Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Well, then it sounds like you have some reading to do.
Amazon has a number of collections of the first five books of the series, which are the only ones worth reading. Unfortunately, the racy Frazetta covers are gone. I'm not sure these books warrant a leather-bound cover but when you consider the stories date to 1910, you get proto-Superman and proto-Star Wars mixed in with some fairly ham-fisted Victorian romance.
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Most science fiction that is that old doesn't interest me. Just as Carl Sagan couldn't enjoy
Star Trek (which, as he wrote, "thoughtful friends have told me I should view as allegory")--and my father, a Fire Chief, couldn't enjoy the 1970s TV show
Emergency! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency! (because it made too many factual errors, for the sake of the stories, than he could overlook and suspend disbelief for)--we know too much now (which the old science science fiction authors [and scientists themselves] didn't know back then) than I can suspend disbelief for, and:
Star Trek must drive chemists batty, because of the totally made-up *natural* elements (not artificial ones; there ^is^ a theoretical "island of stability" for very heavy ones), with names such as dilithium, calorinium ("which forms explosive mixtures with hydrogen"), invidium, etc., that are frequently mentioned in the episodes and films. (This even happens occasionally with more recent hard science fiction [hard SF, which holds scientific speculation and extrapolation to an absolute minimum, being based on known scientific laws and theories]; the storyline of Poul Anderson's 1970 novel "Tau Zero"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero --which first appeared in the form of a 1967 story titled "To Outlive Eternity"--depended on the "Big Crunch" following long, long after the Big Bang, which later cosmological research showed is not the case, making the story and novel obsolete.)