Another find at our local Oxfam bookshop, The Book of Alien. Published in 1979 to accompany the release of the movie, it’s a behind-the-scenes account of the production with lots of art (mainly by Ron Cobb but also by Moebius and Chris Foss) and photos. There are sections on spaceship…
Read MoreBought for £1 at the local hospital’s League of Friends bookshop. Onions is one of the great twentieth-century ghost story writers. This volume does include The Beckoning Fair One which Robert Aickmam described as “one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field”. There’s an intense, manic quality to…
Read MoreLovely piece from 2021 by Brian Sibley about the cover to the 7th March 1981 issue of Radio Times. Sibley writes about the illustration, Eric Fraser, and his acquistion of the original artwork. Much like Jimmy Coulty’s stunning 1976 poster illustration for the novel, Sibley’s BBC dramatisation which was originally…
Read MorePicked up a copy of The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt. I’m in the middle of watching the first season of Doctor Who from 1963-4 and, while I make great use of both the first volume of About Time and The Television Companion – both…
Read MoreIn other news, I went looking in local charity shops for a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, a novel I’ve read twice but don’t have a physical copy. No luck on that front but I did find a delightful hardback of The Hobbit (I have the…
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Found this in a charity shop today: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, part of The Film Classics Library’s “most accurate and complete reconstruction of a film in book form”. It’s a comic book-like presentation of the whole of the movie and an absorbing read. I often find that stills from movies (especially…
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Being an easy pushover for a good UFO book (something I’ve not shaken since my childhood), I’ve just read Jacques Vallée’s and Paola Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s an account of a hitherto unknown UFO crash in San Antonio in 1945 very close to Ground Zero where the Manhattan…
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Aickman’s fifth introduction is brief. He summarises his previous views: that ghost stories are separate from both horror and SF and that its “true affinity” is with poetry as it is “a projection and symbolisation of thoughts and feelings” that are excluded from usual written discourse. Ghost stories, he believes,…
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Aickman leads his fourth introduction to the Fontana Ghost Stories collection with a renewed attack on modern rationalism: “science will end the world,” he asserts. He goes on: “Even if there is no big bang, we shall destroy the world in no time, if we go on as we are….
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Professor Zeh sits in his office in Heidelberg. It’s 1969. Rain falls outside and Zeh’s office window is nothing but a dark grey rectangle. He’s smudged the ink in his notebook, jotting down a thought about Bohr’s interpretation of measurement he had while staring at his reflection in a mirror…
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