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InfoDad.com Book Review 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?
Review courtesy of Infodad.com | |||||||||||||||||
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THE
FAR SIDE OF NOWHERE