the pointless weblog

Tales From The Galaxies was a science fiction anthology published in 1973 by Pan Books. 

This anthology contains four stories (The Red Stuff by John Wyndham, Miss Inman and the Kloots by Amabel Williams-Ellis, The Odour of Thought by Robert Sheckley and Exploration Team by Murray Leinster) and also a comic strip reprinted from Astounding Stories (The Heritage, which was illustrated by Malcom Stokes). The cover was illustrated by Alan Lee.

There’s a single illustration in the book, which is a picture of a Kloot from the story that is about Kloots. It was drawn by Mike Jackson. It’s really lovely.

The book doesn’t mengion who wrote the comic strip that they reprint. All it says was that it was illustrated by Malcolm Stokes and originally published in Astounding Stories. It doesn’t even say when it was first printed and just lists it as copyright unknown. It also feels like they’ve not printed all of it. I quite enjoyed it though, due to dinosaurs, and the spacemen’s incredibly haggard faces.

THE END, maybe.

The Aliens and Space Warriors top trumps set was released by Waddingtons in 1992. The set contains 30 cards, plus a title card with the rules on the back.

By the 90s, Top Trumps monster artwork had gone into serious decline from their Horror top trumps heydey. This pack of Aliens and Space Warriors was pretty uniformly disappointing. With the incredible Oblit Fet card, though, it was nice to see them keep their tradition of mild copyright infringement going, so it wasn’t all completely bad.

Also at some point between the early 80s and the early 90s, packs of top trumps went from having 32 cards down to having 30. If that terrifying rate of decline has continued, the poor children of today would only get 26 cards in a  pack. It would hardly be worth it.

And I know that the Smet is supposed to basically be a Tribble or whatever, but he really reminds me of a Jib-Jib, possibly the best Fighting Fantasy monster of them all. A Jib-Jib gone all fat and pampered.

These two packs of Horror Top Trumps were produced in the early 80s by Waddingtons. The first pack can be seen here.

I prefer the first pack, really, although this one still has a few absolutely brilliant cards (Death used to haunt my dreams until I was at least 12 or so). It’s just that the first pack seems wildly demented whereas most of this pack is relatively sedate.

These two packs of Horror Top Trumps were produced in the early 80s by Waddingtons. Each set had 32 different cards in it, so when you played with both packs games were guaranteed to last for at least a few days. The second pack can be seen here.

These are undoubtedly the best packs of Top Trumps anyone will ever make. The pictures are all pretty much perfect, the categories and numbers are balanced just about right (although there are a couple of cards that are so weak you can’t ever hope to win with them), and also there is blood everywhere. So much blood.

And of course there’s Godzilla wearing a bowtie.

The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind Space and Time was a magazine series from 1980, published by Orbis. It was one of those things where they take a book, cut it up into 12 smaller pieces, and make you collect it each month and put it in a binder until it was complete. This probably cost twice as much as the book would have done in the first place.

This is the only copy of The Unexplained I have, annoyingly. Although, as this contains aliens, spaceships and the Loch Ness monster, I’m not really sure what else they could have had in the previous 11 issues. Crop circles I suppose, and maybe the Crabbus Man.

The best article in it is the one about close encounters with aliens, due to the illustrations.

I really want to meet an alien I think.

I found the magazine in a box full of my dad’s old physics magazines from the 70s in the loft. Inside it was a cutting from a Southend newspaper about UFOS. Although I’m not sure if he’d kept the cutting because of that or because of the beautiful lady on the other side.

I’m not sure which would be a worse and more guilty secret for a physicist - an obsession with UFOs orwith grubby Essex page 3 knock-offs. Or maybe he just really wanted a fur coat.

You can read the whole of this issue of The Unexplained below if you dare.

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