THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION

This week, writer MCA Hogarth reported that her novel Spots the Space Marine had been removed from sale by Amazon after representations by Games Workshop, which publishes tabletop games and novels under the popular Warhammer 40,000 banner and which heavily feature “space marines”.

“…Games Workshop stated that they believe that their recent entrée into the ebook market gives them the common law trademark for the term ‘space marine’ in all formats. If they choose to proceed on that belief, science fiction will lose a term that’s been a part of its canon since its inception. Space marines were around long before Games Workshop.”

“With their analogue gear, the eggheads in The Stone Tape deduce that the eidolon, which manifests itself in a woman’s scream, was a mass of data awaiting correct interpretation. Tragedies of the past had been reduced to information in a continuous feedback loop. There’s nothing left of you but just enough to repeat the worst moment of your life over and over again. You’re just a dead mechanism…”

“Dick dissects modern insanity through the cypher of Bob Arctor. Arctor is a man on the fringes of society. A man who realises one day that he hates his suburban existence, and so trades it in for a life among the hippie drop-outs, drug addicts and street people of Orange County, California. But Arctor is also Agent Fred, an undercover narcotics officer whose identity is hidden even from his police handlers by a “scramble suit” that makes him appear as an unmemorable blur. When an administrative error results in Agent Fred being assigned to monitor Bob Arctor, Arctor/Fred has the strange experience of monitoring his own activities through the holographic scanning equipment that gives the novel its title…”