iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

From back in my ancient days of blogging : ukjarry.blogspot.com/2007/12/31-g...

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Much less nightmarish than the 1999 short film Desserts with Ewan McGregor and a mysterious eclair on a beach

Ewan McGregor stares quizzically at an ecair he holds near his mouth

Ewan McGregor face is distorted by a fish hook piercing his cheek after he has taken a bite of the eclair

Ewan McGregor on his back is reeled across a beach into the sea

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Tom Disch (also sometimes horror writer) at The Nation was a NYC theatre critic who did give ‘Carrie: The Musical’ a riproaring rave The Nation, 4 June, 1988:

Carrie, the Royal Shakespeare Company's musical that just expired at the
Virginia Theatre, is based on the movie by Brian de Palma, which is based on the book by Stephen King, which is based on the story of Cinderella, and it's as much fun in its latest incarnation as ever. Much of the fun is salacious, and in its larger emotive moments Carrie is subject to delusions of aesthetic grandeur, but at the simple level of how well did I enjoy myself I have to confess, with a bit of a smirk, more than at any other musical this season. The dance numbers by Debbie Allen are abundant and zestfully raunchy. Allen has Bob Fosse's knack for elaborating a simple bump and grind into a narrative ballet, and the two teenage villains of the story, danced by Charlotte's d'Amboise and Gene Anthony Ray, are brought to life almost exclusively by her choreography.

And there's the rub. Because for many in the audience the dramatic
premise of Carrie is repugnant and insupportable, a wish-fulfilment fantasy for very naughty ids. Frank Rich in The New York Times practically went berserk in his vituperations, dismissing as ludicrous and inane the opening dance number of Act II, "Out for Blood," and comparing it to the classic Broadway bomb, Moose Murders. I think the rumble scene in West Side Story would be an apter comparison. "Out for Blood," which enacts the ritual slaughter of a pig, is a catchy paean to bloodlust, in the worst possible taste and with a beat you can't resist. As such it's a fair sample of Carrie's dramatic appeal, a tale in which a fat, lame-brained Cinderella is caught between the Scylla of a repressive, fundamentalist mother and the Charybdis of a highschool peer group with the moral instincts of Euripides' Bacchae. Horror, as a genre, bubbles up from the same psychic magma that produces nightmares; sex and violence are its principal concerns. Invariably, the most vivid and innovative works in the genre - E.C. Comics, Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre - have been sneered at by critics when they couldn't be ignored. Viewed in that light, Frank Rich's across-the-board dismissal of Carrie is its most authenticating accolade.

All these departures from the original book and movie have clearly been engineered in the interest of tuning Carrie to the supposedly tenderer sensibilities of the Broadway audience, which is primarily made up of moms and dads who attend the theater to have their values affirmed, not doused with pig's blood.

Director Terry Hands does his level best to manage the transition to good taste without abandoning the story's raison d'etre, staging the initial girlslocker-room scene (a piece of voyeuristic divinity fudge in the movie) in a manner no more lubricious, technically, than a Miss America pageant, but thoroughly steamy even so. On the whole, Hands and Lawrence D. Cohen (who wrote the book and, earlier, the screenplay) manage to have it both ways, creating a moral atmosphere in which sweet and sinister coexist with archetypal simplicity, as in an X-rated Disney cartoon.

The Times's middlebrow and middle-aged readership. The blame properly is the R.S.C.'s for their too sanguine estimation of Broadway's digestive capabilities. The musical Carrie ought to have gone directly to film, in which form it could have reached that more youthful audience that can daydream blithely of their high school's firebombing.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

@dirtyfeed.org A fun discovery of this piece from the Harrow Observer giving a fairly full account of the recording of Monty Python's Money Programme / Argument Clinic episode. And all almost a full year before it was broadcast.

no alt text, as keyboard/laptop is half knackered

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Allan Massie - Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 80s magic realism, grotesque fantasy, and writerly arrogance Sunday Telegraph, 18 Feb 1990

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

And what would you make of the original published title and cover? It is quite a gay book, actually, but more in the way of literary and aesthetic camp:

"I wanted the title The Puppies of Terra. I thought that was a charming title. Don Wolheim is into bondage, and he always put men in chains on the covers (I mean he's the discoverer and publisher of John Norman), so the title Mankind Under the Leash was the result. I don't think it represented the book's whimsical or comical thrust. But what could I do? I had a standard Ace contract. He had the right to make that change. To give him credit, he didn't actually rewrite the novel. He had a benign indifference toward what you actually wrote as long as it didn't exceed the length required."
"An Interview with Thomas M. Disch", Scott Edelman, Last Wave #5, Winter 1986

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

reading an 80s mystery yesterday I enjoyed this unexpected throwaway line about what's happening onscreen as a very upper-class family watch Dallas:

showed that she was by the swimming pool in the usual minimal swimsuit while beyond her one of the blonde ones was strutting away with a display of buttocks which would have done credit to an ape asserting its right to its territory.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

"people who love dogs and hate humanity"? Sounds like a tagline for A Boy and His Dog (1975): Jason Robards, baby-faced Don Johnson, telepathy, rape and cannibalism in the year 2024

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Probably: "reification". So it becomes a different approach to what sf/fantasy *mean*. Similarly:

How much can the artist bring to bear on one metaphor? That's the art of writing. To use a metaphor successfully in a novel you must first recognize that your central metaphor is capable of supporting an enormous amount of weight. In this case, I knew immediately that I could pile a lot onto the metaphorical scaffolding.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Have you seen the original artist Russ Heath's comic strip reply to Lichtenstein:

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

PETER DICKINSON - Murder in the Manor - 1991 lecture after much personal history about realities of Big Houses (costs of running, number of "invisible" servants), economics meets social myth to explain the archetype of the body in the library

When we sit in Plato’s cave and gaze at the shadows on the wall, the ultimate Real Idea of the detective story, that casts all these dim and varied images of itself onto the rock ahead, is of some beastly upstart millionaire slumped at the desk in the library of his country house with a crooked Oriental dagger sticking out of his back.

There was a world once, in unreal, golden England, with houses of Georgian purity or Victorian fancy, standing amid a swooping, tall-treed sward where the deer browsed undisturbed. Ladies and gentlemen of breeding and education inhabited this Eden. (Other inhabitants were needed to keep it going, but they were not seen.) They lived a ritual life, governed by great festivals, grouse shooting on the twelfth of August, partridges and cubbing on the first of September, pheasants and fox-hunting on the first of November, rituals of sacrifice and slaughter. Different rituals of sacrifice between Derby Day and Goodwood, when the London Season was at its height and the virgins — and they really were virgins, most of them — were decked and paraded at nightly balls to be chosen as brides by the tall, young warrior-priests. Warrior-priests because that is what, without knowing it, they were. They kept their hair cut short and their clothes as rigidly prescribed as any uniform. They were educated to an ideal little different from the great warrior castes of the past — the Spartans, the Parthians — to keep their bodies fit, to show no fear or weakness, to ride straight and tell the truth.

And then reality broke in. It was not just that in 1914 these make-believe warriors were called on to fight, and die, though many of them did both. There was economic and social reality as well, which even without the war would have broken that world, because its time was over. It had reached a level of unreality which was no longer sustainable. It did not die at once, of course. When I was a child, there were still quite a lot of people managing to live something like that life, but to them and to the other survivors it was a sort of after-life — and, because they were unable or unwilling to recognize social realities, they blamed the change on the war. They created myths about it, and magics, partly lamenting it and partly attempting to make it live again by special rites and charms. This is why the detective story flourished, had its own Golden Age, between the two World Wars, because its underlying power and purpose was a deep-felt need: to bring that world back to life.

That is why the ideal setting for the mystery novel is the imaginary world of the country house. There, supposed balance and harmony is broken by the act of violence, just as in the real world it had been broken by the war. That is why the ideal murderee is the nouveau riche millionaire, the embodiment of the economic upheavals, contrasted with the dwindling resources that had kept the grand old families going. That is even, perhaps, why the dagger is Oriental, because of the underlying tug of guilt about our colonial empire. (No, that’s a bit far-fetched. Don’t believe that unless you want to.) But the library itself, and, even more, that quite extraordinary figure, the gentleman-amateur detective (a creature as farcically distorted from reality as a Pantaloon or Columbine in the commedia dell’ arte), are very believable symbols.

In almost every country house, there was a room called the Library. Often the books stayed undisturbed on their shelves from spring-cleaning to spring-cleaning — I know it took a five-year cycle to get the library in my brother’s house dusted. What is more, though the actual readers in such houses were often the women, the Library would have been thought of as a largely male preserve, a place for cigar-smoke, and port, and what Kipling described as the most beautiful sound in the world, the deep voices of men laughing together. And around them the books, representing the values of their civilization, the great tomes of sermons, the historians, the poets, at least as far as the romantics, Fielding, Richardson, possibly Scott, but no later novelists. And, above all, the classics — Vergil, Livy, Terence, Ovid, Tacitus, Seneca. Because all these men, however intelligent, however brainless, would have spent most of their school days learning Latin and Greek, subjects almost completely useless but still taught in the same mode right up to my day. Almost all the science I know, almost all the history, certainly all the English literature, is self-taught. The theory was that I could teach myself these relatively peripheral subjects because, there at the center, expert in nothing but capable of anything, stood the supposed product of the educational system, the trained mind. (I was terrible at Latin and worse at Greek, so mine may not be a very good specimen.)

And what is the amateur detective but the literary embodiment of the trained mind?

So you have this mythic world — mythic even in its reality but ten times more so in actual reality. It is doubly intruded upon — first by the upstart millionaire, the new and threatening economy of money unrelated to inherited acres, and then by the blood act in the sanctuary. Blood for blood, only a ritual sacrifice can heal the ever-bleeding wound.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It is the closest anyone has got to putting a Richard Sala graphic novel on screen. Every so often I hope Sala got to watch it before he died.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

from 1979 Stuart Byron explains to the laity how The Searchers is the "Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood": books.google.co.uk/books?id=0tc...

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Immediately thought there's only one actor like that left now. And I was right: Michael Culkin! Who is surprisingly 15 years younger than I thought - so the modern eqiv of eternally late-middle-aged Richard Vernon, Lionel Jeffries and John Le Mesurier

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

As I can't find a copy of this already on Bluesky to like:

tumblr post - bucketofcrows

so what you want to do is go to Settings > Twinks > Manage My Twinks, then right click on That Twink and set the Obliterated setting to true

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Arnold Roth (associated with Harvey Kurtzman more through "Help!" and "Trump" mags than Mad magazine, but same era and cohort):

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

There are a couple of younger women spies who have passing tenure at Slough House. Brenda Blethyn just as she's turning stage success into tv and film roles at the end of the 70s :

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yvonne Mitchell as Saskia Reeves character

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Would you believe his turn as a drunken incestuous rapist assaulting his step-daughter in Peyton Place got him an Oscar nomination?

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

And the partial inspiration for Howard Waldrop 's Keystone Kops story “Flatfeet!” in his collection "Going Home Again" - note the cover

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Tom Disch's tribute to his friendship with John Crowley:

Misremembering John Crowley
Readercon #3 Programme Book, 1990
Many very good writers seem not to have been very nice people. Some,
like Frost or Hemingway or Mencken, end up losing a large part of their
posthumous cachet as their friends and biographers and even their own diaries
make it clear that there was a Jekyll-and-Hyde-wide chasm between the man
and the mask.
As far as I can tell John Crowley is actually as nice as the people he
writes about in Engine Summer and Little, Big and AEgypt, books that inspire
readers to a special kind of readerly love precisely because their protagonists
have a quality of ideal human sociability that is huggable without being
sappy, charming without being coy, kind-hearted without being thick-headed.
Perhaps there is another crueller, growly Crowley whom I’ve never met, but if
so, he is an extremely adept and secretive fellow who’s been able to fool not
only me but all John’s other friends of both sexes, since the only thing I’ve
ever known any of them to say about John behind his back is how
preternaturally nice he is. A good many people (writers) envy him, and in
extreme cases may profess to dislike his work, but only in the way that
Scrooge dislikes Christmas, out of misanthropy, or the way Salieri is said to
have disliked Mozart. For Crowley’s work is at that level of greatness that
sets the parameters by which other work must be measured. It is absolutely
good

understand that the traditional form of these convention-booklet
appreciations is to reveal choice intimate details about the appreciated
author’s private life. It is not a tradition I can easily observe, for though I have
no compunction about gossiping, I don’t remember the details of my life (or
my friends’ lives) only the generalities. I have been chez Crowley on a few
occasions, most memorably a book party for Little, Big at John’s then home in
the Berkshires, a party that had some of the flavor of the big riverside do in
AEgypt. I can tell you that John’s manner of home decoration was rather spare
than cluttered, with a Japanese (or Shaker or French provincial) knack for
making seemingly humble objects yield their numinous potential, a knack one

would expect from a writer whose prose still-lifes are often as ravishing as
Bonnards.
But I can’t tell you very much more about our occasions together. Except
for, in some cases, where they took place, the restaurant or cafeteria where we
sat to talk, I don’t remember our conversations. They were bookish, often
enough, and they must, as often, have been funny, since I can call to mind
John’s particular chuckle, which glides into and out of what he’s saying like a
figure in the left hand. I remember the modulations of his speech, and its
melodies, which are usually down around the bottom of the treble clef but will
take an octave leap upward for humorous emphasis.
I have a sense of how he dresses, which is usually with a conscious sense
of style but never to the degree of being a showoff (yet not "correctly"
neither). High bohemian with an emphasis rather on cut and texture than on
boldness of color. The last time I saw him in New York City he was planning,
the next day, to get himself a new winter overcoat at Barney’s. I wanted to tell
him where he could get the same label for half the price on Orchard Street, but
I bit my tongue. He would get a better overcoat without my input.
So there it is, like a familiar opera seen on various occasions: the sets,
costumes, style of delivery, everything but the libretto. But the thing about a
really great opera is that the story is superfluous, or rather, the music is the
story.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Sadly I note reports of the death of John Crowley (1942 - 2026), the writer of Engine Summer, Little Big, and the Aegypt quartet. A luminous and erudite writer on love and memory. 25 years ago I compiled lists of his career, works, reviews, documentaries, interviews: web.archive.org/web/20030628...

CROWLEY ON WRITING
"One of the reasons you write fiction is because you can create your own world. You need that constant sense of possibility. If you don't feel that sense of possibility on your own life, don't even feel a craving for that kind of possibility and change, it makes it difficult to write. SF and fantasy share a dissatisfaction with how things are arranged. In the past it might have been more like a religious impulse than a scientific impulse. It's what you might call a holy dissatisfaction with the fact that wishes can't come true, that you can't make things better, you can't have what you want - not in the sense of material things, but something that can satisfy you ultimately. Whatever literary fiat you make you still want something different." - CNB

One of the jobs I set myself is to make it convincing that realistic and ordinary people are inhabiting fictional worlds where the miraculous and the unreal and the bizarre and the awful don't happen--then project them into a world where such things can happen." - RG

"One of the things I tend to write about is the solving of mysteries, or of mysterious things coming to be and people trying to understand them." - RG

"The mysteries that have intrigued me are those moments when the world exfoliates in some sudden, surprising way." - TMD

"One of the values of magic, the humanist-magical option, is to say that man is really here to learn, to understand everything, and to gain powers from nature because God has provided nature to give powers to man." - RG

"I'm not really interested in solving problems. I don't really have answers. My wife says 'There's all this funny uncertainty in your writing. Not only the characters are always asking questions, the narrator is always asking questions, ending sentences with question marks.' Maybe because it's really a literary endeavour, to make people excited and affect them emotionally and put them in a circumstance, in an ongoing narrative. It's a philosophical proposition, but you can only support it as fiction. People wouldn't read philosophical romances if they didn't have some other kind of quality. I just wanted to write fictions where I could make the rules and have what I wanted and also get them published. I had to think of some way to cast these things in terms shared by readers. I think they're good, very challenging limitations. SF is a shared universe of rhetoric. I have been peripheral to it. I like rhetorical devices, to see what can be done with them, especially how you can, without changing their assumptions, make them come out more affectingly so they touch people in new ways." - CNB

"A lot of people are very irritated by [a] kind of self-reference, and I am too. You're engaged on a primary level with the events. Everything else is extra. If you don't engage on a primary level, if the primary level is a level of self-reference than it's repellent. I think that there is a movement in literature that is, maybe call it post-post-modernism, but maybe it's just post-modernism which is a sense that there is a duty to entertain, that fiction is stories, that there is a certain fascination (so you might call it magic realism, or something like that), a certain fascination that literature has to have in order to do anything. Way early on I figured out that maybe the distinction was that modern literature contains symbols, whereas this kind of literature that I'm talking about is symbolic, doesn't contain symbols, but is a symbol. It is itself a quest or a journey or one…

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I like to think that barely comprehensible as this is now, when I look at it in the future it will have matured into the finest impenetrable gibberish: "3th"? Really? "Immaculate"? Like PauI Eddington? Few would call me "warm blooded" 100? When somewhere there's a textbook denigrating my cadences

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Good that C4 has put it up for streaming. Unfortunate that their screenshot promo makes it look more like Cleopatra (also 1963). Skeletons, harpies, Talos, the hydra? How are they supposed to draw in new viewers? This is the pic that'll sell it.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Dawdling through assorted English fims of the 60s, late period dissipated Wilfrid Lawson turns up regularly but briefly. I thought he seems weirdly familiar. Watching DG again and its reveal of the final portrait, I thought: My God, it's predicted Wilfrid Lawson's collapse

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Two decades-long mysteries solved at last! Illustrators I used to see in the colour supplements in the early 80s: Janet Woolley Mordillo

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Fresh from the pages of Punch, May 1955, it's Capsulysses ! Ronald Searle imagines how a schock film adaptation of The Odyssey might look. scans from the great ronaldsearle.blogspot.com (no alt-text - images too detailed, and half my keyboard is dying)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

To be ever so ever so slightly fair, Nigel looks the right age to have watched the original broadcasts of 1970s ITV series The XYY Man.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Ancient Gaul's Eye View Of Britain - From Our Own Correspondent, Paris The Times 19 Oct, 1966 explaining the recent popularity of Asterix includes these comments from René Goscinny

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

archive.spectator.co.uk/article/31st...

Brussels MR HOWARD, Home Secretary, you have a reputation as a Euro-sceptic, justi- fied or not. Allow me to suggest to you another reason why it is nonsense to sup- pose Britain is now at the 'heart of Europe'. We British can live here on the continent. Under basic EEC principles, we can work here. But if we are so foolish as to have our children here, in the conti- nent's broadly excellent maternity hospi- tals, we run the risk of forfeiting, by your laws, what is most precious in their inheri- tance. When I look into the faded-denim- blue eyes of my seven-week-old daughter, Lara Lettice, the injustice almost chokes me up. Home Secretary, my daughter is a Belgian.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

THE ICE HARVEST (2005) - black comedy neo-noir at Christmas - directed by Harold Ramis, with Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Oliver Platt (as the most incredible arsehole friend). I think this release got missed by entire continents. Took me 15 years to discover it existed.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

If you have Disney streaming, looks like rights have finally been cleared for The Brave Little Toaster. Much the same ideas as Toy Story and there's hosts of pieces about how *memorable* (or "traumatising" if you're just weak & whiny) it was for several generations of viewers.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Ah, cinema classic "Deadly Weapons" 1974 with Chesty Morgan. Brings a whole new approach to suffocation.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

"Americans United to Beat the Dutch" tells all National Lampoon April 1973

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I couldn't figure why S. Clay Wilson work seemed so familiar 15 years ago, but today's tributes to John Blanche fantasy and sf gaming illustrations from White Dwarf, Sorcery! Warhammer when I was 9-13 are obviously what I was trying to recall for form, detail, colour, violence

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (3)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (2)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (1)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Oh, at the time it was PRESTIGE! the new brand of mature tv drama alongside Thirty-Something, Twin Peaks, Wiseguy, Northern Exposure.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Of course one mustn't overlook White's stirling work on behalf of the paedophile community, offering them succour and assisting in publishing numerous infamous child-fucking apologetics TW in Izzard #9 (Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden), 1987

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Ronald Searle covers for original hardback and Penguin paperbacks of Angus Wilson

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

And just to finish off, Amis's valediction to SF-reviewing with a slightly too-eager satisfaction in the cries of his gored oxes:

Although I have no idea how the fans will take my departure, I do have the comfort of knowing how it will be greeted by the practitioners. They never really liked me. Richard Cowper used to write in suggesting that I be made The Observer's Antarctic correspondent; Christopher Priest believes that he must have accidentally run over a sweetheart of mine in the distant past, and Michael Moorcock has offered to crack my head against that of the paper's literary editor if he ever lets me near a Moorcock again (8 May 1977).

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

The baffling flipside to this during his sf critic period was his persistent praise of Ron Goulart, a workmanlike sf humorist - helter-skelter simulations of a future fractured California at its mostest - comparing him to the best of Vonnegut

Amis hailing Goulart as the inheritor of Vonnegut's mantle, for his "superb poise" (16 April 1972), for being "blessed with an angelic style . . . he can never write a bad sentence" (28 January 1973), and for a "vision as genuinely comic as his style" (16 November 1975).

As literary editor of the New Statesman, Amis devoted the arts section of one issue to coverage of many different aspects of science fiction, and again he chose to review Goulart as the new Vonnegut:

"Critics are always saying of Goulart's work, and of SF in general, that it is basically admonitory in design. It is not. Goulart remains an obtrusive reminder that SF, like any other form, is equally dependent on the irresponsible play of ideas, words and wit . . . most comic SF novelists do not write comedies at all (unfunny things happen and people merely say funny things about them) . . . the most valuable property [Goulart and Vonnegut] share is something very fundamental—a satiric ear for America, refined and intensified in the free-fall of SF" (New Statesman, 14 April 1978).

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

From his days as The Observer SF critic a mere half century ago young Martin Amis shares his cheery opinions of Christopher Priest and his works:

"Christopher Priest's Inverted World, for instance, might just as well have been called Christopher Robin Visits the Fifth Dimension" (18 August 1974).
"It is not so much that Mr Priest is boring as that he is interested in boring things: he couldn't drink a cup of coffee without telling you the approximate radius of the saucer" (4 April 1976).
When Priest says in a foreword that his stories explore characters under stress, Amis replies that they "explore the kind of stress that only a foul-minded SF writer would care to put people under" (23 February 1975).

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Charles Wood's / Jack Gold's Red Monarch (1983) - an earlier British black comedy about Stalin - pulled the same non-Russian, non-RP, regional accents trick.

Colin Blakely as Stalin and David Suchet as Beria

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