Harlan Ellison (editor) - Dangerous Visions (1967)

 

Can there really be anyone wondering why I picked up this collection when I saw it, excepting I suppose those who haven't heard of it? I honestly don't want to think about the kind of person who hasn't heard of this collection or who doesn't know what it was, but anyway, Dangerous Visions was the one that changed everything, according to both Harlan Ellison and its subsequent reputation.

It's an anthology of short stories specifically commissioned for the collection, with nothing reprinted from any previous appearance in one of the digests - as was common practice at the time. Ellison was after the sort of material that might be too weird or edgy for Analog, Galaxy, and the rest, with the intention of bringing readers the cutting edge of science-fiction as it was deemed to be at the time - a parallel and complement to England's new wave showcasing how the genre had begun to vibe with the counterculture, so to speak.

So there's some good stuff here, and some great stuff, and at least a couple of masterpieces; but even with some of the contributions being so short - even shorter than Ellison's lengthy introductions in a couple of cases - five hundred pages is a lot. Dangerous Visions isn't a casual undertaking, and while it may be that one is expected merely to dip in every once in a while, that isn't how I read, and I'm sure it's significant that I drew greater pleasure from the first half of the book with honourable mentions warranted by Dick's Faith of Our Fathers and Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage - even though I had to tackle that one twice before it made sense. Unfortunately, beyond these, there's such quantity here that I haven't retained much beyond a general impression of enjoying most of it, excepting Keith Laumer's Test to Destruction. Ellison's introduction to this one laments Laumer being known mainly for Retief the space detective - adventure yarns which he churned out to pay the bills and which aren't a patch on his lesser known serious work; and lucky for us, Test to Destruction is a fine example of his serious work, even though it's a suspense-filled thriller about space espionage. I gave up after a couple of pages so it may blossom into a masterpiece beyond that point for all I know. Test to Destruction is followed by Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels and Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah… so I got to those a bit quicker, which was nice; particularly as I hated the previous thing I tried to read by Delany.

I suppose these visions were dangerous at the time, given the percentage of the American population who believed that the Beatles represented Communism. If they seem less obviously dangerous in 2024, they have nevertheless mostly retained a certain spiky quality and have as such aged well.

Norman Spinrad - Child of Fortune (1975)

 

It's a good job I try to avoid judging books by their covers because the cover of this one may be the worst I've ever seen - so bad it could be something by Douglas Adams. Thankfully I judge Child of Fortune by its author and so picked it up on the grounds of Bug Jack Barron having been exceptional. Child of Fortune probably isn't quite so stellar but is clearly the work of the same guy, thus presenting what may be the widest ever gulf between the greatness of a novel and the shittiness of its cover in publishing history. I see this cover and the only questions I have are 1) why? and 2) what happened to her legwarmers? Glowing praise from Timothy Leary just inside the front cover doesn't seem like much of a recommendation either, but let us have no further distraction.

Child of Fortune squares with Spinrad's observation that science-fiction as a genre could use some futures in which we're better than we are in the present day rather than worse, although his idea of what might constitute better is rooted in sixties counterculture for what that may be worth. It's the tale of a young woman going off on a voyage of self-discovery equivalent to the medieval wanderjahre, hippy pilgrimage, Native American visionquest, or Elizabeth Gilbert going to India to find herself. Being rooted in sixties counterculture, this entails quite a lot of sex and drugs, with the former being of the tantric variety, naturally. On the face of it, this isn't my sort of book at all, and yet excepting that it's possibly about fifty pages too long, I enjoyed it greatly. Child of Fortune is written in a locquacious and ornate prose which never quite overdoes itself so much as to challenge the attention span. With the spacefaring interplanetary setting and the societies encountered by our girl, it actually put me in mind of Peter F. Hamilton but with the influence of Cordwainer Smith supplanting the Jeremy Clarkson factor, so it's a ripping read even given the hallucinogenic pace, overload of images, and endless succession of people off their tits on some futuristic high.

It's about the evolution of its initially naive main character, but Child of Fortune works because it's also an allegory for the death of the dream of sixties counterculture - or at least what became of that dream if you prefer. For all the pleasure taken in a libertine pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, Spinrad never gets entirely swept up in the drippy evangelism of your Terrance McKenna types, presenting an evenly balanced view of the pseudo-spiritual realm it inhabits which, taking an objective stance, offers a significantly more positive statement about what happened in the sixties than anyone mooing amaaaaaaazing with their head stuck inside a bong ever managed.

I gather critics of the day hated this one, but frankly they can fuck off. It's funny, genuinely weird, beautifully written, strangely gripping, and is sort of about everything if you look at it from a certain angle.

Stanislav Szukalski - Behold!!! The Protong (2019)

 

I vaguely remembered this guy from the first issue of Weirdo about a hundred years ago, which left me with the impression of someone who, if unusually talented, seemed slightly racist in a way I couldn't quite identify; and I didn't understand what the article was doing in Weirdo. Decades later, I stumble across the Netflix documentary and it begins to make sense, sort of…

Szukalski was, so it turns out, Poland's greatest artist and a man whose work was beginning to attract a lot of attention on an international scale; then the Second World War bombed most of his sculptures and associated work out of both existence and public memory, leaving the man somewhat beached in the United States, unable to pick up the thread of his career. The notion that this may have constituted a great loss to twentieth century art is far from hyperbole, as we see from surviving photos. Prime Szukalski seems to represent a unique fusion of nineteenth century symbolism, deco, and with a touch of later Futurism as practised by Fortunato Depero and others - but with a kind of biological elasticity which foreshadows Giger.

Unfortunately, by the time anyone realised, Szukalski's mind had gone somewhere strange, specifically the formulation of what he termed Zermatism - the study of all those bits of human history which science had missed but which were obvious if you knew where to look, or more importantly, how to look. Having been trained as a sculptor, Szukalski knew how to look at examples of primitive or tribal sculpture from all across the globe in ways which eluded members of the archaeological profession, most of whom had been trained to the point of blindness. Thus, were they at a disadvantage, unable to comprehend that which Szukalski saw because he was a genius, as he admits on more than one occasion in this book.

Behold!!! The Protong distills the basics of Zermatism, as set down in the thirty-nine volumes of Szukalski's great work, compiled over three or four decades. Zermatism holds that there really was a global flood as described in the Bible, and that it was caused by the earth inflating, pushing the water up out of the ocean to cover the land. This inflation is part of a natural cycle whereby the sun draws water away from the earth, then replaces it, like breathing in and out but spread across periods of 26,000 years. Humanity came from Easter Island, proof of which can be found in the ancient artefacts of every culture if you know what you're looking for, but also in the names of ancient places, most of which are in Protong, the once universal language. Protong was a simple language, mainly nouns with a few verbs amounting to the sort of things cavemen used to say in the movies - food good, or stranger make sun go away, me afraid, and so on. Luckily Protong was ancestral to modern Polish meaning Szukalsi was well qualified to decode and record this lost tongue; and in doing so he discovered that most place names refer to the flood and those who survived, so it definitely really happened. Those who survived were human beings, and also yeti - their evil, thuggish cousins of such unfortunate genetic proximity as to allow for interbreeding, resulting in Yetinsyn who look sort of like people but are something else entirely. More or less everything bad that has ever happened has been caused by the Yetinsyn. You can identify them by their short arms, piggy eyes, small noses set above a spacious upper lip like Stephen King and John Major, and general gluttony. They tend to seek out positions of authority from which they can wreak the most havoc. Communism was one of their ideas, in case you were wondering how all that got started.

Behold!!! The Protong came about when Glenn Bray and Lena Zwalve were putting together a book of Szukalski's early works, to which the man only agreed on the condition of it being a companion piece to this summary of Zermatism - it arguably being his life's work, and that to which the sculpture was merely a preamble. This is why some people really need editors, or even just a brutally honest pal who will ask what the fuck were you thinking?

It's an undeniably impressive piece of work in terms of how much has gone into it, not least the beautiful illustrations by which our boy was able to underscore or emphasise the features of ancient sculptures to which he felt we should be paying most attention; but, as you may have realised by this point, the whole thing is fucking bananas. It's the same deal as with that pillock, von Däniken - ancient art and even language scrutinised for whichever coincidental and arbitrary resemblance proves whatever stupid point we're trying to make, with evidence to the contrary either omitted or dismissed as a distortion caused by conventional thinking. Szukalski, for one example, claims that no-one knows the meaning of the name of the Mexican state of Jalisco, because - guess what - it's Protong; and it's the same deal with London, and the Mexican Sun God, Tonatiuh - all Protong, you see! Do I actually need to point out that the etymology of these names is mysterious to absolutely no-one, presumably unless you've encountered them only in library books while searching for stuff to force-translate into caveman Polish?

Yet, Behold the Protong!!! must count as a great work at least on the grounds of it involving actual work, which is more than can be said of Erich von Däniken deciding that K'inich Janaab' Pacal is clearly wearing a space suit; and it's difficult to remain unmoved in the face of a lifetime's labour expended on something so patently screwy - a tragedy but for the pleasure it evidently brought Szukalski and the meaning it gave to his existence. In this sense, I'd compare it to the similarly weird belief systems developed by Richard Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others as, if not exactly useful, then not entirely without value on some level. Rarely in art has the journey been so much more vital than the destination.

D.H. Lawrence - St. Mawr and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930)

 

I read (and inevitably wrote about) St. Mawr only six months ago, but here it is paired with The Virgin and the Gypsy in an edition which I bought new from a book store in Camberwell back in the nineties. So nearly three decades passed before I developed the necessary attention span and somehow I just can't skip St. Mawr simply because I read it back in October. I can't let this specific sequence of inky marks remain ignored.

What I wrote back in October regarding St. Mawr still seems to apply for the most part, and although it hasn't spontaneously transformed into a different story, there are details and elements I apparently failed to notice first time around.

People performing outward acts of loyalty, piety, self-sacrifice. But inwardly undermining, betraying. Directing all their subtle evil will against any positive living thing. Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of teeming existences.

Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real pretty much describes most social media right now, even before we consider any of the rest. Lawrence's pseudo-philosophical train of thought chugs with unusual vigour in this one.

The other aspect which struck me this time around is that the model of Mrs. Witt as the author's punch bag doesn't stand up to scrutiny regardless of her being quite clearly inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan; and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny - despite what we read in at least a couple of introductions - because she more or less expresses Lawrence's views regarding his world in their entirety, and she expresses them forcibly; and if life kicks her in the teeth a few times, this reflects the author's own life more than whatever disregard he may have held for the woman upon whom she was loosely based. So if this rereading didn't quite bring any fresh revelations, it certainly brought what I'd already taken from the story into sharp focus. I'm still not convinced it counts as one of his greatest hits, but it has a lot to recommend it.

Conversely, The Virgin and The Gypsy reads like an early effort, inhabiting the world of uptight clergymen, drawing rooms, and impertinent daughters while lacking ten page existential digressions. Brenda Maddox reckons this is because it was written and then sent to a potential publisher in haste, which makes sense, although my first reaction was that he got tired of all that prog rock and went back to Ramones covers, figuratively speaking. It takes place in a stifling and conservative home environment based on what Frieda left behind when she ran off with Dave, following the story of Yvette who finds herself attracted to a young gypsy against everyone's wishes. Given the religious overtones, notably that Yvette's father happens to be the local vicar, it reads a little like an inversion of parts of the Old Testament, where Yvette is Eve and it all ends with an apocalyptic flood - although Adam is nowhere to be seen and there's more than one serpent, which is probably deliberate.

Paired with St. Mawr, initial impressions are that it's hardly a world-beating combination, but as with most D.H. Lawrence, second or third readings may be greatly rewarding. As ever, there's a lot to digest.

Interzone 275 (2018)

As may be apparent from the review of a couple of previous issues I wrote back in July, I haven't exactly been climbing over my massive pile of X-Men comic books to read this; and I only picked it up because Erica L. Satifka is featured, and she's great and therefore deserving of support. I suppose at least this time it's only taken me six years to generate sufficient enthusiasm to read the thing beyond Satifka's characteristically excellent The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest, which probably means something. It took me sixteen years, marriage, and a change of continental landmass to get around to reading issue 218.

It's not the worst science-fiction digest I've read, but I'm still getting a whiff of those boys and girls who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze. The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest is, as I say, wonderful even given its being a mere two pages in length - a lesson in getting to the point if ever there was. Leo Vladimirsky's The Christ Loop is similarly readable, presenting the death of Himself as a sequence of increasingly ludicrous execution beta tests, each followed by a focus group meeting before they finally settle for the version with the wooden cross. Malcolm Devlin's The Purpose of the Dodo Is to Be Extinct has an enjoyable touch of the Borges about it but probably could have been shorter. I didn't really understand either The Mark by Abi Hynes or Steven J. Dines' Looking for Landau. The former seemed nevertheless decent, but the latter was eighteen pages of growling bikers going into Arizona dive bars and starting fights like you see on the telly, but with infrequent puzzling interjections about the Holocaust.

Elsewhere we have mostly inoffensive editorials, reviews and one instance of the word cisheteronormative, which can fuck right off. A couple of short stories in some anthology or other are slated for satirising the political correctness of wokesters because, as you know, it's only satire when coming from the left, so when the right does the same thing it's hate speech, actually. Regardless of anyone who may or may not be channelling their inner Jeremy Clarkson, I believe I've reached the point of equilibrium where I find those whining about political correctness not significantly less irritating than those whining about those whining about political correctness. The review section spunks away a phenomenal generous word count on nothing that really warrants it, so far as I can see, notably the Ready Player One movie - which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing - about which we learn:

As Infinity War understands but this film never quite does, true geek knowing is a superpower in itself: a creative, expansive mode of cognition which parses tropes against a vast internalised corpus of actual and potential narrative utterances, and comprehends megatextual vastness beyond the puny grasp of high-cultural minds.

To be fair, I've a feeling this may be deliberate affectation as set-up to the somewhat more direct punchline, but honestly it's hard to fucking tell - or to care for that matter. Nick Lowe writes the movie reviews and is clearly perceptive, and I've very much enjoyed his writing, but I don't understand why movies are given so much space in this magazine, or why Lowe is wasting his time on such garbage. I guess that's more or less it for me and Interzone.

Peter Hope - Boost / 2nd by 2nd (both 2023)

I sometimes find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for contemporary writing, and I'm growing increasingly suspicious of that which offers its contemporary status as but one of its many virtues. Leaving aside the usual creatives, content providers, and loyal servants of the franchise, even the supposed alternatives are looking ropey these days. Among the transgressives I found one internet twat helpfully making blog posts about how avant-garde fiction is easy, fun, and here's how you do it; and if the Neo-Decadents seemed initially promising, I've been somewhat put off by the unmistakable aroma of boys who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze; and of course this sorry state of affairs echoes the culture I inhabit as a whole. Daily existence has become, just as it was for the Aztecs, a balancing act - a matter of keeping those forces which influence our lives at a distance. In political terms, there no longer seems to be anyone who isn't part of the machine. The right seeks allies while the left seeks traitors. There's no-one on our side, the machine is out of control, and the wheels have come off.

Thankfully, Peter Hope understands this all too well, and articulates it in terms which resist reframing as the usual rebel product.

Let's go walking through the bluebells with our statins and beta blockers, the buttons are popping and the blinkers are in place, surely we'll all be in a continuous state of dependent bliss before nightfall.

I hestitate, wondering if it's my role to highlight any of this or whether everyone should be allowed the freedom of their bad decisions.

A new disquiet is all around and the legal documents are being drafted to obscure contradictory history. It gets harder and harder to focus on the grey area between black and white, it jumps out of its shoes and picks up a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, upending the furniture and threatening to carve us all new eye sockets.

I hear the beep from a thousand phones letting the populace know it's no longer ok to breathe openly.

Boost and 2nd by 2nd are chapbooks - about fifty pages each, which seems exactly the right length - expanding on this theme - the world right now as experienced by one man, because the political as a universal and absolute response to ethical dilemmas is taking us to some incredibly shitty places. There's nothing here so tidy that it will fit on a placard or lend itself to elitist jargon of the kind which left at least me scratching my head over just what the fuck a red-brown tankie is supposed to be; and the reason there's nothing of that type is because grow the fuck up!

It isn't quite poetry, and it certainly isn't fiction, and although both books carry the same argument, where Boost is hard-headed and direct, 2nd by 2nd takes a more hallucinatory approach, I suppose you might say. The argument, which essentially summarises how well life inside Guy Debord's predicted Spectacle has been working out for us, frames the problem in terms which may hopefully inspire resistance, or at least some genuine commitment to leaving the world in a less shitty state than you found it.

Please someone take some fucking notice.

These are, by the by, almost certainly no longer available but keep an eye on the Wrong Revolution Bandcamp page if you're curious.

DISCLAIMER: If I know you either in person or through social media, or if I've written about something you wrote on this blog, criticisms made in the first paragraph almost certainly aren't referring to you. You hopefully know who you are.

John Scalzi - The Ghost Brigades (2006)

This came as something of a relief after Starter Villain because it's decent, meaning that I didn't simply imagine Starter Villain being nothing like so good as it should have been. I had no coherent plan to read anything beyond Scalzi's generally excellent Old Man's War but this was in Goodwill for two dollars and I liked the sound of it. As with Old Man's War, from which it represents a continuation, it's military science-fiction, a genre which is usually about as good as the name promises, but rather than the usual dreary ticking of boxes for the benefit of persons who enjoy saluting whilst screaming SIR, YES, SIR, Scalzi writes with humanitarian wit and not much conceded to those who back the blue.

The Ghost Brigades is the story of Jared Dirac, created as a clone of a scientist who has gone over to the other side - a coalition of three hostile alien races. Dirac's consciousness is also a copy of the defector's personality, implanted in the hope of revealing just what the fuck the guy was thinking before he jumped ship. So there are plenty of pleasurably disconcerting ideas to keep you busy, but what makes the book - at least once we get there - is the realisation of there being a fairly strong argument for Dirac and his cohorts being the wrong 'uns in this equation; so expectations are turned on their head, and with surprisingly little fuss, before settling into a narrative very much informed by the complexities of conflict in the real world rather than the typically eternal struggle between goodies and baddies. My only criticism is that it's probably a bit long, but it's not much of one given that the final hundred or so pages probably require the preamble. It's probably not quite so good as Old Man's War, but as most military science-fiction seems to be garbage, I'm not complaining.

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (2004)

By Persepolis, I'm here referring to the whole thing. I read the first volume, itself comprising the first two parts, then insisted Mrs. Pamphlets give it a read because it was so good. She did so, then immediately bought the second volume, comprising parts three and four. I wasn't going to bother writing anything because I'm trying to break the habit of reviewing absolutely fucking everything I read before I find myself passing comment on the ingredients printed on the label of a jar of peanut butter. Although also, occasionally there will be something so amazing that you're not quite sure what to say.

I'm sure we're all familiar with pow! the comic book having grown up. It was never a development which inspired me to unconditional enthusiasm, because - apart from anything - I'd say the evolutionary through-line with Web of Spider-Man at one end, American Splendor at the other, and Watchmen somewhere in the middle is a complete waste of everyone's time. Marjane Satrapi writes with pictures as well as words, and Persepolis is so powerful as to render comparisons pretty much redundant; and by powerful, I don't mean in the sense of frowning whilst thinking really hard about Bakunin - as she does at one point - but simply that it does what it does to the point of representing a sort of perfection. There's nothing here which could have been done better or improved in any way.

As you probably know, Persepolis tells the tale of Satrapi growing up in Iran during the revolution. It's alternately harrowing, funny, touching, and strongly underscores the humanity of those living in countries unlike our own. This last point is, I feel, something we really need to keep in sight given the tendencies of theocracies - our western version very much guilty as hell in this respect - to reduce those people over there to dangerous monsters who dress funny and probably don't speak English. Persepolis works so well because it's hard not to see ourselves in this story, and if you can't see yourself in this story then get the fuck away from me.

Everyone needs to read this.

T.G. Engle - Silent Dawn (2017)

 

It began life back in 1993 as a play and was rewritten as a novel in 2017, which explains my initial impression being that of a recently revised early novel. Before it occurs to anyone that I may mean early novel in dismissive terms - given that Silent Dawn is also self-published - I should clarify that it does certain things which first efforts tend to do in so much as that the narrative has a loose, somewhat improvised feel and we seem to get a lot of new characters complete with physical descriptions introduced before anything has really started moving. With hindsight I can see some of this may be the trail left by the journey from stage to page - a journey which, I hasten to add, makes a lot of sense given the sheer geographical range of this thing

Beyond these details, Silent Dawn reads like a self-published early novel by someone who really knows how to write. There's a minor issue with formatting, the indention of paragraphs and where it occurs, which I gather is pretty much standard for anyone self-publishing from Microsoft documents; and it's distracting, but not so much as to detract from a novel which otherwise writhes with confidence. As for the usual crimes of the self-published - inactive non-sentences, inept grammar or spelling, absence of proofing, crowd pleasing pop culture references, narrative developments which would transparently prefer to have been on telly, and so on and so forth - we suffer nothing of the sort in this book. Particularly impressive is that in Pastor Stanshall we have an irredeemable monster who, without ever becoming even remotely sympathetic, is easily understood; so his evil - which is the optimum strength fully leaded version - is  believable where, in less capable hands, it could easily have slipped over into pantomime. There are many finely struck balancing acts going on here, which I suspect I only even noticed through having read at least a couple of novels by authors who weren't up to the job.

Silent Dawn is a hard-boiled satire set amongst warring factions of the US population about a thousand years from now. It's not exactly post-apocalypse, but civilisation is a thing of the past and daily life is otherwise about as bad as it can possibly be - rape, pillage, no law, few utilities despite the government still being hidden away somewhere, and a shitload of praising Jesus while passing ammunition. It's like William Burroughs' take on Mick Norman's Hell's Angel books, directed by John Waters, soundtrack by Motorhead - but better. There isn't a whole lot of rib-tickling, and yet it's darkly funny throughout; and certain caricatures which rarely amount to anything more than a groanfest of recycled clichés - not least evangelical preachers and good ol' boys - are delivered as readable and even wildly entertaining, which is a rare thing in my experience. Whatever I read, as soon as the Texan shows up, I'm usually about thirty pages from throwing it across the room and switching to something else, which didn't happen this time.

Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore - The Roswell Incident (1980)

 

Back in the eighties I read this along with a stack of related Berlitz paperbacks investigating mysterious strangeness, flying saucers, the Bermuda triangle, unexplained mysteriousness, and reports which they don't want you to know about. I had a ton of this shit, all picked up on the cheap from Oxfam and the like because I didn't like to read anything that was hard to understand. I eventually saw the error of my barely literate ways and replaced my vast library of cranky tomes with proper books for grown-ups, but I sort of wish I hadn't because this kind of thing is often very entertaining - even genuinely interesting regardless of whether or not you believe any of it.

Anyway…

In short form, the legend has it that the remains of a flying saucer were recovered by the air force from a ranch seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell; and then the story was retracted because it turned out to be a weather balloon; and then this was viewed as a cover up intended to conceal the weather balloon having been a flying saucer after all; except that the weather balloon story was a cover up to conceal the wreckage having originated in some more secretive government effort to monitor Soviet bomb tests at long range; and then somewhere in there we have the bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site, and so on and so forth. All that can really be said is that something crashed, and something was found, and some people were more than a little freaked out by the whole thing*. 

I've been to Roswell since I first read this book. To an outsider, such as I am, it seems a very strange place, not quite real and just the sort of landscape wherein one might anticipate the incursion of strange forces. This sense of mystery is unfortunately diminished by the weight of garishly grinning aliens hoping to sell you everything from cigarettes to chiropody all over the town, and while the portentously named International UFO Museum & Research Center is reasonably interesting, it stretches what debate is to be had to the point of undermining its own argument.

As a book which makes the best of what little it has to go on, The Roswell Incident is more focussed than the museum. Although it doesn't quite manage to argue any case beyond that something happened and everyone shat the bed, the legend seems less easily dismissed in the wake of the US government officially acknowledging that an unidentified flying disc somehow deactivated ten nuclear warheads at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana in 1967. In other words, some of this stuff is now accepted as real by the same agencies who spent the last hundred years or so insisting otherwise; which still doesn't mean that everything described in The Roswell Incident happened, but we're at least a little closer to the idea that it could have done.

*: Quoting myself from here.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Black Orchid (1989)

 

Back in April, 2018 my long-standing regret at having got rid of so much of my comic book collection back in the nineties achieved critical mass, driving me to buy them all back again. I spent twenty dollars a week at the Lone Star Comics online store, knowing it would take a long time but not dwelling on that particular detail. I bought back every issue of anything I regretted having sold in the first place, filled in all of the gaps, and hunted down everything I would have bought had I known about it at the time; and now, just this week, the mission is completed with the purchase of these three prestige format issues of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid. I may still buy the occasional comic book, but probably not regularly given that there doesn't seem to be anything much that I like these days. Weirdly, it does actually feel like an achievement.

Given how I've since come to regard the work of both Gaiman and McKean, and given the possibility of juvenile nostalgia tinting my judgement, Black Orchid seemed like a bit of a gamble. It isn't that either Nelly or the Davester lack talent, but I strongly feel that both have been massively overrated, having achieved popularity during an era when the comic biz was engaging in one of its most rabid periods of searching for the next superstar creator to fill Alan Moore's winkle pickers. Gaiman's writing sometimes felt a little like Alan-Moore-by-Numbers and eventually went full Tim Burton with the twinkly stuff; and while Dave McKean has always had a wonderful sense of design, he looked a little like a Bill Sienkiewicz tribute act for a long time, and I found it difficult to get past that.

However, going back to what was the start, at least for me, before I'd begun to notice any of the traits which eventually became irritating, I'm really glad to have this one back because it's magnificent. You can really see why these two had to spend the next couple of years beating them off with a shitty stick*.

If Neil Gaiman was truly channelling Alan Moore in Black Orchid, it's no longer so obvious as it may have seemed at the time. He imposes structure and rhythm in the style of Moore - switching between variations of six and eight panel pages, and to great visceral effect with the jukebox sequence in book one - but the narrative has a more natural, understated pace giving greater contrast to its dramatic hits than does the jigsaw plotting of Watchmen and the like. Dave McKean likewise keeps it simple, with powerful use of limited colour palettes and generally holding back, allowing the intimacy of his lines and composition to do the heavy lifting - which also reveals his style to be quite unlike that of Bill Sienkiewicz, regardless of whatever else he may have glued to the page in the years that followed.

Of course, Black Orchid is nevertheless caped stuff which also features Batman and Lex Luthor, and was spun out into a Vertigo series which I don't remember being up to much and therefore haven't bothered with this time around; but the telling borders on European art cinema - and the good kind - moody, inspiring, occasionally nightmarish, surreal and yet paradoxically realist at the same time. This may even have been their finest hour for my money.

*: I realise this is an unfortunate turn of phrase given details of Neil's various hobbies which have emerged since I wrote this review.

John Scalzi - Starter Villain (2023)

 

The story here features a substitute teacher inheriting a secret base on a remote volcanic island from his uncle, who happened to be a supervillain in the vein of all those guys who gave James Bond such a hard time. He also inherits his uncle's role and is thus inducted into a world of sentient cats who communicate by typing on a keyboard, with a team of trained dolphins as minions. It's a nice idea which works well for the first third of the novel, even suggesting Scalzi might have a career as the Terry Pratchett of science-fiction, with none of the smirking which rendered Douglas Adams so unreadably pleased with itself. This initial promise seems bolstered when we realise that these aren't exactly Bond villains in the traditional sense but real villains more in line with Martin Shkreli or Bernie Madoff, but without being caught. Then by the time we get to the Bellagio Gathering, a clandestine conference of billionaires and industrialists, it falls apart during chapter after chapter of global economics and the loopholes therein discussed in the form of long, long conversations.

This was the point at which I could no longer ignore just how much of Starter Villain reads somewhat like a script with one eye firmly on the screen adaptation. This was a significant disappointment because I like Jon Scalzi, or at least I liked Old Man's War, and I once asked him whether he would contribute to a short story anthology. The anthology never happened but I was impressed that he took the trouble to respond with a short but chatty email by way of polite refusal. The problem is that Starter Villain reads like a lot of contemporary science-fiction or fantasy in that it reads as though written for people who don't read but identify as nerds because they think it's cute and makes them more like Velma in Scooby-Doo. Tee hee. It's mostly page after page of dialogue and the references are all Millennial friendly and therefore awesome. Here we have Tolkien, The Princess Bride, and:

Dobrev smiled. 'You ever see the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark?'

'Yes.'

'It's like that.'

I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Indiana Jones movies and have no particular interest in doing so, so this reads like Comicon-pleasing gibberish to me. It's not quite so painful as Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free - also published by Tor, curiously enough - which drops a Star Wars zinger on nearly every other page in lieu of the author developing actual writing skills, but then nothing is quite so painful as Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, and this is massively disappointing. Also, it refers to a cis woman on page 138, which I find tiresome.

John Lydon - Anger is an Energy (2014)

 

I was initially puzzled as to why he seemed to have written it all over again, and having already read Rotten, I didn't bother with this one. Then, recently re-reading the aforementioned Rotten I noticed that it came out thirty years ago and therefore assumed this must be a continuation; but it makes a second sweep of both Lydon's troubled childhood and his time in the Pistols, so it isn't that either. Now, however, I understand - Rotten was a counter to all those history of punk books that were popping up at the time and not quite getting it right, whereas this is the autobiography proper, now that he's had a lot more to write about.

...or at least to talk about. Once again, we're back with that conversational style of as told to, complete with digressions and the kind of asides which make more sense in speech than on the page. It can be both exhausting and maddening at times, but I get the impression it was either that or the book wouldn't have happened at all; so you just have to get used to it, which you do because Lydon is a very entertaining man who says a lot which needs to be said.

It may not surprise you to learn that our man tends to blow his own trumpet loudly and often. At one point, for example, he takes credit for shops opening on Sunday because Public Image Ltd played at the Rainbow Theatre on Boxing Day back in 1978. However, this isn't to say that he lacks self-awareness regarding the complaints of his most vocal critics:

'What is it they're really trying to say? Have they a point? Should I analyze myself?' And of course, being me, I do. Well, I'm glad to report that I came out of my own self-analysis rather favourably.

Inevitably we also have certain contradictions, and my favourite of these refers to producer, Dave Jerden, slapping a sample of the Pistols' God Save the Queen over the coda of Acid Drops from That What is Not. I'm absolutely certain I've seen an interview - and just months ago - wherein John describes this having been done without his knowledge and so he's furious when he hears it, then eventually grows to like the idea; on the subject of which, herein we find:

At the end of the song I wanted the end refrain from God Save the Queen - 'nooooo fuuuuuture!' That to me seemed absolutely appropriate. I hope he remembers 'me like acid drops.'

Think Tank was about the rewriting of history that was going on with all them idiot punk books…

Yes, the rewriting of history…

Well, it doesn't matter, and our boy seems to pride himself on his contradictions with fairly good reason, rightly viewing them as symptomatic of the ability to think and progress, as distinct from merely hooting and clapping one's flippers in service of this week's most fashionable doctrine, regarding some of which - in case you were wondering - he also asks that we don't go mistaking his views as similar to those of that twat, Nigel Farage, in those actual words.

...sometimes I will say one thing to get a result, when I actually mean the opposite.

See? It isn't actually difficult to grasp, and any other silly questions you may have are capably answered in this book, which is far from perfect, but probably wouldn't do its job quite so well if it were.

You remember that deal with court jesters using comedic forms to say that which cannot otherwise be said? Well, while this one falls on its arse page after page, it nevertheless comes up smelling of roses nearly every time and is generally wise as fuck.

Michel Houellebecq - H.P. Lovecraft - Against the World, Against Life (1991)

 

The initial reason for my reading Michel Houellebecq is the general serving suggestion of my supposed peers that I shouldn't read him; and I'm reading him regardless on the understanding that he and I may not agree on absolutely everything, and may even violently disagree on a couple of things. If you're unable to tell the difference between Houellebecq and Nigel Farage appearing on primetime national television to complain about having been silenced, then not only is that hardly my problem but you're a fucking idiot.

Anyway, this lengthy essay almost counts as a debut novel of sorts, and is among the few things I've read about Lovecraft which isn't revisionary bollocks. Of course, the aspect of Howie which has been most subject to revision has been his racism which tends to be downgraded to him being a man of his time, and anyway he grew out of it - which as a view is probably sustainable if you've never read, just off the top of my head, every single paragraph of The Dunwich Horror; and that was one of the good ones. Houellebecq's thesis is that most of what Lovecraft wrote reads as it does for reasons beyond his being a recluse, or technically naive, specifically that the great texts - and it should be easy enough to work out which of the stories he refers to by that term - are supposed to be that way. Lovecraft's characters tend to be generic because they're there entirely to carry the narrative and because Lovecraft was a misanthrope. His values inform what he wrote, regardless of any consideration of who might be reading or even paying for the privilege.

The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential - that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised.

It's a very convincing argument, and one that would seem to increase one's appreciation of all those squelchy tales of the super spooky space octopus in so much as that it's consistent with what we know - unlike the proposition that Howard had pretty much transformed into Ben Elton by the end of his life.

More shaky is the notion of there being such a thing as a philosophy of the Cthulhu Mythos - if we're to call it that - which works if you don't understand what is meant by the term philosophy, but here refers to an undifferentiated blast of nihilism as the negation of philosophy. In other words, Lovecraft at his best might be deemed the literary equivalent of listening to Ramleh at full volume; which I can see.

In support of this alleged philosophical quality, Houellebecq also offers the continuation of the Cthulhu Mythos by other authors which, if roughly spontaneous and undertaken purely for the sake of the art, I can't really see as being significantly different to kids growing up with the hope of one day writing the Spider-Man comic and so contributing to that universe; or to Perry Rhodan, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Judge Dredd or whoever else. More likely, it strikes me that the significance and enduring appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos is its presenting a consistent cast of collectible characters rendered in primary colours as a ready-made playbox in which persons who like to make lists of things can indulge themselves, and notably the sort of persons who really, really need their content providers to be on their right side of history.

This edition also reproduces in full both The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness presumably for the sake of comparison; but which unfortunately undermine some of what Houellebecq has written, at least for me. I don't think I've ever been convinced by the telling of The Call of Cthulhu despite that it supports Houellebecq's argument about Lovecraft's structural preferences; and although I found The Whisperer in Darkness effective and reasonably enjoyable, I really have to wonder at my being completely unable to recall having read it before whilst knowing that I read and apparently enjoyed it back in May, 2015. Given that Houellebecq will have read both in French, maybe something was gained in translation. That being suggested, his argument for the carefully directed precision of Lovecraft's narrative structure is surely cast into doubt by The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, produced the same year as Cthulhu and yet reading like the work of a ham-fisted adolescent

Regardless of anything, it's a pleasure and genuinely interesting to read about the man without having to make adjustments for some editorial bias attempting to paint himself as having been just a slightly scarier Lewis Carroll without the kiddy fiddling; and while I don't, for what it may be worth, agree with everything Houellebecq says, he nevertheless makes some fucking great points. In fact, I'm not sure Lovecraft did anything to deserve such a thoughtful and beautifully rendered biography.

A. Merritt - The Fox Woman & Other Stories (1949)

Just for the sake of a recap in the event of your having forgotten who he was - which is understandable given that most of us apparently have - if you're into the weird stuff, then Merritt was probably your favourite author's favourite author. He collaborated with Lovecraft and was a legend in his own lifetime, but a legend which faded with surprising haste, possibly due to the popularity of the sort of thing he wrote having likewise faded. It was fantasy, often drawing on myth and legend but from a twentieth century perspective, and with the influence of H. Rider Haggard very much in evidence. Merritt made a name for himself in the genre with unusually baroque prose which might have verged on the purple had he not applied it with such elegance.

That said, a little sometimes went a long way with Merritt, with the most loquacious application of bon mots suffocating the narrative in ebullient flourishes of topaz more languid than even the silken robes of Lao-Tzu as he rises to greet the crimson morn etc. etc., and his characters can be occasionally somewhat stereotypical. When everything's working as it should, this isn't a problem, but they can't all be classics. Actually, for all those of his books which I've read have going for them, I'm not convinced any of them are truly classics; and I'm not sure about this lot either.

The Fox Woman itself is a mostly elegant excursion into Chinese mythology which surely didn't need to be fifty pages; and perhaps may not have been in an ideal world, given that it's an unfinished piece published posthumously, along with a couple of other sketchy fragments featured here. Three Lines of Old French is one of those deals where some saucy bint you meet in a dream sends you a letter through the actual real world postal system, and it features a line describing military casualties as dregs of a score of carryings to the red-wine press of war, which is probably overdoing it a bit. Two of the stories are related by groups of chaps sat smoking cigars by the fireside, each consecutively out-doing the previous guy's tale of strange animal transformations, concluding with some bloke turning into a bee. You really get the impression that it was written in full confidence of this expression being welded firmly onto the reader's face for the duration.

In Merritt's favour, the ideas are nice and the imagery is often vivid even where they amount to less than the sum of the parts. Through the Dragon Glass and The Women of the Wood are decent, as is The Last Poet and the Robots which succeeds if only through the sheer force of its own weirdness, notably seeming very much a potential precursor to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. So that's a thumbs up even if I seem to be pulling a face.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (1972)

 

I've spent the last forty years of my life avoiding Tarkovsky's Stalker - although it's actually more a case of not bothering with than actively avoiding. The reason for this is that it was shown by the film club when I was at art college, and somebody told me I really needed to see it because it was amazing and just the sort of film you love which, as usual, was pretty much the kiss of death for me. It wasn't that I even disliked the woman who told me this but, for all of her many wonderful qualities, I simply didn't trust her judgement on this occasion.

This unfortunate initial impression was cemented a couple of decades later when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my cousin's lectures, this time inspired by his having just got back from some Tarkovsky related event. As always, his lecture took the form of a leisurely paced droning monologue so delivered as to make it very difficult for anyone to interrupt, and composed with the apparent assumption of my never having heard of Tarkovsky, and possibly having no idea of what films are either. My cousin is five years younger than me but went to a much better school, you see, so has often felt duty bound to impart his greater wisdom.

I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the film and had reason to believe it might not be my sort of thing, but he took no notice. After about thirty fucking minutes of this, as he paused to draw breath, I took the opportunity to quip, 'Go on, then - push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me.' This was an allusion to Ronnie Corbett's shaggy dog stories from The Two Ronnies, and an attempt to reiterate my lack of interest in a light-hearted and humorous way so as not to give offence. He momentarily gave me the blackest of black looks, then continued for another twenty minutes, the condescending fucking cunt.

What eventually brought about my own personal Tarkovsky glasnost was my friend Carl telling me he'd been reading Roadside Picnic - on which Stalker is based and which I hadn't heard of because my cousin was apparently right about me being a massive thickie; but I tend to trust Carl's judgement on most things, so I took the plunge and finally watched it on Netflix or Hulu or one of those.

It was good, as I probably knew it would be, and it looked amazing, but then Blade Runner also looks amazing, and I don't know if Stalker was quite worth the forty year wait. It felt like it should do more than just look amazing whilst hanging about on the screen for far too long.

'It's based on a book that's supposed to be great, although I've never read it,' I told my wife as we sat down to watch. Then, after about seven hours, I added, 'You know, I don't think I'll bother with the book after all.'

I wasn't actually aware that she'd ordered me a copy from Amazon as we were watching because our birthday* was coming up. I'd assumed she was just fiddling with her phone as usual. Amazingly she didn't say anything.

To get to the point at long last, I finally understand the reputation this thing has garnered over the years, and I suppose Stalker is an extension of that, although the movie is very much a remix of the novel rather than a faithful rendering. the premise is, as you may know, that aliens have visited our planet leaving behind all sorts of fascinating super-advanced garbage just as we might leave crisp packets and plastic forks behind following a roadside picnic, if we're louts. The visitation sites coincidentally foreshadow the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in so much as that you wouldn't want to live there and all sorts of weird and deadly effects apply, and so we have stalkers - as they are called - who brave the Zones and retrieve flying saucer detritus which they sell to the scientific community. Much of the detritus is bewildering or just plain deadly, but occasionally something will turn out to be a self-recharging battery, so here we have the ancestral form of all those shitty science-fiction shows about what secretive government departments do with all the stuff that falls from the sky; except Roadside Picnic is mostly wonderful, fairly close to being a masterpiece, and is also entirely believable and true to life, being about the people more than it's about the weirdness. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in her introduction:

There are no superbrilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it's not cheapened. the authors' touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

The use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.

I punched the air when I read that, and the pages that follow live up to the promise of the introduction; although that said, I found I got a little lost around halfway, mainly because I was subconsciously trying to match the narrative to what I could recall of the movie, which wasn't actually a whole lot. Anyway, having recognised that the movie was only loosely related, I started again at the beginning which, oddly enough, was a pleasure more than it was a chore.

Roadside Picnic is about the people, how they relate to the unknown, and the fact of the aforementioned unknown being absolutely unknowable - which is a pleasure to find in a genre that has tended to be more concerned with figuring it all out. Because we all live with the unknowable, even if we're just talking about death, Roadside Picnic feels like real life in a way which can't be said of your Asimovs or your Heinleins; and so it can also be read as being about religion, or even about the Soviet state as was - without actually criticising the Soviet state in any direct sense for obvious reasons. If Roadside Picnic is about anything, then it's arguably about everything.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can't do a thing! We can't stop it, we can't slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It's not because we do bad work. And it's not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

If anyone is still reading, sorry for taking so long getting to the point and so inadvertently summarising how long its taken me to recognise the brilliance of this novel in some form or another, but we all got there in the end. Whatever garbage you were about to read, read this instead.

*: We have the same birthday.

Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files 05 (1982)

I was a 2000AD regular up until 1980, by which point I'd turned fifteen and had to make a choice between Sounds music paper or the comic book which was then bringing me regular instalments of Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, both of which were garbage. It wasn't a difficult choice. I hopped back on board a couple of years later. My friend Nick gave me his collection*, of which the earliest issue was, by sheer coincidence, the first prog I hadn't bothered to buy. His collection was patchy with substantial gaps, meaning I could at least tell that it hadn't suddenly returned to greatness immediately after I'd jumped ship, although it seemed to be back on track a couple of years down the line; and one of the strips which had served to remind me why I'd bought the thing in the first place was, of course, Judge Dredd.

Back in the Mean Arena days, Dredd had succumbed to whatever was happening to the other strips - one single episode after another reading very much as though they'd run out of things for him to do; but now that I was back on board I discovered the twenty-five part Apocalypse War, albeit with gaps which I was able to fill when Quality's colourised US reprints started to turn up in the local newsagent.

Thirty or so years later and I don't have any of those old progs. They all went back to the comic shop, one way or another, driven by a need for space and a fear of spending my entire life collecting a weekly comic which would still occasionally reward my dedication with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Age 13½ Months, or Really and Truly, or whatever else had presumably made the cut thanks to a deadline; and yet…

It was either this or back issues of the Quality reprint, and this big fat assemblage of no less than sixty-two consecutive issues seemed like better value. Being a chronological assemblage rather than a greatest hits this means about half of those strips included serve to remind me why I stopped buying, and so we have The Mega-Rackets which ran for what felt like five-hundred or more issues - actually just fifteen - a series of one or two part stories exploring the theme of what organised crime would look like in Mega City One, and mostly it looked like Chicago in the 1940s but with futuristic fins glued to the mobsters' trilbys, and men named Fingers or Lefty zipping through the skies in flying cars bearing a wearying resemblance to the Ford Model 18. To be fair, this sort of tale is fine in weekly instalments, but try reading a whole bunch in one sitting and—Jesus fucking Christ!

Of course, I considered the possibility that it might be just me, and that the somewhat murky reproduction of the original pages wasn't helping; but the contrast is astonishing once you get to the five-part Judge Death Lives wherein the lad responds to the invitation to gaze into the face of fear with:

It's probably one of the greatest single panels of almost any comic book ever, and as such represents the Judge Dredd strip at its very best so far as I'm concerned.

Judge Dredd - which, for what it may be worth, arguably represents the very essence of 2000AD comic in its purest form - is anything but straightforward, regardless of roots sunk deep into the British comics tradition of square-jawed just deserts. He's a cop who dishes out prison sentences for littering, who judges then carries out routine executions. He's been called a fascist, which implies an agenda bearing no relation to the character unless you consider all forms of authority inherently fascist. He's authoritarian for sure, but more like a law of nature and he is as such impartial - pitiless on one hand but above personal bias on the other. He's objectively harsh but fair - extremely unfair in humanist terms, but then life is unfair, as is most of the universe. This is why the strip has lasted four decades and has thus far resisted attempts to adapt it for the big screen, although at least the Stallone version kept some of the humour.

The humour is the element of contrast which sharply defines Dredd as anything but a superhero, and certainly not just Batman with a gun and a crash helmet. It's the traditional gallows humour of the British working class - if anyone remembers them - the sarcasm of English punk rock which informed those very first strips even when aimed at denizens of the junior school. I'd say the strip is Swiftian, even Rabelaisian - which it is - and is therefore probably not to be taken literally, except that feels like a bit of a slippery slope at the end of which I'd take to describing things as iconic, a sure sign of having disappeared up my own arse. Dredd operates more or less entirely on its own terms, which is probably why it feels so flat when the stories are reduced to answering the question, who do we have him fighting this week?

Anyway, I bought this for the Apocalypse War, which I recall as being amazing, and it turns out that I remember correctly. Carlos Ezquerra - the greatest Dredd artist in my view - illustrates the whole thing, maintaining the consistency with heavy, brutal lines which seem carved as much as drawn, and the story is so relentlessly bleak as to approach exhausting - despite the ever-present element of sarcasm and the peculiar intrusion of comic relief from Walter the Wobot and Maria, Dredd's landlady - who seems to follow in the tradition of the women to whom Tony Hancock once paid rent. How this single tale can pull in so many conflicting directions and still work is a marvel, never mind that it works so well - like standing in the blast of a jet engine for twenty-five issues.

*: They had been ruined when his house flooded and he was going to chuck them out. I took them home and dried them out two pages at a time on an oil-filled radiator.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.