The Planet Buyer

In honor of Cordwainer Smith’s 100th birthday today, here's John Schoenherr’s cover for The Planet Buyer, published by Pyramid Books in October 1964.

This was job #303 in Dad’s work log, and he was hired to do it for $300 on April 3, 1964. That same month he and the family moved from Long Island City to an old farm in rural New Jersey, so The Planet Buyer was probably one of the very first things he finished in the new house (built in 1871 by a Confederate Civil War veteran turned Old School Baptist minister, incidentally - but that’s another story). Before he was able to start renovating the old barn on the property, Dad used a tiny (about 7 x 10 feet) upstairs bedroom as his studio - its low, seven-foot ceiling still bears the scars from the top of his easel scraping against it.

Great Science Fiction Artists - John Schoenherr

An appreciation of John Schoenherr’s science fiction work by Paul Cook just appeared on the Amazing Stories site.

John Schoenherr on a stamp?

From file770.com comes this:

A petition urging the Obama administration to proceed with a set of commemorative postage stamps honoring sf writers - and to make the group much larger and more diverse - has been launched by Chris Barkley on the 106th anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein’s birth.

A five-stamp set had been announced by the USPS Commemorative Panel program in February with a July 2013 release date. Then, Linn’s Stamp News reported in April the issue had been indefinitely postponed. The report also named the writers who had been selected to be on the stamps: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein and Frank Herbert.

The petition contains 60 names and requests that they appear on a series of stamps over the next several years, “in groups of six, ten or twelve individuals.”

You can sign Barkley’s petition at Change.org. His goal is to get 100,000 signatures by August 6.

At this writing, only 99,977 more signatures to go!