Colour me olo, there's a new kid in town

Laser-wielding scientists have discovered a new colour, but unlike sci-fi equivalents it's unlikely to turn the world into ash

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I've expressed my feelings about science fiction many times before in this column. Probably too many. A big fan in my 1960s teens, a bout of illness in the 1970s let me binge all the greats - Vonnegut, Ballard, LeGuin, Dick, Pohl, Bester - overdosing so badly that I never wanted to read sci-fi again. Looking back now as emotionally retarded pseudo-intellectual sci-fi fans appear to be taking over the world, I think my immune system was telling me something. However, this allergic reaction doesn’t apply to the closely related genre of fantasy (or gothic, or cosmic) horror. I still can cringe a little to M P Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland or the entire oeuvre of H P Lovecraft.

One of Lovecraft’s stories, “The Colour out of Space”, struck me particularly hard. A meteorite lands in a tiny community in the New England woods, containing globules of a weird colour that isn’t in the solar spectrum: it has unpleasant effects that consume all living animals, plants and humans and turn them into grey ash. Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to film this story; hard work given that it’s not in the Technicolor spectrum either. Perhaps the nearest anyone has come is Alex Garland’s 2018