My family recently made our roughly annual pilgrimage to Riverside, California to visit relatives. Whenever we’re there, we always stop by Renaissance Books, a used book store with a huge sf section (you can buy stuff from them online here). The owner used to live in Austin and ran a used book store/head shop here. This trip I found out that his shop used to be down the street from where Glade and I live. It was called Anarchadillo: Slow Burning Books and Papers. Gotta love that. I tired to find a photo but I was unable to. If anyone has one, I’d love to see it.

Here are some gems I picked up:

Paul Lehr cover of The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt.

Lehr also did this cover of Solaris. They had a couple other books with Paul Lehr covers and they were all dope. As far as the novel goes, I love this story and most van Vogt in general. His stuff is pure superheroics. Similar in tone to Fletcher Hanks sometimes, at its most manic and exciting. Definitely obsessed with power and authority.

Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon, cover artist unknown.

I haven’t read any Sturgeon but Aldiss made him sound like a great author in his must-read history of sf, Trillion Year Spree.

Impossible Possibilities by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, translated from the German, cover artist unknown.

I really wish this was an sf novel. I’m not sure what it is – futurism? weird pseudoscience? I probably won’t end up reading it.

I also got some awesome comics:

• An old Epic Moebius graphic novel, containing the story Upon a Star that he did for Citroën, serialized online here. It’s one of my favorite Moebius stories.
• A volume of the Akira serialization that’s been colored by Steve Oliff. You owe it to yourself to click that link if you haven’t seen Oliff’s original color guides.
• The three volumes of 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino. I really dug this series. I like near future hard sf (although the science in these isn’t that thoroughly researched). I think it’s because it seems hopeful about our future but is still grounded in what we know. I like that kind of story because I also know it’s something I would never have the discipline to do the research for. I just don’t have the patience or attention to detail. I’d really like to read something that takes into account all the recent exoplanets we’ve been discovering. Anyway, I love how Hoshino used different tone sheets to create a lot of variation in his black and white drawings. I think I’m going to try that out.