BFS Journal #21, by Sean Wilcock and Sarah Deeming (eds) (The British Fantasy Society) | review by Stephen Theaker

At the time of writing (July 2020), it’s been four years since the release of a new issue of the BFS Journal was last mentioned on the British Fantasy Society’s website, and almost four years since the society last announced a new issue on Twitter, but new issues are still being regularly released.

The last issue I reviewed was BFS Journal #18, edited by Allen Stroud (see TQF64). For this issue he moves on to Advisory Editor, while Sean Wilcock takes over as editor. Sarah Deeming is introduced as Reviews Editor, a review section making its welcome return to the publication after an absence of some years.

The first couple of articles are quite hard work. The first tries to persuade us by way of Jungian theory that mazes, water and eating are traditionally feminine. Taking a theory and shoe-horning a few cherry-picked moments from books into it doesn’t tell us anything very much about the books or the usefulness of the theory.

The second, about “Jung’s Concept of the Anima in Fantasy and Science Fiction Pulp”, has a similar problem, and puts forward the nonsensical idea that the UFO craze of the fifties resulted from a Buddhist symbol springing from the “collective unconscious” relating to “the totality of the self”. Hm.

The third article, “When Fantasy Meets Uchronie” by Pascal Lemaire, is genuinely interesting and knowledgeable, telling us about an area of science fiction I knew nothing about: French alternate histories. I’ll be reading some of them in future. It also introduced me to the excellent phrase used for vampire romance in France: bit lit.

The fourth article is a lengthy history of Ladbroke Grove counterculture, taking in people like Pink Floyd, Mick Farren and Michael Moorcock. It’s interesting – I hadn’t known for example how the Notting Hill carnival had begun – but not rigorously academic: many quotations are unsourced, and sometimes even the speaker is unidentified.

Three shorter articles include Allen Ashley’s visit to a witchcraft exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Jessica Pascoe on a guided tour of Middle-Earth filming locations, and three academics talking about a seminar series on international fantasy at the University of Leeds, and setting out their mission statement.

The review section starts with a six-page review of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House which devotes only a few paragraphs to Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House rather than the book. A review of the Nicholas Eames book Bloody Rose tells the reader that we might “love him or hate him”, without explaining why we might hate him.

There are also informative reviews of The Godserfs’ Trilogy, The Girl King and Dragon Heart, all of which make it clear how good (or otherwise) the reviewers thought the books were, which I always appreciate. The issue’s one editorial wobble comes with a review of Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules, which seems to have been published in an early draft.

Otherwise, the egregious errors that plagued #18 have gone, and once you get past the thirty pages of Jungian nonsense at the beginning, there are some good articles with useful knowledge to share. Also, the bibliographies now have the date immediately after the authors’ names, making them much easier to use.

Overall, a good deal of improvement since the last issue reviewed. ***