The book I've been waiting 29 years for!
07/03/07 21:10 Filed in: Personal
The re-issue of a classic book, memories of a magical
Christmas eve and why we should never go back.
Today I got my hands on a book which I guess I’ve
been waiting most of my life for.
It’s a long-ish story, so set the way back machine for 1978...
I was 8 at the time and Christmas was coming up. As I am now, I was then heavily in to sci-fi. A friend of mine, which I have long since lost contact with, was also just as in to sci-fi as I was. He had all the best toys and one day he brought a large, very colourful book in to school, it was Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD. When I saw this book I just knew I had to have it. I begged my parents for it and low and behold on Christmas eve (we where always allowed to open one present to tide us over to Christmas day) I picked the biggest present and there it was in all it’s Technicolor glory.
That evening I couldn’t wait to get back from the Christmas eve service, to look at my new book. It was a magical Christmas eve that one, strangely I can’t remember to much about Christmas day it’s self!
The book was just fantastic, I didn’t really read it as such, it was just the pictures I loved.
The book did well (sold 800,000 copies world wide apparently), and next year another book in the series came out, Great Space Battles. I can remember how I got this one or the 2 others that followed SpaceWreck and Starliners, but I did get the whole series. The first book was with out a question the best, the other three worked with varying degrees of success. I know the books must have been special because even my dad, not one of the worlds great sci-fi fans liked them.
I still have the books to this and others which tried and failed to follow in there footsteps.
Now that I’m err...slightly older I appreciate the stories told in the books and the art work is still as good as ever. There are other fans out there on the web and it is Philip R Banks page that I visit from time to time.
So when I found this page on his site and found out about the re-issue of these classic books in an updated format, I hit amazon with a full loaded credit card with in seconds! Perhaps the old childhood magic would return!
2 days later the package arrived and I opened it and....
Well as you might be able to guess, I didn’t quite recapture the magic of that Christmas eve, but to be honest I didn’t really expect to.
My initial impressions where not good. The book was small and paper back and the CGI art, work, was well disappointing. There wasn’t a great deal of new ships in the book either. It was all a bit of a let down really.
The next day I started to read some of the text, there is a much bigger introduction to the events that take us from now to 2100 when the details of the ships start (26 pages of it) and yes actually it’s not bad. I like the extra background, despite the fact that it’s different to the details that I’d imagined in my own version of this universe inside my head. But one thing I’ve got to say is that the proof reading done on this book (if it was done at all) was not good. It really must be bad for me to notice, you’ve got the word was mixed up with the word war, several blocks of text repeated and even one case that looks like a first and final draft side by side in the text.
But I like the story they are telling, I also like the fact that there are facts missing, like the appearance of both the alphans and proximans. Clearly there are more details to be filed in the later books and the roleplaying game which is coming soon. I shall be visiting the publishers page regularly from now on!
So in review, initial impressions, not so good, but worth while? Yes.
I will probably never recapture that magical Christmas eve, but thats probably as should be. The past is a nice place to visit once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
It’s a long-ish story, so set the way back machine for 1978...
I was 8 at the time and Christmas was coming up. As I am now, I was then heavily in to sci-fi. A friend of mine, which I have long since lost contact with, was also just as in to sci-fi as I was. He had all the best toys and one day he brought a large, very colourful book in to school, it was Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD. When I saw this book I just knew I had to have it. I begged my parents for it and low and behold on Christmas eve (we where always allowed to open one present to tide us over to Christmas day) I picked the biggest present and there it was in all it’s Technicolor glory.
That evening I couldn’t wait to get back from the Christmas eve service, to look at my new book. It was a magical Christmas eve that one, strangely I can’t remember to much about Christmas day it’s self!
The book was just fantastic, I didn’t really read it as such, it was just the pictures I loved.
The book did well (sold 800,000 copies world wide apparently), and next year another book in the series came out, Great Space Battles. I can remember how I got this one or the 2 others that followed SpaceWreck and Starliners, but I did get the whole series. The first book was with out a question the best, the other three worked with varying degrees of success. I know the books must have been special because even my dad, not one of the worlds great sci-fi fans liked them.
I still have the books to this and others which tried and failed to follow in there footsteps.
Now that I’m err...slightly older I appreciate the stories told in the books and the art work is still as good as ever. There are other fans out there on the web and it is Philip R Banks page that I visit from time to time.
So when I found this page on his site and found out about the re-issue of these classic books in an updated format, I hit amazon with a full loaded credit card with in seconds! Perhaps the old childhood magic would return!
2 days later the package arrived and I opened it and....
Well as you might be able to guess, I didn’t quite recapture the magic of that Christmas eve, but to be honest I didn’t really expect to.
My initial impressions where not good. The book was small and paper back and the CGI art, work, was well disappointing. There wasn’t a great deal of new ships in the book either. It was all a bit of a let down really.
The next day I started to read some of the text, there is a much bigger introduction to the events that take us from now to 2100 when the details of the ships start (26 pages of it) and yes actually it’s not bad. I like the extra background, despite the fact that it’s different to the details that I’d imagined in my own version of this universe inside my head. But one thing I’ve got to say is that the proof reading done on this book (if it was done at all) was not good. It really must be bad for me to notice, you’ve got the word was mixed up with the word war, several blocks of text repeated and even one case that looks like a first and final draft side by side in the text.
But I like the story they are telling, I also like the fact that there are facts missing, like the appearance of both the alphans and proximans. Clearly there are more details to be filed in the later books and the roleplaying game which is coming soon. I shall be visiting the publishers page regularly from now on!
So in review, initial impressions, not so good, but worth while? Yes.
I will probably never recapture that magical Christmas eve, but thats probably as should be. The past is a nice place to visit once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
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