Halfway Human

Carolyn Ives Gilman Halfway Human (1989)
I read Gilman's Arkfall last month and was reminded that it was amazing, and that somewhere or other I'd made a mental note to read more. It's taken me a while, but has been mostly worth it. Arkfall gave me the impression of an author who is particularly adept at writing weird, unfamiliar environments - much as was Brian Aldiss - yet with the focus on human interaction and plausible characters lending her work a quite different, and frankly refreshing, tone to that of many of her contemporaries.

Halfway Human, apparently occupying the same continuity as Arkfall, explores a post-human society through the travails of one of its dissidents, specifically a subterranean post-human society divided into male, female, and a third, ungendered slave caste. Given the premise, it's probably no great surprise that this might be considered feminist science-fiction, but Gilman writes without any of the slightly wearying didactic quality of, of the top of my head, Smilin' Margaret Attwood, expanding her argument to encompass social power structures in the broadest possible sense, and all aspects of the small print without even a trace of generalisation. Most impressive of all is that the argument unfolds and reflects upon itself at an absolutely natural pace without any sense of either slogans or shoehorns.

Our main character is Tedla, a representative of the aforementioned ungendered slave caste, or a bland as they are termed, and through it - being neither he nor she - Gilman examines pretty much everything which has been shitty about our own society since records began, from the small scale of rape, coercion, and even just taking others for granted, to class, capitalism, and the evils of hierarchy. Described as such it probably doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, and fun isn't exactly the word in any case, but it is compelling, and, rather oddly, is compelling in the same way that Jane Eyre is compelling with similar emphasis on the personal perspective, and even a narrative rhythm not unlike that of Jane coming to realise that Rochester is kind of an arsehole in certain respects.

Older readers may recall my stating that the wait has been mostly worth it, back during the heady days of the first paragraph when we were all much younger than we are now; and I say mostly because, for all that it's an unusually powerful and well-written novel, Halfway Human feels just a little too long, long enough to communicate what are fairly complex arguments - as it should be - but unfortunately so long as to tread water at a couple of points, particularly the courtroom dramas which feel a little as though we're having the plot and its subtext explained to us all over again; but as a criticism, this is a minor one which I mention only because I felt it got in the way of everything the book otherwise does so well. I probably still prefer Arkfall for its brevity, and for doing something so unusual at such a modest word count, but it's a close run race, and it's been a while since I read something with such emphasis on message which spoke so clearly or so well.

Gladiator-at-Law

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Gladiator-at-Law (1955)
I've been trying to read this one since last April, having started it maybe five or six times, never once generating momentum sufficient to stave off the temptation to read something else. It's been praised as a classic in many places, and whoever last claimed it to be the greatest thing ever written did so in such a way as to bypass my laboriously constructed defences. I wasn't really intending to bother with any further Kornbluth. Beyond Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and maybe a couple of the short stories, I've found the rest mostly an uphill slog. He could write for sure, but too readily descended into a sort of self-congratulatory jabbering, or at least jabbering which felt self-congratulatory to me, like a man having a conversation with himself, or one of those fucking tedious Marx Brothers routines comprising somebody saying something stupid very fast over and over and over. Each time I came back to this one, I had no fucking idea of who was who, what was happening, or what any of it was supposed to mean, and this was usually by page twenty.

This time, vaguely recalling some of the characters from the previous five or six attempts, I felt I had a bit of a handle on it and was duly able to take some enjoyment from reading the thing, but I remain mystified as to the classic status. It's a legal drama in so much as that it's the story of a lawyer involved in a number of dimly related cases, and it's sort of witty here and there, but I still haven't got a fucking clue as to what happens or why. It's set in a future society with a pronounced class divide, the lower tier of which is kept in line with bread and circuses, and it's obviously a metaphor for rampant consumerism and the way America seemed to be heading in the fifties. Maybe the message seemed more profound at the time, because Gladiator-at-Law feels very much like a period piece given that the future has turned out arguably worse than predicted, with its street gangs seemingly resembling the juvenile delinquents one used to see depicted in older issues of Mad magazine, all Brylcreem and chewing gum. The book is not without merit, but it probably would have helped had I not been expected to accommodate some new character with a comedy name every five pages or so.

The Screaming

Daniel Bristow-Bailey The Screaming (2020)
At just sixteen pages, The Screaming might appear almost too brief for any sort of meaningful write up, particularly given that it's a single issue comic book painting a brief psychological portrait rather than telling a story in the sense of anything which could be transposed to telly with Ross Kemp in the title role; but the thing is too beautiful - although that may not be quite the right term - to slip past without notice. It's properly printed with a colour cover, albeit one that's mostly shades of grey and brown, with an interior which picks up every subtlety of scratchy pencilwork in contrast to the violent splatter of ink and a truly harrowing combination of light and dark. The Screaming is a phone call about a dream, incorporating the dream itself, and all framed within a psychological landscape bleeding to the very edge of the page. It's short and very intense with a power comparable to visually related(ish) efforts by the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz or Ted McKeever, and actually doesn't need to be any longer. In fact it's possibly one of the best small press comics I've ever seen, all things considered.

Seek ye the tome yonder.

Fantasy & Science Fiction #676

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 676 (2008)
Back in 2008, I decided to educate myself regarding what science-fiction* there was to be had beyond Philip K. Dick - of whom I'd already read a fair bit - and Who novels. I'd taken to picking up whatever I could find which looked interesting, mostly from charity shops, and so became familiar with Asimov, Simak, van Vogt and others; but still I felt the need to know what was going down on the mean streets of science-fiction literature right now, right at this moment, or right at that moment in this case, so I got my ass to Borders and picked up the September issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and this one, Fantasy & Science Fiction, which seemed to be the best of the bunch.

This issue featured Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six, which I thought was fucking amazing, and which compelled me to buy at least a couple of his other books, and which seems even more amazing twelve years later, not least because it describes the sort of profoundly sickening environmental decline which has actually been coming true right outside our windows.

Even better was Carolyn Ives Gilman's Arkfall which makes fairly profound observations about the human condition and specifically how we relate to each other, but makes them quietly and without any shouting in one of the weirdest, most unsettling environments you could imagine, at least without invoking quantum theory. This one really affected me when I read it, and I've just noticed my having failed to read anything else by the woman, so I'll try to put that one right.

Elsewhere in the mag, Jim Aiken's Run! Run!, Robert Reed's Salad for Two, and Laura Kasischke's Search Continues for Elderly Man are decent, and probably in that order; leaving us with one of those tales told as a series of letters sent back and forth between the two protagonists which I couldn't be arsed to read, and Rand B. Lee's Picnic on Pentecost, which opens with the planet has a face like a dead circus performer, but then did nothing else to keep me from skipping ahead. To be specific, the story is mostly told by means of that Claremont-speak which attempts to fakesimulateinvoke thought by running words words words together in a cloying-annoying way - sillystupidcrappy - and which once endangered the narrative integrity of many an X-Men comic back in the day, so I couldn't be arsed to read that one either. All the same, with Pump Six and Arkfall together in this single volume, you tend not to notice a couple of duds. This issue may not quite be where it all began for me, but it was certainly where something began.

*: Referring here to the written word because I generally couldn't give a shit about film or TV, or at least ceased to do so around this time.

West Coast Avengers

John Byrne & others West Coast Avengers (1990)
More eighties superhero comics, but nothing to do with comfort food this time - these made the list because they were written and drawn by John Byrne and are therefore the bollocks. I say these rather than it because this is a run of comic books rather than the same collected as a - cough cough - graphic novel; and even if they were, it still wouldn't be a graphic novel, it would be a collection of comic books, and it would be a collection of comic books because there's nothing wrong with comic books, even comic books which haven't grown up.

I'm sure we all know who the Avengers are by now. This title dates from an era during which there were so many Avengers that they had to siphon a few of them off into a separate team with its own title; and what distinguishes this one is that it was, as already stated, written and drawn by John Byrne, a man with an unusually profound understanding of what makes this sort of thing work, namely the soap opera aspect combined with the juvenile love of things in sets which can be mixed and matched. Caped types foiling bank robberies had begun to look a bit comical by this point in comic book history, hence the soap aspect with an assortment of fantastic beings pitched against one another, or else pulled apart to see what makes them tick. Byrne pulled the Vision apart during his tenure, to memorable effect, then messed with the Scarlet Witch by revealing that her children were imaginary constructs brought about by her ability to manipulate probabilities.

Byrne's comics tend to succeed on their own terms, rather than by, for example, giving Spiderman a dose of the clap. He combines solid, surprisingly conservative storytelling with truly screwy ideas and genuine magic is born of the contrast while remaining faithful to the form, juvenile though it may well be. Byrne takes scrappy throwaway concepts and retells them with the gravity of legends, and should probably be mentioned in the same sentences as the likes of Kirby and others, even if we're mainly talking about the art.

Unfortunately, the baroque intertwined narrative he'd built up here came to an abrupt end with issue fifty-seven due to a disagreement with his editor, following which he downed tools in protest. I'm told Roy Thomas wrapped it all up a few issues later, but I think I prefer the truncated genius of Byrne's run with all of the loose ends left hanging. Considering all which has been sold in the name of the Avengers over the last three decades, I really wonder if it was ever again as good as this.

The Fall of Chronopolis

Barrington J. Bayley The Fall of Chronopolis (1974)
As a reformed Who junkie, The Fall of Chronopolis piques my interest not least for how much Time Lord stuff it seems to have foreshadowed. Bayley patently wasn't the first to write about a time war with combatants erasing great swathes of enemy history - and I'm not even sure it was Fritz Leiber, come to think of it - but the quota of this material which has since been reincarnated within The Book of the War and all from which it was drawn seems significant - there's even a ruling entity identified as the Imperator. Okay, so Bayley may not have been the first, but he was possibly the first to wrap his time travelling combatants in pomp, ritual and pseudo-religious symbolism; and in case you're interested, I've checked, and the television Time Lords were still vaguely utopian Star Trek knock-offs with a thing for white plastic when this was written.

But anyway, who gives a shit? Let's talk about the novel.

Chronopolis probably isn't Bayley's greatest, but it's decent. The only female character is a victim figure who is raped on at least four occasions, which is troubling, but probably shouldn't be the focus of ensuing discussion about the merits of the novel in any more general sense, arguably being an issue of that which Bayley failed to include or address rather than what we actually have here.

The story runs that time travel has become so common as to blur most distinctions between past and present, with different eras reduced to what may as well be geographical locations, and all in the name of something acknowledged as God. This society is at war with the Hegemony, which is itself from the far future, represented in the present by the Traumatics, the equivalent of a Satanic sect. There are paradoxes and a lot of playing around with different kinds of time as means of accounting for the same, so it's pretty damn weird and often very, very confusing, but rewards the effort of hanging on and powering through the more bewildering passages; and in case you were wondering, it's all about predestination, free will and that sort of thing. So it's chewy, but mostly in a good way, excepting for having failed the Bechdel test so profoundly as to border on impressive.

The Cat Inside

William Burroughs The Cat Inside (1986)
In his later years, Burroughs became a crazy cat lady, and this is the book he wrote during that time, or at least the stack of post-it notes which were eventually collected as a book he wrote during that time. The feline head count at my own house presently stands at fifteen, so you should probably take it as given that I don't use the term crazy cat lady as a pejorative, and this book inevitably increases my appreciation of Burroughs.

As has doubtless been observed in every other review, here we are afforded a glimpse of his softer side, which is nice, not least because he writes about his cats with warmth and affection, but happily without the sort of cloying sentiment which usually renders this sort of thing unreadable. At the same time, even if he's not specifically writing about heroin, boys' bums and firearms, there's still no mistaking this for the work of anyone else. Burroughs' hatred of stupidity and shitheaded authority burned bright right up until the end, only here it serves as part of the protective instincts he feels towards his cats.

This isn't one for the sort of idiots who believe their felines to be reincarnated versions of historical figures (although I personally suspect our own Mr. Kirby may actually have been Burroughs in his previous existence, for what it may be worth); or one for the sort of people who describe the mystical characteristics of their cat with a faraway look in their eyes even when you didn't ask; but it will make a lot of sense to you if you like cats, as I do.

...and still no mention of his best buddy, Porridge. Very strange.

Tales from Moomin Valley

Tove Jansson Tales from Moomin Valley (1962)
I was given the Puffin boxed set of five books one Christmas as a kid, and now that I think about it, those Moomin books were probably the only books I actually read under my own steam, excepting Who novelisations and anything with a lot more pictures. Although the box has long vanished, I kept hold of those books - Exploits of Moominpapa and the rest - and even ended up reading from them to my stepson back when he was at bedtime story age. Moomins have therefore been imprinted on me from the beginning and have been with me most of my life; so it was quite a shock when I found this, having assumed there were only ever six books, with the other one being Moominland in November which I never had. It was a shock but naturally I had to buy it, feeling I sort of owed it to my much younger self to read the thing.

I knew I'd enjoy it, possibly as an exercise in nostalgia, but I'm surprised at how much, and how moving I found it. Jansson's Moomin books seem unlike anything else to be found in childrens' literature, at least so far as I am aware, in capturing a much more rounded impression of childhood experience. Of course, there's the fun, the silliness, the jokes, the brightly coloured characters, and the occasional lesson of a bedtime without supper, but Jansson contrasts her springs and summers with grey skies and the terrible roar of the sea crashing on stony beaches - not as anything deliberately fearful, but simply because it's part of the experience. You can really feel the north Atlantic wind blasting through this landscape, and it provides welcome definition to the warmth of hearth and home. Her most interesting characters seem to be those who prefer solitude and silence, which I guess was something I really needed to hear when I was a kid. Her books are the opposite of Disney's version of childhood, and should be considered as being right up there with the rest of the proper stuff, Alice, Dorothy, Asterix, Tintin and the others.

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956)
Fuck me - this one took some doing, having been punctuated by the autobiography of a Sex Pistol, a Longshot collection, and a couple of issues of Marshall Law, all read for light relief because after a number of days which had been shite to varying degrees, I felt as though I deserved to enjoy my bedtime reading. I'm a little surprised at my having had this reaction. The last two Borges I tackled were great, and I was told this was the one I really needed to read, the solid gold hit single, so to speak.

Borges writes short pieces of surrealist fiction, often in the form of reviews of imaginary books, texts, or authors, which blur the lines between imagination and reality, prompting all sorts of peculiar questions about whether we're reading the story or it's reading us. I'm sure you get the idea. While Ficciones is patently at least as atmospheric as whatever I read in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand, at least as rich in imagery, and as wild in terms of existential questions, it nevertheless felt like homework. The stories seem, generally speaking, to inhabit more cerebral narratives than those in Labyrinths, which at least wrapped their ideas around a sense of space or something physical, thus giving my poor brain something more to work with; or at least that's the impression I had, and I could be wrong, and it may simply be that I simply should have saved this one for evenings in a more receptive frame of mind.

I still enjoyed this, and particularly Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Three Versions of Judas, but I have a feeling I should have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.