A Fantastical August 6th 1967

In the UK’s album charts at number 3 in the first week of August 1967, the Jimi Hendrix’s sublime Are You Experienced, from which The Almanac will unashamedly claim the sci-fi fable Third Rock From The Sun for its own. In it, the occupant of an alien scout ship, dazzled by the Earth but baffled […]

A Fantastical August 1st 1962

Telstar by The Tornados, as written & produced by Joe Meek, was released in the UK on August 17th. The archetypal fantastical pop track, it was out in the shops just over a month after NASA had successfully launched the track’s inspiration, the Telstar communication satellite. I wish there was a movie/book/TV or radio show/podcast/comic […]

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 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 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 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 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 […]

June 22nd 1972 – Fantastical Movies To See In Central London

If you were wanting to book a seat for a fantastical movie in the (somewhat) more upmarket cinemas of central London during the coming seven days, you had but five options. At the Warner West End in Leicester Square, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was still playing. The film had debuted in the UK on February […]