Nigel Kneale - Quatermass (1979)

 

As you may possibly recall, Quatermass IV was televised before it was novelised with this hitting the shops soon after. The scripts for the three previous serials had been published as paperbacks but this was a proper novelisation; and Nigel Kneale really knew his way around a typewriter so it's up there with the best of John Wyndham more than it's comparable with Fred Hoyle's ham fisted Ian Fleming impersonations. The prose is tight and swiftly-paced as you would most likely expect of a tie-in, but with just the right mix of grimly poetic flair to immerse the reader in truly harrowing visions of a dystopian near future extrapolated from the world of the late seventies. Youth gangs such as the Badders and the Blues terrorise the urban environment without quite drawing on the corny punk rock clichés doing the rounds in other dystopias of the time, and what civilisation remains hangs on a thread with law and order enforced by Pay Cops, a brutal South African contract security force. Television, seemingly the only remaining form of mass communication, is reduced to something like pirate productions limited to either news or populist garbage such as The Tittupy Bumpity Show with its outsized genital props doubtless extrapolated from a failure to understand what made Frankie Howerd funny. Meanwhile, a barely comprehensible alien machine has begun to harvest humanity's youth in great numbers, with those chosen running eagerly to their doom with all the guileless fervour of Heaven's Gate cultists anticipating hanging out with Captain Picard.

The ageing Professor Quatermass stumbles through these ruins, never quite sure where he is, dipping into reverie of times past, and ill-equipped to cope with anything of this cowardly and brutal new world while nevertheless hanging onto his grasp of science for dear life. He's bewildered, angry, and stale, the polar opposite of the action hero, even of Frank Miller's greying Dark Knight; and neither is Quatermass IV the typical action thriller neatly solving its puzzle box of modular problems. Here the action is mostly basic survival against terrible odds as the pensioner stumbles through an increasingly desperate sequence of events concluding with a hair's breadth reprieve brought about by our guy's tragically inevitable sacrifice. It may lack the brute force of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but it doesn't fall too far short and is frankly no fucking picnic.

Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it hasn't dated, and its focus on the breakdown of society remains as relevant now as  then.

'The past is more important.'

That's what she had said, quoting Joe Kapp's Clare. And he had denied it, meaning that it ought not to be. But it was. In the end, it was all a person was made of, like the skeleton he'd grown.

Reviews of the time were what you would expect, characterising Kneale as an angry old man shaking his fist at clouds, nowhere near so good as Blake's fucking Seven because if we've learned anything from this last century it's that new stuff is amazing and old people are boring, yeah? No-one really appreciates you pointing out when something everybody else likes is bollocks. They may say they do, but really they don't, and Kneale wasn't taking any prisoners here, which I personally find very refreshing. Quatermass IV is horror as much as it's science-fiction, concerned as it is with mass psychology and the extinction of the individual, a theme which ran through the previous three television serials; and the more we've convinced ourselves we're living in the best of all possible worlds, the less we like to hear claims to the contrary, and particularly not those so eloquent and so free of the taint of reaction as was this.

Total Eclipse (1988)

 

I've a feeling more or less every comic book publisher has done one of these crossover things at one point or another, and while I can't be arsed to check, I suspect Eclipse Comics may have been the first to go down that road outside of the big two, unless we count single page Crumb strips featuring both the Checkered Demon and Spain Rodriguez drawn by himself. The deal is to get all of your superheroes tangled up in a single massive story at once, which was possibly trickier for Eclipse due to company policy of allowing creators to retain the rights to their characters and so make a bit of money out of it whenever someone buys a comic; but it was probably worth the effort here, and Marv Wolfman, who arguably started it all with DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths is a great choice for writer.

Total Eclipse conspicuously follows some of the same path as Crisis with caped types united against a threat to everything ever, albeit by a different route and towards different ends. Where the point of Crisis was, in part, to simplify and rid the DC universe of talking dogs and all which prevented us from taking Superman absolutely seriously, Total Eclipse doesn't give a shit and actively teams its darkest characters with Destroyer Duck, the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and whatever the fuck Beanish of Beanworld is supposed to be. It works too, embracing the joyously ludicrous without feeling the need to apologise, because it's all ludicrous, even Miracleman - who wasn't rendered any less ludicrous when Alan Moore replaced the magic words and ancient wizards with misuse of advanced alien technology - just differently ludicrous. Ludicrous doesn't have to be a bad thing unless you're voting for it.

The story is that Zzed, a man who has lived forever and now wants only to die decides to destroy the universe in the hope of cashing in his own chips by association. He intends to achieve this by lining all the heavenly bodies up to form the most total eclipse of all time, because that will bring about the end of everything for some reason. Unfortunately for his purposes, it serves only to turn him into a different kind of superhero named Dr. Eclipse, although this cheers him up somewhat and he decides he wants to go on living. By this time however, Nine Crocodile, mortal and powerful enemy of Aztec Ace is helping out with the proposed end of the world and so keeps the ball rolling. Beyond these details, I didn't actually understand much of what was happening, but it seemed like fun so I didn't mind, very much enjoying what read like an A.E. van Vogt version of Crisis which could be appreciated as surrealism as much as anything. The Miracleman episodes are enjoyable, and I'm left with the feeling I  should have been reading Doug Moench's Aztec Ace back in the day. Of at least equivalent interest is the extended autobiography of Dean Mullaney, founder and publisher of Eclipse, running as an appendix to each of the five issues for the sake of perspective, from which I gather Eclipse had a more fundamental influence on the entire comic biz than I realised - the only downside being that all this fecking manga may actually be their fault, but never mind.

My only criticism is that Will Blyberg really should have been inker for more than just the first two issues, but it's a minor niggle for something so full of sparks and which clearly shamed the big two into being a bit less crap.

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.