Secondhand Science Fiction & Fantasy Bargain Book Box SP4184

Secondhand Science Fiction & Fantasy Bargain Book Box SP4184

Vintage SF and fantasy, mostly 70s and 80s paperbacks with the covers to match: Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, Le Guin’s City of Illusions, Heinlein’s Glory Road, Ballard’s The Crystal World, two Vlad Taltos books, Vance, Tanith Lee and a rare Not at Night horror anthology. Twenty-three books for a collector of classic genre fiction. Some covers may carry price stickers or sticker residue.

1. The Barbed Coil — J.V. Jones — Tessa picks up a gold ring in a Californian creek and wakes in a world where a tyrant’s crown is driving him mad. Big, self-contained fantasy with a painter-scribe magic system you won’t have seen elsewhere.
2. Mad Amos — Alan Dean Foster — Amos Malone, a mountain man the size of a door with a mule that’s half something else, drifting through a West where the tall tales are true. Funny and strange; a favourite of Foster’s own.
3. The Crystal World — J.G. Ballard — A jungle in Cameroon is crystallising, trees and birds and people turning to jewel, and the people drawn to it are not fleeing. Ballard’s hallucinatory masterpiece.
4. Still Not at Night — ed. Christine Campbell Thomson — From the notorious 1930s Not at Night series, the British anthologies that smuggled Weird Tales pulp horror past the censors. Hard-to-find Arrow paperback.
5. Cyrion — Tanith Lee — A golden-haired mercenary with a past nobody can pin down, in a world of djinn and desert cities. Linked stories, and the final one reveals who Cyrion is. Lee’s prose at its richest.
6. Glory Road — Robert Heinlein — A Vietnam vet answers a newspaper ad for a hero and follows a woman called Star into a sword-and-planet quest. Heinlein’s only pure fantasy, and the last third upends everything. Hugo nominee.
7. Death on Demand — Carolyn G. Hart — Annie runs a crime-fiction bookshop on a South Carolina island, and a mystery writer is murdered at her author night. First of a long-running cosy series beloved by crime readers.
8. The Wizard of Sunset Strip — Simon Hawke — Magic has returned to a near-future world and a warlock with a Hollywood career is up against a necromancer. Light, knowing urban fantasy from before the term existed.
9. Brak the Barbarian: The Sorceress — John Jakes — Brak heads south for Khurdisan and gets detoured by a sorceress who needs a killer. Pulp sword-and-sorcery in the Conan mould, rarely reprinted.
10. Yendi — Steven Brust — Vlad Taltos is a human assassin running a patch in a city of near-immortal Dragaerans, and a rival is muscling in. Fast, funny, first-person crime fiction that happens to be fantasy.
11. Taltos — Steven Brust — How Vlad became an assassin, cut with a journey into the Paths of the Dead to retrieve a soul. The book where the series’ timeline starts to click.
12. Lord of the Isles — David Drake — The sea swallowed a kingdom a thousand years ago, and the magic that drowned it is waking under a shepherd’s village. Drake’s big nine-book epic starts here.
13. First Rider’s Call — Kristen Britain — Karigan tried to walk away from the Green Riders. The wall holding back old magic is cracking, and it’s calling her by name. Sequel to Green Rider.
14. Crisis on Doona — Anne McCaffrey & Jody Lynn Nye — The shared human–Hrruban colony is up for treaty renewal and someone is sabotaging it. Sequel to Decision at Doona; warm, political SF about cohabiting with cat people.
15. Wizardry and Wild Romance — Michael Moorcock — Moorcock on epic fantasy: why Tolkien is nursery-safe, why Peake and Leiber matter, what the genre is for. Opinionated, bracing, and the best thing written on the subject by a practitioner.
16. Gilded Spurs — Grace Ingram — Twelfth-century England: a knight’s bastard son, a forced marriage and a castle under threat. Old-school historical romance with real period grit.
17. Polgara the Sorceress — David & Leigh Eddings — Three thousand years of Polgara’s life, told by her: the Arendish wars, the raising of generations of Rivan heirs, and the sister she lost. Essential for Belgariad readers.
18. The Dragon Masters — Jack Vance — Humans and aliens have each bred the other into war-beasts, and the next invasion is due. Hugo Award winner, Vance at his most concentrated.
19. The Aeronaut’s Windlass — Jim Butcher — Airships, talking cats, crystal-powered warfare and a spire city under attack. Butcher’s break from Dresden, first of the Cinder Spires, and the cat Rowl steals it.
20. City of Illusions — Ursula K. Le Guin — An amnesiac with yellow eyes crosses a ruined future Earth to find out who he is, and the answer connects to the aliens who broke the world. Early Hainish novel, short and strange.
21. Nine Princes in Amber — Roger Zelazny — Corwin wakes in a hospital with no memory and claws his way back to Amber, the one true world of which Earth is a shadow. The start of the Amber series and the best opening in fantasy.
22. The Magic Labyrinth — Philip José Farmer — Riverworld book four: Burton, Clemens and the rest finally reach the tower at the river’s source and learn who resurrected all of humanity, and why.
23. Sea Tales of Terror — ed. J.J. Strating — Hodgson, Blackwood, Wells and others on derelicts, drowned things and what climbs aboard at night. Fontana horror anthology, 1970s.