Everything Old Is New Again (And Still Great)

Michael Moorcock is hotter than ever just now. Not only is DC Comics presenting a new Elric miniseries with artwork by Walt Simonson, another division of the Time Warner conglomerate--Warner Books' Aspect fantasy line--has revived his 1978 novel, Gloriana; Or, The Unfulfill'd Queen, with a new afterword in which the author places the controversial (in England) work in its historical and literary context and provides an alternate version of the chapter that caused much of the fuss. Meanwhile, Thunder's Mouth Press reprints the Moorcock-edited New Worlds anthology.

Two of the authors in that collection have had some of their luster restored by Overlook Press in its latest round of reissues of "lost" science fiction and fantasy classics. First off is Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, which caused a furor in Parliament upon publication in the late '60s; Spinrad tells the tale (and a couple others besides). Then there's The Complete Roderick, which puts John Sladek's two novels about Roderick the robot in a single volume, which should make Michael Dirda, who called Sladek "funnier than Vonnegut at his best," awfully happy. Heck, it makes me happy--I've been trying to find both books ever since I first heard about them as a teenage SF fan, when they were discussed in the sort of reverential tones Quentin Tarantino uses for Wong Kar-Wai films.

Finally, James Gunn wrote five short stories about a seemingly ordinary man with incredible longevity in the late 1950s, stories which became the basis for The Immortal, first published in 1962. Gunn explains some of his motivation for taking this approach:

What you call "the Golden Age tradition" of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946. Classic SF existed in the magazines, as short stories, novelettes, short novels, and serials. The first materials reprinted by the fan publishers after World War II were the serials, then collections of short stories, and finally series of stories placed within the same framework, cobbled together as novels, like Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon, van Vogt's The Voyage Of The Space Beagle, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and Simak's City: classic stories given new life. A.E. van Vogt gave such work the unfortunate name of "fix-ups," which makes it seem as if these were like old houses repaired. But it's always been my belief that science fiction is at its best in the shorter forms--although there are some great SF novels, there are far more great SF novelettes, which embody the substance of a novel without taking on its burden to solve the problem it lays out.

The book's long been regarded as Gunn's classic, and now it's been reissued with a new section, "Elixir," which shifts the focus from the immortal to the doctor struggling to cope with the ramifications of his discovery. (Gunn's foreword also clues me in to the fact that he lives in Lawrence, Kansas, which of course makes me wonder if he ever ran into Burroughs...)