When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Asimov's Science Fiction 392

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 392 (2008)
I've encountered an unusual number of recurrent patterns in this issue, some to the point of irony, not least being Robert Silverberg mourning the progressive spirit of science-fiction's new wave as a casualty of the juvenile and populist, whilst mentioning in much more than just passing the publication of his own Lord Valentine's Castle, of which the looooooong excerpt I read in Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back seemed the very definition of the stuffily traditional crowd pleaser; but never mind.

During the course of his book reviews, Paul Di Filippo laments that while there have been numerous heirs to the traditions of Clarke and Heinlein, there haven't been so many following in the footsteps of that other member of the big three after which this magazine is named; and this lament occurs in the very same issue as William Barton's novella, In the Age of the Quiet Sun which revisits Asimov's tales of asteroid mining without necessarily repeating them. Barton avoids just photocopying Asimov by means of a narrative voice grounded in the immediately recognisable world of an astronaut who makes throwaway references to episodes of Land of the Lost which he saw when he was a kid, and which I didn't so I had to look it up. It could have been horribly post-modern but is handled well and is convincing, even for a story in which we discover a sophisticated extraterrestrial derelict in the vicinity of Jupiter. Indeed, the prosaic clutter of our guy's thoughts renders Barton's story all the more credible in terms which seem very much like an update of what Asimov did on his good days. In the Age of the Quiet Sun turns out to be one of the better things in the collection.

I found Horse Racing by Mary Rosenblum a little charmless. It imagines a conspiracy whereby super-rich venture capitalists buy - although sponsor might be a better word - promising children without anyone realising, assuming the good fortune of their getting to go to a better school or whatever is down to pure luck; but it isn't, because this is how said venture capitalists ensure that someone who might grow up to cure a disease or solve the issue of global warming gets to do so, which is cute, not least in seeming to support the notion that all of the worlds ills may be cured through the wonders of a free market. Maybe I just misread the thing. Maybe it was actually a parody of that which it appears to propose.

I gave up on Derek Zumsteg's Usurpers after two pages. He's a sports writer and this was his first pro-fiction, written in experimental style and so reminding me of that thing about those who run before they've learned to walk - which you would think might have been obvious to a sports writer of all people. I gather it's something athletic, and locker room high jinks ensue in loosely punctuated present tense sentences clipped so as to create impressions rather than statements.

Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over. Vinyl benches tied up their back if they're from a poor zip. Those boys recognise King, stop him as he passes. Exchange complicated handshakes. Wish him luck and mean it. Tell him to fuck shit up and mean it.

The whole thing is written in this way and is as such unreadable, resembling the thought bubbles of persons in eighties X-Men comics which at least had a visual context to make sense of the shorthand, and I've no fucking clue what vinyl benches tied up their back is supposed to mean; but then I don't understand why sports writers even exist. I cycle twenty miles a day but not once have I felt the urge to read about cycling.

Following which, it gets better. Soldier of the Singularity by Robert R. Chase is good, or possibly efficient, with a twist ending which is at least integral to the story and doesn't just pull astonished faces at the reader. Midnight Blue by Will McIntosh pulls off a reasonable Ray Bradbury impersonation without being too obvious about it. Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone by Ian Creasey is briefly satisfying and nicely observed.

Slug Hell by Steven Utley is set in the Paleozoic and is probably the greatest of the shorter short stories in this issue. Nothing really happens aside from a few time travelling paleontologists holding forth on the subject of prehistoric invertebrates and continental drift, but sometimes that's all you need.

The Ice War by Stephen Baxter gets the cover for obvious reasons, and while I remember it as amazing, this time around I'm troubled by details which I'm not sure I even noticed fifteen years ago. It's approximately a prequel to Anti-Ice, bringing those peculiar ice things to Earth in the eighteenth century, and specifically to the attention of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Isaac Newton as the three of them happen to be sharing a coach journey, which all feels a bit too Doctor Who for comfort, not least because even though each of them just happens to mention their respective famous novels, as they would, only Newton seems to have a legitimate reason for his presence, in this case engaging in discussion of whether God intervenes or simply prefers to leave things running. Swift dies before he's able to finish Gulliver - for some reason - and Defoe only seems to have showed up for the sake of mentioning that he wrote Robinson Crusoe, so it all seems a bit gratuitous; but outside of this, it's still Stephen Baxter and is therefore fucking fantastic in all other respects. If anyone is still writing science-fiction in a couple of hundred years time, someone will write a novel about an alien invasion as experienced by Irvine Welsh, Stephen Hawking, and J.K. Rowling as the three of them try to enjoy a lovely day out at the seaside.

There was also some poetry but, well, you know…

Norstrilia

Cordwainer Smith Norstrilia (1964)
It's taken me a year to get through this one. I started it in April last year, failed, read something else instead, tried again, failed again, read a different book, then came back to this one and returned it to the shelf in defeat, telling myself I would get through it when the time was right.

This time, I cracked it. I even enjoyed some of it, although it remains painfully apparent why I stalled and stalled again back in 2021. Cordwainer Smith spins a wild yarn informed by Chinese folklore, amongst other things, not in terms of characters and situations but in the general rhythm of his fiction, the way in which it feels a little like a parable and makes narrative twists and turns with the cadence of a dream. In practical terms, this means we have something which very much foreshadows Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in relating only loosely to the rest of science-fiction as a genre, and generally doing its own peculiar thing in the expectation of the reader being able to keep up.

Norstrilia begins on a planet which is essentially a colony of Australia complete with all the stuff about hats with corks dangling from the rim. Rod McBan is a sheep farmer, tending flocks of giant immobile sheep which exude some substance that bestows immortality. One night he's gambling on his computer and wins so much money that he comes into possession of planet Earth, to which he then travels disguised as a cat person - you get the picture.

It's all very entertaining, and it doesn't quite feel like the series of random twists of gratuitous surrealism possibly implied by the above description, but Cordwainer Smith tends to jabber, and all it takes is one paragraph's worth of lapsed concentration and you're fucked, with no idea of what's going on or who the hell these people are supposed to be.

Anyway, I did better this time around - although I've no idea why. I hung on tight and discovered the first half to be massively entertaining as well as impressively weird. The appendix refers to Norstrilia having originally been broken up into two parts and published as separate novels with the addition of supporting material, so my guess would be that the first of the pair was the strongest. I didn't have so much trouble with McBan's travels on Earth as I did with the first half back in April, 2021, but it felt a little surplus to requirements, possibly because by this point the reader has come to expect the arbitrary swerves as a matter of course. Given Smith's background, it seems fairly likely that Rod McBan is intended to be a sort of rough edged Buddha or Christ figure coming in from the wilderness, then walking amongst mankind, anonymous and yet heir to all the riches of heaven; but unfortunately, I found it hard to care, and if anything profound was said, it wasn't said in any language with which I'm familiar. It's not difficult to see why this guy has such a reputation, but for my money he works best in short, sweet bursts.

Shogun Warriors

 

Doug Moench, Herb Trimpe & others Shogun Warriors (1980)
As a kid growing up in the late seventies, I was obsessed with Micronauts, but inevitably there was a limit to how many of those things I could buy given the economics of pocket money and that the more extravagant figures and their vehicles didn't seem to be available in the UK. I'd seen boxes of Monogram's Shogun Warriors model kits on the shelves, but they looked slightly ridiculous - exaggerated and improbable figures when compared to the Alan Bennett documentary which constituted the world of the Micronauts. Running out of vaguely futuristic stuff to accumulate, I eventually caved in and bought one out of curiosity - Grandizer, I think. I glued all the bits together, painted him, stood him amongst my Micronauts then tried to imagine what they might be talking about. I'd thawed to the Shogun Warriors, although even I had to admit they didn't really do much. They could raise their arms, turn their heads, and a couple of them were able to fire plastic missiles or even their fists, but that was about it. Not knowing what else to do, I bought the other five over the next few months, or however long it took.

 

Then I spotted a Shogun Warriors comic book in the newsagent, issue four of this thing to be specific. It was American and therefore part of a world I didn't fully understand, and it wasn't in quite the same league as 2000AD or even the weekly Star Wars comic, but there was no getting away from the fact of it featuring giant robots. I don't think I had realised they were supposed to be on the same scale as Godzilla until I read the comic book. I bought an issue whenever I saw it, amassing a gappy collection of just five or six issues determined by an unfamiliar publishing schedule and the unreliability of my being able to find a copy.

Now, forty years later, all becomes clear, not least where Danguard Ace and Combatra had sprung from and why Raydeen was the only one I recognised from his model kit. The Shogun Warriors were a line of die-cast robot figures marketed in the US by Mattel, a pantheon from which the six larger Monogram kits were drawn. Most of them began life as Japanese kids' cartoons - as is probably fucking obvious - only to be bundled together under the Shogun banner at Ellis Island, meaning that our Shogun Warriors were actually, it could be argued, forerunner to the Sense of Right Alliance, the superhero team formed when Superman, Spider-Man, Shrek, and Lightning McQueen from Cars came together in the name of justice 'n' stuff.

 

Anyway, this isn't an - ugh - graphic novel, because the publishing rights to licensed characters are apparently a logistical nightmare in legal terms, not least with the three Shoguns starring in this book belonging to different licensees; so it's doubtful that the comics will ever be reprinted, meaning my only option was to buy a stack of back issues - which was easy enough because they're still cheap and it was cancelled after issue twenty; and so here I am at the age of fifty-six reading a pile of comic books about giant robots routinely saving the world from other giant things.

I don't recall being particularly knocked out by the comic even at the time, although it seemed to have something. Trimpe's artwork reminded me a lot of Jack Kirby, seeming faintly ridiculous and simplistic to my untutored eye, and there's a lot of corn here, not least that the Shogun Warriors are pitted against bad guys who are aware of being evil and even rejoice in the same - but it doesn't fucking matter because - duh - giant robots, you idiot! In case it isn't already clear I'm hereby invoking a variation on the Godzilla defence which neutralises criticism by virtue of the fact that he's Godzilla. If that doesn't work for you, maybe you shouldn't have dropped out of law school.

Anyway, the story begins with our three main guys Richard Carson, Ilongo Savage and Genji Odashu. They all have exciting, action-packed jobs - movie stuntman, test pilot and so on - somehow making them obvious choices for Shogun operators, and thus are they spirited away to the hidden base of the Followers of the Light somewhere in the Japanese countryside. The Followers of the Light are a group of ancients, possibly immortal and not entirely human - even though one of them resembles Graham Linehan and smokes a pipe. They fought evil during the previous Chaos War then went into suspended animation, only reviving now that the sorcerous Lord Maur-Kon is back in business. The Followers of the Light have built three giant robots with which to fight evil, but the robots can only be operated by pilots sat inside their massive frowning metal heads, much like the Numskulls from the Beezer.

It's the same sort of ham-fisted pop mythology as informs the Godzilla movies, and it works because it takes itself absolutely seriously, fully expects you to be entertained, and because giant robots. If it seems pale and superficial in comparison to - off the top of my head - Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, then you may have missed the point, the point being giant robots. It may also be worth noting that our Shogun Warriors, aside from being direct ancestors of the otherwise fucking ridiculous* Transformers, provided a shitload of inspiration for the movie Pacific Rim, and not just the enormous robot exoskeletons. Pacific Rim is pretty much Shogun Warriors with swearing and oil stains.

To finally get to the point, Shogun Warriors may not have been the greatest comic book ever published, and it's hard to imagine it having endured beyond these twenty issues without eventually becoming repetitive, but it nevertheless had a hell of a lot of charm. For all of his simplistic lines and shapes, Trimpe does a great job of conveying sheer scale, and after a few issues one begins to realise that he isn't just doing a Jack Kirby. If the influence is obvious, not least in the exhausting dynamism bursting from each page, his figures - amongst other aspects - are significantly less exaggerated, allowing for a sense of contrast which Kirby didn't always achieve. If it's not always easy to pinpoint Trimpe's strengths, sharp contrast is provided by Steven Grant and Mike Vosburg's fill-in issue which conspicuously lacks the charm or imaginative flair of Moench and Trimpe. As with the Ramones back catalogue being similarly resistant to analysis, there's something very satisfying here, even absorbing, and to the point that it seems only natural to feel slightly sorry for everyone involved when the run comes to its end. Moench gave Richard, Ilongo and Genji a slightly more formal send off in Fantastic Four #226, finally revealing that Raydeen, Combatra and Danguard Ace had been destroyed. It made for a surprisingly depressing coda, which itself underscores the sense of idiot joy communicated in the pages of the comic during its short run. They'll probably never get a reprint, but they shouldn't be forgotten.

*: There has never been a really good reason for a massive futuristic robot from outer space to disguise itself as a truck, aside from that Convoy would have been a better movie.