Mar 23
Ryan Comments: On Dress-Yourself-Day, Pete often wore his favorite purple jeans backwards, although this made him walk funny and frequently caused him to see things he was pretty sure weren’t actually there.
Published 1975
Ryan Comments: On Dress-Yourself-Day, Pete often wore his favorite purple jeans backwards, although this made him walk funny and frequently caused him to see things he was pretty sure weren’t actually there.
Published 1975
March 23rd, 2021 at 11:05 am
I think the careers advisor is carried away again.
March 23rd, 2021 at 11:37 am
This is what happens when you keep your options open for too long.
March 23rd, 2021 at 11:37 am
So if I go into Sheckley’s dreams I have to be armed with a pistol? The cover should say up front the cost of a personal fire arm is not included in the retail price of the book.
March 23rd, 2021 at 1:36 pm
The artist had Tim Curry model for the “T”
March 23rd, 2021 at 1:51 pm
This cover: I’m so wacky.
Me: Yeah, I noticed.
March 23rd, 2021 at 2:59 pm
Is that a book title on the right or the sales figures?
March 23rd, 2021 at 3:54 pm
The title broke into a cold sweat at the sight of the GSS Gunslinger.
March 23rd, 2021 at 3:59 pm
@Francis: not nearly as relentless as the book itself. It reads like a bad Sheckley pastiche (i.e. like Douglas Adams).
@Ryan: wherever this was, it has Bob Shaw and some good Sheckleys as well so it’s obviously a find.
March 23rd, 2021 at 7:01 pm
Griz, those lips are Magenta’s. not Frank N. Furters!
Why isn’t there a tag for #wierdrobot?
March 23rd, 2021 at 7:12 pm
Any time you have your font larger than your cover art you have a clusterf*ck of a cover. Font too large so they ended up stacking the SHECKLEY letters. No wonder it all seems to have ended up in a landfill.
March 23rd, 2021 at 7:29 pm
Weird Robot: I am programmed to process 28 gigabytes of data per second and even I can’t keep up with this meshugah cover! Gaaah, now my hair is falling out!
March 23rd, 2021 at 10:30 pm
They had Options, but decided to go with the font that was too big for the cover anyway.
They had Options, but decided to go with a cover that looked like someone had eaten lunch off it.
They had Options, but decided to go Overly Wacky.
Are the title letters sweating from being crammed in too close together, or in embarrassment like the “single drop of sweat” in anime?
March 23rd, 2021 at 11:00 pm
@Tat Wood – this was another find in Tucson.
Tucson, Yuma and Quartzsite in Arizona are second only to the Silicon Valley bookstores for their stock in Very Obscure Literature to be found in the SciFi/Fantasy sections.
Tucson makes more sense, since it is a university town, but Yuma and Quartzsite are populated by, let’s say, “less mainstream persons” with very individual tastes. I highly recommend the bookstores in these towns.
March 24th, 2021 at 4:45 am
@Ryan – I’ve been to Yuma in the summer. It’s so hot I’m surprised all the books don’t burst into flames.
March 24th, 2021 at 2:51 pm
@Bibliomancer – in Quartzsite, the bookstore owner has a solution to the problem of excess heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryWKkIbFjXk
March 24th, 2021 at 4:01 pm
@Ryan: a prominent spinner-display of Heinlein. Cause or effect?
March 25th, 2021 at 2:07 am
@Ryan: I bought a book in Quartzite as a kid. Also some quartz. I don’t recall any nudity. On another trip, I drank a whole lot of cold water in Yuma and looked at desert flora and fauna in Tucson. Then as an adult, I baked to a crisp in downtown Phoenix.
Why the hell do I keep going to Arizona in the summer?!
(OTOH, Sedona and Flagstaff one winter were great)
@Tat: Both, of course. (Time travel)
March 25th, 2021 at 9:21 pm
“His first novel in 8 years!” is rather a vague sales pitch, really.
Does it mean that…
A) The author fell off the wagon for almost 8 years
B) It took him 8 years to finish the book
C) He had writer’s block and only got out of it after 7 years of agony
D) He married and had kids, distracting him for 8 years
E) He tried something else for almost 8 years
F) Publishers snubbed him for a long time
March 27th, 2021 at 1:23 pm
Options – Robert Sheckley’s headfirst dive into the deadly world of day-trading….