What can we do to get our BoingBoing on (since the kids all love that BoingBoing feeling)?
Here’s a link to a French SF site, Noosphere; but I’ll hustle you through the front door straight to the very best stuff: scans – covers and insides – from a series entitled Club Du Livre D’Anticipation. If you can’t read French (which is really just a mixed-up form of English, so give it a try) this page explains that this was a series of translations of classic English language SF, which you would have figured out anyway. It’s all here: Asimov, Van Vogt, C. S. Lewis, Heinlein, Hamilton, Dick, Moorcock, Smith, Farmer, Sturgeon, Brunner, Butler, Niven, on and on. Pages and pages of mostly charming, Gallic-style illustrations to accompany old familiar titles. Much Metal Hurlant-style goodness. The titles are fun, too. A la Poursuite des Slan. (Not sure what was wrong with plain Slan.) En Attendant l’Année Dernière. (That’s Now Wait For Last Year, but the other way sounds more Proustian than paranoid, no?)
Which is your favorite of the lot?
I’ll just presume to point out a few choice bits from elsewhere in the site. The 17 pages of Ace SF doubles are worth checking. In other news, George Clooney is The Demolished Man. These funny little guns are funny. Conan as you’ve never imagined him. A couple of the Italian covers give you that Gina Lollobrigida in space feeling. Nice horizon on that one.
My top pick is Salome, My First 2,000 Years of Love, by Viereck and Eldridge. The cover is so-so, but I delight in lavish blurbs by famous authors on cheesy editions from unknown authors. Here Thomas Mann does not disappoint: "A great book … a monumental conception … amazingly rich in world vision and in sensuous pictures." That Thomas Mann? Off to Amazon we go. All is explained, more or less. A repackaging of sorts. Sounds strangely fascinating. Does anyone know anything more about it?
{ 11 comments }
Henry 11.22.04 at 5:03 pm
bq. En Attendant l’Année Dernière. (That’s Now Wait For Last Year, but the other way sounds more Proustian than paranoid, no?)
Surely even more Beckettian than Proustian (en attendant Godot after all). Which makes for some wonderful images – what would Phil Dick and Sam Beckett have written if they’d collaborated …
Jason Kuznicki 11.22.04 at 6:54 pm
Cordwainer Smith in French? Sounds like just my kind of thing.
(And,as all good Cordwainer Smith fans know, we would never have had Frank Herbert without him…)
bob mcmanus 11.22.04 at 8:53 pm
“what would Phil Dick and Sam Beckett have written if they’d collaborated …”
Phil Dick + Sam Beckett = George Alec Effinger?
Didn’t get whether those were French language editions or not;the covers were in English. I have a couple hundred fifties editions of SF stuff bought in the late 70s as the only available reading copies during a reprint drought. Not any sort of collector though.
Worth, oh golly, $5 to $10 apiece now.
bob mcmanus 11.22.04 at 9:19 pm
Powers
My favorite cover artist when I was 10-15, the only PB’s I would buy for the cover alone was Richard Powers. Probably some kind of snobbishness, Powers just looked like ART. Or xenophilia, Powers was creating landscapes that felt actually alien. I don’t know if today I like Tanguy because he reminds me of Powers.
dave heasman 11.22.04 at 9:42 pm
I’d like to see the cover for Neuf Cent Grandmeres…
dave heasman 11.22.04 at 9:45 pm
..and they have the covers of “Fiction”, the French edition of F & SF, which seems to have lasted from ’53 to ’61.
vernaculo 11.22.04 at 9:48 pm
Everything is a test of one kind or another.
philippe 11.22.04 at 11:00 pm
Somehow I don’t think
this book or this book or this book would find a place in the homes of either John Ashcroft or Michael Powell. Ah! to be a teenager in France…
When I was in 9th (troisieme) grade in a French high school I had a highly unorthodox English teacher. He made us read The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon. It was a powerfully strange and hypnotic novel. He also had us read Peter Ibbetson by George du Maurier – not SF and forgotten now but also strange and enticing. Both had a lasting effect on me.
yabonn 11.23.04 at 1:27 am
Lucky english speakers. You have the boingboingesque feeling of the sf in french, and we have the crappy translations. It could be bearable if it was only incompetence, but no, they feel they have to “make it better”, as in “more adapted to these freaks, the genre loving audience”.
See “snowcrash”? French title “le samourai virtuel”. Flashy colors on the cover, too. Kids like samurai stories and, as it’s sf, we’re selling to kids, right? One thousand gipsy curses on you, editor.
Btw, if you’re interested in sf in french, try “la mort vivante” from stefan wul. Maybe a bit unpolished, but i bet some scenes will stick.
Martin Wisse 11.23.04 at 8:38 am
French SF: I liked the Fleuve Noir (iirc) translations we got in the late seventies/early eighties here in the Netherlands, some very inventive if somewhat pulpy stories there.
ProfWombat 11.23.04 at 7:29 pm
Thanks for bringing me back to middle school, 1961, when 35c. was 35c. Derring-do, pictures of pretty women and a half-assed introduction to philosophy. What more could you want?
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