The Star Beast

Robert Heinlein The Star Beast (1954)
Having got back into the habit of picking up second hand Heinlein if there's something interestingly weird on the cover, I continue to be surprised at how many of them turn out to be juvies. I suppose there might be an argument that most science-fiction is for kids, but it's not an argument I'm interested in having, and at least when Heinlein was writing for the kiddies, he mostly managed to keep the stories free of wife-swapping and the like.

Anyway, I've generally enjoyed his children's books - the only major variance from his regular work usually being the presence of at least one plucky yet studious schoolboy busily having an adventure. This is an odd one in that it's thicker than usual - about one-hundred and twenty pages worth of story expanded to more than twice that length. The Star Beast is a family pet, a sort of eight-legged dinosaur which talks in a voice resembling that of a little girl. His name is Lummox - although he later turns out to be approximately female - seems about as intelligent as a talking canine sidekick in a cartoon, but then turns out to be a stranded representative of an extremely alien and advanced race whose intelligence is of such development that we don't even recognise it. Lummox also eats metal, and gets into trouble as quirky pets tend to do in this sort of story, and all of those pages which we probably didn't need are thus occupied with droning legal conversations about who owns Lummox, how we negotiate with his race, and so on and so forth. Thus something which might have translated fairly well into animated Disney - at least back in the day when Disney had some charm - becomes something of a route march through page after page of barely consequential yacking with so little descriptive seasoning that much of it may as well have been written as a movie script.

Well, whatever you may say about Heinlein, he writes well in lively sentences and is conspicuously capable of spinning a yarn; so it's easier to appreciate what The Star Beast does well than it is to dwell on a few incidences of droning.

The Plumed Serpent

D.H. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent (1926)
In January 1925, responding to an article about him which had appeared in the Milanese Corriere della Sera written by Carlo Linati, Lawrence wrote:

Do you think that books should be sort of toys, nicely built up of observations and sensations, all finished and complete? - I don't. To me, even Synge, whom I admire very much indeed, is a bit too rounded off and, as it were, put on the shelf to be looked at. I can't bear art that you can walk around and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in a crowd. People should either run for their lives, or come under the colours, or say how do you do? I hate the actor-and-the-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering on to some mischief or merriment. That rather cheap seat in the gods where one sits with fellows like Anatole France and benignly looks down on the foibles, follies, and frenzies of so-called fellow-men, just annoys me. After all the world is not a stage - not to me; nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches - like a god with a twenty-lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. - That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and so superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. You need not complain that I don't subject the intensity of my vision - or whatever it is - to some vast and imposing rhythm - by which you mean, isolate it on a stage, so that you can look down on it like a god who has got a ticket to the show. I never will: and you will never have that satisfaction from me. Stick to Synge, Anatole France, Sophocles: they will never kick the footlights even. But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else.

Dave was in Oaxaca, Mexico, writing The Plumed Serpent, a novel which resolutely refuses to deliver foibles, follies, or frenzies. It was the first Lawrence I read and I thought it was great, but then I was listening to quite a lot of Death In June at the time. I recalled it as being Lawrence's greatest, which was also claimed by its author; but we'll come back to that in a moment.

The Plumed Serpent is set in Mexico, in and around Mexico City in the twenties, with much of the detail drawn from Lawrence having stayed there and not really enjoyed it very much. It describes an uprising of the common man, a popular movement with martial overtones aiming to replace both church and state with the pre-Hispanic faith of Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and all of those guys; and because the aims of this movement come to full fruition near the end of the book - although blink and you'll miss it - it could probably be argued that The Plumed Serpent counts as alternate history if not actually science-fiction.

The first fifty or so pages are, I would argue, among Lawrence's greatest - and possibly also his most unpleasant - after which, we settle into three hundred or so pages of Kate Leslie having conversations about blood in a variety of different settings which may as well be the same place. Lawrence had developed a fairly complex philosophy utilising blood as a metaphor for either the human will or possibly a sort of Platonic ideal humanity from which we seem to have strayed - which is why the world is knackered - and The Plumed Serpent was his most intensely rendered expression of this philosophy to date, which I suspect may be why he regarded it as his greatest, being so close to the enterprise as to be unable to tell the difference between what he wanted it to do and what it actually did. In April, 1925 he wrote to Mollie Skinner:

I got my Quetzalcoatl novel done in Mexico: at a tremendous cost to myself. Feel I don't want ever to see it again. Loathe the thought of having to go over it and prune and correct, in typescript.

See! Even without raging malaria having struck him down as he finished the thing, I suspect he knew but had worked so hard on the fucking thing that he was never going to admit the existence of a gap between what he'd tried to write and what he'd actually written. What he'd actually written was, in part, a sort of plea for spiritual honesty, a suggestion that modern man might perhaps shut the fuck up and listen to the eternal truths of his blood; or as Cipriano puts it:

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

So here we have one-hundred-and seventy thousand words on the subject of trusting some instinct more primal than a bunch of men yapping on about nothing. I can forgive the endless frowning and the complete absence of humour, but the lack of self-awareness becomes overpowering.

That said, once we're past the astonishing opening chapters and have accustomed ourselves to the drone, flashes of observational brilliance occur with reasonable frequency - enough so to have kept me reading back in 1997; but very little of the vague philosophical model to which these observations refer connects with what happens in The Plumed Serpent in any meaningful way. Lawrence has essentially decorated his own philosophical aspirations with a few names and places for the sake of local colour, and without any reference to the composition or tradition of that local colour. His desire to hurl the Catholic establishment down the cathedral steps and bring in the lads with the feather headresses is more than a little ridiculous, being based on an assumption of Catholicism and indigenous Mexican belief being at odds with one another. The inconvenient reality which Lawrence either missed or chose to ignore is that, for the most part, Mexico accepted Catholicism on its own terms, and the further you venture from the city, the more difficult it is to identify where one ends and the other begins; so borrowing Mexico for the sake of revising the rise of the mystically inclined far right across Europe as a variation on his own ideas about our relation to the land and its people was always going to be a bit of a non-starter.

The Plumed Serpent has been accused of racism, which seems a little strong, but then it is condescending, and you should maybe ask Mexicans what they think rather than me. Lawrence certainly captures the raging distrust of anything different which white people sometimes experience when surrounded entirely by brown people, and sure - maybe this is the character of Kate Leslie rather than Lawrence himself, but I'm not convinced. The Plumed Serpent aims high, if nothing else, and aims high with approximately noble intentions, but what little it gets right is too easily eclipsed by one own goal after another whilst the manager jumps up and down on the sideline screaming about how this is actually his strategy, and it's working, and if you don't see that then you're an idiot.

Brave New World Revisited

Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Orwell's 1984 has frequently been cited as an instruction manual for the present with alarming frequency in recent times, but Huxley's Brave New World seems much closer to the mark with its totalitarian state reinforced by distraction and bullshit rather than brute force. We're living in a world where people have ceased caring about books rather than one in which they're banned, generally speaking.

Here Huxley revisits his Brave New World nearly three decades later to explain his way of thinking and take stock of whether or not he actually predicted anything, at least as of the late fifties, which he did; and were he around today I'd say he'd be ticking off even more boxes. By coincidence, I watched Jen Senko's The Brainwashing of My Dad a few nights ago, a 2015 documentary on the influence of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets which distort the truth or even flat out lie so as to encourage the sort of thinking which translates into money and power for its financial backers; and it was disconcerting to find many of the same arguments made in Brave New World Revisited which, it should be remembered, refers to a world wherein the dissemination of information occurred at a snail's pace compared to today.

Of course, Huxley - by his own admission - didn't manage to predict everything, and before any of the usual suspects feel like chiming in, I don't include his observations on population growth among his oversights. He foresaw it as a major problem, or a major contribution to the problems of life on this planet. Having expressed this view on a previous occasion, I was informed that population growth is not problem, and that the planet has sufficient resources for all of us, so the problem is in the distribution of the same; and in failing to realise this I was exactly like Hitler. I gather this assertion may or may not have derived from something suggested by Karl Marx. I have no strong opinion on Marx, but have grown sceptical of the accusation that to disagree with something he wrote is to agree with everything for which his opponents stand, particularly the ones in the uniforms who have a problem with Judaism. Whilst certain proposals as to what might be done about there being too many humans on our planet may indeed be termed fascist, the same cannot be said of the mere acknowledgement of it being a problem, or even just a potential problem. Diminishing every point with which you disagree as fascist suggests a reactionary devotion to an opposing ideology more than a nuanced understanding of the situation, whatever it may be, just as a pro-choice stance hardly renders one an advocate of eugenics.

So Huxley makes observations which some of us won't want to hear, now that we know fucking everything - not least that unlimited population growth isn't great and that some people, for whatever reason, are a bit thick - but he's essentially a humanist and this is a wonderful and methodically reasoned, if slightly depressing, argument.

The Naked Lunch

 

William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959)
This was probably the third or fourth Burroughs I read, back in the first flourish of youth when I was reading everything I could find by the man. I therefore suspect I may not have read it since the early eighties, which would at least explain the deficit between what I've read just now and what I vaguely remember.

I'm sure you all know what Naked Lunch does and I don't see much point going over it yet again; but for what it may be worth, it's essentially a written equivalent to one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings commenting on the questionable state of his society by showing a thousand tiny figures with foreign objects projecting painfully from their bumholes. I'd somehow forgotten that it slightly predates Burroughs' use of cut-ups, so although we have random narrative swerves and streams of consciousness implied by Céline's three little dots, it's muted compared to the impersonal onslaught of undifferentiated meaning we find in subsequent books. Mostly we have routines and dialogue, essentially similar to what we read in Junky and Queer but without the linearity.

Much to my surprise, and regardless of whatever I thought first time round, Naked Lunch is a transitional novel wherein the author is still very much finding his feet; and it feels as though those feet were mostly trudging. Of course, it throws up plenty of interesting ideas, but nothing which wasn't better expressed to greater dramatic effect in the novels which followed, most of which additionally benefit from a greater variety of narrative techniques. While Naked Lunch is arguably important, its reputation refers mostly to it having been unlike anything published at the time. This particular edition commemorates this by reproducing three or four months worth of sniffy editorials and related correspondence from the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of how Naked Lunch was either disgraceful or the bestest best thing ever. Both Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess chip in for the defense but no conclusion is reached, and the strangest realisation is how closely this lengthy exchange - beginning in November, 1963 - resembles the incoherent slanging matches seen on Twitter whenever someone points out that women don't usually have cocks. The language may be elevated and the sentences constructed as though by Renaissance architects according to the golden section, but the arguments still amount to burrows is shit LOL #cantfuckinwrite followed by a string of those horrible crying with laughter emoticons, which I feel sort of proves Billy's point about one or two things.

Analog September 2008

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog September 2008 (2008)
This was the first issue of Analog I ever bought, and it probably wasn't a great place to start. I've long held The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by Henry G. Stratmann to be the worst short story I've ever read. Coming back to it fifteen years later, I realise it's not quite so painfully didactic as I recall, and online research reveals the author to be an almost certainly above average decent guy whom I find difficult to square with this particular example of his writing. Last Temptation reads like fundamentalist Christian science-fiction written by someone who prefers movies to books and who might be more at home churning out romance novels. The story is that mysterious and powerful aliens have moved Mars into a lower orbit around the sun, somehow rendering it habitable, but only two people are allowed to visit - a man and a woman, and maybe you can see where this is heading. She's deeply religious. He comes from a more scientific background and is portrayed as cynical - although it seems he's simply a realist to me. The two of them discover a giant pyramid within which they are subjected to a number of spiritual and moral trials seemingly to determine whether or not humanity will be allowed to colonise. On this, my second reading, the story isn't quite so simplistic as I've made it sound, but as with much fiction driven by religious ideology, it feels as though we're playing with a stacked deck, are perhaps even subject to a certain level of condescension, and the symbolism seems at least as heavy-handed as painfully allegorical episodes of sixties Star Trek - although I sort of enjoyed Stratmann replacing the apple in the Garden of Eden with a radish, for what it may be worth.

That being said, it's better than I remember and, I would guess, is more likely a philosophical tale which suffers from the necessary fine balance having eluded its author, rather than the Bible-thumping sermon for which I took it in 2008. It doesn't help that a couple of deferential references to romantic fiction do nothing to prevent it reading like the same, or the number of times Stratmann invokes a specific TV show or movie.

He looked up at the towering structure and growled, 'A pyramid on Mars. With our luck, we'll find Sutekh waiting for us inside.'

'Who?'

Martin smiled mischievously. 'That's right.'

I'm sure that works for most of those who would get the reference, and who would then go on to declare the author a genius in the tradition of literary giants such as Terrance Dicks, but it didn't do a lot for me. I still find The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya vaguely annoying, but after this second reading I've warmed to the idea that Stratmann has probably written better.

Elsewhere in the magazine we find an article about nanotechnology which I didn't really understand and three further short stories which, if not terrible, mostly had me hoping the next one would be better, which it wasn't. We close with one of those review columns which simply relates a detailed plot outline of each title under discussion, then part two of the presumably novel length Tracking by David R. Palmer. Tracking is written in an experimental first person narrative shorthand which tends to eschew pronouns and articles so as to presumably mimic the sensation of experience, so it reads like Chris Claremont's thought bubbles from eighties issues of X-Men. It sort of works once you're used to it, but forty pages seems like a lot and I gave up after about twenty.

The best thing about this were Stanley Schmidt's editorial and his memorial to Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, even his response to some letters page dingus accusing him of expressing eugenicist sympathies in a previous issue is more interesting than the rest of it. I guess this explains why I never became a regular reader.

The Cursed Earth

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Mick McMahon etc. The Cursed Earth (1978)
Being twelve or thirteen at the time, it didn't really occur to me that there might be a problem in Judge Dredd waging war on either Ronald McDonald or the Jolly Green Giant. All my progs went to the local comic shop for something pitiful like a tenner back in the early nineties, and by the time I came to consider revisiting Dredd's trip across the Cursed Earth, the thing had been reprinted following the relaxation of some copyright law or other, so here I am. I have good memories of the Cursed Earth, Dredd's first true saga given that the robot revolution can't have been more than ten issues; and happily it still rocks, so this hasn't been anything like revisiting a once beloved Rupert annual, as sometimes turns out to be the case. Being Dredd, and being aimed at young lads of the age at which I found myself in 1978, there's a lot of narrative shorthand, an explosion on nearly every page, and an astonishing degree of violence, but it works and additionally stands the test of time because McMahon's war torn art is gorgeous, and neither Mills nor Wagner assumed their readership to be fucking idiots. There's not much breathing space as Dredd and Spikes rampage across their post-nuclear wasteland, but just enough to allow for a degree of pathos, even in these primary colours, and to the point that I almost couldn't read the fourth page of Tweak's Story.

I never found Dredd that interesting a character, but this was where the strip really took off for me in revealing a little more of the terrible reality he inhabited. This was the golden age, with Joe as more or less an agent of karma in a brutal but realist world rather than the monotone vessel of fascist slapstick he seems to have become. It always struck me as odd that 2000AD, an English weekly, should run a strip set in a future America in keeping with the prevalent obsession with the romance of the formerly wild west; but with hindsight I see that Judge Dredd offered commentary on America and its seeping cultural infection, complete with jokes, and with a wit that would have been mostly beyond mainstream America itself, this being a far more pragmatic take on truth, justice, and the rest than you would have had from Clark or Bruce back in '78; and it beat Michael Crichton to the genetically engineered dinosaur thing, should anyone be interested, and probably did it better. It really is a masterpiece.

Spook Country

William Gibson Spook Country (2007)
I burned out on Gibson a while back when ploughing through all of those cyberpunk novels and noticing how they're all the same book, give or take some small change. This observation isn't intended to be quite so dismissive as it will seem, but for all the man's astonishing prose, he seems to have wrung a lot of mileage out of punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. On a bad day, it reads as though he's just getting off on describing designer labels and gadgets, which is a shame because although it could be argued that his narratives tend to be all surface, it isn't like he doesn't have anything to say - and usually something which is best expressed through his seemingly obsessive attention to superficial detail.

Conversely, when he gets the balance right, the books are amazing even with those punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. Idoru was pretty great, and Pattern Recognition probably qualifies as a masterpiece. Spook Country has been praised to the hilt. It's not quite Pattern Recognition, from which it follows on in a loose sense, but it gets there in the end.

As usual, the narrative is slightly bewildering, requiring that the reader keep track of a wide range of characters driven by ambiguous motives; but the point emerges like a signal from the proverbial noise, meaning it may not actually have mattered whether you can still remember who was who by the end because the message is fairly clear, despite pertaining to the absence of clarity from the world it describes - which is more or less our world, by the way. Spook Country is about a world which has ceased to make sense in conventional terms, somewhat foreshadowing the rise of the game show host as president and the mess we find ourselves in. It answers the question of how to do satire when that which is satirised is more ridiculous than any fictionalised version could ordinarily manage to be. Spook Country seems to promise the usual narrative of the last minute save as everyone meets up in the town square, the nuclear spectacle averted, the dark forces defeated but - as it is in our world - we don't get that, nor anything which really makes sense.

'I've just seen someone, some people,' she told him, 'tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I'll ever see.'

'Really?' He was suddenly grave. 'I envy you.'

'I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn't. I think that it was actually…'

'What?'

'A prank. A prank you'd have to be crazy to be able to afford.'

I have no idea whether Gibson refers to anything which actually happened when referencing funding for the rebuilding of Iraq after the deposition of Saddam Hussein, but given what he describes in this novel, I'm not sure this even counts as fiction.