Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Out Now: The Eye Of The World: A Lost "Thought-Variant" Pulp Classic By Don Wilcox

Here's a rollicking space opera/pulp classic like no other!  Check out The Eye Of The World and you'll see why Don Wilcox is considered to be a master of the genre.

"Magnificant! It's got everything, humor excitement, science fiction, and plenty of suspense." W. Paul Ganley, Weirdbook. Here is a thrilling tale of A lost sorld of futuristic marvels, a lost legion of American soldiers, a lost soul in search of redemption, a lost alien determined to conquer the world or destroy it - and a love that defied death! The Eye of the World is a mind-bending "thought-variant" novel from the 1940s intended to change the way its readers viewed reality forever! From the text: "What Allan was seeing was a gigantic room, nearly two miles high. And there were clouds of orange fire rolling out of the top of a volcano-like cone. It was the cone itself that struck Allan with awe. It must have been two miles in diameter – yet the room was not filled by it. The great loop of the glide-walk moving around it gave it the effect of slowly turning. It was strangely illuminated, and over its perfectly symmetrical surface Allan could see hundreds – yes, thousands of patches of color ... a glass-like surface composed of small, sharply defined squares. Each square, only about three by three inches, contained a picture. Sixteen squares to the square foot – and how many thousands of square feet? There must be billions of tiny pictures set side by side over this surface – each picture was a person – a face. These pictures were in motion. Was it an actual image of persons in other lands – images that revealed their actions and expressions of this very moment? And then he was sure that all this spectacle before his eyes was happening now. He took a few steps upward. He was walking on faces – illuminated, tinted photographs. The expressions of the faces were quite unaffected by the contact of his heel plates. He caught his breath with sharpened interest. A billion? two billion? Was it possible that there was room here for everyone? Some squares were in darkness ... purple and black – and the deed was murder! Scores of different murders were being pulled off right before his eyes. Some were American, others were murders in India, on some desert island, on the snow field that might have been Siberia. Although the pictures revealed an amazing variety of bloody deeds, they showed up as a group, dominated by a single color-tone. What was the meaning of such a colossal mirror, hidden below these lost mountains of Africa?" Rog Phillips' Eye of the World is a never-reprinted, lost masterpiece of pulp science fiction that award-winning author, editor and critic Terry Carr hailed as one of the "standout" stories of the year after it first appeared in the January 1949 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

No comments:

Post a Comment