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.

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.

Robert Moore Williams - The Chaos Fighters (1955)

 

It's been a shocking three years since I read my last Robert Moore Williams, a lull accounted for by nothing I hadn't already read showing up in the usual second hand places, before a day trip to Austin opened up an entirely new seam. So Austin is good for something beyond providing twats a point of focus for when they suddenly find themselves required to say something which isn't routinely insulting about Texas.

Happily, The Chaos Fighters has proven to be a good choice in terms of getting back in the saddle. As with much of his writing, it adheres to the unashamedly pulp sensibility of agents figuring things out, embellished with sensational dames but saved from the clichés and stock pieces by its sheer weirdness. Williams' writing has about it a strong touch of the A.E. van Vogt, although his own similarly dreamlike and unpredictable narratives are delivered in terms customarily more analogous to Edward Hopper than Edward Wadsworth, with occasionally a sentence so startling that it borders on Alan Partridge. Bright young things will characterise this as bad writing, which probably isn't an argument worth having; and neither does it matter whether or not Williams succeeds because the energy comes from the teeth gritting determination with which he attempts to wrestle that sucker to the ground. 

We open with our man Haldane entering a shop in pursuit of a mystery, just like the protagonist of van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher, which here seems to receive tribute on the very first page in the reference to other agents having vanished on Mars. The mystery stems from a sign in the shop window promising FOR SALE—Homo Sapiens, which is eventually revealed as the title of a book explaining the scientific and spiritual destiny of humanity in cosmic terms, as written by persons stood on the threshold of the same.

'We're human beings in the process of becoming something else. As we see history, the only law apparent in the universe is change. We human beings change too; we become something else, as a race and as individuals. What this something else is we don't know until we become it. Nor will we know what it is until we achieve it and find out what it is. But we are changing, we are evolving, we are moving in some direction.'

You may recognise the obsession with progress, human evolution, and supermen which gripped many science-fiction writers during the first half of the twentieth century, but what distinguishes Williams is how strongly he foreshadowed the utopian movements of the sixties, with whom he became briefly associated, seemingly as a benign guru figure to a commune. Unsurprisingly then, his science-fiction is decidedly fuzzy at the edges with the weird fiction of Abraham Merritt as a starting point, expanding to include all forms of mysticism, whatever seemed to fit, here presenting us with inventors who also summon the occasional mysterious force using incantations from ancient texts. Williams seems to have been a functioning schizophrenic in so much as that he held down jobs, was liked by his friends, and yet was prone to visions and voices in his head - translating to telepathy in The Chaos Fighters.

The voice paused. The spasm was passing in Haldane. He wondered about the voice. Who was speaking in there? In his mind was the thought that no person was in there, that no-one was speaking, that what he heard was a product of his own imagination.

This is illustrated in literal fashion when Haldane's psychic ability communicates with him directly in conversation.

His eyes, in direct contact with their own data, and not giving two hoots about the opinions of his conscious mind, screamed at him that they were not lying.

'We're reporting accurately,' his eyes yelled. 'Not only is the girl getting smaller but the street is stretching out like a rubber band and is growing larger. And the girl is only two feet tall now.'

Communicated as a populist thriller, The Chaos Fighters is therefore Williams' view of where humanity heads in the years to come as drawn and interpreted from his own mental idiosyncrasies. It's accordingly strewn with themes and images which reoccur throughout his fiction - the sound like a bell heard from across the universe, the subterranean tunnels (which we find on the moon in this case); and the hard-boiled familiarity of its settings and characters is offset by the unpredictably surreal twists which the narrative follows in circling and struggling to make its esoteric point. It hasn't predicted anything - at least not yet - but there's too much thought, albeit completely screwy thought, gone into the novel to dismiss it as rambling gibberish; but above all, it's a tremendous and tremendously strange read. It's also possibly the clearest, most overt illustration of the man's unique vision until 1970s pseudo-autobiographical Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight, at least of those I've read.

Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

D.H. Lawrence - Apocalypse (1932)

 

Lawrence wrote Apocalypse, his highly personal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, on his death bed. It was his last great piece of writing and he made every word count, more or less reducing what he'd been getting at over previous decades to its clearest, most concentrated essence. You could call it religion or philosophy, although both are arguably misleading in this case. This is how Lawrence saw the world, or more precisely what he thought was meant by the term.

As an analysis of Revelation, Apocalypse somewhat reveals what might be deemed the contradiction at the heart of Lawrence's view of the world, specifically his shunning the methodical, scientific approach in favour of the intuitive. This might seem to foreshadow today's internet pundits with their apparent belief that facts may often complicate or unduly bias an issue. Lawrence, however, insists on there being two essentially incompatible ways of seeing, and he favoured the materialist approach, giving precedence to that which is seen, felt, or experienced over abstract rationalisation after the fact. Therefore, as with Etruscan Places in which he writes about Italian civilisation before the Romans through aesthetic consideration of their art and architecture, Apocalypse deals in what might be deemed poetic truth rather than the purely historical. While this might seem akin to Erich von Däniken finding flying saucers in Ezekiel's wheels - a proposal facilitated by conveniently ignoring existing interpretations of the symbolism - Lawrence's intuitive method is itself a refusal to impose established patterns or methods of understanding upon the material - in other words an attempt to unravel Revelation entirely on its own terms. This approach is validated, I would argue, by its refusal to view the texts as the poorly formulated mumbling of primitives - actually the opposite of Erich's methodology, such as it is - and is additionally validated by the clarity and conviction of his testimony. For what it may be worth, his testimony here also reminds me a little of A.E. van Vogt, who wrote about rockets and mutants but took a similarly intuitive approach.

As for what Lawrence actually says, the whole point of the book is that the discourse loses definition and even meaning when summarised or broken down into symbols, but the main theme is that pre-Christian religion was not religion as we understand it today, and because of this we have lost our way as a people. He sets out a convincing and coherent argument for this view as well, but - as with Point Counterpoint - you really need to read the thing to appreciate it.

All of this being said, Apocalypse remains very much a personal view - although Lawrence resisted the idea that any of his pronouncements should ever be taken as the final word on anything - so additionally revealing his blind spots; and it seems particularly sad given that he spent so much time in Mexico, engaging with adherents to a pre-Christian belief system very much in line with much of what is described in Apocalypse.

Even to the early scientists or philosophers, 'the cold', 'the moist', 'the hot', 'the dry' were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

Yet, little if anything of this makes it into The Plumed Serpent with its fallen Indians performing a heavily befeathered summary of an actual living religion filtered through the grimmer aspects of Lawrence's Methodist upbringing. It was staring him in the face and somehow he missed it.

Nevertheless, for all the flaws one might find in Apocalypse, the strength of the main argument eclipses them to the point of irrelevance, and this was one hell of a swan song.

August Derleth (editor) - The Other Side of the Moon (1948)

 

This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.

That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.

A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.

The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.

The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

A.E. van Vogt - Cosmic Encounter (1980)

I still find it amazing that my first encounter with the writing of A.E. van Vogt led me to conclude that he couldn't write, and that I might therefore scratch his name from my list; and yet here I sit, approximately fifteen years later, having now read thirty-four of his thirty-six novels - many of which bordered on incomprehensible - and countless short stories. I have only Siege of the Unseen and To Conquer Kiber left to read, and the latter exists only in its French translation so that one probably ain't happening. The French regard van Vogt as an important surrealist writer, which is fair.

My initially unfavourable reaction stemmed from his fiction suggesting an author drunk at the typewriter, and even now that's often how his books read. The difference is that I've learned to appreciate that the disorientation is orchestrated, and that there's a lot going on with this guy's work if you know what to look for.

Cosmic Encounter was one of his last novels and seems better realised than many others written around the same decade - although by better realised I mean that you can see he's doing something even if it's not obvious what it could be. We open on a pirate ship in the year 1704 as it encounters the robots of a Lantellan spacecraft and all spacetime collapses to that one year, with the entire past and future of the universe simply ceasing to exist, after which the novel gets weirder by the chapter. The explanation, when it finally comes, is difficult to understand, being wrapped up as it is in a mesh of van Vogt's ideas regarding the gulf between that which we observe and how we describe it; but if you hold on tight, concentrate hard, and re-read the more obtuse passages until some sort of understanding is reached, you just about get an impression of what he's been trying to do; and I'm beginning to suspect that he may have been using language and narrative to rewire the reader's brain so as to facilitate cognition in terms described by Korzybski's general semantics, of which A.E. was very much a fan. Of all his works, Cosmic Encounter is very odd, even more dreamlike than usual, and certainly seems to do something peculiar to your head.

Without being particularly familiar with Korzybski, I gather van Vogt's interest lay in establishing a form of logic which eschews the binary of either-or with nothing in between, a logic wherein two plus two can equal five, and we shouldn't get too hung up on his using pirates and space robots to communicate this. Cause and effect being something traditionally subject to an either-or duality, van Vogt plays it down, often uncoupling one from the other, writing everything exclusively in the moment - which is why you really have to hold on tight with this stuff, to pay attention, and not get too upset where common or garden linear sense goes flying out of the window.

So I enjoyed Cosmic Encounter a lot, even if I struggle to describe what it's about, that being something you have to experience for yourself. It's worth the effort.

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.

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.

Astounding

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.

The Man with a Thousand Names

A.E. van Vogt The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
John Clute reckoned van Vogt's drive had gone by the seventies, and whilst it's probably true that his greatest work had been written a couple of decades earlier - greatest at least in terms of generating an atmosphere so weird as to smooth over instances where the narrative fails to join up - I'd say his success rate remained mostly undiminished. Sure there were a few duds, which was as true in the forties as in the later years. The Man with a Thousand Names kicks off in typically bewildering fashion, so I paid attention and held on tight, skipping back to re-read anything I wasn't too sure about; and for at least the first half it began to feel as though this might even be his greatest work after The Violent Man, possibly due to A.E.'s customarily foggy disregard for cause and effect being written with unusual clarity; meaning that providing one is resigned to the fact that not everything is going to add up, it sort of makes sense.

Our main guy is the thoroughly obnoxious heir to a private fortune, an amoral playboy who is used to getting what he wants without having to care less about the consequences. This seemingly presents a problem for Goodreads types who expect relatable characters, but never mind. Our guy pilots a spaceship to Mittend, our nearest habitable planet, then instantaneously finds himself back on Earth inhabiting the body and life of Mark Broehm, a bartender he once wronged. This occurs a few more times, zapping his brain into the bodies of others he's screwed over, with no real explanation as to why it's happening, and it doesn't even seem to be karma catching up with our boy who remains a heel regardless, even committing rape at one point, suggesting - at least to me - that he's probably not supposed to be relatable. Eventually we learn that this is something to do with Mother, a sort of psychic gestalt representing the first wave of an invasion from another galaxy, by which point I was lost despite my best intentions.

The narrative zips about at least as much as that of Null-A and presumably for similarly non-Aristotelian reasons, and is accordingly dreamlike, albeit a dream reported with the hard-boiled pragmatism of detective fiction; and the whole somehow reminds me of David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in so much as that it feels heavily allegorical, even symbolic to the point of meaning eclipsing the demands of linear progress from one part of the story to another. I still don't know what it's about beyond that it's obviously about something, but as exercise for my brain, it felt good and was mostly gripping.

Star Trek Log One

Alan Dean Foster Star Trek Log One (1974)
While I've never been a massive unreserved fan of Trek, I've enjoyed some of it, and some of it I've enjoyed a lot. I watched the animated version at the time - around four-ish on a Saturday afternoon as I recall - but have never had any burning desire to revisit the thing beyond vague curiosity about the guy with the three arms who made the cut because they couldn't afford Walter Koenig. Naturally I had no idea anyone had novelised the series in those days before VHS, but they did and so my curiosity achieved the necessary critical mass because it's Alan Dean Foster - who can generally be relied upon to do a decent job in cases such as we have here.

This one rather tidily adapts the first three episodes of the first series, the first of which is oddly familiar, so I guess I must have revisited that debut episode at some point fairly recently, unless they recycled the story for Enterprise or one of the other variations. On the subject of recycling, Beyond the Farthest Star has our cartoon Kirk and pals investigating an alien derelict of several million years vintage, formerly inhabited by massive aliens who were seemingly killed off by the thing which duly wakes up and tries to knacker the Enterprise. It's probably a coincidence that it so strongly foreshadows the half of Ridley Scott's Alien which didn't so strongly resemble A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle that the father of the iconic Hovis advert ended up settling out of court.

Yes, a coincidence. That'll be it. I'm sure of it.

Still talking of recycling, a fair chunk of One of Our Planets is Missing later turned up in the 1979 movie, it could be argued.

Anyway, Log One comprises three decent and generally engaging stories, all with the inevitably modular quality of Trek episodes, but which nevertheless manage to work some pleasing flashes of imagination into the formula. Alan Dean Foster has the reputation of being something of a hack, having written about a million of these things; but you can't really tell from this one which reads more like kin to the aforementioned Voyage of the Space Beagle - itself an obvious precursor to Star Trek - than words copied from a screen with linking material. Indeed, Foster's retelling crackles with character and jazzy asides and observations, possibly more so than most of what we saw on the telly. This isn't Terrance bleeding Dicks rearranging the usual phrases and expressions in a slightly different order to the last one.

I'm probably not massively likely to start hunting down the other nine volumes, but neither am I averse to the idea. Being what amounts to apple-polishing boy scouts having wholesome adventures in space, Star Trek succeeds mainly when it does something weird or spontaneous, and Alan Dean Foster really brings out the best in the mythology*.

*: I refuse point fucking blank to refer to it, or indeed to anything as a franchise.

Reflections of A.E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975)
A.E. van Vogt was one of a number of persons interviewed as part of an oral history project undertaken by three universities - Colombia, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. This lengthy interview was eventually edited and published as Reflections of, which is as close as we'll ever get to a van Vogt autobiography. By this point, I think there are three van Vogt novels that I still haven't read - out of God knows how many - so it's probably fair to say that I'm very much a fan. Accordingly, I've found this to be a fascinating read.

Here Alfred Elton talks about growing up in Saskatchewan, his first writing sales to the magazines, Dianetics, the development of his technique and his theories about writing, particularly what he tries to do in his science fiction; and somehow I'm left with even more questions.

As you may know, van Vogt cultivated a particular style which, for want of a better description, seems to do to the page what German expressionism did to the cinema screen. You have to hold on tight because it can be disorientating, confusing, and dreamlike, often with the most confusing elements left deliberately bereft of explanation. My first reaction to van Vogt was this guy can't write, which changed to drunk in charge of a typewriter, until I realised the disorientation was on purpose and the result of a very specific methodology. As an aside, it's therefore probably a good thing that his just about an autobiography came from a series of lengthy interviews rather than more directly from the man himself.

As I expected, he was never shy when it came to blowing his own trumpet - much of which is admittedly justified - but it's particularly interesting that he should have also been so finely tuned as to his own failures, stories which didn't quite hold together - which is a relief because I've often thought it was just me. I suspect that these days we would describe him as having been somewhere on the spectrum, but I won't because I remain unconvinced of such a term being truly helpful. Aside from his occasionally startling directness, van Vogt comes across as an autodidact, although I suspect some of the grammatical eccentricities may stem from his having spoken Dutch until the age of four. Yet the image he presents of himself is itself contradicted by his views on L. Ron Hubbard, and on other authors he admires, and on what he tried to do with his own writing. I'm still not sure I fully understand what he tried to do with his own writing, although it refers to Marshall McLuhan as well as Korzybski and entails use of fictional sentences, whatever they are. Of course, it may all be word salad and inherently batshit, but the fact of van Vogt's greatest successes working just as well in the world inhabited by the rest of us support the idea that he may have been onto something.

Above all, Reflections leaves one with the impression that while A.E.'s Venn diagram - or Van diagram if you like - may not always have intersected tidily with the planet upon which the rest of us live, he seems like an incredibly nice guy, and one whom it would have been fun to hang around with.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.

England, My England

D.H. Lawrence England, My England (1922)
Given that this was first published after Lawrence had taken to a semi-nomadic existence, having left England after some kids threw rocks at his wife, I'd assumed these ten short stories might represent an exercise in nostalgia - capturing moments of an English working class life which, for the author, had become past tense. However, it turns out that the stories were written between 1913 and 1921, albeit with some revision prior to publication, so I could be way off the mark. That said, I suspect there may be some element of attempting to capture a whiff of the old country even if it's hardly one seen through rose tinted spectacles. The cover promises the decline of a whole social ethos in the wake of the first world war, which is pretty much what it delivers, albeit as emotional conflicts - some fairly low level - which are surely as much part of the human condition as the hallmark of any one particular era. There's betrayal, drama, grief, and disappointment, although no more so than usual for one of Dave's books.

Unfortunately, a few of the tales don't really seem to do much beyond invoking the mood of a gloomy Sunday afternoon in rural Nottinghamshire, or at least I found them a little bogged down with their own introspection. Tickets, Please has its moments, and The Blind Man, Wintry Peacock, and You Touched Me are all blessed with just enough texture to keep things interesting; and Fanny and Annie opens with a paragraph so structurally startling as to foreshadow some of A.E. van Vogt's weirder excesses.

Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fir. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now!

Regrettably, three day later I don't remember anything about Fanny and Annie, and it's the same for a couple of the others. England, My England has its moments, but it's probably not the one you want to start off with.

Time Tolls for Toro

Robert Moore Williams Time Tolls for Toro (2014)
Regular readers may possibly be aware that I've developed a bit of a fascination with Robert Moore Williams, generally overlooked author of an almost uniquely peculiar body of science-fiction writing. He was a populist who churned them out, very much at home in the digests and so easily dismissed as pulp, and while his writing style allows for the occasional poetic flourish, he reads very much as the self-taught enthusiast bashing them out without concessions to literature or even basic literary conventions. His stories tend to follow their own internal logic, probably made up as he went along complete with disorientating dramatic swerves and elements which seem so poorly fitted to the narrative that it's tempting to think of Williams as having been the science-fiction equivalent of Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowry.

Yet beyond the occasionally tangible influence of Abraham Merritt's hard-boiled adventure, Williams writing always seems to hint at some intense pseudo-spiritual undercurrent, something almost theosophical and doubtless drawn from the author's own idiosyncratic understanding of reality, itself informed by his schizophrenia; so even when he's writing what amounts to a hard-boiled thriller with some minor element which just about tips it over into science-fiction, it feels somehow biblical in essence. As may not come as much of a surprise from the above description, he was approximately living on the same island as A.E. van Vogt, and given van Vogt's significantly having influenced Philip K. Dick, it probably shouldn't raise too many eyebrows that 1950's Danger is My Destiny - one of the eleven short stories in this collection - features a detective on the trail of a suspect who turns out to be himself; and the other ten stories are of equivalent quality - both wonky and startling, or containing startling ideas, at the same time.

After six novels by this guy, I've anticipated a degree of burn out, as can often occur with the work of those taking what may seem like an exclusively intuitive approach, but it hasn't happened yet; and while some of these are clearly the work of someone who wasn't playing with quite the same deck as the rest of us, there's always something new and unexpected thrown up by the sparkly, crackly energy of Williams' narrative.

Lord of the Flies

William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
I was approaching the point at which it had begun to feel almost embarrassing to admit I'd never read Lord of the Flies. I recall my mother owning a copy with a severed pig's head on the cover but it wasn't among those few titles half-heartedly shunted in our direction at school, and I never saw the movie either; so it seemed like time.

As I'm sure you all know, it's about a bunch of kids getting marooned on an island and acting like wankers - which I believe was actually Golding's original title. Published in 1954 and without bothering to check, it strikes me as likely that it may have been inspired by the populist politics which brought about the second world war, and more specifically how so many people fell hook, line and sinker for all that rabble-rousing tribal bullshit. Lord of the Flies also therefore works fairly well as a commentary upon our own times, and so much so that I'm surprised no point-missing edgelord twat has yet claimed it for a warning against the perils of socialism, as has happened with Orwell's 1984 on a couple of bewildering occasions. It does approximately the same thing as Conrad's Heart of Darkness - positing that we are all capable of acting like wankers - and has the sort of unambiguously direct impact which justifies its reputation as a classic.

All the same, I really didn't enjoy it like I thought I would. Golding's prose is mostly tight and functional with an occasional flourish of admittedly dark poetry, but unfortunately spattered with slightly clumsy passages which cause the narrative to stumble somewhat, such as when Ralph allows the swollen flap of his cheek to close his eye again at the beginning of chapter eleven. He's been in a fight, so I assume he's been punched in the face - although it isn't specifically mentioned so far as I can see - but a flap?

Simon was speaking almost in his ear. Ralph, found that he had rock painfully gripped in both hands, found his body arched, the muscles of his neck stiff, his mouth strained open.

'You'll get back to where you came from.'

Simon nodded as he spoke. He was kneeling on one knee, looking down from a higher rock, which he held with both hands; his other leg stretched down to Ralph's level.

'It's so big, I mean—'

Simon nodded.

What's so big? I can't even tell who has spoken, and although this particular game of Twister is occurring as the lads circumnavigate a cliff face, the activity is implied rather than stated; so from time to time the novel does that thing of omitting some vital piece of information from a sentence, disorientating readers by obliging us to figure it out; so it's a little like reading A.E. van Vogt in places, except Alfred Elton did it on purpose for the sake of atmosphere.

So it's good, and the reputation is probably deserved, but I thought it would be better somehow.

The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (1956)
This is why I've tended to steer clear of the classics. I'm sure everything said of this novel is approximately true, but as with Asimov's Foundation, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Larry Niven's entire body of work, and many, many others, I probably should have read it when I was a teenager; because I'm nearly fifty-five and I think the moment has gone for myself and this novel. I don't recall being particularly knocked out by The Demolished Man either, for what that may be worth.

The Stars My Destination tells of Gully Foyle, a raging thickie stranded in space who swears bloody vengeance on the crew of a passing spaceship which fails to respond to his distress call. He's eventually rescued by other means, has his face tattooed, receives an education, acquires superhuman powers, disguises himself as the bon vivant owner of a weird futuristic fairground and, in pursuing his vendetta, saves the world from a super-weapon which presumably serves as part of some cold war metaphor. It's weird, fast-paced, imaginative, and ticks all of the boxes which might require ticking, and yet I just wasn't feeling it. For all it has in its favour, it tends to jabber in much the same way as C.M. Kornbluth, lending the text the slightly disagreeable jazzy quality of those Marx Brothers movies amounting to somebody saying something stupid very fast, and that's before we even get to the parole in libertà of the finale.

Some men on the internet said that The Stars My Destination is a precursor to cyberpunk with its pacing and corporate espionage, but I couldn't really give a shit about cyberpunk, so one might just as well call it a precursor to Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face for all the difference it makes. Certainly it's hard not to think of said Ultravox defusing novelty record each time Gully Foyle asks what's a matter, you?, which he does with frequency sufficient for me to have noticed.

The story is actually, on close inspection, a little too weird to be sustainable under ordinary circumstances and is as such exactly the sort of thing A.E. van Vogt churned out on a fairly regular basis, except van Vogt usually made it work in spite of itself, screwy shit that doesn't quite add up being his natural literary habitat. So The Stars My Destination is good, or at least it's not bad, but it could have been better and probably was when I was fifteen. Never mind.

The Witches of Karres

James H. Schmitz The Witches of Karres (1966)
Thanks to Research Alpha, co-written with A.E. van Vogt and which I read back in February, Schmitz was seeming a lot like one of those great, long overlooked etc. etc. authors for a moment there, so it was exciting to have found this so soon after; and then I tried to read it.

In its favour - and it has a lot in its favour - The Witches of Karres is packed with the kind of weird and wonderful ideas which I can see would have appealed to his co-writer on Research Alpha; and Schmitz writes well, with genuine wit, and - taken in isolation - much of what he writes is a delight; yet once past the first couple of chapters, I was bored pretty much solid despite everything. Apparently this novel was formed from a couple of thematically linked short stories bolted together, and my guess would be that they probably worked fine as short stories and maybe didn't require inclusion in this three-but-felt-like-seven-hundred page marathon. The wit and the imagination may remain intact, but reduced to a much smaller fraction of the whole, I guess it all turns to wallpaper.

For anyone still wondering, The Witches of Karres is almost a fairy story transposed to space with a thoroughly Lovecraftian monster waiting at the end of the book. The witches are three little girls from the planet Karres, a world which is able to move around in space to elude its enemies, not least of these being the entity behind the terrifying worm weather, as it is known. As a novel, Witches has no business being quite such a slog given the story it attempts to tell, but a slog it unfortunately is.

While we're here, should anyone have noticed a Goodreads review implying that The Witches of Karres has some sort of paedophile subtext, the detail to which this person refers is specifically that one of the little girls fancies the starship captain who rescues her, thoroughly embarrassing the aforementioned starship captain, which hardly seems significant given all those children's stories I seem to recall wherein little girls develop a crush on some rescuing father figure or some dashing yet unobtainable knight; and which hardly leaves The Witches of Karres looking like the sort of thing you'd expect to find on Gary Glitter's hard drive. I also seem to remember Asterix's dog falling in love with Geriatrix's wife, which doesn't make her the lovely Debbie McGee. It's not that hard to understand, but the implication is about what I'd expect of an individual with a peace symbol and a smiley face in rainbow colours as their avatar. Scratch any one of those tie-dyed crusading new age fuckers and nine times out of ten you'll find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.