Books

Some of the sci-fi books I read during my childhood had this great endpaper…

The Peripheral, William Gibson, 2015. ISBN 0670921556.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, 2000, ISBN 978-0-316-46244-0, Orbit Books print edition 2020.

Across the Space Frontier, Joseph Kaplan, Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Willey Ley, Oscar Schatchter, Fred Whipple, edited by Cornelius Ryan, Viking Press, 1952.

In a sense, this book is part of a prose exposition, and elaboration of von Braun’s The Mars Project, the technical appendix of Project Mars,

I have a copy from the second printing, June 1953

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.

Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.

The Problem of Space Travel, by Hermann Noordung, is a good book.

Circa 1970, I read a large number of grade school reading books. One of them had a story in it about a boy who performed various athletic feats. The passage I remember from this book was the boy’s manager saying that his diet was rich in iron, and the boy was getting a part-time job as an anchor.

I recently read this book because I vaguely recalled reading it as a youngster. For the first third of the book, my recollection seemed correct, but then the book diverged from what I remembered. Maybe I didn’t read it back in the late 60s after all.

A 200 page action story from leftist Heinlein Cory Doctorow.