Paperback 974: Escape to Earth / ed. Ivan Howard (Belmont L92-571)

Paperback 974: Belmont L92-571 (PBO, 1963)

Title: Escape to Earth
Editor: Ivan Howard
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller ("emsh")
Designed by: Irving Bernstein

Estimated value: $15
Condition: 9/10

Best things about this cover:

• Love the "Barbarella" vibe on this one (though "Barbarella" is still several years in the future).
• This is late Emshwiller. Still great Emshwiller. Beautiful, decorative, intricate space-tech surfaces. Bottom half is not much to look at, but the top is lovely.
• Novelets! Is that how you spell that? Reminds me of when I first saw "cigaret" (Raymond Carver). Disorientingly defrenchified.
• Hilariously, Google dictionary flags "novelette" as "derogatory."

Best things about this back cover:

• I like the red-bordered spreadsheet look. Very early-80s / "Stranger Things"
• Hey, look!: credits not just for Emshwiller, but for the *designer* as well!? Why can't all books be this good about crediting the art people!?
• Manly Banister is the politest porn name.

Page 123~

[from "Temple of Despair" by M.C. Pease]

"You're dressed like a priest," Brandis said; "I don't want to get stoned."

One of the great out-of-context lines in Pop Sensation history.

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Paperback 851: The Puzzle Planet / Robert A.W. Lowndes // The Angry Espers / Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (Ace D-485)

Paperback 851: Ace Double D-485 (PBO/PBO, 1961)

Title: The Puzzle Planet / The Angry Espers
Authors: Robert A.W. Lowndes / Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller / Ed Valigursky

Estimated value: $15-20


Best things about this cover:

• Brigitte Bardot senses that things are about take a very, very freaky turn.
• That's some Left Bank space helmetry she's got going there.
• In the future, cameras will weigh 80 pounds and Mr. Clean will have Really let himself go.
• No one could stop Steve Rockwell from making the "Barbarella" prequel of his dreams!

Best things about this other cover:

• "Float, harlequin! Float to hell!"
• Mind-Bowling: It Takes Balls
• In the future, everyone and everything will orbit Rutger Hauer.

Page 123~ (from The Angry Espers)

"May I speak with Doctor Alir?" Corban asked.
"Doctor Alir is not here."
"When is she expected back?"
"She will not be back," the doctor said. "She's been … transferred."

Spoiler alert: Doctor Alir is now a pin girl in Rutger Hauer's Human Bowl-a-Rama.

~RP

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Paperback 833: The Door Through Space / Marion Zimmer Bradley // Rendezvous on a Lost World / A. Bertram Chandler (Ace F-117)

Paperback 833: Ace Double F-117 (PBO / PBO 1961)

Titles: The Door Through Space / Rendezvous on a Lost World
Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley / A. Bertram Chandler
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller / Ed Emshwiller

Estimated value: $10-15


Best things about this cover:

• "40 Demons!?" "No, 4-D Demons!" "…?"
• Even the giantest Fear Hand could not protect the galaxy's skinniest spaceship from the flamboyant-yet-savage robot birds!
• *That's* your "Door Through Space"? Looks more like "Archway To Pool Party."
• Emshwiller's covers are awesome to look at. He likes to include all this random ornate decoration and machinery. Here, I particularly admire the oil rig/water slide/clock tower gizmo in the lower right. The people in the party seem to dig it, too. Maybe it is their god.

Best things about this other cover:

• Damn Ikea ceiling fans! Come on!
• #LostWorldProblems
• Imaginary space suits are So Much Cooler than real ones. I think I found my next Halloween costume.
• I did not know the word "cybernetic" (or "cyber-" anything) went this far back.

Page 123~

It cannot possibly have produced the illusion of two figures, Captain and Captain's lady—and which Veronica was it?—walking, arm in arm, up the ramp to the yelllow-lit circle of the airlock. And the most impossible illusion of all, perhaps, was that of the man who stood there to greet them. I saw his face plainly as I approached, just before the odd scene winked out into nothingness.

It was my own.

End of story! Whoa, did not see that coming. P.S. spoiler alert. P.P.S. "Which Veronica Was It?" is a scifi Archie story waiting to happen.

~RP

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Paperback 770: The Man Who Japed / Philip K. Dick // The Space-Born / E. C. Tubb (Ace D-193)

Paperback 770: Ace D-193 (1st ptg / 1st ptg, 1956)

Title: The Man Who Japed / The Space-Born
Author: Philip K. Dick / E. C. Tubb
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller / Ed Valigursky

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Jackie gonna be *a* severed-headball sta-ar!
• When college pranks go awry. "We said 'japery,' Jackie. 'Japery.' You call beheading the dean 'japery'!?"
• The best, and I mean the Very Best, part of this cover is the teeny arm waving goodbye / pleading for help from beneath the jagged stick pile.

Best things about this other cover:

• Death was their pilot, fear their fuel, underground hot-oil wrestling their passion!
• Hey, you've got to hide your love away! (from the flying pestle-wielding space golems)
• "Halt! Halt! Freddie Mercury wants his boots back! Remove the boots at once or face extreme golem-pestle interrogation enhancement!"

Page 123~ (from The Space-Born)

He stared at the knives in the hands of the searchers.

"Wait … those aren't knives," Tom whispered to Jerry. "Those are just pestles. I say we run for it!"

~RP

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Paperback 698: Vulcan's Hammer / Philip K. Dick // The Skynappers / John Brunner (Ace Double D-457)

Paperback 698: Ace Double D-457 (PBO/PBO, 1960) 

Title: Vulcan's Hammer / The Skynappers
Authors: Philip K. Dick / John Brunner
Cover artists: Ed Emshwiller / Ed Valigursky

Yours for: Not for sale


Best things about this cover:

• Bang bang Vulcan's space-age hammer came down upon his head
• Prototypes for the robot in "Short Circuit."
• I think a double-flashlight pincer hammer would actually be a pretty cool tool. 
• I like to think they're little styling hammers, making our hero look fabulous.

Best things about this other cover:

• A nice visual representation of what happens Every Time I try to peel a hard-boiled egg.
• That's some pretty sweet quintessential '60s sic-fi goodness. Best rockets always look like they came out of a kit and have a maximum of 8 parts, total.
• They kidnapped the sky! Or else they nap on planes, not sure.

Page 123~ (from "Vulcan's Hammer")

Halfway across the Atlantic they passed an immense swarm of hammers streaking toward helpless, undefended North America.

Other continents had presciently installed anti-Vulcan's Hammer technology decades earlier. Silly North Americans.

~RP

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Paperback 623: Alien Planet / Fletcher Pratt (Ace F-257)

Paperback 623: Ace F-257 (1st ptg, 1964)

Title: Alien Planet
Author: Fletcher Pratt
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• In many ways, a rather generic scifi title / cover (I mean, come on, Alien Planet? That's the best you can do?). But all of this intricate techno-organic Rube Goldberg-esque machinery is gorgeous. There's man, there's monster, and then there's the in-between—which I'm gonna call the "Psychotic Fish Rollercoaster."
• Also love the design on the dude's spacesuit. It's ornate, clean, and confectionary. I wanna lick him real bad.
• That monster thingie is super-creepy if you really look at it. Looks like generic "alien" until you notice the humanoid features; that's what makes it really nightmarish. The face. The opposable thumbs. All floating in their own haze of stink. Good stuff.

Best things about this back cover:

• Humanish hands harder to see here. Also, this thing's a lot less scary out of context. 
• Apparently this is a "classic novel." I checked the original publication date. 1932.
• I would've sworn "Murashema" had to be based on "Hiroshima," but the original publication date suggests not. Too early for that name to be very evocative in the west. 

Page 123~

The big man gave a heave that threw me on my side. I clutched him desperately, but at that moment the prisoner won free, snatched up the javelin and calmly and accurately plunged it into the throat of the man who was now trying to down me.

If unintended sexual subtext is your thing (you know, plunging "javelins" into throats and what not), this is your book. "I shifted position to bring the big man under me," etc. etc.

~RP

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Paperback 415: Galaxy (January, 1956)

Paperback 415: Galaxy, January 1956

Authors include: Alan E. Nourse, James E. Gunn, Lester del Rey, Robert Abernathy, Robert Sheckley, and Richard R. Smith

Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• A cover painting of astonishing detail, complexity, and charm. Hang out with it for a few minutes—it's really something.
• The sweat on Santa's brow does not look like sweat. The only comments I have border on the sacrilegious, so I'm gonna move on.
• Is he doing calculus?
• LOVE the way "EMSH" embeds his signature in his paintings (today, he's the author of the awesomely titled "How to Manage Reindeer in Space")
• I want that coffee pot So Bad...
• I know the dude has four arms, but he'd still never need more than two to hold a coffee cup, ergo that coffee cup is ridiculous.

Best things about this back cover:

• I just like that the "Science-hyphen-Fiction Book Club" has a "Dept. GX-1" — that's got government front / conspiracy theory written all over it.

Page 123~ (from "The Ties of Earth" by James H. Schmitz)

It sounded like an esoteric classification of varying degrees of human psi potential — an ascendant individual "new mind" threatening the entrenched and experienced but more limited older group, which compensated for its limitation by bringing functioning members of the "new mind" under its control or repressing or diverting their developing abilities.

That's what I like to call "teaching."


[More by EMSH...]
~RP

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Paperback 388: Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, August, 1955

Paperback 388

Title: Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy (August, 1955)
Authors: Poul Anderson, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Anthony Boucher, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: SOLD!


Best things about this cover:

• Farmer Ted Goes to Planet Blortron
• If Norman Rockwell did paintings about interstellar, interspecies sexual confusion, they might look something like this: "Wheeeere are youuuuuu goinnnng!? Youuuuu sed youuuuu luvved meeeeee... Take this hellllmet off riiight nowwww..."
• I love the highly underrated Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and I'm pretty sure I bought this magazine ONLY because she had a story in it (she's more an eerie thriller writer than a scifi writer, normally)

Best things about this back cover:

• Well if Eva Gabor and Guy Lombardo say so, who am I to disagree?
• Love the font on "IMAGINATION."
• "Better newsstands" ... ??? "Man, this is one classy newsstand! ... it's got an awning and everything!"

Page 123~

from "The Tiddlywink Warriors" by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson

Too late, Alex remembered that he had left Toka without a supply of the potent liquor which was so much a part of everyday Hoka life. Whether known as wine, red-eye, rum, grog, uisgebeatha or Old Spaceman, it was always present in wholesale quantities. Now, for the first time, Alex found himself with a bunch who had it not.

When I am a very elderly man, living on some lunar outpost because of nuclear war / End Times, I will drink "Old Spaceman." Proudly.

~RP

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Paperback 386: Again, Dangerous Visions Vol. 1 / ed. Harlan Ellison (Signet E7580)

Paperback 386: Signet E7580 (5th ptg, 1972)

Title: Again, Dangerous Visions, Vol. 1
Editor: Harlan Ellison
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller (illustrations throughout)

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Honestly, the cover does nothing for me, but this is a really important collection of so-called "speculative fiction," and Ellison's introduction alone is worth the price of admission. He writes with an elegance, ease, humor, and speed that I covet something awful.
• OK I kind of like the dude with legs of very different lengths. Psychedelia was clearly still the dominant visual style of the day. I just wish the art were more central (throughout), less decorative.

Best things about this back cover:

• I think this book was designed by and/or for someone on mind-altering substances. The promise of an expanded consciousness is a nice touch. Consciousness-raising = political. Consciousness-expanding = acid.

Page 123~

from "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin

But when the great ship returned, and he went to Eshsen, Lyubov met him there. He was silent and tenuous, very sad, so that the old carking grief awoke in Selver.

I don't understand any of that, but I want to incorporate "carking" into my vocabulary right away. Is it a real word? Ha, it is—CARK, tr. and intr. v., "To burden or be burdened with trouble; worry."

~RP

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Paperback 368: Voodoo Planet & Plague Ship / Andrew North (Ace D-345)

Paperback 367: Ace Double D-345 (PBO & 1st ptg, 1959)

Title: Voodoo Planet / Plague Ship
Author: Andrew North / Andrew North
Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller / Uncredited [Ed Valigursky]

Yours for: $13


Best things about this cover:

• In the future, cell phone earpieces will be silly, cumbersome contraptions that double as coffee makers.
• "Golly, these black vikings are a lot less primitive than I thought!"
• Love the squiggle-edged script on the title. You can really feel the voodoo.

Best things about this other cover:

• "The Galaxy" ordered their destruction!? Wait ... "their?" Him and the bird?!?!
• Bird: "Run, Steve, Run! They'll never understand our love!"
• That is the longest, slimmest, most slowly tapering rocket I've ever seen.

Page 123~

And yet the hunting Hoobat was sure that the invading pests were within.

This book clearly had merchandising potential. I want a hunting Hoobat action figure to put between Batwoman and Samurai Jack on my bookshelf.

~RP

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Paperback 363: Fantasy & Science Fiction (Oct. 1957)

Paperback 363: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October, 1957

Includes stories by: Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Lewis Carroll, L. Sprague de Camp, Jane Roberts, Anthony Boucher, Poul Anderson, H.P. Lovecraft, etc.

Cover artist: Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• ... featuring the controversial story, "Anorexic Chicken Whores of The Mogron Valley!"
• Monster designs on this are Fabulous. Emshwiller is a cover art hero.
• Trying to understand, from an evolutionary standpoint, why the bird (background) should require an oxygen helmet while everyone else apparently easily breathes the miasma of peach atmosphere. Also wondering why giant deformed Gumby monster should have to brush his teeth.

Best things about this back cover:

• People were apparently Really excited about satellites in the late '50s.
• We're not really comfortable using slang, so ... we'll just put "top-drawer" in quotations, so you won't think you're actually supposed to store the books in the top drawer of your dresser.
• "Handsome, permanent bindings," to prevent annoying fall-apart.

Page 123~ (from "Full Pack (Hokas Wild)" by Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson)

He was not a bad felino-centauroid at heart.

Can't believe that line is buried at the back of a F&SF Magazine. Should be the first line of some epic space opera.

~RP

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Paperback 160: Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1959)

Paperback 160: Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1959)

• Includes work by: Robert Bloch ("Sabbatical"), Philip K. Dick ("War Game"), Frederick Pohl ("The Snowmen"), Robert Sheckley, Willy Ley, George O. Smith, A.J. Offutt, and others
• Cover artist: EMSH (best cover artist name ever) - real name = Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• It is aDORable. I want to make Christmas cards out of this cover.
• Martian pyjamas
• Santa has four arms
• I want that rocket that Santa is holding
• Really, the design on this cover is astonishingly beautiful. It's like Norman Rockwell meets mid-century modern meets The Future. The little silver snowflake-stars around the date / price just seal the deal
• How did Robert Bloch and Philip K. Dick get driven off the front cover by ... these guys. A.J. Offutt? He should be banished for name ugliness alone.
  

Best things about this back cover

• Seriously, one of the Worst ads I've ever seen. Shouldn't the NAME OF YOUR PRODUCT be featured ... somewhere? Prominently? I mean, if the title had been "What's In IF For You?" I might have been impressed. Maybe that was the idea and the typesetter just effed up.
• "We often wonder why all our readers aren't subscribers" = "We often wonder why we can't pay our bills each month"
• I imagine the most boring, droning, Hugh Beaumont-esque guy making this would-be sales pitch. "When you subscribe to our magazine, it comes straight to your house via a little bit of magic we like to call: The Mail"
• Who designed this, Luddites!? It's like the anti-ad!

Page 123~

"People are always watching me, Brother," I said. "So now they do it even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to that."

-from "Charity Case" by Jim Harmon

This is far too prescient for me to snark on.

~RP

Paperback 128: A Touch of Inifinity b/w The Man With Nine Lives / Harlan Ellison (Ace Double D-413)

Paperback 128: Ace D-413 (PBO / PBO, 1960)

Titles: A Touch of Infinity / The Man With Nine Lives
Author: Harlan Ellison / Harlan Ellison
Cover artists: Ed Valigursky / Ed Emshwiller

Yours for: $40


Best things about this cover:

• Harlan Ellison is a legend. A pop fiction legend. Smart, funny, imaginative, and just a great, great, page-turning writer. Hence the price of this book (he's super duper collectible).
• That said, this cover is not the most imaginative scifi cover I've ever seen. By a longshot. Spaceship that looks like prototype for Doctor Octopus shoots its oddly fiery gun at some unseen enemy / turkey buzzard while befuddled and square-jawed man with slinkies on his limbs looks on in what I'm guessing is disgust.
• The front part of the main ship's underside doubles as a waffle iron.

Best things about this cover:

• Scratch that. Eight lives.
• "I'd like to thank the Emmy voters for AAAAAAAAARGH!"
• This is how each episode of "American Idol" will end in Season 116. In fact, this is very much how I remember the moment that Kelly Clarkson beat Justin Guarini in Season 1.
• This painting looks like a still from a futuristic Christian rock video.
• The design and concept here are a mess. He mastered a maze ... but his head is being electrified by a giant statue and some eerily headphoned judges ... and he also is a cat or owns a lot of cat food.

Page 123~

"I still need that job done on my face, Patooch," Cal Emory said to the little cellulist.

-from "The Man with Nine Lives"

~RP