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

 

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

Jack Kirby - The Eternals (1979)

 

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

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

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

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

Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968)

 

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

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