Today’s birthday post (February 25) features Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976). Pangborn isn’t well remembered today, This is due in part because he didn’t leave a large body of work behind when he died. He wrote several novels, not all of them genre, and a smattering of short fiction. I’ve seen Pangborn compared favorably to Theodore Sturgeon.
The novel he is best remembered for is Davy, a postapapolyptic tale of a young boy. I haven’t read it yet, but I do have a copy of the Ballantine (later Del Rey) edition with the Boris Vallejo cover that has an image of Davy and two nude young women about to have sex in the background. This book is part of a series. The rest of the series is comprised of short stories. Some of these are collected in Still i Persist in Wondering, which is where I got the title of this post.
Another novel is A Mirror for Observers, which I read in college. Unfortunately, I had an outpatient procedure before I finished it, and when I went to finish it, not much of it stuck with me. I enjoyed the book, at least until I had to put it down, and I enjoyed the rest of it. I just wasn’t really recovered enough to jump back into it. I’ll give it another try one of these days.
The third novel, Pangborn’s first, actually, is West of the Sun. It’s about a group of colonisits on a planet that turns out to have hidden dangers. This novel is iinclulded in The Edgar Pangborn Megapack, along with three pieces of shosrt fiction and two other novels that are nongenre.
Pangborn wrote enough short stories to fill a hefty collection. Maybe NESFA could put one together. It would be a good fit for their line.
