Bloody NEL: Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock (1975)

Once again, I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks, so whilst I’m gallivanting, I’ll leave you in the company of some recent additions to my paperback mountain, beginning with a few from the ever-pungent exploitation vats of New English Library.

Even before the late ‘70s saw paperback racks suddenly overflowing with sharks, crocs, rats, bears and crabs (more of which in a few days), monsters already seem to have often taken pride of place on NEL’s SF covers (see To Outrun Doomsday, for example), and, in their own weird sort of way, these delightful bat-headed spider things feel as iconic as anything in the realm of ‘70s British paperbacks. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a name to attach to the cover art anywhere online, but as ever, info or speculation is welcomed in the comments.)

Likewise, I’ve always had a real soft spot for Michael Moorcock’s early straight science fiction novels, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to this one – originally published in ’68 as ‘Blades of Mars’ - or it’s predecessor ‘City of the Beast’.

Basically these books are an unabashed homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus stories (lest we forget, Moorcock began his literary career, aged 17, as the editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’), and verily, they are red-blooded stuff, full of grand sentences, with many commas, ending in proud exclamation points!

(Perhaps the fact that NEL also reprinted the Burroughs books in the ‘70s had something to do with their decision to acquire these particular Moorcock works? Who knows..)

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that Moorcock was knocking out this delightfully old school stuff at the same time that he was championing the most far out voices of SF’s experimental / psychedelic new wave as the editor of New Worlds. But then, that goes straight to the heart of what makes him such a unique and vital figure in the field of popular culture really, doesn’t it? At any given point in his career, he has contained multiples, and his determined refusal to acknowledge a dividing line between high and low culture, between intellect and entertainment, between reality and fantasy, should stand as an inspiration to us all.

Martian Chronicles (and Bonus Tarzan).

Ok, so first off, I’d like to both offer a quick apology to regular readers for letting my informal once-a-week posting schedule slip a little, and to alert you to the fact that such slippages might be liable to occur more frequently in the near future.

I prefer to avoid talking about my personal circumstances on the internet, but let’s just say that life events have conspired this month to kick the idea of maintaining a regular weblog into what I believe is known as ‘the long grass’. Thankfully I had a few previously scheduled posts lined up to take the slack, but those are now exhausted, so we’ll see how things go, but nonetheless, I hope to get some new stuff up here soon.

To give you something nice to look at in the meantime though, here are some recent acquisitions to my seemingly ever-growing collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. I confess, I’ve never so much as read a word of Burroughs, but he sure was a gift to cover artists, and as long as these New English Library editions keep jumping off charity shop shelves at me, priced at mere pennies, it’s difficult to say no.

In fact, so widely scattered and cheaply marked up are E.R.B’s works (second only to Moorcock in their awesome-science-fantasy ubiquity), it’s probably only a matter of time before I start forgetting which ones I’ve got already and buying doubles. Maybe we habitual second-hand bookshop fiends should get together and start swapping them like trading cards? Stock up comrades, you never know when you’re going to need to trade a few commoners for a super-rare to complete your John Carter collection. First one with a complete set of the NEL editions wins the admiration of all.

The NEL editions above are all 1972-74, and the Four Square is 1965. All artwork is unaccredited.