Books by Bill Allerton

They're all in here... Seasons, Life- Change, Wishes, Cookery, Love, Sex, Death and Obsession, Giving, Hope, Need, Guile, Motorcycles, Guns, Trees and Bananas... plus a smattering of old Japanese Brake Parts.This collection of short fiction has been a long time coming... written over a period of years they have now been reworked and collated for the first time in this Edition.If you wish to be surprised (and I hope delighted) by the change of direction presented in each story, then this is the book for you.My dearest wish is that you open your mind to any eventuality, sit back, and travel with me along unfamiliar tracks of discovery...

...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

Julius McEarly, in a surreal landscape of his own metaphoric inner thoughts and haphazard projections of reality, is a man on the run from a previous life. He sees himself as a Fish... but not just any Fish... A Capital Letter Fish... a Noun Fish... moonlit of the Scales and slick and agile of the Fin. In his search for Anarchy, Freedom and Love, with perhaps along the way just a little Immortality, his dearest wish is to become ordinary and rejoin The Shoal. Struggling to survive in a world where 'Normality' is under a process of constant revision, he finds his future placed in the hands of an eleven-year-old Tinker girl... whose hair is a bright conflagration upon her head, whose lies wisp her teeth like chicken feathers, and whose eyes are blacker than he ever saw on a Kipper. Enter The Fox...