Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)

 

Here's another posthumous collection, but this time without anything which has already seen print. It's short fiction, and I get the impression most of it must surely date from before Player Piano, or was at least written around the same time. Many of the stories are drawn from life to greater or lesser degrees, particularly Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War. As you may be aware, Vonnegut's experience of the Second World War was significantly coloured by his time in Dresden as the city was bombed into oblivion, which he returned to again and again and to greatest effect in Slaughterhouse Five; and much of this reads like preliminary explorations of the subject, circling around and chipping away to see whether it was even possible to write about something which made no sense. I guess he realised it wasn't, at least not in conventional terms, hence the non-linear blend of reality and surrealism that was Slaughterhouse Five. Nevertheless, he had a good go at it, and these shorter, more focused vignettes are rewarding if occasionally shocking, because even if the short form wasn't really his thing, he mastered it nonetheless. The Commandant's Desk and the almost novella which gives the collection its title both pack a punch, utilising a degree of satire but nothing at the strength with which we're familiar. The former narrows its martial focus to the tribulations of a Czech carpenter obliged to rework the desk he's been ordered to make for his invading Commandant, first from a swastika motif to the hammer and sickle, then to the American eagle. It's powerful, funny, and very depressing all at the same time and I'm astonished it didn't see print until the lad left us for the typewriter in the sky; but the collection is solid from start to finish.

Jack Kirby - The Eternals (1979)

 

I like to think this was the main inspiration behind the toe-tapper on the second Joy Division album, but had this been the case then it probably would have been a better song, or at least one which sounded less like Imagination's superior Just an Illusion. The Eternals represented Jack Kirby's return to Marvel Comics given more or less free reign to draw what he wanted to draw following the success of DC's Fourth World books, and so continuing his mythological fascination with yet another set of new Gods. Unfortunately, and possibly in the wake of Star Wars, it didn't go down too well, and these nineteen issues plus one annual seem to lack the focus of earlier efforts towards similar ends.

That said, it's still Kirby, with much to recommend it even beyond splash pages of such grandeur that they actually rewire your brain as you stare at them and try to work out what you're seeing. The Eternals, although working with superhero types, is closer to science-fiction than the traditional caped stuff. The premise is undoubtedly wonky, being inspired in part by Erich von Däniken with roughly the same casual regard for detail, but even with alleged Incas identified by unmistakably Nahuatl names, the sheer spectacle is such that it's hard to care about the ethnological bloopers. The story is that the Space Gods have returned as silent, inscrutable giants called Celestials who stride across the globe leaving the rest of us to wonder what they want and why they're here; except for the Eternals, an ancient Godlike offshoot of humanity created by the aforementioned Celestials last time they stopped by to inspire cave paintings and monolithic sculptures. The Eternals understand that the Celestials are here to judge our world, to discern the success or otherwise of their grand experiment, and to wipe us out should it seem like we've failed to live up to our potential. So far, so mythic, and undeniably startling in visual terms.

Unfortunately, either Jack's initial enthusiasm wore thin, or else he felt restricted by editorial pressures given how the book doesn't quite connect with the rest of the Marvel universe and may even have been intended as its own unique entity, at least initially. A couple of generic SHIELD types turn up early on with little consequence, there's a reference to Ben Grimm, and when the Hulk turns up in issue #14, he's a robot version built by a couple of students - which sort of preserves the integrity of the saga at the expense of war breaking out on the letters page from readers who presumably wanted to know who would win in a fight between Ikaris and Paste Pot Pete. There's also the deal with the Eternals having provided inspiration for established mythological figures, with Zuras obviously representing Zeus, despite Hercules' dear old dad having made regular appearances in previous Marvel titles. Maybe it all became a bit of a headache with Jack wrapping it up before anyone decided we really need to know whether Galactus could knacker Arishem the Judge.

The collection develops a bit of a limp as we near the end, then just stops leaving the rest of us to consult the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in order to find out what kind of judgement the Celestials passed on us, or even whether they just got bored and went home. Yet even Kirby with a bit of a limp pretty much shits over anything else which has tried for such scale, and it still makes more sense than the movie. I think by this point we've pretty much established that whatever they were paying Kirby, it wasn't enough, and even this arguably lesser work is more evidence of the same.

Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968)

 

It's a classic, they all said, and I'm not going to argue with Ursula LeGuin whose glowing praise is reproduced on the back cover. If you read it, she promises, you will be changed, and true enough I have indeed been transformed from a person who hadn't read Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch into a person who has. It's one of those science-fiction novels which doubles up as literary fiction and which can therefore be mentioned in polite circles without it seeming like you've asked Brian Sewell about his favourite Star Wars sequel.

It's all allegory, arguably satirical, as implied by the lengthy quote from The Pilgrim's Progress at the beginning. It's the diary of a man imprisoned and pumped full of Pallidine, a variant form of syphillis which dramatically increases the subject's intelligence to genius level while reducing life expectancy to something under a year. The allegory seems to amount to look how intelligent we've become, and yet we've used our intelligence to build nuclear weapons, but can be further distilled to a variant on that whole Garden of Eden deal with the snake and the apple. It's fair enough as messages go and not without value, but the novel doesn't seem to do a whole lot else, or even a whole lot of anything so far as I was able to follow. That said, snowed under with doubtless clever references to Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger, and others, I found much of it difficult to follow in so far as that there didn't seem to be any good reason to do so. It may be redundant to describe Camp Concentration as self-indulgent given Disch having freely admitted to writing for his own pleasure, and self-indulgence doesn't usually bother me, being preferable to the cynical button pushing of bland populism; but God this was joyless and so fucking boring.

Pat Mills, Tony Skinner & Duke Mighten - Brats Bizarre (1994)

Brats Bizarre originally ran in Toxic!, the relatively short-lived British weekly aiming to recapture some of the magic which had gone missing from 2000AD, and which remained unfortunately incomplete once the comic vanished from the shelves. I had no idea those responsible took the strip to Epic Comics for a four-issue series, and only made this discovery about a month ago.

Following the similarly acidic Marshall Law, Brats Bizarre finds Pat Mills squeezing further poison from the superhero spot and somehow without repeating himself. It's horrible and it's supposed to be horrible, and was perfectly suited to Duke Mighten's arrestingly stylised Art Deco graphics providing insight into how it might have been had Aubrey Beardsley been born half a century later and ended up working for DC or Marvel, should any of us have been pondering that one. In the generically dystopian near future of muscular super-powered cops in capes enforcing the status quo, the Brats Bizarre are amoral super-powered outcasts, freaks in the truest sense of the term, degenerates, and proud examples of any other pejorative you care to invoke. Unlike the traditional Marvel outcast who reads books and is therefore unpopular at school, Brats Bizarre were the weird and perverse children of a literary tradition which probably owes more to de Sade or Burroughs than to Siegel and Shuster, and was honestly one of the best strips to have appeared in Toxic!

So of course it was exciting to discover it had been expanded upon, continued and all wrapped up, and in terms of the story it's done fairly well for the most part, although the ending wherein the Brats are revealed as at least morally consistent, ultimately becoming role models for the corporate super-schills who have been trying to kill them - it feels a bit Breakfast Club and strikes an odd note. Unfortunately, none of this quite works without Duke Mighten, whom I gather was probably either busy or not interested when the reboot came up. He draws the first issue, which starts again from scratch rather than simply reprinting the Toxic! material, his work embellished by Anthony Adhikary, Colin Fawcett, and Paul Scott, the three of whom then illustrate the remaining three issues under their own steam. Working with Mighten, their contributions seemed a little fussy but work as a faux-Giraud embellishment of Mighten's art, if a poor second to the elegant simplicity of what he drew and painted for Toxic!; but without his contribution, the art is - sorry - mostly fucking abysmal requiring particular focus on the writing as a distraction from its raging ineptitude, except somehow the writing doesn't quite work without Duke Mighten.

What a fucker.

Apparently this either inspired or at least foreshadowed The Boys, although even in this state it was many times better from what I've seen of both the Garth Ennis book and its inevitable Netflix adaptation. This could have been a beautiful thing, but never mind. 

Now Comes Tomorrow

 

Robert Moore Williams
Now Comes Tomorrow (1971)
Although a prolific novelist, Williams was a man with certain psychological idiosyncrasies, suffering from schizophrenic episodes expressed as voices in the head or visions of abstract colours, all contributing to his own unique view of the universe and how he believed it worked. These ideas endeared him very much to the flower power generation and, although older, he seems to have been flattered by their attention and saw their desire to take control of their own destiny as generally positive. His ideas about the nature of the universe informed his novels and short stories, most of which were published as science-fiction by a very loose definition of the term; and while it's often difficult to work out quite what he's trying to say, the later novels are more and more explicit in their attempts to describe the Williams-cosmos. Given the quantity of books he had published, it seems safe to assume he had enough of an audience to justify taking chances, and 1970's Love is Forever, We Are for Tonight was an autobiography which, in common with some of Philip K. Dick's later efforts, is more or less impossible to differentiate from his science-fiction.

I've come to think of Williams' writing as theosophical more than philosophical given that which it shares in common with other fringe authors, Richard Shaver and so on, not least themes common to those of psychologically unorthodox disposition - mind control, psychic visitations, unexplained and unseen forces, subterranean realms, the science of lost civilisations, myth as reality and so on. Williams also brings much of his own vision to the table in recurring themes of often profoundly allegorical composition - tiered societies within mountains, portentous sounds heard across time and space, and love as a physical universal force. Needless to say, it can all get a bit confusing because Williams often seems to be talking to himself. If Love is Forever, We Are for Tonight represented a serious effort to give some sort of background to his ideas, crackers though they may well be, Now Comes Tomorrow is perhaps the first example of their dominating his fiction to this extent, as distinct from merely informing certain elements.

If you took Euclid's point and extended it simultaneously in all directions—a piece of rock dropped on the surface of a still pond sent out waves in all directions on the surface—it became a sphere.

In doing this, you had described the creation of a solid figure with an inner and an outer surface. Had you also described the manner in which an energy of enormously high frequency descended to a lower frequency and built itself a house in which to live, the house being the sphere?

Crenshaw rather suspected that this was what you had described. He suspected that at the original point was a whirling vortex. He suspected that planets and suns and solar systems and the great swirling galaxies had come into existence in this way. He suspected that the physical structure of the universe, meaning suns and stars and men, was only a small part of a much greater, much vaster, perhaps much more beautiful universe than was visible to man, which human eyes could not see nor human ears hear nor human fingers touch. He thought this greater, invisible universe had existed for billions of years and that the physical universe which humans knew was only the extension of it, perhaps the most recent extension...

More than with at least a few previous novels, this one follows a simple story in a straight line while sweetening the pill of Williams' reality with rumination - or at least invocation - of associated theory drawn from mathematics and the weirder end of physics. The simple story in question describes the lives of a group of people frozen in a form of suspended animation for various reasons, then revived in a very different world after a century has passed, with particular emphasis on the different realities each experienced while frozen. If it superficially sounds like Dick's UBIK, there's little common ground beyond the customary questions regarding the nature of reality, here coming from a quite different direction; and even with Williams writing during what appears to have been one of his more lucid periods, it remains essentially crackers, but works because the internal logic of the novel is stronger than usual. So we experience something profound even if it's hard to describe.

More and more I find it difficult to keep on thinking of Williams as a pulp writer given the apparent depth of that which he tried to communicate, and his obvious desire to go beyond the straightforward adventures of A. Merritt which inspired him. Today he's mostly forgotten, or else remembered as an oddity, novels routinely described as incomprehensible by people who probably should have stuck to their Heinlein. Yet even when his plotting ties itself into a knot, there's a mysterious elegance to the shadows cast by the atmospheric effects of his fiction, and even where the answers might turn out to be screwy, the questions can really grab you; and if you remain unable to appreciate this on some level, maybe books just aren't for you.

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (1984)

 

I reeled with shock when I first read this and it seemed like a masterpiece, but then I hadn't read much else for the sake of comparison. Coming back to it decades later, it still packs a punch but feels otherwise surprisingly thin and not entirely satisfying.
 

If you need spoilers for something published forty years ago, grow up. The Wasp Factory is the story of Frank, a young man in an isolated community who is ultimately revealed as having been a girl all along. This turns out to have been an experiment conducted by his hippy father, and I gather we are to assume Frank's peculiarly brutal worldview stems from resentment at having had his meat and two veg bitten off by a bulldog when he was a baby, or so he's been told; except he was born female and what he's been told is pure fiction. Let us at least be thankful for this novel having been written before the rise of the gender pillock.
 

What makes any of this interesting is the elaborate ritual existence by which Frank deals with his perceived disability, which is mostly animistic and sacrificial incorporating the murder of several younger children and a lot of animal cruelty. It's rare that I read all the way through anything with animal cruelty these days because it so rarely seems to do anything beyond pushing a button, and I'd rather not carry certain images around in my head, thank you very much. Banks is absolutely pushing buttons in this book but just about gets away with it through descriptions mostly favouring the psychological over the visceral. Nevertheless, having had a number of previous novels rejected, this one feels like a conscious effort to record his own version of Never Mind the Bollocks in an effort to break through which, as you will have noticed, worked. Critics of the time responded to and condemned the apparent application of shock tactics, and some of the most scathing reviews are jumbled up along with those written in praise in the opening pages; which is amusing, somewhat as though the author, or at least the publisher, knows and doesn't give a shit, much like punk bands claiming they couldn't play.

The problem is that the novel is so reliant on pulling the rug out from under its readers right at the end, because otherwise, while exceptionally well written, it doesn't make enough sense to even account for why it was written. Once our sight recovers from the blinding of the final revelation, it becomes difficult to work out why anyone does what they do here, and mumbling well, that's just what happens in this story doesn't seem quite enough; which leaves us with just an admittedly engaging account of some guy shooting critters so he can stick their heads on poles.

David Gill - In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves (2015)

 

David Gill served as one of a number of editors and annotators to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's 2011 collation of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis, and his name stuck with me as one of those yielding the more interesting and insightful annotations to what may have been an otherwise near impenetrable text. By association I therefore expected short stories owing much to Dick, but hopefully done better than the usual recycled Phil which somehow misses the whole fucking point, Ridley. I wasn't disappointed because not only can Gill write, but he very much writes his own thing, and which seems distinctively his own thing, the only comparison coming to mind being that the warmth and humanity of his tone seems comparable to that occasionally achieved by Ray Bradbury, who doesn't otherwise seem an obvious influence.

Time's Empire comprises short stories - mostly very short at just a couple of pages - comprising tiny, fleeting glimpses through the window of human experience, with the occasional android or spacecraft serving to fast-track an understanding which might otherwise be weighed down by the baggage of its own explanation (and I swear that sentence will make sense if you catch it on the right day). The sheer brevity is astonishing and often a delight in its contrast to the emotional charge of many of these stories - no twists, no fuss, no ostentatious tech fixation, just tiny poems caught in the moment revealing emotional nuance so fragile that it would be lost to a more robust description. Spoiled for choice, my favourite is possibly the title track, In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves which accordingly takes place at a drive-in as young lovers divide their attention between Spartacus and each other, their fumblings taking on an allegorical dimension as the moment unfolds across its scant two and a half pages, and the question of whether or not we can really call this science-fiction seems ridiculous, even irrelevant.

Or a transporter accident involving A.E. van Vogt and Ivor Cutler, if that works better for you.