Man vs. Nature, as of 1932

Every time one re-reads a worthy book, one finds new resonances within it. I believe this is my fifth time with this volume, and its ecological view would have found agreement back then with J.R.R. Tolkien, as it finds resonance today:

He wondered how all this cultivated part of Dartmoor would have looked, say, in Tertiary times, before the advent of man on the planet; before that uglifying master-brute had put a hand to his congenial and self-honoured labour of clearing lands of their established life. Savage and lovely beyond thought, no doubt. So what had been gained by the substitution? Additional sources of food supply for man himself and some dozen kinds of degenerated animals, his servants. For this, fair trees had been uprooted, strange, beautiful beasts and snakes of the wild exterminated, exquisite birds made rare or extinct, the inhabitants of the streams slaughtered and poisoned. Verily, a ruthless campaign!

And the effective result? Why, this foul trail of earth-viscera and metamorphosis wheresoever man passed. All over England and Europe, and gradually all over the world, the houses, pavements, factories, mines, quarries, cuttings, bridges, railways, cars, engines and machinery, slag-heaps, gas-works, roads, stagnant canals, the grime of unreckonable chimneys, the grit and dust of a hell-maze of thoroughfares; and the slums, and backyards, and hidden corners of filth and shame. Or the cabbage-rows, and manure-heaps, sties, stables and pens—to demonstrate the superlative vulgarity of this scrambler for easy food, the human biped, whose stomach was paramount in the existence of a mystic universe.

The source?  This comes from  Chapter VI of Devil's Tor (1932) by David Lindsay.

Hell's Cartographers

This book passed under my radar for a long time, but I'm glad to have finally discovered it. I guess I never made a connection with what is referenced in the title, and thought the book was merely another anthology of stories. But the title references one of the first books on science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960) by Kingsley Amis. By 1975, when Hell's Cartographers, edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, came out, Amis's book was receding from memory.

Yet the subtitle of the book (in small typeface on the cover) is more descriptive:  "Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers."  And that's what the book is: personal histories by Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Brian Aldiss. Each writer also contributed a short piece to an appendix entitled "How We Work" covering their own writing habits.

I've read books by all six writers before reading this volume, and even had some (small) associations with two of them. Of the six, only Robert Silverberg is still alive, forty-five years later, and he was the youngest contributor when the book originally came out. Silverberg's essay is arguably the most interesting in the book, for his writing career, in the period covered, changed and evolved more than that of most of the other writers. Yet each author has worthwhile things to say, and it is quite interesting to encounter autobiographical reflections by a writer like Bester--from whom I don't think I've previously read anything but fiction. Aldiss, Harrison, Knight and Pohl have each written autobiographies of one sort or another.

There are some good moments throughout the book, and I'll share a few here.

Robert Silverberg noted: "I wrote my strangest, most individual book, Son of Man, a dream-fantasy of the far future, with overtones of Stapledon and Lindsay's Voyage of [sic] Arcturus and a dollop of psychedelia that was altogether my own contribution." (p. 39).

Alfred Bester recalled attending meetings of science fiction authors in a London pub in the mid-1950s.  This would have been at the White Horse or the Globe.  Bester recalled:  "John Wyndham and Arthur Clarke came to those gatherings. I thought Arthur rather strange, very much like John Campbell, utterly devoid of a sense of humour and I'm always ill-at-ease with humourless people" (p. 68).

Brian Aldiss's comments on the state of science fiction writing forty-five years ago are still applicable today though there has been a good deal of books on "new and darker ages" in the decades since: 

“Most of the science fiction being written is disappointing and not merely on literary grounds; so many of its basic assumptions are fossils of thought. The philosophy and politics behind the average sf novel are naive; the writer takes for granted that technology is unqualifiedly good, that the Western way of life is unqualifiedly good, that both can sustain themselves forever, out into galaxy beyond galaxy. This is mere power-fantasy. As I have often argued, we are at the end of the Renaissance period. New and darker ages are coming. We have used up most of our resources and most of our time, Now nemesis must overtake hubris” (p. 201). 

There's much to reflect upon in this book. 

The Violet Apple by David Lindsay

In sorting some large piles of research notes there emerged an advertisement for the first publication of David Lindsay's The Violet Apple and The Witch, forthcoming from the Chicago Review Press (then distributed by the Swallow Press) on their Fall/Winter 1975 list. Here is the advertisement from Publishers Weekly, 25 August 1975. (Click on any scan to make it larger.)

It is interesting that the price of the book is given as $10 (for comparison I note that in 1977 Tolkien's The Silmarillion was priced at $10.95). But The Violet Apple and The Witch wasn't published at that price, nor did it come out in 1975. When it finally appeared in April 1976, the price was upped to $15. Here are scans of the front and rear covers, with flaps, of the dust-wrapper (scanning with the mylar still on the wrapper has resulted in some unfortunate glare streaks).

Note the quotes from reviews, on the rear cover, of A Voyage to Arcturus, and Devil's Tor. The new book apparently did not sell well. The trade paperback edition came out in June 1977. Every page--including the copyright page--is identical to that in the hardcover edition, so it looks as though the trade paperback edition came out in 1976, but of course that wasn't the case. In fact, the trade paperback gives the impression of having been made up of repurposed pages from unsold copies of the hardcover edition. In any case, neither edition sold well, and copies are pricey today (though the hardcover is by far the rarer of the two editions). Here are the front and rear covers of the trade paperback.

Some of the flap copy on the dust-wrapper has been reworked on the rear cover of the paperback, and of the quotations from reviews only one concerning A Voyage to Arcturus remains.

A British edition of The Violet Apple (omitting the severely edited version of The Witch) was published in hardcover by Sidgwick & Jackson on 29 June 1978. Priced £5.50, it restores Lindsay's chapter titles that were omitted from the earlier edition, and corrects some transpositional errors in the text. Here is the simple and elegant front cover along with the front and rear flaps.

This edition, too, sold poorly, and a sticker was later added to the front flap dropping the price to only £1.50.  Here is the flap of another copy, with the sticker affixed.

Even that drastic a reduction in price was not enough to get rid of unsold copies, and in 1981 the publisher rebound the unsold sheets together with another book (A Double Shadow, by Frederick Turner) as a Science Fiction SPECIAL 33, issued without a dust-wrapper. Here is the cover.

 To date, these are the only published editions of both of Lindsay's posthumous books.