Future Revisitations

4. This week‘s ‘Out of the Unknown’ entry back in 1966 was ‘Frankenstein Mark II’, a psychological horror tale by Hugh Whitemore.
An early take on the implications of transforming (& virtually replacing) the human body to cope with space travel, this episode is still sadly missing from the archives.

Back to ‘The Illustrated Man‘ & the next in line was Bradbury’s entertaining homage to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
A breezy read with plenty of well crafted twists, but what struck me most was the references to book burning policies, predating ‘The Fireman’ (’Fahrenheit 451‘) by a good year or so.

4. This week‘s ‘Out of the Unknown’ entry back in 1966 was ‘Frankenstein Mark II’, a psychological horror tale by Hugh Whitemore.
An early take on the implications of transforming (& virtually replacing) the human body to cope with space travel, this episode is still sadly missing from the archives.

Cover of a 1942 issue of the SF magazine ‘Astounding’. Cover illustration from A.E. Van Vogt’s story ‘The Weappn Shop’. This shows a 5-tiered building over which a multitude of different coloured lights are shining. A queue of human figures on an elevated walkway are awaiting entrance to the building.

The latest ‘SF Hall of Fame’ pick was A.E. van Vogt’s ‘The Weapon Shop’. Setting aside some curious social philosophy, I can see why he was such an influence on Philip K. Dick - rapid dreamlike shifts of setting & a generous share of ‘cognitive dissonance’.
First printed in Astounding SF in 1942 👇

Excellent news - thanks for the heads-up!

Illustration by James Cawthorn from the original publication of David I. Masson’s story ‘Psychosmosis’ in the March 1966 issue of New Worlds magazine. Image depicts a woman’s face with long hair superimposed on the side of a smoking volcano.

Just finished ‘Psychosmosis’, another tale from David Masson’s ‘The Caltraps of Time’ collection.
In this curious story, uttering
the name of a deceased person subjects the speaker to ‘vanishment’ - an otherworldly ‘crossing over’ to another plane of existence. Beautifully written & very enigmatic.

Close-up publicity photo of David Hemmings from the 1965 Out of the Unknown production ‘The Counterfeit Man’, broadcast 11.10.1965

4. OTD 1965. This week‘s episode was ‘The Counterfeit Man’, adapted from Alan E. Nourse’s 1952 tale ‘Counterfeit’.
A tense thriller involving a malevolent alien masquerading as human aboard a spaceship, it stands up remarkably well. Brilliant central performance from a young David Hemmings too.

I‘m sure many here will be familiar with the ‘Outlaw Bookseller’ channel, but if not here‘s a wonderful place to start - a heartfelt and very erudite reflection on 25 books which have brought many hours of reading joy…
m.youtube.com/watch?v=b9nT...

I was prompted by this to search out the episode I vividly recalled from my childhood - a quasi-surreal story in which Midge the mouse has a dream when the family visit the seaside :)

3. The production went on to win first prize at the 1967 Trieste Fantasy Film Festival.
The photo here shows series producer Irene Shubik receiving the prestigious award, alongside a section of contemporary press coverage.

Actress Yvonne Mitchell as Vashti - sitting in her cocooned underground space facing a screen in an 1966 TV adaptation of E.M. Forsters SF story ‘The Machine Stops’.

2. The 2nd season got off to a spectacular start with an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s remarkably prescient story ‘The Machine Stops’.
Later that same evening, Brian Aldiss was full of praise for the production, which boasted some extraordinary set design, on the BBC arts show ‘Late Night Line-Up’.

OTD 1966. The start of second season of the BBC SF anthology series ‘Out of the Unknown’.
1. Image shown is the cover of the BBC Enterprises document used to promote copies of the episodes for overseas sales - thankfully, some of these copies survived & were subsequently returned to the archives.

Must get to ‘Trillion Year Spree‘ one day…. 🙂

Cover of the US (Mariner publications) release of the 1964 Philip K. Dick novel ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’. Minimalist cover with a soft focus close-up of what looks to be a shop mannequin’s face.

Currently halfway through this gem of a book, marvelling at how PKD manages so many disparate plot elements whilst keeping the main narrative anchored.
At this point, a key character has found himself in a virtual landscape with a talking suitcase for company…
This reader is having a great time 🙂

Same chap who worked on the original BBC Quatermass and the Pit and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 50s - sounds like he had a wild old time in those early days :)

3. My favourite production anecdote from the show. Here we have special effects pioneer Bernard Wilkie remembering how he had created the illusion of a boat sailing along a Martian Canal for the episode back in 1965 - in the days when any form of digital manipulation would have been inconceivable 🙂

Copy of a 1961 collection of short stories entitled No Place Like Earth. Cover shows a large disembodied eye looking down on the figure of a man, with a large rocket and its gantry in the background.

2. The first episode was a very faithful adaptation of a 1951 John Wyndham story entitled ‘No Place Like Earth’.
This image here is of an early Panther anthology edited by John Carnell, in which the title story also incorporates material previously published in New Worlds magazine as ‘Time to Rest’.

A copy of Mark Ward’s superb history of ‘Out of the unknown’, published by Kaleidoscope in 2004, and the BFI DVD release of the surviving episodes in 2014.

OTD 1965. The television SF anthology series ‘Out of the Unknown’ is shown for the first time.
1. A critical & popular success, the show would run for several seasons on BBC2, creatively adapting the works of many well-known SF authors for the small screen.

I love that quote from Calvert describing how the likes of Pink Floyd are more ’upper middle-class‘ Asimov & Arthur C.Clarke, whereas Hawkwind are more ‘Roger Zelazny’ 🙂

Thanks for the heads-up on this - will certainly check these out 👍

Absolutely - one that will certainly stay with me for a long time.

Cover of the 1970 anthology ‘The Science Fiction Hall of Fame’, depicting small machine objects casting deep shadows over what looks like a spacecraft exterior.

My favourite ‘Hall of Fame’ tale so far, ’It’s a Good Life’ brilliantly utilises a focused ‘show not tell’ approach. Although we quickly surmise that something is *very* wrong indeed in the story’s pastoral setting, the way in which the tension is held until the unnerving climax is just masterful.

2025 Sci Fi Scavenger Survey - Your Top 10 Science Fiction Books! AND Your Top 5 SF Series! Just tell me your ALL TIME favourite science fiction books, recent, vintage, any era, any size, novel/collection/anthology, whatever. No whole series, pick single books (which could be from a series)...

The 2025 SciFiScavenger Viewer Survey is now OPEN!

NEW this year, I'm also asking for your Top 5 SF series.

I'll leave the survey open for the whole of October so there's plenty of time to have a think and get your responses in,

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There’s a 1951 John Wyndham tale (writing as John Benyon) entitled ‘No Place Like Earth’ - a tale firmly rooted in the romantic view of Mars as a planet crisscrossed by canals 👍

Two more tales read for the first time from these books - Pohl’s ‘Day Million’ & Delany’s ‘Aye, and Gommorah’.
Some shared themes around ‘personal identity’, albeit the treatments are worlds apart - one somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the other more sobering & understated (and deservedly an award winner!)

Illustration by John Martinez for Brian Aldiss’s story ‘But who can replace a man?’ (from the June 1958 issue of the SF magazine ‘Infinity’). Image shows a male figure dwarfed by a towering robot machine, referred to as a ‘fielder’ in the story.

On to Aldiss’s oft-anthologised ‘Who Can Replace a Man?’
I thought this was wonderful - Aldiss at his playful best as we follow the efforts of several machines in determining their new status after the demise of humankind.
John Martinez‘s fine illustration hails from ‘Infinity‘ (June 1958)

Well there will always be lots of wonderful things to say about the book that’s laying at the bottom of the horizontal pile of course, but I also often hear great things about George Turner’s ‘The Sea and Summer’ 👍

And very nice it is too! There’s a striking simplicity to his style - great eye for composition as well. I believe he was very exacting with publishers about the cover art for his later books (Kiteworld in particular as I recall).

A very distinctive style. I noticed that the first story in the Pavane sequence was also graced by a Roberts cover too:

Cover of a 1966 issue of the British SF magazine ‘SF Impulse’, depicting a scene from Keith Robert’s story ‘Corfe Gate’ - the illustration shows an assembled army (on horseback, holding banners aloft and pulling a wheeled cannon) outside the stronghold of a castle (fashioned after the real life edifice of Corfe Castle in its prime).

On to ‘Corfe Gate’, the climactic last novella of Keith Robert’s extraordinary novel ‘Pavane’.
So a fitting moment to also celebrate Robert’s talents as an illustrator, including contributing many striking covers to SF Impulse, in which the majority of these superlative tales first appeared.