The Nature of the Catastrophe: A British Apocalypse Cover Art Gallery.

Watching Hammer’s version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ recently, I was struck by a brief exchange between Andrew Keir’s Professor Quatermass and James Donald’s Dr. Roney as they brain-storm the likely origins and the excavated Martian remains.

“The will to survive is an odd phenomenon”, says Quatermass. “If we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?”

“Nothing, probably”, replies Roney, “just go on squabbling like usual”.

As the 1967 movie swiftly moves on to other matters, 2016 viewers are left with a momentary chill (and yet more evidence of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale’s uncanny talent for holding a beam on the future, even when he wasn’t trying to).

Spending Christmas and New Years in Wales a few months ago, the temperature was anything up to 8 – 10 degrees higher than normal for the time of year, as rain poured down relentlessly for almost the entire duration of our stay. Watching the evening news, seeing various areas of the UK devastated by floods for the second year in a row, I couldn’t help reflecting that we probably have one of the more placid and non-disaster-prone climates of any nation on Earth, and wondering how many ‘freak’ meteorological upsets were simultaneously going unreported in other parts of the globe.

The second story each evening meanwhile brought grim footage of the proxy forces of assorted Western and Eastern powers scrabbling for control of empty, blood-stained piles of rubble in whatever remains of Syria, the juxtaposition making as clear a realisation of Kneale’s casual, fifty year old predication as could be wished for.

A few months later, watching the public’s largely disengaged response to the sight of the French authorities torching and tear-gassing the makeshift city constructed by refugees from war just across the channel, I was reminded not only of Christopher Priest’s bleak 1972 novel ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ (a book that trumps the “this might happen” scenarios of Priest’s fellow doom-mongering SF writers by depicting a series of events so grimly inevitable it’s a miracle it hasn’t taken place already), but of the obligatory shrugging-off-the-warning-signs / “it’ll never happen here” segment that tends open most stories in the good ol’ British End of the World tradition.

(This is most bluntly and grotesquely realised by the scene early in Cornel Wilde’s film adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ [‘No Blade of Grass’, 1970], which sees attendees at a buffet lunch stuffing their plates with food as the TV in the corner of the room carries news of the Chinese government’s desperate decision to begin dropping atom bombs on their largest cities in a last ditch effort to curb the effects of mass starvation.)

Of course, you shouldn’t necessarily pay too much attention to my doom-mongering. I’m particularly prone to such alarmist trains of thought, having been unhealthily fixated by this peculiarly British strain of '60s & '70s apocalyptic sci-fi ever since I was in primary school. John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series were amongst the last “children’s” books I read, and, following my Dad’s sound recommendations from there, John Wyndham’s classics were amongst the first “grown up” tales I subsequently made a start on.

After that, I spent the rest of my formative years consuming any story I could find that concerning “the end of the world” and, whether by means of wind, floods, drought, plague, famine, alien invasion, over-population, under-population, nuclear fallout, air pollution or god knows what else, my nation’s authors and paperback publishers were with me every step of the way.

With this in mind then, I’ll leave you to peruse the collection of scans below and decide for yourself the extent to which these storied literary gents of the mid-twentieth century might have been on to something.

Meanwhile, I could claim I was busy this weekend scoping out that easily defendable farmhouse with it’s own water supply and potato field, wondering who I should invite to share the landrover with me as we flee the city before the roadblocks go up. But, for better or for worse, such survivalist fantasies must remain just that in my case. As a Type 1 diabetic, I know I’d be dead within six weeks if the NHS stopped dishing out regular prescriptions of injectible human insulin. So, um..

Happy Easter everyone!

(Please note that a few of these scans have previously appeared on this blog in the past, but it’s always nice to see them again I hope. Also, the ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ scan above is not mine – I seem to have lost my copy, so I found this one online.)

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by John Griffiths)

CATASTROPHE: famine.

(Corgi, 1961 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: heat / alien terraforming.

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by Denis Piper)

CATASTROPHE: Kraken.

(Signet, 1965 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: infertility.

(Arrow, 1971 / cover designer unknown)

CATASTROPHE: overpopulation.

(Penguin, 1974 / Cover illustration by David Pelham)

CATASTROPHE: wind.

(Orbit/Quartet, 1977 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: pollution.

(Penguin, 1977 / Cover art by Harry Willock)

CATASTROPHE: blindness / Triffids.

(Arrow, 1979 / “Cover photograph of John Mills as Professor Quatermass by courtesy of Thames Television.”)

CATASTROPHE: general societal breakdown / alien matter harvesting.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: Kalin by E.C. Tubb (Arrow, 1973)

Urgh, January. Always a bit of a slog, isn’t it? To keep us ticking over until I manage to pull some new movie reviews together, and hopefully to transport us to some warmer, weirder, more colourful locales for a moment or two, now seems an apt time for some posts showcasing a few recent, random additions to my collection of psychedelic sci-fi paperback artwork.

To begin, how about this eye-catching wraparound number from the cover star of one of the issues of New Worlds we looked at a while back, Mr. E.C. Tubb?

Regrettably, the distinctive montage artwork is uncredited, but any readers able to put a name to it are encouraged to drop us a line and do so.

As to the book itself, like much SF of this era, it sounds a bit… trying, but who knows, maybe I’ll give it a go sometime.

Below is a bonus .jpg of the whole wraparound cover. Perhaps it might make a nice desktop wallpaper, if you’re thus inclined? (Apologies for the bookshop sticker on the back by the way – I know from bitter experience that it’s one of those ones that would be difficult to peel off without tearing the cover.)

This Week’s Wheatley: To The Devil – A Daughter (Arrow Books, 1960 / first published 1953)

To put it plainly, I’m not really a fan of Dennis Wheatley (1897 - 1977). Although “the prince of thriller writers” (as he is heralded on the inside cover of this paperback) wrote extensively on a number of subjects that greatly appeal to me – Satanic cults, adventure on the high seas, exploration of lost/ancient civilisations, and so on – the authorial voice and general tone of his prose makes it impossible for me to ever get very far with one of his books.

I don’t know enough about Wheatley’s personal life and proclivities to start throwing ‘-ist’ words at him, but… how best to put this? Trying to read a Wheatley book is a bit like being trapped in the back room of a private members club in Calcutta in the 1920s, being interminably lectured by a drunken British cavalry colonel. Not so much ‘old world’ as actively ploughing backwards into the past, it’s easy to imagine Wheatley snorting with derision at the work of his ‘modernist’ literary contemporaries, naturally assuming that his rip-roaring tales of melodramatic daring-do are infinitely superior works, just because, well, it’s bloody obvious, isn’t it? They've got STORIES, and such.

Even more distressingly, Wheatley seems to have combined his cheery advocacy of Victorian colonial imperialism with an adherence to a strict Manichean belief system that saw him banging on – apparently in earnest - about the eternal battle between good and evil at every possible opportunity… which can’t possibly be a healthy combination, I’m thinking.

Nonetheless though, given my interests in old horror films, pulp fiction and so on, a certain amount of Wheatley contamination is inevitable. As I’ve mentioned several times before on this blog, I absolutely love Hammer’s adaptation of ‘The Devil Rides Out’ (to some extent precisely because the pompous attitudes that render the novel unbearable become wonderfully entertaining when transferred to an 80 minute genre movie), and for one reason or another Dennis’s name crops up more frequently on my shelves than that of many an author who I actually like.

Case in point is this edition of ‘To the Devil a Daughter’, the cover of which provides such a knock-out bit of straight-down-the-line horror-pulp artistry, I just couldn’t say no. (Cover artist is uncredited as per usual, but signature in the bottom left corner reads ‘Sax’?)

Staring at this cover, and reading the equally evocative list of chapter headings, really makes me wish that Hammer had stuck to a similarly old school approach when they came to film this one, rather than belatedly turning in some kind of muddled, post-Omen ‘70s thriller type effort complete with creepy jailbait nudity and the worst “oh shit, we forgot to film an ending” ending in cinema history. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

(In fairness, it’s been a long time since I saw Hammer’s ‘To The Devil a Daughter’, and I know it has its supporters… maybe it’s about time I gave it another shot..?)

For no particular reason, several more Wheatley-related posts to come over the next few weeks!

Windows of the Mind by G.M. Glaskin (Arrow, 1975)

I can’t remember where I found this. I think it must have been free, or near enough, but something about it grabbed my attention - heavy, heavy new age vibes of the sort that can’t help but seem thoroughly sinister. Just check out the strange geometric shapes on that landscape illustration on the back cover. Something’s not quite right there. A rather too literal uncanny valley.

‘The Christos Experience’, as outlined in the bits of this book I’ve skimmed over, appears to be a set of meditation techniques which can be used to invoke a kind of waking lucid dream state, wherein one explore amorphous internal landscapes and, allegedly, details of one’s past lives. Despite the doubtlessly profound impact this technique had upon participants at the time, the internet circa 2012 remains fairly quiet on the subject of ‘The Christos Experience’, suggesting that its long term legacy may have been somewhat limited.

Although ‘Windows of the Mind’ bears all hallmarks of the kind of book that might be distributed free at some dubious ‘institute’ or passed between shaky hands on busy street corners, it is actually the work of a mainstream paperback publisher (Arrow, an imprint of Hutchinson), and, rather surprisingly, G.M. Glaskin turns out to be none other than Gerald Glaskin (1923-2000), a celebrated Australian novelist who won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 1955.

A straightforward, factual (well, factual as this kinda stuff gets) account of the experiences of the author and his friends with the aforementioned technique, ‘Windows of the Mind’ seems to be, well, some genuinely head-bending stuff to be honest. Dipping into some random passages, it certainly seems strange enough to make me want to give it a proper read some time.