Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Continuing their range of SF classics, The Folio Society has today announced two very special releases.

A triumph of both cult and mainstream literature, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.  Delivering all the thrills of golden age comics and a deeply humane story about hope and tragedy – all via an exuberant literary voice – it has become one of the defining novels of the modern age.

With Chabon’s approval, The Folio Society has teamed with Eisner award-winning artist Chris Samnee to take on the world of the Escapist in the first-ever illustrated version of this literary work. His work on iconic heroes such as Thor, Spider-man, Batman and Daredevil, allows Samnee convincingly to portray the smoky, frantic world of the comic book studio with 10 colour illustrations including seven double-page spreads, and a blocked and die-cut slipcase.

Michael Chabon’s pre-war New York is a place of optimism and art, of big band music and sharp suits. In his hands the city becomes a transformative place, taking lost souls and making them Americans; taking broken children and making them superheroes. By intertwining the stories of two Jewish boys with that of their liberty-inspired comic hero, Chabon tells not only the story of a fledgling art form, but that of America itself, as seen through the eyes of its immigrants.

In his introduction for this special collector’s edition, author Michael Moorcock describes The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as ‘a modern classic worthy of its Pulitzer Prize as only a handful can be’.  Having worked in the ink-stained offices Chabon describes, Moorcock praises this visionary novel’s authenticity, noting that it creates a world so compelling it leaves us wanting to “remain in its aura just a little while longer.”

Robert A. Heinlein is celebrated as one of the true masters of the science fiction genre, and this is the first of his novels to be published as a The Folio Society edition. Winning a Hugo award in 1960, Starship Troopers is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the science fiction genre.

Earth is caught in the midst of a deadly conflict with the implacable ‘Arachnids’, a swarm of insect-like aliens intent on wiping out all human life. Fresh recruit Juan ‘Johnny’ Rico signs up impulsively, keen to prove himself in the upper echelons of the Navy. Instead he finds himself assigned to the Mobile Infantry, the frontline where all that stands between life and an alien death is a sophisticated armoured suit.

Serving in the US Navy for five years, Robert A. Heinlein brought the lived experience of his service to this, his most famous work. Written partly in reaction to the US policy of ceasing nuclear testing in the late 1950s, Starship Troopers remains a controversial novel, with its central argument that violent conflict is an inevitable and necessary part of human civilisation.

For this, the first illustrated edition, celebrated science fiction and fantasy illustrator Stephen Hickman created seven illustrations, with two double page spreads. Hugo award winner and known throughout the SFF community for his work inspired by writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey, Hickman brings fantastical space opera to each full-colour page, conjuring vast spaceships, unsettling chitinous legs and dreamy plumes of nuclear flame.

In his perceptive introduction for this edition, Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War, talks about the influence Starship Troopers had on his own work, and how the fallout of the Vietnam War changed the speculative fiction of the 60s and 70s.

The Folio Society edition of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, introduced by Michael Moorcock and illustrated by Chris Samnee, colouring by Matthew Wilson, is available exclusively from www.FolioSociety.com

The Folio Society edition of Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, introduced by Joe Haldeman and illustrated by Stephen Hickman, is available exclusively from www.FolioSociety.com