The Cursed Earth

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Mick McMahon etc. The Cursed Earth (1978)
Being twelve or thirteen at the time, it didn't really occur to me that there might be a problem in Judge Dredd waging war on either Ronald McDonald or the Jolly Green Giant. All my progs went to the local comic shop for something pitiful like a tenner back in the early nineties, and by the time I came to consider revisiting Dredd's trip across the Cursed Earth, the thing had been reprinted following the relaxation of some copyright law or other, so here I am. I have good memories of the Cursed Earth, Dredd's first true saga given that the robot revolution can't have been more than ten issues; and happily it still rocks, so this hasn't been anything like revisiting a once beloved Rupert annual, as sometimes turns out to be the case. Being Dredd, and being aimed at young lads of the age at which I found myself in 1978, there's a lot of narrative shorthand, an explosion on nearly every page, and an astonishing degree of violence, but it works and additionally stands the test of time because McMahon's war torn art is gorgeous, and neither Mills nor Wagner assumed their readership to be fucking idiots. There's not much breathing space as Dredd and Spikes rampage across their post-nuclear wasteland, but just enough to allow for a degree of pathos, even in these primary colours, and to the point that I almost couldn't read the fourth page of Tweak's Story.

I never found Dredd that interesting a character, but this was where the strip really took off for me in revealing a little more of the terrible reality he inhabited. This was the golden age, with Joe as more or less an agent of karma in a brutal but realist world rather than the monotone vessel of fascist slapstick he seems to have become. It always struck me as odd that 2000AD, an English weekly, should run a strip set in a future America in keeping with the prevalent obsession with the romance of the formerly wild west; but with hindsight I see that Judge Dredd offered commentary on America and its seeping cultural infection, complete with jokes, and with a wit that would have been mostly beyond mainstream America itself, this being a far more pragmatic take on truth, justice, and the rest than you would have had from Clark or Bruce back in '78; and it beat Michael Crichton to the genetically engineered dinosaur thing, should anyone be interested, and probably did it better. It really is a masterpiece.

Spook Country

William Gibson Spook Country (2007)
I burned out on Gibson a while back when ploughing through all of those cyberpunk novels and noticing how they're all the same book, give or take some small change. This observation isn't intended to be quite so dismissive as it will seem, but for all the man's astonishing prose, he seems to have wrung a lot of mileage out of punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. On a bad day, it reads as though he's just getting off on describing designer labels and gadgets, which is a shame because although it could be argued that his narratives tend to be all surface, it isn't like he doesn't have anything to say - and usually something which is best expressed through his seemingly obsessive attention to superficial detail.

Conversely, when he gets the balance right, the books are amazing even with those punky types hunting down some crucial piece of either technology or information in a dystopian setting spattered with brand names. Idoru was pretty great, and Pattern Recognition probably qualifies as a masterpiece. Spook Country has been praised to the hilt. It's not quite Pattern Recognition, from which it follows on in a loose sense, but it gets there in the end.

As usual, the narrative is slightly bewildering, requiring that the reader keep track of a wide range of characters driven by ambiguous motives; but the point emerges like a signal from the proverbial noise, meaning it may not actually have mattered whether you can still remember who was who by the end because the message is fairly clear, despite pertaining to the absence of clarity from the world it describes - which is more or less our world, by the way. Spook Country is about a world which has ceased to make sense in conventional terms, somewhat foreshadowing the rise of the game show host as president and the mess we find ourselves in. It answers the question of how to do satire when that which is satirised is more ridiculous than any fictionalised version could ordinarily manage to be. Spook Country seems to promise the usual narrative of the last minute save as everyone meets up in the town square, the nuclear spectacle averted, the dark forces defeated but - as it is in our world - we don't get that, nor anything which really makes sense.

'I've just seen someone, some people,' she told him, 'tonight, do the single strangest thing I imagine I'll ever see.'

'Really?' He was suddenly grave. 'I envy you.'

'I thought it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn't. I think that it was actually…'

'What?'

'A prank. A prank you'd have to be crazy to be able to afford.'

I have no idea whether Gibson refers to anything which actually happened when referencing funding for the rebuilding of Iraq after the deposition of Saddam Hussein, but given what he describes in this novel, I'm not sure this even counts as fiction.

Mosquito Blood Diaries

I wasnae gunna share this one, but fuck it...

Adam Gill Mosquito Blood Diaries (2011)
Well, it isn't the worst book I've ever read but is probably somewhere in the top two; although to be fair, as with Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, I'm basing this assessment on the first fifty pages. I couldn't manage any more than that.

It was one of those out of the blue things, turning up in the mail without warning or explanation. Then a week later I heard from Peter Jones, with whom I briefly shared a house back in 1985, who said it had been written by his class mate at Dundee - presumably from some video post-production course or something of the kind. It was a nice gesture, possibly undertaken because I'd written a book which was likewise set in Mexico; but I have to say, the thing didn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm.

The back cover promises something about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012, which is unfortunate because everything written about the end of the world as predicted by the Mayan calendar for 2012 has been complete bollocks*. Similarly depressing is that I find I have a signed copy, and that it has been embellished thus:

 

Aside from my experiencing a possibly irrational and classist disgust at the thought of anyone being named Jonty, this cheery message somewhat suggests the author would have preferred to have made a movie, and that's coincidentally what the fucker reads like - or at least the first fifty pages do - begging the question, if you didn't want to write a book, why do I have to read it?

Never mind.

Anyway, I tried. It didn't seem too horrible at first, although it felt a little as though boxes were being ticked as part of something learned during a writing class - here's the character, here's what they look like, where they are, followed by some routinely sardonic observation just so we know we're not reading Enid Blyton. After a little while I noticed how each female character is introduced in terms of how cute she is, but she's also fiesty so it's not sexist; and we meet Herbert Tidy, one of the main protagonists.

So, let's see. His Christian name is Herbert and his surname is Tidy, which seems ingeniously Dickensian, wouldn't you say? What sort of person might that be, do you think?

But generally such charitable thoughts occupied only a fraction of his consciousness, the rest of his introspective ponderings were taken up entirely by work and his growing collection of graphic novels, not comics mind you, graphic novels. They were perhaps the only thing that he was passionate about and organising and reorganising them took up most of his spare time.

Nerds! Ha ha!

Later we learn that Herbert has been spending most of his time cataloguing and cross referencing the characters in his graphic novels, which no-one in human history has ever done, no matter how sad, possibly excepting characters from the Big Bang Theory which is - as is hopefully fucking obvious - the sports meathead's idea of what people who read comics are like. Many years ago I tried to read a Ben Elton novel, and this thing reminds me why I failed.

Amazingly, it doesn't get better. I didn't make it so far as the chapters which I presume wheel out various Mayan supernaturals as yet another pantheon of blood hungry monsters jumping up and down whilst chanting oogah-boogah, and this was because the writing began to get in the way. More and more I felt as though I might be watching some wearyingly edgy BBC thriller with a fast car every five minutes and no question denied its due sardonic response, one eyebrow raised so we can see that gosh she really is a fiesty filly!

Naturally Gill succumbs to that thing they all do with the clipped inactive sentences impersonating a brooding voice-over, which people who can't write tend to do in hope of building so powerful a mood as to distract from their being otherwise unable to string a sentence together. Full-stops everywhere. Willy nilly. Like this. You're not. Fooling anybody. Sunshine.

Finally we come to this, whatever the fuck it's supposed to be.

'But that was beyond butchery. That was sacrificial slaughter.' Exclaimed the scientist.

Exclaimed the scientist, doesn't work as a sentence by itself, and yet there it is; and speech is attributed by this same peculiar grammatical tic throughout the book, hence a shitload of sentences beginning with a capitalised Said. Whilst I dispute that there's such a thing as a definitively correct way to write English, it helps to understand at least some of the rules before you start flushing them down the crapper; and persons such as myself who read more than three books a fucking year can nevertheless tell when you don't know what the hell you're doing, no matter. Where you put the fucking. Full-stop.

I looked at the guy's facebook page and felt sorry for him because he's almost certainly a lovely guy. I assume this was his only novel, presumably composed in the belief that writing a novel is simply a matter of method - just like constructing a cabinet - so anyone can do it. It gives me no pleasure to describe Mosquito Blood Diaries as garbage, just as it gave me no pleasure to struggle though the first fifty pages; but garbage is indeed what it would appear to be.

*: Even assuming the Maya indicated the termination of their calendar to be anything apocalyptic - which they didn't so far as I'm aware - the correlation of the big day with the Gregorian 21st of December, 2012 seems to depend upon which elements of the Mayan calendar one takes into account, particularly those details which allowed said calendar to compensate for its falling slightly short of the true solar year. Clearly the Maya employed a system equivalent to that of our own leap year, one which was not formally acknowledged as part of their calendar, yet which must have existed because otherwise their calendar would not have been so accurate as has demonstrably been the case. What this system could have been remains open to debate, and four different Gregorian dates can be seen to correspond with the termination point of the Mayan calendar depending upon what assumptions are made about this mysterious mechanism.

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall

Spike Milligan Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (1978)
The fourth of Spike's war journals opens with a slightly testy rebuttal to Clive James having described a previous volume as an unreliable history of the war. Whilst I'm sure it's true that, as Spike claims, he spent a lot of time getting his dates and facts right, Monty was erratic even by Spike's standards with those doubtless correct dates and facts speckled by jokes, comic asides, and absurdist sketches to the point of giving the impression of it having been edited by shoving everything loose into a carrier bag. Mussolini accordingly feels a bit more substantial, striking a fine balance between what happened and how stupid it seemed at the time.

Having read this one before, I recalled it as a harrowing volume concluding with a shell-shocked Spike gibbering away to himself in a secure facility; but my memory is off-kilter here. It's mostly light, or as light as one might reasonably expect under the circumstances, with shell-shock bleaching only the last twenty or so pages of humour.

As is probably obvious from the title, this volume records Spike's posting to Italy in 1943, and the eschewing of comic illustrations in favour of a higher, more thorough word count does well to capture the grinding misery and mundanity of warfare - in this instance, mostly waiting around in the pissing rain, terrible food, not enough sleep, and not much idea what the bigger picture looks like - contrasting wonderfully with the sublime experience of a few days leave in Amalfi, for one example.

Spike gives good account of how it looked from ground level, even expressing genuine sympathy for the occasional deceased German. As with anyone who ever had to get their hands dirty, he doesn't have much time for the bullshit of those higher up; and to hilarious effect when reporting a fire in the officers' mess, with the hated and officious Major Jenkins scrabbling to rescue his possessions from the conflagration, oblivious to a resentful Gunner throwing it all back on again.

There are a few later volumes of these war memoirs that I've never read, but this one seems to have been the best of those published at the time, reading as a proper autobiography beyond it being the work of someone more at home penning radio plays about hurlers of batter pudding. There was always a certain pathos to Spike's humour, even if it wasn't always obvious, and Mussolini is a powerful account in that respect.

The Eyes of the Overworld

Jack Vance The Eyes of the Overworld (1966)
Excepting Moorcock on the grounds of him being pretty much his own genre, Jack Vance is the first author of unambiguous fantasy to whom I've truly warmed, and by unambiguous fantasy I mean sagas of wizards in pointy hats inspiring quests across hill and dale, and so on and so forth. Actually, he's the second come to think of it, the first being Matthew Hughes whose tales of Raffalon are set against the backdrop of Jack Vance's Dying Earth, and this is one of Vance's Dying Earth novels - so I'm sure the sense of whatever I was trying to say can be found somewhere in that lot.

The Dying Earth is host to a post-technological society vaguely resembling our Renaissance but with magic, all occurring in the improbably distant future, at which point the sun routinely blinks out like aging strip lighting, hence the name. It was a significant influence on Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. I could probably leave the review there, but I won't.

Cugel the Clever is discovered attempting to steal certain valuable mystic items from Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Iucounu wraps an extraterrestrial squid around the thief's liver and obliges him to travel to the far north to procure the eyes of the overworld. The eyes of the overworld allow one to see the higher reality, transforming conventional perception of our world of rancid paupers screwing and pooing in stinking hovels into a reality of Disney princesses daintily wafting from one sparkling palace to another. The novel is a quest with a spell or enchantment resolving pretty much every scrape and episodic dilemma strung along its familiar path - and with no greater sense of consequence than in any other magically driven narrative - and yet Vance proves that it really is all in the telling. His fiction is heavily stylised, erudite almost to the point of shameless ostentation, and feels fresh and lively - more so than anything involving wizards surely has the right to be. I'd be surprised if he hadn't influenced Pratchett to some extent - although his wit is possibly sharper and less obviously satirical - and he assails the reader with a disorientating barrage of peculiar ideas and images to incredibly surreal effect - somewhat like Cordwainer Smith, but - frankly, better done. I don't know if The Eyes of the Overworld exactly says anything, but then it doesn't have to. Sometimes the mood, spectacle, and delightful confusion can be enough by itself.

Studies in Classic American Literature

D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (1924)
I approached this with some trepidation assuming it would be fairly dry, being Dave's thoughts on a stack of novels I've never read - excepting Moby Dick - and which I can't see me reading at any point in the near future. Happily, at least for me, Studies reads almost like a dry run for Apocalypse, or at least limbering up in preparation for The Plumed Serpent. It was begun in 1917, then revised and completed after the Lawrences moved to the States in 1922, and D.H. naturally had a few things to say on the subject of the country in which he'd made his home.

Studies in Classic American Literature gets the last couple of centuries worth of American society up onto the psychiatrist's couch and pulls them apart to see what's happening under the hood - if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor - an inspection made through the medium of its writing, what the land of the hypothetically free has had to say about itself.

This is something I've pondered myself, having moved here back in 2011 and been struck by the contradictions, and how it really isn't just Europe with different stuff. America makes a big deal out of having thrown off the yoke of hereditary monarchy, and so being a country where no-one is held back through having been born to the wrong parents - which is patently false. It's all about freedom, liberty, and other intangibles; and yet America's dedication to tradition, ceremony, speechifying, awards, more ceremonies, ionic columns, tradition, marble statues, medals for everyone, capes, salutes, honour, proclamations, ceremonies commemorating the previous ceremonies, pomp, circumstance, processions, and so on, is such as to make your average Euro-coronation seem like a fund raising piss-up at an anarchist collective. It's the messy divorce wherein one of those formerly wed spends the rest of his or her life telling you how great it is being divorced.

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Lawrence being Lawrence, much of the argument strays into philosophical, even pseudo-mystical territory, although not without  justification so it's never entirely self-indulgent; and pretty much everything he's said remains approximately true today, a full century later.

As discourse, Studies tends to freewheel, to follow a train of thought like a dog sniffing its way around an unfamiliar field; so it's a monologue which makes coherent observations in an order which mostly makes sense, as distinct from a rigorously mathematical  analysis - a form which would, in any case, contradict Lawrence's most fundamental arguments. It hasn't left me with the desire to read Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper or Poe - whose writing I already know I dislike in the latter case - but then that isn't really the point, and for a title which may look somewhat peripheral next to the others, it's one of the breezier and more clearly expressed introductions to Lawrence's view of the universe and our place therein.

Starshine

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine (1966)
This collection of six short stories is possibly the first Sturgeon I've read since having noticed that Kurt Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was based on Sturgeon. Given that Vonnegut tended to write Trout as cranky at best, and otherwise something of a loser, I've found it hard to avoid this notion tainting my impression of Sturgeon's fiction, although in this case, the parallels seem to exist independent of my imagination. However, it should probably be remembered that Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends, and that the genesis of Trout was as much to do with Kurt being amused by the idea of someone having a fish for a surname. I really don't think Kilgore Trout was intended as a criticism of Sturgeon, even though it's difficult to get away from the possibility.

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: 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.

While I recall Sturgeon's More Than Human as astonishing, nothing since has done much to sustain that impression. Apparently I thought The Synthetic Man was great too, and yet I don't even remember reading it.

Anyway, the six stories collected as Starshine mostly represent sparky, original ideas, and Sturgeon's prose is jazzy and engaging, or should be engaging, bespeckled as it is with unexpected and often startling images; and yet I kept finding myself thinking that Vonnegut had a point, even though Vonnegut's point was never anything to do with the quality of what his friend wrote. The energetic style isn't really a problem and never quite becomes as irritating or yappy as Kornbluth could occasionally be after a major Sunny D jag, but the ideas at the heart of these tales somehow feel convoluted and unlikely for the sake of convoluted and unlikely, as though Sturgeon wrote to see whether he could pull it off, imposing what might at least seem like internal logic on this stuff; and I found it hard to care. For all that Sturgeon wrote well, I was left without any idea as to why he wrote these.

William and the Space Animal

 

Richmal Crompton William and the Space Animal (1956)
This is yet another book I had as a kid, and I'm pretty sure it had been one of my dad's books from when he was a kid which eventually found its way into my possession along with a stack of Eagle annuals; and yet I never actually read it, the words to illustrations ratio being incompatible with my attention span at the time even though it looked kind of interesting and I remember wondering what happened in the story - or the main story, William and the Space Animal being one of the five assembled herein. Remember kids, next time some shiny-eyed arsehole tells you how such and such a piece of garbage at least gets kids reading, this usually means the kids in question will try to read as much Doctor Who, Harry Potter, or Clifford the Big Red Dog as they can get their hands on. It doesn't inevitably lead to Crime and Punishment.

Anyway, I sought out a new copy because I felt I owed it to my five-year old self, the illiterate little bollix; and because the other William book I read was fucking great.

I don't do spoilers - as the youngsters call them - because if the pleasure you take in reading a book can be diminished by the revelation of its ending, then books probably aren't for you; so I'll reveal that the space animal is nothing of the sort. Nevertheless the narrative path leading to its discovery and ultimate explanation is a thing of ludicrous beauty and masterful wit, as I've come to expect from Crompton. The other stories are of equivalent standard, but the greatest is probably William the Tree-Dweller wherein our man returns to the wild, turning his back on civilisation through it having responded so poorly to his experiments with rocketry. The experiments in question, undertaken in hope of aiding the space program as was, entail lit fireworks launched by means of bow and arrow.

'Well, what I thought was that if we could get a specially strong firework an' fix it to the end of this new arrow of mine an' let it off—the firework, I mean—jus' when I'm shootin' off the arrow, it'd go up jolly high an' then when we'd got into the way of it we'd put another firework on an' then another an' then another an' so on till we'd got it strong enough to get there.'

German fireworks maker Johann Schmidlap invented the two-stage rocket back in 1591, proposing a system wherein a first stage projectile carries a smaller rocket to the heavens, so unfortunately we can't credit Crompton with that one; but as for rocketry in works of fiction, I'm pretty sure everyone else writing in 1956 was still thinking of rockets as boats which land on the moon then fly back, all in one piece - and this is merely the preliminary set-up to William the Tree-Dweller.

William comes fairly close to being a work of genius - improbable and riotously funny stories grounded firmly in a reality I just about recall from my own childhood, no button pushing, no condescension or assuming the reader is an idiot - even though I may well have been - and sharp as a razor blade. Had I managed to read this when I was a kid, I've a feeling my life would have been very different, and certainly not worse.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Charles Bukowski Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
This fell into the shopping trolley not through some burning need to read it, but more because I knew I'd eventually wonder why I hadn't picked it up when I had the chance. The posthumous Mathematics of the Breath and the Way from 2018 was likewise an assemblage of odds and ends, newspaper columns and so on, and while there was much to recommend it, as a collection it felt a bit of a slog where a Bukowski usually passes through the reader like curry at the end of a night on the sauce, at least in my experience. Notes, on the other hand, was compiled back when Chuck was still mostly in the land of the living, deriving from weekly columns in Open City, an underground Los Angeles newspaper. I gather Open City were happy with Bukowski submitting whatever the hell he liked in a general spirit of literary freedom; so if there's an occasionally topical observation to remind us this was a newspaper column, it's otherwise a principally autobiographical novel, albeit one with column length chapters written in whatever order he felt like writing them. There's quite a lot of booze, gambling, a fair bit of screwing, general grumbling about writing and writers, and even a few amusing pot shots taken at perceived literary golden boys of the day, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Chuck didn't really do sacred cows, or indeed anything which he saw as getting in the way of the truth. I quote the following in full understanding of some readers being too fucking stupid to understand.

I laugh. he's comfortable and he's human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he's good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers - intellectually, just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left-wing - intellectually. I don't care which way it goes - I only know: there are too many people afraid.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns out to be the collection I was hoping for when I picked up The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Bukowski's observations regarding all which continues to render life such an uphill and often joyless slog are on point and sadly timeless. It's ugly, uncomfortable and it smells bad, but truth is always more beautiful than the alternative, and that's what we have here.

Your Dreams

Thomas Moore Your Dreams (2023)
Thomas Moore further explores his own seemingly insubstantial existence as he's driven forward by desires which he doesn't quite seem to trust, and which he regards with a certain emotional detachment - which I find quite refreshing and a welcome variation on the usual invitations to spend time rolling around in some stranger's inscrutable fantasy.

 

I think about the idea of community and about how weird it is now that everyone wants to be part of one community or another. Growing up, being part of "the gay scene" seemed too repulsive to me. It represented exclusion, it represented consumerism, body fascism, shit music, assimilation, and the idea of shared community was such a reductionist way of thinking - a sexual preference didn't make me share anything else. The mainstream gays would scowl at me.

Regardless of my own sexual preferences, I feel like I've been waiting half a century for someone to express this. Moore goes places I wouldn't want to go, but for reasons other than customarily waving an assortment of cocks and fannies in your face, thus leaving the somewhat redundant transgressive tag looking ever more like the cliché that it is. Your Dreams concludes on a surprisingly post-modern note involving the author, potential reactions to his work - specifically that which we've just read - then his reactions to our reactions and whether any of it means anything. It could have been a bit too self-conscious for its own good, and yet it works and makes sense as part of the whole.

As with his previous books, what Moore does is so nuanced as to reduce most attempts at description to hopeless generalisation, and I'm not sure that anyone else is doing it. That's a recommendation.

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.

Stricture

Isabelle Nicou Stricture (2022)
Here's another which qualifies as a proper book, with bits I didn't understand and everything; although to be fair, Nicou's prose - or possibly Kaycie Hall's translation from the original French - is precise and clear in its description of people, events, and the ambiguous or even fantastical means by which they are associated. I'd say it's this last aspect which fosters the atmosphere of a waking dream, which leaves us unsure as to what we've just read.

Nicou's seemingly pseudo-autobiographical character is a young woman attempting to make sense of having been in thrall to her mentor, a professor of philosophy; and the existential hinterland of her musing as she strives to break free draws associations with King Lear, the science-fiction of Jules Verne, and alien abduction, amongst other examples of magical thinking. It's a cloud of shifting meaning somehow rendered in sharp focus which remains nevertheless quite difficult to describe beyond listing a few of the sign posts. Probably inevitably, reading Stricture felt a little like reading Sartre's Nausea - albeit without the undercurrent of revulsion - which possibly may say more about how little French literature I've read than it does about what Nicou was trying to do; but, for what it may be worth, I kept reading Stricture because it felt as though I was getting a lot from it, even if what that was eludes easy quantification.

The Moon Maid

Edgar Rice Burroughs The Moon Maid (1923)
After the previous three, I had no real intention of dipping any additional toes into Edgar, but this was in a second hand book store in Kenilworth, England, exactly opposite the charity shop from which I'd bought my first Edgar back in 2011; and my brain had somehow already flagged The Moon Maid as worth a look, for some reason.

It starts well, at least reminding us that Burroughs knew how to pull a sentence together, but before we've even come to the foot of the first page, we're told that the war which has been waging since 1914 is at last over, and that the Anglo-Saxon races have won - which has obviously come as a massive relief to everyone, even the losers who apparently always knew themselves to be a bad lot. To be fair to Edgar, I'm fairly certain he's referring to the Anglo-Saxon as something distinct from the forces of Communism - then making quite a commotion in the east at the time of writing - rather than specifically distinct from other racial groups. Nevertheless, it strikes an unfortunately ambiguous note.

Next we realise we're reading a variation on that narrative device, so popular at the time, where our man strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious explorer at the gentleman's club, and the mysterious explorer is naturally busting to spill the beans on his recent most diverting escapade in the celestial planet of Neptune, or similar. For reasons best known to himself, Edgar goes one better in The Moon Maid, and our guy strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious adventurer who just so happens to be channeling his own future self, or possibly his son from a few decades down the line, and the son has been to the moon. My friend Neil once had an idea for a movie comprising just a continuous car chase, but which incorporated flashbacks to previous car chases throughout, and the flashbacks would also feature flashbacks to earlier car chases. I'm not sure if Neil ever read The Moon Maid.

Anyway, whichever narrator we eventually end up with, he goes to the moon in the company of his most hated enemy, who also happens to be a technical genius - so that makes perfect sense. They crash inside the moon, because it's hollow with numerous rudimentary civilisations dwelling therein, the first encountered being the Kalkars, a race of cannibalistic centaurs resembling the bastard offspring of Jason King and Germaine Greer if the cover of this edition is any indication. As usual, these creatures are more or less American Indians so there are spears aplenty, various incidents of failing to recognise the inherent superiority of whitey, and so on and so forth. Our guy's most hated enemy runs off to teach the Kalkars how to make guns because he's a wrong 'un through and through, and bringing him to the moon was a huge mistake. The Kalkars were commies in an earlier version of the book, for what that may be worth. Our guy teams up with the noble underdogs, as usual, having fallen in love with a right tasty moon lady of normal human physiognomy, which is handy. You can probably guess the rest.

The great shame is that Burroughs had a genuinely wonderful way with words, an elegant prose at least equal to that of Wells, which keeps you reading no matter how fucking stupid the story gets; and he wasted these not inconsiderable talents on this barely coherent garbage resembling the much older lunar satire of Cyrano de Bergerac and others, but rendered in wax crayon without the satire.

This was definitely the last one for me.

The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster The Time Tunnel (1967)
This, as you may recall, was an Irwin Allen television series thus described somewhat harshly by John Clute:

In one of the worst 1960s series, time travellers - trapped in a vortex created by experimenting scientists - carom through cardboard sets, overturn whole societies, and escape again and again.

I remember watching a few episodes as a kid but not much else. The basic premise and title, albeit lacking the definite article, came from Leinster's Time Tunnel of 1964, published a couple of years prior to the series. My guess for how any of this relates would be that Leinster conceded the rights and title to Allen in return for a couple of novelisations more directly tied in to the television series.

I began reading under the assumption of the book most likely expanding on the first couple of episodes, given that it kicks off with more or less the same cast of characters and vaguely scientific furniture - significantly featuring our main guys, Doug and Tony, sent into the time stream so as to demonstrate the validity of the government funded project to a disgruntled Senator Clark who wants to know where all the money has gone. Having myself novelised an episodic television show, I've been surprised at the slender page count which tends to be generated by even a full hour of television drama - as anyone who ever read a Terrance Dicks Who novelisation will probably appreciate - and so a certain quota of padding or treading of extemporary water is usually necessary to avoid the finished thing resembling a pamphlet. There's a lot of that in evidence here, but it turns out that the first episode of the television show sends Doug and Tony to the RMS Titanic just as it's about to make the acquaintance of that iceberg. Leinster instead first sends the boys to Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 - site of a catastrophic flood - then to a critical battle at Adobe Walls, Texas in 1874, neither of which correspond to anything we saw on the screen. Given that Leinster was nothing if not quick off the mark, I suspect that either Allen's people gave him license to go his own way, or possibly this book may represent a novelisation of something he proposed for the television show which was deemed to have less potential impact than the Titanic story filmed as Rendezvous with Yesterday, which is probably fair.

With this in mind, what I've read as padding is therefore most likely Leinster doing what seemed right for the story, and so we get a ton of historical detail delivered in large chunks, which is interesting but makes for somewhat chewy reading. We additionally get certain imaginative flourishes and elements which attempt to make sense of what was seen on the screen to some degree - our time travellers each wearing a kind of technological harness which connects them to those operating the Tunnel; and then an additional harness is sent to join them equipped with a poorly defined means of locomotion and a camera - amounting to a remote drone - by which I suppose the reader might rationalise the screening of historical events unfolding on the other side of the next hill, beyond the ken of our travellers; and this remote drone is then developed into a sort of time car by the end of the book, allowing our temporal castaways to whizz around the futuristic city which provides the slightly puzzling setting for the final chapters.

It's a novel which does a lot of telling and not quite enough showing to strike the right balance, which is also true of the 1964 Time Tunnel which, for all its wacky ideas, is really a bit of a mess. This is a shame because Leinster's best is usually wonderful, notably The Greks Bring Gifts and The Wailing Asteroid both of which are just screwy enough to overcome any objections one might harbour regarding the pulpier end of the genre. His greatest strength seems to have been the short story form - or at least sequential short stories welded together into novels - and his short stories mostly appeared in the digest magazines and would thus have been subject to the attention of some fairly astringent editors. His three Time Tunnel novels were, on the other hand, published by Pyramid Books whom I gather were in the business of wacking them out fast and cheap and may therefore have left established writers to their own devices - and the sheer weirdness of those novels they published by Robert Moore Williams seems to support this as a possibility.

All the same, The Time Tunnel is a book which could have been better rather than a bad one. It somehow maintains a heady pace in spite of the infodumping, its ideas are engaging, and my initial concerns about Doug and Tony helping out in the extermination of hostile Indians at Adobe Walls proved mercifully unfounded for the most part, for Leinster achieves a surprising objectivity in his sensitive portrayal of what might not unfairly be described as genocide.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs

Allen Hibbard (editor)
Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999)
Given that Burroughs oeuvre can often prove somewhat repetitive, it's probably testament to the man's ability that new details remain to be discovered even when you've read pretty much everything. I haven't read everything but I've read the major novels and a significant quota of those lesser known, with this being my spooky twenty-third Burroughs title. As may be obvious, it's a collection of interviews spanning his career of which only the one first seen in Re/Search is familiar to me; and taking in subjects adjacent to the writing, whatever Bill felt like talking about at the time, it feels like a more thorough overview of his work than, for example, John Calder's William Burroughs Reader, not least in its reiteration of themes which we may or may not have noticed in individual novels - notably that Burroughs' life work can be distilled to a desire to communicate that which we already know, but don't realise we already know.

Also, this collection roughly maps out the shape of Burroughs' intellectual progress over the years, particularly as he dismisses and moves beyond earlier fixations. This is in particular a relief as the first third of the page count is dull as fuck, adding nothing new whilst endlessly retreading everything we've already read in Naked Lunch and others in response to the enquiries of overly earnest young men with long hair and beards, the nadir of which has Burroughs concluding that the revolution will not only be won, but will probably be won by the Rolling Stones.

It gets a lot more interesting once we're past the sixties and Bill's habit of predicting massive cultural shifts which never came to pass, which also means we have to talk about telepathy, mind control and the like, but at least he has his gun pointed in the right direction. By the time we come to the last page, the journey has proven mostly fascinating as our boy pontificates on his life, influences, favourite painters and writers, and other subjects which fed into the novels without any more overt manifestation therein. I'm still not sure he was the most important writer of the twentieth century - let alone that such an accolade means anything - but he was certainly one of the most interesting.

The Witling

Vernor Vinge The Witling (1976)
I'm not quite sure how this one came to leap from the shelf and into my shopping trolley. I vaguely recall finding Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Peace War underwhelming beyond their admittedly sparky ideas, and nothing on the cover of this one promises anything likely to change my mind; and yet I picked it up, for some reason, and it's fucking great, and so much so as to leave me wondering why the other two failed to get me going.

Anyway, this being my third Vinge, I think I've spotted the theme, specifically that he very much enjoys fucking around with the laws of physics as they apply to space and how one moves around therein. Here it's a pseudo-mediaeval alien civilisation which has evolved an ability to instantaneously teleport from place to place. The rhythm of the story and the cadence of its characters borders on Tolkien, albeit less cloying, or at least something by Ursula LeGuin, and this contrasts very well with how their society is seen through the eyes of technologically advanced human visitors - with the story riding along on the fact of said visitors having found themselves stranded on this strange world.

The Witling isn't anything mind-expanding, but it does that which it does exceptionally well and makes for a thoroughly breezy read which does much to remind the reader what first drew him* to the science-fiction novel.

*: I've made this hypothetical person masculine because I'm referring directly to myself, and also because girls are more likely to read romance novels or the latest issue of Woman's Hat Monthly than anything by Vernor Vinge.

Analog April 1980

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog April 1980 (1980)
Just when you think you know someone… as Lord Rothermere observed on the first of September, 1939. I've developed certain expectations as I work my way through a handful of unread back issues of Analog picked up here and there over the years, and true to form, the April 1980 issue features a science article which I couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first couple of pages, Jerry Pournelle droning on about something or other, advertisements which appear faintly ludicrous with hindsight, and the second instalment of Bob Buckley's World in the Clouds - which would be fine if it were just about terraforming Venus as the science is quite interesting and well communicated, but said terraforming is undertaken as some kind of futuristic community service deal by a street tough. I assume tough as a noun made sense for my father's generation and I remember finding it weird in Topper and Beano when I was a kid. The problem is that, science aside, the rest of the tale is written in a style consistent with the kind of writing you would expect in a story about a street tough.

Also, there's David A. Roach's Memo from the Big Chief which takes the form of correspondence between various cavepersons - one of whom is imaginatively named Ugg - detailing, I presume, health and safety concerns raised by the invention of fire. I didn't read it because I make a point of not reading short stories which take the form of correspondence, and the premise just isn't that funny.

However, this was otherwise a surprisingly enjoyable issue of this thing. The characteristically right leaning editorial is fairly liberal and concerns itself with the environment in terms which serve to remind us that Republicans weren't always the largely amoral corporate shitbags we see before us today and were once worth listening to, sometimes. The letters page features satisfyingly testy missives from Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt defending his 1979 novel Renaissance from a reviewer who may or may not have bothered to read it.

The star attraction for me, the reason why this leapt off the shelf and into my hands, would be Simak's Grotto of the Dancing Deer which notably won Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards for best short story. Oddly, it's nothing spectacular in context of Simak's body of work, but is nevertheless decent - as you would most likely expect - so I suspect someone or other simply felt it was high time Cliff won another award, which is fair.

Finally we have the novella length Nightflyers, an example of George R.R. Martin's early science-fiction work. I sort of enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, but not enough to read the books so this is my first encounter with his writing, and it's not difficult to see why he would eventually be shifting this stuff by the truckload. Nightflyers almost mashes a ghost story up with a murder mystery and flings the results out into deep space, and is of sufficient complexity and sophistication to oblige me to re-read the first half when I came back to it because I was already lost; and yet going back to start again turned out to be a genuine pleasure, such is the quality of the tale, which may even be the best thing I've read in any of these digest magazines. At least I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything I've enjoyed more.

I appreciate that even a stopped clock is correct twice a day - unless it's digital - but this one has made for a very pleasant change to the usual.