This book brings together all of David Langford's sf parodies and pastiches. The first part was published in 1988 as The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge, Odyssey Two and is long out of print. I commented in a review of that book that the parodies it contains tended a little towards undergraduate humour, but they were early work. The pastiches in the second half are - for the most part - rather more polished and substantial. The Spear of the Sun (first published in the British sf magazine Interzone) is not just a G.K. Chesterton pastiche, but indeed is a clever meta-fiction, set within an alternate universe where Chesterton wrote science fiction and popularised the genre in the UK before Hugo Gernsback could get a look in. Out of space, out of time is an interesting piece of Lovecraftiana. If looks could kill came from the shared-world anthology Temps (properly, the second volume, Eurotemps). There are also some E.E. 'Doc' Smith pastiches which are nearer to the earlier parodies, one of which - the resoundingly-titled Sex Pirates of the Blood Asteroid - dates from 1979, earlier than most of the entries in the second part. The whole is well worth acquiring. ( )

Langford has always been a brilliant critic, with sharp, sarcastic wit and a great command of the English language (along with a degree in Physics).

As he explains in the foreword, parody is a great criticism tool. Very good authors are practically impossible to make fun of - in the actual parody sense, at least - in most cases you are forced to insert completely unrelated elements, like anachronism or pop-culture references - as in the case of "Bored with The Rings", but that's not a real parody.

Also, as he eminently points out in the same foreword, a good parody is a short one - and it's also very tiring to compose.
Hence, the relative scarcity of the genre. This book(let - a mere 220 pages) collects all his works in the area, including a couple which are more properly homages than parody (Lovecraft and Conan Doyle).
Some of them appeared originally in magazines or other books, but they are quite hard to find out.

I am giving this a very high rating considering that I really like Langford as a critic (even more than as a novelist) and so I am sort of a fan of his.
It could also be a great gift for someone who likes "Golden Age" SF - alas there is nothing regarding cyberpunk or more recent tropes/styles. ( )