The Bladerunner

Alan E. Nourse The Bladerunner (1974)
Nope, not that one. This is the original novel from which Ridley Scott pinched the name for his movie about how robots have feelings too. He thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounded a bit gay or something. This is why the term bladerunner doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Ridley's high-tech Hovis commercial, and nor does the movie feature anything to which it might apply, unless you regard Han Solo's job as sort of like running along the blade of a massive knife. Here the bladerunner is one Billy Gimp, and his job is to literally run scalpels and associated medical paraphernalia to a medical professional operating outside the law; and so the title makes some fucking sense, Ridley.

Anyway, griping aside, Nourse's novel seems unusually prescient - and keeping in mind that the science-fiction novel has historically been fairly lousy at predicting the future once you get past Arthur C. Clarke and Murray Leinster. Here we find a world for which 2007 was about a decade ago, so it's more or less the present, and although it's a present which approximately resembles 1974, technologically speaking, we have huge sections of the American populace turning its back on the medical establishment, refusing vaccines and so facilitating a massive pandemic. The social furniture is otherwise mostly different, and thankfully Nourse was wrong about the medical establishment pursuing a eugenic agenda, but as a doctor, his predictions regarding the treatment of illness in modern America - or the disease industry as Jello Biafra has called it - were unfortunately well informed in many respects. At least you can see how William Burroughs found potential in this material when it came to writing his treatment for the movie which was never made.

The Bladerunner is approximately a high-tech thriller, or at least high-tech as of 1974, and it's interesting that its urban landscape seems somewhat closer to what we saw in the unrelated movie than anything from Dick's novel; but it's probably not an overlooked classic. The prose does its job, but had the movie option been taken up beyond just a cool title, it's hard to shake the feeling that it probably would have been a Lorimar production featuring Roddy McDowell and Patrick Duffy. Also, the happy ending feels a little weird given the somewhat darker build up.

Yet it's still fucking better than Robots Have Feelings Too.

D.H. Lawrence - a Biography

Jeffrey Meyers D.H. Lawrence - a Biography (1990)
I picked this one up back in the late nineties during an unusually heavy D.H. Lawrence binge - which is a sentence you don't see every day - along with the biography by Brenda Maddox. I'd already read the Maddox version as a library book, but read it again because I'd enjoyed it and so somehow never got around to this one, having heard it wasn't anywhere near so good as The Married Man. Nosing around online would seem to yield the same opinion expressed many times over, specifically that Meyers didn't do anything like so good a job as Brenda Maddox. It's been a while since I read the Maddox biography but I'm no longer convinced. This one feels pretty fucking thorough to me, and I find it encouraging that Meyers' other biographies seem mostly to be of persons from Lawrence's circle, or at least approximately adjacent - Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad and so on, contrasting with Brenda Maddox having written biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher; which isn't to say that The Married Man wasn't as great as I seem to remember, only that Jeffrey Meyers wasn't fucking around here.

As biographies go, this one is hardly what you'd call an easy option and becomes distinctly chewy in places. Meyers combines his account of Lawrence's life with a fairly extensive analysis of the autobiographical aspects of the man's writings, meaning there's a degree of zipping back and forth between actual events and the publication of Lawrence's vaguely allegorical reiterations. Progress is therefore occasionally slow, with discussion conducted at an almost archaeological pace, but the book rewards the reader's effort and at no point does it become a slog. In other words - and in response to the naysayers - if all you really want to know is which celebrities he used to hang out with or what his favourite colour was, this probably isn't the biography for you.

For the most part I've generally considered myself moderately knowledgeable regarding the life and works of our Dave - hardly an expert but blessed with at least some understanding of the guy. Meyers' biography has therefore been one hell of an eye opener and positively revelatory in places, not least in confirming hunches which I've felt were probably on the money without quite being able to say why - not least dispelling the notion that he was ever a fascist in any meaningful sense, as distinct from a man prone to expressing an occasionally caustic or otherwise uninformed opinion. It was obviously a fucking nightmare having Lawrence as a friend, but there were reasons for his extraordinarily abrasive personality, and it clearly wasn't all about the thunder clouds. Indeed, Meyers successfully communicates what a joy his companionship could be under the right circumstances and why D.H. inspired such loyalty and devotion. Part of my reason for reading this biography right now was so as to be better armed when tackling The Lost Girl - which is the next one on the Loz pile - and I'm very glad I did.

Ground Zero

Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen & others Ground Zero (1988)
I never really felt one way or the other about the Hulk, but picked this up because it includes issue 340, an X-Men crossover which otherwise costs several hundred dollars these days. Before we proceed any further, here's what someone called Aurora thought of it on Goodreads:

I haven't read much Hulk, and this is pretty much why. The basic metaphor of Hulk and Bruce Banner is only so interesting, and there just isn't much else here. Also! The art is sooo bad. Everyone has mullets! The X-Men show up and Wolverine and Rogue have mullets!

Yeah, I sort of enjoyed it but I can't really disagree with that. Ground Zero wasn't quite pow! the comic book growing up, but its voice had broken, it couldn't talk to girls, and it was still playing with action figures while dreading any of its pals finding out. It's written by Peter David whom I recall as being not without certain qualities, although for some reason his only regular title which I can recall off the top of my head was when he turned X-Factor into a vehicle by which to bag sales for all those other mutants usually seem hanging around in the background of better stories. David kept these seven collected issues reasonably interesting in terms of doing weird things with the characters, which probably wasn't easy given that the villain combines a porno-moustache with a giant throbbing brain and is seemingly aware of being a villain. At one stage he transforms a couple of the Hulk's enemies into monsters named the Rock and the Redeemer, then later finds it advantageous to betray the pair, and so we see a memo added to the to do list on his fancy computer screen in futuristic Asimov font so as to ensure that he doesn't somehow forget to stitch them up like kippers:

LIE TO ROCK AND REDEEMER.

What a wrong 'un, he is!

Unfortunately though, the art isn't great and the best I've ever been able to say about Todd McFarlane's work is that he's consistent. He's not the worst, and true enough some of those Spider-Man covers had something, but his figures are clunky, resembling Stretch Armstrong dolls pulled into uncomfortable taffy shapes which no amount of crosshatching can conceal; and there's not much variation from his three basic expressions - surprise, anger and glee on faces with otherwise more than a touch of Archie about them and which don't really gel with the mood of the book. He draws a decent grey Hulk but has difficulty with anything that's supposed to look like a person. Bruce Banner here resembles the Archie version of Harry Potter, for example.

That said, Ground Zero is good enough to leave me wishing it had been better, which is, I suppose, a recommendation.

Asimov's Science Fiction 26

George A. Scithers (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 26 (1980)
Based on what I've read, I'd formed the impression of Asimov's being a decent magazine if marginally more conservative than Fantasy & Science Fiction. This is the earliest issue I have by at least a decade, picked up - from what I'm able to remember - back in 2008 from a second hand book store in Looe, and only now have I got around to reading it, for some reason. I think maybe the cover put me off.

I've seen it claimed that the state of written science-fiction was getting pretty desperate towards the end of the seventies with everyone churning out soupy sub-Tolkien drivel until William Gibson blasted it all away with his edgy cyberpunk revolution just as the Pistols had made all those music biz hairies look a bit dated. I've seen this claimed mainly in preface to interviews with William Gibson so I'm sceptical, and yet...

The best thing in this issue is Isaac Asimov's factual editorial discussing the classification of planets, meteorites, and other celestial bodies. I learned a few things and it beautifully illustrates why the man is remembered as such a great communicator. Travels by Carter Scholz, in which the consciousness of Marco Polo encounters a philosophical artificial intelligence in deepest space is also pretty great; as are Sheridan A. Simon's The Eumenides in Koine and Relatively Speaking by Lee Weinstein and Darrell Schweitzer, although these last two are both very short and therefore lack the presence to help towards balancing out the rest.

A. Bertram Chandler's Grimes and the Great Race reads very much like the writing of a former naval officer. James Gunn's analysis of the history of the science-fiction novel conveniently chooses Asimov's Foundation as typical of the genre, explains the plot in detail, and then proposes that its success is due to it being such a brilliant book - suggesting a certain lack of impartiality and failing to explain anything at all, and certainly nothing to anyone who found Foundation massively underwhelming, as did I. I started Joan D. Vinge's The Storm King but it seemed to be all swords, dragons, mead and people saying behold and I stalled after about the fourth of its thirty or so pages; and Jo Clayton's forty pages of Southwind My Mother looked like more of the same with a hey nonny no, none of which squares with why I would have bought an issue of a magazine which specifically refers to science-fiction in the title.

I guess it was early days for Asimov's Science Fiction, and everyone is entitled to fire a few blanks from time to time.