The Lunar Tickle

I have just received the complimentary copies of my new collection of stories The Lunar Tickle. I am extremely fond of this book but I know it won't be a very popular one and sales will almost certainly be low because it is a kind of fantasy that is fairly unusual these days, especially in Britain and the US, namely fiction that utilizes non-empirical logic.

The logic that controls the development of the stories in this collection tends to be lateral, i.e. based on word- and ideas- association rather than everyday causality...

I love this kind of fiction but very few other people do... Spike Milligan was the last great exponent over here (his Puckoon is a masterpiece of punnery and absurd comedy), but before him there were writers such as Maurice Richardson, J.B. Morton and many others doing this kind of thing... Lighthearted word-games, absurd ideas and lateral twists of logic.

One magazine that published many of these writers was Lilliput, which was founded in 1937 and lasted until 1960. It was especially good in the 1940s. The cartoons of Raymond Peynet also appeared there...

My favourite ever comic novels, W.E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle and The Cruise of the Talking Fish, are also vague members of this elusive 'non-genre genre'.

I have added this title to my Aardvark Caesar blogsite, which lists all my published books so far.

The Lunar Tickle is available directly from the publisher here or from Amazon. The cover artist is Emmet Jackson, who was also responsible for creating the wonderful cover for my novel The Young Dictator.