August Books 7) A Very British Genre

[nwhyte]

7) A Very British Genre: A Short History of British Fantasy and Science Fiction, by peakeA nice short book, ten years old now, looking at the history of sf in Britain, though the title is contradicted by the first sentence, "Science Fiction is not a distinctly British genre." I found this useful as a contextualisation of a lot of the stuff I've already

Comments

[pnh]

I was about to ask what happened on November 23, 1963, but amazingly enough Wikipedia via Google led me straight to it.

[peake]

Given that the whole thing, from original conception through research, writing and finished publication was done in just three months, I'm more astonished that I got things right than that I missed things out. Yes, I should have included more on comics, and particularly I should have done more on TV sf, but they are still areas I know little about and I just didn't have the time to sort out what was significant and put it in. Still, I should have included Dr Who, since I remember watching that very first episode.

[nwhyte]

Whoo. That's not a lot of time. I didn't spot any serious omissions among the authors, just the themes I mentioned. (Also not much on films.) I know it's ten years ago now, but did you do the thing of circulating drafts for feedback, or did time and resources allow?

[peake]

It was around May that I suggested to a BSFA committee meeting that we produce such a booklet for the Worldcon. I then wrote the 20-odd thousand words in, I think, a month. I know i wrote it mostly from memory, going to the reference books to check facts rather than do much in the way of basic research. A couple of people must have looked at it - I'm pretty sure K.V. Bailey saw it - but there wasn't really any free time for that. In lieu of typesetting, I typed the whole lot up on the Apple Mac at the advertising agency where I was then working. I was then reviews editor at Vector, so putting the reading list together was pretty easy, just a mattter of a couple of days. MKS and I put the index together in a weekend, then she read over the manuscript to get rid of most of the typos. I did a cleaned up top copy at work, handed it all over to Roger Robinson to take care of the actual production. And if I recall correctly we had the finished chapbook in our hands just a week before the Worldcon. It was a rush, I certainly didn't have a

[nwhyte]

Fair enough. I hope it at least sold in the numbers it deserved. (I take it that it wasn't a freebie to tempt people to joint the BSFA at Worldcon?)

[blonde222]

Can u remind me, is worldcon this weekend?