Science Fiction Book Haul #1

I have a wee problem. Not to the extent many a booktuber finds themselves in, but my collecting A format SF paperbacks is starting to eat up available shelf space. Does that mean I'm going to stop? No! Instead I'll start posting about hauls on here while weightier pieces carry on simmering at the back of my brain.

Kicking off this first outing is Sheri S Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall. In the futuristic year of 2000 a "ruthless politician is amassing a terrifying fanatical power base" and misogynistic mobs are abroad. Sounds a bit familiar. Among a group of friends, the mysterious Sophy disappears and figuring out why she vanished is key to saving us all. Okay, not the most engaging of premises, but Tepper has written some celebrated works and this fact helped transport this from the charity shop's shelves to my own. Next up an obscurity from an unobscure author. Isaac Asimov's Through a Glass Clearly is a very short 1967 collection of some lesser known shorts. No idea if they're any good or not, but on to the pile they go.

Michael G Coney's Syzygy is about a colony on a distant world consumed by inexplicable violence. What the hell is going on? Plague from Space by Harry Harrison is, you guessed it, about a plague from space. Can Dr Bertolli save the Earth from a cheesy-sounding 1960s cataclysm?The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is another planetary colony mystery. Tau Ceti Four is a lush, pastoral world of bountiful harvests. Yet this ecotopia is surrounded by a heavily fortified perimeter and no one knows why. Is there something lurking beyond the walls? This will probably be a fun read, but as Pournelle is involved there's bound to be unsubtle racism and conservative preachifying.

On to the last three, Pohlstars is a mid-80s collection of 15 years' worth of Frederik Pohl short stories. I thought it would be worth a stab, despite not liking his somewhat celebrated Gateway and its sequel, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. We'll see if these are better. Then we have Robert A Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold. This tale of nuclear war survival is, apparently, not among his best. It aims to be a polemic against racist attitudes but Heinlein gets a little carried away with the racist and sexist views he puts into the mouths of his characters. Sure to be a fun read. And the last is a modern(ish) B format novel (yes, I habitually pick these up too) and it's Becky Chambers with Record of a Spaceborn Few. The third in her loose Wayfarers sequence, lots of cosy people being excellent to each other in spaceships is expected. I didn't mind her Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but her work is never likely to push the boundaries of literature or provoke difficult thoughts about the world as is. Unless she turns heel and heads off in a completely different direction in future novels.

That's it for this small collection. The next exciting installment will drop when I've hauled enough to justify a post.