The Sheriff of Babylon

Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon (2016)
Given that it has somehow taken me five years to get around to bagging and reading the second collection of this twelve-issue comic book, I've just re-read the whole thing from issue one onwards. In fact, I've re-read it twice in consecutive sittings because, much like real life, it's occasionally confusing and difficult to work out who is on which side; and because it seemed to warrant it.

Tom King worked for the CIA and spent five months in Baghdad after the fall of Saddham Hussein. The Sheriff of Babylon isn't really autobiographical, but has the cadence of human existence doing what it can in terrible situations. This terrible situation was, of course, the war; and King's experience of the war, as informs this story, suggests that the principal casualty - which I suppose you might say we've been referring to as truth for the sake of argument - is the notion of there ever having been an us and them. War, the book seems to suggest, atomises combatants into a million disconnected individuals, each just trying to survive, with allegiances sworn in peacetime rendered meaningless by shitbags on both sides of the divide. The allegiances cautiously struck in this tale - Chris the US military contractor, Nassir who was Saddham's favourite cop, and Saffiya, whose entire family were executed by Saddham's favourite cop - could only have come about during wartime. The story attempts to solve the murder of a single individual in a country busily fighting itself, where the lives of single individuals mean nothing, and therefore mean everything. It's occasionally difficult to keep track of who probably shouldn't have done what because this isn't one of those Punisher stories about guns, grunting, and clearly defined moral codes; all of which is the great strength of this work fuck it - this masterpiece.

The art is astonishing, distinctly filmic, and never overplays its hand. One might imagine that The Sheriff of Babylon would be better suited to film given that it seems to impersonate one in certain respects; but I'm not convinced. Some of what occurs is too awful, and the horror would overpower the narrative, turning it into something it never set out to be. Gerads beautiful yet harrowing art, on the other hand, removes the story from its own reality just enough to allow for its telling without the body count getting in the way.

You remember all that stuff about pow! the comic book grows up? Well, this is what it looks like.

Rocket Ship Galileo

Robert Heinlein Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I loathed Stranger in a Strange Land with such force as to inspire the promise that I would never read another Heinlein, but Alec Nevala-Lee's history of Astounding has given me cause to lift this embargo, because I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed those I read before I came to the aforementioned four-hundred pages of egocentric shite. So here we are again.

Rocket Ship Galileo may be among the squarest tales ever told - pipe-smoking scientist helps three rocket crazy young lads to build a spacecraft by which they fly to the moon, with all the science done right, equations and calculations described in detail, and no agricultural language or references to beastly habits. It's almost a variation on the lunar expeditions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells as they would have been serialised for fifties America by the guy who wrote Biggles, but - as I now remember why the man had such a reputation - Heinlein not only makes it work, but it's positively gripping. He ticks every last box on the John W. Campbell checklist - five page lectures about sub-atomic particles, plot elements hung upon obscure features of trigonometry, lengthy discussions of structural integrity whilst our three smart young lads address everyone as sir and behave unlike teenagers have ever behaved in the real world - and yet Rocket Ship Galileo dazzles, page after page, somehow swanning around like a jaunty insurance salesman with pipe clenched firmly in its wry grin without a predictable sentence or narrative twist in sight.

I still don't know how he came to write Stranger, and there's no way I'm touching anything written later, but I'm glad I got over the hump. I'm already looking forward to the other two I picked up at the same time as this one.

The Weird of the White Wolf

Michael Moorcock The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)

There were six books in this first cycle of the Elric saga. I'd read the first two; then tracked down the three I didn't have with plans to read them in order, one through to six, mainly because it's been a couple of years since I read Elric of Melniboné and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and felt I should get reacquainted. The books are mostly slim, about one-hundred and fifty pages give or take - about as long as they need to be. So I re-read the first two then tackled this one, and realised that a little goes a long way where Elric is concerned. The first book is mostly wonderful. Sailor has its moments but is somewhat episodic with our boy moving from one scrape to another without it really feeling like it's adding up to anything in particular, and The Weird of the White Wolf is the same.

This isn't to say that the saga ever begins to bore or tread water, because Moorcock always kept things lively, avoiding almost all of the clichés we've come to expect from sword and sorcery, writing as fiction should be written rather than just recycling the usual bollocks about persons who do aquesting go. So regardless of ghastly apparitions and soul-stealing swords, the Elric books have a distinctly punky edge which really keeps you on your toes; and the magic is that this spikey, almost post-modern quality somehow emphasises the mythic power of the tales - as distinct from being mechanically reclaimed Tolkien with Star Wars jokes bolted on*. Elric works like the real world, albeit under extraordinary circumstances, and not even mythology itself is beyond scrutiny.

Elric Smiled. 'Oh, it's nothing more than a folktale, probably, the story I told you. This Saxif D'Aan could be another person altogether—or an imposter, even, who has taken his name—or a sorcerer. Some sorcerers take the names of other sorcerers, for they think it gives them more power.'

Both Sailor and White Wolf, it could be argued, have a rhythm more closely resembling real life than those housebrick sagas of persons seeking specific mystic items - digressions occur and not everything adds up as it might in a novel written with reference to a wall laden with post-it notes. Of course, I now realise this is also due to a few of these novels comprising sequences of short stories woven together; but for all the many, many, many, many, many faults of Lord of the Rings, it does at least have momentum driven by a coherent goal somewhere near the end of the third book. That which drives Elric onwards is less obvious, at least here, meaning I probably didn't need to re-read the first two, and I'll probably wait before tackling the other three because they seem to work better in short, sharp doses.

Beyond the above observations, Elric remains arguably one of the few things in the fantasy section which is worth reading. It's weird, scary, occasionally disturbing and the thematic opposite of all those cosy quests, bursting with peculiar ideas, like a sleeker, sharper, more chilling heir to Clark Ashton Smith. Each time I pick up a Moorcook I've never read, I notice just how much of the landscape of contemporary science-or-otherwise-fiction has come from him, and in forms which are never anything like so powerful or honest as the original.

*: Referring here to Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free which remains more or less the worst thing I've ever read, or at least tried to read. It still hurts three-and-a-half years later.

The Importance of Being Earnest

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
It was The Spider's Web by Philip Purser-Hallard, a Sherlock Holmes novel borrowing a few of Wilde's characters, which shamed me into acknowledging that I actually know bugger all about Oscar - despite it having been my nickname at work. The realisation unfortunately obliged me to acknowledge myself as equivalent to a fan of The Confessions of Dorian Gray, a series of seemingly pointless Big Finish audio things wherein Wilde's celebrated creation has spooky yet thought provoking adventures in time and space just like Doctor Who! Brilliant! They're reviewed on Goodreads despite not actually being books, with at least a few of those reviews focussing on what a sexy voice the guy playing Dorian apparently has, which seems to me like another clue as to whether or not said Confessions should be considered books, or are perhaps something else altogether - something which isn't a fucking book, you sad c***s.

Anyway…

It seemed like time I gave the lad a go, so to speak. I found Earnest initially impenetrable, if you'll pardon the expression, and concluded that the time simply wasn't right. Six months later, I come back to the thing and it clicks immediately. Plays were written to be performed and experienced in real time, and I've never found reading them entirely satisfactory, which is presumably why it took me a while to get around to this one; because, just like those Big Finish CDs or downloads or whatever the hell they are, The Importance of Being Earnest isn't really a book.

Nevertheless, trying to read it as a book, I'm struck by both the absurdity of the characters and the powerfully artificial cadence of their discourse and the situations into which they launch themselves. It's hugely entertaining and, in one respect, arguably a precursor to Hancock's Half Hour, amongst many, many others which have made use of this sort of contrarian wit. However, Earnest is significant in striving to avoid realism, instead pursuing an aesthetic of the artificial, and of the ornate social construct as an end in itself as part of the decadent tendency then sweeping Europe; and foreshadowing the exaggeration and absurdity of Jarry's Ubu Roi as performed in Paris just one year later. It's all surface, which is entirely the point, namely that the medium is the message, or at least a demonstration thereof. It's serious about failing to take itself seriously, hence the gag barely concealed by the title.

Above all, The Importance of Being Earnest is still very, very funny, with a voice so distinctive as to inspire me to a certain loathing for those attempting to duplicate the humour whilst inevitably getting it wrong, having reduced the wit to a mathematical formula - looking at you, Douglas Adams.

I think I probably need to see this on a stage.

Astounding

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.