Conform to Deform

Wesley Doyle Conform to Deform (2023)
It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare given the endless eulogisation of lesser musical entities and occurrences - jangly C86 bollocks, Britpop and here—have another fifty fucking essays about sodding Joy Division while we're on the subject. The Some Bizzare label tapped into something of which I was once very much a part, albeit at the molecular level, and was therefore of great importance to me when I was at the age of finding such things important.

Doyle avoids all the major problems of editorial bias by allowing those involved to speak for themselves, and so the story is told entirely as a series of quotations transcribed without additional comment. It could be argued that the book has been compiled rather than written, for what that may be worth, and given the flaring of tempers and associated drama which came to surround the label, it's easy to see why this was perhaps necessary. There may well be two sides to every story, and Stevo sure made a lot of people angry. On the other hand, I recognise many of the tantrums from hanging around at the World Serpent offices in the nineties, so I'm entirely familiar with noise weirdos getting the hump over unpaid royalties on a record that no fucker actually bought.

Anyway, this is a fascinating story of which I knew very little, despite owning more or less everything the label put out during its first decade; and it's also strangely depressing. I couldn't get enough of the book, and yet it was a massive relief when I came to the final page. I'm not sure I enjoy finding myself quite so immersed in the past, and in something to which I had such an intense connection; and it's uncomfortable reading nearly four-hundred pages of quotes, not least because the book doesn't appear to have been proofread at all and features more typos than your average print on demand magnum opus. In a sense, this seems ironically fitting given Some Bizzare's haphazard progress - one entertaining fuck up after another, albeit with the best of intentions.

It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare, but it's kind of a shame it had to be this.

Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley Antic Hay (1923)
In The Plumed Serpent of 1926, Huxley's pal, D.H. Lawrence wrote:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

If it's about anything, Antic Hay specifically concerns itself with the jazzing of this younger generation, although Huxley spends less time sighing and rolling his eyes than Lawrence. Although billed as the exploits of the supposedly Rabelaisian Theodore Gumbril, Antic Hay flits amongst various members of his circle as they strive for purpose in the wake of the first world war, the death of God, and the advent of modernism. In many senses it's almost a rewrite of Huxley's first novel, although Crome Yellow is arguably funnier and more scathing for its somewhat tighter focus. Antic Hay may possibly represent attempts at a new form of narrative, something presenting themes as part of an overall texture rather than anything you could call a story - Oscar Wilde doing a Burroughs but without the actual cut-up technique, I suppose you might say. For the sake of argument, we may as well assume Huxley had been thinking about Dadaism, this being the cumulative effect of all the interpersonal relationships arbitrarily mixed in with the likes of Gumbril's inflatable trousers and the peculiar twenty-second chapter.

As with Crome Yellow, certain elements foreshadow Brave New World - notably the eugenically directed vivisection, which is thankfully lacking in detail - but it only really scrapes by as a novel in its own right, at least compared to Huxley's hits. Gumbril and pals are building a new world, having done away with the old one, but find themselves floundering without the foundation of tradition upon which to build; which is mostly entertaining, but as I say, covers familiar ground to lesser effect.

The Door into Summer

Robert Heinlein The Door into Summer (1957)
It's taken me a while to forgive Heinlein and grudgingly accept that he may have written some greats. The Door into Summer gets off to a tremendous start, then races along in consistently tremendous style for more or less the duration. There's no way of saying it without annoying someone or committing what will almost certainly resemble sneering, but Heinlein writes like a guy who knows regular people and has had sexual intercourse. He writes like a proper author, an author of books written for persons who like to read more than they care about signing up for a genre which doubles up as their identity.

This is a novel about time travel, and an ingenious one which avoids the usual time travel twists that have since been done to death. It's a novel about an inventor and his cat, and the cat features prominently as much more than just some arbitrary pendant to the main character. Heinlein really got cats, it seems, and writes at satisfying length about them, and also about people who don't get cats and what's wrong with them; so that scores points with me.

Unfortunately he almost blows it at the end by having his main character turn up in a nudist colony, then travel forward in time to marry a little girl once sufficient years have passed for her to have become a woman. They're not related, despite her being referred to as his niece, but it seems a needlessly creepy development reminding us that this is the author of Stranger in a Strange Land, and also that persons referring to themselves as inventors usually have something wrong with them.

So it's a great book, and you can see why Heinlein has been so revered over the years, but you may prefer to pretend you didn't hear a couple of comments made near the end.

Analog November 1979

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 1979 (1979)
Here's an Analog I've had for something like fifteen years, picked up from a shop in Cornwall because it seemed a shame to leave it on the shelf but never read because I soon came to realise that Analog was often shite, particularly the September 2008 issue which - seeing as I haven't mentioned it in about five minutes - featured Henry G. Stratmann's Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya, which is competition level dreadful.

Anyway, here we get off to a poor start with Beyond Relativity, G. Harry Stine's guest editorial about how science is never finished, and Einstein would have said as much and would therefore have been quite pissed off to find his theories about general relativity now set in stone. It's interesting and seems worth taking seriously once you've read past the repetitive tone of a nutcase muttering about how those fools have got it all wrong - wrong, I tell you! Elsewhere we find Stine explaining how difficult it will be to fly spaceships, and as a friend of doctors and dentists - professional people - he should know. Whether or not he has a valid point, I stopped caring because he does that thing which autodidactic bores always do of challenging you with a rhetorical question you will be unable to answer.

Why do you think there are still three highly-qualified people riding on that flight deck engaged in constant monitoring and ready to assume complete command in a split second?

I don't fucking know, George, but I'm sure you're about to tell me.

I couldn't get past the first few pages of Roger Arnold and Donald Kingsbury's lengthy article explaining where NASA have been going wrong all this time with regards to getting things up into orbit. Apparently there's a much easier way. Given that this notionally revolutionary article appeared in 1979 and it's now 2023 and we're still using massive rockets, I'm guessing maybe there wasn't a much easier way after all. Whilst Analog's blend of science fiction and science fact, or science almost fact was probably commendable, I read New Scientist for a number of years back in the nineties and I don't recall a single article written in the slightly cranky, defensive tone of the stuff you find in this thing - not one instance of anyone muttering about fools who don't understand.

On a marginally happier note, we have the fiction, of which Mark J. McGarry's Phoenix is readable and interesting from an anthropological perspective, placing a lone explorer in the midst of an inscrutable alien species, although it's somewhat let down when the phoenix turns out to be himself experiencing an holistic (or something) awakening after watching an extraterrestrial birthing ritual. His career was on the rocks but now he has purpose, you see.

Also featured is the second of three instalments of Simak's The Visitors, published as a complete novel in 1980, and even read bereft of top and tail, it's a pleasure and one which makes everything else in the mag seem underwhelming at best. The Visitors uncannily foreshadows the movie Arrival - or whatever novel that was based on, I guess - with its uncommunicative extraterrestrial monoliths floating hither and thither. I'm guessing it's either Simak's response to Close Encounters of the Third Kind - or some editor nudged him in that direction - from which healthy distance is achieved in, for one example, a character who shuns identity because he does not want it known that he had been 'taken up' by the visitor, he does not want to be another kook associated with flying saucers. As ever Simak, does his own thing.

Maybe it was because it was so totally unlike the common concept of something out of space. To a people brought up on the idiocies of TV and movie imagination, the reality must seem quite commonplace.

It's probably odd to read just the middle part of a novel I have on the shelf, but Simak is rewarding in any configuration, and this excerpt is additionally interesting in that the two page synopsis also seems to have been written by himself, or is at least recognisably his voice, which for me renders it the written equivalent of rare studio outtakes.

A less ambitious alien invasion is somehow prevented by a pair of old codgers in Kevin O'Donnell's Old Friends, which centres upon extraterrestrial technology disguised as a park bench - but a lot less Tharg's Future Shocks than that may sound and therefore pretty decent by Analog standards; and we end with Movers and Shakers by Thomas A. Easton which is satisfyingly absurd and possibly the best thing I've read in an issue of this magazine.

 

So this ended better than I had expected. Given the history of Astounding and John W. Campbell, Analog always had a lot of unfortunate stuff in its DNA, and even with the occasional uncharacteristic ray of sunshine peaking through those frowning clouds of manly pipe smoke, the advertising reminds us that we're hanging out with persons who don't work right, the sort of people who would actually read an outer space newspaper or send off for the microfilm edition of the magazine because it seemed futuristic and therefore exciting. From this, I guess we learn that these people were always amongst us. The difference is that now they have the internet.