Dr Simon Reads...

  Here we go with arguably the first “rock opera”, although SF Sorrow by the Pretty Things makes some claim to this. Where The Who differ from the Pretty Things, however, is that Tommy is more deliberately operatic in nature, whereas SF Sorrow may have an over-arching biographical story, but it is comprised of songs that each fundamentally stand on their own. In some ways, Pink Floyd’s The Wall will build on both of these traditions – while it tells the story of the unhappy childhood, unhappy marriage, and unhappy success of its protagonist, each track more or less stands alone. With Tommy, however, many of the tracks are linking refrains, and returns to leitmotifs that run throughout the album. Listening to the whole thing, it’s unsurprising that Pinball Wizard is the only single from it, since it’s also the most entire and self-contained song. The plot starts with the apparent death of Captain Walker in the Great War, leaving his widow to raise his infant son Tommy alone (The...

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.   Margaret St. Clair     Born in Kansas in 1911, St. Clair (nee Neeley) had a fairly “lonely and bookish” upbringing after her father died when she was 7 years old , but otherwise doesn’t seem to have been plagued by the trials and tribulations that many of the authors in this series have had. She moved to Cali f ornia , where she graduated from UC Berkel e y and married Eric St. Clair, and the two of them did lot of travelling. She was also interested in Wicca, which certainly informs her writing . She died in 1995, but didn’t have any more publications from 1971 onwards . She’s the third and final woman to feature in Appendix N ...