The Remarkable Exploits of Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman


The Remarkable Adventures of Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman is a collection of humorous science fiction stories by Nelson Bond, published by Doubleday Books in 1950. It comprises eleven of the fourteen stories in Bond's "Lancelot Biggs" series. Sometimes described as a novel, it presents the stories in a sequence of twenty-seven numbered chapters. The collection was reissued in trade paperback by Wildside Press many years later; no mass market paperback edition was issued.

Contents, in order of their appearance in the collection

  • "F.O.B. Venus"
  • "Lancelot Biggs Cooks a Pirate"
  • "The Madness of Lancelot Biggs"
  • "Lancelot Biggs, Master Navigator"
  • "Where Are You, Mr. Biggs?"
  • "The Ghost of Lancelot Biggs"
  • "Honeymoon in Bedlam"
  • "The Love Song of Lancelot Biggs"
  • "Mr. Biggs Goes to Town"
  • "The Ordeal of Lancelot Biggs"
  • "The Downfall of Lancelot Biggs"
Not included in the book were:
  • "The Genius of Lancelot Biggs"
  • "The Scientific Pioneer Returns"
  • "The Return of Lancelot Biggs"
The eleven Lancelot Biggs stories included were revised for this volume to provide continuity from one episode to the next. The incorrectly lists "The Scientific Pioneer Returns" as one of the volume's included stories.

Reception

Time magazine reviewed the book under the headline "Space Ahoy!"—reporting it as "chiefly notable as a publisher's trailblazer," a step by a mainstream trade-book company into the science fiction genre, one of a half-dozen such books Doubleday had published that year. Its reviewer commented that "Author Nelson Bond, who used to write westerns, has merely put a Space Age icing on the old Wild West conventions" and that "to those who have never exposed themselves to the comic strips, the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that spews forth from every page of Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman may cause some confusion for a while he persistent will get the hang of it." In Astounding Science Fiction magazine, P. Schuyler Miller gave the collection a somewhat mixed review, saying that "Bond lacks few of the tricks of the born storyteller, and uses them all blandly and shamelessly."