Title: Children of the Void
Author: William Dexter
Cover artist: Uncredited ("The artist is not credited, no visible signature [Jack Gaughan ?]" (isfdb))
Condition: 8/10
Estimated value: $10-12
- Used Spaceship Salesmen of the Void
- When the humans you're using for biceps curls suddenly get a mind of their own...
- My favorite word on this cover is "Violently." Like, how else is an Earth going to be "torn from its sun"? "Affectionately"?
- Grafton can't even get to his damned spaceship. How's he gonna halt a runaway world when this animatronic Chuck E. Cheese reject makes him run in terror?
- Not at all sure they didn't mean "Children of the Noid"; the similarities are uncanny:
And now...
- Wow, superdumb title replication, but super cool sketch of '60s scifi futurism. Spaceships were awesomest when they were entirely fanciful. I don't want to live in a future that isn't a mid-century future.
- That is a particularly dull and detail-free opening paragraph.
- Wow, Denis Grafton (!) is a recurring character? The basis of a series? He's like Chairman of the Board of Space Heroes That Time Totally and Utterly Forgot
But there was always something at the back of the adult mind that whispered to us that we should shun these strange creatures.O great, a treatise on right-wing immigration policy. No thanks.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]
3 comments:
I think I'm reasonably well-versed in old science fiction, but I'd never heard of this guy. With good reason, apparently. This and the book it's a sequel to seem to be the only things the guy wrote, and the SF Encyclopedia entry on him (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/dexter_william) is pretty brutal. Phrases like "fairly incoherent" and "metaphysical space opera" tell me everything I need to know.
That tagline on the front cover grates at me. It would work so much better if "violently" were moved to after "torn".
I'm reading it right now. Fifty pages in and it's wonderful so far.
At the risk of sounding like a complete bore, I've just read the thing and it's actually pretty great, just very weird. I expect the tagline on the cover may also have grated with the poor fucker who wrote the book given that Earth remains firmly in its orbit for the duration of the novel (they're possibly thinking of another slightly more mobile planet which appears in the story). Also, the red guys with the wings are eight feet tall and generally harmless; plus Grafton's best buddies are a Muslim and a Native American, so er... not particularly right-wing at all. I've just spent the previous couple of weeks slogging through Alan Moore's Jerusalem which is the size of a breeze block and is a massive yawn. I gave up during the third book and read this instead, and frankly it was one hell of a lot more fun.
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