The beautiful cover paintings are naturally the first things you might notice and a primary reason I bought the book. No matter how gorgeous the cover, however, I won't buy a book that I can't imagine reading someday. And here I made good on that implicit contract.

I didn't see an artist's name mentioned in the book but according to this amazing website about the Ace double novels (which appears to be created and/or maintained by a professor of archaelogical ceramics at the University of North Carolina Wilmington—or something!), we should give credit to Ed Valigursky.

The second thing you might notice is that the copyright on both books belongs to James MacGregor, even though the authors on the cover are J. T. McIntosh and Dwight V. Swain. The Ace website asserts that McIntosh is a pseudonym for MacGregor but has nothing to say about Swain other than that The Transposed Man is his only novel.

Which leads us to the third thing: One in Three Hundred (©1953, 1954) is a fairly short novel at about 222 pages but The Transposed Man (©1955, "magazine version" ©1953), at 97 pages, is just barely a novella.

But no matter! They're both great, regardless of length and authorship. And they're also very different.

One in Three Hundred takes as its starting point one of my frequent nightmares. Life on Earth, all of it, will soon be obliterated and only a small sample of humanity can be transferred to a different planet to survive. The nightmare for me is that, it seems to me, if this were to happen, it would be a slam dunk that all the worst people in the world would go.

All of our "elected representatives" would naturally fill the spaceships. They make the laws, they control government, and didn't we already choose them to represent us? Isn't this merely the logical continuation of representation, an ultimate representation? You'd find every member of Congress blasting off to ruin some other planet but not a single barista or graphic novelist.

When it came to creative types, "artists", it would probably be a slam dunk for awards winners, another kind of representative. It could be that that trumpet player on the subway platform is a zillion times better than, say, Ed Sheeran, but how many times have you heard that trumpet player on the radio?

One in Three Hundred somewhat sidesteps this awkward situation with a neat premise. First it's established that all life on Earth is doomed. Our sun is going to flare up and burn more brightly for a while. But it's going to increase the temperature on the planet to something like 500º Celsius (almost 1000º Fahrenheit) and, well, that's game over.

There's a handful of large spaceships that can take on a bunch of people and provisions but then thousands of "lifeships" are hastily thrown together, each one capable of carrying ten passengers.

Anybody qualified to fly one of these things can pick the ten people to go. But they pick them out of a group of strangers, each prospective pilot assigned to a community of three thousand people (hence the book's title).

The hero and narrator, Bill Easson, is sent to Simsville, population 3261, to select ten to go with him. (A neighboring town with a population of about 12,000 has four different pilots making selections in that community, and that's how it goes worldwide.)

The action starts briskly. This is the first line: "I ignored the half-human thing that ran at my heels like a dog cring '"'Please! Please! Please!'"

Easson is a typical mid-century American genre fiction protagonist: level-headed and phlegmatic, competence and of solid character. And certainly you'll find familiar conventions here as regards women and men and attitudes about sex.

And also like quite a bit of this territory from that time (consider The Twilight Zone's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), you'll find surprising undercurrents of cynicism and criticism, of both individuals and society, which lead to some unexpected turnarounds. "The more I learned about people, the more likely they were to come off my list," thinks Easson.

The town's most desirable candidate for selection, the one everybody including Easson knows should go, turns out to be a murderous psychopath and sadist.

Early on a conspiracy theory is floated. With only eight weeks to prepare for the end of the world, and humanity already freaking out, either in deadly riots or lunatic fringe religions, who can say whether these thousands of lifeships even exist? Maybe it's just a ploy to pacify the population.

Easson puts it this way: "Problem: If two thousand skilled men can build a lifeship in a hundred days, how long will it take a thousand unskilled men to do it? Answer: 56 days".

It would be a different book if it went in this direction but the lifeships are real. They aren't built very well, however, and it seems that pretty much all of them don't have enough fuel. Use enough to break away from Earth and you won't have enough to manage landing on Mars. Crash now or crash later.

Easson opts for later and the higher g-forces result in one of the passengers getting crushed to death during take-off.

It's that kind of book. Don't get too attached to the characters, even though they're well drawn and differentiated from one another.

When they leave Earth they leave religion, too. The last thing the representatives of mainstream faiths do is smooth out the transition and aid the few people chosen to get to the spaceships, by distracting everybody else.

Mars at first means nothing but work, every day and intensively, for survival. In time, though, it becomes clear that not everybody who was brought along was a great choice. There are budding power brokers and dictators and it isn't long before there's corruption, hastened along by the invention of money.

And this after so many other conventions, of thought, religion, marriage, dress, were left behind!

Did J. G. Ballard encounter this book? A sequence of a massively destructive storm on Mars anticipates parts of his first novel (which he was very determined to disown), The Wind from Nowhere. An earlier passage detailing the Earth's destruction also seems in sympathy.

If you like this sort of thing and you don't mind surfing the waves of 1950s attitudes and assumptions about various things, then this book is highly recommended.

The Transposed Man is an entirely different story, in every possible way. While One in Three Hundred pursued a fairly simple story in a procedural sort of way and easily brought to life about a twenty different characters who all seemed like they could be real people, at least if you didn't dig too deeply into it, The Transposed Man is all action and practically no character at all.

What the hell is going on here anyway? Our narrator is apparently a spy, saboteur, secret agent and terrorist for the Meks, the Society of Mechanists. And what is it they want? I'm not really sure. Something about using science to destroy anything that's not science maybe? And the rest of civilization, the opposition to the Meks, I'm not sure what they want either.

But I suppose it could be seen as an inversion of Alphaville, where an IBM agent is infiltrating the world of Tarzan instead of the other way around. As one Mek agents puts it, before the main character interrupts him: "The Society of Mechanists is dedicated to science and progress. The barrier is the FedGov's insistence on catering to the prejudices and emotions of the mob; the authorities' refusal to accept the counsel of superior minds—".

But it moves along so quickly and bombards the reader with so much sci-fi futuristic mumbo jumbo that it hardly seems to matter. Here, for example, is a simple description of a room: "tinted chromoid furnishings made less bleak by the sparkle of paradone insets, veldrene carpeting and Nacromean velvet drapes—a decor that combined triangularity with sleek Modarc curves.

None of those terms are ever explained and this kind of jargon is on almost every page.

"Someone put another coin in the musicord."

"I was looking at the perceptoscope's scanner screen."

"Over my shoulder, I glimpsed the man on top of the vanster swinging round his paragun."

"I took a light-bath and changed clothes, then went into the kitchen and scrambled together a quick lunch of sliced canna and gesk-meat sandwiches, washed down with a tube of foamy purple Venusian yar-beer."

The writing is actually really great throughout, though, quite imaginative and effectively indicating mood through small touches, the movement's of a character's hand, for instance. The author is especially good with atmosphere, whether it's a futuristic freak show or an abandoned radiation tunnel.

The main character can hop from one body to another using his pulsator and neurotrons. He does it quite a bit, too, reminding me a bit of the movie The Hidden.

But body hopping and impostors and mind control (also in this book) were themes to be found in a lot of science-fiction of the time: The Mind Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars...

This is usually written off as Cold War communist anxiety but the enemy within could just as easily be the rise of automation and technology and industry and the subsequent rise of powerful industrialists who could wield such power that democracy itself and the "American way of life"...

Fanzines have been pretty much destroyed by web sites, but such things never really die. Bubbles pop but there are still operas, poems, people who study Latin and so on.

And when your subject is a specific and little known subsection of the category "book", then your ideal reader is likely to want something to put on the shelf.