The Bed Sitting Room. Richard Lester (movie). First Flights to the Moon. Ed. Hal Clement (Doubleday, no price). SF: Author's Choice 2 (Berkley, 75¢). One Step from Earth. Harry Harrison (Macmillan, $5.95). The Cube Root of Uncertainty (Macmillan, $5.95). Time Rogue. Leo P. Kelley (Lancer, 75¢). Operation Ares. Gene Wolfe (Berkley, 75¢)

Movies don't belong in a book review, but Baird Searles (our new film reviewer) will probably never have a chance to see Richard Lester's fine science fiction film, The Bed Sitting Room, and I want to call readers' attention to it. The film was released some time ago and seems to have died so quietly that no one I know even heard about it. I saw it last summer only by accident.

The Bed Sitting Room (we would say “one-room apartment”) is a familiar story of England ravaged by the Bomb, but the world of the film has suffered a weird shift into the ultraviolet, so that the familiar incidents one would expect are represented not by themselves, but by absurdities that are only half metaphorical. Plague? Sir Ralph Richardson not only fears that he will turn into a bed-sitting room, but actually does so (in an unfashionable part of London). There are the young lovers – Rita Tushingham, seventeen months pregnant, who announces herself as “Penelope, the celebrated fiancée,” and complains to her lover, Alan, that they really ought not to eat Dad, who has been metamorphosed first into an intelligent parrot and then into a barbecued chicken. The perversion (a gentleman who has spent a decade in a bomb shelter after shooting his wife and mother-in-law as they tried to get in) is of a kind that would astonish Krafft-Ebing. In a very British clinging to business-as-usual, a Mrs. Ethel Noakes (the nearest to the throne) has become Queen; at the end of the film everyone sings:

Mrs. Noakes appears, royally dressed and mounted on a horse under an arch made of junked refrigerators; radiation is declared unnecessary and despair un-British, the sky turns blue, the grass springs up, Penelope's monster-baby turns to a real baby; and it is declared that everything is now hotsy-totsy.