July 31st 1972 – The Science Fiction Book Club

Above is an ad from the UK’s Science Fiction Book Club taken from a summer 1972 edition of The Observer. These adverts appeared in the paper, as far as I can see, once or twice a month, were relatively small, and were placed right at the bottom of one of the The Observer’s book review […]

July 28th 1972 – The Coming Week’s Fantastical programmes on UK TV and Radio.

My memories of summer 1972 are, in terms of its fantastical TV and radio, of a dulling drought of anything that was particularly interesting. Yet looking at the terrestrial listings for this current week in 2025 has put my memories into context. Yes, the summer of 1972 was mostly about fantastical repeats, and yes, those […]

July 27th 1972 – The Paperback Covers Of Chris Foss

My memory is that Chris Foss’ sci-fi covers were everywhere in 1972. But I’ve long put that down to the fantastical mono-focus of my then-prepubescent mind. Reading 2011’s excellent Hardware: The Definitive SF Works Of Chris Foss, I’m surprised to find my shockingly fallible memory has actually been telling me the truth. What an amazing […]

July 26th 1972 – The Fantastical Gigs Of The Week: Can, Roxy Music, Stevie Wonder, Arthur Brown, Genesis & Hawkwind.

Relying on the gig pages of the UK music press can’t be said to be an entirely reliable business. Gigs were often cancelled, dates and venues rearranged, and schedules can prove to be highly misleading. (In Sylvain Sylvain’s fine memoir of his life as a New York Doll – There’s No Bones In Ice Cream […]

July 25th 1972 – The Comic Books We Never Saw

Heaven only knows how many fans were buying UK comics zines in the early 1970s. A few hundred? Somewhere in the (very) low four figures? Whatever the figure was, it was tiny, and the same names would often appear across a number of different fanzines as writers and correspondents. In and around London especially, there […]

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, […]

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 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 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 […]