'The Furies' was serialized in the UK digest Science Fantasy in 1965, then published in novel form in the UK in 1966 by Hart-Davis. This US edition (192 pp) was released by Berkley Books in January 1966; the striking cover art, among the best on any sci-fi paperback of the 1960s, is by Paul Lehr.
The novel is set in the UK in the late 60s. First-person narrator Bill Sampson earns a comfortable living as a comic book artist. Accompanied by his Great Dane 'Sek', Sampson is a familiar figure in his small Wiltshire town of Brockledean.
As the novel opens it's a fine day in late June, and Sampson is having a beer at the Basketmaker's Arms, the local pub. There a fellow patron shows him a provocative newspaper story about an unusual incident in Dorset: a farmer had a near-fatal encounter with a wasp a yard in length, with a foot-long stinger.
It soon transpires that this is no solitary event; reports of the giant wasps begin to trickle in from other parts of the UK, all with the same ominous implication: the wasps - or, as they come to be called, the Furies - attack humans and larger animals on sight.
As Bill Sampson is about to discover, his world has been invaded.......by entities unlike any Mankind ever has faced before........
'The Furies' is worthy of five stars. Although it's the first novel Keith Roberts ever published it's also his best, and one of the best sf novels of the 1960s.
Perhaps because it was his first novel, Roberts writes with a clear, declarative style that is much like a documentary in its approach to narrating the trials and tribulations of Bill Sampson and his fellow survivors of the insect invasion. The more oblique prose style that Roberts would come to employ in his later novels such as Pavane, The Chalk Giants, The Grain Kings, and Kiteworld is absent in the pages of The Furies; the plot unfolds at a quick pace, while effectively communicating the atmosphere of a UK in the aftermath of an apocalypse unlike those usually rendered in the genre.
Another aspect of The Furies that makes it such an effective novel is its refusal to offer succor in the form of the cliches of the genre that were still in place during the mid-60s.
Without disclosing any spoilers, I will say that The Furies resolutely avoids contrivance: there is no entomological genius who discovers a hitherto unknown vulnerability that, overnight, is exploited to bring about the defeat of the wasps. There is no miraculous intervention in the form of a microbe that is sprayed across the countryside to kill the invaders. There is no salvation in the form of a visit from omnipotent aliens who kindly implement the safe and effective extermination of a planet-wide bug infestation. In The Furies, there are only the hapless survivors, and their struggle to live for another day.
Summing up, The Furies retains its status as a sci-fi classic more than 50 years since its publication. While copies of the paperback in good condition can be quite pricey, if you see this on the store shelves, it's very much worth picking up.
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