The Playboy Book of Science Fiction By Alice K. Turner
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (First Edition Hardcover Copy)
Forty-Five Years of Uncensored Tomorrows from Speculative Fiction's Ultimate Mainstream Market
Forty-Five Years of Uncensored Tomorrows from Speculative Fiction's Ultimate Mainstream Market
Bibliographic Specifications
- Title: The Playboy Book of Science Fiction
- Editor: Alice K. Turner
- Publisher: Harper Prism, New York
- Publication Date: 1998
- ISBN-10: 0061052884
- ISBN-13: 9780061052880
- Edition Details: Stated First Edition, First Printing (Full number line "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1"). Standard hardcover release with original unclipped dust jacket.
- Binding: Original publisher's premium multi-toned binding featuring a durable cloth-backed spine with crisp silver/gold gilt-stamped typography, paired with matching heavy-stock endpapers.
- Physical Format: Heavy octavo (8vo), 469 pages. Designed with clear typographical hierarchies, featuring 25 elite short stories, individual author bio-notes, and custom cover design by Carl D. Galian.
- Language: English
Official Condition Report
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The Book: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Exterior / Cloth Boards: The binding sits in excellent condition, remaining flat, square, and structurally robust. The cloth casing and outer board surfaces are exceptionally clean, displaying only minor shelf-rubbed wear along the bottom rim corners, fully consistent with careful handling over decades. The spine remains completely unbroken, upright, and undamaged, retaining its original textbook rigidity.
- Interior: The text block is robustly bound, tight, and immaculate. The clean pages exhibit a uniform, natural tanning and browning of the paper edges, an completely standard aging characteristic for this specific 1990s US paper stock. Internal sheets are entirely intact and free of student highlighting, ink underlines, dealer pencil marks, or dog-ears.
- Provenance: A beautiful collector's anthology showing no evidence of institutional library checkout sheets, remainder stamps, or past owner names.
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The Dust Jacket: Very Good Plus (VG+)
- Condition Details: The original, strikingly illustrated dust jacket displays rich, bright graphic elements and excellent color contrast. It shows very limited, superficial signs of handling and slight micro-friction along the outer extremities. It features no significant open chips, heavy sun fading, or structural tears, and comes protected in a clear, archival Cellophane cover.
Synopsis & Historical Value
Published in 1998, The Playboy Book of Science Fiction is a historic, genre-defining anthology assembling the finest speculative fiction ever published in Playboy magazine. Since its inception in 1953, the magazine provided authors with unprecedented literary freedom to address mature, adult themes and highly controversial issues. This platform proved completely irresistible to world-class writers searching for a high-paying, uncensored mainstream venue.
Spanning forty-five years of provocative history, long-time fiction editor Alice K. Turner curates an extraordinary, diverse collection that acts as a virtual hall of fame for speculative writing. Inside, readers will find foundational masterpieces from acknowledged Golden Age and New Wave giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. These are balanced by the daring, innovative cyber-realism of Harlan Ellison, Lucius Shepard, and Larry Niven, and leavened by surprise, boundary-pushing fiction from Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, crime master Donald E. Westlake, and even actor Billy Crystal. Moving seamlessly from traditional star travel to virtual sex and cloning, this volume captures speculative fiction at its absolute, uncensored best.
Author Profile: Alice K. Turner
Alice K. Turner (1939–2015) was a highly influential American editor, journalist, and cultural historian. Educated at Manhattanville College, she served as the legendary, long-standing fiction editor of Playboy magazine for over two decades, where she single-handedly kept high-caliber, short speculative fiction alive in the commercial mainstream. Beyond her historic editorial achievements, Turner was a respected author in her own right, universally praised by critics for her deep historical analysis in The History of Hell (1993). Her work is widely celebrated by academics for its sharp literary discernment, commitment to protecting authorial intent, and profound impact on the evolution of modern American short stories.
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