James D. Hudnall & David Lloyd - ESPers (1985)

As one of de yoots dem back when I first got sucked into a comic shop, the big three publishers were Marvel and DC with Eclipse Comics bringing up the rear. Eclipse looked initially exciting because I'd never heard of them, but - excepting Alan Moore's Miracleman - nothing much grabbed me on closer inspection and ESPers was one of those titles which didn't grab me, possibly because I was a very superficial person. I'm coming back to it now for the first time as homework of sorts, in preparation for re-reading James D. Hudnall's run on Marvel's Alpha Flight for Beautiful Mutants, my magnum opus which will be read by three people if I'm lucky, with one of those people being me. I'm also getting around to ESPers in vague hope of correcting a poorly quantified deficit in the general flow of publishing karma. I briefly met Hudnall at some comic book thing back when he'd just had Lex Luthor: the Unauthorized Biography published by DC, about which he was obviously excited while I stood there mumbling my gormless enthusiasm for Alpha Flight, additionally throwing in one or two mutant themed questions that most twelve-year olds would have been too self-conscious to ask. Then years fly by and I come to notice that Hudnall passed on in 2019 which, tenuous though my connection undoubtedly may be, seems shitty and unfair even to me. He was a nice guy who seemed to have great potential as a writer, at least of comic books, and I don't even know if he made a living at it.

So it goes.

I hadn't even realised ESPers, the name of which I remember well, was one of his, specifically his first book. To be fair, it's not the most solid start to a career, and the first of the five issues collected here remind me that I was left underwhelmed by at least the first two issues of Hudnall's Interface, which I now discover to have been the continuation of ESPers. The stylistic influence of both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns is tangible in the tone of what kicks off in much the same way as so many first efforts tend to kick off*. I suppose you could call it a high-tech thriller, albeit one from an era in which the Sinclair ZX81 was not yet old enough to be deemed hilarious, so it has the slightly exhausting focus of Lynda La Plante channelled by someone who probably wasn't quite ready to be teamed up with David Lloyd. ESPers, as I half suspected at the time, answers the question, what if we had the X-Men in the real world, albeit allowing for a fairly loose grasp on what constitutes the real world - no costumes, no codenames, no aliens, and their powers are either telepathy or something similar and - you know - that stuff is kind of real if you squint a bit, maybe; plus it's the real world as seen in Bond movies, with some bad guys planning to detonate an atomic bomb in the middle of the Lebanon. Plus each issue closed with two pages of a related ESPer prose story of which the two paragraphs I managed were barely readable - although to be fair, comic book writers rarely make decent novelists, which is fine because it goes both ways.

However, by the fifth issue, you realise you've been reading for pleasure rather than out of duty, and even if you still have no fucking clue who any of these people are supposed to be, it somehow leaves you wanting more; or has done with me. I guess Hudnall was learning on the job here, and apparently learning fast, and while ESPers doesn't say much about anything in particular, it finishes superior to anything with which it might have been initially compared when you started; and the art is gorgeous, obviously.

His run on Alpha Flight was fucking great, by the way.

*: It has certain things in common with Berserker, which was my own first effort along depressingly similar lines and yet another real world superhero. It took me two months to produce the first seven pages, at which point I thankfully realised that it was garbage. A later version was drawn by Charlie Adlard but nothing came of it because I still hadn't come up with a story.

Fred Hoyle - Ossian's Ride (1959)

 

Among the innovations bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, the broadest is surely the idea of progress, with both the development of technology and new ideas of biological evolution introducing the possibility of a world which changes over time, as opposed to having remained stable and essentially the same since origins described in the Bible. Much science-fiction has tackled the discovery of progress by one means or another, either as a warning or else as basic cheerleading. Hoyle is an oddity in that he seems almost to belong to the other tradition, the one mostly supplanted by science as progress. Among his best known achievements as an astronomer was the development of the steady state model of the universe in which the cosmos is understood to have neither a beginning nor an end with expansion explained by the continual and spontaneous creation of matter. The steady state theory was seemingly discredited* by the big bang theory; and in these two conflicting models I see a curious echo of variant ideas concerning evolutionary theory, specifically the regular Darwinian version which proposes a more or less constant rate of change conflicting with Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium wherein lengthy stable states are punctuated by short periods of rapid change which, curiously, seems somewhat descended from the catastrophism which predated Darwin.

The parallels aren't a perfect fit but, to get to the point, the world to come as Hoyle saw it in 1959, was one in which progress was very much an exception to the rule. Science-fiction has a generally lousy record in terms of prediction, but Hoyle's rural Ireland of 1980 is strikingly undeveloped given that electric power had begun to reach even the most isolated communities in the fifties, and his England of 1980 is familiar mainly from black and white movies, which at least contrasts with the promise of his futuristic Ireland, if not its description once we get there.

Ossian's Ride aspires to espionage, a technological spy thriller because we all want to know what's been going on in Ireland behind the Erin Curtain, as Fred calls it. We have reports of fantastic buildings and moving mountains, but the Emerald Isle is no longer so welcoming to visitors as was once the case, so British Intelligence sends a young mathematician to get to the bottom of it. What we find at the bottom of it is that the Irish government now puts everything into the development of science, meaning it has become a technocracy, if that's actually a word. So, while parts of Ireland remain rustic and without electricity or even basic plumbing, some areas have fantastic buildings a bit like Canary Wharf, and those moving mountains are actually huge nuclear powered machines the size of ocean liners which roam across the land depositing futuristic buildings hither and thither.

Our mathematician eventually deduces the mission of the Irish government and that some of the more futuristic ideas come from an alien mind sent from a distant star inhabiting the body of a human woman - an idea which Hoyle developed to better effect in A for Andromeda - most of which emerges during the final chapters. Up to that point, although competently written and certainly engaging, our boy's mission is mostly himself travelling across rural Ireland on foot, occasionally by public transport where he's able to obtain a bus timetable without arousing suspicion. There's an occasional skirmish with representatives of ICE, the Industrial Corporation of Ireland, but nothing of consequence beyond reminding us that our guy is a spy and it's mostly on the level of what happens in Famous Five yarns where crooks are defeated by ingenious use of jam jars and elastic bands. A lot of time is spent fixating on stuff about hiking, rucksacks, bed and breakfast, and where our boy eats that evening - sometimes a hotel restaurant, sometimes just a sandwich, sometimes breakfast at a farmhouse. I have to assume Fred had recently enjoyed a hiking holiday in south-west Ireland if the level of detail is any indication. In the books' favour, if less than gripping and carrying a significant tang of Bob Mortimer's Graham Lister, Hoyle at least keeps the greenface to a respectable minimum, so beyond a few references to Guinness, it's mostly just low-level stereotyping expressed as bewildering speech patterns, such as when Cathleen admits, 'It's sorry I am about those papers,' because that's how Irish people talk, see.

Ossian's Ride, which never quite gets around to explaining the reference made by its own title, is written with just the sense of poetry you might expect of a mathematician, but for all it's walking into walls on almost every other page, it has some interesting things to say once it stops banging on about what it had for breakfast and has a certain clunky charm which is difficult to dislike with conviction.

*: I say seemingly because I honestly don't feel qualified to weigh in on this. The big bang probably wins, but I nevertheless have a soft spot for Hoyle.

Will Self - Elaine (2024)

 

Following on from 2019's directly autobiographical Will, Self travels further down the branches of his family tree to formative events of his childhood, with the focus shifted to the prime mover of those events, specifically his mother who died in 1988 leaving behind over forty years worth of diaries. These diaries seem to have provided the recipe and psychological ingredients for this approximately biographical novel, although the novel itself inhabits less than a year of her life with events occurring in order of significance rather than where they appeared on a calendar. Having already read 2000's How The Dead Live, dealing in part with his mother's death*, I felt I knew what to expect, so naturally it's something else entirely.

Elaine is hardly light reading, and yet proves surprisingly breezy for a novel which eschews many of the usual conventions of the form, presenting not quite a stream of consciousness, more like events ordered according to an associative train of thought - which I swear is different even if I'm not sure how to describe it. I've witnessed at least one denizen of social media whining about lines of speech left to roam free within the text, unfettered by those handy inverted commas which at least allow us to pretend we're watching it on telly, but it works fine for me, keeping the dialogue buried firmly in the swirling mists of memory from which the narrative is woven. I won't claim it reminds me of Ulysses because I still haven't got around to that one yet, but I gather it's not the worst comparison that could be made. The style of the writing levels everything out, giving more or less equal emphasis to what happens, what is thought of what happens, what hasn't happened as a result and so on. It can be disorientating, but somehow serves to root the reader in the exact moment of what is read, as distinct from the usual unconscious gathering of information where A, B, and then C adds up to the story we probably expected. If that suggests short change, the effect is, I would argue, emotionally more powerful than what we might have received from the traditional written equivalent of a diagram.

Another cracker, and any peanut gallery season ticket holders still alive to wheel out the stuff about some hypothetical anal thesaurus and how no-one actually reads Will Self, they just say they do because they think they're all lush and that but they don't know nuffink can go fuck themselves, as they should have been doing from day one.

*: This is the impression I've picked up from somewhere, although I'm no longer able to find anything to support the conceit beyond vague literary parallels I seem to recall as present in How the Dead Live, although the main character's name is actually closer to that of the author's maternal grandmother.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

 

One of those books which became part of my personal reference library as a kid was the Piccolo paperback Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller, which I treasured for both its inclusion of obscure monsters I'd never heard of and the evocative black and white line illustrations by Mary I. French. Online research reveals that Miller made a career from books which terrified and fascinated the children of my generation, another one I owned being the beautifully painted hardback Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs from 1977 which only now do I realise was by the same author. This may all seem obtuse as preamble to my writing about Borges, an Argentinian author whose works have, as Wikipedia puts it, contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in twentieth century Latin American literature; but with hindsight it's difficult to believe Carey Miller wasn't cherry-picking from this earlier compendium when compiling her own dictionary given the quota of mythical monsters I've never seen mentioned outside of these two books - the Kujata, the Squonk and the Nasnas, to name just three. This isn't an accusation of plagiarism so much as one of influence given the differences. Miller's purpose being to give kids goosebumps, she includes dinosaurs and Frankenstein's monster.

I'm not sure Borges' intention was at variance but for a slight shift of focus, and we're in roughly the same territory as his short stories, here with narrative boiled down to its essence of time, place, character and so on, delivering equivalent observations and ideas in alphabetical order and without any of it being pinned to the customary progression of regular fiction. Where Miller's scope was sufficiently broad as to include Mary Shelley's hit single, Borges similarly draws in creatures from the writing of both Poe and Kafka whilst himself employing considerable artistic license in relating established mythological figures, and even creating one of his own - the Peryton, a half deer and half bird chimera which somehow casts the shadow of a man. This, I would assume, is because a rigorously scientific bestiary of mythical beasts arguably misses the point of that which it purports to describe, and because the larger world is often mapped from the seclusion of daily existence by fictions or truisms at best; and The Book of Imaginary Beings seems to provide a more informative account of the historical human experience as related to our environment than whichever facts or statistics might apply, even where the facts and statistics are more accurate in material terms.

This distinction is probably something we should try to keep track of, not least in recognising that there is a distinction which doesn't detract from the world described herein by Borges being a wonderful place.

Robert Moore Williams - The Chaos Fighters (1955)

 

It's been a shocking three years since I read my last Robert Moore Williams, a lull accounted for by nothing I hadn't already read showing up in the usual second hand places, before a day trip to Austin opened up an entirely new seam. So Austin is good for something beyond providing twats a point of focus for when they suddenly find themselves required to say something which isn't routinely insulting about Texas.

Happily, The Chaos Fighters has proven to be a good choice in terms of getting back in the saddle. As with much of his writing, it adheres to the unashamedly pulp sensibility of agents figuring things out, embellished with sensational dames but saved from the clichés and stock pieces by its sheer weirdness. Williams' writing has about it a strong touch of the A.E. van Vogt, although his own similarly dreamlike and unpredictable narratives are delivered in terms customarily more analogous to Edward Hopper than Edward Wadsworth, with occasionally a sentence so startling that it borders on Alan Partridge. Bright young things will characterise this as bad writing, which probably isn't an argument worth having; and neither does it matter whether or not Williams succeeds because the energy comes from the teeth gritting determination with which he attempts to wrestle that sucker to the ground. 

We open with our man Haldane entering a shop in pursuit of a mystery, just like the protagonist of van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher, which here seems to receive tribute on the very first page in the reference to other agents having vanished on Mars. The mystery stems from a sign in the shop window promising FOR SALE—Homo Sapiens, which is eventually revealed as the title of a book explaining the scientific and spiritual destiny of humanity in cosmic terms, as written by persons stood on the threshold of the same.

'We're human beings in the process of becoming something else. As we see history, the only law apparent in the universe is change. We human beings change too; we become something else, as a race and as individuals. What this something else is we don't know until we become it. Nor will we know what it is until we achieve it and find out what it is. But we are changing, we are evolving, we are moving in some direction.'

You may recognise the obsession with progress, human evolution, and supermen which gripped many science-fiction writers during the first half of the twentieth century, but what distinguishes Williams is how strongly he foreshadowed the utopian movements of the sixties, with whom he became briefly associated, seemingly as a benign guru figure to a commune. Unsurprisingly then, his science-fiction is decidedly fuzzy at the edges with the weird fiction of Abraham Merritt as a starting point, expanding to include all forms of mysticism, whatever seemed to fit, here presenting us with inventors who also summon the occasional mysterious force using incantations from ancient texts. Williams seems to have been a functioning schizophrenic in so much as that he held down jobs, was liked by his friends, and yet was prone to visions and voices in his head - translating to telepathy in The Chaos Fighters.

The voice paused. The spasm was passing in Haldane. He wondered about the voice. Who was speaking in there? In his mind was the thought that no person was in there, that no-one was speaking, that what he heard was a product of his own imagination.

This is illustrated in literal fashion when Haldane's psychic ability communicates with him directly in conversation.

His eyes, in direct contact with their own data, and not giving two hoots about the opinions of his conscious mind, screamed at him that they were not lying.

'We're reporting accurately,' his eyes yelled. 'Not only is the girl getting smaller but the street is stretching out like a rubber band and is growing larger. And the girl is only two feet tall now.'

Communicated as a populist thriller, The Chaos Fighters is therefore Williams' view of where humanity heads in the years to come as drawn and interpreted from his own mental idiosyncrasies. It's accordingly strewn with themes and images which reoccur throughout his fiction - the sound like a bell heard from across the universe, the subterranean tunnels (which we find on the moon in this case); and the hard-boiled familiarity of its settings and characters is offset by the unpredictably surreal twists which the narrative follows in circling and struggling to make its esoteric point. It hasn't predicted anything - at least not yet - but there's too much thought, albeit completely screwy thought, gone into the novel to dismiss it as rambling gibberish; but above all, it's a tremendous and tremendously strange read. It's also possibly the clearest, most overt illustration of the man's unique vision until 1970s pseudo-autobiographical Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight, at least of those I've read.

New Juche - Water Margin (2024)

 

Another chapbook, but as always he makes the words count with more to digest in these fifty or so pages than most writers manage in a lifetime. If you've read New Juche on previous occasions, you'll be familiar with the themes - although there's no sex in this one - but each piece of writing carries a different emphasis or approaches its subject from a new angle, so continuing to yield moments of intense clarity comparable to the proverbial ray of sunlight bursting from behind a storm cloud even given the often immersive degradation of the subject. Water Margin further explores the author's relation to his environment, how he's formed by his environment in certain respects, here with particular emphasis on water as the medium which binds all things almost in the sense meant by certain pre-Christian religions. We open at the Noi Na bathhouse, subterranean and characterised by extremes of temperature, amongst foreigners who no more belong to Thai culture than does New Juche himself yet seem to define him as an outsider. This contrasts with the longer account of our man's visceral struggle with his pond which also serves as a source of food and water, and which cements him firmly into his social landscape as friends, neighbours, or relatives muck in - literally - to help with the drainage, or cooking whatever they can find slopping about in the silt and mud.

It's a physical account which very much reminds me of whatever it was that D.H. Lawrence said about the value of labour and getting one's hands dirty as a more profound and even spiritual pursuit than anything born of intellect. It also represents a communion with nature on significantly more honest terms than those usually associated with such a cliché; and either I'm yet to read another author who has truly given us anything like this (which is admittedly a possibility), or he really is something new in literary history.

Spike Milligan - Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (1985)

 

I'd drifted away from funny books into more po-faced territory by the time this, the fifth of Spike's war memoirs, was published; but having read the first four, and feeling I owe it to my younger self, here I am again. The previous volume closed in harrowing fashion with Spike binned up in Italy with shell shock and an attendant absence of jokes and one liners. I was assuming this volume might represent a deeper descent into the psychological twilight, but no. Spike recovers despite the best efforts of the British Army, who arrange for him to continue his convalescence at a medical facility in close proximity to Mount Vesuvius just as it's about to blow; but in sunnier news, the war is over with Mussolini hung upside down in a garage somewhere. Somehow, this doesn't end the memoir because rather than being sent home as one might expect, Spike and pals continue to bum around Italy for another year, mostly entertaining the troops while playing in a variety of jazz bands, or possibly swing bands - something you dance to anyway. I assume the British Army hung around in Italy after the war as part of some clean up operation, or maybe getting the country back on its feet - Spike doesn't go into detail on this or even much else of the bigger picture unless I blinked and missed it.

Not that it matters because the author clearly never intended to bump heads with A.J.P. Taylor, instead delivering a worm's eye view of the war as many of us working classes would have experienced it - as something too vast and remote to comprehend except when the bombs are dropping directly onto our heads. Now, as the fighting retreats and dribbles away to nothing, our man catches up with himself and the job of existence, torn between the loss of all that was familiar and the pleasures of sun, sea, a different country, and not being shot at on a daily basis. The barrage of jokes and zingers is tempered with pleasantly reflective interludes of the kind experienced when realisation dawns that you've been through hell and survived. It's conversational and with an impressionist grammar that's more or less its own thing, which can be frustrating for anyone wondering why we're suddenly in Florence, or Naples, or wherever else, but is probably the only way to capture this kind of history. That said, the notes and letters reproduced solely as photographs - leaving us to struggle with Spike's handwriting or a typewriter which obviously needed a new ribbon - seem more trouble than they're worth, but your own mileage may vary.

Also, Harry Secombe finally shows up, in case anyone was wondering, and is a lot more funny on the page than I'm afraid I remember him being in real life. It isn't War and Peace*, but it's pleasantly substantial and satisfying compared to at least one of Spike's earlier, scrappier memoirs.

*: I haven't read it either.