Sean Wallace & Philip Harbottle - The Tall Adventurer

[andydecker]

Sean Wallace & Philip Harbottle - The Tall Adventurer : The Works of E. C. Tubb (An annotated guide to every book & short story (Beccon Publications, 1998, 199 pages)

I don't like hyperbole, but this must be one of the best guides ever produced about a genre writer. E. C. Tubb (1919-2010) - for those who don't know him - was one of those great British SF writers who wrote mostly adventure tales. His biggest success was the Dumarest series, a space opera of 33 short novels. Earl Dumarest, a traveler and fighter, is searching for the planet Earth, which has been forgotten among the countless colonized worlds after the Galactic Empire (supposedly) broke down. The series started at American Ace Books in 1967, then went to DAW Books where it became very successful. So the story was stretched and the series was ironically terminated before the already written last novel could be published. Years later it was finally published in the small press.

Tubb's kind of story and style became outdated, when SF became "relevant" in the mid-70s and he often was dismissed as a hack. But he was much more than that.

Wallace's and Harbottle's book has a detailled introduction to the writer, a very good interview with Tubb and then a complete listing of everything Tubb has published, from his first sale in 1950 to his at the time pseudonymous westerns for John Spencer. Foreign editions are listed and every entry comes with a short synopsis and commentary. It is clearly a labour of love, but is not uncritical.

I don't remember where I got my copy, must have been at Zardoz Books. It is signed by Mr Harbottle and Mr Tubb. I am the lucky owner of another signed copy by E. C. Tubb, courtesy of writer Jim Mortimore, who was doing Dr. Who novelizations back then and with whom I had a pleasant contact at the time. He met Tubb at a signing and sent me a copy of an later Dumarest as he knew I was a fan. I still owe him one.

[dem bones]

Philip Harbottle's history of British post-war Science Fiction publishing, Vultures of the Void is another marvellous piece of work and an engrossing read into the bargain. He edited the two Best of Syd Bounds volumes, too, which can't have been easy, whittling all his short fiction down to less than thirty stories!