Brit Apocalypse Redux.

(Manor Books [U.S.], 1974 / cover artist unknown.)

CATASTROPHE: Mass immigration / civil war.

(Hodder, 1968 / cover artist unknown.)

CATASTROPHE: Earthquakes.

Always the way isn’t it? Just a few weeks after my doom-sodden Nature of the Catastrophe post, I snagged a couple of great additions to my collection of British apocalypse literature, both acquired from a decidedly un-apocalyptic Falmouth, where the proprietor of Benford Books on High Street uttered the fateful words, “I’ve got a few more boxes of science fiction out the back, if you want to have a look.”

It’s interesting to see ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ slightly retitled for this American edition (presumably somebody decided those backward colonials wouldn’t know what a “Fugue” is), with a lovely ‘70s action movie styled illustration that belies the book’s grimly dispiriting tone. I lost my previous copy of this book some time ago, but I have extremely strong memories of it, so look forward to revisiting it.

I’ve never read ‘A Wrinkle In The Skin’, but, given how unhealthily fixated I am on Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’, I can only hope it will prove similarly edifying.

My apologies for the recent dearth of content here, by the way. All I can do is vainly promise that a wealth of new content – with actual writing and stuff – is currently in the works, so keep watching this space, etc.

The Clue of the Silver Key by Edgar Wallace (Hodder, 1961)

(Originally published 1930 / cover uncredited.)

So, I know he supposedly inspired all those zany German movies full of villains running around in frog-masks and old castles full of neurotics being murdered with spiked gloves and so on, but from the little Edgar Wallace I’ve tried to read over the years, I fear I may have achieved the impossible.

Great cover illustration though.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up, part # 1:The ‘60s

(Tandem, 1968)

(Lancer, 1968)

(Hodder, 1967)

Even more-so than movies or comic-books, you might assume that lower tier sci-fi paperback designers would have been a bit slow in picking up on youth culture trends, but just look at all this bad trip, pop-art madness - merely a taster of the innumerable eye-grabbing volumes that were hitting shelves prior to 1970, all waiting to be harvested from book fairs and charity shops the world over.

All of the above are more or less trad pulp skiffy yarns enlivened by some way-out graphics, but by way of contrast, here’s a rather toe-curlingly try-hard attempt to bring SF to the new youth market. The logic is sound: hippies read sci-fi, and half the people who write it seem to veer in that direction too, so let’s bang out some sci-fi for hippies. The execution however? I think I'll pass. ('She Stripped For Cider' in the author biog made me laugh though.)

Wikipedia reveals that 'The Unicorn Girl' is the middle volume of an apparent 'Greenwich Village Trilogy' published by Pyramid. Characters were shared, but each volume was written by a different author, the other two being respectively credited to underground press luminary and Crawdaddy! editor Chester Anderson, and "professional magician and magic author" T.A. Waters. Presumably any resemblance between "Mike and Chester, fearless hippy explorers of a thousand worlds" and their apparent creators would be wholly coincidental..?

 

(Pyramid, 1969)

All cover artists and designers featured in this post are uncredited, by the way.