Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
I've read nothing but good things about this novel - or I suppose novella given its brevity - many of them on the back cover, which promises wry humour and penetrating satire, a mind-expanding journey comparable to that of Swift's Gulliver, and as prophetic a science-fiction classic as the works of H.G. Wells. The main character is a sentient square inhabiting a two-dimensional realm who encounters the denizens of three, four, one, and no-dimensional spaces and thusly tries to get his head around it all. I suppose we've been spoiled, living at the arse end of the twentieth century and having grown up with either James Burke or Carl Sagan explaining this kind of thing by means of either computer animation or a snooker table; but I still have my doubts. My copy of Flatland is published by Signet Classics, but then I suppose there's no such imprint as Signet Adequates.

The prose is breezy and readable and stuffed with the sort of ornate phraseology which has self-published CreateSpace steampunk novelists coming in their pants - or issuing most tenaciously in their finest Sunday pantaloons if you prefer; but Flatland is essentially a novelisation of one of those curly and straight animations you used to see on Rainbow in the 1970s. The humour may indeed be wry, but the satire didn't strike me as particularly penetrating, and if you were expecting a sort of mathematical version of Gulliver's Travels, then you're likely to be seriously disappointed. Whilst not without its good points, albeit good points mainly communicating ideas now so commonplace that we've seen them turn up in episodes of Scooby Doo, Flatland is written by a Victorian school teacher and is about as much fun as you would expect given this pedigree. I assume the hierarchy of dangerous, presumably elliptical two-sided females, a triangular servant class, square gentlemen, and polygonal intellectuals is what the book's fans have identified as satire, but I don't actually see anything resembling commentary on the English class system so much as a pseudo-mathematical echo composed for the sake of chuckles. Similarly the subjugation of Flatland's females described on the back cover doesn't seem to be saying anything much about emancipation, and as for the supposed sex amongst consenting triangles, I guess I must have blinked and missed that one.

Flatland is a faintly amusing novelty, but let's not get carried away here. Just because something is old and a bit cranky, doesn't mean it's a work of genius.

Consumer Guide

Simon Morris Consumer Guide (2016)
Simon Morris is the vocalist and - so far as I can tell - principal creative drive behind the Ceramic Hobs, a sort of Dadaist rockabilly band with whom you will be familiar if you've ever come into contact with the Mad Pride movement. I suppose you might also call him a raconteur, at least based on Bang Out of Order - a novella as fanzine about an imaginary version of the power electronics scene which I now deeply regret having sold on eBay - and the material he regularly secretes upon facebook and the like. Anyway, we may as well call him a writer because someone at Tegenaria Press enjoyed his writing enough to commission this, which is nice.

I've actually already read about half of the essays assembled here, but it's not a problem as there's something quite different about reading them as part of this collection. Aside from the obvious aesthetic appeal - just one hundred numbered copies of this lovingly produced hardback - the assemblage of this material brings out a personal quality I never noticed whilst picking this stuff out from amongst the digital detritus of Donald Trump, Kanye West and dresses which might be black or possibly blue.

Consumer Guide is autobiographical, although the lion's share of the page count is taken up by a series of annotated lists. The lists include overviews of the oeuvre of various bands, writers, film makers, artists, and so on, then lists of favourite pubs, drinks, and even just relationship tips. There's no really obvious progression or logic beyond these subjects being what Morris felt like writing about at the time. Some of it I skipped - although I should probably stress that I refer here to a page count in single figures - due to it seemingly having derived from a period during which Morris was channelling Mojo magazine - Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Morrissey, Jimi Hendrix, Sonic Youth, Lou bastard Reed - almost surprised that he missed out Rod Stewart and ELfuckingO; although to be fair, he finds something interesting to say about even the most militantly beige of their brethren. He also writes on Skullflower, Consumer Electronics, and his own band, most of which is fairly engrossing. Then there's the air-punchingly cathartic Your Favourite Band Are Shit which correctly identifies Billy Bragg, Primal Scream and other deserving sacred cows as the irredeemably useless wankers they are, and for which I happily forgive the author his banging on about Morrissey and Sonic Youth elsewhere.

This probably makes Consumer Guide sound a little like Steve Lowe and Alan MacArthur's Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? - nice try but still just one of those books you keep next to the toilet - but it really, really isn't. Whether dissecting obscure noise albums or comparing books written about the Moors murderers, the Morris testimony feels a lot like autobiography, something akin to mapping a room by describing its contents. It feels very much like a complete work, despite the scattered origination of the material, and might even be read as though we're following some kind of narrative. You might even call it educational.

There's not be much point trying to find a copy of this now as I understand the limited run to have sold out, but hopefully this spring will yield more of its like.

Follow this link for Tegenaria Press.

The Wonder Effect

C.M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl The Wonder Effect (1962)
I bought this collection on the assumption that I'd probably already read it all in His Share of Glory, a car battery sized compendium of every short story Kornbluth ever wrote. I'd dedicated myself to His Share of Glory from start to finish over the course of a week, then concluded that most of the material, for all its wonderful qualities, would probably have been better digested in smaller doses; so I picked this up, it being just nine shorts and an introduction, and because I liked the cover. Happily, closer inspection revealed that due to these being collaborative works written with Frederick Pohl, I hadn't already read them after all. I'm familiar with a couple of the novels the two wrote together, and they're pretty great, leaving me with just the mystery of the title, The Wonder Effect, which doesn't actually refer to any of the stories within. I suppose it might be something to do with the sense of wonder instilled by the best sort of science-fiction short story but, to make the obvious joke for which I apologise in advance, it might just as well refer to the reader wondering why the hell these stories in particular should have been chosen.

Okay. That's unfair - a comment made mainly because the title was giving it away, and there's nothing here I'd describe as terrible. Unfortunately nor is there anything I would necessarily describe as amazing.

It's a mystery, as Toyah memorably observed. Kornbluth and Pohl were great together for Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and presumably the other collaborative novels which I haven't yet read. The same magic is evident here in lively, talkative, witty prose of a kind you don't often find in books with either a spaceship or an alien on the cover. It's intelligent and literate, and Nightmare With Zeppelins and The World of Myrion Flowers - an early and convincing indictment of segregation and racism in America - both hint at how great this collection really should have been. It's difficult to say what the problem could be or why. I assume it's some side effect of a collaborative process either failing to work as it should, or which is simply a poor fit for the short form despite having yielded great novels, resulting in stories which simply seem to go on about nothing for far too long, and narratives which slip the mind even as you're reading them. Paragraphs studied in isolation appear fine, but it is difficult to square the bland porridge of the whole with the author of The Marching Morons and the like.

Unless it was just me.

Galápagos

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Galápagos (1985)
This is the fifth Vonnegut I've read and I think I'm beginning to notice a certain consistency running through his life's work. It's the peculiar and conversational digressions coming together to form a pattern from seemingly disparate elements which make his novels so distinctive and so readable, but which threatens to become a little repetitive if the book isn't doing whatever else it should probably be doing.

Galápagos riffs on the selfsame island which proved so important to Charles Darwin's work, using the setting as birthplace for a successor to the human race, an amphibious species with much smaller brains. Their origin story is told by means of a monologue tangentially concerned with our extinction and where we're going wrong. As you might expect, there's a lot to love about this tale with Vonnegut's voice as ever giving an incongruously warm and humane testimony regardless of how horrible his characters turn out to be; and funny too, of course.

The problem, which may actually be me rather than the book, is that it just goes on a bit longer than it really needed to, its length seemingly dictated by how much fun the author was having. I rarely read anything in a single sitting, so it's a pain when I come back to a novel for the second or third stretch and realise that whilst the names are familiar, I can't otherwise remember anything about these people; and given Vonnegut's characteristically over-involved level of detail, this means I become confused and then frustrated, and then I stop caring. A paragraph picked at random from any point between the first and last pages will be full of wry observations made in lovingly crafted terms, but the whole doesn't quite hold together as well as it might. This is still an inspired book in most respects, but he's written better.

X-Men: E is for Extinction

Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely & others
X-Men: E is for Extinction (2002)
I've a feeling this may have been the one which got me back into reading comic books, and more significantly into actually buying comic books. As the nineties broke for half-time, the number of monthly titles I could be bothered to pick up had dwindled to just a few Vertigo efforts which I'd been following with ever-decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Then came Preacher in which Garth Ennis bravely experimented with references to that time we drank a million pints of Guiness and ended up in this really amazing Irish pub with this bloke playing one of those Irish tambourine things and we were all singing Pogues songs and we were sooo pissed and it was like really wild so it was and we were sooo hungover it was untrue as a substitute for narrative, and Morrison's Unreadables which was shit; and my comics habit began to feel like I'd found myself cornered by the world's most boring wanker at some party I hadn't really wanted to go to in the first place. Thusly did I pack it in.

Almost a decade later, probably not too many months before I committed to obsessively penning reviews of everything I read, I found this collection misplaced in some corner of the book store which patently wasn't comics and picked it up out of simple curiosity.

'So this is still going,' I scoffed to myself, feeling older and wiser before noticing that it was written by Grant Morrison. I'd had no idea he'd become quite so mainstream whilst I'd been looking in the other direction. X-Men was a superhero title which had once pissed over most of the competition, historically speaking, and the thought of it having been written by the author of the wonderful Zenith and Doom Patrol intrigued the shit out of me. I skimmed through the collection there in the shop, making sure it wasn't just an incoherent sequence of references to Aleister Crowley. It wasn't, and there seemed to be much to suggest that I'd be able to follow the story despite not having bothered with an X-Men comic since about 1992.

I loved the X-Men at least since junior school when the classic Lee and Kirby material had been reprinted in black and white in the back pages of something or other; and then again in about 1985 when shopping at the Maidstone branch of Safeway with Charlie Adlard, I noticed a comic bearing the same title with an individual I didn't recognise on the cover.

'Who the hell is that?' I wondered out loud.

'That's Wolverine,' Charlie told me, revealing a previously unsuspected interest in comic books.

'What does he do?'

'He has these metal claws,' Charlie explained, and so I bought the thing and became immediately addicted. This was the Chris Claremont run on X-Men. As a writer, Claremont had certain weaknesses - not least a propensity for way too many thought bubbles crammed with proto-emo corn - but he was always a fucking great storyteller. Over the next couple of years I became obsessed, faithfully following the ever-expanding catalogue of mutant titles until the whole edifice eventually began to collapse under the weight of its own overextended marketing. Suddenly Claremont was no longer involved, and Rob Liefeld was, and the formerly wonderful New Mutants had been cancelled, and it all seemed like a massive waste of everyone's time. It really felt as though Marvel were taking the piss, and so I took my wallet elsewhere.

Amazingly, Morrison's X-Men turned out to be every bit as good as I had hoped. He'd reigned in his own more self-indulgent tendencies and really tapped into the essence of what made the book so great back in its heyday, back when Chris Claremont had been pulling the sort of wacky twists which just shouldn't have worked and making it seem effortless - turning the bad guy into a hero, resurrecting the dead and so on: all the stuff which has become commonplace and prosaic in the tiresomely mannered storytelling of modern film and television and other media aspiring to be film and television. Morrison seemed like a natural for this book, pulling off all sorts of convoluted continuity derived intrigues without the off-putting fan-wankery so often associated with the form. It's soap opera with explosions, and is at least as much science-fiction as it was ever about leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Superheroes tend to entail a certain degree of wish fulfilment of the kind which appeals to outsider types, and the success of X-Men was always rooted in this idea, perhaps more so than has generally been true of the genre as a whole. You might wish for Superman or one of those others to sweep down, fix your broken glasses and retrieve your dinner money from Gripper Stebson, but you knew full well that you could never be like him, you weirdo. The X-Men, on the other hand, were similarly outcast and - once over the initial hump of expectations associated with a 1960s mainstream comic book - it wasn't even about fighting crime. X-Men was always about survival, about getting from A to B without having your head kicked in. Even if the readers weren't actually strange mutants with peculiar powers, they may as well have been so far as our Gripper Stebsons were concerned. Accordingly Morrison's X-Men is an appeal for tolerance and an indictment of the censorious and religious right as representative of everything which is wrong with society; and the message is somehow written in block capitals without so much as a whiff of preachy, which is some feat.

Even with the massive chins of Frank Quitely, this is a raw and unalloyed joy to read. It's at least as solid as anything Chris Claremont ever wrote and is amongst Morrison's very best - right up there with Zenith and Doom Patrol if you ask me.

King of the Fourth Planet

Robert Moore Williams King of the Fourth Planet (1962)
Here's another one of those forgotten science-fiction authors who dominated book stands for the first half of the last century - a million novels to his name and yet remembered at best as typically adequate by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The description seems to square with a boggle-eyed cover promising the god-king, the man-wolf, and the I-machine, a cover I encountered only when I flipped over an Ace Double partially inhabited by the wonderful Katherine MacLean. Had it not been for her, this probably wouldn't have found its way into my collection, which would have been a shame.

The promised man-wolf is actually just some bloke with a bit of a shitty attitude rather than actual lupine characteristics, and the pop-eyed cover star turns out to be the hero, contrary to expectation; and contrary to everything else suggested by both the cover painting and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, whilst this one may fall short of masterpiece status, it's a long way from being the work of a hack churning out one space opera after another for the sake of paying a bill.

King of the Fourth Planet has some of the functional hard-boiled cadence of its supposed type whilst reading like a more coherent van Vogt - all of the surrealism forced to stand in a straight line and act like a proper narrative. The story occurs on Mars amongst native Martians and deals with John Rolf, the main character, having created a machine which allows the user to read the minds of others. So far so Flash Gordon you might think, but as the narrative progresses it begins to feel increasingly allegorical, and allegorical in the sense of A Voyage to Arcturus and related novels of the Symbolist era rather than William Shatner noticing how the really ugly aliens are actually polite and fairly helpful. The setting is Suzusilmar, described as a Martian holy mountain comprising seven distinct levels. I don't know enough of Dante's Divine Comedy to say whether there are any intentional parallels with Mount Purgatorio, but I imagine Williams had something of the sort in mind given that each level is associated with the advance of technology, culture, and spiritual thought, with the peak of the mountain representing the pinnacle of each. Moving from one level to another is the King of the Fourth Planet, a Messianic figure whom we initially fail to recognise because he appears only as a blind beggar on the lower slopes of the mountain. The key to John Rolf's machine is that it allows one to see into the minds of others and to understand their true motives; so for the sake of the story it is regarded as an innovation which will put an end to all the shitty stuff - wars and what have you - and is thus much sought after. Those doing the seeking represent companies from Earth fearful that Rolf's I-machine will bring about the end of marketing, greed, consumerism, capitalism, and even materialism.

Of course, one might read all of this as no more than an episode of Star Trek wearing a kaftan, but the emphasis on spiritual journeys and the like, couched as they are in terms which pay very few concessions to either space opera conventions or alien biology, suggests that Williams' intention was more ambitious. Whether he succeeded or not is debatable, but this is a weird little book, very engaging, and anything but average.

Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe

Alan Moore etc. Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe (2011)
What the fuck, I thought, it's Alan Moore - how bad could it be?, and so here we are again. I wondered about those issues of Green Lantern, Vigilante and other historically unremarkable DC titles written by the lad with the beard, having failed to notice them in their day. Specifically I wondered about them a little later by which time I was approaching thirty and somehow still young enough to be able to read X-Men spin-offs without wincing. Had I picked up the material collected here when it was new, I probably would have thought it amazing, but in 2016 I am no longer quite so comfortable extending the benefit of the doubt because a bloke in a cape is fighting crime.

DC Universe - to give the book its actual but arguably less descriptive title - collects old issues of Batman, Superman, Secret Origins and everything else Moore ever wrote for DC comics which wasn't Swamp Thing. There's nothing I'd call genuinely terrible. On the other hand there's a limit to how much you can reasonably expect from a comic about a vigilante who fights crime, drug dealers, drug dealing pimps, drug dealers who sell drugs to the kids on the street, and who calls himself Vigilante; and his superpower is that he has a gun with which he shoots drug dealers who commit crime, I suppose. You can tell that Moore is making the best of it, struggling to work with what is essentially crappy material, but you can also tell that while his heart wasn't really in it, that lecky bill wasn't going to pay itself. Even with generally great art, most of this is roughly as good as a decent run of Tharg's Future Shocks in 2000AD. I've read the Superman strips before in a black and white eighties collection called The Man of Tomorrow, and they're decent for what they are, but what they are now seems underwhelming even given that I'm about four decades past the reading age of the target audience.

The second half of the book derives from comics originally published by companies which were ultimately assimilated by the great DC Comics Borg Cube - much to Alan Moore's public displeasure - mostly relating to Jim Lee's WildCATS about which I know next to nothing. Surprisingly I found this stuff a little more engaging, which I suppose may be down to the less familiar territory and Moore having been granted license to do the sort of thing he does best. Voodoo, centred around some WildCATS character of the same name, is fairly enjoyable as yer typically brainy mainstream Moore fare, although it probably helps if you can pretend it isn't a story about murdered strippers drawn by someone with a massive collection of Bratz dolls. Then there's Deathblow which is incomprehensible and more or less bereft of dialogue, but is nevertheless justified by Jim Baikie's wonderful moody artwork.

Even when he's phoning it in, Alan Moore still makes most of the competition look like wankers. DC Universe is a reasonably enjoyable exercise in barrel scraping which should under no circumstances be mistaken for Homer's Odyssey just because author of Watchmans, V of the Vendettas blah blah blah...