The Empire of Glass

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.

Trejo

Danny Trejo & Donal Logue Trejo (2021)
I bought this autobiography for my wife's birthday with no particular plan to read it myself; but she insisted that I do so, and I like Danny Trejo, so I did and here we are. The two of us - Bess and myself, not me and Danny - saw the man speak at some vaguely charitable thing to do with the opening of a rehab clinic a few years ago. He was very entertaining and I've been well-disposed towards him ever since, to the point of believing that people who don't like Danny Trejo probably have something wrong with them.

I had some vague idea of the general shape of his existence, how he got where he is today, but not in this sort of detail. He was a bad ass, a career criminal, a violent nutcase, a substance abuser in and out of prison; and then he had a revelation about where his life was going, cleaned up, and has now spent the majority of his life dedicated to being a better person, and above all to helping others be better people. Never having struggled with addiction - apart from the fags, I suppose - I've occasionally found the language of recovery and its ruthless optimism a little headachey, but then it doesn't really matter what I think and if it works, as it certainly can do, then it's a beautiful thing; and by describing the context of his formerly troubled existence with such powerful clarity, Trejo really slams the message home without even a trace of preaching, or indeed anything surplus to requirements, resulting in a genuinely inspirational autobiography.

The account of his criminal past is, honestly, about a thousand times more interesting than Genet, and framed in such a way as to involve the reader. You know exactly where he's coming from, or at least I did; and sure, it's a celebrity biography with two names on the front cover and at least one account of hanging out with De Niro, but it's really a great fucking book because Trejo is a great fucking guy, and he's very funny, and being a genuine tough guy, he has no need to keep telling us how tough he is.

Edward James Olmos doesn't come out of it very well though, which is unfortunately amusing.

Collected Essays

Aldous Huxley Collected Essays (1956)
I've been well-disposed towards Huxley since I read Brave New World, then Crome Yellow, and more so since I discovered his association with D.H. Lawrence; and while the sheer volume of this collection (four-hundred pages, dense text, shitloads of classical references) meant it took me at least a year to gear up to reading it, I'm glad I made the effort. Huxley writes about more or less everything ever at exhaustive length and in painstaking detail, inevitably yielding a number of essays which went way over my head, being outside the scope of either my interests or my schooling; but for the most part he's perceptive and insightful even when navigating territory which is, for me, relatively unfamiliar. In this respect his essays remind me a little of the mighty Kenneth Clark, or Brian Sewell, or even Robert Hughes; and most of this stuff still applies today - perhaps now more than ever before.

It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but you think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them. It is also vulgar (and this is the more common case) to have emotions, but to express them so badly, with so many, too many protestings, that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery. Sincerity in art, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is mainly a matter of talent.

Written in 1931, this nevertheless neatly summarises much that is wrong with the stories we tell, social media and, by extension, western civilisation in 2022. While, focused on the work of Breuhgel for one example, Huxley's specific observations often seem to have a near universal prescience.

In every age theory has caused men to like much that was bad and reject much that was good. The only prejudice that the ideal art critic should have is against the incompetent, the mentally dishonest and the futile. The number of ways in which good pictures can be painted is quite incalculable, depending only on the variability of the human mind. Every good painter invents a new way of painting. Is this man a competent painter? Has he something to say, is he genuine? These are the questions a critic must ask himself. Not, does he conform with my theory of imitation, or distortion, or moral purity, or significant form?

That one's from 1925, back in the days - one might suppose - when we still had the chance to learn the lessons which we are quite clearly still to take on board.

The history of medical fashions, it may be remarked, is at least as grotesque as the history of fashion in women's hats—at least as grotesque and, since human lives are at stake, considerably more tragic.

Elsewhere in the collection, Huxley covers more or less everything you could possibly want from him - art, music, literature, travel, politics, religion, society - without shorthand, summary or skimming for the sake of anyone failing to keep up, including me, meaning I never quite made it to the end of 1941's Politics and Religion. Much of what was written here fed into Brave New World by one means or another, and the collection also includes that other smash hit, The Doors of Perception from which the band took their name, and which is interesting but probably not so earth-shattering as its reputation might suggest. If you have the patience, Huxley's Collected Essays otherwise rewards the effort many times over.

The Zaucer of Zilk

Al Ewing & Brendan McCarthy The Zaucer of Zilk (2012)
This was one of those things I missed, having long given up on 2000AD comic. I'd heard of it, but the title sounded like something you would expect to find in 2000AD and thus failed to pique my curiosity; at least until I happened upon this reprint and realised it was by Brendan McCarthy - which changes everything, obviously.

I still don't really know what to call this sort of thing, or even that it matters. The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan McCarthy doing what he does best, and nothing else has really come close, certainly not Hewligan's fucking Haircut or - ugh - Really & Truly, or even Rogan Gosh for that matter. This, on the other hand, seems to exhibit kinship with Alice in Wonderland, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Windsor McCay, and thankfully none of the also-rans who would give their collective left one to be this strange but just don't fucking get it - looking at you, Tim, Neil, and all of your self-consciously kooky spawn - also anyone who ever mistook the Cure for a wild display of imagination.

The Zaucer of Zilk tells a surprisingly traditional story using characters and settings which wouldn't seem out of place on a Nurse With Wound album, and to similarly disorientating effect but for the presence of a beating heart where one might, under other circumstances, expect to find the usual emotive button pushing. McCarthy has always been in a class of his own, but rarely has it been so obvious as it is here.