the 1973 volume ‘1 Hinge: The Mike Hinge Experience’, copies of which sell for a starting price of $75. A new book, compiling his entire corpus, would be ideal…..

Information about Mike Hinge is available at the Onyx Cube blog. 

Book Review: 'Ancient, My Enemy' by Gordon R. Dickson

 

2 / 5 Stars

‘Ancient, My Enemy’ was first published in hardback by Doubleday in 1974. This DAW paperback (No. 190, 206 pp.) was released in April 1976 and features a cover illustration by Eddie Jones. DAW released another paperback printing in July of 1980, this time with a striking, orange-tinted cover by Greg Theakston.

All of the stories in ‘Ancient’ were first printed in the 50s and 60s in various sf magazines and digests.

My brief summaries of the contents:

Ancient, My Enemy: on a desert planet, Terran prospectors confront hostile natives. The story struggles a bit in trying to say something profound about humanitys' inherent prediliction towards violence.

The Odd Ones: two aliens look on and philosophize, as a Terran couple struggle to survive their first year on a colony planet.

The Monkey Wrench: a variant on the sf cliché of the powerful, all-knowing computer reduced to imbecility when asked to solve a paradox.

Tiger Green: the crew of a spaceship must solve the riddle of an alien ecology before they all succumb to a fatal madness.

The Friendly Man: a man who travels 50,000 years into the future finds his reception to be a bit too comfortable.

Love Me True: a crewman is lost without the cuddly alien he illegally brought back from a starship voyage.

Our First Death: on a bleak planet, members of a colony confront their internal divisions.

In the Bone: bereft of weapons, a lone earthman must find a way to defeat a seemingly invincible alien. The best story in the collection.

The Bleak and Barren Land: labored tale of a Federation agent mediating conflict between the natives of a planet and Terran colonists.

On the whole, ‘Ancient’ is very unremarkable, serving as an example of the type of short fiction that dominated sf publishing in the years prior to the New Wave movement.

Dickson’s writing is not particularly accomplished, suffering from the adverb-centered syntax that regularly plagued the prose of the pulp era. You will find characters who regularly roar with laughter, smile mockingly, laugh barkingly, say things croakingly, say things flatly, say things thickly, etc., etc.

The setting and plotting of these stories are bland and derivative, sticking to tried and true sf tropes.

To be fair to Dickson, the magazine and digest editors of the 50s and 60s tended to want a particularly style of material in their story submissions, and for writers who earned their living selling to these outlets, taking the salable route was more financially prudent that attempting to upset the publishing apple cart with highly novel or imaginative submissions.

I can only really recommend ‘Ancient, My Enemy’ to hard-core Dickson fans.

Primabell by Juan Jimenez

'Primabell' by Juan Jimenez

from the Fall 1986 issue of Heavy Metal

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review:  'A Feast Unknown' by Philip Jose Farmer

 

1980, Playboy Press, illustration by Jordi Penalva

1969, Essex House

1975, Quartet Books (UK), illustration by Patrick Woodroffe

excerpt from Mythopoeikon, 1976

1975 (hardcover, limited edition) Fokker D-LXIX Press,illustration by Richard Corben

1988, Grafton (UK), illustration by Peter Elson

5 / 5 Stars

In the late 60s, Essex House, a L.A.-based, small-press publisher of highbrow ‘erotica’ (i.e., porn) paperbacks, agreed to publish several novels written for its imprint by the well-known sf writer Philip Jose Farmer.

Before Essex House went out of business, it released Farmer’s ‘Image of the Beast’ in 1968, and its sequel ‘Blown’, and ‘A Feast Unknown’, in 1969.

[The concept behind Essex House books may seem quaint by today’s standards, but remember that back in 1969, there was no world wide web, and 'sleaze' fiction was an integral part of the porn landscape. ]

Essex House paperbacks sell nowadays for large sums of money (i.e., > $50) for copies in very good condition.

In the early 80s, Playboy Press obtained the reprint rights to Farmer’s Essex House titles, and issued ‘A Feast Unknown’ in January 1980, and a combined edition of ‘Image of the Beast’ and ‘Blown’ in June 1981. All are mass-market paperbacks.

‘A Feast Unknown’ (288 pp.) features a cover illustration by Jordi Penalva.

The novel can best be described as a sort of ultimate (if extremely warped) homage to Doc Savage and Tarzan, by their greatest Fanboy, Philip Jose Farmer. Think of a piece of slash lit / fanfic, albeit one published in 1969 (back before those terms even existed) and you have some idea of the attitude Farmer brought to this book.

‘Feast’ is a first-person narrative by ‘Lord Grandrith’ (Tarzan), and is set in Africa in the late 60s. Within the first few pages, there are acts of explicit mayhem and depravity committed by Grandrith, just the start of a steady stream of such episodes that last until the very end of the book.

The plot revolves around Grandrith’s quest to re-contact a secret cabal of otherworldly beings, the Nine, who have endowed a certain number of Earth’s inhabitants with a cessation of aging, the ability to heal rapidly from grievous wounds, and superhuman physical and mental capabilities.

However, as Grandrith makes his way to the meeting place, where he will again be questioned by the Nine, and again drink the elixir that maintains his youthfulness, he is aware that the price demanded by the Nine is exquisitely….. painful.

En route, Grandrith encounters homicidal Kenyan rebels, Balkan mercenaries, and not least, Doc Savage, here referred to as ‘Doc Caliban’. It turns out Caliban is not only Grandrith’s half-brother, but he also is one of those endowed by the Nine, and he also journeys to the rendezvous site for a shot of elixir.

But Caliban believes that Grandith has tortured and killed his cousin, Patricia Savage, and thus, the two greatest supermen of modern pulp / pop literature are destined to have a brutally violent showdown.

Hand-to-hand, with no Marquis of Queensbury Rules……..

‘A Feast Unknown’ is one of Farmer’s better novels, a consistently engaging read from its first to its last page. Thematically, it deals with the issue of how supermen might ‘really’ behave, when given the liberty to pursue their own desires without being under the moral restraints of Judeo-Christian ethics.

‘Feast’ does contain plenty of XXX material, and it’s not for the squeamish. However, its myriad atrocities and perversions are related in a deadpan, even droll manner, which gives ‘Feast’ more the character of a dark comedy than a work of pornography. More than once, I laughed out loud while reading some of the more outrageous events taking place in ‘Feast’.

Perhaps because he had so much fun with ‘Feast’, in 1970 Farmer reunited the characters in the Ace Double ‘The Lord of the Trees’ and ‘The Mad Goblin’. The volume was ‘coincidentally’ re-released by Ace in 1980.

Perhaps realizing that he had gone as far into Excess as he could have in ‘Feast’, Farmer wrote ‘Trees’ and ‘Goblin’ as G-rated novelettes. 

Accordingly, while competent in their own way, both works seem bland and unremarkable compared to ‘Feast’.