As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping - not to say simple-minded. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams.

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them - a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants - a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence - a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein.

Michael morecock