rats to 2022

My article about James Herbert's Rats - which, I'd argue (riffing on an idea from Stephen King), did for British horror writing what the Sex Pistols did for popular music - is in the current edition of Focus. (Is it time to renew your BSFA membership?).

You see, I 💗 the 1970s and I think there's a lot that you can say about the decade (which, naturally, has some intriguing parallels with our own) through talking about 'the scary and/or menaced animal' trope in the genre fiction and cinema of that time.

I hope to developing this theme further, in a paper I'm working on that's provisionally titled, 'Following the river of death downstream: animals in genre fiction and film during the British 1970s'; I had hoped to present this at Once & Future Fantasies in Glasgow this summer but other life commitments have supervened. The paper's going to take a little longer (not meant in a Harlan Ellison 'LDV' sense) and I won't be in Glasgow this July.            [this para edited in March 2022].

Still: look out for 'A Kinder Scout trespass of a day: walking the 2020s with Mack Reynolds' in a future Banana Wings installment:

"One hostile reviewer of Mack Reynold's ‘Earth Unaware’ described it as “a politically contradictory 1960s thriller with bad characterisation”; I’d urge this, though, as not a bug but a feature – friends, we’re living in a politically contradictory 1960s thriller with bad characterisation."

On that happy note... here's wishing you all the very best for 2022; hope it brings you everything that you're hoping for (for progressive, anti-racist/ anti-colonialist, pro-feminist, pro-LGBTQ+ values of 'everything', naturally).