I Am Mung!

I hit the used bookstores today, so I'm going to share a few of my finds:

First up, we have a novel that I expect to be absolutely dreadful:  Stationfall, by Arthur Bryon Cover.  The reason I picked it up should be obvious enough, but if it isn't: "An Infocom Book" says everything that needs to be said.  On the negative side: it supposedly doesn't make a lot of sense without having read the first novel, and secondly, it's a marketing tie-in dating from the the last days of the post-Activision-buy-out version of Infocom.  On the plus side: there's a glowing review of the author's ability by none other than Harlan Ellison.

And speaking of Harlan Ellison — the man who left college because he punched a professor in the mouth, who once tried to design a computer game that was impossible to beat, the man who spent almost 30 years feuding with Gene Roddenberry over the later's altering of a script (which won Ellison a Hugo in its altered state), and who once mailed a publisher a dead gopher (fourth class) — I managed to spot a graphic novel collection of three of his stories (with the original text-only versions of the stories included) at Strange.  Given the difficulty in acquiring Ellison's works (perhaps largely due to his ability to irritate people, especially publishers and editors), it was a must buy.  I have to tell the owner whether it is any good the next time I stop in there.  So far I've only read the introduction, which has a tone that's unmistakably Ellison.

And finally, another author who's next to impossible to find, but for different reasons: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, better known simply as Lord Dunsany.  For a man who produced an unbelievable amount of literature during a 50-year career (there are five volumes collecting just the stories involving Jorkens, a character he created 25 years after his first major published work), he certainly is difficult to find in bookstores.  (Chapters lists 4 titles by him, one of which is out of stock, and another which is temporarily unavailable to order.)  It's a pity, as he was considered to be a master of fantasy writing, influencing the likes of Lovecraft, whose early published work reads like a pale imitation of Dunsany, and Tolkien, with his tales of strange gods with Eastern-sounding names.  (The official website of the Dunsany Estate has a story by Dunsany online.  It's not anywhere's near his best work, but it does give people who've never heard of him a quick introduction.  Project Guttenberg has a number of his works, which have lapsed into the public domain due to age, online, but I've never been one to enjoy reading entire books from a text file.)

All of this, of course, meant that I was very happy to find a novel by him in one of the secondhand stores.  I've never actually read a novel by him before, as I only have short story collections by him.  I'm hoping it's good, but I've got plenty of other things to read first.

That's it, that's Andrew's day at the bookstore.  Rather cheap, given the amount I normally spend.  Oh, I almost forgot: since I'm on the topic of old publications, here's something for the Unix geeks that I found in an old (April 1981) edition of Scientific American.