Fantasy & Science Fiction 717

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 717 (2015)
The last digest magazine I tackled was an old issue of Analog which left me feeling slightly unclean, and this, combined with a failed attempt to read the work of Yukio Mishima - a man whom I'm fairly certain Kenneth Clark would have denounced as quite, quite beastly - I've really come to appreciate Fantasy & Science Fiction, a digest which has yet to let me down. Even given that not everything in such a collection is going to click with every reader, and that I'm really not even that struck on fantasy as a genre, the standard is such that you can even appreciate the quality of the occasional turkey, and that turkeys tend to be in the eye of the beholder with Fantasy & Science Fiction; or to put it another way, even the weaker material is usually a decent read. As for this issue, I was less than knocked out by Francis Marion Soty's interpretation of a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, but the rest range from respectable to even wonderful.

Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason, and Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer both have enough going on for it to be worth mentioning. Better still is Dale Bailey's Lightning Jack's Last Ride, which seems to suggest that the western is alive and well, despite the author substituting cowboys for post-apocalyptic NASCAR drivers. It's also a refreshing change for being an actual narrative rather than just a plot with characters attached.

Matthew Hughes' Prisoner of Pandarius seems to be a fairly literal fantasy transposition of E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief as Raffalon, who inhabits a pseudo-medieval world of taverns, spells, imps and the like. I've often found such settings to be something of a stumbling block, but Hughes really drew me in with a tightly knit and elegantly delineated mystery nevertheless based around people who nick stuff from castles and hang around with wizards. In fact Prisoner of Pandarius was so engaging that I'm  going to see if I can't find some more by the guy.

Bud Webster's Farewell Blues is actually the reason I bought this issue, having faintly known Bud online as part of a Simak appreciation group. We were hardly brothers from other mothers, but Bud was one of the people I liked in an online community which nevertheless managed to attract the usual quota of disagreeable arseholes, despite our having been brought together in mutual appreciation of an unusually gentle and pacific author. I'd enjoyed Bud's excellent and informative online articles about the aforementioned Simak, Murray Leinster, and other favourites, and he mentioned having a story featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction then departed this mortal coil before I actually had a chance to read the thing. Farewell Blues is, with a certain irony, about death and the passing of loved ones, and is dedicated to Bud's father. It's centered around jazz players in New Orleans, two of whom are named Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn after alleged members of the Residents, and refers to an afterlife which is actually the place we all go when we dream - a Mexican folk myth which I used in Against Nature; so it turns out we would have had plenty to talk about had I read this while he was still with us, not least being that Farewell Blues is a wonderful tale and the peculiar likelihood of Bud actually having known the Residents; but never mind.

Once again, I feel thoroughly restored by this thing and encouraged by the fact that it is still able to exist in a world of corporate entertainment product, franchises, and cynical marketing.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Yukio Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)
I picked this up some years ago, vaguely recalling that the bloke from Death in June was a fan - which seemed like a recommendation back then. Mishima was Japan's most celebrated author, or one of them. If low on chuckles, The Sailor gets off to an intriguing start, assuming here that this is mostly thanks to the author as much as the translator. A young boy discovers a peephole which allows him to spy upon his mother while she's on the job with a random sailor. I gather that the boy forms a cruel, elitist gang with others from his school in order to torture the sailor for reasons which may or may not have become clear had I finished the thing; but I got to the page where the kids torture and kill a kitten and found that I had thrown the book across the room, which hasn't happened since Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can't deal with gratuitous animal torture because it upsets me, which I presume is the author's intent, and somehow it's always cats so it seems like nasty, lazy button pushing, a cheap effect; and the preamble about breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos just means you're an arsehole, Yukio.

Godzilla aside, I don't have any particular investment or even necessarily any interest in Japanese tradition or culture, so unsmiling men frowning into the sunset while thinking really hard about honour doesn't do much for me in and of itself. Wikipedia claims Mishima was bullied at school for reading books, which is doubtless why Noboru in The Sailor seems to be one of those lone wolf preying on the sheeplike herd of weak, sentimental humanity types, although I could be wrong because, as I say, I didn't actually make it past the end of chapter five. Had I done so, perhaps I would have discovered that Noboru is to be pitied rather than admired, but I guess I'll never know. Have you ever noticed how the aforementioned lone wolves always seem to be overcompensating for failing in the Darwinian terms they themselves often claim to have embraced? Show me almost any scowling, black-clad poetry binging representative of the spiritual elite, and I'll show you someone who wouldn't last five fucking minutes down Catford high street on a Saturday night.

My theory is that had Mishima been born American, and a couple of decades later, his work would have been mostly published on Amazon CreateSpace as eBooks, and he'd be spinning scowling patriotic yarns about freedom fighters defending the last of the white race against Obama's NWO. Luckily, he wasn't, and so we get to view his elegantly composed mania through an Orientalist lens, essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt because each word is set carefully in place with much honour like in one of those Samurai rituals or summink; so we imagine we're watching Kurosawa when actually it's probably closer to that nebulous shit beloved of Hitler and his pals, the honour of suffering and other Death in June albums in the making. Almost anything can be made to appear philosophical when you transgress the limits of just how seriously you are prepared to take yourself.

I could be wrong, of course, given that I didn't finish the thing; but honestly, I couldn't give a shit.

Oh No It Isn't!

Paul Cornell Oh No It Isn't! (1997)
I realise this is the third Who related thing I've read this month, which is a bit depressing. Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with a to be read pile the size of the Empire State, I've avoided stocking up on too many new books this year, intending instead to read all those I've had for at least a decade which I either never got around to reading, or at least read so long ago that they may as well be new books. Practically speaking, this means that when I come to the end of one thing and suddenly decide I feel like reading something in the general direction of science-fiction, ruling out anything read in the last decade leaves me with either a back issue of some digest magazine or one of four-million Who tie-ins; and yes, it is a bit depressing, because despite the magic of Who being that it can tell any kind of story, it rarely has much to say outside a few very specific kinds of story, with one of the main ones being where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal - which I state in full knowledge of having done this myself.

Anyway, so as to save the usual preamble, let's just assume this is Doc Savage or some other piece of serial fiction. It's Who, but one of the Virgin Who novels after the point at which the BBC reclaimed all of their copyrighted material, the stuff they decided might still yield a few shekels if they could just squeeze hard enough; so it's Who without Who, if you will, sort of like:

Bernice Summerfield is Emma Thompson as an archaeologist who has adventures in outer space, but generally more entertaining than that may sound depending on who was writing. At worst, her books tended towards generic Douglas Adams impersonations based on the sort of boffo larks we all had at uni, unfortunately predicated on the notion that the word bonking was still funny; but occasionally someone got it right with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Paul Cornell always seemed like one of those authors with more to offer than just further Who, which I guess you could say has turned out to be the case. Here he does that thing where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal, but it works because the premise is so deeply fucking ludicrous as to defy expectation, namely that reality has come to resemble pantomime. Professor Summerfield is granted access to an archaeological dig upon an alien planet just as a species called the Grel show up in argumentative spirit and suddenly we're in a world of glass slippers, princesses, and shoddy scenery.

'We have not escaped from a show!' exclaimed Moody. 'we work in our mine, and sell the rubies and diamonds that we find there in the village market.'

Bernice frowned. 'Is there much of a market for precious stones in a small agrarian community?'

The dwarves all looked at her blankly.

Truthfully, it all gets a bit knotted up at the end with far too many characters chasing around for reasons I couldn't quite follow, but it doesn't really matter. This sort of thing could have fallen flat on its arse, but is otherwise actually as great as one might hope, and genuinely funny without digging the reader in the ribs and smirking the whole fucking time. In this respect it reads a little like Terry Pratchett with the post-modernism turned up a notch or two, notably while self-consciously posing for the cover art.

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the room, a rueful expression on her face.

Wolsey looked around the cave to his right, leaning his weight on his right front paw, holding the gun in his other hand.

They stood like that for a moment.

Somehow, there also seems to be a point to all of this beyond the basic requirement of scrapes and chuckles, namely that this sort of thing is essentially absurd at the best of times even without the pantomime, so why the fuck not?

One might easily view Oh No It Isn't! as heir to Simak's Out of Their Minds or even Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, at least more so than to The Underwater Menace or even Cornell's Love and War. As with the best of the line, it counts as a respectable effort in its own right.

Strangers From the Skies

Brad Steiger Strangers From the Skies (1966)
I've no idea where this one sits in the Brad Steiger bibliography, but his first was published in 1965 so it's pretty close to the beginning. You can sort of tell, Strangers being pretty much your standard saucer paperback of its time - a list of peculiar encounters, mostly just lights in the sky, nothing too weird and certainly no probes vanishing up anyone's bum, the usual excuses made by the air force, some vague mumbling about what science doesn't know and we're all wrapped up at around 160 pages. Presupposing for a moment that there's any value whatsoever in saucer literature, Steiger went on to write better, much weirder, and generally more satisfying by virtue of the theories he developed in an effort to tie all that paranormal stuff down to a single coherent cause; but even here, in this comparatively sober treatise, his writing shines and he keeps things interesting, and never insults the reader's intelligence as did many of his contemporaries - possibly excepting that of evangelical rationalist puritans. This is because, aside from selecting an interesting and genuinely surreal array of alleged cases - many predating Kenneth Arnold - he tends to report without any significant editorialising, pretty much leaving it up to us as to whether we believe what he's telling us. It also helps that he can string a sentence together.

I've read a ton of these things now, and I still don't consider myself a believer any more than I necessarily consider myself a sceptic. Strangers From the Skies hasn't done anything to change my mind, but is a fucking good read nonetheless.

The Time Travellers

Simon Guerrier The Time Travellers (2005)
This was one of the final Who novels to be published before the thing returned to the screen in 2005 and therefore belongs to the era of proper Who to my way of thinking. Additionally it has helped me clarify what I mean by proper Who, at least for the sake of argument, which boils down to this. Proper Who took place in a vastly mysterious universe and told stories which could only ever reveal one small part of the picture at a time, usually by looking past the main character to whatever was happening around him, so the main character was never quite the focus so much as the lens - even when whatever we were looking at seemed to represent some aspect of his own role in the greater story of this imagined universe; and although some of the weirder details were occasionally explained or hinted at - as with The Three Doctors, Lungbarrow, or Alien Bodies - that which was revealed seemed only to deepen the mystery by posing further questions. I'm not suggesting this was anything intentional on the part of the producers, but this was how it looked to me and why it usually worked.

New Who, on the other hand, rewrote the mission statement with a main character who became focus rather than lens, like a cool older brother*, someone of whom dimwits on forums claimed that the Doctor is always good as though it were part of some manifesto, essentially reducing him to yet another dull adventurer. New Who is proper Who reimagined by Tim Burton, or someone aspiring to Tim Burton's formulaic brand of surrealist whimsy, with changes made based on the findings of focus groups and committees. It's slick, corporate, targetted, and even its fans refer to it as a franchise, a property, a concern; as distinct from earlier versions scraped together by cranky radiophonic outsiders who probably would have ended up homeless had they not managed to con their way into the BBC. There's no real mystery in new Who, because everything you need is right there on the screen in big snowflake swirls of magic and wonderment. His name is actually Darren Who, and he's quirky and kind of zany but always good, and he went to school with the Master. One day he did a drawing of a horse, and the Master said it was shite which caused young Darren Who to experience feelings of sadness and low self-esteem, and from thence forth he didst vow that never again would the forces of evil blah blah blah…

You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. Soz.

Anyway, I know it's all product, and the usual alarm bells sounded with unusual volume at Guerrier's resume, which is extensive and seemingly exclusively Who related, excepting a pair of novels tying in to other culty telly franchises; and a Sapphire & Steele audio drama.

Sapphire & Steele…

Jesus fucking Christ…

Anyway, there appears to be a multitude of writers of this general career driven type, each one just itching to tell an untold and entirely negligible story of some television Who companion about which we'd otherwise forgotten for reasons which actually aren't that difficult to understand, and ordinarily you couldn't pay me to read their work, not after that shit about how Davros created the Daleks because someone called him names when he was a kid; but, I remember liking The Time Travellers a lot, and statistically speaking, there has to be at least one of these guys who can actually fucking write, yes?

Simon Guerrier is that man, it seems. The story is actually a bit of a mess, as is possibly inevitable given all of the potential paradoxes upon which the story is built, but it works because it's well told. Guerrier's prose is, I suppose, efficient, if not really given to flights of poetic fancy, but at the same time it commits none of the usual sins of Who obsessives, imagining that writing is somehow a bit like talking, or like a portentous cinematic voiceover; and he eschews both clichés and button-pushing sentiment. The Time Travellers is clearly the work of someone who actually knows how to write, which shouldn't be taken for granted.

Of course, certain expectations come with the book being a Who novel, which is fine. Guerrier strongly invokes the mood of something which could easily have been on the box back in 1964 and yet wasn't, without it feeling like a self-conscious period piece - or like it would rather be telly for that matter; and his story works on a sort of vintage logic, kind of like old programmes run on the latest operating system, which is even a little impressive given the once prevalent temptation to do an Alan Moore by forcing the innocents of yesteryear through the contemporary wringer, turning Pogle's Wood into a popular dogging spot, for one example. Except Guerrier actually does this by transposing sixties telly characters to a fairly harsh version of London in the year 2006 with Canary Wharf, the DLR, mobile phones and so on, but gets away with it by telling the story on their terms, rendering the contemporary as something weird and borderline Orwellian.

The cover says it all, really - more unsettling modernism than a hook in the commercial sense, a suggestion of mood which promises only further questions. Within a year these books would have photographic covers of the stars, reaching out to punters and figuratively asking would you like to come on an adventure with me? It was all downhill after this, downhill and right into the crapper.

I really wish Guerrier would write something which hadn't been on the box in some form.

*: Or indeed sister. I don't have any problem with the recasting of the Doctor as female beyond the existing problems I've had with the television show since 2005.

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
Anaya, in case you were unaware, was a fairly big cheese in Chicano literature - Chicano literature being, in case you were unaware, the writing of working class, indigenous and mestizo Mexico, and therefore something dealing with folk history, the role of the Mexican in modern society, and understanding one's roots in the conquest where those roots may incorporate both the conquered and the conquistador. I came to Anaya through my Mesoamerican obsession and Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, which he co-edited with Francisco Lomelí. This led me to the novels Heart of Aztlán then Bless Me, Ultima, both of which significantly informed elements of my own Against Nature in the event of anyone giving a shit.

Bless Me, Ultima is a folksy tale of growing up Chicano in New Mexico around the time of the second world war. It's folksy in so much as that its semi-rural people live at the very lowest rung of the economic ladder, and is unlikely to alienate anyone who enjoyed Little House on the Prairie, except there's not much sugar to be spared here, and even Ultima, the amiable curandera grandmother at the heart of our family, remains a little too mysterious to be entirely cute. There's nevertheless plenty to warm the heart, mostly centred around the early life and schooling of Antonio, our main character, much of which will be familiar to anyone who was ever six years old - which is probably most of us; but the warmth is, as with much lore of Mexican derivation, part of a cosmos built from dualistic counterparts, and so the rest of the universe is necessarily cold, dark, and full of uncertainty. Ultima herself contrasts with the alleged bruja daughters of Tenorio, a contrast which itself hints at the possibility of evil being no more than a question of where one happens to be stood, particularly when Tenorio accuses Ultima of witchcraft. All the while, Antonio is torn between, amongst other forces, his Catholic upbringing - albeit the indigenous interpretation of Catholicism - and something more animist, closer to the old ways, embodied in the magical realist figure of the Golden Carp which hints at a water-based cosmos far closer to the traditional Aztec view of creation; as are the travels Antonio experiences in his dreams, interludes which seem to impact upon his waking world. As to what it's actually about, it's about life and death, no more, no less, and in terms which are both figurative and absolutely literal.

Whilst arts grant funded poets from San Francisco gobbling mescaline and having visions may be all well and good, Bless Me, Ultima would seem to present a genuine, and unflinchingly honest insight into the Chicano soul at ground level, out on the llano and far away from any tourist attraction or even anything too rustically picturesque. It's also the work of an author who wanted to be read, so it communicates theological and philosophical complexities without either talking down to anyone or shaking its head and muttering that you probably wouldn't understand; which is why it's rightly regarded as a classic.

Wolverine / Kitty Pryde & Wolverine

Chris Claremont, Frank Miller & Al Milgrom
Wolverine (1982)
Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (1984)
As I may have mentioned, I was once something of a Marvel zombie, particularly where all those X-books were concerned. I bought and collected them religiously up until the point at which Rob Liefeld came on the scene and it all went down the toilet. Then, feeling a little uncomfortable about how much of the stuff I'd accumulated, I flogged the lot for not nearly enough back in the nineties, an act of Cromwellian reform which I've regretted ever since; at least up until about two years ago when I noticed how this shit is still pretty cheap and easy to find now that we've invented the internet. So I've re-bought more or less everything I once owned then sold, and filled in a few gaps along the way.

Accordingly I have a big stack of Wolverine back issues which I intend to tackle fairly soon, but I thought I'd start here for the sake of keeping things tidy - two limited series dating from before the lad graduated to his own regular comic book, four and six issues respectively, the earlier one having been collected during the initial excitement of the graphic novel, the comic growing up, and all of that good stuff.

At the heart of most superhero comics you'll find the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, so those comics I'd consider the most successful have tended to work in spite of the genre, usually by doing things in such a way as to distract from the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, or else by doing something slightly different. The X-Men comics, for example, border on science-fiction by focussing on the sheer weirdness of superheroes, emphasising their outsider credentials - potentially at odds with the status quo rather than necessarily supporting it through the foiling of bank robberies. Wolverine, as a character, took this one further through being a dangerous, homicidal nutcase, an outsider even amongst outsiders. I'm sure you all know who he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do, but it's possibly worth remembering that initially, this was all he did - the unstoppable mutant dude who gets the red mist and stabs everyone in the room. It was one dimensional and somewhat limiting in terms of story because his response to any situation could only ever be to slice everyone into pieces, so Chris Claremont and Frank Miller decided to open things up a little.

1982's Wolverine sends our man to Japan and redefines him as a failed samurai, as a man striving to become something better than just the guy who loses his shit and slices everyone into pieces. Superheroes had come fitted with their own inner demons at least since the sixties when the Mighty Thor lost all faith in his own ability to select an insurance policy combining peace of mind with genuinely competitive rates; so Wolverine's hero journey was nothing particularly new but for the way in which it was told, borrowing from film noir and martial arts cinema which - again - if not exactly new, represented a refreshing further abstraction from the superhero genre. I'm possibly unique in having no particular interest in Japanese culture besides Godzilla movies. I therefore can't vouch for how well Claremont and Miller do Tokyo, and it may well be hokey as fuck given Claremont's version of London as seen elsewhere, but it works for me. It remains a kid's comic, or at least a precocious teenager's comic, but it does the job through never talking down and by maintaining a certain level of emotional intelligence, and Frank Miller's art is nothing if not cinematic.

 

Kitty Pryde is a character who had been hanging around the pages of the X-Men books for a while, seemingly another abstraction from the conventions of the genre in her failure to have settled upon either an action figure super-identity or costume. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine approximately repeats the previous hero journey in the service of granting Kitty a little more substance than just reader identification. Al Milgrom has drawn some truly ropey stuff in his time, but sort of gets away with this, rendering a slightly sketchier version of what Miller drew in the previous book, albeit without quite the same fine-tuned sense of design, picture space, and so on. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine fumbles the ball a little compared with its predecessor, taking a little too long to do its thing then closing with a ludicrously generic slap-up feed, suggesting Miller's input was fairly crucial.

Neither of these titles were life changing, but they did what they set out to do extremely well for the most part, expanding the form into something a bit more engaging than foiled bank robberies. They were something with a sense of art beyond what one might expect from unit shifting entertainment factories.

I continue to find Chris Claremont's writing fascinating because what he does seems fairly straightforward and mainstream - nothing too avant-garde, nothing particularly weird, certainly no obscure references to Marcel Duchamp - and yet his style is distinctive, immediately recognisable, and it hooks the reader into whatever is going on like few other comic book authors have managed, hence, I would argue, the phenomenal success of all those X-books back in the eighties. Some of what he writes should logically be as corny as shit given the stories to which the words are applied, and yet he always finds a way around stating the obvious without even drawing attention to such dodges.

Neither of these two series were ever really examples of the comic book having grown up, but they didn't need to be, and they work just fine on their own merits.

Down From

Ursula Pflug Down From (2018)
Of all the writers assembled within Snuggly Books' Drowning in Beauty anthology, Ursula Pflug seemed like someone whose work I should seek out, and the novella length Down From does not disappoint. It's probably a story about depression, schizophrenic episodes, mania and delusion, but is told with the only solid ground being the ever-shifting universe of Sandrine and then Vienna, who seems to be her friend but may also be herself - it's hard to be certain in this world, or rather these worlds, because each time Sandrine comes down from the mountain, everything has changed to the point of her sometimes having to guess what her husband is called this time. So, to render a potentially lazy comparison, think the folksy cosmos of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe filtered through the later, more paranoid writings of Philip K. Dick, at least in so much as that it's left to the reader to decide what's really happening here, then whether what's really happening is what matters.

Otherwise, it's a story of loss, loneliness, and means of coping with the same found in places beyond everyday reality. It's a world viewed from within the existence of a crazy homeless lady who lives in the woods in a house she's made from whatever trash she's been able to find, but from the inside looking out at the rest of us, and seeing things we may not expect to see. Down From is probably not quite like anything I've read before, and actually exceeds the promise of Fires Halfway.

The Job

William S. Burroughs The Job (1974)
I had this but never got around to reading it, then was reminded of its existence by The Revised Boy Scout Manual about a year or so ago, then realised I no longer owned a copy; so I've no idea what happened there. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would have given away, but never mind. Here's another one and this time I've read the fucker before it can slip from my grasp or is else spirited away by Venusians intent on keeping me from the truth. The Job comprises an interview or, more accurately, Burroughs responding to questions posed by Daniel Odier, occasionally responding by simply reproducing some relevant piece of writing. I assume Daniel Odier was a real person, although the reader could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, perhaps assuming this to be Burroughs setting himself the sort of questions he would like to be asked. It's pretty dry, reads like a postal interview, and is conspicuously lacking any inquiry along the lines of favourite hamburger topping or who's best - Beatles or Elvis?

As one might expect, most of Burroughs' major preoccupations are discussed - control, drugs, conspiracy, and so on. The subjects under discussion will be familiar to most who have read Burroughs and differ from how they are represented in the novels mainly in being a tidier, slightly more linear rendering of Bill's obsessions. Some of it is pure horseshit, as usual, and our man's analysis of Mayan culture is, as ever, about as useful as a chocolate fireguard - probably not quite so wacky as the notion of how we're actually living in a controlling matriarchal dictatorship, but same ballpark.

On the other hand, in The Job we find our man's testimony shining with particular brilliance when playing to his strengths - language as a virus, control systems, and an unusual and intriguing insight into Scientology suggesting it wasn't all just money for old rope. Of all the man's works, The Job probably isn't essential, but there's enough here to justify my having owned it twice.