The Shipeater

Rob Carter & Jamie Ortiz The Shipeater (1979)
Starblazer was a twice monthly digest sized comic book published by D.C. Thompson running from 1979 to 1991 and featuring, so I gather, a single story each issue, so not much in the way of recurring characters or scenarios. I'm not sure I'd even heard of it until long after its passing and have no memory of having seen it in any newsagent when I was a kid. It seems to have been roughly the same format as all of those Commando type things I avoided like the plague so I probably wouldn't have been looking on that particular rack; but apparently it suffered from terrible distribution, and I expect that, had I ever seen a copy, I almost certainly would have bought it, or at least thought about buying it. Apparently first formulated in 1976, by 1979 when it hit the stands, or a stand somewhere, it nevertheless looked somewhat like those Beano people hoping to wet their beaks in the 2000AD bird bath.

Anyway, I found this one in Oxfam in Coventry and couldn't really not buy it for obvious reasons. As with other offerings from the same stable, neither writer nor artist receive credit so I had to look up their names online. The art of Jamie Ortiz actually seems vaguely familiar, although it's probably more likely that he shares certain stylistic traits with other presumably Hispanic artists, notably Redondo. There's a touch of various Mikes who drew for 2000AD, outstanding dynamic figure work, and great use of shadow; and it has to be said that for all D.C. Thompson's supposed faults as publishers, they tended to employ artists who could actually draw - possibly excepting Grant Morrison in a later issue of this same organ - as distinct from IPC whose annuals were often cursed with eye poppingly wonky sub-fanzine level work. They also had a copy of the 1980 Dan Dare annual in that same Oxfam and it was pretty ropey.

As a story, The Shipeater is your basic modular opera with space cops solving space mysteries, the sort of thing which could quite easily be recycled as the aforementioned Dan Dare or Captain Scarlet or any of those; but there are some pleasantly weird, wonky ideas here which, combined with the wonderful art, make for the sort of thing which would have absolutely blown my nuts off had I chanced upon it back in 1979; and which remains a pleasure to read now that I'm a fat old man sat at the PC in just my underpants.

Apparently there's a shitload of this material due for a reprint, so that will definitely be one to look out for.

Analog November 1966

John W. Campbell (editor) Analog November 1966 (1966 obviously)
The more I learn of John W. Campbell, the less I like, and this didn't help. I've recently been listening to Frank Zappa's We're Only in It for the Money album and have found myself particularly entertained by Bow Tie Daddy, a short jolly burst of ragtime sarcasm.

Bow tie daddy dontcha blow your top,
Everything's under control.
Bow tie daddy dontcha blow your top,
'Cause you think you're gettin' too old.
Don't try to do no thinkin',
Just go on with your drinkin',
Just have your fun, you old son of a gun,
Then drive home in your Lincoln.

Anyway, I get the impression that Analog was probably essential reading for the bow tie daddies of America. This is the second issue I've read, and the first featured Henry G. Stratmann's The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya which is probably the worst short story I've ever encountered.

'What the fuck, Lawrence, man?' I hear you ask. 'Why you be putting yourself through that shit? Man, that's fucked up.'

I was in one of those used book stores resembling the front room of some hoarder - weird smells, nothing in any particular order, and half of the stock piled in random towers here and there. I found this and bought it, being quite partial to a spot of Murray Leinster. Only when I got home did I realise that I'd already read Quarantine World as one of the three collected in SOS from Three Worlds.

Oh well.

Unfortunately, while SOS from Three Worlds is not without charm, it was never anything mind-bending, and Quarantine World is arguably its weakest story; which leaves us with Christopher Anvil's Facts to Fit the Theory, Stewart Robb's Letter from a Higher Critic, and the final instalment of Randall Garrett's serialised Too Many Magicians. There's also a scientific article about alternative dimensions which seemed to be mostly sums and was therefore incomprehensible to me; plus book reviews, letters, some editorial about antibiotics and the FDA, and an advertisement for a five album boxed set from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on the back cover. The issue to follow this one apparently featured Amazon Planet by Mack Reynolds, as summarised thus:

Amazonia, being the only planet colonised by a bunch of fiercely feminist women, was naturally all the more fiercely determined that the other misguided (read: "male-guided") planets of the United Planets weren't going to interfere in any way whatever.

Which made it a l-i-t-t-l-e difficult for a United Planets man to land on the planet—even if Amazonia needed his help badly. But when a little, inoffensive contract negotiator man got into a slight mix up over names—they read his name Guy as Gay—he was in for trouble of types he had never dreamed of. Amazonia has some very unusual marriage customs it seems…

See what I mean?

Anyway, Facts to Fit the Theory is a short story taking the form of memos and letters exchanged between various star colonels and solar lieutenants discussing military protocol as applied to the defense of some planet during an alien incursion, so I couldn't be bothered to finish that one. Letter from a Higher Critic is yet another story taking the form of a letter, this time composed by someone from the far future disputing the facts of ancient history, which is actually our present, and for reasons which aren't really sufficiently novel as to form the basis of a short story; and the title Too Many Magicians probably tells you as much as you need to know about Randall Garrett's thing, which employs the address my Lord in more or less every other sentence, ingeniously features a character named Sir Lyon Gandolphus Grey, and amounts to an unusually long episode of Midsomer Murders written as a tenth generation Tolkien knock off. It isn't quite so bad as Anvil or Robb's contributions, but I nevertheless gave up about half way through. There just didn't seem to be a point in reading any more.

Yup. Excepting one of Leinster's lesser works, this was rubbish, I tell you what. Even Bow Tie Daddy deserved better.

The Wild Boys

William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys (1972)
This was bloody rubbish and it don't make no sense and to be honest I'm surprised Simon Le Bon let him write it because it don't even say anything about the band and none of them are in it and it don't even name any of their songs. Mostly it's just about a lot of boys bumming each other and looking at each other's private parts. Disgusting is what I call it. Shame on you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Seriously, in case anyone ever wondered, Russell Mulcahy who later went on to direct Highlander - which is possibly one of the worst movies ever made - wanted to film Burroughs' Wild Boys, so persuaded Duran Duran to record a song inspired by the book, or at least inspired by his description of the book; he then produced the lavish but essentially ridiculous promotional video for the song in the hope of using it as a showreel to impress upon film studio people just how amazing his big screen version of Burroughs' novel would be if they paid him to make it. I guess they weren't sufficiently impressed because that's the end of the story, aside from me suffering a Duran fucking Duran earworm every single time I picked this up to read it.

I looked all of that up so that you don't have to.

Where The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded all seem to constitute fall-out from The Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys - along with Exterminator! and Port of Saints - were generated by The Job, roughly speaking, specifically as the material taking the form of fiction rather than essays. The shift of focus is difficult to define but is nevertheless tangible with much less actual cut-up material despite the occasional lapse into Cubist or otherwise non-linear narrative. The Wild Boys as a novel works with the logic of a dream, meaning the reader's focus remains in the moment, with the before and after of cause and effect being vague and impressionistic. It feels like it adds up even if it doesn't in terms a mathematician would recognise, which is why simpletons insist that none of it makes any sense, which I would argue is the same as saying that a landscape makes no sense as you move through it. It's all a matter of perspective.

The Wild Boys is a science-fiction novel, one which I personally take as a demonstration of what happens once control systems are disrupted and subverted by the events described in The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded; and what happens is revolution as a natural development, a personal and organic process rather than anything political in the traditional sense.

The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.

Naturally Burroughs equates existential liberty with man on man action, so there's a lot of that going on, possibly as a symbol of moving beyond the known and the authoritarian. Sex is, after all, freedom.

'The new look in blue movies stresses story and character. This is the space age and sex movies must express the longing to escape from the flesh through sex. The way out is the way through.'

This idea, that we are here to go, is further invoked as part of an arguably traditional science-fiction narrative by a full page of very specific references to Clifford Simak's Time is the Simplest Thing in chapter six, a novel centred upon telepathic projection of the self to other worlds. I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised to find Bill reading Simak, although I suspect the appreciation would have been very much a one way street.

If you have trouble making sense of Burroughs, The Wild Boys is probably less of a headache than a few of his previous efforts, and I can see why the Highlander dude thought he could make a movie out of it - although I'm glad that he didn't.

Silas Marner

George Eliot Silas Marner (1861)
...talking of Feminism, whilst I'm not saying that women haven't ever been airbrushed from history, or even that it hasn't been fairly common practice, but the dialogue wherein it is written that all women are amazing and all of their great works have been suppressed by the phallocrats, is bollocks. If you're unsure about this one, ask yourself which names are best remembered as giants of the nineteeth century novel. My admittedly Anglocentric answer would be Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, George Eliot, then maybe Dickens, then, I suppose, a load of other guys and assorted worthy but unreadables. Therefore great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Anyway, we read Silas Marner in school, except as I now realise it was a heavily abridged version excluding all of the bits which weren't directly concerned with Silas himself; which is pretty weird given that it's already a surprisingly slim and breezy volume by nineteenth century standards, and which probably explains why I don't remember anything much about it. A casual remark about George Eliot made by D.H. Lawrence brought me here, along with the revelation that not only was Mary Anne Evans (who wrote as George Eliot so as to evade detection by the penisoid phallocrat man-censors) from my general neck of the woods, but the village of Raveloe - in which Marner resides - seems to have been based on Bulkington, Warwickshire, which is where my dad lived for a while. I spent one of the shittiest Christmasses ever in Bulkington, and have got pissed in the pub upon which I presume the Rainbow in the novel may have been based.

Take that, Alan Moore*.

Silas Marner is a little more Victorian than I usually enjoy, being the pseudo-folkloric tale of a miser whose frozen heart is restored by an orphan with just deserts served to any bad 'uns who happen to be in the vicinity, but Eliot maintains an amazing balance for the duration, never quite allowing anything to slip over into sentiment for the sake of it, therefore allowing her message to unfurl, clear and undeniably righteous, without anyone ending up diabetic.

Eliot's Raveloe is actually Georgian and profoundly rural, seemingly so as to emphasise the onset of change - social and technological - by means of an environment traditionally resistant to the same, where few ever travel to neighbouring villages and everyone is firmly rooted into the soil. The novel was written during the decades which saw the rise of Darwinian thought, social reform, and an accordingly profound shift in the relationship between God and man; so that's what it's about.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from their threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.

Marner is done a great wrong, for which those responsible eventually pay so that it all works out very well for our boy by the end of the book, and all by the agency of what we may as well refer to as karma, but which amounts to cause and effect rather than the usual rewards dished out in recognition of piety. Eliot's initial religious faith was very much open to debate by the time she wrote Silas Marner, and this is reflected in the generally agnostic thrust of the narrative; that is, that she sees the use of religious instinct as morality, but feels no need to dwell on the mechanism - a potentially shocking message for at least some of her contemporaries, and one Eliot seemingly wishes to diffuse by emphasising morality as a constant.

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Because nothing is permanent but change, as Heraclitus apparently wrote, and change would have been a daunting prospect in nineteenth century England at least for the great body of the population. Silas Marner therefore serves as a sort of reassurance, affirming that change, no matter how scary, can be for the better.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' said Mr. Lammeter; 'one feels that as one gets older. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.'

The beauty of Silas Marner is that it presents this argument with subtleties and shade, no recourse to shorthand or the sledghammer pathos of much Victoriana, and is written in a hand which grips firmly, despite the complexity of those long, long sentences. This is a truly great book.

*: This possibly confusing comment refers to Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem which seems to place its author at the cultural centre of everything ever based on a series of spurious - and not even entirely accurate - coincidences associating various significant historical events and people with Northampton.

The Female Man

Joanna Russ The Female Man (1975)
Feminist science-fiction, so I am reliably informed, and one for which I was on the lookout on the grounds of Joanna Russ giving good account of herself in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, and The Female Man being listed amongst the ten greatest science-fiction novels of all time by someone or other, and because it sounded interesting; and yet I'm underwhelmed, doubtless - as some might suggest - because I have a penis and should have stuck to Robert Heinlein writing about mighty men piloting phallic rocket ships.

The Female Man seems to feature four versions of the author meeting up and comparing notes. One of them is from Whileaway, a supposedly far future Feminist utopia. I think my problem stems in part from certain themes having a didactic cadence, where Russ herself has stated that this was not her intention. As a general non-linear and arguably subjective fist shaken at useless arseholes and persons who make life unpleasant, it mostly works, or is artistically valid and at least as much so as the occasional descent into misogyny by Burroughs or Bukowski - here assuming that Whileaway represents a critique of Feminist utopia rather than something to which we might necessarily aspire. Most men are indeed useless sacks of shit, so I don't have a problem with this being pointed out, particularly as Russ seems to take a dim view of nearly everyone. The problem is that whilst certain passages suggest there might be a lot more humour here than is obvious from first glance, it's mostly lost amongst all the grousing and whining, and this muddying of the waters is further exacerbated by the random modernist structure of the narrative - another author doing the Burroughs thing but never quite striking the right balance. The problem, to really break it down, is that The Female Man is a little boring - the rigged matches against sad, saggy, priapic men get a bit obvious and repetitive, and the cubist progression of one scene to the next becomes a chore. I can't disagree with anything she says, but the telling gets in the way. I have no idea how it could have made the top ten anything.

The Vanishing Man

Philip Purser-Hallard The Vanishing Man (2019)
I loved the films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce when I was a teenager, and so much so that I have a vague memory of checking one of the Conan Doyle novels out from my local library, but otherwise I couldn't really care less about Sherlock Holmes. This is one of an ongoing contemporary series relating further adventures of the great detective which is distinguished through having been written by Philip Purser-Hallard, who is great, so here I am with what may be the first book I've bought new rather than second hand this year.

The last Conan Doyle I read was The Lost World which I actively hated, so I'm not sure whether Purser-Hallard gets Holmes right to the standard a Holmes purist would expect, but it feels right to me. My only raised eyebrow was hoisted during a few of the more dialogue heavy chapters, page after page of exposition which is something I've never liked because it always feels as though the author would rather be working on a television series; but on the other hand, I suspect this may simply be part of the Holmesian territory, so it's not a problem.

Most appealing of all from my point of view is that this is definitively a Purser-Hallard novel, as such returning to themes which run through his previous works, notably those of transcendence and spiritual evolution, even to the point of bringing Gideon Beech, the playwright modelled on George Bernard Shaw, back from Peculiar Lives of 2003.

It's not difficult to see why this one held such appeal for Purser-Hallard given the setting of an era during which a number of his thematic preoccupations were in the ascendant - the birth of science-fiction from nineteenth century spiritualism, new ideas about God and humanity and our place in the universe, and a chance to play around with all of this in The Vanishing Man; so we additionally get a stand-in for Madame Blavatsky, proposals hinting at the cosmology of C.S. Lewis' cosmic trilogy, passing references to Hy-Brasil, and an occult detective named Constantine - although patently not the one famed for hanging out with Swamp Thing. Purser-Hallard accordingly stretches the limit of Holmes' universe as far as it will go in the general direction of the fantastic without quite jumping the shark, then bursts the bubble, returning us all to Earth in elegant fashion and no pandering either to expectations of steampunk cliché or any other attempt to jazz things up by turning it into something else entirely.

I'm still not convinced we need new Sherlock Homes in 2019 - although I'll concede there's no harm in it - but if we really must, then I'm very happy to have Philip Purser-Hallard writing it.

Fallen Angels

Jo Duffy Fallen Angels (1987)
Here's another children's comic book to which I turned, having found my brain ill-equipped to cope with D.H. Lawrence after ten in the evening, another children's comic book which I flogged back in the eighties then recently repurchased in a flurry of nostalgia fueled by the realisation that I'm getting rid of this because I'm a big boy now is an essentially childish position. Fallen Angels was an eight-issue series which fell some considerable way short of classic, but was nevertheless readable, and which remains readable thirty years after the sell-by date.

Fallen Angels applies mutants to whatever you would call that trope wherein a bunch of orphans buddy together as a lightly criminal gang for scrapes and japes, as seen in various Dickens things and probably more recently in Marvel's Runaways, except I've neither read the comic nor seen the TV show and am probably unlikely to do either at any point soon. The art is efficient, if a little uneven in places, and would almost certainly have worked better in black and white. The writing is occasionally hokey, explains a bit too much in places, and the routine of reintroducing the characters anew every single issue becomes quickly annoying; and yet the enterprise, once you get past noticing that the furniture wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Michael J. Fox vehicle, is essentially fucking mental, and endearingly so.

Sunspot and Warlock of the New Mutants join a gang which seems suspiciously reminiscent of the Double Deckers, or even the Banana Splits, other members including a pair of super-powered lobsters and Devil Dinosaur, who is an actual dinosaur. The gang has been brought together by Ariel - who reputedly gave Shakespeare the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Tempest - a native of the Coconut Grove, which seems to be an alien place rather than specifically a planet. Being an alien place, the Coconut Grove is stereotypically cool by terms which made sense in 1987 - somewhere between jheri curls and the first Madonna album; and lessons about being who you are, true to your friends and all that shit are inevitably delivered before we get to the final page, none of which is so trite as to detract from this being Morrison era-Doom Patrol or even Umbrella Academy, albeit with the sleeves of its jacket rolled up to the elbows like that twat in Miami Vice; which is why it's a lot of fun and I enjoyed reading it. That's all there is to it.

The White Peacock

D.H. Lawrence The White Peacock (1911)
This was his first novel, rewritten three times prior to publication but never quite shaking off that first novel quality of meandering whilst simultaneously trying just a bit too hard. Prior to this effort, he mainly wrote poetry which shows in so far as that the opening chapters read very much like an accumulation of poetic material - florid descriptions of the natural world, landscape and so on - in which an indeterminate number of characters are embedded like raisins in a currant bun. These characters are naive, vaguely middle-class, and slightly unworldly - possibly for the sake of contrast with the violence of their environment, which itself is rooted in nature red in tooth and claw with the occasional brusque intrusion of earthier, seemingly more substantial working class persons whom, it might be argued, serve as extensions of the environment. Not a page seems to go by without either a rabbit strangling, mention of a sheep killing dog, or some other reminder that the refinement of our civilised lives is an anomaly in the great scheme of things, at least not until we come to the awful, sugar coated sub-Dickensian Christmas celebrations at the close of the first of the three parts into which the novel is divided; and even the festivity is itself briefly punctuated by:

There was a great fall of snow, multiplying the cold morning light, startling the slow-footed twilight. The lake was black like the open eyes of a corpse; the woods were black like the beard on the face of a corpse.

...then right back into the Quality Street choccy box for another couple of dozen pages.

My first guess would be that Lawrence didn't want to take too many chances with his first novel, and maybe thought the swearing coal miners of his own upbringing would alienate potential readers, so he gave us Dickens-lite and so much so that I found myself waiting for some comic misunderstanding based on a pair of gloves having been left on the drawing room table rather than in the parlour as would ordinarily have been the case. The problem is that it's difficult to care about these characters one way or the other, and the first person narrative only serves to muddy their definition - I only realised his name was Cyril after a hundred or so pages. Cyril and his friends seem slight in their wispy thoughts and passions although, as I say, it seems to be on purpose, as this exchange perhaps suggests.

I laughed to see her so enthusiastic in her admiration of my sister. Marie is such a gentle, serious little soul. She went to the window. I kissed her, and pulled two berries off the mistletoe. I made her a nest in the heavy curtains, and she sat there looking out at the snow.

'It is lovely,' she said reflectively. 'People must be ill when they write like Maxim Gorky.'

'They live in town,' said I.

'Yes — but then look at Hardy — life seems so terrible — it isn't, is it?'

'If you don't feel it, it isn't — if you don't see it. I don't see it for myself.'

'It's lovely enough for heaven.'

The point eventually becomes clear, this being the tragedy of the disparity between the dreams and aspirations of these four young people, and how the world actually works; but the absence of forward thrust results in a narrative which more closely resembles music, and probably ambient music at that, so it's only once we reach the last hundred or so pages that anything really begins to feel as though it's saying something, and the way in which all has been kept isolated from the intrusion of the twentieth century at last makes sense.

One of our boys settles into respectable nineteenth century conservatism where the other embraces modernity and the rights of the working man, with Lawrence himself more concerned with what drives their impulses than where those impulses lead.

Of course, I am in sympathy with the socialists, but I cannot narrow my eyes till I see one thing only.

So, I suppose you might say it's a nineteenth century novel waking up to the harsh industrialised daylight of the twentieth century, this being its subject as much as it might be considered a description. Most of Lawrence's major themes are already there, not least the casual homoeroticism and the pagan undercurrent, here most visibly expressed as the death of Annable, the gamekeeper and a sort of Green Man holding out against the encroachment of Christianity; but The Trespasser does at least some of this in half the page count, and without suggesting that the writer has gone into a room looking for something but is now unable to remember what it was.

There was a gap between to-day and tomorrow, a dreary gap, where one sat and looked at the dreary comedy of yesterdays, and the grey tragedies of dawning tomorrows, vacantly, missing the poignancy of an actual to-day.

See, that probably boils the whole thing down to a single sentence, or at least as I understood it; so it's a mostly decent novel, and particularly so for a debut, but mainly in the context of Lawrence's back catalogue.

Sex Pistols - the Inside Story

Fred & Judy Vermorel Sex Pistols - the Inside Story (1981)
Here's an actual crappy 1970s paperback with airbrushed Sex Pistols on the cover, and probably not worth reviewing because it isn't like I have anything profound to say. D.H. Lawrence's White Peacock was getting a bit too chewy for bedtime reading so I took to dipping into this, the expanded edition of a book published soon after they split first time around. It's mostly excerpts from Sophie's diary - Sophie being McLaren's secretary, roughly speaking - coupled with verbatim transcripts of interviews with everyone involved, thus allowing the band to pretty much speak for themselves; which is great. The material which I gather has been added to form the expanded edition doesn't really do much, maybe even detracts from the first and otherwise snappier part of the book. The added interviews with record company types aren't particularly interesting, and there's Fred Vermorel's lengthy essay, When Malcolm Laughs, which is at least better than the usual bollocks people tend to write about Malcolm the Master Situationist, except that it never fully escapes from being the usual bollocks people tend to write about Malcolm the Master Situationist. Oh well. This book is still better than a lot of the stuff which has been written about this group.

The Twilight Man

Michael Moorcock The Twilight Man (1966)
A couple of years ago I spent about a month wracking my brains trying to remember some novel wherein the moon had fallen from the sky and was to be found in the middle of the ocean, which turned out to be Moorcock's The Shores of Death, which I read about a decade ago. By the time I noticed that this was Shores of Death retitled for America, I was already home; but then the book was probably overdue a re-read, so why not?

The Twilight Man harks back to those wonderful pre-Gernsbackian science-fiction tales taking their cues from poetry rather than the strict letter of any scientific law, and as such seems part of whatever tendency inspired all those ponderous, allegorical science-fiction movies of the early seventies before George Lucas decided there were still a few more drops to be squozen from the Flash Gordon cow.

It's the far future, the Earth no longer turns, the moon has fallen from the sky and is sat in the middle of the Pacific - like I said - and what little is left of humanity is pretty much sterile; so the future doesn't look too bright. On the positive side, humanity has settled into a vaguely Utopian existence - probably the most perfect in history, so it is written, anarchist and peaceful. Unfortunately, the gloom of extinction hangs heavy on our final descendants, giving birth to fear, and the Brotherhood of Guilt who take it upon themselves to destroy things in response to the fear; which in turn brings about an authoritarian movement, and thus does it all go tits up.

Our hero, the Twilight Man of the title, seeks a solution to all of this - without it feeling like anything so prosaic as a quest - leading him to the fallen moon wherein dwells Orlando Sharvis whose scientific knowledge is such that no problem is really beyond his ability to solve it. Sharvis might represent Satan in the Faustian sense, or at least some pre-moral version of the serpent bringing light or illumination at a cost without necessarily implying evil.

I'd prefer not to simply summarise the plot, so I'll leave it at that, but this one delivers a whole ton of mind-candy in the form of what may be one of the strangest tales you will ever read, something very much inhabiting the same space as all of those paintings by Ernst, De Chirico, Remedios Varo and others. Moorcock, as ever, is amazing.

The Devils

New Juche The Devils (2019)
This will be the best book you read this year, said Philip Best in some facebook post I can no longer locate. I've read some pretty great stuff this year, and while I'm not convinced that The Devils sits at the absolute top of the pile, it's clearly among the best. In the context of New Juche's body of work, or what I've read of it, he hasn't yet topped Mountainhead from 2016, but then Mountainhead may conceivably be the greatest thing I've ever read so comparisons probably aren't fair.

The Devils takes our author back to his roots, the soil from which he was born and which formed him. It's a non-linear account of growing up in Dalkeith, semi-rural Scotland, blending childhood impressions with historical detail of Thomas Dalyell - a seventeenth century Royalist general - and the murder of Jodi Jones in 2003. Jones' supposed killer, one of the author's contemporaries, seems to have been convicted more or less entirely on the strength of owning a Marilyn Manson record, and The Devils is accordingly thick with the background noise of witch hunts, lynch mobs, and random beatings. I myself grew up in a similar environment of awful deeds perpetrated in rustic isolation with specific urban estates to be avoided, and The Devils captures it perfectly, just in case anyone could have mistaken childhood for anything so endearing as The Railway Children. In fact the mood of this thing is so familiar that it's chilling.

As with Mountainhead, The Devils approximately inhabits the spaces between an individual and his environment. Psychogeography seems to have become an overused term of late - not least with twats like [name withheld because I can no longer be arsed to directly identify the shitehawk] now happily dropping it into casual conversation - but this is something else, an account which maps territory as part of the individual's psychology, and which in doing so, is likely to resonate fairly strongly with most sentient readers.

Simply writing the above has made me want to read this again. Maybe it is the best book I've read this year.

Purchase your copy of this masterpiece here, and yes - it actually is worth all those pennies.

Iceman

J.M. DeMatteis & Alan Kupperberg Iceman (1985)
This was a four-issue limited series from before the comic grew up - an era for which I've been feeling increasingly nostalgic. Iceman, as you may know, was from the first line-up of the X-Men, the sixties incarnation which quietly blew my mind before I was old enough to be certain that these weren't real people. He's a fairly obvious attempt to duplicate some of that Human Torch magic but it worked for me; and I guess it still works for me considering I've just read this thing.

Iceman is one Bobby Drake, essentially a variant on Peter Parker, Richard Rider and others. He's a teenager, old enough to be a role model, but not so old as to seem inscrutably adult to anyone under twelve. He's slightly neurotic, and his adventures tend to be seasoned with thought bubbles full of stuff about not wanting a career in accountancy, contrary to the wishes of parents, and the potentially terrible consequences of what will happen if some girl discovers he's really a super-powered mutant; and so on and so forth. If the Marshall McLuhan references seem a bit thin on the ground, it's because Iceman is approximately aimed at twelve-year old boys.

As such, whilst it's hardly life-changing, the series nevertheless does its job very well - telling a story which is surprisingly unpredictable given the rigorously traditional mechanism of its telling. Visiting his parents, Iceman realises that he fancies the girl next door. Naturally she turns out to be a time-traveller fleeing from a terrible authoritarian father figure, unwittingly instigating a series of events which result in Bobby Drake accidentally murdering his own father before he's born, subsequently ceasing to exist and ending up in a realm of non-existence. It's actually a bit like Faction Paradox if Faction Paradox had been created by Jack Kirby in the late sixties; and it could be argued that the series is really just a series of hoops through which Iceman is made to jump, but who cares?

Kupperberg's art is a little uneven, but comes into its own with those peculiar Kirby-inspired outer realms, and DeMatteis keeps you reading, all the while presenting just enough of a glimpse of a truly peculiar background cosmos to demonstrate why Marvel were consistently shitting all over the rivals back in the mid-eighties.

Women

Charles Bukowski Women (1978)
I was told this one wasn't so great, but I can't remember the specific thrust of the objection. As with Factotum, Post Office and the rest, it's fictionalised autobiography with the author recast as Henry Chinaski presumably so as to allow for a little wiggle room where an artistic truth makes more sense than a literal one. Being rooted in autobiography, references to Bukowski's career as a writer - by this point fairly successful in so much as that strangers are now paying him to fly across the country to give readings - seemed initially awkward, at odds with the tone of the novel and its focus on smelly realism; but I stopped noticing once the narrative settled into a steady rhythm of arbitrary fornication. There might also, I suppose, be some objection on the grounds of it being difficult to mistake Charles Bukowski for Margaret Attwood, but I'm not convinced accusations of misogyny really hold, excepting readers who just really need to find something over which to get pissy.

If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women—good women—frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn't strong. So I continued to struggle with women, the idea of women.

Women might therefore be regarded as Bukowski struggling with the idea of women but failing to achieve any solid or consistent understanding. He drinks, he writes, he visits the race track, and he falls slowly apart as a seemingly endless succession of women beat a path to his bedroom door, one after another, each grubby union doomed before his pants have even hit the floor. His success, if we're going to call it success for the sake of argument, is bewildering, but its occurrence is massively enlightening, not through explaining anything but because of the range of questions it raises; and through all of this, despite Chinaski's raging libido and one track mind, he never quite reduces any of his girlfriends to just another series of holes. He remains transparent and committed to the truth, not least to the truth of his own bullshit.

I poured another wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to my life. I had lost my sophistication. I had lost my worldliness. I had lost my hard protective shell. I had lost my sense of humour in the face of other people's problems. I wanted them all back. I wanted things to go easily for me. But somehow I knew they wouldn't come back, at least not right away. I was destined to continue feeling guilty and unprotected.

I tried telling myself that feeling guilty was just a sickness of some sort. That it was men without guilt who made progress in life. Men who were able to lie, to cheat, men who knew all the shortcuts.

Women as a feminist text is probably a bit of a stretch, but it scores higher than you might think, at least as an unflinching inspection of one dude's attitude to women; and of course, he writes like a dream so it doesn't really matter whether we approve of his serial knobbing. No-one but an absolute fucking twat is going be cheering him on, or reading Women as an instruction manual.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 471

Edward L. Ferman (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 471 (1990)
Occasionally I've had cause to search for a particular issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction on Google, and for some weird reason this always seems to be the first issue which comes up as an image, regardless of whether or not it relates to my search; so when I happened upon a second-hand copy, I could hardly not buy it. The universe had obviously been trying to tell me something.

What it was apparently trying to tell me is that I probably should have been buying this thing regularly. I've always been reluctant to commit to the digests given that I always have more than enough to read as it is, but on the other hand, based on the five or six issues of this magazine which I've now read, I might have to make it a regular purchase, or at least splash out on a few more back issues. I always seem to pick it out when whatever I've just finished reading has turned out to be a bit of a slog, and due to some apparently subconscious belief that Fantasy & Science Fiction probably won't let me down; and, Robert Silverberg notwithstanding, it never has. It's short, snappy, suggestive of serious care and attention in the editorial department, always with one or two surprises, and with enough going on to reduce the impact of an occasional bum note.

This 1990 issue may not be life-changing, but it scores pretty high. Firstly we have Ian Watson's In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade, which is mostly great - weird and yet breezy with just the right kind of bizarre delivered in casual fashion; and Daryl Gregory's In the Wheels, a vivid tale of voodoo road racing in rural post-apocalypse America, is sufficient to get his name on the list of authors of whom I need to read more. Then we have The Three Wishes by John Morressy in which elves and fairies find themselves stalled by bureaucracy, which is very funny and so ingenious as to make it seem crazy that no-one thought of it before. We Were Butterflies by Ray Aldridge is a bit of a mess but with a nevertheless powerful story in there somewhere. His Spirit Wife by Karen Haber is decent and moody, and Asimov's science column is, as ever, excellent. Finally there's Gregg Keizer's Days of Miracle and Wonder which is actually a pretty tough read, given the subject matter, but worth the effort.

For the sake of balance, Herself by Katherine Newlin Burt, first published in 1930, lays it on a bit thick and the prose is like wading through treacle; and something about Ian Watson's Asian characters doesn't sit right and ends up seeming faintly insulting. It's nice that Watson was shaking a fist at those who want to send them all back, but unfortunate that his Asian characters all turn out to be terrorists, somewhat conforming to stereotypes favoured by those who want to send them all back. Further along the line we have a couple of pages of nutters objecting to something Asimov wrote in a previous issue, a couple of which use the term liberal as a pejorative, so fuck those guys; and Poul Anderson for praising Margaret Thatcher. So that's a couple of bum notes, but the rest of the song is of such quality that there doesn't seem to be much room for complaint.

Traumatic Tales #1

Noah Brown Traumatic Tales #1 (2019)
Well, it's not quite so violent or weird as Energy Realms, and I must admit I already miss Power Squad and Stabber Duck, but Noah Brown's latest offering otherwise delivers. This time the horror is a little more traditional in so much as that fewer special effects will be required when Spielberg gets around to adapting this stuff.

Brown's art continues to fascinate. On a technical level it may be a few life-drawing classes short of a picnic - whatever the hell that means - but makes up for its shortcomings in other ways. I myself spent a decade or so as a vaguely underground cartoonist, and one of the first things I realised - once I noticed that I wasn't actually Leonardo da Vinci - is that consistency compensates for a multitude of sins, working by the logic that if a mistake is repeated often enough, it will eventually seem like you meant it. Knowing what you're doing is at least as important as doing it.

With this in mind, Noah Brown's art is beginning to remind me of that of Charles Burns or Mark Beyer - not really so much the look as the sheer jaw-dropping intensity, like there's voodoo scratched into the page with a flicknife dipped in ink, and even if lines seem to have been drawn in the wrong places, those are the places they're supposed to be because pretty was never an option here. You are expected to shit yourself. That's the effect he seems to be after.

The same applies to the writing, and close inspection reveals that beyond the chaos, the timing is pretty fucking sharp with not an extraneous line of narrative to deaden the pace.

Darius the Decider seems to be the star of this particular show. It's also the longest strip, and hence the one which sustains the gratuitous and absolutely inexfuckingcusable violence the longest, and the opening full page splash panel of the aforementioned Darius contemplating his own giant hand is one of the weirdest things I've looked at this year.

Noah Brown still isn't any closer to taking over the Garfield strip once Jim Davis is gone, but he makes Johnny Ryan look like a Neil Gaiman strip about Shakespeare's most delightfully whimsical creations, and his art will violate you in ways you can't even imagine.

Demand your copy here.

The Battle of Forever

A.E. van Vogt The Battle of Forever (1971)
It makes a nice change to read a van Vogt novel which appears to have been written as a novel rather than being a number of short stories jammed together like something from the weirder end of the Taco Bell menu, and an internet search for discussion of this title pulls up a number of other reviews opening with the very same observation, therefore representing, I suppose, some huge collective sigh of relief; and to continue this positive note, this one's absolutely fucking mental.

Humanity has evolved itself into a sort of futuristic foetal state and Earth is populated by humanised animals for no obvious reason, hippo-men, fox-men, hyaena-men and others who seem to talk like rubes and schills from the lower east side during prohibition. Our main character, van Vogt's customary man at war with his own environment, emerges from his miniaturised state and passes himself off as an ape-man so as to avoid suspicion. Humanity has achieved something resembling immortality and therefore no longer practices sexual intercourse, although van Vogt manages to keep from dwelling on this for once, aside from a couple of awkward - for them and for us - episodes wherein a futuristic woman named Soodleel comments on our man's genital rigidity. Then it transpires that Earth is under the dominion of the hyaena-men; and then it transpires that the hyaena-men are under the dominion of the alien Nunuli; and then it transpires that the Nunuli are under the dominion of the alien Gunyan, or at least I think they are. I was lost by this point. The Gunyan themselves may even be under the dominion of someone else.

It twists, swerves, and stubbornly fails to make sense just like many of van Vogt's best; but lacks the startling, angular prose of his better novels, and also seems to lack that weird eight-hundred word rhythm which rendered his more peculiar, dreamlike efforts so compelling. So it almost reads like something written by a regular science-fiction author in terms of pace; and yet van Vogt retains a few of his more aggravating habits, turning adjectives into nouns and vaguely scrabbling around at what he means, leaving descriptions of what is happening riddled with ambiguity. Characters experience a thought-feeling, or deliver an awareness, or perform an indication. In fact, Modyun, our main guy, seems to perform a lot of indications in terms which suggest we're talking about a telepathic act of some description, but after nearly two-hundred pages, I still have no fucking idea what is meant.

The Battle of Forever would appear to be about evolution, maybe even free will in a deterministic universe, although it's difficult to tell what A.E. was actually trying to say. I'm fairly certain it must be some point of Korzybski's General Semantics about the wisdom of not reading a book by its cover, the actual thrust of which is lost amongst the indeterminate wash of thought-feelings and awarenesses. Otherwise, it's approximately fun - as you would expect of a novel featuring a hippo-man who talks like James Cagney - but not quite so much fun as it probably should have been.

The Little Grey Men

Denys Watkins-Pitchford The Little Grey Men (1942)
Although the cover seems distantly familiar, none of the usual nostalgia informs my choice, and I'm not aware of actually having heard of The Little Grey Men prior to Chris Browning mentioning it on facebook a couple of months ago; but the aforementioned Chris Browning's recommendations have served me well in the past, and as I'm presently sitting on a couple of unfinished gnome novels, it seemed like I should at least have a look at this one; and there it was by pure chance on the shelves of the Coventry branch of Oxfam.

Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote as B.B., was primarily a naturalist, and The Little Grey Men explores his interest in the same from a variant angle, namely in the form of a children's book perhaps partially inspired by the success of Tolkien's Hobbit which had been published in 1937. The Little Grey Men accordingly distances itself from anything else which may have featured small persons of mythic composition, and does so on the very first page, declaring what follows to be none of your baby, fairy-book tinsel stuff. Most impressive about The Little Grey Men is the author's communication of scale, expertly guiding the reader around a diminutive riverbank world which at least a few of us will recall from childhood. This story is told amongst the voles and squirrels with its quiet drama as wide as the stream or hedgerow, as distinct from the usual warmed over mythology scaled down to fit a doll's house; and it's told exceptionally well, at the pace of ordinary rural life, and with surprises as weird and unexpected as anything found in nature, provided one is prepared to sit and watch for a while.

Very little actually happens, at least in comparison to other, more demonstrative quests inhabiting the same vague genre, but it doesn't need to as Watkins-Pitchford demonstrates that the very small is just as important, and as vital, and as worthy of our attention; and he does it with such convincing veracity that when we get to chapter ten and its introduction of the genuinely weird, it seems like the most natural thing on Earth.

The Little Grey Men isn't quite like anything else I've read, and may be justifiably deemed a masterpiece.

The Thief's Journal

Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (1949)
I'm not quite sure what brought me here, but it was probably something to do with Amphetamine Sulphate given that, with hindsight, The Thief's Journal seems ancestral to at least a couple of their titles, notably Josiah Morgan's Inside the Castle.
 

Genet - as I will freely admit I didn't actually know until I looked it all up about a month ago - was a petty thief of no consistently fixed abode who took to writing and so caught the attention of Jean Cocteau and other poetic types of his generation. The Thief's Journal is approximately autobiographical in being an account of Genet's existence on the periphery of the law, but rather than reading as a straight narrative comprises a flowery existential analysis which sporadically refers to events from Genet's life, mostly nicking stuff and encounters with men's cocks - these being the main reasons for its apparently having been embraced as transgressive literature, on which subject my friend Paul Woods had this to say:

I liked the couple of early books I read of his when I was a kid and enjoyed a couple of his plays which I saw in filmed versions, but I never really got why the transgressive literature label was applied to him. I suppose it might be straight literati types getting all excited about a writer who's actually from the underworld. I was reading a biography of Genet when I was on a mini-tour with Damo early this year and it struck me that, for someone who called his own semi-autobiog The Thief's Journal, he was pretty piss-pathetic as a thief - stealing shirts and books from Paris shops. More of a failed kleptomaniac really. I remember when my old man had been home from the nick for a couple of years (who really did earn the title of professional thief - or recidivist from the law-enforcement point of view) and he took my copy of The Thief's Journal off the shelves to read. A night or two later he comes in the living room, points at me, says, 'You're fucking mad!' and walks out again. I suspect that may have been old Jean's description of dropping his drawers to other men to earn a crust.

Anyway, Genet takes an aesthetic position loosely comparable to that of Esseintes in Huysmans' Against Nature.

Abandoned by my family, I already felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. I thus resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me.

It's also comparable to certain Shamanic ideas informing members of the priesthood in Mexica society before the conquest, specifically their embracing the filthy, the unclean, and the transgressive as pertaining to the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the traditionally acceptable. Genet therefore finds endless beauty in the world he inhabits.

The beauty of a moral act depends on the beauty of its expression. To say that it is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendours of the physical world. The act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song. Sometimes the consciousness with which we have pondered a reputedly vile act, the power of expression which must signify it, impels us to song. This means that treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.

The Thief's Journal is therefore mostly about Genet finding poetry, and unusually florid poetry, in dirt, poverty, degradation, shame, small acts of betrayal, and a seemingly never ending procession of men's spunky cocks - this novel having been written back when homosexuality was a somewhat more contentious subject to the point of representing an open act of rebellion against some notional natural order. So as with Sartre, then Debord, William Burroughs to some extent, and more recently the aforementioned Josiah Morgan, it's actually about how reality relates to our perception of the same, or something in that general direction.

Unfortunately, whilst Inside the Castle - for one example - was a punchy forty pages or thereabouts, The Thief's Journal is more than two-hundred, allowing me ample scope to tire of endless descriptions of men's amazing cocks to the point of turning to Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols biography on a couple of evenings for the sake of reading something which didn't feel like homework. I can appreciate both Genet's craft and his philosophical depth - if that's what I mean - but other's have done this sort of thing better with significantly less droning.

The Face in the Abyss

Abraham Merritt The Face in the Abyss (1931)
It seems that Merritt was a big, big deal in his day, a name which dominated the fields of fantasy and science-fiction at the dawn of the pulp era before anyone had quite decided which was which or where to draw the line; and then he just went away, barely surviving as a footnote in popular terms. He significantly influenced both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, but my own interest stems almost entirely from his influence on the work of Robert Moore Williams.

The Face in the Abyss is the first of Merritt's books I've even encountered on the shelves of a second-hand store, so naturally I snapped it up, although I suspect it probably wasn't the best place to start. The influence of H. Rider Haggard is tangible, so we have what feels a little like a more literary Edgar Rice Burroughs - intrepid explorers discovering lost civilisations full of dinosaurs and that sort of thing, embellished with occasional flourishes of sciencey ruminations.

The caverns of the face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium - dull, inert lead?

Yeah, I know - it still belongs to the special kind of ray school of technological speculation, but my point here is that this is essentially a fantasy novel wherein the magic is explicitly identified as advanced science.

The Face in the Abyss is otherwise very much of its time. Our hero learns of the lost gold of Atahualpa, setting off to find it in the inexplicable company of ruffians. Not a night seems to pass without one of them pulling a gun on the other three, tying them up, then delivering one of those hard boiled speeches about how he's known all along how they would turn out to be dirty, double-crossing rats, in light of which maybe he'll be keeping all the gold for himself, see? Of course, everyone is friends again next morning, having somehow risen above their little misunderstanding, at least until they encounter creatures which would almost certainly have been animated by Ray Harryhausen had this book ever been adapted for the big screen.

Merritt's prose has been generously described as florid, or as purple by less sympathetic critics. I fall somewhere between the two in holding that while his writing is ornate and often quite beautiful, a little goes a long way. Hoodlums aside, everyone in The Face in the Abyss speaks in what I have come to think of as Marvel Shakespearean, not quite the full my liege at the termination of every bleeding sentence, but certainly a lot of persons asking what say you, my friend?, and not a whole lot of chuckles to lighten the atmosphere of what begins to feel like one of the more portentous Ultravox records, thematically speaking.

I can see how Merritt's influence on Robert Moore Williams is at least as profound as that of A.E. van Vogt on Philip K. Dick, and I can see why he was popular for at least a couple of decades; and while this novel had a lot going for it, I unfortunately found it a bit of a trudge getting there.

Reach for the Sky

Paul Brickhill Reach for the Sky (1954)
I vaguely recall having been told to pick a book and read it back during the latter phase of my time at Ilmington Junior and Infants school. I would have been about nine, maybe ten, and none of the available selection had been written by Terrance Dicks, so I picked this, possibly because I'd seen the 1956 film starring Kenneth More, or more likely because I'd heard of Douglas Bader and liked the title; so it probably counts as some sort of first in my formative reading habits, what with it not being off the telly, at least not directly.

Should the name be unfamiliar, Bader was an RAF fighter pilot who lost both legs and yet continued to fly planes regardless, scoring countless victories before ending up in Colditz for the remainder of the war.

To briefly ramble at something of a tangent, following the passing of the aforementioned Terrance Dicks, I've seen it opined that he got children reading books like no other writer of his generation, although the claim is often made by persons of my age who seemingly read Doctor Who books to the exclusion of anything else, so I'm not sure it's entirely the same. On the other hand, reading is reading and maybe it doesn't matter. There'll always be a few who stick to a familiar furrow for the duration, and my own mother - who now routinely reads things no-one else understands - began with a shitload of Enid Blyton; so dogged allegiance to a particular author or even genre probably isn't the fault of whoever happens to be sat on the other side of the typewriter.

So I read and enjoyed Reach for the Sky as a child, regardless of the absence of Daleks, hence curiosity sufficient to justify my buying a copy found in Oxfam, Coventry, not least because it's the very same edition - a tidy little hardback with an orange cover.

Brickhill was a journalist who flew planes during the war, and who also famously wrote both The Dam Busters and The Great Escape. His prose has a certain trim populist efficiency and might be described as pleasantly musty - to borrow a term from John Bagnall. The narrative reads a little as though it has been dictated to a secretary, with pacier sections succumbing to clipped non-sentences - although thankfully without the usual suggestion of anyone attempting to invoke Orson Welles - and with the occasional weirdly arresting passage.

Among the survivors fear and tension lay under the surface like taut sinews in a naked body, but always decently covered with understatement.

Bader comes across as having been a bit of a tosser prior to losing his legs, none of which quite detracts from Reach for the Sky serving as a genuinely inspiring story, even gripping, which is doubtless why it worked on me as a child. It's of its time, as the saying goes, but our man's slightly boorish youth of physical combat and mean spirited pranks is swiftly eclipsed by that which came after. I dislike the term hero but he was undeniably something in that general direction, and this biography goes a long way to breaking my association of aviation with lonely nutcases.

Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

2000AD Summer Offensive

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and others 2000AD Summer Offensive (1993)
Not a collection, in case anyone was wondering - but eight back issues of the comic nabbed from eBay and dating from a year or so before I gave up on the galaxy's greatest and flogged my entire collection to Skinny Melink in Lewisham. I remember Big Dave being great, and as something which is obviously never going to get a reprint, and the Summer Offensive sounded fun as I applied myself to Wikipedia in an effort to jog my memory of having read the thing.

The idea was to hand the editorial reins over to Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months just to see what would happen - these being three writers who had distinguished themselves with sparky, volatile strips characterised by a reluctance to play it safe, or summink. Maybe someone was hoping to revive that wave of lucrative outrage which had greeted 2000AD when it first appeared in the seventies.

Big Dave is as horrible as I recall it being, and therefore justifies this return visit. It's essentially real world Biffa Bacon from Viz turned up to eleven, working mainly because it really doesn't have any redeeming features whatsoever and constitutes a psychological portrait of the worst aspects of nineties Britain, and because Steve Parkhouse's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best he's ever drawn. Big Dave arguably defies criticism by already being everything bad you could possibly say about it.

Then there's the rest, none of which I was able to remember from the first time I read this stuff back in the nineties, and now I know why. Morrison and Millar's version of Judge Dredd isn't bad but it's no Cursed Earth, and only really feels like Dredd because of Carlos Ezquerra's characteristically exceptional artwork, which I guess at least distracts from a story which might otherwise seem fairly average; and the Indian Judge is named Bhaji and comes fitted with speech patterns very much in the vein of Apu from the Simpsons, so that's a bit of a bore.

Back in April, I wrote a satirical thing called 2000AD After I Stopped Reading which proposed a number of strips which may or may not have featured in the comic since I lost interest, informed mainly by sarcasm and vague memories of the formulaic composition of some of 2000AD's lesser series. Anyway, Mark Millar's Maniac 5 and John Smith's Slaughterbowl read unfortunately as though they were expanded from vague ideas I came up with when taking the piss. Maniac 5 looks amazing, having been drawn by Steve Yeowell, but that's all; and while Slaughterbowl isn't entirely without worth, John Smith has written much better, and it reads as though the other two were egging him on, insisting he make it even more offensive; which I suppose at least conceals its parentage in those earlier future sport strips which were mostly just Roy of the Rovers with jetpacks.

I'd say Really & Truly is as bad or worse than I remember it having been, except I had no memory of ever having read it; so it's as bad or worse than I would have remembered it being had I been able to remember having read it, which wasn't the case. It's like a conversation with a pothead, the word wow in faux psychedelic lettering dragged out over eight agonising instalments, or hits if you prefer, man. Groovy. The plot - and it should be noted that were I to frame the word plot as it applies here between accordingly ironic quotation marks, the necessary degree of irony would demand that said quotation marks be of such scale as to force the rest of my text right off the edge of the screen - is almost identical to that of Everyman and shares similar affectations of nadsat, drugs, and self-consciously quirky characters on a really amaaaaaaazing trip, meaning it's unreadable and a criminal waste of Rian Hughes.

So that was the Summer Offensive - Big Dave, a cover version of Judge Dredd, a couple of participation award winners, and a strip which really, really wanted to be Philip Bond's Wired World from Deadline, which was itself a massive pile of wank: not very zarjaz at all, it has to be said.