During the Cold War, a new archetypal establishment role joined the pantheon of soldiers, cowboys, and cops that often peopled children’s games: the spy. Equipped with false identities, given to using hidden surveillance devices, and communicating in strange codes, this newcomer was perfectly suited to the duplicitous, mistrustful mood that was the constant background noise of the times…
It’s one of the peculiarities of SF literature—and perhaps of genre writing in general—that the imagery generated to sell and promote it has often proved to be more visionary and transformative than the writing itself. Serious-minded SF fans are often heard complaining about this irony, claiming (not without some justification) that Star Wars, say, is not actually science fiction but rather fantasy, or just straight-up infantile dross…
As the nuclear crisis between the Western powers and the Eastern Bloc deepened, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Doomsday Clock stood at four minutes to midnight, perplexed children across Great Britain were treated to the release of When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel by British artist Raymond Briggs that narrated the aftermath of a nuclear attack from the perspective of the Bloggses, a working-class couple who have recently retired to the country…
In 1976, the year after the death of Spanish military dictator Francisco Franco, Barcelona publisher Ediciones Martínez Roca launched its Colección Super Ficción series—an eclectic selection of science fiction novels—with Los Hijos de Nuestros Hijos, a Spanish translation of Clifford Simak’s Our Children’s Children…
Designed to educate the country’s public in virtuous behaviors and warn them of the dangers they might encounter in everyday life, Public Information Films, or “PIFs,” were broadcast on British national television throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, and were one of the tools successive post-war UK governments employed to educate the populace in civic comportment…
Set in a world called “the Unifactor,” Jim Woodring’s wordless Frank recounts the adventures of the title character—a gormless-looking, anthropomorphic, rabbit-like creature with a nature by turns passive and perverse—and his interactions with the Unifactor’s other inhabitants and the world’s beautiful and frightening flora and fauna, given to unpredictable reactions and behaviors…
I watched Annihilation without having read the book it’s nominally based on or knowing anything about it except for a trailer that I’d seen and hadn’t much liked. I’d expected to hate it, and instead came out of it feeling profoundly moved…
Billed as “global guardians,” the X-Ploratrons were four toy vehicles, each equipped with its own novelty tool—mirror, magnifying glass, compass, and magnet—and charged with protecting humanity in the “fictitious disaster-wrecked world of the 21st century,” where “the elements rebel against man!” They were long-established die-cast toy brand Corgi’s attempt to adapt to the wave of SF-driven commerce that followed the unprecedented success of Star Wars…
The car: what better avatar for our age than that mass-produced, self-contained, mobile habitation that frames the outside world through an anamorphic screen? Over the last century, the car has conditioned our world and lives perhaps more than any other technology, shaping our ideas by accident or design while hobbling the growth of public transport…
From a merger of its 1961 acquisitions—British publishers Ace Books Ltd. and Four Square Books Ltd—the American Times Mirror Company created the New English Library (NEL) as a sister company to the New American Library. While the latter retained some of the cultural prestige of its original owner, Penguin Books, the NEL was under no such constraints of perceived quality: the publisher was therefore free to specialize in paperback genre fiction…
We Are the Mutants 