Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Autumn Angels | 1975 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 2 | The Light at the End of the Universe | 1976 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
| 3 | Involution Ocean | 1977 | Bruce Sterling | Buy |
The Harlan Ellison Discovery Series was a short-lived imprint that produced three paperback originals between 1975 and 1977. Ellison selected the authors and wrote introductions, lending his name to the project as a guarantee of quality and novelty.
Bruce Sterling’s entry, Involution Ocean (1977), is his debut novel. The premise — a world with no water, where hunters track enormous creatures through a sea of dust, and where whale oil has been replaced by the creatures’ extract — is inventive in a way that points toward the Mechanist/Shapers universe he would develop a few years later. The novel is more baroque and less idea-driven than his mature work, but readable as a first novel and as a historical artifact of 1970s science fiction.
The other two Discovery titles, by Arthur Byron Cover and Terry Carr, are significant in their own right within 1970s genre history. As a series, the three books represent a snapshot of a particular moment in science fiction publishing.