Updated 14 Sep 2018 (notes on all three)
Updated 21 Feb 2021 (Night Slaves movie)
I’ve been purging all of my CDs by sending them to a ripping service (I used MusicShifter) and then selling what I can and donating the rest. I sold a hundred or so to Book Nook and with a small portion of that fine fine cash got my book on. There were some classics, and then there were these:
Table of Contents
Midsummer Century (Daw, 1968/1971/1972) by James Blish
Cover by Josh Kirby
- artist web site
- Sci-fi gallery with an image of this cover painting
- Pulp Covers
- SFE
- Wikipedia
Terror on Planet Ionus (Paperback Library, 1957/1966) by Allen A. Adler
Cover by Jerome Podwil (referenced at MPorticus Fiction Log
Night Slaves (Fawcett, 1965) by Jerry Sohl
Cover by Paul Lehr (referenced at Night Slaves by Jerry Sohl. Fawcett Gold Medal 1965. Cover artist Paul Lehr)
Their covers are classic sci-fi pulp and of a type that I wish I could own the original paintings. Of the thousands and thousands of cheap sci-fi novels from the 60s and 70s, I can only imagine where all of the art is. Private collections? The artists’ families? Ultimately discarded? artnet has many, but most auctions are closed and you need to at least know the name of the artist. No “crazy 60s sci-fi pulp” category.
Midsummer Century contains three novellas: Midsummer Century, A Style in Treason, and Skysign. So fare I’ve read the first one. I will be taking all three to read on my flight to Australia week-after-next, and then leaving them at the hotel or in some random place for others to acquire and enjoy. Book Nook had them in a section titled NO RETURNS. I’ll probably continue my foray into pulp sci-fi, if only to relive the remembered excitement of 14-year-old Scott.
Updated 2 Aug 2018 (art)
Found a reference to what happened to some of the art via Pulp Covers:
When Fiction House, publishers of the magazine, went out of business in the sixties, all of the original art stored in its warehouse was burned by workers who saw no reason to keep the art. Fortunately, Frank Kelly Freas had rescued several of his own paintings years before. Later, as Freas told it, he took the Anderson painting, one of two, in trade for monies owed him when he was visiting the publisher to discuss his own artwork, shortly before the fire.
I finished the books on the way to Australia and back. Midsummer Century was deposited late at night into the unlocked under seat storage of a parked Vespa (of which Sydney had many). The other two were left on seats in the Sydney and LA airports.
I liked Midsummer and Terror, but I was disappointed in Night Slaves: although the story had some interesting aspects, it was not science fiction in any way. FALSE ADVERTISING!1!!
Updated 14 Sep 2018 (notes on all three)
Reviews and notes before I forget. These books were deposited in Australia. One in the open seat of a Vespa late one night and the other two at the airport before leaving.
Midsummer Century
Three stories with the first, eponymous the bulk of the book. A physicist falls into a radio telescope and is transported into the mind of a computer (?) who is worshiped by the primitive dependents of humankind tens of centuries into the future. He eventually tricks the computer (?) to transfer his consciousness into one of said primitives. An odyssey, with competing consciousnesses, takes him to their village and is cast out, then to the Bird People that threaten the primitives. He escapes and “flies” to Antarctica where civilized humankind survives. Conflict and brain imprisonment until… he becomes effectively the computer (?) brain the leads humans to the next tens of centuries of evolution. Wow.
Skysign is a story of a hipster 60s guy who gets abducted with others into an enormous flying saucer as part of a human zoo (?). He figures out how they freeze time and turns it against them to take over. It ends in an unexpected #MeToo (after his of-the-day sexism) with him being captive of the Earth forces run by one of the females on the menagerie.
A Style in Treason. Dammit, not to diminish the story, but I forget the plot. It starts with a airline/spaceship leaving Mars and an IRA-like uprising boarding. Then something happens.
Terror on Planet Ionus
A secret military ocean battleship/torpedo is tested, goes off the grid, and is abducted by aliens from a moon of Jupiter or maybe one of the outer planets (?) to help them with a monster, on their barren moon/planet, who is eating all of their resources. The abducted humans are shocked by the aliens’ spare existence and all are thrust back to Earth as the monster decimates their protective city. Here’s the thing: the monster comes to Earth, nation leaders are dubious and mistrustful of cooperation (whaaaat?) and most of the Earth is destroyed in graphic tragedy. The monster is eventually destroyed, natch, and the aliens, inexplicably, leave the end. The End.
Note: this novel had the most dated sexism of a batch of dated sexist novels.
Night Slaves
Interesting. It might have been sci-fi but was not and was really a psychological novel. Spoilers! Couple stops in a small mountain village and stays for days/weeks (?). He has insomnia and sees that at night everyone, zombie-like takes to the streets and leaves town to who-knows-where. A complex–and really very psychologically interesting even though I was let down because of the lack of sci-fi–interplay of his troubled history, his psychologist’s advice, his compicit-or-dubious wife and seductive “alien” culminate to a genuinely shocking final scene.
Updated 21 Feb 2021 (Night Slaves movie)
The end of Night Slaves has really stuck with me so I found a poor copy of the TV movie from 1970 to watch. Dated though the book is not at all, and there’s less ambiguity than the novel. I found out that Jerry Sohl was a writer for The Twilight Zone and seeing the story on film makes it obvious. Minor recommendation but I would go with the novel instead.
- It Came From The Tube: NIGHT SLAVES (1970) – Informative review of the movie from It Came from the Tube.
- Night Slaves (1970) – Review from Mike’s Take on the Movies.
There are some VHS versions and some press photos available on eBay and some suspect DVD copies (probably custom burned from the VHS) for sale elsewhere. Images in the blogs suggest that there is a very good copy out there somewhere.
