After the End...

John Christopher's Cosy Catastrophes

Many of the formative sci-fi authors of my youth were from that school of post-war science fiction that had plied a fertile transatlantic trade from the 1950s through to the 1970s. And this ‘new wave’ of Anglosphere authors of popular, speculative fiction, blossomed in the era of the mass paperback. The pulps were fading, but the genre of the fantastic, the horrifying, and the weird, birthed many an offspring in the 1950s. And some of that new generation living in the depleted, dying empire on this side of the pond, peered at the future through an increasingly dark glass in a tradition epitomised by their predecessor, H. G. Wells.