Classics & Others — 12 May 2002

Recent Releases

• Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (Starscape, $5.99, Feb.)
  YA paperback edition of Card's popular, Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1985 SF novel about a boy genius, Ender Wiggin, who's recruited for training in simulated war games and discovers he's fighting real aliens; first in an ongoing series. This is a title in Tor Books new young adult imprint Starscape Books, which has released two books a month since January. Volumes measure 5 1/8 by 7 5/8 inches, larger than mass-market paperbacks but slightly smaller than the usual trade paperback, and are cheaper than even most mass-market books these days, at $5.99 each.

  Other volumes in this series include Card's recent parallel novel Ender's Shadow (first published 1999), as well as

  • Robert Jordan's first "Wheel of Time" novel split into two volumes, From the Two Rivers and To the Blight;
  • Two novels by Joan Aiken, The Whispering Mountain (1968) and The Cockatrice Boys (1996)
  • Steven Gould's Jumper (1992)
  • Will Shetterly's Dogland (1997)
  • Jane Yolen's Briar Rose (1992)
  • Patricia C. Wrede's Mairelon the Magician (1991)
  
  
  
• Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (Citadel Press, $14.95, May)
  Collection of stories, including the basis for the upcoming Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film Minority Report, a 30-page novelette titled "The Minority Report". This is a retitling of Volume 4 from Underwood/Miller's 1987 set "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick", The Days of Perky Pat, with an introduction by James Tiptree, Jr. The cover of this edition (image not available on Amazon) unfortunately misspells Tiptree's name, on both the cover and title page, as "Triptree".
  
  
  
  
• Camille Flammarion, Lumen (Wesleyan University Press, $17.95, April)
  SF classic by 19th-century French astronomer, first published in 1872 and here translated for the first time into English (according to the PW review posted on the Amazon page). Introduction by Brian Stableford.
  
  
  
  
• Nicola Griffith, Ammonite (Del Rey, $14.00, April)
  Trade paperback edition of Griffith's first novel, published in 1993 as a mass-market paperback original (in Del Rey's Discovery series), and subsequently winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. It's about a colony planet where a virus has killed off the men but enabled the surviving women to continue having children, and a follow-up team from Earth trying to understand its society.
  
  
  
  
• David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, $13.95, April)
  Classic 1920 allegorical SF novel of a trip to another planet. This is a "Commemorative Edition" with a new introduction by John Clute; Loren Eisley's afterword originally appeared as the introduction to a previous Scribner edition.
  
  
  
  
• Barry Malzberg, On a Planet Alien (Pocket/iBooks, $14.00, May)
  Omnibus of three novels, On a Planet Alien (1974), Scop (1976), and In the Enclosure (1973). The first concerns a human mission to civilize barbaric aliens; the second, a time travel mission involving JFK; the third, an alien held captive on Earth. Not among Malzberg's best-known novels, they nevertheless amply exhibit his characteristically intense writing, black humor, and psychological depth.
  
  
  
  
• James White, Alien Emergencies (Tor/Orb, $19.95, April)
  Second omnibus (after Beginning Operations) of three Sector General novels, clever, colorful puzzle stories set aboard a space hospital: Ambulance Ship (1979), Sector General (1983), and Star Healer (1985). With an introduction by David Langford.
  
  
  
  

Earlier in 2002