Trade Paperback
ISBN 1-58715-326-2
$15.00 US / $20.00 CAN / £12.00 UK
THE MAN WHO STOPPED THE DUST
and other stories
EIGHT CLASSIC STORIES FROM SCIENCE FICTION'S FIRST FLOWERING IN THE 1930'S GOLDEN AGE OF PULP MAGAZINES, SELECTED FROM AMAZING STORIES, ASTOUNDING STORIES, SCIENCE FICTION, THRILLING WONDER STORIES AND WEIRD TALES!
This book is your personal time and space
machine, that
will transport you from the beginning of
creation to the end
of the universe, as narrated in this first-ever
collection of
early short stories by pulp legend JOHN RUSSELL
FEARN.
They range from the universe-busting "thought
variant" to
the very human story, and will surprise and
delight all science
fiction connoisseurs!
SCIENCE FICTION PIONEER
"If John Russell Fearn had been alive today, I am sure that he would be
delighted with this epitaph and probably just as bewildered and surprised...
I don't think that he ever realized how much of a pioneer of science fiction
he was: he wrote it because he liked the medium. I don't think he could
ever be called a 'great' writer of SF, from the literary standpoint, but
he was one of the Greats of the earlier ages, and his name should be there
with Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Murray Leinster,
and all the others whose thoughts and works formulated today's modern
science fiction."
- John Carnell, founding editor, New Worlds.
"This essential, gap-filling
collection...has been assembled with intelligence and devotion by editor
Philip Harbottle, who provides two introductory essays which are both
historically informative and critically acute...Falling under the guiding
hand of editor F. Orlin Tremaine, who demanded that his writers produce
"thought variants ... stories containing new and unexplored ideas,"
Fearn built each of his tales around some mind-boggling concept. Amazingly,
many of these nuggets foreshadow work seen as cutting-edge in the 21st
century. The "Mathematica" stories, with their insistence that
the basis of the universe is equational, could be pure Greg Egan. And
in "The Devouring Tide," when we meet aliens who are described
as "crystallized thought," we invariably think of Rudy Rucker's
recent Realware (2000). "Brief Gods" explores the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle quite well. Fearn's reach may have exceeded his
grasp, but what else is SF for? Also, in a quiet, restrained piece like
"Black Saturday," with its emotional depiction of two people
trapped by a global blindness, Fearn approached his compatriot John Wyndham
in subtleness." [full
review]
- Paul DiFilippo, SF Weekly