A Day for Tigers

...it's 1955 and you've just moved house. You go to the local newspaper shop for your 'Beano' and find they have a rack filled with 'Astounding Science Fiction', 'Weird Fantasy', 'Wonder Stories', 'Mandrake the Magician', and 'Green Lantern'. To top it all, they have 'The Eagle', with its sensational Frank Hampson illustrations of 'Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future'. These comics showed me that Life Has No Boundaries, and set my imagination free and on fire. To mention only the magazines is to deny the influence that 'Flash Gordon' had when, for the princely sum of three pence, my mother took me to the Church Hall film show across the road and left me for an hour to soak up the spectacle of flashing, smoking, sparkling spaceships dodging Emperor Ming's Death Beams to rescue Dale Arden, with the help of strange men in tights. Sci-Fi, I Love You. There. I've said it. And now there's no going back. In this book I have tried to recreate the sense of discovery that I felt when I first encountered it so if, like me, you are still seven at heart and also, like me, still in love with the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I hope you find that heart again within these pages. Bill Allerton