Forty to fifty years ago though, of evidence of SF either in that present or from earlier decades, there was barely a trace, neither as reprints nor on library shelves. A tendency towards fantasy and horror in Scottish fiction had always been present – taking in George MacDonald’s Lilith etc and some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories (notably of course The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) – as was the tale of the supernatural or, at least, encounters with the devil, whose origins go back even further than Victorian times. And again it leaned towards fantasy, though some of his short stories were more recognisably SF. Alasdair Gray produced his monumental Lanark in 1981 but that was such a unique novel (or four novels) that it hardly represented a trend or a model practicable to aspire to. Only four names spring to mind as being much in evidence at the time J T McIntosh (who did though manage to publish over 20 SF novels,) Angus McVicar – whose output was aimed at YA readers (such books were called juvenile at the time) – and a reprint in the early 1960s of David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which despite its impeccably Science-Fictional title was arguably more of a fantasy than SF as such. In the mid- to late twentieth century Science Fiction by Scottish authors was all but invisible.
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