Category: Science Fiction
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Science Fiction Monthly Vol. 1, No. 2
I’ve chosen the second issue of the 70s British SF magazine Science Fiction Monthly because that’s the one that started it all off for me in 1974. I was on holiday in Filey with my parents, on the North Yorkshire coast. There’s a great song by Morrisey called ‘Every day is like Sunday’, which pretty…
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Eagle Book of Spacecraft Models
By the time I was old enough to read the famous British comic Eagle it had folded, so I missed Dan Dare, Police Constable 49 and the inner workings of various planes, trains and automobiles. Eagle was founded in 1950 by a vicar who wanted to get the morals of Anglican muscular Christianity over to…
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Angel’s Egg
The first batch of Japanese anime to appear in video shops in the UK were resolutely aimed at the disturbed 13 year old boy market. The choice was limited to giant robots belting each other or deeply unpleasant pornography involving school girls being raped by multi-tentacled demons. Not surprisingly those of us uninterested in badly…
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Worlds of If – part two
My last post about the magazine Worlds of If generated quite a bit of interest so I thought I’d post a few more covers so you can see how it developed during its thirty year lifespan Below are the first and last covers, from March 1952 and December 1974 respectively. The first cover bears no…
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Future Past – Worlds of If
I first came across the magazine Worlds of If in 1974, in a little news kiosk on the Via Veneto in Rome. It was amongst a bunch of comics with covers showing naked women having their legs ripped off by zombies, which apparently is a peculiarly Italian genre. I was just getting into Science Fiction…
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Alexander Thynn – The King is Dead
Two reviews stand out on the back of Alexander Thynn’s self-published 1976 epic The King is Dead. Princess Zouina Benhalla (yes she really does exist and you can see her perform her poetry on YouTube) states that ‘La profondeur analytique de sa philosophie font du “Carry Cot” une oeuvre inoubliable.” The other one, by Anonymous…
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Rodney Matthews
Rodney Matthews appeared out of nowhere in the mid 1970s. At that time the one-stop shop in the UK for posters to adorn bedroom walls was Athena, which made its fortunes from a tennis player baring her bum and Che Guevara. One day, leafing through the stacks for a big picture of Kate Bush, I…
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Evoluon – future past 1969
Holiday afternoons were a bit of a wasteland in the late 1960s. There were three TV channels in the UK and no video recorders. Nothing interesting came on until round about 5pm when children’s TV began so we had to do things like go outside and play Japs and Commandos in the woods and other…
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The Whisperer in Darkness
The cinema industry has a poor track record when it comes to films of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. Despite his often turgid prose, the piling of adjective upon adjective for effect and his ill-concealed snobbery, Lovecraft was a very atmospheric writer. His power comes from what he hints at, as well as from his over-blown…
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John Carter (of Mars)
I admit that this review is going to be a bit biased. As I’ve said before, when I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian series as a teenager it had a massive impact. My life-long love of SF and Fantasy can be traced back to that summer in 1974 when I first came across A Princess of…
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Peter Bradshaw – I spurn you as I would a Calot!
Tars Tarkas riding a Thoat on Barsoom, yesterday. OK – ticket’s booked for tomorrow at the Odeon in 3D IMAX. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave it 1 out of 5 and called it a ‘giant, suffocating doughy feast of boredom’. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt even though it read like a…
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Bruce Pennington
In the 1970s two cover artists stood out among the piles of books in the little science fiction corner at W. H. Smiths Harrogate – Chris Foss and Bruce Pennington. While Chris Foss’s titanic ultra-realistic spaceships have had a massive influence on illustrators and film makers over the past 40 years, Bruce Pennington is less…
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The End
Thumb is set at the very end of the Universe when all the stars have vanished and we have entered the phase called the heat death of the universe. Early twentieth century SF writers, overcome with fin-de-siecle angst, often tried out-do each other in constructing visions of the end of the time. H.G. Wells’ time…
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Titus Groan
Not surprisingly over the past few years people’s ideas of British post-war fantasy have been been dominated by J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, but his nostalgic Pre-Raphaelite vision of an idealised medieval world is not the only non-realistic writing to come tumbling out of the horror of World War II. Alongside the…
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The Night Land
The Night Land (1912) has to be one of the oddest books ever written. It was penned by William Hope Hodgson, an English author who produced a small collection of macabre stories just before World War One. He belongs to a group of Edwardian fantasists who, between them, created a number of strange, elegiac books at…