ice-nine n an isomer of frozen water (ice-one) which is solid at room temperature and causes liquid water to crystallise immediately into ice-nine on contact. Used as a doomsday device, a single crystal of ice-nine would solidify the world's rivers, seas and oceans in a global chain reaction, destroying all life on Earth. Ice-nine was first synthesized by Felix Hoenikker, a Nobel laureate and the father of the atomic bomb in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle (1963).


Following his Fred Hoyle triptych and A Clockwork Orange cover, David Pelham's next contribution to sf was a set of thirteen eye-catching covers for a new mini-series in 1972-73. For this he retained the trademark black covers and contrasting colours used by Aldridge and Grignani but added all white typography and a distinctive computer typeface for the author's name. The sf label beneath the logo was dropped and a banner reinstated across the top of the cover, while the lower quarter became a coloured band which in some cases was incorporated into the artwork: as a switchboard for Sirius, a launch pad for The Space Merchants or a place to prop one's elbows on A Cure for Cancer.

Casting its eponymous orb over Pelham's covers a quarter of a century later, the Autumn 1996 issue of Eye Magazine commented that they 'dignify the books with symbolic images that help to convey the conceptual sophistication of the writing inside'. Which, if interpreted correctly, seems to be saying how nice they look.

The mere mention of magic in an sf novel usually sees it hastily reclassified as fantasy but Black Easter and its sequel The Day After Judgment are not so easily pigeon-holed. For what if black magic was fact instead of fantasy and sorcery was science without the fiction? If demonology was one of the respectable 'ologies' and the rituals for summoning demons, described in medieval grimoires, actually worked then how might the dark arts be manifest today? Such is the premise of Black Easter. It's short on hocus-pocus and has little in the way of legerdemain but as a discourse on method it is highly informative.

To create the greatest piece of performance art the world has ever seen – one in which all Hell, quite literally, breaks loose – a wealthy megalomaniac commissions a magician to summon all the major demons out of Hell and turn them lose in the world for a night. But as the fiends pour forth and the sky begins to boil, reports filter in of cataclysms, nuclear strikes and the start of World War Three. Then a goat-headed devil quoting Nietzsche stops by and it is clear that things have got badly out of hand. Pandora's box, once opened, is not easily closed for the demons have no intention of going home at dawn. Nothing can stop the Apocalypse now; the end is nigh and the sandwich-men are saying 'I told you so'.

The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus is a single-volume edition of the three earlier anthologies, Penguin Science Fiction and More and Yet More. The back of the omnibus has a promotional page for Harry Harrison's Plague From Space which Penguin had evidently planned to publish, but this was scrapped when it was discovered that Sphere Books had the reprint rights and had published the novel the year before under its alternative title The Jupiter Legacy.