From the ridiculous to the sublime.

To follow up from my previous post, some covers that have it all: bubble helmets, see through spacesuits, impractical metal bras, bug eyed monsters, and the Galaxy cover as sort of an honourable mention. And yes, the woman on the Planet Stories cover is wearing spiffy red high heels.

And now, the reality of fashionable spacewear, as modelled by Canada's own female astronaut, Roberta Bondar. (Photo courtesy of the NASA web site.) I've had the pleasure of very briefly meeting Dr. Bondar, and frankly, if something goes wrong in orbit, this is the person you want with you, rather than the helplessly screaming woman in the yellow miniskirt from the Captain Future cover - I think of Roberta Bondar as being Canada's answer to Ellen Ripley.

- Sid

 

P.S. A friend of mine read this post and expressed her surprise that I knew Ripley's first name was Ellen. What, did you miss the part where I said I'd been an SF/fantasy fan since birth, Laurie? 

 

"We're interested in the movie rights to your book title - but not your book."

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.

- Sid

Okay, it's self-interest.

To my mild pleasure, this month I made my way into print for the first time. A locally published magazine of children's fiction saw fit to accept a submission from me, and I received my two author's copies in the mail on Friday. The magazine is Crow Toes Quarterly, and although only two issues in, is making a strong attempt to position itself as a source of unconventional fiction for children.

This is all well and good, but why did I find it appropriate to mention here? Well, of course, it's a science fiction children's story, what else would I write? The story is titled The End with a Big E and although I doubt that anyone will figure it out, the end with a big E is entropy - the story deals with the entropic decay of the universe, although it's really more of a fantasy, there's no scientific validity to the damn thing at all. Nonetheless, it was a fun little thing to write, and I have to confess that when I read it I cry a little at the end. Half of my two-child test audience (thanks to Les, my ex-supervisor) had the same reaction, so it can't be entirely bad. To be honest, I have no idea where it would be for sale, but feel free to visit the Crow Toes web site and ask them about distribution.

- Sid