InfoDad.com Book Review of THE FAR SIDE OF NOWHERE

InfoDad.com Book Review

THE FAR SIDE OF NOWHERE

Nelson Bond, Arkham, $34.95 (423p)

ISBN 0-87054-180-3

Small commercial book publishers may be an endangered species, but you wouldn't know it from the outstanding output of Arkham House. At first, it was best known for publishing works by H.P. Lovecraft and company founder August Derleth (Arkham, based on Salem, Massachusetts, is a town invented by Lovecraft). After 60-plus years, Arkham House is still a family business -- April Derleth runs it now. And it has moved well beyond Lovecraft into works by such notable writers as J.G. Ballard, Alexander Jablokov and Barry N. Malzberg.

Nelson Bond isn't in that august company, but The Far Side of Nowhere is well worth exploring for fantasy and SF enthusiasts. Bond, now a nonagenarian, flourished (if that's the right world) in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s. He moved to movie and TV writing in the mid-1950s and produced no new short stories for 40 years. His return to story writing, "Pipeline to Paradise," is included here, but wrongly listed with a 1955 copyright. It's actually one of his best tales, about a phone call from beyond the grave -- but from Heaven or Hell?

In Bond's earlier stories, the style ranges from forgettable to execrable: "Gunner McCoy, Bartlett's staunchest friend and admirer, looked up from the rotor port, wrinkled his leathery, space-toughed cheeks into a frown, and squirted mekel-juice at a distant gobboon." There are flashes of humor, though often not germane ones (two photographers named Gray and Dorry combine forces to produce the pictures of Dorry & Gray). There are some wonderful opening lines: "This sounds silly" in "The Scientific Pioneer Returns" and "Old MacDonald had a firm" in "The Geometrics of Johnny Day." But there are disturbing lapses, like misspelling Mein Kampf in a story mentioning Hitler and calling an entire section of the book "In Uffish Thought" -- then misquoting the "uffish" line from "Jabberwocky." There are repetitions, like the description of a very odd gait in "The Scientific Pioneer Returns" (1940), reused in "The Masked Marvel" (1943). Yet Bond has his moments, such as 1942's "The World Within," which could have been called "A Nazi's Fantastic Voyage" and anticipates Isaac Asimov's in-the-bloodstream tale by a generation. Bond is certainly no Asimov -- he's more the bronze side of the Golden Age of SF. But his work is worth knowing, and who but Arkham House would collect it for us today?

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Review courtesy of Infodad.com