In which I bore you about the most infuriatingly difficult series I've ever tried collecting.
There will be nine images in this, but I have discovered that Microsoft Picture Manager has a helpful button which turns my 'xMB' into 'xkb', with which I am now in love and promise to spam you more with more pictures. Pictures of boring stuff though. Pictures of exciting stuff gets used as Christmas presents for the kind of family members who like it more when I make stuff than when I buy stuff for them.
ANYWAY:
There is a wonderful little series by a man called Walter Hughes, who died in 1993 (actually, there are two series and a standalone book, but I'm only going to be talking about the UNEXA series here because I've yet to get my mitts on the other books). His pen name was Hugh Walters, because he was a community bigwig and thought to himself 'drat, nobody really takes sci-fi seriously, I'd better have a different name for my work'. This is perhaps a little bit like somebody writing 'Nosiop' on a bottle and assuming that nobody will be able to work out what's in it.
One day, when he was asked to give a lecture at a science fiction group (after giving a lecture on space and astronomy at another place, proving that he actually knew his science stuff), he went off and read lots and lots of science fiction.
And Mr. Hughes was not impressed.
Granted, this was the time when lots and lots of scifi was being churned out, but most of it wasn't terribly accurate stuff. It was, to the average member of the public, pulp fiction, penny dreadful, but IN SPACE!. Which does go some way to explaining why he decided a pen name was the way to go for his novels.
These books are great. There's character development, and the characters age. The initial main character, Chris Godfrey, is from England and starts off his Astronaut career aged 17, and continues to grow from that point. Then we get Serge Smyslov, who is Russian, and I'll admit my favourite of the group, in a later book. In the same book we meet Morrison 'Morrey' Kant, who is American. A further book brings us Tony Hale, the sick English kid who goes to the Moon to be dosed with a different radiation for a cure to his illness, who then becomes a more permanent astronaut.
For one brief book, we're joined by Pierre Isnard, a biologist from France.
Then there are Gill and Gail, a pair of female telepathic twins who join the team in Mission to Mercury and Spaceship to Saturn (gosh, don't you just love those titles?!) but surprisingly not Nearly Neptune, First Contact? (a title chosen I think because of the difficulty in finding something alliterative to say about Uranus), nor Passage to Pluto, all of which you'd expect them to be involved with for the same reasons as they're in Mecury and Saturn. Possibly the books wouldn't have been as exciting with them in it to solve things.
Eventually, Chris Godfrey becomes less the astronaut and more the desk jockey, and the series becomes rather more Tony Hale -centric. Other characters age, retire, or get promoted. This is not a static series.
Note that Serge is Russian, and that Gill and Gail are both girls. There's some anti-Soviet bits in the earlier books, but it's all overcome with the power of friendship. According to this guy (just about the only decent website about Hugh Walters out there, & Wikipedia was only very recently updated) Gill and Gail prove their worth despite the sometimes sexist jokes.
Later books, such as Tony Hale, Space Detective, include Security Chief Ho Lung from China (who is thenceforth referred to as 'Mr. Ho', proving that Hughes really actually cared about getting things right - this book was published in 1973), and the 2IC of the Lunar Base in the same book is both French, and female. There's a little bit of mild racism (Ho is referred to as 'the only Chinese on the base', but it's 1973, after all, so at least it's not 'Chinaman'), and there's a little bit of fairly tame sexism (Vice-Commandant Danielle Larue is referred to as 'Mademoiselle' more than a few times, while her male boss is more usually 'Commander', and the characters actively comment on her being female & in charge, but apparently 10% of the base is female anyway. Serge, interestingly, just treats everybody exactly the same way. On the other hand, the book plays the 'standing up when a woman walks in' bit for laughs).
For comparison of the possibly more common prevailing attitudes of the time, other things from 1973:
(from http://dreamlandjunction.com/2010/05/25/gene-hunt/, which is a boring website but had a good picture of Gene in the image search)
The telepathy is one of the rare moments when the science drifts a little out of left field - that, and the aliens one sometimes gets in the books, and the blasters which wouldn't be viable tech for the time, or even for now (oh, and one bit where an astronaut goes to the moon while he's still got the flu. Yeah). But the important, big stuff? Is seriously accurate. He predicts inventions like Lunar Buggies (albeit designed more like a tank, with oxygen inside), and the Ion engine; explains how space food works; really knows his stuff about the craters of the moon (all this before Wikipedia to help!); and even includes Woomera as an appropriate place for rockets to launch, as at the time it was where the former Allied Forces tested rockets for military functions and for possible later space flight.
Fast forward to me aged 11. I've finally read one of the books my mother bought on one of her multiple booksale trips (this is how I typically managed to have any given book that the teacher would read to us at storytime. Usually in hardback, which got more interesting when the teacher deliberately got the most obscure books she could find - I still had them).
Expedition Venus
This is actually the second copy of this book I have. Sadly, both of them are the softcover editions, which slightly offends the hardback snob in me, but the hardback of this is a bit of a whatsits to get hold of. I found this copy in a second hand booksale last year for $2, as I missed my own copy and missed taking it around on adventures with me. When I go back to NZ, this will live in my Earthquake bag, as my Earthquake Book.
Expedition Venus usually shows up in my 'Con Bag' - the bag of things I take to conventions. Includes a deck of YGO cards, a sketchbook, a camera with spare SD card & battery (previously spare film), a phone, plenty of space for swag, and somewhere safe to put anything I have signed. Venus is what I take to read while standing in line. I've been complimented by organisers for my forethought about this sort of thing when I've been in line for something for over 1/2 an hour, and I live in eternal hope that somebody will notice what I'm reading and geek out about Hugh Walters with me.
And I loved it. It was thrilling. And there were MORE IN THE SERIES.
Fortunately, I subsequently discovered that the book I'd read had one of its sequels also buried in my bookshelf. I discovered this quite by accident, as I happened to have this one in Hardback, so it was on an entirely different shelf. This fact has made shelving these books a little bit of a conundrum, as for various reasons I like my books to be of similar height when I shelve them (the other great offender in my typical bookcase, obviously not the one I have here, but in general, is my Star Wars collection, which I insist on being Chronological; the Star Trek is too much of a total whatsits to organise, so is allowed to be rather more higgledy piggledy).
Destination Mars
Again, the second copy of this book, found in a booksale this year for $6, as I missed my other copy far too much. My original copy lives in storage in New Zealand, along with my Expedition Venus. This copy, however, I'm fortunate enough to own the far prettier Leslie Wood cover, in storage:
(from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gaudeamus/walters/06mars/index.html)
As it turned out, my mother had had ulterior motives for buying these books for me as a youngster.
She really wanted them for herself. Because as a kid, she'd read them all. My mother had been a bit of a Space Nut. Possibly not helped by the boy-who-lived-downstairs-whose-Dad-worked-for-NASA. Around the time of the Moon Landings. Think 'brings in real NASA models of Apollo 11 for Show&Tell', just before it's due to launch. That sort of kid.
So this is part of how I know that once upon a time, the local library had copies of every single one of these hard-to-get-now books. Because mother would go to the library and pester them until they gave in and bought it, then she'd disappear off to read it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said now (although my research has found that one of the local universities still has a copy of the first book in the series, Blast Off From Woomera, in its collection).
So, last year, I started researching them. I thought ooh, maybe 5 books or so. I thought I was pretty well into the series.
I was wrong.
Mr. Hughes had written 21 books in the Chris Godfrey/UNEXA series (of which 20 were published), three books in another series (the Boy Astronaut series), and one standalone book (called P-K). Because that's what you do when you're awesome like that.
Which left me with 18 left to collect in the Chris Godfrey/UNEXA series. Which isn't actually very good. Because (warning: Large number of images):
eBay:
But that's certainly not all of the books. Even including this next one it's not all the books, but it is what's currently up on eBay (they weren't there a few weeks ago, when I got a copy of Passage to Pluto for a little over $10; I'll talk more on that later.
Those of you not clicking the images, there's a copy of Nearly Neptune going for $325.55, and a slightly-worse-off copy of my little Expedition Venus paperback is going for $82.65. Also, the American edition of Nearly Neptune (Neptune One Is Missing) is going for $79.95.
Those are just the highlights.
Oh yes. The American editions often have alternate names. So Blast Off From Woomera becomes Blast Off at 0300, for example. And there are other, less obvious title changes. Which doesn't help either. There are even changes between the editions of the books - Nearly Neptune is apparently missing several pieces, The Domes of Pico is missing an entire chapter (plus other various changes to the storyline), and of course there are the various different spellings between editions.
Fortunately, last year I was able to get hold of another book in the series at a booksale, at the same time as I picked up my new copy of Expedition Venus.
Terror by Satellite
I have to admit that I haven't read this one yet. But I'll probably read it tonight. I'm expecting it to be both claustrophobic and scientifically accurate. Because Mr. Hughes does that atmosphere bit SO WELL (there's a reason I decided I desperately needed another copy of Venus, and that's because it's brilliant, and at $2 I certainly wasn't going to turn it down - especially now I've seen the eBay price up there!).
This book I also managed to get for $2. I do know that it's a little different from the usual book in this half of the series, as the adventurer is not Chris Godfrey, but instead Tony Hale, the youngest member of the eventual 'crew'.
Now, we're going to look for now is the 'Holy Grail' of this series; Tony Hale, Space Detective.
AbeBooks:
So that's anywhere between $149-249.11, plus shipping, for this first-edition-only book (or $108 plus shipping for the Uncorrected Proof copy up the top). Not too bad compared to Nearly Neptune up there...
Amazon:
For those of you not clicking on the images: Prices for Tony Hale go all the way up to $700 on Amazon.
That's $700 for a good old mystery set in space. And it is a good mystery, I'll grant it that much. I didn't spot the ending. And I like reading mysteries.
How did I manage to get this one?
Another booksale, of course!
Tony Hale, Space Detective
Here's the cover, and it truly is not very good, especially in comparison to the previous books Leslie Wood covers. But there's only one edition, so it's not like I can be picky or anything.
And here's the price I paid for it. I think I did pretty damn well here. I actually let out a shriek when I found it. I got it at a booksale this year. It was great.
For those who aren't clicking the images/can't see the price (it is pretty small), that's $7 I paid for it. TAKE THAT, INTERNET!
Since then, I've also bought a copy of Passage to Pluto from eBay for I think about $11 or so. I was willing to pay that price, even though it didn't come with an image for the cover, as the ISBN information was otherwise correct. On the other hand, I don't know which cover or edition I'll be getting.
Passage to Pluto
I hope it looks like this. (from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gaudeamus/walters/14pluto/index.html)
So that's some pretty good going there. Now I'm 1/4 of the way through.
In the meantime, there are very small pieces of electronic editions of this series available online.
The first is an extract from The Domes of Pico.
The second is a particularly adorable selection of photographed notebook pages from Pico, which appear to have been placed online by the author's nephew (image heavy).
The third are two Protected Daisy Reader editions of Blast-off at 0300 from Open Library, for which one must first have the permission of the U.S. Government to read, as there is apparently an unlocking code involved.
Finally, the fourth is an Adobe Digital Editions copy of First on the Moon, the American version of Operation Columbus, the third book in the series, and also available from Open Library. Only one person is allowed to borrow this book at a time, and you must have Adobe Digital Editions installed to read it. It comes in ePub or in PDF form. I recommend the PDF, as it's actually easier to read from. Particularly notable for being the book to introduce both Morrey and Serge. I have searched high and low, but there would appear to be no other digital copies of this series available.
So, that's what I'm expending energy collecting at the moment.
ANYWAY:
There is a wonderful little series by a man called Walter Hughes, who died in 1993 (actually, there are two series and a standalone book, but I'm only going to be talking about the UNEXA series here because I've yet to get my mitts on the other books). His pen name was Hugh Walters, because he was a community bigwig and thought to himself 'drat, nobody really takes sci-fi seriously, I'd better have a different name for my work'. This is perhaps a little bit like somebody writing 'Nosiop' on a bottle and assuming that nobody will be able to work out what's in it.
One day, when he was asked to give a lecture at a science fiction group (after giving a lecture on space and astronomy at another place, proving that he actually knew his science stuff), he went off and read lots and lots of science fiction.
And Mr. Hughes was not impressed.
Granted, this was the time when lots and lots of scifi was being churned out, but most of it wasn't terribly accurate stuff. It was, to the average member of the public, pulp fiction, penny dreadful, but IN SPACE!. Which does go some way to explaining why he decided a pen name was the way to go for his novels.
These books are great. There's character development, and the characters age. The initial main character, Chris Godfrey, is from England and starts off his Astronaut career aged 17, and continues to grow from that point. Then we get Serge Smyslov, who is Russian, and I'll admit my favourite of the group, in a later book. In the same book we meet Morrison 'Morrey' Kant, who is American. A further book brings us Tony Hale, the sick English kid who goes to the Moon to be dosed with a different radiation for a cure to his illness, who then becomes a more permanent astronaut.
For one brief book, we're joined by Pierre Isnard, a biologist from France.
Then there are Gill and Gail, a pair of female telepathic twins who join the team in Mission to Mercury and Spaceship to Saturn (gosh, don't you just love those titles?!) but surprisingly not Nearly Neptune, First Contact? (a title chosen I think because of the difficulty in finding something alliterative to say about Uranus), nor Passage to Pluto, all of which you'd expect them to be involved with for the same reasons as they're in Mecury and Saturn. Possibly the books wouldn't have been as exciting with them in it to solve things.
Eventually, Chris Godfrey becomes less the astronaut and more the desk jockey, and the series becomes rather more Tony Hale -centric. Other characters age, retire, or get promoted. This is not a static series.
Note that Serge is Russian, and that Gill and Gail are both girls. There's some anti-Soviet bits in the earlier books, but it's all overcome with the power of friendship. According to this guy (just about the only decent website about Hugh Walters out there, & Wikipedia was only very recently updated) Gill and Gail prove their worth despite the sometimes sexist jokes.
Later books, such as Tony Hale, Space Detective, include Security Chief Ho Lung from China (who is thenceforth referred to as 'Mr. Ho', proving that Hughes really actually cared about getting things right - this book was published in 1973), and the 2IC of the Lunar Base in the same book is both French, and female. There's a little bit of mild racism (Ho is referred to as 'the only Chinese on the base', but it's 1973, after all, so at least it's not 'Chinaman'), and there's a little bit of fairly tame sexism (Vice-Commandant Danielle Larue is referred to as 'Mademoiselle' more than a few times, while her male boss is more usually 'Commander', and the characters actively comment on her being female & in charge, but apparently 10% of the base is female anyway. Serge, interestingly, just treats everybody exactly the same way. On the other hand, the book plays the 'standing up when a woman walks in' bit for laughs).
For comparison of the possibly more common prevailing attitudes of the time, other things from 1973:
(from http://dreamlandjunction.com/2010/05/25/gene-hunt/, which is a boring website but had a good picture of Gene in the image search)
The telepathy is one of the rare moments when the science drifts a little out of left field - that, and the aliens one sometimes gets in the books, and the blasters which wouldn't be viable tech for the time, or even for now (oh, and one bit where an astronaut goes to the moon while he's still got the flu. Yeah). But the important, big stuff? Is seriously accurate. He predicts inventions like Lunar Buggies (albeit designed more like a tank, with oxygen inside), and the Ion engine; explains how space food works; really knows his stuff about the craters of the moon (all this before Wikipedia to help!); and even includes Woomera as an appropriate place for rockets to launch, as at the time it was where the former Allied Forces tested rockets for military functions and for possible later space flight.
Fast forward to me aged 11. I've finally read one of the books my mother bought on one of her multiple booksale trips (this is how I typically managed to have any given book that the teacher would read to us at storytime. Usually in hardback, which got more interesting when the teacher deliberately got the most obscure books she could find - I still had them).
Expedition Venus
This is actually the second copy of this book I have. Sadly, both of them are the softcover editions, which slightly offends the hardback snob in me, but the hardback of this is a bit of a whatsits to get hold of. I found this copy in a second hand booksale last year for $2, as I missed my own copy and missed taking it around on adventures with me. When I go back to NZ, this will live in my Earthquake bag, as my Earthquake Book.
Expedition Venus usually shows up in my 'Con Bag' - the bag of things I take to conventions. Includes a deck of YGO cards, a sketchbook, a camera with spare SD card & battery (previously spare film), a phone, plenty of space for swag, and somewhere safe to put anything I have signed. Venus is what I take to read while standing in line. I've been complimented by organisers for my forethought about this sort of thing when I've been in line for something for over 1/2 an hour, and I live in eternal hope that somebody will notice what I'm reading and geek out about Hugh Walters with me.
And I loved it. It was thrilling. And there were MORE IN THE SERIES.
Fortunately, I subsequently discovered that the book I'd read had one of its sequels also buried in my bookshelf. I discovered this quite by accident, as I happened to have this one in Hardback, so it was on an entirely different shelf. This fact has made shelving these books a little bit of a conundrum, as for various reasons I like my books to be of similar height when I shelve them (the other great offender in my typical bookcase, obviously not the one I have here, but in general, is my Star Wars collection, which I insist on being Chronological; the Star Trek is too much of a total whatsits to organise, so is allowed to be rather more higgledy piggledy).
Destination Mars
Again, the second copy of this book, found in a booksale this year for $6, as I missed my other copy far too much. My original copy lives in storage in New Zealand, along with my Expedition Venus. This copy, however, I'm fortunate enough to own the far prettier Leslie Wood cover, in storage:
(from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gaudeamus/walters/06mars/index.html)
As it turned out, my mother had had ulterior motives for buying these books for me as a youngster.
She really wanted them for herself. Because as a kid, she'd read them all. My mother had been a bit of a Space Nut. Possibly not helped by the boy-who-lived-downstairs-whose-Dad-worked-for-NASA. Around the time of the Moon Landings. Think 'brings in real NASA models of Apollo 11 for Show&Tell', just before it's due to launch. That sort of kid.
So this is part of how I know that once upon a time, the local library had copies of every single one of these hard-to-get-now books. Because mother would go to the library and pester them until they gave in and bought it, then she'd disappear off to read it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said now (although my research has found that one of the local universities still has a copy of the first book in the series, Blast Off From Woomera, in its collection).
So, last year, I started researching them. I thought ooh, maybe 5 books or so. I thought I was pretty well into the series.
I was wrong.
Mr. Hughes had written 21 books in the Chris Godfrey/UNEXA series (of which 20 were published), three books in another series (the Boy Astronaut series), and one standalone book (called P-K). Because that's what you do when you're awesome like that.
Which left me with 18 left to collect in the Chris Godfrey/UNEXA series. Which isn't actually very good. Because (warning: Large number of images):
eBay:
But that's certainly not all of the books. Even including this next one it's not all the books, but it is what's currently up on eBay (they weren't there a few weeks ago, when I got a copy of Passage to Pluto for a little over $10; I'll talk more on that later.
Those of you not clicking the images, there's a copy of Nearly Neptune going for $325.55, and a slightly-worse-off copy of my little Expedition Venus paperback is going for $82.65. Also, the American edition of Nearly Neptune (Neptune One Is Missing) is going for $79.95.
Those are just the highlights.
Oh yes. The American editions often have alternate names. So Blast Off From Woomera becomes Blast Off at 0300, for example. And there are other, less obvious title changes. Which doesn't help either. There are even changes between the editions of the books - Nearly Neptune is apparently missing several pieces, The Domes of Pico is missing an entire chapter (plus other various changes to the storyline), and of course there are the various different spellings between editions.
Fortunately, last year I was able to get hold of another book in the series at a booksale, at the same time as I picked up my new copy of Expedition Venus.
Terror by Satellite
I have to admit that I haven't read this one yet. But I'll probably read it tonight. I'm expecting it to be both claustrophobic and scientifically accurate. Because Mr. Hughes does that atmosphere bit SO WELL (there's a reason I decided I desperately needed another copy of Venus, and that's because it's brilliant, and at $2 I certainly wasn't going to turn it down - especially now I've seen the eBay price up there!).
This book I also managed to get for $2. I do know that it's a little different from the usual book in this half of the series, as the adventurer is not Chris Godfrey, but instead Tony Hale, the youngest member of the eventual 'crew'.
Now, we're going to look for now is the 'Holy Grail' of this series; Tony Hale, Space Detective.
AbeBooks:
So that's anywhere between $149-249.11, plus shipping, for this first-edition-only book (or $108 plus shipping for the Uncorrected Proof copy up the top). Not too bad compared to Nearly Neptune up there...
Amazon:
For those of you not clicking on the images: Prices for Tony Hale go all the way up to $700 on Amazon.
That's $700 for a good old mystery set in space. And it is a good mystery, I'll grant it that much. I didn't spot the ending. And I like reading mysteries.
How did I manage to get this one?
Another booksale, of course!
Tony Hale, Space Detective
Here's the cover, and it truly is not very good, especially in comparison to the previous books Leslie Wood covers. But there's only one edition, so it's not like I can be picky or anything.
And here's the price I paid for it. I think I did pretty damn well here. I actually let out a shriek when I found it. I got it at a booksale this year. It was great.
For those who aren't clicking the images/can't see the price (it is pretty small), that's $7 I paid for it. TAKE THAT, INTERNET!
Since then, I've also bought a copy of Passage to Pluto from eBay for I think about $11 or so. I was willing to pay that price, even though it didn't come with an image for the cover, as the ISBN information was otherwise correct. On the other hand, I don't know which cover or edition I'll be getting.
Passage to Pluto
I hope it looks like this. (from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gaudeamus/walters/14pluto/index.html)
So that's some pretty good going there. Now I'm 1/4 of the way through.
In the meantime, there are very small pieces of electronic editions of this series available online.
The first is an extract from The Domes of Pico.
The second is a particularly adorable selection of photographed notebook pages from Pico, which appear to have been placed online by the author's nephew (image heavy).
The third are two Protected Daisy Reader editions of Blast-off at 0300 from Open Library, for which one must first have the permission of the U.S. Government to read, as there is apparently an unlocking code involved.
Finally, the fourth is an Adobe Digital Editions copy of First on the Moon, the American version of Operation Columbus, the third book in the series, and also available from Open Library. Only one person is allowed to borrow this book at a time, and you must have Adobe Digital Editions installed to read it. It comes in ePub or in PDF form. I recommend the PDF, as it's actually easier to read from. Particularly notable for being the book to introduce both Morrey and Serge. I have searched high and low, but there would appear to be no other digital copies of this series available.
So, that's what I'm expending energy collecting at the moment.