Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4 (2008)
The lesson here was don't rush out and snap up the next issue before you've read the rest of the one you've just bought, which no-one told me. It seemed like a safe bet because Stephen Baxter's Ice War had been terrific in the September issue; and it's probably significant that it's taken me fifteen fucking years to get around to reading this one. I guess I knew on some level.

Actually, it's not a bad issue - just a bit underwhelming without the virtue of being a pleasantly slender volume through which one may breeze over the course of an afternoon. Specifically, it's a fat double helping of 240 pages comprising two novellas, two novelettes (which are shorter), and five short stories. The short stories vary, but are mostly decent and there's nothing which feels like a waste of time; although by the same token there's nothing I felt worth singling out as specifically noteworthy, possibly excepting Peter Higgins' Listening for Submarines which at least works up a powerful sense of atmosphere.

Of the novelettes, I gave up on Brandon Sanderson's Defending Elysium because the word holo-vid turns up in the third paragraph and after a couple of pages I felt I was reading something inspired by Gerry Anderson's Godawful Space Precinct TV series; and I couldn't generate the enthusiasm to read Ian R. MacLeod's The English Mutiny past the first couple of pages - an alternate history wherein the English rebel against the forces of the Colonial Indian Empire or something. It seemed well written but felt like homework. So I gave Defending Elysium another shot, made it all the way to the end, and concluded that my first impression had been about right.

On a more positive note, The Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress was great, and I felt could have been expanded to novel length, although the end didn't quite work for me. Likewise, the final page of Robert Reed's Truth seemed a bit unnecessary given how well it had been doing up to that point. Much of its extended page count comprises a conversation between a prisoner and his interrogator, and it does well to hold the attention in the absence of any other dynamic, building a mood so pensive and ultimately depressing as to become quite harrowing, given how much of the world of Truth is clearly the one we see outside our windows.

 

Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

And just like the one outside our window, it gets worse:

 

'About a thousand nukes went off, and wildfires are still burning, and the entire continent is poisonous dead. The field office is abandoned. We aren't getting any messages from anybody. Not a squeak. We've got some security cameras working, our only connection to the surface, and they're only working on battery power. It's the middle of August, but there isn't any sun, and judging by what we can see and what we can guess, it isn't even reaching forty below at noon.'

Anyway, Truth justifies my having this one on the shelf, as does the novella from Nancy Kress. It's a respectable issue, just nothing life-changing.

The Green Death

Malcolm Hulke The Green Death (1975)
I'd rather not describe what set me thinking about maggots, but it was fucking horrible and put me in mind of this, a novelisation of a TV serial which I hadn't thought about in a long time. There was a point at which just about everyone seemed to remember the one with the maggots, and with good reason. I was seven at the time and it was fucking terrifying, now hanging in my memory as one example of why certain parties wanted Who pulled from the schedule - because it was a kid's programme and it scared the living shit out of us.

The only way for any of us to relive episodes back then was by purchase of the inevitable Target novelisation, and so here we are, a full half century later hoping this thing still packs some sort of punch.

It kind of does for the most part, at least with allowances made for my being older and presumably wiser. It's a children's book based on a children's show, regardless of what the kidults will tell you - because occasionally there's a kid's show which grown-ups can enjoy without feeling entirely ridiculous, so the goalposts can stay where they are, thank you very much. The story wherein corporate interests inadvertently bring a swarm of giant maggots into being through their casual attitude to the environment is faintly ludicrous in terms of hard science - not significantly more plausible than whatever was running in the pages of TV Comic at the time - but is pretty solid as an allegory and massively entertaining. Hulke did a great job of communicating this in prose so peculiarly breezy that it would probably take longer to watch the thing on the telly. I don't think he left anything out, or there surely can't be much, but he does well with the grey areas even while reducing the basics of plot to primary colours.

'I recall a time, Dr. Stevens, when Great Britain could regard itself as a sovereign state, answering to no-one but its elected Parliament and its monarch,' the Brigadier said. 'Now, it seems, we can be told what to do by international business companies.'

The problem with Who in a general sense has been that it was never as amazing as its most delusional enthusiasts would claim, because nothing is that amazing; but at times it has been pretty decent in spite of its many, many limitations - none of which have anything to do with a special effects budget, I hasten to add. When everything blessed with the logo is the most brilliantly brilliant thing ever, it sort of means that none of it is, so taketh ye not thine cultural recommendations from persons without critical faculties.

The Green Death was pretty fucking great, all things considered, because it did what it set out to do without any of the focus group box ticking to which subsequent reincarnations became subject. Witness Pertwee's single devastating tear as he parts ways with his faithful companion in comparison to the gushing boo-hoofest which flooded from the screen when we thought we were finally getting shot of Billie fucking Piper.

Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Side Effects

Woody Allen Side Effects (1980)
In reference to the usual objections, please refer back to this review. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is still mostly very funny, and funny beyond simply cracking jokes or overloading the reader with non-sequiteurs.

Our project is coming to a close—unsuccessfully, I am sorry to say. Funding has been cut off, our foundation board having decided that the remaining money might be more profitably spent on some joy-buzzers.

The Kugelmass Episode, for one example, allows the aforementioned Kugelmass to enter literary classics and get busy with the great female characters of fiction, and so feels oddly like a Borges homage albeit with sex and wisecracks. Being the work of Woody Allen - even without referring to more recent transgressions - we begin with an understanding of this collection being maybe one step up from Mad magazine or whatever, because humour is generally regarded as a low form unless dignified by age, as is the case with Rabelais, Voltaire and those guys; but Allen's satire was often both literate and pointed, and would surely deserve to be held in higher regard had he not allegedly pissed on his chips.

That said, of the three collections I've read, this has been the first to hint at anything we probably would have rather not discovered, specifically in Retribution which strikes a peculiar note in describing a man who seduces his girlfriend's mother and, in doing so, becomes suddenly irresistible to the former girlfriend who tries to rekindle the original relationship:

 

'Marrying Mom has made you my father.' She kissed me again and just before returning to the festivities said, 'Don't worry, Dad, there'll be plenty of opportunities.'

Which gets a great big prudish ewww from me, not least because the story's near twenty pages seem curiously lacking in the usual zingers; so it's quite difficult to separate the art from the artist with that one. Of course, it should be remembered that Allen was never convicted of anything, and no evidence of abuse was found; but it's hard to avoid being reminded of the whole shitshow when reading Retribution in particular.

Never mind.

Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff Fire and Fury (2018)
If, like me, you've ever wondered at the transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate, to whisperer for a disaffected demographic, to risible nominee, to rent-in-the-fabric-of-time president elect, then Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury is nothing if not a revelation. Wolff somehow managed to hang around in the White House for long enough to observe the real shit going down without himself becoming a target, and Fire and Fury seems to answer more or less any question you could have regarding the Trump administration.

The picture is shocking, and probably more shocking than you may have realised, amounting to an angry bear at large in the building with a team of handlers vainly striving to keep it happy without being eviscerated. The question of how he got there - as reiterated by all those memes based around a photograph of a turtle floundering on top of a fence post - seems to be that it couldn't have happened without Bannon; and even Trump had no illusions on that score, his campaign being an exercise in building the brand because he knew he had no chance of winning. This revelation additionally incorporates the suggestion - which I find convincing - that without Bannon, Trump's time in office would have been unremarkable at best, politically insensitive at worst, and without the taint of extreme right politics. So, amazing though it may seem, Fire and Fury actually left me feeling just a little bit sorry for Donald. I wouldn't say he's without blame, or even necessarily a nice guy, but he probably didn't quite deserve the shitshow with which his name is now synonymous.

The highly specific combination of factors contributing to Trump's election in 2016 described in this book would seem to make it unlikely he could make a comeback in 2024, but then I didn't think he stood a chance of winning in the first place. I guess we'll see.

The Ladybird

D.H. Lawrence The Ladybird (1923)
Three novellas, one written in 1915 then revised, each more or less exploring the changing dynamic of the relationship between men and women in the aftermath of the Great War. My previous readings of Lawrence's short stories left me with the feeling that the form didn't really allow him space in which to do his thing. These, being longer, seem to support my hunch, although only The Fox seems to work with the same strength of conviction as the novels, or at least the better novels.

Of the three, The Fox seems the least overtly autobiographical and is, presumably as a result, the most direct in delivering ultimately pessimistic observations about the impossibility of true intimacy between men and women, specifically that even with the best of intentions, each sex works against the interests of the other. I personally find this more plausible as a perspective than a statement - keeping in mind here that Lawrence's own relationships tended to be somewhat volatile - but it's impressive that such a perspective can be described without requiring illustration from scheming pantomime characters of obvious ill intention.

The Ladybird and The Captain's Doll may have more going on, and the latter seems to represent a dry run for The Plumed Serpent, albeit with less emphasis on that old time religion; but both seem to stumble here and there - which The Fox avoids - in emptying new people into the narrative at unexpected intervals and unsettling whatever we thought we'd understood up to that point.

Nevertheless, The Ladybird is a reasonably satisfying collection, notable for its characteristic blending of people with their respective environments; for its cautiously progressive, if pessimistic, spirit; for its unflinching analysis of human relationships, and specifically of Lawrence's relationship with Frieda - who was almost certainly doing the milkman during the writing of The Captain's Doll.

Transit

Ted McKeever Transit (1987)
This was where he started. I was aware of its existence but had my head buried in mutant books, so it's taken me a while. The biggest surprise, at least to me, is that you can actually see McKeever learning on the job, developing his style over the course of the original five-issue run; and as learning curves go, this one was dramatic. The first five pages are ropey as fuck, resembling something that a not especially promising graffiti artist might have had printed in Deadline; but the shadows deepen and the bodies take on a more expressionist angularity as McKeever dispensed with the hip-hop munchkins, and everything is in place by the time the art needs to take on any heavy lifting.

The narrative wobbles here and there, finding its feet. It's nothing mind-blowing - corrupt officials, sociopathic evangelists and so on, but with pleasantly odd flourishes of imagination to keep it from sinking into the generic. In places it feels a little like moody artwork in search of a story, but that's okay. These were early days and the atmosphere carries the story with ease, and it's easy to see that Ted McKeever was clearly destined for greater things.