Robert Conquest has just died, in his 99th year. He was most famous as the man who saw through Stalin’s Emperor’s New Clothes with ‘The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties’ (1968) (which, when the truth became widely known after the fall of Communism in 1991, his friend Kingsley Amis said should be re-issued as ‘I Told You So, You Fucking Fools’); but I remember him as one of the earliest scholarly supporters of SF, writing with Amis ‘New Maps of Hell’ (1960) and the ‘Spectrum’ anthologies. Unlike many, he lived long enough to be proven right: both about the murderousness of Stalin and the literary worth of SF. May his dear soul be bound up in the bonds of life eternal.