INCOMING

For my birthday, Kitty and I drove to Fort Walton to check out a used book store.  We actually found two and I picked up a few intereesting things.

• Kingsley Amis, The Riverside Villas Murder.  A "classic armchair mystery" with a fourteen-year-old hero.  Peter Furneaux is more interested in investigating the mysteries of sex rather than the death of the wet man with the bleeding head wound.  Amis was the first person to write an authorized James Bond novel (Dr. Sun as by "Robert Markham") wing the death of Ian Fleming.
• Ben Bova, editor, Analog Annual.  SF anthology by then-Analog editor Bova.  Three stories, one article, and a full length-novel (Fighting Madness by 1975 Campbell winner P.J. Plauger) in what was meant to be an annual series.  The best laid plans, etc, etc,..this was the only Analog Annual , although two years later Bova did edit Analog Yearbook, whichalso lasted only the one year.
• [Boys' Life], The Boys' Life Book of Mystery Stories.  YA mystery anthology with ten stories from the magazine from 1950 to 1961.  I picked this one up mainly because three of the stories were by Hugh B. Cave and two were by Gordon D. Sherriffs.
• A. Bertram Chandler, Matilda's Stepchildren.  A John Grimes SF novel.  Now the owner of a deep-space pinnance, Grimes is hired to take a muckraking reporter to the pleasure planet New Venusberg. not realizing that also on the planet was a person who vowed vengeance against the reporter.  Chandler was an Australian sea captain and John Grimes has been described -- not inreasonably -- as Hornblower in space.  A great writer and a fun series.
• Kathleen Ann Goonan, The Bones of Time.  SF novel.  In a near future Hawaii, the bones of King Kamehameha may hold the secret to cloning, time travel, and alternate universes.  A riff on nanotech provides the bones (no pun  intended) for Goonan's second novel.
• [Flash Gordon], Flash Gordon Book Two:  War of the Citadels.  Anonymous comic strip tie-in novel.  Flash, Dale, and Zarkov stumble on a plot that threatens the entire universe.
• "Rex Gordon" (Stanley Bennett Hough), First Through Time  SF novel.  The top-secret synchronotron took accurate pictures of the future and the future was a disaster.  Now an astronaut trained for the first flight into space must now travel across time to save the future.  Also published as The Time Factor.
• James Herbert, The Rats.  Horror novel, the first in Herbert's Rats trilogy.  I think it's about some type of rodent.
• Bernhardt J. Hurwood, Haunted Houses.  Collection of 28 supposed true stories about haunted houses. Published for the YA market.
• Damon Knight, editor, Orbit 7.  SF anthology with a dozen original stories.
• Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory.  Horror novel.  Joe Ledger and the DMS (Department of Military Sciences) go up against two foes at one time:  a group creating transgenic monsters to create genetically enhanced mercenaries, and a group continuing Josef Mengele's plan for creating a Nazi master race.
• Dean McLaughlin, The Fury from Earth.  SF novel.  The laws of physics are toppled when a super weapon triggers an interplantary war.
• Austin Mitchelson & Nicholas Utechin, Hellbirds.  A Sherlock Holmes mystery with possible SF overtones.  It's 1914 and Holmes and Watson encounter a deadly flock of birds loosed by a German master spy.  A sequel to The Earthquake Machine.
• Thomas F. Monteleone, Fantasma.  Horror novel.  A Mafia blood fued is fought on one side with guns and explosives, on the other with deadly magic.
• "Kenneth Robeson" (Paul Ernst), The Frosted Death.  Pulp novel.  Richard Benson -- The Avenger -- tries to stop the Frodsted Death -- a white powder, like snow, the covers a human body, bringing death.  This is the Avenger's fifth outing, first published in 1940.
• James H. Schmitz, Legacy.  SF novel in the Hub series.  The millennia-old machines known as plasmoids were supposedly created by the long-vanished Masters of the Old Galaxy.  The plasmoids, long inactive, have suddenly come to life and the man who discovered them has disappeared.  That man's closest associate Trigger Argee, who may possibly be the deadliest woman in the Hub, sets out to find him.  Originally published as A Tale of Two Clocks.
• David C. Smith, The Eyes of Night.  Horror novel. the second (and last) book in The Fair Rules of Evil Series.  Smith is probably best known for his heroic fantasy novels, including six about the Robert E. Howard character Red Sonya, co-written with Richard L. Tierney.
• D. A. Stern, Black Dawn.  Horror novel.  L.A. is burning and in the center of the flames rises a dark god.
• Melanie Tem, The Deceiver.  Horror novel.  The devil is in the details, and for the Harkness family that expression is literally true.  Tem, who passed away earlier this year, was one of the most effective horror writers of the past thirty years.
• Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World.  Georges Remi's comic book hero Tintin is reimagined in this highly acclaimed literary fantasy.
• F. Paul Wilson, Sims.  SF/horror novel.  A powerful corporation genetically creates a human-simian hybrid and the corporation has a hidden agenda.