Copyright © 2023 Rick and Ruth Coy

Books are the format that a lot of us were introduced to SF.  When I first started reading SF, there were not very many good movies - a lot of poorly filmed “B” movies and one or two really good ones (Forbidden Planet, Day the Earth Stood Still). Now I started SF with books in the library and then PB and used books. But a lot of the old timers when I was fist starting to get into SF got their start with the pulps. Pulps were a wonderful thing - a low cost magazine digest size that contained novels, short stories, serials, articles all on a genre you liked. (There were all kind of pulps)

Today we still have pulp SF magazines.  They still are a cheaper way to get some good stories. At one time this was the only way a new SF author could get published was in the plups (today we have E-books). Once they were established a lot of them had books published by Gnome Press. Gnome Press was sort of a vanity press, except they published the books and the author got nothing until the cost of publishing was covered.  Sometimes they would never see any money. So why did they keep using Gnome Press - exposure. These were hardback - would sell in book stores - library's would handle them… and they might get a chance with another publisher, one who would pay them advances and royalties. Now they did one other thing that could be looked on in two ways - they got the books copyrighted. This protected the book, but it also looked they were “stealing” the books. But form everything I’ve read, if the author asked for the copyright it was returned to them. And the fact that Gnome was run by fans - my personal though's is that it was them trying to help the authors.

Besides the Foundation trilogy, they did the hardback copies of the Conan books.

Today SF is considered a genre that can make money and the better SF writers can get major publishers print their work.  In fact many publisher have special SF imprints that do nothing but Sf/fantasy books.

Now we are going to review both single books and complete series. Most of the single books we have reviewed are part of a series or going to be.

Some authors such as Asimov and Heinlein have taken their entire works or at least most of them and made them all part of the same universe.  Asimov combined both his Foundation series and his Robot series into the same universe.