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| That sinking feeling... |
TftC lacks the variety of, say ShockSupenStories - and although its stories tend to have a moral (albeit most of them are along the lines of "Do this, and someone will take revenge on you from beyond the grave") there is nothing which comes close to the social commentary stories , and none of the adaptations of other writers' works (like the Ray Bradbury's seen elsewhere).
You can forgive the lack of variety - Bill Gaines provided most of the plots for Al Fedstein to write the stories, for most of the EC line of seven bi-monthly titles. Do the maths - that fourteen short stories a month, every month. No wonder the plots could be a little samey (or even "inspired" by other media - note the number of times a Wax Museum provides the setting).
Still - you can imagine the chill these stories gave the unsophisticated juvenile reader, and some of the artwork is pretty ghastly (in the best possible sense). And you can equally imagine how parents siezed up the EC horror line as the cause of all their problems (in much the same way that, say "Civil War" bubblegum cards outrgaed British parents in the 1960s, and punk rock in the late 70s). Every generation needs something other than their own failings to take the blame for the inevitable youth disaffection. Poor old Bill Gaines - it was him and the Communists, and his comics were easier to spot.
Volume 1 now sells for around the £200 mark - not sure that I am completist enough to go that far. But I shall continue to pick up odd volumes of the EC archive whenever I see them at a decent price.
Unputdownability: Like a big box of chocolates, one or two taste great, but the the whole lot in one sitting 'll make you a little bit icky.
The yellow, black and purple of the Gollancz covers were the first things I learned to loook for when I moved up to the adult library. That, and the PG
Wodehouse "Signature" edition jackets from Jenkins.
So
I was delighted when I saw a bunch of them in a bookshop, all wrapped
aropund ten classic SF novels, and I decided to reintroduce myself to an
old favourite; "Dune". I last read this in 1974, just after I started
work - it got me through quite a few Tube journeys, books weren't
usually that thick in those days. It bears re-reading nowadays, for
the grand scale and the dashing (and sometimes slapdash) plotting. The
writing is surprisingly old-fashioned - the omniscient narrator who can
tell you wahat every character in the room is thinking has long fallen
out of fashion, but once re-accustomed to it, it becomes bearable if not
over-used. I am left, as I was many years ago, with the impression
that Herbert started out with a swashbuckling story of interplanetary
fueding, and ten found his story taking over - it becomes more
psychedelic the further you get into it, and more portentous and
(occasionally) more pretentious.
Oh well, if you are going to delve into SF's back catalogue, you might as well go for The Master.
Actiually, by this stage of his writing, RAH was far too interested in showing how clever he was, and how well constructed his philosophical arguments were. So the story itself is episodic, disjointed, and less than satisfying by modern standards (but in its day won, I think, a Hugo for Best SF Novel of the year).
It is astonishing the extent to which Heinlein's world of 5000 years in the future has changed so little from the world of 1960, but RAH isn't there to construct a future technology, merely a future quasi-stratocracy (not actually a military rule per se, but a democracy where only ex-military can vote) and a vehicle for his less than right-on views. Sometimes I think the only liberal view RAH had was concerning intra-familial love; Time Enough For Love and Farnham's Freehold both have characters and situations which espouse (*ahem*) "close and loving family relationships".
Never mind.
Don't read this expecting all the excitement of the Vehoeven movie, or the CGI cartoon "Roughnecks" that graced breakfast TV about 15 years ago - don't even expect all the characters to have the same gender. And take it all with a pinch of generous salt. Thems was different days, after all.
Unputdownability: Another day, another chapter.
