really pretty good – Schlock Value

The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb
Arrow Books, 1976 (First Published in 1968)
Price I paid: none

Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker for Man’s forgotten home.

Dumarest’s search begins in the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.

Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child—an obscure world scarred by ancient wars which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believes exists:

Earth, birthplace of Man.

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The Pursuit of the Phoenix by John-Allen Price
Zebra Books, 1990
Price I paid: 50¢

Rising on twin pillars of white-hot fire, the U.S. space shuttle Phoenix curved up from its Cape Canaveral launch pad into a low-altitude orbit around earth. The crew’s mission: train and instruct three fledgling French astronauts in the secrets of space flight. But short hours after liftoff, Commander Ed Cochran knew he must scrub the mission for a far more perilous task—the rescue of three Russian cosmonauts suddenly trapped in orbit in a space-debris-damaged Soyuz space capsule, its heat shield gone, its fuel depleted, and its supply of life-giving oxygen rapidly running out.

Or so Cochran thought—until the Politburo abruptly declined Phoenix’s offer and the White House threatened that any rescue operation might set off the beginning of World War III. As the three Soviet cosmonauts televised their last good-byes to a waiting world below, Cochran suddenly realized that the differences between men who challenged the deadly hazards of the space frontier and those concerned with bureaucratic politics on the earth below much finally be resolved—even if it meant the risk of turning the world into a radioactive cinder to which there would be no return!

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