Ralph Blum - Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974)

Where vintage UFO literature is concerned, I tend to prefer the weirdly implausible to droning lists of moving lights seen in the sky which, while doubtless unnerving for those who saw them, don't necessarily make for interesting reading. So I'll make exceptions to my preference for the writing of John Keel or Brad Steiger where the author actually claims to have been taken to Venus, but that's about it. Until now, for this was recommended by a person on facebook as dealing extensively with the Pascagoula encounter wherein an angler found himself forcibly interviewed by things which looked like this:

Happily for me, it turns out that Ralph Blum was a legitimate journalist before he was a believer, who came to this subject having been commissioned to write about flying saucers for Cosmopolitan, of all things. So beyond the obligatory cover reference to von Däniken - and its use of the font which launched Eric's shabby efforts - we have a well-written, beautifully argued, and entirely sober account of what happened to Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, extending into a much broader examination of the saucer phenomenon and what it meant in 1974. Blum doesn't bother with any of the overly defensive stuff about how so-called scientists will mock, or - on the other hand - dismissing everything as having been Venus seen through swamp gas; and so we have an account and its analysis which seems very much consistent with present times, given that the US Air Force can no longer be bothered to pretend it ain't happening. The tone is closer to that of political biography than to that of most UFO literature, making allowances for sake of argument and taking the rest from there yet without going full Brad Steiger. I'm inclined to wonder whether a few more of those published taking this approach might have brought about the thawing of officialdom a few years ahead of schedule.

D.H. Lawrence - Selected Essays (1950)

 

This feels a little more stimulating after the above undifferentiated adventure porridge*, and although Lawrence was known to produce his own porridge from time to time, it was mostly in the novels and short stories. We seem to be on safe ground with the essays given that he didn't have to keep referring to his characters or describing a flower halfway through some already rambling discourse. What has struck me most from this collection is that, as Lawrence himself cheerily admits, we're a long way from the essay as practiced by Huxley, Orwell and others. The difference is, as Lawrence himself acknowledges, that his arguments are intuitive, developing organically and drawing on experience rather than theory, so his writing often has as much or more in common with painting than with the work of an essayist who might set out some idea and then go about presenting evidence in its favour. This approach additionally allows for some wiggle room in the possibility that Lawrence knows he may have it arse backwards.

From a London editor and a friend (soi-disant): Perhaps you would understand other people better if you did not think that you were always right. How one learns things about oneself! Or is it really about the other person? I always find that my critics, pretending to criticise me, are analysing themselves. My own private opinion is that I have been, as far as people go, almost every time wrong!

With this in mind, the bombast becomes a little more palatable, should you need it to be. Lawrence tackles more or less everything he's tackled in a novel, but here in much snappier form; and even where I might disagree, I don't see that he gets much wrong, and a lot of it is air-punchingly on point. He writes about class, modernisation, human relationships, art, writing, painting, religion, America, Germany, England and all that we're getting wrong in terms which apply as well today as I presume they did in the previous twenties.

In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over, nor something to try to reform.

If you've ever wondered where the man was coming from, then you won't find it spelled out with much greater clarity than here.

*: Who shite, the review of which you'll have to wait for the book if you care that much. I've given up posting reviews of that sort of thing here because it attracts the attention of the sort of person whom I would customarily cross the road to avoid.

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.