Forthcoming, both Good and Bad

A quick survey of some upcoming cover designs...

First, a couple of Orwells. Penguin like to repackage Orwell at regular intervals, and the 60th anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is excuse enough. I'm not complaining, though: the cover for the edition due in June looks like this:



I hope they don't decide to slap on the title and author at the last minute. Also due at around the same time is the latest repackaging of Orwell's complete novels...



..a collection which holds a particular place in my esteem as it was an earlier (and uglier) edition of this book which was the first thing I ever bought with money I earned through writing.

Later in 2009 Penguin Classics are also republishing some of the best books by Walter Tevis and Eric Ambler, both of whom I like a lot. One of the Tevises makes effective use of a film still...



..while the Amblers have nicely evocative cover photos.




Ambler's rights must have come up for grabs recently, as the books Penguin didn't acquire seem to have gone to House of Stratus, much mentioned round these parts recently. These Stratus Amblers rejoice in some of the ugliest, most hideously slapped-together covers I've seen in a long time.





That last one says "Bring me some paracetamol!" rather than "Thrilling spy shenanigans!". I can't imagine anyone wanting to pick up these books based on the cover designs. ("Wow, some badly Photoshopped ghostly boots on holiday! A must-read!")

Spoiler: Everybody Dies

It's been a while since we last looked at a good, old-fashioned apocalypse. Nevil Shute's famous On the Beach (published 1957) is more worthy of that name than most since, as is well-known, and my apologies if you didn't know it, everybody dies at the end. It is a book which is quietly, stiff-upper-lip-ly, affectingly, utterly without hope.

This is the first edition:



The book starts off in the year following a third world war that has gone nuclear. Massive amounts of fallout have wiped out all life in the Northern Hemisphere, and the deadly clouds are now drifting irrevocably southwards, killing everything. Southern Australia is now chock-full of refugees, including the remnants of the British military, and the crew of a single surviving US Navy submarine.

Then a Morse code signal from the continental United States is received, and the American sub is sent to investigate. What happens next I will not spoil, in case you haven't read it yet. Much of the story also concentrates on the relationships between a number of central characters, including the submarine's American captain and his alcoholic Australian girlfriend, and an Australian sailor, his wife and young baby, all of whom are faced with inevitable extinction.

It's an odd thing to say, but to someone brought up on a diet of British and American ends-of-the-world, it's pleasing for an Australian reader to see the planet's last lights going out in Melbourne. Shute was English by birth, but became an Australian after World War II, and set many of his later works in this country. None had more impact than On the Beach, though, with some even attributing the passing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 to the American public's horrified response to the book.

Until recently, it was available from the erratic House of Stratus.



In October, though, it and a startling 22 other Shute books are being brought back into print by Vintage Classics UK. These editions have attractive, sedate covers: you wouldn't even know that was a mushroom cloud at first glance. I like the way it picks up the colours of that first edition, too, with the green sky and red dress.



For a mainstream publisher to resurrect 23 books by a mostly neglected writer at once is quite a vote of confidence: Vintage don't even keep most of Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Bowen or William Faulkner in print. I would be surprised if all the projected titles actually appear in October.

On the Beach was successfully filmed, adding to its impact, though Ava Gardner's famously scathing remark that Melbourne was "the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world" seems to have been invented by a journalist. The film produced a the usual tie-in edition...



..as well as pointing the way for publisher Pan's changing-but-unchanging cover designs over the following decades.



It was only when Pan started to churn out muscular, blokey adventure stories in the 1980s that they decided to ditch the girly romantic element of the cover and just focus on the hardware.



As a book that's been through a huge number of editions, it has a huge number of other covers to match...








Shute strayed into science-fiction on a couple of other occasions, depending on your definitions. No Highway predicted the "metal fatigue" which would lead to a number of aircraft crashes, while What Happened to the Corbetts is one of those novels written in the lead-up to World War II that project forward into the war itself (see also Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies).

_tratu_

I recently read and was disappointed by Brian Aldiss's Dracula Unbound. Aldiss is one of the great British science-fiction writers, and has written a lot. Unfortunately, among the classics (Greybeard, The Brightfount Diaries, Frankenstein Unbound (to which Dracula Unbound is a sequel)), there are some duds, and this is one of them.

It should have been a bit of fun, with time travel, vampires, Bram Stoker as a character, syphilis as unexpected metaphor, etc, but ended up deeply flawed and sporadically stupid (vampires as the descendents of pterodactyls?) to the point of not being enjoyable (and when you've both already travelled in time, AND have JUST unveiled your newly invented time machine, would you not suspect the fossilised 65-million-year-old human remains found by one of your employees were not some previously undiscovered lost race but, just maybe, time travellers?).

Anyway, this is not a book review site, so what I actually came here to write about was the cover:



It's OK as these things go: moody if uninspired. The real problem, though, is that they've misspelled the author's name. It's Aldiss with two Ss.

This edition is from House of Stratus, a weird little publisher I can't really get to grips with. They launched in 2001 with a vast panoply of previously out-of-print titles available as print-on-demand books: some were classics (H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, etc), some were once-popular middlebrow bestsellers fallen into obscurity (C. P. Snow, Nevil Shute, Nicholas Monsarrat), and some were period trash (Sapper, Edgar Wallace). Since then they seem to have lost the rights to most of their list, though some of the books dropped from their catalogue are still available, and every now and then their website goes missing. It's this sort of thing that makes me suspect my pipe dream of setting up as a republisher of lost classics would see me end up a gutter-dwelling penniless beggar.