Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy
By Desirina Boskovich
The mission statement for this colourful casebook is to provide a “secret history” of science fiction and fantasy by cataloguing some lost, overlooked, or uncompleted works. That second adjective, however, is made to do a lot of work. What counts as overlooked? What makes a book or film obscure or underappreciated? I think it’s great to want to “uncover the work of artists who, for whatever reason, did not receive their due.” But what is any creator due? How much recognition or reward? It’s hard to quantify these things, but I wouldn’t have thought Angela Carter or Mervyn Peake overlooked.
What we have here then is more in the way of a grab-bag, with brief articles mixed in with introductions, interviews, and essays on subjects ranging from books and films to architecture, fashion, and video games. It doesn’t add up to a coherent account of anything in particular – lost, secret or otherwise – but there are some interesting stops along the way and even fans will likely be alerted to some items in the great SF&F tradition that they’ve missed.
Alex on SF 
I am finding that a lot of these supposed “lost” stories are lost for a reason…..
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That’s definitely the case for some. In this book my problem was more along the lines of “this was never really lost.” Or underappreciated. I mean, she includes a lot of really mainstream stuff. But it’s a neat book in a lot of ways and I found some interesting nuggets in it.
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“Under appreciated” seems very subjective to me. But that’s what happens when nobodies like these editors get a modicum of supposed power. Suddenly they think they’re hot stuff
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I think I’m pretty hot stuff . . .
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See, you write a couple of blogs and look what happens!
You are a classic case….
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