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3 stars
Any good bookstore will have a section with really old books. I got this at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan for $3, which by my math is over a 750% increase over the original 35 cents it was going for when it was released in 1958, but I still think I got a good deal out of this. If nothing else, it made for a unique tactile reading experience because of how the spine was falling apart, and I wish you could smell just how old this book is.
I think I like the ~idea~ of old-timey pulp adventure and science fiction books more than the execution, but I was surprised here with two separate, surprisingly dense political plots. Both stories had similarities around engineers being stranded on dangerous planets with harsh environments and being forced to play two opposing factions against each other for their own interests. But …
Any good bookstore will have a section with really old books. I got this at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan for $3, which by my math is over a 750% increase over the original 35 cents it was going for when it was released in 1958, but I still think I got a good deal out of this. If nothing else, it made for a unique tactile reading experience because of how the spine was falling apart, and I wish you could smell just how old this book is.
I think I like the ~idea~ of old-timey pulp adventure and science fiction books more than the execution, but I was surprised here with two separate, surprisingly dense political plots. Both stories had similarities around engineers being stranded on dangerous planets with harsh environments and being forced to play two opposing factions against each other for their own interests. But beyond that they were pretty different.
Snows of Ganymede centered around a small team of engineers trying to determine the viability of terraforming a moon of Jupiter that had been settled by anti-science evangelicals from "the southern part of the old United States". Lacking the knowledge to construct robots to perform difficult labor, the head priests instead just raised a caste of intentionally dumbed-down citizens to work for them instead. The engineers are disturbed by this strange culture they've been hired by, but soon discover there's even more shady shit going on in the background. Had a lot more machinations going on, and a really captivating opening chapter.
War of the Wing-Men however was exactly what was written on the box. Three humans on a rich guy's private rocketship get sabotaged and crash land on a world inhabited by winged humanoids with roughly medieval age technology. The humans can't eat anything on this world and only have six week's worth of food, so they're on a time limit to get to the single human outpost on this world. Problem is, they're being fought over by two opposing nations of wing-men who have been in a multi-generational war. It's not graphic or brutal, but there are a lot of large-scale battles described, and the protagonist is an absolute scheming and conniving asshole of a businessman who you can't help but respect.
Definitely something out of my normal wheelhouse, but it went better than I hoped.