Secondhand Vintage Science Fiction & Pulp Adventure Bargain Book Box SP2761

Secondhand Vintage Science Fiction & Pulp Adventure Bargain Book Box — 21 Books

Six Doc Savage novels give this collection its distinctive character — a pulp adventure library within the library, featuring Clark Savage Jr. in the orange-spined Bantam editions that introduced him to a new generation of readers in the 1960s and 70s. Around them sit some of the most important names in the history of science fiction: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, C.S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov. Vance's The Dragon Masters won the Hugo Award; Clarke's 2010 continued the greatest science fiction story ever filmed; Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet launched a Space Trilogy that stands apart from everything else in the genre. A box for readers who know their SF history and want it on their shelves in its original paperback form.

1. Swords in the Mist — Fritz Leiber — The third volume in Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series — the sword-and-sorcery stories that helped define the genre. Leiber was called "the best-loved American fantasy writer" and these stories of two rogues in the city of Lankhmar show exactly why.
2. Dr Bloodmoney: Or How We Got Along After the Bomb — Philip K. Dick — A quietly devastating post-nuclear novel following a cast of survivors in a transformed California, bound together by mutual dependence and the man who may have caused the disaster. Less paranoid than much PKD, and more humane — one of his most underrated works.
3. Gladiator-at-Law — Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth — A satirical science fiction thriller set in a future America where corporations control everything and the public is pacified by gladiatorial games. Pohl and Kornbluth were the great satirical partnership of 1950s SF, and this is among their sharpest collaborations.
4. Starman Jones — Robert A. Heinlein — A young man stows away on a starship and finds himself navigating not just deep space but the rigid class system of an interstellar future. Heinlein's juveniles are often his most purely pleasurable novels, and Starman Jones is among the finest.
5. Robots and Empire — Isaac Asimov — The final Robot novel, bridging the gap between the Robot series and the Foundation universe and delivering the grand synthesis Asimov had been building toward for decades. Essential for anyone who has followed the sequence.
6. The Land of Terror — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — One of the earliest Doc Savage adventures, sending the Man of Bronze and his crew into the American wilderness to investigate a series of inexplicable deaths. Lester Dent's pulp plotting at its most propulsive.
7. The Hand of Oberon — Roger Zelazny — Book Four of the Chronicles of Amber, in which Corwin discovers the Black Road leads back to its source in Amber itself. Zelazny's Amber sequence is one of the great achievements of fantasy fiction, and this instalment tightens the central mystery with considerable skill.
8. Empire of the Atom — A.E. Van Vogt — Van Vogt transposes the rise of Rome to a far-future Earth where atomic energy is worshipped as magic and the old political struggles play out in science-fictional dress. An early classic from one of the genre's most inventive minds.
9. A Gift from Earth — Larry Niven — Set on the planet Plateau, where a small ruling class maintains power by using the colonists as organ donors. Niven builds his Known Space universe with the rigorous internal consistency that makes him one of hard SF's most satisfying practitioners.
10. Hellstrom's Hive — Frank Herbert — From the author of Dune, a thriller about a secret underground society of humans who have modelled their civilisation on insect behaviour. Herbert uses the concept to explore collectivism, individuality, and survival with the same philosophical intensity he brought to Arrakis.
11. The Dragon Masters — Jack Vance — Winner of the Hugo Award. A war between two human communities, each of which has bred and trained captured aliens as combat creatures. Vance's imagination and his prose — elegant, ironic, precise — are both on full display in this compressed masterpiece.
12. The Living Fire Menace — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — Doc Savage investigates a mysterious weapon capable of killing with fire from a distance. Classic pulp construction — a baffling menace, a global conspiracy, and the Man of Bronze at the centre of it all.
13. The Stone Man — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — Victims are found turned to stone in this early Savage adventure, which deploys the full pulp arsenal of scientific villainy and last-minute rescue. Collector's interest: one of the rarer entries in the series.
14. The Evil Gnome — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — A mysterious dwarf and a series of bizarre crimes draw Doc Savage into a case that showcases Dent's gift for the grotesque villain and the impossible situation. Vintage pulp at its most entertainingly preposterous.
15. The Klingon Gambit — Robert E. Vardeman — A Timescape Star Trek novel in which the Enterprise crew faces a Klingon warship and a mystery that may doom them both. For readers whose science fiction loyalties run through the original series.
16. 2010: Odyssey Two — Arthur C. Clarke — The sequel to 2001 and one of the most eagerly anticipated science fiction novels of its era — a joint American-Soviet mission returns to Jupiter to discover what happened to Dave Bowman. Clarke brings his characteristic scientific rigour and genuine sense of wonder to the universe's greatest mystery.
17. Fantastic Voyage — Isaac Asimov — A novelisation of the classic film, in which a submarine crew is miniaturised and injected into the body of a dying scientist to destroy a blood clot from the inside. Asimov's scientific intelligence makes the implausible premise work better than it has any right to.
18. Out of the Silent Planet — C.S. Lewis — The first volume of Lewis's Space Trilogy, in which a Cambridge philologist is kidnapped and taken to Mars — finding not the dead world of scientific assumption but a living world of unfallen beings. Extraordinary world-building and genuine theological imagination, from a writer working at the height of his powers.
19. Quest of Qui — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — Doc Savage follows a trail of mystery to an uncharted region where something ancient and dangerous has been disturbed. One of the more atmospheric entries in the series.
20. The Phantom City — Doc Savage (Kenneth Robeson) — The tenth Doc Savage adventure in the original publication sequence — a lost city, a hidden treasure, and the forces that will kill to keep both secret. Essential for collectors assembling the early run.
21. The Byworlder — Poul Anderson — A Hugo Award winner in which humanity makes first contact with an alien and only a social outcast can truly communicate with it. Anderson uses the premise to examine what it means to be human with the intelligence and compassion that made him one of SF's most enduring writers.