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Home | Books
| Spider Island
Spider Island,
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson,
Volume Four
Jack
Williamson
Foreword by Edward
Bryant
Cover art by Rudolph Belarski
ISBN-10
1893887146
ISBN-13 9781893887145
$35.00
616 pages Hardcover
Description
This fourth
volume continues the publishing program to collect the
stories of Science Fiction Grand Master Jack Williamson.
Drawn
from such classic pulp magazines as Astounding
Stories, Weird Tales,
Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Thrilling
Mystery, this volume
features sixteen tales (including four novel-length adventures,
"Dreadful Sleep," "The Blue Spot," "Released Entropy," and the original
magazine text of The Legion of Time),
seven of which have never been published in book form.
The book
is smythe-sewn, bound in full cloth, and printed on acid-neutral paper,
with full-color endpapers reproducing the original pulp magazine cover
art.
With a foreword by author, and critic, Edward Bryant, Spider Island contains the sense of
wonder
from the early years of American Science Fiction and continues the
documentation of Williamson's unparalleled career.
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Table
of Contents
"American Gods,
American Dreaming" by Edward Bryant
"The Ruler of Fate"
(Weird Tales, Apr, May, Jun
'36)
"Death’s Cold
Daughter" (Thrilling Mystery,
Sep '36)
"The Great
Illusion" (with Eando Binder, Edmond Hamilton, Raymond
Z. Gallun, and John Russell
Fearn) (Fantasy Magazine, Sep
'36)
"The Blue Spot"
(Astounding Stories, Jan &
Feb '37)
"The Ice
Entity" (Thrilling Wonder
Stories, Feb '37)
"Spider Island"
(Thrilling Mystery, Apr '37)
"The Mark of the
Monster" (Weird Tales,
May '37)
"The Devil in
Steel" (Thrilling Mystery,
Jul '37)
"Released
Entropy" (Astounding Stories
Aug, Sep '37)
"Dreadful
Sleep" (Weird Tales,
Mar, Apr, May '38)
"The Infinite
Enemy" (Thrilling Wonder
Stories, Apr '38)
"The Legion of
Time" (Astounding Stories,
May, Jun, Jul '38)
Afterword" by Jack
Williamson
Appendix
"Interview with Jack
Williamson" (Interview, The
Science Fiction
Fan, July
1936)
"Psychology and
Characterization" (Article, Science
Fiction
Correspondent, November/December
1936)
"Has Science Fiction
a Future?" (Article, The
International
Observer, January
1937)
"Polar
Catastrophe" (Authorial Comments on “The Ice
Entity," Thrilling
Wonder Stories, February 1937)
"Science in
Science-Fiction" (Letter to the editor, Astounding
Science Fiction, June 1937)
"Horror Yarns—Double
Action" (Article, The
Author &
Journalist,
August 1937)
"The Inverse
Universe" (Authorial Comments on "The Infinite
Enemy," Thrilling
Wonder Stories, April 1938)
Reviews
“. .
. Let me phrase
my sentiments
bluntly: Stephen Haffner's
as-yet-uncompleted achievement in resurrecting all of Jack Williamson's
short fiction is as good as publishing gets. Note that I did not say
"as good as small
press
publishing gets," but as good as any
publishing program gets. Big house or small, no one else in recent
memory has lavished any greater love, attention, historical respect or
keen design sensibilities on such a project . . . From
the moment you open this book and see the gorgeous endpapers, which
colorfully reproduce all the pulp 'zine covers first associated with
these stories, you will be impressed by the craftsmanship and quality
materials that underpin each book. For the price, there's not a better
deal for either the hardcore collector or unassuming reader. And a
feature such as the non-fiction appendices illustrates how Haffner has
gone the extra mile to unearth material that would otherwise be lost.
But
of course, without Williamson and his marvelous work, all this labor
and craft would be pointless. It's the chance to read these mostly
forgotten (and sometimes much-anthologized) stories from the early
years that gets the SF neurons firing. These stories appeared from
April 1936 to July 1938, the very cusp of the John W. Campbell era (JWC
took over the helm of Astounding in September 1937).
And what
they tell us about the young Williamson himself and the genre at the
time is plenty . . . "The Ruler of Fate"
predicts the famed Butterfly Effect and rewrites
all of Earth's history as the whim of a tyrant. With its
self-organizing life form, "The Ice Entity" appears to be based on the
field of artificial life some decades before that field was invented.
And "The Blue Spot" anticipates Greg Egan with its conundrums deriving
from downloaded personalities. But the top three stories exceed
all expectations. "Released Entropy" barrels like an express train
through the Big Crunch and beyond, as if written by van Vogt and Poul
Anderson. "Dreadful Sleep" outdoes both Lovecraft and M.P. Shiel in its
portrayal of cosmic menace. And "The Legion of Time" is tinged with
Moorcock's blithe multiversal buccaneering. If Williamson had written
nothing else but this trio, he'd have earned his place in SF's
pantheon.
And what
do the stories tell us of the 30-year-old author? They convey
a sense of someone self-assured and worldly, with a prose style fluid
and mutable, equipped to handle any task he set himself. Having just at
this time undergone some initial psychoanalysis, Williamson's fertile
invention was now tapping into subconscious realms that allowed him to
portray Oedipal and male-female conflicts in vivid narrative shapes.
Why have these stories survived when others of their vintage have
disappeared? They continue to grip us because Williamson wrote not
solely for money but for love of his art, and listened to his soul."
—Paul di Filippo, Science Fiction
Weekly
Excerpts
TBA
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HAFFNER PRESS
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