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Apr 09

And there is the only corridor my space microlight can actually fit down...Click for full image

Good Show Sir’s Art Direction: Imagine the future, my friend… men will be either glowing silver pillars of greatness or riding around on space microlights. Women? Well they’ll be in skintight body suits and stay on their knees all day. Sexist? No not at all, people will look back at this cover and see our predictions as genius! I think…
Published 1958

Many thanks to Joe for sending this in!

Actually, that cover IS a classical work of art!I would touch it without protective gloves.I've seen worse. Far, far, worse.Interesting, but I would still read it in public.Middlng: Neither awful nor awfully goodWould not like to be seen reading that!Awful... just awful...That belongs in a gold-lame picture frame!Gah... my eyes are burning! Feels so good!Good Show Sir! (Average: 7.80 out of 10)
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27 Responses to “Address: Centauri”

  1. Dead Stuff With Big Teeth Says:

    The tricycle has a horrified look on its face. I would too, if someone were crawling up my bum and using my ears to steer.

  2. THX 1138 Says:

    Ladies and gentlemen, the future has arrived. I give you… The Sinclair C6!

  3. Bibliomancer Says:

    Faces are hard to draw. Especially tricycle faces.

  4. Yoss Says:

    Wow, who knew? Before there was Fonzie, there was Space Fonzie.

  5. FeařofMusic Says:

    Truly visionary! I look forward to the future when men will be genetically engineered to have their own organic ting! It’s all good all day every day when you got ting! from your head to your toes!

  6. fred Says:

    The face is OK, it’s the stick shift that gets me.

  7. Tom Noir Says:

    Is there a saying about how you can put jet intakes on a space tricycle, but at the end of the day it’s still a tricycle? Because there should be.

  8. Tom Noir Says:

    The woman is on the ground because she’s looking for her nipples, which seem to have fallen off.

  9. SI Says:

    “No no… that’s the polish station right over there Jeff…. jezzzzz”

    Yep… risky joke of the day. Sorry.

  10. Pat Says:

    The “tricycle” is obviously a space wheelchair, there is no room for him to have legs. Whatever took his legs obviously also left him with some serious skeletal deformities.

    He is clearly asking his android helper to fetch his girlfriend’s crutches so she can get up.

    Now do you feel ashamed of your cruel mockery?

  11. B. Chiclitz Says:

    A close look at Silver Man’s boots reveal that there are little sleeves for his toes. I am not sure what to make of this, or even how to describe it. It seems metaphysically connected, somehow, to the strange concavity on Tricycle Man’s right arm, and the missing nipple syndrome.

  12. Bibliomancer Says:

    Today’s class discussion topic:

    “Earth was too perfect for these extraordinary exiles – to belong to it, they had to flee it.”

  13. Pat Says:

    Well, blow me down, I appear to be correct:

    http://gnomepress.me/tag/address-centauri/

    Surprisingly, the ting is mentioned in the review of the book!

  14. JuanPaul Says:

    It’s disturbing to see that in the future, tire technology has regressed.

  15. JuanPaul Says:

    Centauri! Where the men traded their genitalia for surfer physiques. Now they compensate by degrading women and driving phallic cars.

  16. Anti-Sceptic Says:

    Address: Centaur? I don’t see any Centaurs…Oh wait, it’s the guy who is half man and half space-dune-buggy.

  17. Frank Says:

    I looked at this cover and thought of a pool party at a nerd convention: the folks by the pool look like they’re closer to an argument than a party. Whatever’s going on isn’t happy.

    Then I wondered what this book was about and found http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/32597 which I think is the short story that Floyd Wallace expanded into this book.

    It’s “Handicap Haven”, an asteroid sanatorium where the shiny happy people on Earth ship the apparently not-so-many folks who can’t be fixed up to fit in to normal society. So Tricycle Man is in fact truncated somewhere above his legs, Silver Man does have a bit of the bioluminescence about him but hasn’t got enough of a shoulder/back to attach prosthetic arms that can be used for anything but show, the lady looks normal enough but can’t hear nor speak, and is considered a moron in that the authorities haven’t been able to figure out how to train her, and there’s another lady in that pool because it’s full of acid that keeps her ever-growing body somewhat under control. Such are future medical technology and its limits.

    Having read the short story, I’m thinking that’s scary good cover art.

  18. B. Chiclitz Says:

    A couple of months ago, I coincidentally downloaded this story to my iPad—it’s collected in a public domain anthology called “100 Classic Science Fiction Stories.” Except for the really strange *handicaps* given to the lead characters, it is a plodding piece of fluff. @Frank’s post recalled the text to me, so I went back and checked it out again. Here’s the epigraph to the story: “Outcasts of a society of physically perfect people, they couldn’t stay and they couldn’t go home again—yet there had to be some escape for them. Oddly enough, there was!”

    If you can make sense of that (particularly the exclamation point), you can handle anything the SF genre can throw at you.

  19. RachelJ Says:

    “…Oddly enough, there was! You see, they were a new kind of soldier, created for a new kind of war. Their swords shone with magic might and their hearts burned with ardent lust! In their (collective) brain was the power to rule the world. Banished- to do the impossible, with magnetic artistry they reached escape velocity and embarked on a new odyssey of love and rebellion- in a universe beyond imagination! It was Man’s most exciting adventure. (It’s Howling Time!)”

  20. B. Chiclitz Says:

    ” . . . beyond imagination!” GSS!!

  21. A.R.Yngve Says:

    More like Address: The 19th Century

  22. Anna T. Says:

    @Pat: “Space Wheelchair” was the first thing I thought when I saw that tricycle. I’m pleased I was right.

    Why is the girlfriend wearing a topless swimsuit?

  23. Ray P Says:

    Return to sender.

  24. anon Says:

    The guy is just doing his corseted silver space robot statue thing and his girlfriend is just doing the plastic slavegirl statue thing and the guy’s twin, born without legs, just came around to ask if he wanted to take a break and get some ice– whoa, look at the rack on her!

  25. Bruce A Munro Says:

    @Frank:
    ” and there’s another lady in that pool because it’s full of acid that keeps her ever-growing body somewhat under control.”

    She’s Mrs. SCP-682? ( http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-682 )

  26. fred Says:

    1955 hardcover dust jacket was done by Ed Emsh. Very tame compared to his paperback covers, but I like it.

    https://www.firstplacebooks.com/pages/books/007235/f-l-wallace/address-centauri

  27. GSS ex-noob Says:

    @Bruce: dammit, I’d gone a couple years without being sucked in by SCP (not literally) and now…

    Reading through this batch of comments, ISTM that I actually read this one at some point, as it all sounds familiar. But not in paper, in digital. Probably the same collection as BC mentioned, or similar. It’s generic space opera of the period, save for the cast’s various disabilities. A bit of X-Men presaging, too.

    Silver guy’s feet are disquieting — those toes are slightly too skinny to be his own, and far too skinny to be the also-disquieting rubbery 10-toe running shoes some people wear nowadays.

    That 2/6 sticker is badly placed. “Address: Centaur” reminded me of our old pal from ISTBE (shudder).

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