Books of my past found - Captain W E Johns' science fiction
Sunday, 5 April 2026 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eOh, my goodness me! 
When I was very young, in Primary School, our school had a library, so naturally I was a volunteer librarian. I used to enjoy science books and must have read most of what our library had to offer. One day I happened upon some books written by Captain W E Johns -- the guy who was best known for his Biggles books. At the time I had no idea he wrote some science fiction too. So I started reading them... and was hooked. Thus began a life-long fascination with science fiction.
That was more than 60 years ago (feels like last week). From time to time since then, I've searched for those books again and failed to find them anywhere. Well, tonight I struck the motherlode! FadedPage have all ten of his science fiction titles for free download (FadedPage is a Canadian version of Project Gutenberg).
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Johns%2C%20W.%20E.%20%28William%20Earl%29
Yay! I look forward to re-reading them. I'm not expecting them to be great SF, but I'll be reading them for the memories of when I was a child and was taken away on those adventures to strange worlds of wonder.
Incidentally, for many years I've been trying to find a science fiction story I read when I was a child. It involved an advanced civilisation where people volunteer for treatment if they feel criminal tendencies, and they're treated without cruelty. That story appears to have been "The Edge of Beyond", the fifth book in this series. Cool!
The first of the ten space books by Capt W E Johns
When I was very young, in Primary School, our school had a library, so naturally I was a volunteer librarian. I used to enjoy science books and must have read most of what our library had to offer. One day I happened upon some books written by Captain W E Johns -- the guy who was best known for his Biggles books. At the time I had no idea he wrote some science fiction too. So I started reading them... and was hooked. Thus began a life-long fascination with science fiction.
That was more than 60 years ago (feels like last week). From time to time since then, I've searched for those books again and failed to find them anywhere. Well, tonight I struck the motherlode! FadedPage have all ten of his science fiction titles for free download (FadedPage is a Canadian version of Project Gutenberg).
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Johns%2C%20W.%20E.%20%28William%20Earl%29
Yay! I look forward to re-reading them. I'm not expecting them to be great SF, but I'll be reading them for the memories of when I was a child and was taken away on those adventures to strange worlds of wonder.
Incidentally, for many years I've been trying to find a science fiction story I read when I was a child. It involved an advanced civilisation where people volunteer for treatment if they feel criminal tendencies, and they're treated without cruelty. That story appears to have been "The Edge of Beyond", the fifth book in this series. Cool!
The first of the ten space books by Capt W E Johns
no subject
Date: 2026-04-06 09:36 am (UTC)I recognised the name immediately, but not why.
I don't know if I even read any (or many) of his Biggles books (I may have read the novelisation of the movie), much less recalled him writing SF, but finding the books - much less a white whale of a story - is very much a win!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-06 09:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, finding those books that blew me away when I was little is bliss. I know they won't live up to my juvenile memories, but that's okay. I now have all ten books sitting on my phone, waiting for me to give them some time.