Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: In The Kingdom of the Beasts by Brian M. Stableford (Quartet, 1971)

Yes folks, after his novel ‘To Challenge Chaos’ appeared in our last Psychdelic Sci-Fi Round Up, young Brian Stableford is back to bamboozle us again with more headache-inducing, order/chaos themed science fantasy hullabaloo… but thankfully on this occasion, illustrator Patrick Woodroffe has a suitably retina-punishing cover design on hand to help get our poor minds softened up in advance. Pretty freakin’ far-out.

A specialist in this sort of thing, Woodroffe went on to bestride the ‘70s with a wealth of similarly intense fantasy/sci-fi artwork, as well as creating a handful of stone-cold classic prog era LP covers, including Greenslade’s Time & Tide (which I bought as teenager based solely on the artwork), Budgie’s Bandolier (which I WISH I’d bought as a teenager) and Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny.

Sadly, Woodroffe passed way in 2014, but a wide variety of his artwork (and a terrific photo of the great man in the early ‘70s) can be found here.

(The faded colours on the above scan are accurate to the appearance of my copy of the book by the way, in case you were wondering. God only knows how mind-flaying this thing looked when it was fresh off the presses.)

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: The Half-Angels by Andrew Lovesey (Sphere, 1975)

Ok, so not ‘psychedelic’ exactly, but this mid-‘70s science fantasy number strikes me as being a bit odd, at the very least.

I like the crudity and general nastiness of the cover illustration, and the ‘about the author’ blurb caught my attention too.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (Panther, 1971)

Last summer I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s canonical SF classic ‘Lord of Light’ (here accompanied by a rare SF cover from the fantastic pop/pulp painter Michael Johnson), and I enjoyed it very much.

It’s been years since I read anything with that particular kind of ‘epic world-building fantasy’ kind of feel to it, and it certainly made for a welcome change of pace amid my usual diet of hard-boiled crime and mid 20th century British miserablism.

In particular, I was quite surprised that the weighty mystical / philosophical content one might reasonably expect to find in a book like this generally took a back-seat to thunderous descriptions of the hyper-weaponised avatars of the Hindu pantheon blasting the shit out of each other as they bestride a far future terraformed world of verdant neo-medieval splendour and ‘Dancers at the End of Time’ techno-decadence. Heady stuff indeed.

Whilst I’m not much of a fan of current CGI-heavy giant monster/robot-based blockbusters (you’d never have guessed, would you?), I’ve got to admit that if the makers of, say, ‘Pacific Rim’ were given the GDP of a small country to make a movie out of this one, I’d definitely be standing in line on the day of release – in the right hands, it could be fantastic. Unfortunately I suppose the possibility of offending every Hindu on earth probably mitigates against that possibility somewhat, but we can dream.