Ed Pinsent & Mark Robinson - Silver Age Superman (1993)

 

Should the name be unfamiliar, Ed Pinsent is probably as close to a living legend as you'll find in the world of small press comics, having done much of it first, better, and for longer than most whilst remaining absolutely faithful to a vision entirely his own, stylistically some way outside the mainstream yet neither esoteric nor indulgent and near impossible to mistake for the work of any other artist. His strips tend to combine art and writing in a single visual train of thought, but Silver Age Superman seemed to demand a different approach, not so much an homage or impersonation of Superman as a form more suited to what Ed had written. Enter Mark Robinson who matched Ed's enthusiasm for the undertaking.

As is probably obvious, Silver Age Superman wasn't published by DC but has succeeded - or at least eluded legal scrutiny - by virtue of a format bearing no similarity to anything official, and through terming itself fan art, almost a love letter - certainly unlike the more acerbic reading one might expect from the small press taking on an icon of the mainstream. It's faithful to Superman with none of the gritty revisionism which has become such a cliché, but does more, straying into the introspective realms of the small press; and the magic is that even in doing something different, it remains true to Superman, albeit a Superman of whom we've had only glimpses.

This Clark Kent is an amiable reporter but never quite one of the gang in terms of humanity despite his best intentions. The recurrence of a puzzling memory sends him back through time to the Great Library of Alexandria, the dissolution of the monasteries, and other lost repositories of knowledge in hope of answering an existential question - whether knowledge can be reconciled with understanding or experience. At least that's how it reads to me. It's a weighty subject, but doesn't feel unduly ponderous due to the telling which cannily retains the charm and wonder of the finest Superman strips. I also enjoyed the church and its predecessors acknowledged as central to the development of civilisation, and sponsors of art and science as was historically the case whether we like it or not. Tales of this stripe so often invoke religious institutions mainly for the sake of ill omen, softening us up for the inevitable appearance of Aleister bleeding Crowley; and as if to underscore the refreshing spirit of the enterprise, Pinsent and Robinson have Superman meet John Dee without any of the traditional beastliness.

This one really is a breath of fresh air, a reminder of what we may have lost and of how exciting it once seemed - a breezy philosophical rumination without posturing which, if instilled with a certain melancholy, nevertheless warms the heart and leaves us with smiles on our faces.

Genuinely amazing.

...and you can find it here!

August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Timequake (1997)

 

This was his final novel, and I'm calling it a novel regardless of ambiguity on the grounds of its predecessors being novels. It began life as the tale of a timequake, causing time to slip backwards a decade, then start again, obliging everyone to relive the previous ten years one moment at a time without being able to change anything. Unfortunately it just didn't want to be written so the author eventually cannibalised it and made a stew incorporating autobiographical elements. You could call it an autobiography or an extended essay, but novel works just as well. Kilgore Trout from Slaughterhouse Five features heavily, as do many, many short sketches of his stories, regarding which - in case you can't be arsed to skip back to August 2024:

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

It works pretty much as autobiography, even with the fiction embedded, and honestly isn't much different to Slaughterhouse Five, to which it might be deemed a sequel, I suppose.

Vonnegut's recycling of his own incomplete material is inspired, with the timequake itself serving as metaphor to the ageing process and its shifting emphasis on memory - the author being well into his seventies and duly reflective by this point. As a slightly jazzy thesis on memory and the passage of time, the book also serves to illustrate the slow disintegration of culture during the twentieth century, not so much for the sake of shaking a fist at clouds, but a lament at our having lost sight - as we most certainly have - of what makes it fun. Contrary to the publicity, this isn't a bunch of random observations indulgently slung together but a very clear and direct summary of our world interspersed with jokes and asides, specifically because jokes and asides - and even throwaway synopses for science-fiction tales which will never be written - are the details which matter most. It's sad, funny and, as always, thought provoking.

I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't much about James Blocker and his ongoing fight with the Droon from Rigel, but you can't have everything.