Flying Saucers are Hostile

Brad Steiger & Joan Whritenour Flying Saucers are Hostile (1966)
Steiger wrote about a million books, many of which have been described as sensationalist, and even most tin-foil hatted of History Channel junkies seem to regard him as unreliable. I'm sure his critics have a point - despite the raw irony of one group of saucer nutcases looking at another group of saucer nutcases askance whilst muttering about the dubious credibility of their evidence - but the fact is that Steiger wrote some massively weird and entertaining stuff, regardless of whether or not any of it's actually true.

Once was that the charity shops runneth over with cheap saucer paperbacks, and aside from a few of the same blurry photographs which turned up again and again - even those which had been long since proven fake when someone found the actual model and length of fishing line - most of them were as dull as fuck: page after page after page of a farmer who saw a light and how it definitely wasn't a weather balloon. Steiger on the other hand never seemed bothered by whether anyone actually believed him and happily shared even the most preposterous and hence entertaining reports in a spirit which was more Charles Fort than J. Allen Hynek - and to give credit where credit is due, Steiger's tentative theorising about what it could all mean is usually less ridiculous than that of Fort with his silly ideas about stars being volcanoes in the sky.

As might be gathered from the title, this one focusses on accounts of the saucer people acting like wankers, marking a shift from the previously held folk mythology of benign space brothers as reported by George Adamski and others. Whether or not one believes, the book remains a fascinating record of its time, a world in which mass communication was very much a new thing, back when there was still a lot of darkness around the edges where the inexplicable might still lurk; and it works because a mountain of horseshit with some element of truth will always feel a more intuitively plausible description of the preposterous than pure horseshit and nothing else. In other words, maybe some of it happened, or at the very least, for something which didn't happen there seem to be a hell of a lot of people who think it did, which is in itself interesting.

Steiger churned this stuff out at least as fast as people could buy it, and his back catalogue brims with titles such as Discover Your Own Past Lives, The Wisdom Teachings of Archangel Michael, and others I wouldn't even touch with yours; but regardless of the actual homeopathic truth quotient of whatever tale he's spinning, I can't help but be impressed by the cut of the cloth.

The Witches of Karres

James H. Schmitz The Witches of Karres (1966)
Thanks to Research Alpha, co-written with A.E. van Vogt and which I read back in February, Schmitz was seeming a lot like one of those great, long overlooked etc. etc. authors for a moment there, so it was exciting to have found this so soon after; and then I tried to read it.

In its favour - and it has a lot in its favour - The Witches of Karres is packed with the kind of weird and wonderful ideas which I can see would have appealed to his co-writer on Research Alpha; and Schmitz writes well, with genuine wit, and - taken in isolation - much of what he writes is a delight; yet once past the first couple of chapters, I was bored pretty much solid despite everything. Apparently this novel was formed from a couple of thematically linked short stories bolted together, and my guess would be that they probably worked fine as short stories and maybe didn't require inclusion in this three-but-felt-like-seven-hundred page marathon. The wit and the imagination may remain intact, but reduced to a much smaller fraction of the whole, I guess it all turns to wallpaper.

For anyone still wondering, The Witches of Karres is almost a fairy story transposed to space with a thoroughly Lovecraftian monster waiting at the end of the book. The witches are three little girls from the planet Karres, a world which is able to move around in space to elude its enemies, not least of these being the entity behind the terrifying worm weather, as it is known. As a novel, Witches has no business being quite such a slog given the story it attempts to tell, but a slog it unfortunately is.

While we're here, should anyone have noticed a Goodreads review implying that The Witches of Karres has some sort of paedophile subtext, the detail to which this person refers is specifically that one of the little girls fancies the starship captain who rescues her, thoroughly embarrassing the aforementioned starship captain, which hardly seems significant given all those children's stories I seem to recall wherein little girls develop a crush on some rescuing father figure or some dashing yet unobtainable knight; and which hardly leaves The Witches of Karres looking like the sort of thing you'd expect to find on Gary Glitter's hard drive. I also seem to remember Asterix's dog falling in love with Geriatrix's wife, which doesn't make her the lovely Debbie McGee. It's not that hard to understand, but the implication is about what I'd expect of an individual with a peace symbol and a smiley face in rainbow colours as their avatar. Scratch any one of those tie-dyed crusading new age fuckers and nine times out of ten you'll find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 697

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 697 (2011)
Two years on from my previous issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction and this one initially looked as though the ship might have been going down, at least in comparison to previous issues I've read. Van Gelder seems to have proven himself a decent editor, so maybe it was just me, or maybe it was a couple of duds shoved up front so as to get them out of the way.

We open with Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim by Esther M. Friesner which offers humourous encounters with urbane mythological figures, a genre of which I'm now thoroughly bored and have been since the fifty-three pages of Randy Henderson's appalling Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free which I managed to read before giving up. I've done it myself, for fuck's sake, but those were first steps and if a writer has reached the stage of someone else actually wanting to publish their shite, then they really should have got it out of their system. Rutger and Baby was funnier than Randy Henderson, but then so is almost everything else ever. Terry Pratchett has a lot to answer for.

My mood improved with Sarah Langan's The Man Inside Black Betty which, if nothing spectacular, is at least readable; which is the best one can say of most of that which follows, exceptions being Alan Peter Ryan's underwhelming Time and Tide, and Mary Rickert's The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece which, as with the previous thing I read by her, I found a bit incomprehensible; and A Borrowed Heart by Deborah J. Ross which seems to be Mills & Boon with dishy vampires and is therefore awful and a reminder of why I ordinarily tend to avoid fantasy fiction.

Albert E. Cowdrey's Where Have All the Young Men Gone? and Donald Mead's Spider Hill count as efficient and enjoyable. Karl Bunker's Overtaken and Bright Moment by Daniel Marcus are actually good; and Jon Armstrong's Aisle 1047 seemed initially impenetrable but was actually very good once I was accustomed to his weird stylistic flourishes.

Finally, Anise by Chris DeVito is excellent, dealing with a depressingly plausible cybernetic post-humanity and reading how I always expect J.G. Ballard to read, but without that off-putting air-brushed quality; and Geoff Ryman's What We Found is fucking great and more than justifies my having ploughed through a few turds to get there. It's set in Nigeria and I'm not really quite sure what you'd call it - science-fiction only in so much as that it's about the scientific process, or rather our understanding of the same, but what matters is that it's properly a masterpiece regardless of genre.

So we got there in the end.

The Magician

Christoper Zeischegg The Magician (2020)
This has been quite a surprise on several fronts, not least being its big fat four-hundred pages girth, stepped up from the Amphetamine Sulphate norm of forty or so. It's approximately a horror novel - albeit one which reads more like hallucinatory autobiography in all but a couple of places - and is a horror novel written by a former porn star, and one who won some sort of porn biz award for wife swapping action or something of the sort; so that's doubtless a whole stack of expectations set up right there. Additionally, there's the intimation of magic, or probably magick, given that we're never too far from that sort of thing when navigating waters such as we have here, which is a subject I tend to associate with persons in black clothes who talk complete fucking bollocks, usually with a flashlight held directly beneath the chin so as to appear spooky and mysterious like that Paul Daniels or someone from Coil.

All the same, by this point it's become clear that Amphetamine Sulphate aren't just going to publish any old shite, and true to form, not only does The Magician refrain from doing anything stupid or obvious, but it's yet another of those which isn't quite like anything I've ever read - which admittedly may say more about me than it does about Zeischegg. It took me a while to realise that the narrative wasn't purely autobiographical in the literal sense of Bukowski's efforts in the same direction, which I mention because it shares both Los Angeles and a stripped down, muscular prose which delivers without unnecessary distraction. Given a few of the scenes, I'm quite glad it's not purely autobiographical for the author's sake. There's arguably nothing more harrowing than you will have seen on an episode of, off the top of my head, Breaking Bad, so the actual horror - as distinct from individual horrific acts, which are in any case few and far between - is, I suppose, existential, being a catalogue of the seemingly inevitable decline of our author, brought down by his own existence, by his own will to live even in the knowledge of tomorrow being worse. There's a lot of Christianity involved, which put me in mind of half-remembered folk horror movies of the seventies transposed to California, but which seems to give the story some sort of structure. The Book of Job is referenced quite early on, seemingly implying that our narrator views himself as subject to similar trials. The Magician is fairly mild for something in which Satan (probably) makes an actual appearance (maybe), as written by a man who has been known to take it up the bum for cash, but its power is profound, and is to be found in the grinding inevitability of our man's descent in a seemingly hopeless world populated by the sort of spotty denim-clad losers who pass by in the background of comic strips drawn by Daniel Clowes. The Magician is sad and powerful without any of the usual button pushing one finds in the genres to which it is related. Additionally, while Bukowski's trials often seemed down to the basics of cause and effect, as with the aforementioned Job, there's not much to suggest that Christopher the Magician deserves any of what happens to him.

Lazarus Churchyard

Warren Ellis & D'Israeli Lazarus Churchyard (2001)
As you may recall, Lazarus Churchyard was approximately the main feature in Blast!, a monthly anthology comic which lasted for seven issues back in 1991 at the height of the hoohaa of the comic having grown up - meaning Batman was suddenly allowed to say rude words and kill the occasional paedophile. Blast! had replaced Speakeasy, a mag about comics rather than specifically featuring them, which pissed me off because I liked Speakeasy, and Blast! wasn't actually that good. Lazarus Churchyard sounded like something which couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be in either 2000AD or Deadline, and even the name seemed to be trying far too hard to be weird, like one of those lazy steampunk juxtapositions - Jedediah P. Mainframe or whatever; plus it's Warren Ellis. Apparently his work is amazing, except for the stuff I've tried to read, which is weird.

Anyway, Nick Sweeney seemed to rate this thing and suggested I give it another go, and then a week later I happened across this collection in Half Price Books, which seemed too timely a coincidence to ignore.

To be fair to Warren Ellis, Lazarus Churchyard is pretty much him finding his feet as a writer, learning on the job, so to speak. It's more or less a list of shocking or startling juxtapositions like one of those Sigue Sigue Sputnik songs which is just a tally of futuristic sounding things - dead man butterfly effect sex toy foetal heroin and so on; and Lazarus Churchyard - Keith Richards reimagined as that Sisters of Mercy album which no-one bought, the one with Tony James on bass - moves from one startling thing to another, then to another, and that's the story. I'm a little cynical regarding this narrative technique because I was once involved in an unfortunately similar enterprise, so I can tell when a comic book writer is trying to distract from the possibility of his having no fucking clue what he's doing. The ability to gift one's characters with sardonic or ostentatiously edgy observations is not the same thing as being able to tell a story.

However, none of this takes into account the art of D'Israeli, which is rich, angular, and absolutely breathtaking, and so much so as to take up most of the slack; and some of what we have here is surely sufficient to warrant his canonisation in one of those greatest of all time lists. Therefore, unless I'm just making excuses, the problem with Lazarus Churchyard may actually be to do with expectations, specifically my expectations. It seems to present itself as something profound and revealing when actually it's just a Ramones album which ticks the boxes you would expect it to tick, and ticks them very well. It's nothing deep - it's simply a list of things which seem cool or interesting, and I guess maybe that's enough.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Theodore Sturgeon Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered but for this novelisation having been written by Theodore Sturgeon. I think I saw the movie as a kid, but I'm not absolutely certain, and I recall being underwhelmed by what I saw of the subsequent TV series which, given my unconditional juvenile love of anything starring a vaguely futuristic vehicle, doesn't seem to speak well of the enterprise. Momentarily ignoring what Sturgeon did here so as to examine his source material, Voyage is essentially a variation on Gerry Anderson's formula with characters and situations packed in around the edges of the technological lead role - typically a fast car which shoots house bricks or something; which is in turn an essentially Gernsbackian misreading of Jules Verne; and so Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is Twenty Thousand Leagues reimagined by a dunce, a man who dared to ask what anyone ever saw in Nemo, suggesting the story would be a lot more fun and exciting if we were to reinvent him as a guy one could respect such as a police officer or a solid military man, someone who knows doctors and dentists. As with Star Trek and others of its general type, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is adventure with safety features, framed in a tidily modular setting with regular guys and associated squares at the controls, none of that weird beatnik stuff to confuse you or keep you awake at night.

Against all odds, Theodore Sturgeon managed to squeeze something pretty damn readable out of this near terminally beige commission. Charles Bennett, co-author of the original script, seems to have had an otherwise reasonably impressive track record, so I assume his role was to elevate Allen's basic ideas above grade school level. I don't know how much Sturgeon kept of what Bennett wrote, but it's fairly easy to forget this was ever a movie, which is probably a good thing. Sturgeon's prose is intense and jazzy, twisting and turning in such a way as to blur the focus of what we're actually reading, but throwing out such wild images and ideas that it doesn't really seem to matter that it's founded on what may as well have been an unusually dull episode of Stingray. Additionally, he makes an effort with the science, or at least more of an effort than whoever came up with the original plot, so even if Asimov's title remains unchallenged, the reader can squint a bit and just about get past this being a story in which the sky catches fire.

Assuming the novel inherited these details from the script, it's interesting - even amusing - that the good guys, the progressive, radical thinkers should be conservative uniformed Americans who know when to say sir, while the dangerous, backwards-looking bureaucrats are sceptical European types; but Sturgeon manages this aspect without either hint of an agenda or diluting the occasional ecological digression. Following the maxim of how lousy books can make for decent movies, it's pleasing to find that the equation can work both ways.

Invisibility: A Manifesto

Audrey Szasz Invisibility: A Manifesto (2020)
As always with Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it takes me a few pages of settling in before I feel I have some sort of handle on what I'm reading or what I might reasonably expect from the text. Most of them seem to end up doing something completely different, but I actually quite like that, at least providing I've achieved an understanding of what the hell I'm letting myself in for. Invisibility: A Manifesto seemed to establish itself as a Surrealist novel, or at least novella, quite early on - capitalised Surrealist as in Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and those guys as distinct from more lazy contemporary understandings of the term usually amounting to not much more than the juxtaposition of disparate images. Invisibility: A Manifesto seems to tap into something of the human subconscious and, as such, presents questions rather than the definitives one might expect from something calling itself a manifesto; and, for what it may be worth, there's some fairly stark juxtaposition of disparate images going on, but clearly nothing arbitrary.

Principally we have the contrast of author as wholesome child detective in the general mode of an Enid Blyton character, although not clearly drawn, with atrocity, murder, fucking, and framing of victims, although thankfully rendered with a degree of honesty thus disassociating itself from low-calorie goth versions of the same contrast - all those wearyingly mental versions of Alice which have kept Tim Burton in Cure reissues over the years. The contrast drawn up by Szasz are genuinely affecting, and possibly a clue to the title: the victim abused as powerless, worthless, and yet whose victimhood constitutes both the real power and value in the equation; so we have elements which simply won't be jammed together, and perhaps in the resulting interference pattern, the subject becomes invisible, blending in with the background from either angle.

Hopefully that makes sense to someone. At least that's how Invisibility: A Manifesto reads to me. I'm sometimes a little uncomfortable with the idea of the victim as the one with the power because while it may be philosophically useful, I'm not convinced it works in real life, which is why, I would suggest, Pauline Réage's Story of O is honestly just a massive pile of wank (and not even good for that); although this, much shorter work does some of the same thing, but succeeds simply through an elevated self-awareness, meaning it knows what it's doing, even if I don't. I think what this amounts to is another Amphetamine Sulphate title mapping the disparity between the real and its interpretation, which is always welcome, not least because this one takes a quite different narrative approach to others I've read.

Most of the above comprises impressions picked from the text and should probably be best regarded as me scrabbling around, from which you should take that Szasz certainly provides plenty of material from which such conclusions, or possibly completely different ones, may be drawn, which is, I suppose, inevitable with any exploration of the subconscious; so it's at least as rich, fertile, and shocking as anything Max Ernst ever painted, and is additionally a lot more coherent than I may have implied here.

Disturbing for all of the right reasons and very satisfying.

Cop one here.

Leviathan Wakes

James S.A. Corey Leviathan Wakes (2011)
I got so profoundly sucked into The Expanse that I'd probably describe it as either the greatest science-fiction television serial ever made, or at least as one of the few which has ever been worth watching; so it was sort of inevitable that I should backtrack and pick up one of the books, additionally curious due to my never having heard of it prior to the adaptation turning up on some streaming thing. Leviathan Wakes is, roughly speaking, the first series of The Expanse as a novel, and while I'm not sure it entirely supports the maxim of how lousy books tend to work better on the screen, it's nevertheless oddly underwhelming.

It's not bad, and is arguably well written, or at least efficiently written, but Peter F. Hamilton and Stephen Baxter both did this sort of thing much better in terms of the printed page. The problems with Leviathan Wakes are either minor or else simply difficult to quantify, but what they lack in clarity, they make up for in sheer force of numbers. To begin at a perhaps unusually picky level, I'm inclined towards scepticism with anything which mentions the New York Times on the cover, and which garnishes the same with glowing endorsements from more financially lucrative writers, and I actively distrust novels published in the trade paperback format, same size as a seventies Marvel comic, because it somehow feels ostentatious, demonstrative, and as though those involved are trying too hard to render something special - which is more properly the job of the cunt or cunts writing the thing, I would argue. Even before I'd taken the book from the shelf, it felt like a marketing exercise, like the Game of Thrones of science-fiction, like something which was thinking about the television series even before it had hit the book stands. The endorsement of George R. R. Martin therefore rang an unfortunate note for me, never mind that James S.A. Corey doesn't actually exist, being the pen name shared by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, both of whom belong to the same writers' group as the aforementioned Georgie. Film, telly and, to an arguably lesser extent, comic books tend to be collaborative efforts and hence corporate in nature to greater or lesser degrees, so I can forgive the occasional stench of marketing in such cases providing the narrative manages to do something interesting within whatever limits may apply; but it's different with the novel, or it should be. I'm not suggesting that only anguished hermits who suffer for their art are capable of churning out a decent novel, but there's a happy medium, and I never again want to find myself in the same room as an author who talks about writing in terms of the pitch, the franchise, or the demographic. I would prefer to read the words of people who wish to write rather than to simply entertain.

Trying hard to ignore the above reservations, I got to reading, finding it initially difficult to follow without my mind's eye attempting to reconstruct what it had seen on the telly, meaning it's quite difficult to assess how much I would have got from Leviathan Wakes without already having the special effects imprinted on me. It seems to be fairly well written for what it is - essentially a detective thriller as space opera - but I felt as though something was lacking, some spark of inspiration for which narrative efficiency, maybe even something derived from a formula, was hoping to compensate. It was like reading the book of the movie when it should probably be the other way round, except somehow the TV people did it better while remaining more or less faithful to the material; except they didn't. A few details we saw on the screen are better explained here, but then the book pulls moves which seemed a lot more convincing as television, not least being the inclusion of scenes set on Earth featuring Chrisjen Avasarala which were entirely absent from this first written instalment - conspicuously absent even, and yes, I know the book came first.

Leviathan Wakes is a decent novel, above average even, but not an exceptional one, whereas The Expanse really is an exceptional television show. It's way too fucking long considering what it spends most of its time doing and how much of the dialogue reads like it wants to be on telly when it grows up. It's not lacking in poetry or even worthwhile themes - mostly concerning humanity's habit of collectively shooting itself in the foot - and it's efficiently pacey, and even where we can see it obviously wants to be telly when it's older, at least it wants to be decent telly rather than Babylon fucking 5; but, like I said, Peter F. Hamilton and Stephen Baxter have both done this sort of thing so much better; which is probably why we don't really need Netflix versions of Night's Dawn or the Xeelee Sequence.