Things!

A few things prompted by the newest Penguin Classics catalogue...

First, here's the upcoming new edition of one of this blog's favourite books, The Death of Grass.



In the same catalogue, there's also a new edition of Harry Harrison's science-fiction classic of overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room!, with a groovy cover.



However, given the theme, it's not quite as effective as this dramatic US Orb Classic edition from earlier this year.



Among the other books I already know I MUST HAVE in said catalogue, comes a new translation by the brilliant Michael Hofmann (of whom I've previously, accurately, remarked that you could read anything he translates and be assured of very high quality) of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin.



This same translation is being released in the US by the fine small press Melville House as Every Man Dies Alone.



Melville House also have two other Fallada books scheduled for 2009--The Drinker and Little Man, What Now?--with very attractive, simple cover designs.

John Christopher update

Another quickie, this time updating the posts about the great literary catastrophist John Christopher. I came across a new-to-me blog, Bookride, about collecting/buying/selling rare books, and they had a post on the first edition of Christopher's The Death of Grass, showing the original UK jacket by Trevor Denning (click for much bigger version).



I am also reliably informed by a Man Who Knows that this excellent book is to appear as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2009. Huzzah!

While we're here, have a couple more Trevor Denning covers:

A Quick John Christopher Follow-Up

For anyone here who doesn't also read The Age of Uncertainty (and you really should--it's over there on the links bar, see?), the goodly proprieter has recently posted a series of excellent and thoughtful posts on the three John Christopher novels I discussed here earlier. The specific posts are here, here and here.

He also has a nifty Penguin cover for The Death of Grass which I'd never come across. I hope I can be forgiven for pinching it to show here:

John Christopher

Back again to the end of the world, and one of the best writers about it.

In any respectable apocalypse connoisseur's list of the great books, John Christopher (born 1922) will be found, alongside John Wyndham, with whom he has often and reasonable been compared. Unlike Wyndham, Christopher (real name Sam Youd) is still alive and writing, though very little of his output oiver the last couple of decades has been science-fiction. Nor is it under the name of John Christopher, who is still perhaps best known for his children's Tripods trilogy.

Christopher has published widely under nine different names: Anthony Rye, Christopher Youd, John Christopher, Hilary Ford, Peter Graaf, Stanley Winchester, Samuel Youd, William Godfrey and, most recently, Peter Nichols. Usually the different names go with different writing genres, John Christopher being his SF name.

His four end-of-the-world novels (three of them masterpieces) were first published in the 1950s and 1960s. As far as I can tell, they're all now out of print. Here are the covers of the editions I own.

The Death of Grass (1956): This edition is the Penguin film tie-in from 1970, with a cover photo by Dan Budnik. The so-so film used the US title, No Blade of Grass. A grass-killing virus destroys the world's crops, leading to riots, starvation and the collapse of civilisation. Youd's 9th book.


The World in Winter (1962): This is the 1964 penguin paperback, with a lovely silkscreen-style image (by Bruce Robertson) of a lone car struggling through a snow-paralysed London. A sudden new ice age hits the world, with dire consequences. Interestingly enough, the European winter after this was first published was especially severe, a fact alluded to on the back cover. Youd's 21st book.


A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965): This edition is the 1978 Sphere edition; the US title was The Ragged Edge. This time it's massive tectonic activity which destroys civilisation: the surface of the globe is rearranged overnight, killing almost everybody, reshaping continents and oceans, wiping out cities. Great stuff. The cover painting of the remnants of Heathrow is by an uncredited artist. Youd's 28th book.


Pendulum (1968): This is the hardcover Michael Joseph reprint from 1974, also with an uncredited cover artist. Perhaps ending the world thrice in a decade was wearing a bit thin by this point, as this is the only one of these novels which doesn't completely convince and enthral the reader. Economic stagnation and collapsing social conventions are at fault for ending civilisation in this novel, and it gives the book a disgruntled-old-man vibe. It's still good, but disappointing compared to the others. Youd's 35th book (bloody hell!).


So, you have your instructions: seek these books out. If you're a publisher, reptint them. And if you have children you'd like to inspire with an introduction to world-ending literature, try the The Tripods, or Empty World, or The Prince in Waiting (civilisation ended by aliens, plague and tectonics (again) respectively). They'll thank you, or else spend the rest of their lives plagued by apocalyptic nightmares. It's all part of life's rich tapestry.

All Fool's Day

This is the first of the Ends of the World posts. I must repeat that these books are not being presented in any order: Edmund Cooper's All Fool's Day has its moments, but it's far from a great book, and demonstrates too much of the author's undoubted misogyny. I'm starting with it for the simple reason that I just finished reading it.

The reason for the crumbling of civilisation is weird sunspot activity causing a huge number of suicides, leaving most of humanity dead by their own hands. Only the unstable types are left alive--psychopaths, artists (Cooper was no friend to the Left), political extremists and so on--to eke out a living in the ruins.

My edition is the Hodder & Stoughton paperback from 1967. It has the feel of that era's Penguin covers, combining an eye-catching and -warping pattern with the hero's girlfriend in her bra and a bunch of religious cultists. It's a very Summer of Love cover, and though the cultists look like psychedelic KKK members, there's no hint of the numerous murders, deaths by rats, and other nastiness contained within.



This second cover was used on later Hodder/Coronet edition. it's by artist Chriss Foss, famed among readers of science-fiction in the '60s, '70s and early '80s for his ability to get naked breasts onto the cover of any book, irrespective of their relevance to the book itself. The book was set only a few years into its own future, and so there were no futuristic cities or Mad Max-style Amazons in there, either.



Then we have the original hardcover jacket, a moodily Masereel-like image hinting at the sinister contents.



Last of all, for completeness, here are a few of the other editions: one a scene from the book, the second quite abstract, and the third gloriously '60s-ish. These three images came from the Edmund Cooper Visual Bibliography.



So there you go. It's no masterpiece, though it does have a few nastily effective set-pieces, and Cooper's hatred of women shows through too much. This is, after all, a man who said in an interview that "let [women] have totally equal competition ... they'll see that they can't make it!"

The next time we visit the end of the world, we'll try for something with a little more quality.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter informs me that "the illustration on the Remploy edition of All Fool's Day was originally illustrated to cover Remploy's edition of Death of Grass by John Christopher. Both novels contain scenes of which this illustration could be a representation. I think the swap-over was because of an illustrator not coming up with the goods on time and All Fool's Day was due out sooner. I am not so sure that it wasn't used on Death of Grass as well.