Getting on a bit now, but chock full of vivid prose and memorable ideas. Nutritious brain food.

Fantastic recasting of the game of Nomic into a mysterious tropical-island scenario; the author is a veteran player of Agora Nomic, and knows his stuff.

The action gets a bit airport boilerplate in places, but the basic idea and execution is solid and ingenious. Required reading for anyone who’s ever thought about trying an enclosed social Nomic…

Definitive tight-angle view of the end of the world, the monstrous Triffids being a simple loose-end tidier behind the grim social effects of mass blindness.

Two stories intertwined, the narration chopping between a beautiful dreamlike fantasy world and a cryptoanalyst poking around grim Tokyo sewers and being hassled by hit-men. Isolation and the nature of reality. Well-crafted stuff.

The story of a child who escapes to the bright lights of London, from a Prisoneresque English village guarded by all-seeing rural policemen. Simultaneously farcical and sinister, and written as perfectly as everything else of Thomson’s.

Magnificently prescient view of a happy, controlled utopia; socially-engineered citizens pouring money into entertainment that requires spurious equipment, and never daring to be alone…

Bit of a clich

Scattered with comic gemstones throughout, but it all seemed a bit to slapdash and incoherent, to be honest.

A nicely-set tale of the infectiousness (the joys and the dangers) of arbitrary patriotism.

Aha, it’s been reprinted! I found the original buried in a teetering bookshop over the weekend. Light 1940s sporting humour on the surface, but a surprisingly solid look at game psychology underneath.