A Day for Tigers

…it’s 1955 and you’ve just moved home. You go to the local newspaper shop for your Beano and find that they have a rack filled with ‘Astounding Science Fiction’, ‘Weird Fantasy’, ‘Wonder Stories’, ‘Mandrake the Magician’, with the occasional ‘Green Lantern’. To top it all, they have ‘The Eagle’, with its truly sensational drawings by Frank Hampson illustrating the stories of ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’. 

I found within the pages of these magazines that Life Has No Boundaries. I’d always suspected that our boundaries were self-set, and these ‘pulps’ as they were known, set my imagination free and on fire with all kinds of possibilities. 

To mention only the magazines above is to deny the influence on my early years that ‘Flash Gordon’ also had. Tuesday evenings, for the princely sum of three pence, my mother took me to the Church Hall across the road and left me for an hour to soak up the spectacle of grinding, smoking, sparking spacecraft dodging Emperor Ming’s Death Beams to rescue Dale Arden with the help of  men in lumpy tights.

I was blown away by the breadth and scope of it all. 

Sci-Fi, I Love You. There. I’ve said it. And now there’s no going back. 

In this book I have tried to recreate something of the sense of discovery that I felt when I first encountered this kind of story so, if, like me, you are still seven at heart, and also, like me, fell in love with the grand and the not-so-grand of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, then I hope you’ll find your heart again within these pages.