Today is August 15, and it is the birthday of Robert L. Forward (1932-2002) and Darrell K. Sweet (1934-2011). I’m going to do this birthday post a little different than most of them. I’m not going to simply give a few biographical and bliblographical facts with some comments on what the subject(s) of the post mean to me.

This will be more of a rumination on aging and nostalgia.This isn’t going to maudlin, I promise.

As anyone who has been paying attention should already know, the mass market paperback has gone the way of the dodo. They aren’t being printed anymore. Ingram has pretty much a lock on book distribution, and last year they announced that they wouldn’t be distributing mass market paperbacks anymore. The reason is that as the distributor, they get a cut of the money, and that cut is based on cover price. Mass market paperbacks, although they were no longer what I would consider cheap, were the cheapest books around.

Cover for Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan by Darrell K. Sweet

So, from a purely greedy monetary perspective, that made sense.

Having grown up reading mass market science fiction, fantasy, and mystery, I miss the mass market format. Publishing was different then. For starters, there were a lot more of them.

Which meant the publishers had to compete for reader eyes and reader money. The covers were one of the ways they did this. Covers needed to be eye-catching, which usually meant colorful and showing something that would make a reader pick up a book. Frequently action and/or some sort of mystery.

Case in point, the cover (minus any text) of Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan. That cover is one by Darrell K. Sweet.

I first encountered Sweet’s artwork on the Flinx and Pip novels of Alan Dean Foster, which I read after reading Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. If a book had a cover by Sweet, I at least picked it up and usually bought it. I only met Darrell K. Sweet once, and I made sure to tell him that. His art seemed to be everywhere in the seventies and eighties.

I’ve drifted from science fiction over the last decade. Mostly I read fantasy and then mystery. There were reasons for this that aren’t relevant here. I still read some sf, but not much.

In the last six months, I’ve gone back to reading more sword and sorcery and science fiction. There are many S&S authors I want to read to catch up with the state of the subgenre.

Science  fiction is a little of a different story. Most of the science fiction writers I grew up reading are either dead or retired or not writing much anymore. I don’t live near a major bookstore anymore, so going in and browsing isn’t much of an option. A lot of the science fiction I am familiar with these days isn’t to my taste. About the only science fiction by new writers that I’ve read in recent years and really liked (that I can think of off hte tops of my head) is the Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio.

I find myself revisiting books I read years ago. I finished C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station last night. Took me abuut two and a half months becuase it is a long book and I have been juggling a number of reading projects over the summer. I read it more than a quarter century ago. I didn’t remember much about it, and I enjoyed it. I’ll be wroking in more of Cherryh’s work over the next year or so, as I can fit it in.

That seems to be what I’m drawn to these days, at least in science fiction. Older books and stories from my adolescence and early adulthood.

For example,Robert  L. Forward’s debut novel, Dragon’s Egg. I got this one from the SFBC and read it around eighth grade. It’s a hard sceince novel about scientists trying to communicate with life forms on a neutron star. It was probably a bit advanced for me at theh time. I’d like to give it another try sometime soon.

Forward was a full-time scientist, so he wasn’t a very prolific fiction writer. Heonly wrote about a dozen novels, one collection, and about nine short stories. He was considered one of the hardest of hard science fiction writers. Now that I’ve collected a few degrees in physics, I want to give him another try.

And Inherit the Stars along with other works by Hogan. And Heinlein. And Herbert. And Varley. And Niven. and Anderson. I’ve read a great deal by most of those writers.

But its been years. In many cases, it will be like reading them for the first time.

But I also want to keep up with what’s going on in science fiction.

Any suggestions on the new stuff?