Cover & Synopsis: The SFF Classic THE BLACK FLAME by Stanley G. Weinbaum

Stanley G. Weinbaum’s The Black Flame was first published in 1939, and was considered quite risqué for the time. Tachyon has given it a new cover and has re-released it in hardcover, limited hardcover and boxed limited hardcover.

Here’s the book’s synopsis (from Tachyon) and a larger cover appears below:

Hundreds of years after a nuclear disaster and a devastating plague that leave the Earth full of mutated humans, a family of immortals seek to conquer the world with advanced science. Two siblings will lead a battle that spans millennia and leads to unfathomable social change.

When the risqué (for its time) science-fiction pulp novel The Black Flame was first published in 1939, Stanley G. Weinbaum had already been dead for three years. By that time, more than 18,000 words had been excised or edited from the original manuscript. The intact manuscript, held by Sam Moskowitz, was auctioned off to Forrest J. Ackerman at the First World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. It was subsequently stolen from his collection and never recovered. The publication of this edition was made possible by the discovery of a carbon copy of the manuscript in a trunk of Weinbaum’s papers found in the basement of his grandson’s house in Denver, Colorado.