Mission of Gravity by
Hal Clement
pbk out April 00
(Gollancz)
at £9.99
As a follow-up to their deservedly successful Science Fiction Masterworks reprints, Millennium has launched Fantasy Masterworks, a new series devoted to some of the best fantasy writing of the century. The first four books - Time And The Gods by Lord Dunsany; The Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolf (containing The Shadow Of The Torturer and The Claw Of The Conciliator); The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison; and Tales Of The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
(containing four complete novels) - have now appeared and they are indicative of the range and quality of material planned for the line. The books are handsome, chunky paperbacks with decent covers,
and are, importantly, rather more legibly set than the pays-your-money-and-takes-your-chances typesetting of the SF Masterworks books. Future volumes in the series include works by John Crowley, Robert E. Howard, M John Harrison, Jonathan Carroll and Roger Zelazny. With the exception of the Howard (is
there anyone who wants to read Conan stories who can't readily find them?) this is a worthy and engaging mix of titles. My only carp is that the books would have benefited enormously from some supplementary material - introductions or afterwords to put the
works in some historical and critical context. It wouldn't have cost Millennium much - of course, *any* money a publisher has to spend is regarded as too much - and would have added a lot of value for the reader. Still, this is solid money's-worth material.
In a similar vein, Gollancz (like Millennium, part of the Orion group) have inaugurated the SF Collectors' Editions series of reprints, starting with Hal Clement's Mission Of Gravity,
Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time, Robert Silverberg's Tower Of Glass, and Wasp by Eric Frank Russell. These are trade paperbacks published in the "classic" butt-ugly, plain yellow Gollancz wrapper. There's some good stuff here - and more to come, especially with reprints of some wonderful Pat Cadigan novels - but at ten and eleven pounds each, these books are mystifyingly overpriced. For that much money, they could and should have been reissued as hardbacks. You have to believe
Gollancz paid bupkis for the rights to some of these items, and given the plain packaging, there's no justification for the price, especially when the Masterworks books cost only seven or eight
pounds. Good books to be sure, but will readers pay this much for them?
(
Jay Russell
- one of the greatest talents the horror industry has produced for some time… (Black Tears))
Mission of Gravity by
Hal Clement