They show a solo Kuttner spinning off ideas like a Catherine Wheel throws sparks. The tales in Thunder fall between those poles. Detour, however, offered lasting works of pure genius. Useful as an insight into the development of a talent. Terror contained facile, repetitive stories that packed a simple, effective punch, then evanesced. Haffner previously gave us Terror in the House and Detour to Otherness by Kuttner, the latter with his wife, C. Specifically, today, this latest Kuttner offering. Taking all that into account, I believe that any reader with a more than passing interest in what SF is and means and can accomplish-and who wants to enjoy some Haggard-level storytelling-owes it to himself or herself to check out these books. Whereas in this uncertain age of the digitization and evaporation of paper books, a book from Haffner, lovingly and luxuriously crafted and thoughtfully designed, carries a weight of defiance, of proud traditional assertiveness and rootedness, even of countercultural nose-thumbing. The Boucher project was just another line-item in the boring, stable world of Doubleday. One final thing that distinguishes Haffner (and NESFA, etc.) collections from the Boucher landmark is the altered state of book publishing. It’s a feeling I welcome, but I know that others, perhaps especially younger readers, might feel such assemblages are fusty relics. This phenomenon imparts to these collections a sense of time-travel artifacts, antiquities rescued from the dustheap of history. In fact, in many cases, these newly collected stories will be getting their first airing in several decades. But the strata from which these new books mine their treasures are much deeper and stranger and uncommon for the 21st-century sensibility. The Boucher books felt to me then almost like a state-of-the-art snapshot. Boucher is nearly twice as far from us as he was from Gernsback. Today, we are (almost) fifty-five years deeper into the production of SF. So great as the Treasury was, it spanned only twenty years of the field (admittedly, a field that was barely just a tad over thirty years old in 1959). And many of the stories-the novels especially-could easily be found in other editions. But most of the pieces were from the forties and fifties. But additionally, they also carry a weight of nostalgia and time-binding and laudable archival rescue work that the Boucher volumes did not. The giant, career-spanning compilations these fine presses produce offer a similar thrill of enormous literary riches. I get the same feeling these days whenever I receive a book from Haffner Press (or from NESFA Press, or a few other worthy independent publishers). Needless to say, I hardly waited ten minutes after receipt before diving into them, and they fulfilled all the advertised delights. I marveled that any editor could assemble between two covers (okay, four covers) such a generous treasure trove for my enjoyment. Holding those books, I felt a palpable sense of the living, ongoing history of the field, and a vision of the riches the genre contained. The set contained four complete novels, and a wealth of shorter fiction. "When I was but a lad, the Science Fiction Book Club held out as enticement to join (cost: one thin dime, to be mailed physically via USPS) the two-volume anthology edited by Anthony Boucher and titled A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. When I received this induction premium, my head practically exploded. THUNDER IN THE VOID is a massive collection of 16 vintage Space Opera stories selected from classic pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Marvel Science Stories, Astonishing Stories, Super Science Stories, Super-Detective, and of course, Planet Stories. Most of the these are appearing in book form for the first time. An added bonus, Haffner Press is pleased to include anunpublished story by Kuttner, “The Interplanetary Limited.”Īward-winning author (and the only writer to stage a live performance of a Kuttner Space Opera story) Mike Resnick contributes an introduction reflecting on his admiration for stories by Kuttner (and Moore). But he also wrote blood-n-thunder Space Opera stories in the vein of Edmond Hamilton (one of young Kuttner’s favorite authors) told with a rough-edge style similar to Kuttner’s protege Leigh Brackett. Moore in 1940, Henry Kuttner wrote stories of Lovecraftian horror, weird-menace “shudder” tales, and thrilling adventure stories. Prior to his marriage to fellow science-fantasy writer Catherine L.
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