Short SF Book Reviews: If All Else Fails…., Craig Strete (1980), My Petition for More Space, John Hersey (1974), and All Judgement Fled, James White (serialized 1967)

[Preliminary Note: This year saw a massive drop off in the number of reviews I’ve managed to put together due to professional pressures etc.  I wish I had been able to write fuller reviews–especially as much of the SF I read is lesser known and deserves a wider audience.  In some cases, I waited too long to write and thus loss the necessary momentum.  I have ten or so more waiting in the wings–hopefully they will allow me “to catch up” so to speak.]

1. If All Else Fails…, Craig Strete (1980)

(Margo Herr’s cover for the 1980 edition)

4.75/5 (collated rating: Very Good)

Craig Strete, one of the few Native American SF authors, picked up three Nebula Award nominations for short SF over the 70s and early 80s (“The Bleeding Man” in 1976, “Time Deer” in 1976, and “A Sunday Visit With Great-Grandfather” in 1981 although it was withdrawn).  The first two are in If All Else Fails… (1980).   They are both far from the best of the collection.

Favorites: “All My Statues Have Stone Wings” (1980), “To See the City Sitting on Its Buildings” (1975), and “A Horse of a Different Technicolor” (1975).

The pages reek with despair at the loss of Native American culture ….  The narrator of the “All My Statues” is reminded of his “grandfather who died humming all the songs he had kept silent because there was no one left to sing them” (11).  In “To See the City” the dead try to escape the concrete prisons of the cities that desecrate the holy places: “Buried animal and ground people were trying to reach out through the cracks in sidewalks.  The ground people moved restlessly under the concrete” (36).  The television, an embodiment of the white man’s control of mass culture, declares the Native American is a figment of the past, not of the present: “We make decisions for you.  Take you hand of the silver screen.  You are interfering with the projectionist.  Yes, we listen, we tell you, you are a book, and having been written, you cannot cancel a line of it” (46).

Filled with gorgeous lines, evocative images, pain….

I have a feeling that I am going to reread the collection (something I almost never do) in the near future and write a full-length review… Fans of SF tackling tough themes (such as oppression, the effects of technology, and Native American myth) in a literary and experimental manner—track down this collection!  Original authors such as Craig Strete, with distinct and diverse voices, are too often neglected in the grand narratives of SF’s past.

2. My Petition for More Space, John Hersey (1974)

(Uncredited cover for the 1976 edition)

4/5 (Good)

John Hersey’s My Petition for More Space (1974) is a quiet novel where the horror of the overpopulated future world sends only occasional currents of dread to surface.  My Petition is also a deceptively simple novel with a crystalline structure—the vast majority of the story takes place in dialogue form, with interior thoughts, between characters waiting shoulder-to-shoulder in a line waiting for a hearing for their petitions.  There is something so incredibly polished about the scenario of waiting in a line, and in this case the thoughts and actions of a narrator whose outlandish petition will never be granted.  The line as a manifestation of the travails and joys of life, brief transformative encounters, and the thoughts that might occur over the course of an afternoon… Beautiful.

Recommended for fans of literary + overpopulation themed SF.  Who knew that John Hersey, who won the Pullitzer for his coverage of Hiroshima, wrote two SF novels? (the other is The Child Buyer, 1961).

For Keith Laumer’s equally wonderful take on the endless line see my review of “In the Queue” (1970).

3. All Judgement Fled, James White (1968)

(Lawrence Edwards’ cover for the 1968 edition)

4.25/5 (Good)

James White’s All Judgement Fled (1967) is easily the most inventive 60s/70s “Big Dumb Object” novels I have encountered.  Far more complex than Clarke’s straight-laced so-called masterpiece Rendezvous with Rama (1973) or the fascinating veneer (and nothing more) of Larry Niven’s bland Ringworld (1970).  Notice that White’s novel predates both better known behemoths of this common subgenre.

Years ago I read and enjoyed James White’s The Watch Below (1966) but for whatever reason I did not read more of his novels.  All Judgement Fled (1968) is even better.  Unlike White’s most famous medical-themed SF, this novel psychologically dark and unsettling which often hints at themes that Malzberg would tackle a few years later (such as perpetuating the cult of the astronaut even in the face of incredible danger)…

“It was Walters who had the last word.  Deafeningly, apologetically, with the volume of his transmitter turned right up he said, ‘It was set to rebroadcast your last words as the Ship carried you out of the solar system to some dire, extraterrestrial fate.  This spirited exchange of ideas is being overheard by all the world.

‘I don’t think the general will approve of some of the language…'” (140)

The first third of the novel is claustrophobic and terrifying—the astronauts journey towards the strange Big Dumb Object in two tiny space capsules.  One crewman is wrecked by some psychosomatic illness triggered by his psychological state…. And, all hell breaks loose as all semblance of a potential peaceful first contact breaks down.  Wild theories proliferate, violence abounds, who is experimenting on who?

Recommended for all fans of dark first contact SF.

(Uncredited cover for the 1969 Corgi edition)

(Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s cover for the 1979 edition)

(John Harris’ cover for the 1987 edition)

For more book reviews consult the INDEX

Book Review: The Pastel City, M. John Harrison (1971)

(Bruce Pennington’s cover for the 1971 edition)

4.25/5 (Very Good)

One of the previous owners of my copy of M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City (1971) must have harbored a pernicious grudge against corroded landscapes and nebulous morals.  So much in fact that they propped up the first volume of the Viriconium sequence against a tree and used it for BB gun target practice. I am still trying to identify the cause of the book’s other wounds… [pictorial evidence below].

As one can expect from Harrison, decadence and decay seeps from the quires of The Pastel City as characters try to create meaning, or grasp hold of half-formed shreds of past purpose, in a world that will continue to crumble regardless of the defeat of evil.  Although not as forceful as The Centauri Device (1974) in its subversion of fantasy/SF quest tropes, M.  John Harrison’s fascination with degeneration of landscape and purpose attempts a dialogue about the nature of genre. That said, I suspect the narrative itself will intrigue most readers of more standard entries, although the characters are not the strapping young desperate to win passionate new love and resurrect the “Golden Age” of the past.  Rather, they are aged and weathered and more inclined to speculate on the nature of ideograms whose indices are long lost and brood on past cataclysm whose current effects cannot be escaped.

The Pastel City is followed by A Storm of Wings (1980) and In Viriconium (1982) along with various short stories including “The Lamia and Lord Cromis” (1971) and “Lamia Mutable” (1972)

Analysis/Plot Summary

The narrative impetus: A civil war breaks out in Viriconium between the young queen and the old queen. The young Queen Jane, the direct descendant of King Methven, holds the allegiance of (most) of a surviving tattered band of washed-up knights, called the Methven, which dispersed after the death of their king.  Canna Moidat, at the head of the Northman, whose “sprawling townships where intricate and beautiful machines of unknown function were processed crudely into swords and tribal chieftains fought drunkenly over possession of the deadly baans unearthed from the desert” (8), conjures terrifying forces to fight the battle against the Queen Jane and the armies of the Pastel City.

The characters: tegeus-Cromis, “of the nameless sword, who thought himself a better poet than fighter” leaves his tower, still filled with despair after the death of his wife, to fight for Queen Jane (34).  His poetic lines embody the state of the remaining Methven: “we are nothing but eroded men…” (65).  He is joined by Birkin Grif who dreams of “immense ancient forces moving in darkness” (42) and the decrepit Theomeris Glyn, who spends his time harassing women. Tomb the Dwarf joins their ranks of brigands, in power armor fashioned from some ancient metal skeleton, he provokes and capers “sniggering like a parrot” (69) as if in some ritualistic dance to ward off the melancholic film that covers all…

The landscape as character: The inhabitants of Viriconium, a decaying empire even before the civil war, “live […] on the corpse of an ancient science, dependent on the enduring relics of a dead race” (14). It is a landscape where scattered objects are covered with cyphers and sphenograms that have lost their meaning; ancient machines whose gears and mechanisms no longer function crumble into acrid dust; strange men ensconced in towers forget their own origins; and where sloth-like megatheria wander sinking cities.

The non-sentient megatheria mirror the movements of the characters:

“Between the collapsed towers moved the megatheria, denizens of the dead metropolis. They lived in sunken rooms, moved ponderously through the choked streets by night and day, as if for millennia they had been trying to discover the purpose of their inheritance” (131)

As Viriconium relies on excavating the machines of the Afternoon Cultures for its survival, the nourishing ruins will run out and turn to dust.  And, as the previous powers mined all the ore from the Earth, the end is neigh and unavoidable.

Final thoughts

Harrison’s first novel, The Committed Men (1971) remains my favorite due to its careful use of surreal scenes and social commentary.  And The Pastel City takes over second place from The Centauri Device (1974)…    The Pastel City’s motivating conflict appears as if a momentary event near the the end of the world.  The quest, but a preordained pattern enacting some lost meaning, cannot escape its deterministic constraints.  A haunting evocation of decadence and decline, M. John Harrison’s prose, filled with hypnotic intensity, is a joy to read.

“Burn them up and sow them deep:

Oh, Drive them down;

Heavy weather in the Fleet:

Oh, Drive them down;

Gather them up and drive them down:

Oh, Drive them down;

Withering wind and plodding,

Oh, Drive them down!” (50).

Recommended for all fans of 70s SF/fantasy.

For more book reviews consult the INDEX

(BB gun holes and other assorted wounds inflicted on my copy of the1974 Avon edition)

(Wendell Minor’s cover for the 1972 edition)

(Gray Morrrow’s cover for the 1974 edition)

(Karel Thole’s cover for the 1979 Italian edition)

Book Review: Clifford D. Simak’s The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)

• Richard Powers’ cover for the 1961 paperback edition

3.25/5 (collated rating: Above Average)

At this point in my reading adventure, I approach Clifford D. Simak’s science fiction with a clear intention to expand my understanding of his economic, political, and technological critiques of American society. This culminated in 2024 with my article “’We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” Since then, albeit at a slower pace, I’ve continued to cover his science fiction, speeches, and additional interviews I’ve been able to track down. I find him a deeply fascinating author who’s often pigeonholed as “bucolic” or “pastoral” with no real attempt to read beyond his tendency to set a few of his narratives in a rural simulacrum of his childhood corner of America.

If you’re new to his work, this is a solid but unspectacular collection despite the inclusion of his best-known short story “The Big Front Yard” (1958) (winner of the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novelette). However, with the exception of “Jackpot” (1956), I found The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960) missing the type of ruminative and grimy moments I find most appealing about his work. It’s swings towards Simak’s more goofy and sentimental side.

And before we get to the story-by-story discussion, here’s a brief note about the publication history. This review covers the 1961 paperback edition of The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960). It contains six less short stories than the hardback. Those six cut stories appeared in The Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1962). I own both volumes.

Brief Plot Summary/Analysis

“Honorable Opponent” (1956), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (August 1956). You can read it online here.

In the far future, the vast Galactic Confederacy centered on Earth finds itself in conflict with the alien Fivers. A meeting is scheduled on a barren planet to exchange prisoners. Why this particular planet was picked isn’t entirely clear, but the same could be said about the society/culture/and objectives of Fivers themselves. The Galactic Confederacy appears to be licked: “Earth was across the barrel. For there was nothing he could do but negotiate” (15). Earth’s war ships disappear with their crews left and right. In order to counter the Fiver threat, “thousands of researchers were working day and night in a crash-priority program to find an answer to the weapon” (8). Of course, there’s no equivalent program to understand Fiver society!

While I won’t spoil the rather silly ending, it fits into Simak’s common tendency to imagine humanity’s unwillingness to depart from traditional patterns of interaction and conflict. When the Fiver secret is revealed, Earth’s generals immediately speculate on how the new technology can be harnessed to extract new planets of their resources more effectively (18) rather than to improve lives.

I found this one a bit forgettable despite its re-emphasis of Simak’s central themes.

“The Big Front Yard” (1958), 3.75/5 (Good): First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (October 1958): You can read it online here. Won the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Hiram Taine, an antique dealer and electronic repair handyman, comes home after acquiring antique furniture to resell to a mysterious substance on his basement wall. Its occupants transformed Taine’s basement. Soon a black-and-white TV set to be repaired suddenly is in color (27). Towser, his dog, comes across a spaceship buried in the woods. With Beasly at his side, a local man who seems to have an intellectual disability, Taine returns home to find his home’s exterior transformed. The porch now opens up on an entirely new, and alien, vista. As they explore the alien landscape, they come across another home that serves as a portal to another world, and more spaceships, and more aliens craftsman setting off to establish new networks. The secret gets out and soon the government and its agents come running to lay claim to new territories. Taine and Beasly will have to use their wits to understand the new world before conflict breaks out.

As with “Operation Stinky” later in the collection, Simak’s renders the rural countryside in the near future (1965) as in a state of transformation. Taine’s neighbor Henry runs a new computer factory on the outskirts of town (23). Taine fears prime pieces of land, including on where he played as a child, will be purchased to develop suburbs (22). There’s also the unavoidable sense of humanity’s relentless quest for profit. While Taine speculates on antiques and the odd job for survival, the FBI and Pentagon have something more draconian up their sleeves: “the government, of course, could exercise the right of eminent domain and start condemnation action” (52). The Russians also learn of the portal and want to lay their claim (57). Simak’s “bucolic” edges of the American countryside, often sites of contact and interaction with the alien and new, become contested spaces of Cold War conflict.

I found Taine an appealing character–he cares for Beasly, barely tolerated by the rest of the town, and his dog Towser. He wants to do good. He wants to make an honest living. He doesn’t give in to blind patriotism. He stands up for himself and others. This is a better version of the classic Simak contact story.

“Operation Stinky” (1957), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (April 1957): You can read it online here.

The funniest (and silliest) story in the collection, “Operation Stinky” follows a classic Simak narrator–a “day-laborer” (75), gun-waving, drunk, shack-dwelling, good-hearted man–and his encounter with a strange type of skunk. The narrator rescues Stinky from a pack of dogs. The skunk becomes his friend and purrs like a cat. He takes it to the local bar as he doubts his friends will believe his story unless he brings evidence. And then something mysterious happens on his way home. He’s plastered. And the animal attempts to drive Old Betsy, his car… The authorities at the nearby air base catch wind of the animal and speculate that the unusual changes to Old Betsy might be the product of its handiwork.

Where “Operation Stinky” rises above its outlandish premise is Simak’s commentary on American Cold War culture. As with other stories in this collection, the alien becomes a source of exploitation for immediate gain. In this instance, rather than attempt to understand Stinky or figure out a mode of community, the military sees his skills solely as contributing to the American military-industrial complex: “We’ve got enough we actually understand to give us unquestioned air superiority. We’re a good ten years, if not a hundred, depending on how much we can use, ahead of the rest of them. They’ll never catch us now” (90). The air base interrupts the rhythms the rural experience. Simak’s countryside perches at that juncture where old ways of life are rapidly changing.

“Jackpot” (1956), 4.25/5. (Good): First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1956). You can read it online here.

A ragtag crew of intergalactic scavengers “scour the Galaxy for anything that’s loose” (97). They land on a planet. Loot ruins and resources. The dream of a jackpot that will raise them all from poverty propels them forth. Doc, the voice of conscience, spends his days blotting out their sad existence with the bottle. The captain, our narrator, justifies his actions with the lens of the past: “Back on Earth, in the early days […] it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found rivers and climbed the mountains and bought back word to those who stayed home. […] They didn’t worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it” (100). And, most egregiously, he posits a defense of colonial violence: “If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad” (101). Clashing ideologies will come to fore with the discovery of a new alien technology.

On a desert planet, the crew encounters an immense silo–“quiet and solemn inside” (99)–with what look like endless rows of filing cabinets and strange chair-like contraptions. The crew, sans experts like the better equipped explorers, putter around with the alien tech in a sad scene of trial an error. Are the sticks in the cabinets dynamite? Is it an alien library? One will have to draw the short straw and find out. But there’s profit for sure whatever the discovery might be, right? The occupants of the building soon discover the interlopers.

This is absolutely the best story in the collection! We got some grime and intriguing rumination! “Jackpot” posits a series of historical parallels between the crew of scavengers and the famous expeditions to explore Earth. This serves two primary rhetorical purposes: 1) the ways people use the past to justify exploitation 2) to further Simak’s contention that humanity, despite its vast intergalactic empire, cannot escape its innate tendency towards brutal capitalistic exploitation. Profit remains the goal. Understanding the alien is only important if it leads to profit. There’s a bleak desperation to all that transpires.

Recommended.

“Lulu” (1957), 2.5/5 (Bad): First appeared in Galaxy Magazine, H. L. Gold (June 1957). You can read it online here. I previously reviewed this short story here.

My least-favorite story in the collection is a humorous trifle about a sentient “female” robotic spaceship falling in love with her three human male crewmen and setting off on her own grand romance. Riffing off of the tradition of naming airplanes and ships after women, Simak imagines that a Planet Exploration Robot–“a combination spaceship/base of operations/synthesizer/analyzer/communicator” (132)–would be programmed with a female persona in order to keep the crewmen company on a long voyage (as Simak is rarely more than G rated other implications are not discussed). In retrospect, the narrator suggests that Jimmy Robins’ bad romantic poetry caused Lulu to connect with them far more than intended. The three crew attempt–never picking up after themselves, refusing to move for days at a time, etc.–to make her fall out of love. Eventually she lands on a planet and finds a long lost alien robot. But there’s a hitch. Lulu’s new “man” means that she abandons the three crewmen outside on an alien planet. They need to get her to fall back in love if they’re ever to return to Earth.

It’s Simak at his least ruminative and moody–a strange inclusion for a best of collection. The concept of the robot programmed with a particular character to keep the crew sane on a long voyage is only touched upon. The rest is straight, often sexist in a 50s manner, sap. Forgettable.

“Neighbor” (1960), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (June 1954). You can read it online here. I previously reviewed this short story here.

The inhabitants of Coon Valley, a ubiquitous rural farming community of the “kind of people you meet all over these United States” (170), barely survives on farming the bottomlands and pasturing the hillsides.1 The story follows an “old-timer” who would feel strange living anywhere else and the arrival of an unusual neighbor. Unlike many who buy up an old farm and leave as the work gets hard, Reginald Heath transforms an abandoned farm into a veritable rural utopia–highly productive crops, repaired fences, a gorgeous garden filled with unusual vegetables, etc. The narrator slowly realizes that not is all that it seems.

While I’m not convinced of the merits of the actual story, “Neighbor” posits a utopian possibility that I’d suggest helps us formulate the world the Simak yearned for after the devastation of WWII and the emergence of a strong capitalist state. Here a small number of families, with the assistance of a humanoid alien that represents what humans could be if technology was not controlled by “our commercial-industrial society,” radically improve their own lives. As in many of Simak’s stories of corporate nightmare, farmers are not forced from their lands.2 Decentralization of technology prevents profit from becoming the sole objective. As Simak retrospectively spells out in various interviews, the problem is with technology’s implementation and control: “[it] should be used for the betterment of mankind and to make life more meaningful.”

There’s a mournful sadness in Simak’s stories as humanity rarely seems to change, without outside assistance, its own destructive urges.3

Somewhat recommended.

Notes

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCL(Jack Vance, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Thom Keyes, and Kenneth Bulmer)

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. Jack Vance’s Galactic Effectuator (1980)

• David Mattingly’s cover for the 1981 edition

From the back cover: “Meet Miro Hetzel, Galactic Effectuator. He’s part gentlemen, part detective, part fraud, and his trail of exploits cuts through some of the more improbably civilizations in the universe. Join him in a trip to the planet Maz, whose natives are so fierce that they’ll fight three battle before lunch and then dine on the enemy–a planet that only a man with Miro Hetzel’s steely nerve would dare to visit at all.”

Initial Thoughts: This is a fix-up novel containing “The Dogtown Tourist Agency” (1975) and “Freitzke’s Turn” (1977). I previously reviewed “Freitzke’s Turn” (1977) and did not classify it amongst Vance’s best. As many know, I’ve soured a bit on Vance in the last decade. That said, I still think novels like Wyst: Alastor, 1716 (1978) and Emphyrio (1969) are worth the read.

2. Adolfo Dioy Casares’ Diary of the War of the Pig (1969, trans. Gregory Woodruff and Donald A. Yates, 1972)

• Eric Dinyer’s cover for the 1988 edition

From the back cover: “The Obelisk edition of Diary of the War of the Pig marks the first time in paperback for this fictional chronicle about street terror and disappearance by the greatest living Argentine author. Written almost a decade before the death squads disrupted Argentinea, it is the gripping first-person narrative of an old man caught in a wave of persecutions against all old people, and might well stand as a metaphor for the murkier currents of Latin American society today. Adolfo Bioy Casares relates the day-to-day life of Isidro Vidal, the “old boys” from the corner cafe, and the women, young and old, who offer temporary redemption from madness and mob terror. Part allegory and part irreducible dream this story of courage, cowardice, and love is disquieting testimony on the human conditions of our southern neighbors.”

Initial Thoughts: As issue one of Rachel Cordasco’s new online magazine Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine (with one of my reviews) recently went live, I’ve acquired a bunch of SF and SF adjacent works for my review column. She suggested I track down Casares’ near-future dystopia Diary of the War of the Pig (1969). In college I read (and adored) his masterpiece The Invention of Morel (1940, trans. 1964) (one of many tantalizing books deliberately visible and in dialogue with the narrative of Lost).

3. Thom Keyes’ The Battle of Disneyland (1974)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “A hilarious post-Vonnegut trip. Prophets of doom, harbingers of the coming self-destruction of the U.S.A., fasten your forlorns. Exiled Californian sci-fi writer, Thom Keyes, has the answers to it all.

Disregard what Gerneral Jastrzab is doing to the playboy bunnies with his wooden lef. Look down into the streets… There’s a whole lot fighting going on! And when the riot spills into the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and the Magic Kingdom in Disneyland you’ll see where things are really at.”

Initial Thoughts: All I know is what SF Encyclopedia blurbs: “The Battle of Disneyland (1974) also hyperbolic, depicts a Post-Holocaust Los Angeles, and the calving of California from the continent.”

4. Kenneth Bulmer’s The Insane City (1971)

• Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “In a city of tomorrow–the master-machine turns upon the people who created it.

A clicking sounded up the tunnel. A robex on three wheels rolled steadily toward them. Ridgeway swallowed. He knew they were safe, but he felt jittery just the same. The thing looked so calm and unemotional, so mechanical and precise. Moving closer, it glittered at them. Then a box on its body opened with a squeal. A long screwdriver appeared on one tenacle, a hammed on another.

“Oh, No!” screamed Carrit. “It can’t be!” But it was…

In a single lethal rush the robex charged toward them, brandishing its tenacles like weapons of final destruction.”

Initial Thoughts: Kris Vyas-Myall over at Galactic Journey wrote nice things about this one. Kris described it as “told in a beautifully alienated style” and that “it is unfortunate this book has been put out by Curtis, known primarily as the venue for reprinting the back catalogue of people like the Binders or Robert Moore Williams. I think if this had been published as an Ace special, it would be a shoe-in for a Hugo nod.” Count me intrigued. Despite the fact that Kris and I rarely see eye-to-eye on science fiction (which is fine of course)!

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

The perils of judging a book by its hard cover | Letters

Readers take issue with an article that advocated ditching hardback books in favour of paperbacks I read Larry Ryan’s piece with interest and some sympathy ( The hill I will die on: Heavy, awkward and incredibly expensive – we don’t need hardback books, 6 May ). I agree that hardbacks are now becoming prohibitively expensive. I took a passing interest in a new hardback recently but my interest passed quickly when I saw that it was priced at £35. It is also true that hardbacks are awkward to read, other than at a desk, and make poor travelling companions. They can look attractive, but a pleasingly serious effort is put into the design of paperback covers these days. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/the-perils-of-judging-a-book-by-its-hard-cover

#Books #Publishing #Culture #Society #Paperbacks