Galactic Journey: Venus Plus X

We begin the year with a retrospective look at the future, through the eyes of someone of today pretending to be from yesterday. Wait. What?

Last summer, we noted our admiration and appreciation for an intrepid time traveller, reviewing the SF magazines of the past through the slow glass of 55 years, and chronicling his findings at Galactic Journey. We later posted an interview with him, which we recommend checking out if you haven’t already.

There is so much to enjoy about somebody in 2015 reviewing 1960’s SF as if it were new – the knowing references to ‘new’ writers like R A Lafferty as ‘a fellow who may surprise us some day’, the reminders that even writers now acknowledged as giants of the field occasionally produced work that was less than well-received – but one of the greatest pleasures for your friendly neighbourhood Gateway is to see books we consider to be (and publish as) classic SF reviewed as new titles. As it was with Theodore Sturgeon‘s Venus Plus X  . . .

Ted Sturgeon wrote a book about sex.

It appears that Sturgeon has always wanted to write “a decent book about sex,” – how it affects our society, not the act itself. At least, that’s what Sturgeon says in the post-script of his strange new novel, Venus Plus X . . .

You can read the full review at galacticjourney.org. And if you can leave the site without losing hours going back through the archive for ‘contemporary’ reviews of the ‘latest’ issues of Amazing Stories, Analog, Galaxy, If, F & SF, and the like then you have more self-control than we do!