Bought from eBay this was published to coincide with the Beyond This Horizon Festival from 1973 – October 23rd to November 25th to be precise. There were various editions produced from a one off to an ordinary edition. I have the ordinary edition, which was priced at  £1.10.

Bob Shaw has Alter Egoes in this edition and I must confess I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

Ah, eBay turns up another little gem. This time an early short story by Bob Shaw; Departure, in the October 1955 issue of Authentic Science Fiction Monthly. A reasonably big price to pay for the issue, but not too excessive. Although the sporadic searches are turning up less and less to buy it is a treat when something does eventually turn up.

There are some half decent names in the content list too: – Sydney J Bounds, E.C. Tubb, plus some names who seem not to have come forward in time to us with recognizability.

Of course, the first thing I did was read the Bob Shaw story. It’s a quaint little story, well told and atmospheric, and a nice little twist in the end. I think Bob Shaw took a break around about this time as he was unsatisfied with his writing. This is a shame as the story concerns a galaxy spanning space service. Maybe there was a good chance he would have built on this – The Hub, Universe ships and other elements – in additional stories if he had not paused his career.

Seems like creating Themes for WordPress is harder than I remember. There’s a lot of free programs and sites out there but they are just building blocks, whereas I want to generate a theme which is more bespoke on the image front. That wasn’t so easy.

I turned back to Artisteer and even that was a little heavy going.

Plus, for whatever reason, it appears the Artisteer generated Theme was the problem when the PHP version was updated – even though my other blog on the same site has an Artisteer generated theme and there was no issue with that when PHP was updated.

So I basically used that with the Bob Shaw Theme header image. It’s not as Boshy as the original theme, which had Bosh specific images down to the RSS feed, but it will do for a while.

I may or may not get around to working on the theme again. We’ll see.