Fantastic Stories of Imagination - December 1964

 

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination December 1964 (1964)
Someone deposited a stack of these at my local Half Price Books so I bagged all those issues which looked interesting, seeing as they were going for just two dollars each. The thing which looked interesting about this was it being the original home of Philip K. Dick's The Unteleported Man which I'd never read in this form. Dick added a second half for the reprint as an Ace Double, then eventually expanded the thing and renamed it Lies Inc., which I have read, and about which I don't remember a great deal beyond that it probably didn't need quite such a lengthy guitar solo half way through side one. The Unteleported Man seems to have been Phil trying his hand at a spy thriller, or at least something which borrows from spy thrillers. It's fairly typical of what he was writing in the early sixties, although feels a little more forced than usual, or at least lacking both the usual jazzy sparkle and the humour - which is perhaps why he revisited it. The story runs that Earth is suffering from overpopulation and so everyone is encouraged to relocate to a distant colony planet, communication with which has proven suspiciously difficult; so we don't know if the migrants are enjoying a new life in outer space, or if the teleport is simply a more technologically advanced gas chamber, meaning those Germans are up to their old tricks again. The paranoia is pronounced even by Phil's standards, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the suggestion of Germans being up to their old tricks again, but it generally works better than it did as Lies Inc.

Elsewhere we find Harry Harrison's They're Playing Our Song, Gordon R. Dickson's It, Out of the Darkest Jungle, Christopher Anvil's Merry Christmas from Outer Space, and John Starr Niendorff's I Am Bonaro. There's also The Fanatic by Arthur Porges which I read but can't remember any of the details, whether I got anything out of it or what. I'm likewise sketchy where Merry Christmas from Outer Space is concerned because I read no further than the first page. It's one of those stories told as a series of letters, a conceit which has always struck me as gimmicky, kind of lazy, and usually the last resort of a scoundrel, so I didn't bother. Similarly gimmicky and lazy is It, Out of the Darkest Jungle being written as a screenplay, either in reference to its achingly stereotypical b-movie narrative, or because Dickson just couldn't be arsed.

You might expect better from Harry Harrison, but in this instance you would be mistaken. Being 1964 and the height of Beatlemania, They're Playing Our Song is about a hit pop combo called the Spiders. They play a concert for their screaming fans, a couple of whom manage to sneak past security and make it to the groups' hotel room, only to be eaten alive because the Spiders really are spiders.

Clever.

I Am Bonaro was all right - nothing Earth shattering, but certainly readable. I have a few more issues of Fantastic to get through, but on the strength of this one, even with the presence of Philip K. Dick, I'm not too surprised it hasn't lasted.

The War in the Air

H.G. Wells The War in the Air (1908)
The general consensus seems divided as to the quality of Wells' later work, or at least his less well-remembered work. My take is that, based on what I've read, you're probably better off sticking with War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon, and the ones you've already heard of because they're mostly at least as amazing as their respective legends would have it. In the Days of the Comet is decent, but probably not so astonishing as earlier novels, and The Food of the Gods is massively underwhelming - an interesting story struggling to free itself from beneath a duvet of creaking gags and supposedly comic characters. The War in the Air struggles with similar whimsy but mostly keeps the balance to just the right side of readable. Of course, history itself has somewhat overtaken this novel and readers may need to remind themselves of what a wonder powered flight must once have seemed. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men foresaw the aircraft as such a radical invention as to inspire what would become a new religion, and in the art world there were the Italian Aeropainters - about whom no-one really likes to say too much these days - but the miracle of aviation has since been lost somewhere within the general thrust of technological progress.

Once again, Wells tends to fall flat as an author of predictive science fiction, his flapping flying machines belonging to the same oubliette as the feeding tubes which Hugo Gernsback had believed would put an end to the misery of mastication. Although this isn't to suggest that this novel lacks purpose or fails to say anything of interest, and certainly it predicted the change in the zeitgeist brought about by the first world war, if not necessarily the means by which it was fought. Our main character is one Bert Smallways of Bromley, Kent. Smallways - who probably would have worked just as well without his speech rendered in phonetic south London - is one of Wells' working class types who thankfully manages to stay just the right side of turning into Will Hay or George Formby, and who finds his parochial existence cast rudely upon the wider world stage through a faintly improbable encounter with an inventor. Manned flight is developed and swiftly spreads, and the entire world is suddenly at war. Combatants are no longer obliged to fight along a limited earthbound front and are now able to attack the enemy from above, far behind the traditional lines. Finding himself aboard a German airship as it bombs New York, Smallways accordingly comes to a realisation.

Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.

Technological progress has forever changed the dynamic of war, as did, it could be argued, the first world war a few years later.

Nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways might lift his head proudly and vote for war and spirited foreign policy, and go secure from such horrible things.

Wells takes a typically pessimistic view, and so The War in the Air effectively bombs the human race back into the stone age, the message being at least as much to do with human nature as the technological progress which allows us to express its worst aspects.

The development of science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed but imperatively demanded.

Wells' view is that such a synthesis is vital but unlikely because we as a species tend to take for granted the universal nobility of our own intentions, so the argument is, as ever, not whether we can do something, but whether we should. The above principal applies just as well now as it did in 1908 and might be considered with regard to the sort of cultural homogeneity and amplification of stupidity which the internet has brought about.

The War in the Air is far from Wells' greatest but its only real failing is, arguably, that it would have worked as well with about half the page count. Otherwise, it's respectable, and only truly suffers through War of the Worlds and others having been such tough acts to follow.

Talisman Angelical

Samantha Davies and Matthew Bower
Talisman Angelical (2017)
I'm not sure why I left it so long to track this one down, it being among the first to be published by Amphetamine Sulphate. I suppose those initial six titles appearing all at once seemed just a bit overwhelming, and a couple of the others sounded more like the sort of thing I would appreciate, and I had a hunch this one might be a bit on the incomprehensible side.

I'm not sure who Samantha Davies is. Goodreads describes her as an author of books about life as an executive escort whose job seems to be the sexy spanking of important business people. I strongly suspect we're talking about a completely different Samantha Davies, although you never know with Amphetamine Sulphate. Matthew Bower is of course the man behind Skullflower, who probably influenced more groups, artists and musicians than you've even heard of. I'm not really sure how the division of labour works here. My first instinct would be to propose Davies as an organising force to that which gushes forth from the Bower spigot, but I'm probably wrong.

Anyway, Talisman Angelical is a bit on the incomprehensible side in so much as that the HBO series is probably a long fucking way off. Yet while it reads like random signals, channelling if you like, the narrative suggests a progression - like we're learning something and we're given the details in an order which makes sense, even if what we're learning isn't easy to describe. The narrative is approximately shamanic, I suppose, but eclectic and not above the occasional pop reference where it suits the mood, and at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, as a reading experience it's very much comparable to listening to Skullflower - like a blast of non-verbal meaning, something which can only be described in abstract terms, beyond language, something overwhelming which overloads the sense. Strangest of all is that something so uncompromising in forging its own lines of communication regardless of convention should prove so absorbing. It really pulls you in and it's difficult to say why. I've never subscribed to the idea of there being a meaning of life, but were there such a thing, I'd say you stand a good chance of finding it somewhere in here.

Sore Sites

Will Self Sore Sites (2000)
It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Self wrote a regular column for Building Design, a weekly magazine for architects. Sore Sites assembles a whole shitload of those columns into a single volume which has garnered the sort of appraisal you would expect on Goodreads, which only makes me wonder why some of these people bother to read Will Self at all if they're going to get pissy, as they invariably do, over his use of words in making the sort of observations he tends to make.

For what it may be worth, even as a fan of the dude, this one initially struck me as quite a hard sell. Nevertheless, it works, and it informs, and is insightful and funny in all of the right places. The author freely admits that he understands architecture only in so much as that he has opinions, and often the same sort of opinions as the rest of us, which is why he - as a layman, albeit an erudite one - was hired to write for Building Design in the first place, because you're not going to get this sort of perspective from anyone who has won an award for a series of concrete blocks. Being Self, the digressions greatly outweigh the strictly architectural content somehow without actually straying from the topic, and so mixed in with the aggregate we get autobiographical observations concerning typography, literature, Eric Gill, J.G. Ballard, the London Underground, fatherhood, pretty much everything, of which my favourite was this takedown of some miserable performance art thing.

But the reality was a couple of upper-middle-class twerps who'd turned their sub-designer house in Camberwell over to a bunch of grown-up children performing inadequate party turns. I'm as pretentious as they come but this really stuck in my craw.

The thing that stuck presumably being the fifty quid admission, the sponsorship, and that these kinds of performers do what they do because they can't think, or write, or paint, or print; and... the audience pay to see them for the same reason.

Sore Sites is funny, surprisingly illuminating, and works far better as a psychogeographical monologue than the great majority of pointless wank presuming to hijack the term.

The Saviour

Mark Millar, Daniel Vallely & Nigel Kitching
The Saviour (1990)
I don't remember whether this came before Insiders or very shortly after, but it was in any case the first comic which seemed to propel Mark Millar in the general direction of the radar - and a brave undertaking by Leicester's Trident Comics, putting themselves out there with this title and fingers crossed that all that late eighties fan enthusiasm for things which weren't actually the X-Men hadn't been just so much hot air. I remember the sense of excitement fairly well, so it all seems a little sad with hindsight, particularly given that Trident's Martin Skidmore is no longer with us. I met him a few times and he was a lovely guy, and even though Trident went tits up with tragic inevitability, one can hardly fault his ambition.

The Saviour lasted six issues and the story remains incomplete, although I gather Millar may have recycled some elements in American Jesus. This book collects the first five issues, presenting a fairly well rounded if obviously open ended chapter describing a second coming wherein our universally adored Lord and Saviour, is actually the man downstairs taking his revenge in the body of Jonathan Ross. It's more complicated than that, obviously, and although I suspect that Jesus is back but is actually someone else is probably its own genre by now, this was either the first, or is at least the first that I remember. The real Jesus has returned too in Saviour, albeit as an itinerant stoner no-one takes seriously, but - and here I make no apologies for revealing a plot twist in a book that got cancelled thirty fucking years ago - even the real Jesus turns out to be someone else.

I vaguely recall mumblings about the artwork being crap, and that's what killed it, and the same mumblings can naturally be found in contemporary form on Goodreads, but such mumblings are as unto the bleatings of those without sight to see, my child. Daniel Vallely was patently still finding his art-feet but his stark black and white almost photorealist images remain shocking and chilling, and if you can't see the beauty in Nigel Kitching's stark McKeever-esque expressionism, you can go fuck yourself, quite frankly.

I don't suppose there's much chance of ever seeing this thing concluded now, but it's at least nice that we have enough to reveal the full extent of its promise. When they started up a year or so later, Vertigo Comics really should have been all over this one.

The Forgotten Planet

Murray Leinster The Forgotten Planet (1954)
I read this as one of two novels assembled in a big fat collection along with a bunch of short stories. The collection is called Planets of Adventure because all of the stories occur on other planets. Where the adventure comes in is not yet obvious and based on this first one, the thing may as well have been named Planets of Explanation. I suppose I should at least be happy that the common theme is the intergalactic setting rather than characters, as with Leinster's Med Ship books.

The forgotten planet of the title is at an approximately Carboniferous stage of development, having been seeded by ships from Earth which left behind a load of insects, plants, and so on to turn the otherwise barren world into something with an ecosystem. Then another ship crashed there several thousand years ago and our story follows the progress of their distant descendants, who have devolved to something below even a basic stone age level of civilisation by this point. We follow the gang across their foggy wasteland of bugs and fungus grown to gigantic proportions and no-one even speaks until the final third of the novel. Mostly it's descriptions of insects doing things qualified by references to what Earth scientists used to claim regarding the life cycle of such and such an invertebrate, and occasionally our grunting survivors find themselves having to fight off a giant spider. It's more or less a novelisation of a nature documentary, with added cavemen for the sake of focus. It's also three short stories bolted together, of which the first two were written in the early twenties when Leinster was just getting started. Being Leinster, they're nicely written but almost certainly had much greater impact in the twenties than they do now that giant spiders and the like have become somewhat prosaic.

It therefore felt a little like reading a novel about paint drying, although is not entirely without worth and is at least better than Lindsay Gutteridge's fucking awful Cold War in a Country Garden which does more or less the same thing with less charm.

Paresis

Isabelle Nicou Paresis (2002)
I imagine the deal of translating an entire novel from its original language - in this case French - must be a colossal headache, and one which more or less guarantees that the work had to be pretty special in the first place in order to warrant translation. Paresis, Nicou's first novel, certainly seems to qualify, and we should be doubly glad because, being fairly esoteric and philosophical, I doubt this one is likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single - which I state as a judgement on the audience rather than the book.

Once again, I know what it's about, or know what I think it's about, but am unlikely to be able to furnish any description which really does it justice because, put simply, you just have to read the thing. I've noticed a degree of griping on social media of late along the lines of Amphetamine Sulphate having settled into a rut of publishing transgressive confessionals and not much else. The accusation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, and Paresis is something else altogether for what that may be worth - existential philosophy as approximately linear fiction and so, I suppose, sort of traditional in that respect. Nicou seemingly spent many years studying phenomenology and so seems a good fit for the imprint, given the number of titles which have explored the gulf which divides the human body and our understanding of the same.

To clarify in more tactile terms, there's a lot of self-harm here, all mixed up with sexuality, self-loathing, and all that good stuff, despite which it defies almost all of the convenient categories which might be proposed by such ingredients. I'm not sure it's even what people usually mean by transgressive as I found only the final paragraph truly disturbing in isolation. There's masochism, although that may be too loaded and misleading a term, and as with most Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it's not really about the sex so much as it is about the power, or lack thereof, and is therefore in an entirely different class to bullshit such as the Story of O. I guess the bottom line is that Paresis pulls the reader through the sensations and memories of its narrator as she falls to pieces, affording a delirious limited view such as might be seen between bandages, and so allows us to understand perspectives which might otherwise send us all running for the hills; and it does all this in just over a hundred pages.

I'm hugely impressed.

Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall

 

Spike Milligan Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (1971)
I read this - and this very same copy - when I was fifteen and doubtless pissed myself with laughter. I read it again at some point in the nineties and was left with a vague impression of it being relatively sober in comparison to Milligan's subsequent war memoirs, as though he was still trying to write a proper grown up autobiography without being quite sure why. Now I've read it again and have gone back to my initial reaction, or at least something more in that direction. I haven't actually pissed myself with laughter, but I've chuckled because it's often funny, and the humour has aged well for me. It may also be significant that the last Milligan I read was Puckoon, which mostly tried too hard and failed. However, Puckoon was a novel where Adolf is autobiography, and autobiography describing what must have been a truly terrifying time, freeing the author from the onus of delivering one gag after another, instead allowing his humour to settle in a more natural configuration across the events of the early forties.

It's fascinating for me because I lived within walking distance of the Milligan family home in south-east London for more than a decade, so the account opens on what is very much familiar territory. It's also fascinating because this is the second world war as seen from ground level, from what is very much an authentic working class perspective, part of a narrative which has become very much sidelined in recent times, not least by the current appetite for the past recontextualised as cutesy heritage product in service of some exhausting contemporary dialogue - and if you're waiting for the diatribe about momentary lapses of judgement such as Curry & Chips or the Pakistani Daleks, then you may actually be part of the problem.

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory.

The victory he's referring to was - obviously - over Adolf Hitler, Fascism, screaming Nationalism, and the drive to reduce human society to a black and white world of good and evil with dogmatic and definitive answers to complex issues reducing the need for actual cognition. I'm sure we're all aware of the traditional role of the funny man as jester, the one who uses humour to express that which might be otherwise frowned upon. Well, Milligan's work still fulfils that role with devastating wit, humanity, chilling insight, and even poetry. We should try not to forget that.

Nine Tales of Raffalon

Matthew Hughes Nine Tales of Raffalon (2017)
My initial impression of the Raffalon tales first featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction were of a sword and sorcery take on E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief. The author himself happened upon this observation and set me straight, explaining that he regarded the setting of his tales as renaissance more than medieval and what I misread as significantly influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels. This made a lot of sense once I read Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous which inhabits the distant future of Earth's final years with magic having returned to human society, which has itself resumed a mostly pre-technological economy. Anyway, it turns out - as I now realise - that I hadn't fully grasped the proverbial stick and that the Raffalon stories quite deliberately inhabit the very same world as Vance's magicians; so it all makes sense now.

Rather than merely playing with someone else's train set or indulging in mimicry, Hughes explores aspects of the Dying Earth which Vance didn't seem to touch on, at least not in Rhialto the Marvellous. Where Rhialto at least inhabits the surreal world of reality warping wizards, Raffalon relies upon his wits to get him by in the semi-feudal lowlands of craftsmen and wandering pugilists; and it works because Hughes writes with the sort of elegant wit and wild invention which worked so well for Vance, whilst retaining what I've come to recognise as absolutely his own voice. Raffalon is funny without feeling the need to pull faces, and the stories wrap the reader up in all sorts of logistic knots before leading us to conclusions we could never have predicted, all of which makes for immensely satisfying reading, high on roughage and essential vitamins. Fantasy has never really been my genre of choice, but Raffalon is an exception, and I can confidently say it's because it's rare to find an author so convincing or so well versed in his craft as is Hughes.