Experience (Martin Amis) angry, journalistic reckoning with those journalists who have hunted Amis from tooth to tooth. But Experience is not quite a memoir, nor is it quite a portrait of his father, nor is it really an autobiography. It is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy. In the very book which might, at first glance, seem most exhibitionist, most shamelessly metropolitan, Amis has softly retreated to the provinces of himself. His book often reads like a letter to his family and closest friends. It is sometimes embarrassing to read; the ordinary reader feels voyeuristic, at times almost uninvited, but
Kingsley Amis C. M. Kornbluth, and in "New Maps of Hell" coined the term "comic inferno" to describe a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. Amis further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science fiction anthology series "Spectrum" I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction". Though not explicitly science fiction, "The Anti-Death League" takes liberties with reality not found in Amis's earlier novels, and introduces into his fiction a speculative bent that would continue to develop in others of his genre