TESTING THE LIMITS

Joanne Morreale. The Outer Limits. Wayne State University Press, 2022.

 

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity....

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JUST WILD ABOUT HARRY

Ray Harryhausen Special Collection. Blu –Ray Box set. Via Vision 2023.

Unsealing this box set of eight Ray Harryhausen films I was reminded of the early 90’s when I met Ray Harryhausen at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, London. He was delivering an illustrated talk on his work. Apart from myself, and a friend, the cinema was full of young animators who’d come to hear the master of stop-motion animation. It was an inspiring evening.

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NIGHTMARES AND DAYDREAMS

Nigel Kneale. Nightmares and Daydreams (BFI Southbank)

Can any single genre pin down Nigel Kneale? He certainly used genres to allow ideas to percolate within their parameters but never fell back on the formulaic. For me it’s Kneale’s speculations, satiric power, emotional warmth, ironic viewpoints and dramatic intelligence that grip: all making for a highly unusual and original writer.

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YESTERDAYS' FUTURES

John Wade. The Golden Age of Science Fiction. Pen and Sword, 2019.

Science-fiction from the 1950s was where it really began for many people. There were sci-fi themes and films around before World War II but the genuine science and the real-life drama of such a gigantic conflict tended to overwhelm fiction. With the nightmarish global war behind them, the type of folk who looked upward and outward for inspiration soon began to discover a genre that both captured and nurtured their imaginations. 

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THE SCIENCE-FICTIONAL ROSWELL

Robert Silverberg, Those Who Watch. New English Library 1967.

Robert Silverberg is a veteran American science fiction writer, best known for his books Dying Inside, Thorns and the Majipoor trilogy. Dying Inside is about a telepath gradually losing his talent; Thorns, about a romance between a man left deformed after being surgically altered by aliens and a woman made infertile through donating her eggs to science.
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STAR TREK SPEAKS - AGAIN

Star Trek Speaks!, by Susan Sackett, Fred Goldstein and Stan Goldstein (New York: Pocket Books/ London: Futura 1979)

This was a mass-market paperback, published in 1979. I picked up a copy at a secondhand book sale in Cheltenham nearly 30 years ago. Subtitled "Wit, Wisdom, Humor and Philosophy Culled Directly From the Scripts Of The Greatest TV Adventure Of All Time Created By Gene Roddenberry!", it's a collection of quotes from the Classic Trek TV series on various subjects touched on by the programme.
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BRITAIN CONQUERS SPACE (IN 1956!)

Satellite in Space by Professor A.M. Low. London: Brown Watson Ltd, 1956.

I found this piece of fascinating British SF in a secondhand bookshop in Cheltenham. A.M. Low was, as the book's blurb said, a former president of the British Interplanetary Society and the author of many scientific papers. Science Fiction, it has been said, is as much about the time in which it's written as about the future, and this book is fascinating for what it says not just about how the British in the 1950s viewed the future, but also about the fears and hopes haunting their time.

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REJOICE

Steven Erikson, Rejoice. Gollancz Science Fiction, 2018

This is not the usual type of alien invasion story involving hordes of tentacled blobs piloting flying saucers that blast apart our beloved cities with laser beams. Instead this is an invasion by stealth and cunning orchestrated by an alien artificial intelligence.

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JUST PLANTING A THOUGHT

Robert Sheckley was an American SF writer, who published a series of novels and short stories from the 1950s to the early '90s. These were similar to the Douglas Adams' later Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that they spoof standard science-fiction clichés and conventions, often from a philosophical viewpoint, subtly satirising the emerging consumer society of the 1960s. His characters are often the hapless victims of incompetent bureaucracies and corporations.

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FORTEAN FICTION AND FICTIONAL FORTEANA

Andrew May. Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Springer, 2017.

In this book Andrew May, known for his articles in Fortean Times, examines the influence that 'pseudoscience', i.e. Fortean phenomena and the paranormal, have had on science fiction and vice versa. As the book is aimed at an academic readership in a series entitled 'Science and Science Fiction' it adopts a suitably sceptical tone.
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FIRST READ - MIRACLE VISITORS

A book can have an impact even though you first read it many years after publication. Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors was published nearly 40 years ago, and it had a major affect on some British ufologists at the time. Jenny Randles wrote about it in her book Mind Monsters, and noted a number of coincidences between the fiction events in Miracle Visitors and the UFO abduction that she was investigating at the time of its publication.
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CLOSE SHAVER

Richard Toronto. War Over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction. McFarland, 2013. 

Recent books by Aaron John Gulyas and Fred Nadis have cast new light on the earliest years of the development of the UFO legend, revealing many aspects which later ufologists have been keen to paper over. Nadis has shown that the contactees, far from being an occult-tinged dead end in ufology, were in fact central to its development. 
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INVENTING UFOLOGY

Fred Nadis. The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey. Tarcher Penguin, 2013.  

Ray Palmer was hailed by John Keel as ‘the man who invented flying saucers’ through his exploitation of the subject in the science fiction magazines he published in the 1940s and ‘50s. Some have challenged Keel’s assessment, calling it ‘fatuous’. This book goes a good way to presenting a more balanced viewpoint.
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MUTANTS AND MYSTICS

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, University of Chigaco Press, 2011.

Mutants and Mystics is a fascinating and stimulating book, and an important one. It's one of the most authentically Fortean works I've read a long time, as well as being perfectly in tune with the spirit of  Magonia, since its addresses head-on the relationship between culture and the paranormal (defined in its widest sense to include everything from psi to UFOs and alien encounters).

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