The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth
Any aspiring space explorers in the audience? NASA is looking for astronauts - sadly, US citizens only, and out of over 12,000 applicants in 2020, only ten became astronaut candidates: odds of 1 in 1200 against you, even if it was a random selection. But you know, if you don't apply, the odds are zero.
- Sid
Ah, the great traditions of science fiction cover art! This forty-nine year old publication doesn't cover all the bases, since it lacks a both a bug-eyed monster and a woman in either a brass bikini or see-through space suit, but it's still pretty good as clichéd covers go - the needle-pointed red-finned space ship, the bubble helmet, and the accordioned spacesuit.
If only this poor fellow had gloves, it seems a bit much to be out there bare-handed.
Sadly, I was unable to find a credit for the cover art, not so much as to assign blame but to attribute credit for copyright purposes. Of course, copyright for the novel resides with Alan E. Nourse, or more probably his estate (since his death in 1992).
Nourse was born in 1928, and was a strong member of the Golden Age group of SF authors - Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1964 novel Farnham's Freehold to Nourse. There's often a bit of confusion about Nourse, because Andre Norton was writing as Andrew North at about the same time, and he is sometimes assumed to be another of her pseudonyms. (I admit to having fallen prey to this belief at one point.)
Nourse has the dubious honour of having a movie named after one of his books without the movie itself having anything to do with the book in question: for some odd reason, the title of his 1974 novel The Bladerunner was borrowed for the 1982 movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This has to be one of the strangest decisions ever made when adapting a book to the big screen, like deciding that War and Peace would be a better sounding title for a movie version of Anna Karenina.
As an footnote to the above, an uncopyrighted Nourse novel, Star Surgeon, is available at the Project Gutenberg web site.
