Science fiction authority Phil Harbottle continues to deliver some fantastic British Science Fiction-focused videocasts on YouTube, the project largely now focused on newly published books and magazine stories arising from his activities as a literary agent.
Episode 87 charts the story of one of SF author John Russell Fearn‘s best known stories, Zero Hour, first published as “Deadline” in Canada’s Star Weekly in late1952. He also details the battle between publishers to retain Fearn as one of their major authors – one publisher failing to do that after delaying payments… a situation I’m sure many of you reading this will, sadly, be familiar with. As ever, Phil offers the full history of publication, with a look at some of the rare editions in his incredible book collection, and reveals how recent editions utilise a restored full version of the adventure.
“It is undoubtedly one of Fearn’s best stories,” Phil says of Zero Hour, “working brilliantly as a science fiction story and as a mystery/suspense novel. Gordon Fryer is a man who discovers the exact future moment when he is due to die by accident at a relatively young age and so sets out to change his future history. The scientific process that reveals his demise also provides photographs of him at future intervals. But despite Fryer’s best efforts to change things, each of the photographs becomes a true record, and suspense builds as the deadline of the final photograph comes ever nearer…”
Comic fans will be interested to know that, in the 1970s and 1980s Zero Hour was also be republished in France by Aredit as a graphic novel, as were many others of his Scion novels. “So highly did the comic strip publishers regard the story,” ” Phil notes, “that, instead of abridging it to fit a single volume, they split it into two episodes, and published it, unabridged, in two separate volumes. A few years later it was reissued in a single double-sized volume.”
Zero Hour was published by Borgo Press in the United States as Fugitive of Time in 2012, with a cover from Ron Turner, specifically commissioned by Phil; and, more recently in Italian, by Luigi Cozzi, with a cover by Romana Nuzzo, who also provided the same publisher with the cover for Caccia al dinosauro by Maurice Renard; and a new interior illustration by Roberta Guardascione.
Episode 88 brought us new attention to John S. Glasby‘s impossible crime novel, This Time Forever, re-published earlier this year by Wildside Press after nearly seventy years out of print. Although Glasby was a prolific British science fiction and genre writer who created the Los Angeles private eye Johnny Merak, This Time Forever stubbornly remained unavailable, while his other works were successfully reprinted.
In the book, a wealthy diamond dealer is found dead behind a door bolted from the inside, the only key still in his pocket and a single playing card clenched in his fist. Suicide, the police rule – until sharp-eyed private investigator Johnny Merak notices the card, and smells murder.
Hired to crack the impossible crime, he plunges into a city where the smuggling trade runs on blood and every suspect carries a flawless alibi. A grieving daughter with no grief. A diamond smuggler with too much to lose. A contract killer who never misses. And somewhere behind them all, a phantom who signs each murder with a card drawn from a deadly deck.
As the bodies stack up and the cards keep falling, the line between hunter and hunted blurs. To name the dealer in this murderous game, Johnny Merak must wager his own life – and pray he isn’t holding a losing hand…
It took some sleuthing by Phil himself to track down a copy of the original book – an investigation that has an unexpected Chinese connection, as he explains in the video.
“Amongst collectors, the only known copy had belonged to the late Robert Adey, an internationally known expert and collector of ‘impossible crime’ novels, famous for his non-fiction reference book Locked Room Murders, published in 1992,” Phil explains (a book so rare a 1979 first edition is being offered for almost £800 on eBay right now, although an independently published revised and corrected version, which we have had no sight of, is listed on AmazonUK for a more reasonable just over £15.
“[Locked Room Murders] became the ‘bible’ of fans and collectors of impossible crime stories,” Phil notes. “Details of the ‘locked room’ plot of This Time Forever had been given in his book, making it a legendary collectors’ item.”
Episode 89, recently released, celebrates the ongoing efforts of Wildside Press to reissue E.C. Tubb’s entire, extensive science fiction catalogue, previously out of print. Sadly, their welcome efforts have gone overlooked by other SF book fans on Youtube.
Wildside Press began reissuing Tubb’s SF work in 2021 with The Warbirds (a revised reissue of his first 1951 novel, Saturn Patrol), and has continued with releases of novels such as the best-selling The Hell Planet (2021) and Stardeath (2022). Several more are in preparation.
Last month saw the release of Venusian Adventure, an atmospheric tale of criminal opportunists, ship-jumpers Thorn and Scrivner, native exploitation, and an El Dorado expedition that prefigured the ancient astronaut theories of Erich von Däniken; and I Fight for Mars, first published in 1953 as by Charles Grey, which opens on an Earth after an atomic war, a dying world: overcrowded, starving, and run by big companies for their own benefit.
Released from prison, a former rocket pilot named John Delmar comes home to find his wife dead and nothing left worth staying for.Then a big man with a stolen fortune offers him a way out—pilot a rocket built from junk, loaded with smuggled weapons, to the one place where mankind still has a future: Mars. The Martian colony has broken free of Earth, but it desperately needs weapons to survive attacks from lobants, mysterious black-armoured Martian creatures. Crash-landed and half-dead, Delmar sets out to learn where the lobants come from – and finds an answer older and colder than anyone imagined…
This new edition features a new introduction by Philip who, in this videocast, relates how enthralled he was by Tubb’s writing as a teenager, despite the anonymity of the author.
“In many of his stories, Tubb attacked oppressive governments, big business, and the ‘company store’ system of exploiting workers and in I Fight for Mars, interplanetary colonists,” Phil notes. “His science fiction became a mirror in which all aspects of slavery, exploitation and monopolies could be reflected. This underpinning of philosophical and sociological insight, coupled with his realistic and logical approach, gave Tubb’s stories a depth lacking in the work of most of his contemporaries.
“As a teenager back in the early 1950s, I used to scour all the local second-hand bookshops and markets in a determined campaign to collect all the previously published titles of my favourite authors. At first, I was handicapped by my ignorance of the widespread use by UK publishers of pseudonyms and house names. The latter device was to prevent a popular byline being employed by a rival publisher and attracting readers away from their own product. So, it came as a pleasant shock when I discovered the first of Tubb’s several pseudonyms by reading I Fight for Mars as by ‘Charles Grey.’ As I read the opening chapters, I was gripped by the flowing, gritty style of writing, leavened with occasional flashes of near poetry…”
“… I Fight for Mars is a book I have never forgotten, not only for the nostalgic interest mentioned above, but because it is such an interesting book itself,” he reveals. “The shocking ideas propounded in chapter three (which I will not reveal here to preserve the surprise for new readers) were almost unique in science fiction at that time. Almost because the famed Ray Bradbury had anticipated part of the theme in his short story ‘The Garbage Collector’, included in his collection entitled The Golden Apples of the Sun [an inducement to re-read my copy of that collection – John].
“But Bradbury’s story is very short, little more than a vignette. It does not explore the central idea in any depth, and Tubb’s handling is far more memorable, with an extra vicious twist.”
Do check out all of Phil’s videos on YouTube. His enthusiasm and love of science fiction will soon rub off on you, and send your scurrying to your favoured bookshop to track down the new editions of classic SF he’s had a hand in seeing reissued – and perhaps become as much of a fan of these sometimes overlooked authors of yesteryear..
Who is Phil Harbottle?
Philip Harbottle is a life-long science fiction fan, regarded as a world authority on the works of John Russell Fearn, whose credits encompass writing “Garth” for the Daily Mirror, and the “Golden Amazon” for Spaceship Away (adapting Fearn’s stories).
He’s also very kindly contributed a number of synopses of early “Garth” stories to downthetubes, which we are adding as time permits.
Back in the 1950s, he adapted some of the Radio Luxembourg Dan Dare radio shows into comics at a young age – the only record of some of these tales known to exist, since very few recordings survive.
• Subscribe to 1950s British Science Fiction YouTube Channel here
• The Fantastic Art of Ron Turner 320pp approx. Large format 11×8.5-format full colour hardback | ISBN 978-1845832353 | Check out our preview feature here
• Available to order direct from Telos Publishing | AmazonUK Affiliate Link | Available to US-based customers through Bud’s Comics and Art |
• Vultures of the Void: The Legacy by Philip Harbottle (AmazonUK Affiliate Link)
Philip Harbottle presents a fascinating guide to British science fiction publishing history
• Buy Across the Ages by John Russell Fearn, adapted into comics by Philip Harbottle here from Lulu
A vintage comic strip by Philip Harbottle, adapting John Russell Fearn’s much admired SF novel Across the Ages, has finally been published – some sixty years after the now renowned author and publisher drew it (Read our news item about this here)
• Books edited or published by Phil Harbottle on AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
• Check out books by E.C. Tubb published by Wildside Press here
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Books, Comics, Digital Media, downthetubes News, Other Worlds, Science Fiction
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