Death’s Dimensions — Rare Paperback 1st Edition
A Psychotic Space Opera
252pp, 6″ x 9″, out-of-print, Autographed, Very Fine —
$15
Based on the short story of the same title published in the Feb., 1978 (Vol. 39, No. 2) issue of Galaxy Magazine, edited by John J. Pierce, the novel version of three-time Prometheus Award-winning novelist Victor Koman’s Death’s Dimensions was written between October, 1977, and July, 1978, just before he began writing The Jehovah Contract. When friend and fellow author J. Neil Schulman started the first digital-book company in 1987 — SoftServ Publishing, Inc. — Koman scanned in the manuscript of the novel, proofread and polished it, and intended to publish it through SoftServ, but ultimately decided to withhold the novel until 1999, when Schulman created Pulpless.com. The trade paperback first edition for sale here has been out of print for almost a quarter-century, and is among the rarest examples of Koman’s early work. Cover by Billy Tackett (Koman provided the image of a flying Orbit Gum point-of-purchase display to represent the spacetime-jumping starship Circus Galacticus).
His death wish exceeded that of any other mortal. Only his lust for oblivion gave him the strength to survive the Valliardi Transfer, the key to the Universe. He was Virgil Grissom Kinney, and he was insane beyond hope.
Caged and bound in a madhouse she had found him. She rescued him, reprogrammed him, forged him into a test pilot, then abandoned him to the trackless stars. She was Delia Trine, his angel of Love and Death.
She filled him with the memories of a man already dead. When that man lived
again inside Virgil, she tried to shatter their souls, to possess both her dead lover and her lover of death. The dead man — Jord Baker — would stop at nothing for a chance to live again.
Delia thrust Virgil into the madness of deep space and tried to forget her betrayal. He returned against all odds, battling a squadron of spacecraft piloted by corpses. Returned, to steal Delia from her frozen tomb under the craters of Mercury so that she might die with him again and again, forever.
Their private war amid interstellar darkness was interrupted by another. His death wish was a great as Virgil’s, but it was directed at Virgil and for Virgil. Across space and time he hunted, striking from nowhere, littering the stars with his taunts and warnings. He was Dante Houdini Brennen, Delia’s billionaire master gone mad.
The Universe was their ballroom, madness their song, and Death was the dance they danced.
“In case you, like others, have forgotten the Future, Victor Koman remembers it. He grew up there and now, with total recall, wakes us to jog our memories and rebirth Tomorrow. Would that there were a dozen more writers like him, in the field.”
