Cromie (Robert) A Plunge Into Space
£325
London & New York, Frederick Warne, 1890.
First UK edition. 8vo. Contemporary, presumed institutional, red cloth binding, gilt to spine.
The first edition of this significantly influential work of fin-de-siècle science fiction. The story follows a diverse group of idealistic explorers who travel to Mars in a steel sphere powered by an anti-gravity device. They discover a peaceful, co-operative utopia, promptly find it intolerably dull, and attempt to remake it along capitalist and imperial lines, with predictably disastrous results. The book later attracted controversy through a dubious claim of a foreword by Jules Verne and legal action by the author against H.G. Wells for alleged plagiarism. An important and unsettling anti-utopian work, ending in a fashion as extreme as anything in early science fiction.
In stock
Some light marking and soiling to some pages, mostly constrained to margins, Castwellan Library Society book-label to front pastedown, with handwritten reference to the same at head of front free endpaper, half-title, title-page and first page; cloth generally rubbed with some wear to corners and spine ends.
Related products
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Methuen, 1939.First UK edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, cheaper issue jacket correctly priced 4s.6d.A scarce edition of this the third title in Burroughs' 'Pellucidar' series, set in a hollow earth environment. Wonderful jacket artwork.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
First edition, first issue binding.
London. Charles Griffin & Co, [1909]
Early Sci-Fi with a fin de siècle perspective on interplanetary voyaging across the solar system. A companion volume to his The Stolen Planet novel. In Bleiler.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Harrap, 1937,
First edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Brunngraber was a German industrial designer and author. In Radium he speculates about near-contemporary cornering of the radium market causing problems in a hospital using it as a medicine cure cancer.
Rare in jacket. An important sci-fi title.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Gollancz, 1964.
First UK edition. Ex-library. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
The first UK edition of Simak's sci-fi classic, about a lonely immortal farmer who man & maintains a way station for aliens in Wisconsin, winner of the Hugo prize for that year.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.
First edition. 8vo. Original green boards lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket, priced 12s6d
A very nice first edition of this sinister sci-fi novel, by ex Merchant Seaman Frank Crisp.