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.

Kilgore Trout - Venus on the Half Shell (1974)

 

Kilgore Trout is a recurring character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He's a pulp science-fiction writer and occasional bum providing support to a myriad of satirical points while additionally allowing Vonnegut to season his narrative with ideas which might prove otherwise too laborious.

If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

Venus on the Half Shell was first referenced as one of Trout's many, many novels in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, eventually to be fully realised by Philip José Farmer writing as Kilgore Trout, so it's essentially Vonnegut fan fiction and I gather that despite some initial enthusiasm, Kurt wasn't entirely amused by the time it saw print. It's not difficult to understand why given that, for the most part, Venus reads like fan fiction, imposing linearity on an approximation of Vonnegut's freewheeling narratives, leaving us with a less annoying precursor to Douglas Adams particularly in its fixation with the meaning of life, here serving mainly as a hook for the sake of structure; but the tone is wrong, offering shrugs and impersonations where Vonnegut would at least have said something worth saying. The lesson we take from the creatures of the No Smoking Planet, for one example, seems to be the usual mumbling about polyamory, which is at least at home amongst other parables drawn from clichés of the seventies counter culture.

If falling short of that from which it takes inspiration, Venus is mostly readable, not actively annoying, and seems to develop its own personality once we land on the Prison Planet in chapter nineteen and the author gets around to saying something of more universal import than his initial long-haired preoccupations. The novel as a whole is Swiftian, as is much Vonnegut, in comprising a conveyor belt of absurdist allegories in illustration of this and that, which is underscored by the doubtless inevitable books within the book credited to Jonathan Swift Somers III. Aside from the above reservations and the slightly tiring emphasis on sex, Venus on the Half Shell is honestly a better book than it deserves to be, which may or may not be to do with the quality of the ground upon which its tent is pitched. It's not a bad read, just not an amazing one.

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.