Just Finished Reading: Escape to Earth edited by Ivan Howard (FP: 1963)

Yet another book that’s been sitting on my shelves for far too long. I think it’s one of the (large) pile I brought with me from London that I ‘bought’ off one of my team by paying for his left-over books in jars of coffee. Always a good deal I thought!

Anyway, this was a pretty standard collection of six short stories from 1952 – 1957. Readable if not exactly exciting they came across as typical of the age and the 50’s American culture they came from. They even had aliens using 50’s idiom without any pretence of it being anything other than contemporary speech aimed at contemporary teenagers. Sloppy but quite amusing in its way. About the only story that quite intrigued me was Doomsday’s Color-Press by Raymond F Jones which concerned a small town news editor using symbolic logic to manipulate events in her town in order to prove a theory of social control. Reading like an episode from The Twilight Zone it was quite clever and I found it interesting enough to give me much food for thought long after the story and the slim volume (a mere 173 pages) was finished. One definitely for SF addicts only.

[2015 Reading Challenge: A book of short stories – COMPLETE (20/50)]