July 24th 1972 – What Galaxy Showed Me

In the years before Far Too Much became A Very Bad Thing for all but our lords and masters, America was A Very Good Thing Indeed. Older generations might have balked at our enthusiasm, but we knew, or rather we felt, that they were just plain wrong. The traditional, disapproving view of Americans as vulgar, […]

July 23rd 1972 – Creators Of The Fantastical At London’s National Portrait Gallery

On this Saturday in 1972, were you in the vicinity of London, you could have visited the National Portrait Gallery for free and searched out images of many of the greatest fantastical writers of all time. As a boy during the period, I never imagined that the palaces of High Art could be for me […]

22nd July 1972 – The Respectable Ones

There is a remarkable, if not heartening, similarity to the way in which fantastical fans were often discussed in the past and how they’re discussed today. Take the review of 2025’s new Superman movie in The Observer of Sunday 15th July. It was respectful, upbeat and, to a surprising degree, informed. Not only did the […]

July 21st 1972 – The Coming Week’s Fantastical programmes on UK TV and Radio.

Nothing reminds me of how bleak the TV and radio schedules were for a fan of the fantastical during the period. Summer, of course, was a particularly arid time when it came to the schedules. As Michael Palin notes in his The Python Years diaries, the season was, traditionally, a wasteland filled with repeats and […]

July 20th 1972 – Edmund Cooper’s ‘Who Needs Men?'”

Edmund Cooper wrote an awful lot of books. Many under his own name and many not. He penned novels and all manner of shorter stories and whodunnits and non-fiction and romances and criticism and technical pieces and stories for children and poetry. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote. (When I was stumbling through […]

July 19th 1972: The Perishers On Their Summer Hols, Boot Returns To The Rock Pool.

The Perishers, like most of the rest of us, lived highly structured and essentially predictable lives. Anyone who’d read a year of their adventures could comfortably predict most of the set-pieces of the following twelve months. Readers knew that each October would, for example, find the inexplicably independent Wellington scheming to swell up support for […]

July 18th 1972 – The View From The Film Reviews of Cinefanastique’s Summer Issue

Ignoring for the Almanac’s purposes the Planet Of The Apes cover feature in Summer 1972’s Cinefantastique, we arrive instead at the magazine’s film reviews. Unlike the newspaper columns discussing fantastical films that The Almanac has consulted to this point, Cinefantastique was a specialist publication. It expected its audience to be interested, enthusiastic and informed. Here, […]

July 17th 1972 – Dan Dare On Stage At The Half-Moon In Aldgate

Given how well nigh impossible it’s long proved to license Dan Dare, it’s something of a considerable surprise to discover the following in several of the Theatre – Fringe sections in July 1972’s Time Out: Sadly, it appears the show, beyond the memories of those who were there and a few photos and the like, […]

July 16th 1972 – This Month In Science Fiction Books?

Discussions of science fiction books in the “quality” press were relatively rare. But, as on this Sunday in 1972, the likes of The Observer would occasionally feature a review column. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how hard it was to keep in touch with what was being released. Firstly, the titles were all hardbacks except […]

July 15th 1972 – Giant Hogwood, Terrible Triffids & Genesis

There were (relatively) rare moments in the period when evidence surfaced that some clear trace of Science Fiction had broken through to the mass audience to become part of everyday language. In the Town And Country Notes in July 15th 1972’s Darlington And Stockton Times, for example, an anonymous writer discussed a report from Middleton […]