The SYLE Press
The Fratellini Winter they had called it, after the Italian scientist who had first detected the decline in solar radiation. The seasons pass and the cold bites ever harder. The Thames freezes over, stocks of food and fuel run low, and London falls under martial law. That first arctic winter, it seems, was only …
‘It is always nonsense for us that says some are chosen and others left to die. If that should be, it is better not to be chosen.’
‘You mean, we’re all chosen.’
‘No,’ Dadda said. ‘I mean, we are all left to die.’
One night, the island of Guernsey convulsed. As shock followed shock, the landscape tilted violently in defiance of gravity. When dawn came and the quakes had stilled to tremblings, Matthew Cotter gazed out in disbelief at the pile of rubble that had been his home…
London in the late forties: strange shifting times in the aftermath of the war. A motley sample of humanity has washed up on the shores of the down-at-heel boarding house that is 36 Regency Gardens, their mutual proximity enforced by shared impoverishment…
In 1949, Sam Youd – who would later go on, as John Christopher, to write The Death of Grass and The Tripods – published his first novel. As he later said:
I knew first novels tended to be autobiographical and was determined to avoid that. So my main character was a woman …
An Englishman’s home, supposedly, is his castle, and property developer Rod Gawfrey was incensed when a gang of hooligans gatecrashed his son’s party, infiltrating the luxury residence that was also home to his wife’s parents and her sister Jane.
When the storm rages and the avalanche cuts off power and phone lines, no one in the chalet is particularly bothered. There are kerosene lamps, a well-stocked bar and food supplies more than adequate to last them till the road to Nidenhaut can be opened up…
The Chung-Li virus has devastated Asia, wiping out the rice crop and leaving riots and mass starvation in its wake. The rest of the world looks on with concern, though safe in the expectation that a counter-virus will be developed any day. Then Chung-Li mutates and spreads…
Five people enter the Frohnberg caves, three men and two women. In the glare of the Austrian sunshine, the cool underground depths seem an attractive proposition – until the collapse of a cave wall blocks their return to the outside world. Faced with an unexplored warren of tunnels and caves …
A disparate group of Londoners are brought together by Sweeney, a mysteriously charismatic man of wealth, for a luxury cruise in the South Pacific – they know not why. Sailing far from the normal shipping routes, the ship weighs anchor just off an uninhabited tropical island…
‘You’re something of a bastard,’ Andrew said, ‘aren’t you?’ ‘In both senses of the word, as a matter of fact. That’s probably what made her so self-sacrificing. I’m also something of a realist.’ Andrew said...
‘For weeks you were sleeping with my wife and meeting me seemingly as a friend.’ ‘Nothing seeming about it. It started with Carol when I hardly knew you – that first time you came round...
She said: ‘I’m going to leave you, Andy.’ He was aware of a slight shiver that ran across his shoulders and down his spine; he hoped the tremor had not shown. The girl behind the...
Over the week-end, the snow stopped falling. There was a thawing rain on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and on Monday it was clear and cold, with small clouds skating over a chill blue sky. In...
‘I do like you for being old-fashioned,’ she said. ‘No, I suppose he wouldn’t, under the circumstances.’ The last phrase carried a shadow of emphasis. ‘There’s nothing wrong – nothing basically. He’s meeting … a...
‘Everything degenerates into habit – nausea, vanity, everything. For a year after I began drinking beer, I couldn’t stand the taste of it. All I was getting was the satisfaction of being one of the...
‘Extraordinarily rosy-cheeked, that girl.’ ‘Effect of high-altitude living,’ David said. ‘She comes from some tiny village up in the Italian Alps. You get that sort of thing above the fifteen hundred metre level. The small...
It was difficult to tell, looking back, how good a summer that had been. The records gave a statistical answer – at Kew, the century’s fourth best for dryness, the third best in hours of...
The light was poor, the bulbs glowing dully on the inadequate voltage. He ruffled the pages back awkwardly, peering at dates and headlines – back through the early days of scientific reports, dubious prognostications, tucked...
Today the consensus may be that we are heading towards a future of global overheating, but back in the 1960s, when the novel was first published, the talk was of a new Ice Age. In...