There are any number of good reasons for joining The Science Fiction Book Club. You get access to all kinds of cool books for very reasonable prices, they do their own nifty omnibuses and hardcover first editions, and they even do anthologies by people like me. However, this morning I heard one of the best reasons to join up yet.
Last year the good folk at Centipede Press produced an enormous retrospective of the best short fiction of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, Two-Handed Engine: Selected Stories. It was a great book, beautifully produced, finely crafted and full of top-notch stories. The only drawbacks were that the book was a little pricey and that the edition was fairly small. Well, apparently the SFBC has just reached an agreement to reprint Two-Handed Engine in a nicely affordable edition this May. If you can’t think of any other reason to join up, this is it. The book is wonderful, and this is probably the most accessible edition likely to be published for some time. Oh, and if you like beautiful books, check out the Centipede site because they still might have a copy or two of the first edition left.
PS: To follow on from something in the comments, if you’re not in the U.S. you can’t join the SFBC. You can, however, usually find SFBC editions of books on amazon.com with little difficulty.
It’s worth noting, though, that you can only join the Science Fiction Book Club if you live in America! (Or, I suppose, have someone whose US address you can use…)
This is a real bummer. Gardner Dozois’ anthology ONE MILLION A.D., which came out late last year, has exclusive stories from Al Reynolds, Charlie Stross, Robert Reed, and more, including… Greg Egan! And is only available to USAsians at the moment (OK, I just noticed there’s a Canadian SFBC).
Fortunately Gordon van Gelder @ F&SF kindly offered a whole lot of people outside the US to get copies for them and post them out, so I am fortunate to have a copy.
But I gotta say, I would join the SFBC, I really would! If I could.
The other choice is to peruse Amazon.com. One Million A.D, which actually came out in January of this year, can be purchsed from amazon (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0739462733/qid=1139460749/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9719484-9939842?s=books&v=glance&n=283155). For nearly every SFBC book, you need only search Amazon, and someone is reselling it.
Thanks for that info, Jonathan! I must admit I just thought that it wouldn’t be available direct from Amazon – which it’s not – and thus it wasn’t worth looking for. In any case, I’ve got a copy via GvG, but for the next SFBC book I’m interested in, that looks like a great route to take!