Adrian Mitchell

A selection of science fiction novels from my shelves

I hope you’ve gotten off to a great reading start to 2024! What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading this month?

If you’re new and curious about my rationale for the perimeters of my site, check out this recent interview and podcast. And follow me on Mastodon if you don’t already as I no longer post on my Twitter account. Also make sure to check out the previous installment of this monthly column

And, most importantly, let me know what pre-1985 SF you’ve been reading!

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

Adrian Mitchell’s The Bodyguard (1970) might be one of the oddest dystopias ever written.
Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) is a fascinating peek into her vast oeuvre of disquieting visions. While I read it before I started my site, a friend reviewed it for my guest post series on Wilhelm’s fiction. As I recently covered Wilhelm’s far lesser known anti-Vietnam War novel The Killing Thing (1967), her work was on my mind.
M. John Harrison is rightly famous for his Viriconium Nights sequence: The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), and In Viriconium (1982). If you enjoyed them, I highly recommend tracking down his first novel — The Committed Men (1971). From my review: “Possessed by destructive melancholy, the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptical UK–where political powers have sunk into oblivion–attempt to recreate a semblance of normalcy. Clement St John Wendover, teeth long since rotted, still administers to the skin diseases and ailments of his one-time patients although he cannot cure them. […] Gathering together a troop of “committed men” (and a woman!), Wendover sets off across the corroded landscape with a newborn mutant child: a new species for an altered Earth or an accidental abnormality….”
I recently covered a Barrington J. Bayley short story in my cities of the future series and it reminded me of his most extreme moments of off-the-wall invention — The Garments of Caean (1976) immediately came to mind.

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(Roger Phillips’ cover for the 1972 edition)

3.5/5 (Good)

“[Lens] Rossman’s narrative is both single-minded and rambling, a tangle of facts and fantasies, distorted sexuality, obscured dates, anti-feminism, glorified brutality and narcissism” (153).

Adrian Mitchell’s sole SF novel The Bodyguard (1970) is a perverse romp through a diseased England viewed through the eyes of an equally diseased narrator. Lens Rossman’s deathbed ramblings of his “adventures” and “training” as a B.G. (bodyguard) in his fight against “The Rot” spread by leftist subverts, is, as the “editor” of the narrative indicates in a hilarious afterword, “a tangle of facts and fantasies” and “glorified brutality” (153). Mitchell presents Rossman’s account as a ghastly artifact of a pre-revolutionary era while simultaneously suggesting that the excess Continue reading →