Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1977.
First UK edition, first impression. Signed by the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Menolly joins the Harper Hall on Pern as its first female apprentice, shunned by most of the girls and doubted by several masters, but excels and becomes the Masterharper's personal apprentice. The second of the Harper Hall trilogy, and the fourth Pern book. McCaffrey (1926–2011) was the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction and received the 1999 Margaret A. Edwards Award. Signed by the author.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Griffith & Farran, 1876.
'New Edition'. 8vo. Original green cloth decorated and lettered in black & gilt.
Verne's 1864 classic of subterranean exploration: Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and the guide Hans follow a coded note into Iceland's Snæfellsjökull volcano, meeting a vast underground sea and prehistoric creatures before being thrown out of Stromboli. The anonymous Griffith & Farran translation of 1871, in which the characters are renamed Hardwigg, Harry and Gretchen, was the first in English; this is the 1876 "New Edition", with Riou's engravings. Filmed by Fox in 1959, with James Mason.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Sampson Low, Marston & Company, n.d..
'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.
Verne's Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), a continuation of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The schooner Halbrane sails from the Kerguelen Islands to rescue the survivors of the Jane, among them Captain Len Guy's brother, and a mysterious sailor aboard proves to be Pym's companion Dirk Peters. Translated by Mrs Cashel Hoey (1898); this is a Sampson Low Cheap Edition. Verne (1828–1905) was a founding figure of science fiction.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
or, Strange Doings Underground...translated by W.H.G. Kingston
London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1877.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original green cloth lettered and decorated in gilt and black, gilt edges.
Verne's Les Indes noires (1877) in W. H. G. Kingston's English version, which is freely rendered rather than literal. Engineer James Starr revisits a supposedly exhausted Scottish coal mine and finds a rich new seam, a subterranean town on an underground loch, and an orphan girl, Nell, living in the caverns. This is the first English edition, October 1877.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883.
8vo. Original green cloth stamped in black and lettered in gilt.
Verne's celebrated voyage novel: Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land are captured by the enigmatic Captain Nemo and carried round the world's oceans aboard the submarine Nautilus. Verne (1828–1905) was a founding figure of science fiction.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Avalon, 1960.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
New York, Henry Holt, 1941.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.50.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, The Science Fiction Book Club, 1953.
8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Scribner's, 1904.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Gnome Press, 1950.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.50.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York & London, Putnam, 1926.First edition, first printing. 8vo. Publisher's cloth. Facsimile dust-jacket.Merritt's most famous works, an Arabian Nights type fable.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Reading, Penn., Fantasy Press, 1950.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $3.00.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Doubleday, 1992.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $20.00.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Doubleday, 1990.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $19.95.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Doubleday, 1987.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $17.95.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Bantam, 1987.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $17.95.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Gnome Press, 1952.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Science fiction short stories.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1961.
Film tie-in edition. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Featuring photo stills from the 1960 film adaptation Village of the Damned.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1968.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1958.
First edition, third impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel, described by Margaret Atwood as his "chef d'œuvre", while the dramatist Dan Rebellato described it as "a searching novel of moral ambiguities" dealing with rape, abortion, motherhood, and the struggle between men and women quite as much as with alien invasion.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Heinemann, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
The Prequel to The Day of the Triffids... Edited by David Ketterer and Andy Sawyer. Introduction by David Ketterer
Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009.
First edition thus. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A near-future thriller set in New York, where Nazis are plotting to create a race of conquering clones (SF Encyclopedia). Written around 1950, at the same time as The Day of the Triffids, it was rejected by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1951 Wyndham told his American agent Frederik Pohl that he had "messed about with the thing so much that I've lost all perspective", and he abandoned it.
Reviews were mixed. M. John Harrison found it "almost unreadable"; Leo Mellor in The Independent conceded it was not "an extraordinary lost masterpiece" but found it "fascinating"; and Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph praised the way it anticipates Wyndham's later themes.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
and other stories
London, Michael Joseph, 1975.
First hardback edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Twelve stories written between 1932 and 1960, ranging from Wyndham's early work for the American pulp magazines, under his earlier pen-names, to the postwar stories written as "John Wyndham". In the title story, as the jacket describes it, the great attraction on the planet Venus is an exhibition of creatures found preserved in the Valley of Dur, among them a man from Earth. Stranded on Venus through the treachery of his fellow men, he warns the Venusians to avoid all contact with an Earth ruled by two ruthless mineral companies. The collection was first published posthumously as a Sphere paperback, The Best of John Wyndham (1973)
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
A Tissue of Moonshine London, Methuen, 1902.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original red cloth lettered in gilt.A fantasy romance. In 1899 a mermaid comes ashore on the south coast of England, takes the name "Miss Doris Thalassia Waters", and is received into a respectable family at Folkestone. Her purpose is Harry Chatteris, a rising politician she first encountered years before in the South Seas off Tonga. The novel mixes fantasy and romance with light social satire; Wells said it expressed his "craving for some lovelier experience than life had yet given me". John Clute has called it "the most complex thing Wells ever wrote". It was serialised in Pearson's Magazine (July–December 1901) before book publication by Methuen in 1902. The American edition (Appleton) followed in September 1902.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel, described by Margaret Atwood as his "chef d'œuvre", while the dramatist Dan Rebellato described it as "a searching novel of moral ambiguities" dealing with rape, abortion, motherhood, and the struggle between men and women quite as much as with alien invasion.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Macdonald, 1968.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A collection of Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories; the title tale won the 1967 Hugo Award. This Macdonald printing is the first UK and first hardcover edition, the American original having appeared as a paperback.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A Russian scientist invents a serum conferring immortality on selected recipients, and a young couple are left to decide whether it should be used; the protagonist's advocacy of the drug is brought to an end when the Wandering Jew appears and describes the cost of being unable to die. Harold E. Scarborough (1897–1935) was an American journalist and author resident in Britain from 1920, and this is the title for which he is remembered in science fiction. The book belongs to a distinct and long-running line of argument within the genre - that immortality would produce social sterility - running from Walter Besant's The Inner House (1888) through Martin Swayne's The Blue Germ (1918) and forward to Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939), and the Wandering Jew device places it equally in the Gothic tradition of Godwin's St Leon, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Mary Shelley's The Mortal Immortal. Noticed by Bleiler in Science-Fiction: The Early Years and Locke's A Spectrum of Fantasy. Published simultaneously in New York by D. Appleton.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Jonathan Cape, 1967.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Nine of Ballard's short stories, drawn largely from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including 'The Concentration City,' 'Manhole 69' and 'Mr F. is Mr F.,' pieces generally regarded as key examples of his early psychological science fiction. The collection's story 'Minus One' was later adapted by documentary filmmaker Simon Brook as a short film.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Grant Richards, 1909.
'New and Cheaper Edition'. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to upper cover.
One of the author's posthumously published novels, relating the rivalry between two amateur astronomers in small-town American town who attempt to claim a surprisingly valuable comet.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Seattle, Darkside Press, 2003.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A retrospective gathering of short fiction by John Wyndham, the first in a planned series of Darkside Press "readers" devoted to his shorter work, edited and introduced by John Pelan with story notes by Philip Stephensen-Payne. The 16 stories and novelettes span Wyndham's career from the 1930s to the '60s.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Garden City, Doubleday & Company, 1969.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $4.50.
The first edition of this novel set in a future 1992 where psychics are common and utilised in corporate espionage while intricate technologies allow recently deceased people to be maintained in a lengthy state of hibernation.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Chatto & Windus, 1932.
A pillar of the 20th century's dystopian architecture: Huxley acknowledged the book began as a parody of Wells's optimistic utopias, Men Like Gods specifically, before the joke deepened into the World State entire: Bokanovsky-processed embryos decanted by caste, soma, the feelies, Our Ford, and happiness administered until nothing human survives it.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Macmillan, 1906.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth, lettered in gilt.
The gentlest apocalypse Wells ever arranged: a comet grazes the Earth, its green vapours dissolve into the atmosphere, and humanity wakes from "the Change" cured of jealousy, war fever, class hatred and the whole armature of pre-comet spite, narrated by a Midlands clerk who went into the Change murderous with sexual jealousy and came out of it sane.
The scandal was immediate and entirely deliberate: the transformed world's relaxed arrangements in love were read as an endorsement of free love, the Times Literary Supplement huffed, and Wells, then conducting his Fabian campaigns and his private life on similar principles, declined to reassure anybody.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London & New York, Harper & Brothers, 1899.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Graham falls into a trance in the 1890s and wakes two centuries on to find compound interest has done its patient work - he owns half the world, held in trust by a Council ruling a London of vast enclosed cities, moving ways, aeroplanes and a drugged, screen-fed proletariat. It is Wells pivoting from romance to dystopia, and the twentieth century took notes: the mega-city of Metropolis, and the administered futures of Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell, all trace their plumbing here. Wells himself was dissatisfied enough to revise it in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
and particularly how Mr. Bert Smallways fared while it lasted
London, George Bell & Sons, 1908.
First edition. 8vo. First state blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine and upper cover.
Five years after Kitty Hawk, when powered flight could barely lift a man over a hedge, Wells wrote the book in which German airship fleets cross the Atlantic and bomb New York into ruin, air power dissolves the distinction between front and home, and civilisation, its trade and credit systems severed from above, simply stops. With A.C. Michael's plates, in the first state binding, an honest and attractive copy of the foundation stone of the aerial-warfare shelf.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1953.
'Cheap Edition'. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 6/-.
The phenomenon in its second wave: two years after publication, Joseph's 6/- cheap edition arrives to meet a demand the first printing plainly hadn't exhausted, with Penguin waiting in the wings - the bibliographical fossil record of a novel becoming a fixture.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Gollancz, 1987.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A surprisingly rare edition of this Asimov collection, which includes one previously unpublished, new story.
"Presented in this volume are several previously uncollected stories, alongside a selection of vintage Isaac Asimov: such tales as 'Little Lost Robot', one of the best of his famous robot series; 'The Feeling of Power', in which Asimov anticipates by over twenty years the development of pocket computers; 'The Ugly Little Boy', a time travel story which may be the most moving tale he has ever written; and 'The Last Question', which Asimov himself chooses as his best story." (jacket blurb)
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1960.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original dark grey boards. Dust-jacket.
The last of the novels published in Wyndham's lifetime under the famous name at full stride, and the one whose reputation has travelled furthest: a lichen extract, the "antigerone," is found to slow human ageing - and the two discoverers split on what to do with two or three centuries of life. A thriller plot wearing a genuinely radical argument about gerontocracy, cosmetics and female emancipation; sixty years on it gets cited in bioethics discussions more than anything else he wrote. Very good in equally good Hugh Marshall wrapper.
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Beynon (John, pseud. John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, aka John Wyndham) Planet Plane
London, Newnes, [1936].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
Wyndham's third book and second science fiction novel. Written as John Beynon, it was serialised the same year in The Passing Show as Stowaway to Mars, abridged again in 1937 in Modern Wonder as The Space Machine, cut differently for a 1953 paperback, and finally restored in 1972 as Stowaway to Mars "by John Wyndham".
The plot: it is 1981, a million-pound prize awaits the first interplanetary flight, and a British millionaire launches the rocket Gloria Mundi from Salisbury Plain, bound for Mars. Once clear of the atmosphere the crew discover a stowaway, a woman, Joan Shirning, to their considerable period-typical consternation, carrying a strange tale of a machine of Martian origin. On Mars itself the book turns unexpectedly thoughtful: a dying race, and the machines destined to outlast it, a theme Wyndham was rehearsing fifteen years before anyone was paying attention. He revisited the story in the novella Sleepers of Mars (1938).
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
London, Michael Joseph, 1961.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The mature Wyndham in short form, led by the novella that first appeared sandwiched between Golding and Peake in Sometime, Never (1956) and here gives its name to the collection: a woman wakes in a future without men, the male half of the species eliminated by an escaped virus; her amnesia making her the reader's guide to a society of castes and functions that works perfectly well, which is precisely the problem...
![Alternative view of Wyndham (John) Re-Birth [The Chrysalids]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88377_2-300x300.jpg)
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Ballantine Books, 1955.
First US edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The Ballantine Re-Birth actually precedes the Michael Joseph Chrysalids, making this less-lovely-titled US version the true first edition of the book many critics, and Wyndham's own editor at New Worlds, who thought it far superior to Triffids, regard as his masterpiece. Post-nuclear Labrador; a fundamentalist farming society whose scripture commands "Watch Thou for the Mutant"; crops burned and deviant babies cast out; and young David Strorm, who recites the creeds while concealing that he and a handful of children can speak mind to mind. It is the least typical of the major novels and the most perfectly made. A set text in British and Canadian schools for generations, and with the odd distinction of a rock afterlife: Jefferson Airplane's 'Crown of Creation' draws its lyrics directly from the novel's dialogue.
The texts differ, the American edition trimmed of some of the philosophical passages, so the completist perhaps needs both...but the priority belongs here, and Ballantine's mid-fifties hardcovers were tiny printings inside a paperback operation, making them far scarcer than their renown.
London, Newnes, 1938-39.
3 issues (complete). Large 8vo. Original pictorial stapled wrappers.
Published by George Newnes Ltd, which paid respectable rates and obtained good-quality material, these three issues comprise a complete run of the magazine Fantasy, edited by T Stanhope Sprigg. The short-lived periodical included stories by significant authors such as John Wyndham, Eric Frank Russell and John Russell Fearn. John Beynon was one of the pseudonyms used by John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–1969), the British science fiction writer best known for The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos.