Andy Sawyer

This book is a selection of papers based around a 2001 conference marking that science-fictional date in British SF with, as the title says, a 'Celebration' of the British contribution to the genre. As the aim of the conference was neither wholly academic, nor exclusively fan-based, the papers presented here are not as long as would normally be found in more academic journals like the Science Fiction Foundation's own Foundation. They are nonetheless properly analytic, even if they don't show more ascend to some of the heights of academic obfuscation that can so often be found in such august journals.

Papers include a discussion of John Wyndham and an unpublished sequel to The Midwich Cuckoos; Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose's White Mars; Arthur C. Clarke's mysticism; the British "cosy catastrophe" sub-genre; Michael Moorcock; Keith Roberts; D.G. Compton; Richard Cowper; Gwyneth Jones; the science fiction of the historian E.P. Thompson; Iain M. Banks; Kim Newman; Ken MacLeod; and Brian Stableford. John Clute contributes an epilogue, which is drawn from his closing comments at the conference. That they were extemporized is remarkable.

As this selection dates from 2005, it should be noted that the papers on Banks and MacLeod are seriously out of date, but as long as they are read in context, the reader will still find them of interest. And Jo Walton attributes the term "cosy catastrophe", referring to particularly British books like The Day of the Triffids and Death of Grass, to Brian Aldiss; but he is on record as having told Dave Langford that the term actually originated with, of all people, the late Queen Elizabeth II. Apparently, when Aldiss was being invested with his OBE, he asked the Queen if she had ever read any science fiction. She replied that she had only read The Day of the Triffids, and added that she thought it "such a cosy catastrophe". After Langford published this in his newsletter Ansible, the term spread rapidly, and stuck. show less

An academic review of Lem's career as a writer.