Flying Saucers Uncensored

Harold T. Wilkins Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955)
I found this in Half Price, incorrectly libraried away on the science-fiction shelf, or possibly correctly depending on how you tend to view this sort of thing. It seemed promising with a back cover listing chapters on The Coming of the Titans, Stories of Colossal Space Ships, and the Mystery of the Martian "Death Ceiling" - no idea why the aforementioned death ceiling should be in quotation marks, and I can't even remember what Harold had to say about it; and this sort of thing seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground these days, what with the presumably increased collectability of vintage saucer literature and today's potential readership apparently being more interested in fat orange men from New York than little green ones from Mars. The author's home address is even given in the back should you notice anything a bit weird which he might want to write about. I couldn't really not buy it.

Unfortunately, Wilkins was very much a student of the Charles Fort school of paranormal journalism, writing in a very similar style and looking you right in the eye without flinching as he states that most reputable scientists now agree that both Atlantis and Lemuria existed and had flying machines. This would be okay but for his book settling into a steady and distinctly Fortean rhythm of endless newspaper excerpts reporting strange and inexplicable occurrences, many of which aren't even particularly weird. Therefore, as soon as Wilkins settles on, for one example, the subject of mysterious explosions, it becomes difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the impending twenty pages of single paragraph newspaper articles quoted verbatim on the topic of inexplicable bangs, punctuated only by somewhat minimalist commentary just in case we've forgotten the involvement of an author.

Strangely enough, a few days following this fire, the water mains in this same San Mateo region broke, and for hours streets and highways were flooded. The explanation was—just 'faulty valves' . . . . But much stranger is this: Two boys were riding bicycles in Millbrae, near San Mateo. They were not riding together, nor did they know each other; yet they suffered similar injuries at about the same time, 4PM. Neither could remember how the accidents occurred, or what happened just before the accidents. Both suffered head injuries and one was injured in other parts of his body. One of the bicycles was smashed.

I expect it was aliens, although Wilkins doesn't actually say, preferring to taunt us with an enigmatic just ordinary accidents, reader? despite that none of the rest of us have any fucking clue because we weren't there and the account is patchy at best. Such flim-flam is, I suppose, at least marginally preferable to the chapter on mysteriously shattered windows to which our host's contribution is the occasional interjection of here we have some more accounts to confound the scientists, and where one such interjection actually uses the word followeth. Fort did the same thing with endless lists of claims, few of which appear significantly mysterious, all working up towards an overarching loopy theory about how we're all living inside a hollow sphere and stars are in fact upside down active volcanoes. Wilkins doesn't even bother to pull all of this random crap together by means of some hypothesis which would at least justify our suffering, instead being content to bury us beneath endless newspaper articles while pulling a spooky face. Brad Steiger has been known to peddle some preposterous shite in his similarly themed books, but at least he kept it entertaining. I have to admit I may have skimmed the second half of this one.

Wow, No Thank You

Samantha Irby Wow, No Thank You (2020)
I'll begin with the customary whining, specifically that I feel I'm beginning to see too much of this sort of thing, namely collections of wackily confessional autobiographical essays. While I'm aware that wackily confessional autobiographical essays existed before David Sedaris first began tapping away, it feels very much as though the current wave have been surfing along on the same ticket. I regard David Sedaris as unreservedly wonderful - although I generally prefer his readings of his essays to their printed form; and while I  enjoy wackily confessional autobiographical essays for the most part, I'm seeing a bit too much of a pattern here, and we've got to the point of the wackily confessional autobiographical essay as an end in itself*.

The books - many of which often began life as a blog - usually have some single knowingly peculiar image on the primary coloured cover, with a self-consciously quirky saying or phrase for a title, and it's all starting to feel a bit obvious. There was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Samantha Bee's I Know I Am, But What Are You?, and David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs, and about fifty billion others. My wife rates the Samantha Bee and Jenny Lawson books fairly highly. I tried Let's Pretend This Never Happened but felt my buttons being pushed in an effort to make me laugh, which would have been fine except that seemed to be all that was going on. I bought my wife the David Thorne book as a birthday gift because it seemed kind of funny, but turned out to be a collection of notionally comic emails by some guy who once wrote jokes for David Letterman - money for old rope. In publishing terms, it seems we may have reached a point equivalent to that year during which the field of stand up comedy was suddenly flooded with a million unfunny laddish cunts who'd doubtless gone down a storm in the work canteen and had decided to make a go of it.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened sold so well that Jenny Lawson was able to open up her own book store here in San Antonio, which is where I came across Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You. There was a bunny on the cover and a quick flip through brought forth chuckles, so it seemed like it would make a good anniversary present for my wife. She read it and laughed a lot, then insisted I give it a go, so here I am.

My first impressions were good - those being the impressions which inspired me to buy the thing on the grounds of it being something my wife might enjoy, which she did. My second impressions were more subdued, because a random paragraph read in the book store doesn't get chance to outstay its welcome; and despite initial promise, I found myself reading something by someone with whom I seemingly shared only a few points of reference. Samantha Irby is fifteen years younger than I am, black and female, and there's a lot about moisturiser, chick stuff, and the internet - and to the point of influencing Irby's style of writing which is full of net slang and contractions - LMFAO, hashtags, and things which work fine on a webpage but look fucking silly in print. If I'm reading a book, I like to feel some effort has gone into the writing, and that it isn't simply a copy-pasted treasury of - oh, off the top of my head - Simon's most LOLworthy facebook posts. I wasn't quite feeling this with Wow, No Thank You, but the thought was at the back of my head. It was confessional, almost gratuitously so, communicated with a shitload of sarcasm in the form of sentences which didn't quite seem to know when to stop. It was good, or at least I wasn't not enjoying it, but…

I skipped to the end, to an essay about how Meaty, Irby's first book came to be published, which seemed potentially a little too self-aware for its own good, but I wanted to get a handle on where the woman was coming from; and that's when it all clicked. Despite either appearances or my preconceptions, Irby seems to have been as much bewildered by her own success as anyone, and once you realise this, the rest makes a lot more sense. If her focus seems a little arbitrary, it's because she's writing what the fuck she wants to write about, when she wants to write it. There's no calculation going on here, no pandering to an audience, just scatterbursts of honestly righteous testimony seasoned with a wit that could take your eye out.

I can't watch This Is Us because even though the brothers are hot and the dad is a smoke show, in the first couple episodes the fat girl doesn't get to be much more than "fat," and wow, no thank you! Maybe there are fat people sitting around silently weeping about being fat every minute of every day, but that is a redemptive arc thin people like to see on television, and it's just not the fucking truth. And I like physical comedy as much as the next guy, but it's also super gross to watch a fat bitch just bounce off shit all the time? I don't know, dude, sometimes the chair with fixed arms isn't going to work for me, but it's not like every time I sit in a desk, I get up and take the whole thing with me, or I'm sighing wistfully as everyone else at brunch joyfully eats their quiche while I pick at a piece of boiled lettuce. The shit is called Meaty, and sometimes I hate my body not because it's fat, but mostly because I never wake up in the morning to discover it has transformed into a wolf or a shark overnight. When is the last time you watched a show with a fat woman who didn't at some point reference a new diet or some ill-fitting old jeans? Also this idea that fat people only get pity sex from recent parolees or whatever is bullshit; I've never fucked a repulsive loser ever in my life.

While I wouldn't say the book is exactly free-range, it swings around wildly from one page to the next, requiring that the reader acclimate to its rhythm - but is worth the effort. For what it may be worth, I additionally enjoy the fact of Wow, No Thank You being the testimony of a chunky black lesbian from an economically impoverished upbringing who communicates without recourse to any of the usual reductive box ticking so beloved of middle class pronoun wankers; and ultimately it becomes apparent that Irby and I have a lot in common, and that which we don't have in common, I can at least understand - even the moisturiser, sort of.

I began with the suspicion of there being too much of this sort of thing, but on close inspection I realise I was wrong, and that there isn't anything like enough.

*: I'm aware this may seem a little hypocritical given that much of what is said here might just as well be applied to my own self-published An Englishman in Texas, amongst others. My defence is that I generally regard such material as secondary or supplementary in the wider context of my writing, and as such the only buttons I'm bothered about pushing tend to be my own.

Blindness

José Saramago Blindness (1995)
Ursula LeGuin seemed to think this was something special and it sounded great. Happily, I chanced upon a copy at Half Price and Ursula was right, as usual. The quick version is that Blindness is Day of the Triffids had it been written by Borges, but deserves a somewhat more thorough account. Our story begins when everyone in the world - so far as we're able to tell - is suddenly unsighted for reasons which remain undiscovered and which probably don't matter. The blind are at first quarantined in an abandoned asylum, with food left sporadically at the gate in the hope of their being able to fend for themselves without infecting anyone else; except, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a disease and the food deliveries soon cease. Naturally, it doesn't take long for civilisation itself to cease, and human existence becomes a vision of hell as all that we take for granted is stripped away - electricity, running water, law, order, food, transport and working toilets. Blindness is potentially one of the most harrowing things I've read, except Saramago clearly understood that what he wanted to say about human nature might be lost to the visceral horror of its telling. In fact, he specifically states as much near the end of the novel while additionally describing one of his solutions.

Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

Additionally, as you may notice from the above, Saramago utilises his own conventions of punctuation and grammar, embedding dialogue within the text without indicating quotation or even direct attribution to the speaker, instead trusting the cadence of the words to distinguish speech. He abruptly switches tense or makes occasional authorial observations, even speculating what may happen next, and there are plenty of commas, not many full stops, and very few paragraph breaks. It's initially disorientating - not least because we never learn the names of any of our people, persisting with identification such as the doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint and so on right up until the end - but it soon becomes absorbing by somehow placing the reader at the centre of the horror, so it feels as though the book is occurring around you rather than simply on the page; and it really is horror of the most harrowing sort, the kind which occurs here in the real world when we reduce ourselves to living garbage. Yet Saramago keeps his emphasis firmly focussed on the positives, even when those positives constitute just the faintest glimmer of hope in a brutal world of blood and shit, forging a powerful parable about human nature without it reading like transgressive body horror drivel, and yet without pulling any descriptive punches. Blindness is honestly not like anything I've read before.

Amazing Stories July 1961

Cele Goldsmith (editor) Amazing Stories July 1961 (1961)
Whenever I pick up one of these old digests - and usually because Murray Leinster is promised by the cover - the story within nearly always turns out to be something I've already read, and usually one of his series featuring Doctor Calhoun, a sort of spacefaring version of the district nurse. Pariah Planet is thankfully not one of the Calhoun stories with which I'm familiar, although it's fairly typical of the series, meaning it may as well have been written by Hank Hill and comprises a sequence of Asimov style narrative puzzle boxes which the reader is invited to see if he, or she - but probably he, can solve before our man gets there. So it's pretty dry and this one isn't helped by a ton of speculation as to what Calhoun might find before he's actually found it, which tends to diminish the potential for surprise and threatens to muddy the distinction between what's happening and what may yet happen; but on the other hand, Leinster is rarely, if ever, a chore, and this episode borders on being a western with planets as frontier towns and our man Calhoun solving medical mysteries on a world overrun with cattle, so I'm not complaining. Also, Virgil Finlay's line illustrations are gorgeous.

Elsewhere, we're very much reminded of the space race transpiring right outside the reader's window with an article on escape capsules of the future, and Gordon Dickson's efficient but underwhelming account of lunar heroism. Thankfully we also have Dan Morgan's implausible but satisfyingly disgusting Father, and The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.

I hadn't heard of the guy, and The Coming of the Ice is significant as having been the first original story to be commissioned and printed in Amazing back in 1926, everything before that having been reprints of Wells and the like; and it turns out he lived in San Antonio, so that's interesting - at least to me. The Coming of the Ice isn't life changing, but it's snappy, well written, and deliciously suggestive of that short window in publishing history during which no-one was quite sure what science-fiction was supposed to be, and the notion of an idea being too wild was yet to take hold. It concerns a man who is made immortal by scientific means, describing his experiences over the millions of years to come as humanity evolves around him even as he himself remains essentially unchanged. The influence of Wells is obvious, but it's got enough of a spark to get me on the hunt for more Wertenbaker, and more than justifies what little I paid for this magazine.