Odd Strange Fantasy
By Adam Roberts | February 16, 2012
Categories: Book News
You wait for ages for a book to come along containing a contribution from yourself, and then three come along all at once. First, the Gollancz Masterworks reissue of Stapledon's Odd John (1935) with a new introduction by Y.T.:
Fishbowltastic cover, I think, though of limited relevance to the actual story. Then there's Keith Brooke's anthology of original critical essays Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the Sub-Genres of Science Fiction (Palgrave 2012), containing my essay on SF and Religion called 'Does God Need a Starship?'.
And finally, The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn). I contributed the 'Gothic and Horror Fiction' essay to that one:
So in sum: odd; strange; fantastic.
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July 6th, 2012 at 9:48 am
Just finished reading Odd John and I was immediately struck by the similarity to the X-Men first class story. John is indeed Professor Xavier, he has telepathy and a desire to gather all other mutants. Spooky. I wonder if this book was used as inspiration for the comics? I need to investigate further.
BTW, good intro Adam. Thanks
August 13th, 2012 at 5:39 am
I checked with Stan Lee through his assistant (Mike Kelly) and Lee said that he never read or heard of Odd John. Of course it was published in 1935 when Lee was 13. He could have read it and forgotten about it, or Jack Kirby could have read it (and Arnold Drake claims the X-Men are a rip off of the Doom Patrol). In any case the parallels between the X-Men and Odd John are very interesting. Dennis Power and I wrote a fictional biography of Odd John and his connection with the X-Men
http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret.....djohn.html