Timeslip!

Murray Leinster Timeslip! (1967)
This was the second of Leinster's three novels tied into the television series, which itself seemed to draw inspiration from Murray's earlier but unrelated novel of the same name. As with the one I read back in May, there's not much point getting upset over points of continuity shared with the Irwin Allen version because this takes the same cast of characters in a completely different direction; which I suppose might be attributed to the magic of time travel.

Here we have the intrusion of yet another officious type hell bent on cutting funding, in this instance by exposing the time tunnel as a massive scam - which he intends to achieve by sending a nuclear warhead back in time to some crucial point in history, which will of course be impossible because it's all a massive scam. My guess is that he probably hadn't quite ironed all of the wrinkles from this particular cunning plan, which goes somewhat awry when our curmudgeonly bean counter inadvertently succeeds in depositing a nuclear warhead in the garden of a nunnery in Mexico City just as the Mexican-American War of 1846 kicks off, the silly fucker.

What happens next is somewhat dry, leisurely paced if not actually slow, but more or less works because the novel is too short to outstay its welcome, and Leinster seems very thorough with his historical details. Furthermore, for all the respects in which Timeslip! reflects the era in which it was written, it's difficult to predict where it will end up, and the author engages in surprisingly lively speculation as he's getting there. At one point he effectively predicts Reagan's Space Defense Initiative - although there may well have been some earlier example of this - and his estimation of the most terrible potential aspects of war between time-active powers is unusually chilling for being applied to a world which most of us will recognise more than the usual science-fiction scenarios.

Timeslip! isn't anything amazing and would have benefited either from better editing or a more generous deadline, but neither is it anything like so shoddy as might be expected for something featuring television personalities on the cover. Its failings are easily ignored, leaving just the good stuff, of which there is more than enough.

The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence

Brenda Maddox
The Married Man: A Life of D.H. Lawrence (1994)
This was a library book I read twice and enjoyed so much that I ended up buying it when they had a clear out of old stock. More recently I've also read Jeffrey Meyers' biography of D.H. Lawrence - to which I felt well-disposed with all the critics having claimed this one to be the superior account, and having noticed that Brenda Maddox had also written biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher - suggesting a bit of a production line. Having now read this one a third time, I conclude the comparison to Meyers' version isn't fair on either author; and The Married Man remains a nevertheless tremendous piece of work. It differs from Jeffrey Meyers' book in slightly shifting the focus from Lawrence's semi-autobiographical writings to his problematic marriage to Frieda Weekley, which Maddox views as essential to understanding his body of work. However, rather than being some cliched brilliant woman behind the mediocre but more successful man job, Maddox examines Lawrence through his relationships, which makes a lot of sense given their constituting the principal influence on what he wrote.

As a significant part of the equation, Frieda gets at least equal billing here, and thankfully with unflinching honesty. Whilst she was doubtless a force of nature, an inspiration, and ultimately essential to Lawrence's creative process, she was often extremely difficult to live with and, by her own admission, a general pain in the arse - not least in her refusal to be shackled by the convention of not shagging strangers whenever the opportunity arose, much to her husband's annoyance. Of course, he was himself an awkward, argumentative man who routinely alienated friends and acquaintances with bluntly unflattering portraits in his novels. Together, they seemed like a terrible combination, but at the same time it's difficult to imagine a couple better suited to one another, even with all the ranting, raving and dinner plates flying back and forth.

Of the two biographies, Jeffrey Meyers does a better job of communicating that there was more to both Dave and Frieda than just mayhem, and that there were often good reasons why they inspired such loyalty and such warm feelings among their friends - or at least among those they hadn't terminally pissed off. This one is probably marginally more thorough, and hence more depressing.

 

The Dr. Who Annual 1974

Edgar Hodges, Steve Livesey, Paul Crompton & others
The Dr. Who Annual 1974 (1973)
I am aware that nostalgia has informed a fair few of my recent reading choices, and here we are again. I was eight and I can still vividly remember tearing the wrapping from this one that Christmas morning; and of course I thought it was amazing, because television crossing over into the real world, or at least print, didn't seem that common at the time; and if you were obsessed with Who, as I was, there wasn't really much you could do about it when it wasn't actually on the box, aside from eating the choccy bars and impersonating various monsters in the playground. Inevitably my annuals went the way of all childish things, or at least some childish things, leaving me with just memories, and memories which have given me cause to wonder.

Had Listen - the Stars! been anything to do with John Brunner's novella of the same name, and was Menace of the Molags really just Childhood's End with the judicious insertion of Jon Pertwee?

Not quite, is probably the answer to both of those - not that it honestly matters either way - but I've very much enjoyed revisiting this thing, having nabbed a relatively cheap copy from eBay. That said, I'm not even sure I read any of the six text stories back when I was eight, although I definitely enjoyed looking at the pictures, and I read the comic strips over and over. That whole thing about how comic books get kids reading has often struck me as something of an overstatement, although it's doubtless true that it gets them to read more comic strips.

Naturally I found an online review of this annual wherein a man who has probably never had sexual intercourse sneers at stories lacking originality and our cover star repeatedly referred to as Doctor Who, concluding that the 1974 annual seems an unusually childish collection which is unlikely to appeal to mature older readers. Nevertheless, it worked for me when I was eight.

Now that I'm older and wiser, while I concede that it's a bit basic in places, its charm remains undiminished. I've no idea who wrote the stories beyond that it probably wasn't Arthur C. Clarke, but the art of Edgar Hodges and Steve Livesey is gorgeous - vivid and dynamic with just enough of an unsettling tone to match the telly version as it was at the time without giving anyone nightmares. The stories to which this wonderful art is pinned are, as I say, a little basic, mostly setting up weird encounters without quite knowing what to do with them. Old Father Saturn, for one example, introduces us to astronauts from one of the ringed planet's moons, newly revived from many millennia spent trapped in suspended animation at the bottom of our ocean. Unfortunately it turns out that they can't breath Earth's atmosphere, so they turn green and die, and that's the story; but as with most of what we have here, it pushes so many familiar Who buttons and pushes them so well that you don't really care about what shortcomings there may be. At least I didn't.

As with most annuals of the time, this one is padded with factual pieces, brain teasers, puzzles and the like, which is interesting because the spacey stuff and rocketry was offered with the then recent moon landing still very much lodged in the public imagination, and it's clear that readers of 1974 were committed to the idea of the future improving on the present, and that many of them would be living on Mars by the year 2000; and this breezy futurist optimism informs most of the stories too. The Dr. Who Annual was a product, a corporate tie-in, and a means of getting parents to cough up, but the 1974 edition nevertheless seems to have been a labour of some love and as such has more character than can be written off as only the glow of nostalgia.