Oct 18 2008
City at World’s End - a rediscovered treasure
This is one of my Books without ISBNs. When I was a kid, and just starting to read science fiction, I had a book about a nuclear explosion that sent a small American town far into the future, about a million years, to a time when the earth was arid and lifeless, and the sun was dying.
I loved the story but somehow, through the years as I purged books (stupid girl, stupid girl!), that book vanished from my bookcases. And then one day I realized that I really missed the book, and wanted to find it again.
Years and years followed, in which I constantly asked science fiction fans, “Did you ever read a story about…?” When I met fans who seemed to know a lot about the older science fiction - people I met at SF&F conventions, people I worked with on the planning committee when I helped run one of the conventions myself, people who owned second hand bookstores with lots of older SF in them - I literally asked all of them, “Do you remember a story about…?”
But no one ever seemed to have heard of it. I got very discouraged, because I had really, really liked the book, and I so wanted to find it again! For all I knew, the story wouldn’t seem nearly as good to me as an adult, as it had when I was a kid, but it was going to haunt me until I finally read it again.
And then an online friend, when I asked my usual question, said, “You know, that sounds a lot like City at World’s End by Edmond Hamilton.” And that was the title - I was sure of it! So when he found a copy of the book (I don’t know how he finds these things), he sent it to me in a box of books.
I pulled the novel out of the box, took one look at the cover - and I was in heaven! All I had remembered was that the cover was orange. But now I recognized it instantly. That stark, orange landscape, that distant line of people walking toward the last, domed, abandoned city on the planet - this was the book! After all my hunting, my friend had found it for me. (Boy, do I owe him!)
I almost cried, I was so happy! And I read the book straight through, that night.
And it was as good as I remembered. Granted, since it was written in 1951, a lot of things were dated. And given the way women were regarded in society at the time, one could just manage to grit one’s teeth at how most of them were portrayed in the story (dependent little things who couldn’t — didn’t want to — grasp the intricacies of science, but who relied on Their Men to take care of everything, valiantly).
But what I had loved most about the story, way back as a kid, was how people in the town reacted psychologically to the loss of the earth they’d known, and the challenge of finding a way to survive on the dead earth that now existed. I had vaguely remembered that Kenniston, the main character, the scientist who figured everything out, stood up against a distant galactic council that had decreed that these Old Earthlings were going to be moved to a distant planet, with or without their agreement. I remembered that part of the attraction of the story was that these people from the town were not going to let themselves be pushed around, and were going to exercise their right to choose, because that’s what humanity was all about. And they reminded the humanity of a million years in the future what their heritage was.
It was all there. Everything I remembered. (And now I know, of course, that just a few years after this book was published, the same human pride and strength shone through the Star Trek series that enthralled so many people. That was a major theme in so much of the early science fiction.)
So that’s one of my treasures now. It didn’t need some kind of standardized number stuck to it, so the marketing dudes in some big corporation could assess its “revenue potential,” calculator in hand. Who needs that?? This was a story that sold because people loved the ideas in the book, and the way Edmond Hamilton portrayed them.
I’ve now acquired quite a few Edmond Hamilton books since my friend Tim sent me this one, a year or so ago. Most of those don’t have ISBNs either. But they’re all treasures.
Oh man, that sounds like a really good book! One I’d like to read too. Keep asking around, because you really never know. You may run into the one person who does remember, like I did, and once you’ve got a title you may find it.
I wonder if you could email someone at the Science Fiction Writers of America and if they could find it.
I’ve got another book that I’m still hunting for, that no one ever seems to have heard of, so I empathize.
Oh, and Editrix - I could maybe loan you my copy. (Emphasis on “loan”, heehee!) Or it wouldn’t surprise me if Tim could find you another copy, as he found mine.
I had a book like that. A series of books, actually.
In my childhood, during the ’40’s, I had an accident which affected my vision. Because of this I had an eye removed and spent a month in the hospital with my remaining eye covered to restrict movement. My folks bought some books to read to me during this time of forced blindness.
Thornton W. Burgess, a prolific children’s author, wrote a series of books during the first twenty years of last century in the theme of the daily lives of various woodland animals. They took me mentally away from the hospital bed and into the world of make believe and the intricacies of the forests and meadows of my mind.
I recall titles such as ‘The Adventures of Bobby Coon . . .Bobby White . . . Chatterer the Red Squirrel . . . Danny Meadow Mouse . . . Grandfather Frog . . . Jerry Muskrat . . . Jimmy Skunk . . . Johnny Chuck . . . well, you get the idea.
There were 20 books in the series, and I had them all given to me over the course of the next two or three years. I read them over and over, even, occasionally into my teens. They were a treasure of my formative years.
I don’t know what happened to them in the end. I suspect they were passed on to some other young person, or given to the small town library where we lived.
I don’t particularly miss them, but sometimes the memory of them is momentarily in forefront of my thoughts.
CKE, that Venus novel sounds awfully familiar, but I can’t quite place the title or author. For some reason I’m thinking of either Eric Frank Russell or Henry Kuttner, but further research is required.
CKE and Tim, It’s Erik Frank Russell, and the title is ‘Sentinels from Space’.
I searched ‘insectivocals’ …
Yes, that’s it! And I’m positive I’ve got a copy on my shelves, too. Back in the 1970s, Ballantine/Del Rey reprinted most of Russell’s work in uniform mass market paperbacks, and I got ‘em all. Have to check when I get home from work!
You can’t beat Eric Frank Russell. My folks used to use the term, “Mersh, faplap!” to get us kids to move when we were standing in the way, and it never quite registered, until I was in my late teens anyway, that this was not a “normal” phrase to use. My dad said it came from some science fiction book he’d read about the time I was born, but he couldn’t remember the title or author. Some years later, I was standing in a used bookstore with a whole bunch of S/F geek friends, and it occurred to me to ask if anyone there knew where the phrase came from - and not only did someone know (Russell’s “Wasp”), but there was a copy of it right there in that store! Wonderful story! And to this day, I tell people to “Mersh”. (They always get it from context, even if they give me a weird look after they finish mershing.)