SPACE PLAGUE (HIGHWAYS IN HIDING)

Avon paperback, 1957. Cover artwork by Richard M. Powers.

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET

Avon paperback, 1960. Cover by Art Sussman.

CHAINING THE LADY

Avon paperback, third printing, 1978. Cover illustration by
Ron Walotsky.

"Ten centuries after the War of Energy, Melody of Mintaka - daughter of Flint the Caveman - assumes the forms of alien and animal, male and female, to bring victory to the people of Cluster against the Andromedan spacefleet. But first she must endure untold humiliation... 

THE MISTRESS OF SPACE IS ENSLAVED!"

Reverse of wraparound cover of the 1978 Avon paperback.

After yesterday's Larry Niven salvo, today I thought I'd make a start on all the Piers Anthony paperbacks I have lying about. This one is my favourite, and with the cover especially so. I don't usually make a habit of scanning both front and back of wraparound covers but I really love the artwork here, by Chesley Award nominee Ron Walotsky - unfortunately, the front was a victim of the phantom permanent-marker-scribbler, so now everyone can see I paid 70p for it.

PAWN'S DREAM

Artwork by Eric Peterson.

"The Sleeper Awakes. 

A nightman at a 24-hour quick-stop, Roland Pritchard's life is an unending parade of tedium, loneliness and despair. His only escape is into the fertile landscape of his dreams - a magical realm of demons, war and miraculous adventure - where he imagines himself to be a postulant in an isolated monastery...who, in turn, dreams of a dark urban world of violence and machines. In his sleep, the simple grocery clerk is much more than he could ever be... 

But now something is happening that cannot be rationally explained. An extraordinary merging of nightmare and daydream is awakening Roland Pritchard to a wondrous, terrifying truth - that the two worlds and lives he inhabits are equally real...and equally deadly."

VOR

Avon paperback, fifth printing, April 1970. Cover by Don Crowley.

"FIRST CONTACT! 

The glowing ovoid plummeted earthward, the sky screaming like a metallic banshee as the air boiled away from its sides. 

A supersonic boom broke over the forest. The curious thing glided down; earth fountained away from it like water, and the forest burst into flame! 

Then a thin black line etched a circle on the side of the metal egg; the circle thickened into a door, or airlock; the air was rent by a searing, screaming hiss and suddenly - the strange being soon to be known to all mankind as 

VOR 

emerged...."

CITIES IN FLIGHT

First Avon printing, Feb 1970. Cover artist uncredited.

"The epic cyclic history of the future is now brought together in one volume. In the tetralogy, James Blish has structured an entire universe in which mankind is no longer bound to the Solar System, but has become both conqueror and victim of the stars."