Fred & Geoffrey Hoyle - Fifth Planet (1963)

 

I promised myself I wasn't going to have any more on the grounds of 1970's Seven Steps to the Sun having bordered on unreadable, but here I am. Seven Steps to the Sun featured this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Fred Hoyle, as you may recall, was the astronomer who briefly taught Stephen Hawking and became one of his most vocal opponents, actually coining the term Big Bang while taking the piss out of the theory. Fifth Planet is better than Seven Steps - which was also cowritten with his son - although it suffers from traces of the same clunk. Domestic scenes abruptly focus upon the musings of Conway, the main character, and segue without preamble into five or six pages of theory concerning rocketry, orbital dynamics of planets, gravity or whatever. These digressions are reasonably interesting and doubtless Asimov would be proud, but the switch from one form of description to the other is clumsy, particularly when the straightforward narrative passages are themselves distinctly weird in tone:

Mike was waiting for her. He was a big, powerful fellow, with shortish hair, handsome rather than good-looking. In his official dossier he was described as well coordinated, and the figures for his reaction times were very good indeed.

Fifth Planet is set about one hundred years in the future, at least as of 1962, and writing in the introduction, Fred himself admits that attempts to predict the shape of future society usually end up looking pretty silly, so the world of Fifth Planet is conspicuously extrapolated from 1963, but 1963 as experienced by an unswinging science guy who probably doesn't play well with others, doesn't fully understand women, and fucking loves equations. Anything outside his somewhat sheltered existence seems to be drawn from movies, television, or cheap paperbacks, at a guess - James Bond mashed up with bits of kitchen sink dramas, retold by someone either on the spectrum or who is simply wound too tight. To be fair, the limits of such a perspective are acknowledged if not actually understood by the main character, and presumably at least one of the authors.

Although he could hardly believe it, Conway realised that to most people things were the other way round. It was usually the calculations on paper that seemed obscure. To most people calculations only acquired a meaning when they were translated into material terms. It was a question of the way you saw the world. Conway saw it in terms of the abstractions of the mind, not in terms of concrete everyday things. 

This goes some way towards alleviating the otherwise uneven and slightly rigid tone of the opening chapters, and once we're done with this admission, the novel starts to look up.

Conway is married to a woman he doesn't understand, a smashing dolly bird - as they were known back then - who isn't very bright and openly shags other men, with hubby obliged to accept that this is simply the way she is. Meanwhile, an alien solar system crosses celestial paths with our own, close enough to shift a few of our local planets into slightly wobblier orbits, but also close enough to visit in rocket ships not much further advanced than those which would take us to the moon at the end of the decade - and the technology involved seems to be the only concession to this being set in 2087. Expeditions are sent to Achilles, the planet of this roving system which most resembles Earth. They find plants but no animal life, and both teams, Russian and American, experience difficulties weird enough to have been drawn from the zone in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. Some of them make it back to Earth, but there's an alien consciousness among them, one which ends up migrating to Conway's wife.

If the novel retains its clunk in certain respects, this is easily forgotten by the second half, which compensates for any literary shortcomings with disquieting surrealism founded in some of the weirder claims of theoretical physics, and even the unflattering portrayal of Conway's wife is redeemed by the story. This is probably the best Hoyle I've read, which I didn't expect. It opens as a humourless version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and yet somehow ends up making Arthur C. Clarke seem frivolous.

August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

The Dr. Who Annual 1974

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analog September 2008

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog September 2008 (2008)
This was the first issue of Analog I ever bought, and it probably wasn't a great place to start. I've long held The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by Henry G. Stratmann to be the worst short story I've ever read. Coming back to it fifteen years later, I realise it's not quite so painfully didactic as I recall, and online research reveals the author to be an almost certainly above average decent guy whom I find difficult to square with this particular example of his writing. Last Temptation reads like fundamentalist Christian science-fiction written by someone who prefers movies to books and who might be more at home churning out romance novels. The story is that mysterious and powerful aliens have moved Mars into a lower orbit around the sun, somehow rendering it habitable, but only two people are allowed to visit - a man and a woman, and maybe you can see where this is heading. She's deeply religious. He comes from a more scientific background and is portrayed as cynical - although it seems he's simply a realist to me. The two of them discover a giant pyramid within which they are subjected to a number of spiritual and moral trials seemingly to determine whether or not humanity will be allowed to colonise. On this, my second reading, the story isn't quite so simplistic as I've made it sound, but as with much fiction driven by religious ideology, it feels as though we're playing with a stacked deck, are perhaps even subject to a certain level of condescension, and the symbolism seems at least as heavy-handed as painfully allegorical episodes of sixties Star Trek - although I sort of enjoyed Stratmann replacing the apple in the Garden of Eden with a radish, for what it may be worth.

That being said, it's better than I remember and, I would guess, is more likely a philosophical tale which suffers from the necessary fine balance having eluded its author, rather than the Bible-thumping sermon for which I took it in 2008. It doesn't help that a couple of deferential references to romantic fiction do nothing to prevent it reading like the same, or the number of times Stratmann invokes a specific TV show or movie.

He looked up at the towering structure and growled, 'A pyramid on Mars. With our luck, we'll find Sutekh waiting for us inside.'

'Who?'

Martin smiled mischievously. 'That's right.'

I'm sure that works for most of those who would get the reference, and who would then go on to declare the author a genius in the tradition of literary giants such as Terrance Dicks, but it didn't do a lot for me. I still find The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya vaguely annoying, but after this second reading I've warmed to the idea that Stratmann has probably written better.

Elsewhere in the magazine we find an article about nanotechnology which I didn't really understand and three further short stories which, if not terrible, mostly had me hoping the next one would be better, which it wasn't. We close with one of those review columns which simply relates a detailed plot outline of each title under discussion, then part two of the presumably novel length Tracking by David R. Palmer. Tracking is written in an experimental first person narrative shorthand which tends to eschew pronouns and articles so as to presumably mimic the sensation of experience, so it reads like Chris Claremont's thought bubbles from eighties issues of X-Men. It sort of works once you're used to it, but forty pages seems like a lot and I gave up after about twenty.

The best thing about this were Stanley Schmidt's editorial and his memorial to Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, even his response to some letters page dingus accusing him of expressing eugenicist sympathies in a previous issue is more interesting than the rest of it. I guess this explains why I never became a regular reader.

Flight 714

Hergé Flight 714 (1968)
Several people have told me I shouldn't be reading Tintin just as I shouldn't be reading the works of others on the list. Hergé was a collaborator and Nazi sympathiser, you see, except as per fucking usual he actually wasn't, just as it is with those other persons on the roll call of individuals denounced due to the contemporary equivalent of Rik from the Young Ones jumping up and down and screaming, look at me, everybody, I found one, because that's apparently all it takes. That said, I probably shouldn't mention that I picked this up as light relief from John Toland's nine-hundred page biography of Adolf Hitler on the grounds that it gets a bit depressing once you hit 1942.

Apparently I just did. Never mind.

I grew up on a farm in the middle of the rural English nowhere, and every two weeks or so we were subject to a visit by a mobile library. I was just about big enough to cope with the steps and would climb up into the rear of the truck, lined with shelves, and toddle off towards the back where they kept the children's books. The cover of this one really grabbed my attention, and so it served as my introduction to Tintin, an obsession which kept me going for the next couple of years. I came to prefer Asterix, but at the time I felt the cover of Asterix in Spain seemed smug and frivolous, whereas Tintin took itself just seriously enough to appeal to me as I struggled to make sense of the world. So this is possibly where it all started, whatever it may be.

Hergé - not actually a Nazi sympathiser by any meaningful description unless you believe my opening paragraph makes me one - seemed to be on a mission to educate his audience, to send them to far flung places and cultures without patronising them, and to portray those cultures and encounters with realism and a degree of sympathy, formative efforts predating The Blue Lotus notwithstanding. Of course, Tintin wasn't actually journalism and took an occasionally speculative digression - sending the gang to the moon for one example, and Flight 714 for another.

If Destination Moon skates fairly close to the hard science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, this one gets even weirder in drawing on the theories, such as they are, of Robert Charroux who significantly influenced Erich von Däniken. So not only do we have the discovery of hidden subterranean temples constructed by ancient astronauts, but also telepathy, and a lift back to civilisation facilitated by flying saucer, albeit in hallucinatory terms.

This was Hergé's penultimate Tintin adventure, assembled following failure to relaunch as an abstract artist, while significantly disgruntled by the success of Asterix, and himself somewhat bored of his own characters. This much is roughly apparent from Flight 714 only barely having a story - and the title names the flight they didn't take because they ended up on this one - with nothing so complex as the intrigue and espionage of previous escapades; and the paranormal element feels a little as though Georges was simply trying to keep himself invested. Additionally, some of the background material, notably the then fairly trendy supersonic passenger jet, were drawn by assistants.

Nevertheless, despite all that's stacked against it, Flight 714 is a great book - just stranger than we'd come to expect. The slapstick is never far away, never overdone, and remains funny throughout; and the pacing is such that it never feels as though we're treading water, waiting for the next scene, even where the lack of obvious direction has become apparent; and of course the art is, as ever, outstanding.

Even as the comeback album its author didn't really want to record, Flight 714 stands with the best of them, and enough so as to have retained its charm half a century later.

The Bladerunner

Alan E. Nourse The Bladerunner (1974)
Nope, not that one. This is the original novel from which Ridley Scott pinched the name for his movie about how robots have feelings too. He thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounded a bit gay or something. This is why the term bladerunner doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Ridley's high-tech Hovis commercial, and nor does the movie feature anything to which it might apply, unless you regard Han Solo's job as sort of like running along the blade of a massive knife. Here the bladerunner is one Billy Gimp, and his job is to literally run scalpels and associated medical paraphernalia to a medical professional operating outside the law; and so the title makes some fucking sense, Ridley.

Anyway, griping aside, Nourse's novel seems unusually prescient - and keeping in mind that the science-fiction novel has historically been fairly lousy at predicting the future once you get past Arthur C. Clarke and Murray Leinster. Here we find a world for which 2007 was about a decade ago, so it's more or less the present, and although it's a present which approximately resembles 1974, technologically speaking, we have huge sections of the American populace turning its back on the medical establishment, refusing vaccines and so facilitating a massive pandemic. The social furniture is otherwise mostly different, and thankfully Nourse was wrong about the medical establishment pursuing a eugenic agenda, but as a doctor, his predictions regarding the treatment of illness in modern America - or the disease industry as Jello Biafra has called it - were unfortunately well informed in many respects. At least you can see how William Burroughs found potential in this material when it came to writing his treatment for the movie which was never made.

The Bladerunner is approximately a high-tech thriller, or at least high-tech as of 1974, and it's interesting that its urban landscape seems somewhat closer to what we saw in the unrelated movie than anything from Dick's novel; but it's probably not an overlooked classic. The prose does its job, but had the movie option been taken up beyond just a cool title, it's hard to shake the feeling that it probably would have been a Lorimar production featuring Roddy McDowell and Patrick Duffy. Also, the happy ending feels a little weird given the somewhat darker build up.

Yet it's still fucking better than Robots Have Feelings Too.

Freedom of Choice

Evie Nagy Freedom of Choice (2015)
This is one of a series of books, each dedicated to the discussion of a classic album - although most of them are exactly what you would expect from the term classic album - the usual Mojo magazine suspects which I've either never heard or which have otherwise left me unmoved; but happily, Devo somehow made the cut. I still find this, their third album, a bit of an odd choice for the series. For myself, their greatest album is usually the one you're listening to, possibly excepting Smooth Noodle Maps which somehow feels as though it went into a room to look for something and then forgot why it was there. Freedom of Choice always felt like a transitional set to me, lacking either the uneasy mania of Duty Now for the Future or the synthetic Spartan polish of New Traditionalists; but it's the one which sold by the truckload and which briefly transformed Devo into a household name, and of which the band themselves seem to be the fondest, so why not? If it's Devo, I'm not complaining.

Excepting Arthur C. Clarke's communication satellites, Devo may be the one example of science-fiction actually predicting something; and while de-evolution might seem an unusually pessimistic idea, perhaps even one reliant upon specific readings of societal facts, the last four years of US politics look one fuck of a lot like something from the Devo manual. This is a group to whom we probably should have been listening.

Nagy anatomically dissects each individual track of the album, taking her conclusions as starting points for biographical detail and  observation, orchestrating it all as a pleasantly unified thesis in support of just why we should have been listening to Devo, even why the world would have been a better place had we been listening to Devo - although I can't actually be sure that this isn't something I've read into the text rather than something Nagy necessarily wrote. In any case, it's a fascinating read, and one which threw up quite a few surprises; plus it reminded me why I hate the NME, which is always worth remembering.

I still don't really know how to explain Devo to those who don't get it, but this book made me feel a little bit more righteous nevertheless, so praise Jesus and pass the spud-gun.

Doctor Who and the Daemons

 

Barry Letts Doctor Who and the Daemons (1974)
Just to get the cloying stench of nostalgia out of the way, specifically the increasingly widespread notion of the quality of a work being equivalent to whether one is able to remember it from childhood, I was nuts for Who when I was a kid and The Daemons, first broadcast in 1971, constitutes my absolute earliest memory of the show. I would have been five. My memory is specifically of being terrified as I watched Jon Pertwee menaced by Bok, a living stone gargoyle, in a subterranean burial chamber. Somehow attendant to this memory is that of me informing my mother that it would be okay for me to watch Doctor Who from that point on because it no longer scared me as it had once done - which I vaguely recall as having been a cause for concern.

I became a regular and obsessive viewer from that point on. I bought the Radio Times special in 1973 and what little mind I had then developed was blown by the realisation of there having been both doctors and stories prior to Jon Pertwee. It never occurred to me that I might ever get to see, or at least experience, any of them because television was an ephemeral medium and I'd missed the boat. Naturally I went wild for the Target novelisations when they started to show up on the shelves of my local WHSmith. There were just five of them - three from the Hartnell era and two Pertwees. I wasn't much of a reader but I bought and read them all, assuming that would probably be the lot.

Then another five came out, and because I'd sent my stamped addressed envelope and coupon off to Target Books, I was forewarned and excited almost to the point of exploding. If they could just keep novelising the stories I'd missed due to either being too young or not actually having been born, I could die happy.

I expect persons of similar vintage will have recognised at least some of this, and a few of them give Doctor Who and the Daemons five stars on Goodreads. Five stars is the rating you give a book on Goodreads if your reaction is that it was amazing. I assume five stars also covers reactions as diverse as I can remember this from my childhood and I see it has a Doctor Who logo on the cover, thus illustrating the general worthlessness of the system.

The Daemons, which is also one of the first Who serials I ever saw on VHS, was inspired by Barry Letts reading Dennis Wheatley and Robert Sloman concluding that Erich von Däniken had proved that there were spacemen on Earth before we arrived, which he really hadn't. The thing we saw on the telly additionally betrays significant influences from John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos, Quatermass, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End at a bit of a stretch, and all that folk horror which was doing the rounds in the early seventies. It was a lot of fun and nearly caused me to shit myself when I was five.

The novelisation was great when I was a kid who hadn't actually read much of anything, but is underwhelming now that I'm in my fifties - which I state as a fully grown man who is nevertheless still able to take pleasure from seventies Defenders comics. It's not badly written. Letts makes some efforts to flesh things out a little, presenting more than we actually saw on the screen, but the bottom line is that it remains a two-hundred page blow by blow account of what we would have seen had we been sat in front of the telly back in June, 1971. There's a lot of running around while people get tied up and held captive in wooden trunks, which simply fails to hold the attention as prose, meaning the infodumps are more interesting than anything done with that info in the course of the story. It's readable, even now that I'm old and fat, but it really isn't amazing. Sorry.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

 

Frank Hampson Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future (1951)
I picked up a few of these collected editions for pennies back in the nineties in some remaindered book store and only recently realised I'm still yet to read them all; and this particular one - collecting a year and a half's worth of Eagle strips amounting to the first Dan Dare story - is now several hundred quid on eBay, so that's nice, or possibly just weird.

My Dare standard was formed early on from a stack of Eagle annuals my dad passed onto me when I was a kid and probably at the right age to appreciate them without any of the strip's shortcomings getting in the way. The shortcomings aren't really anything worth getting too upset about given that this was a children's strip from the fifties, published by a man of certain religious convictions, and which probably shouldn't be judged by whatever standards one might apply to, off the top of my head, the oeuvre of J.G. Ballard; but it nevertheless feels like this first epic represented an experiment in progress with Dare still finding his feet, not least in a technical sense. What doubtless worked well as seventy-seven snappy weekly instalments seems a little jittery when digested in just a couple of sittings; and strangest of all is that the lettering - of all things - is particularly ropey, suggesting panels of artwork drawn to some vague notion of a script, complete with speculative speech bubbles which were either too large, too small, or poorly situated once time came to add the dialogue. It's not a massive problem, but it's something which requires a little getting used to whenever yet another explanation wanders out of its balloon to spill across the background. Also, in the absence of original artwork, the reproduction in this volume - taken directly from issues of the comic - tends to look a little overexposed here and there, which is a shame because Hampson's drawings were obviously painstaking and beautiful. I'm sure this was the best they could do in 1988, but it's nevertheless odd that the whole should seem so technically uneven in comparison even to the American comics of the time.

Still, I'm not complaining because even poor reception is unable to diminish the imagination and inspiration which informed this thing, even as it took these first faltering steps. Of course, it's Biggles in space and is as such an expression of the values of its time. The attitudes are entirely colonial and patriarchal, derived from a notion of authority figures as essentially decent, even altruistic. Sir Hubert Guest huffs and puffs when he realises he's sharing his spaceship with a woman and that the cabin will doubtless soon be full of washing lines strung with her unmentionables, but he gets over it, and Professor Jocelyn Peabody is at least spared the more traditional indignity of providing brainlessly imperiled eye-candy fit only to be rescued from the clutches of beastly foreign types. Venus is more or less colonial Africa but its people are treated with sympathy and, excepting the Mekon himself, ideology is the villain rather than those in its sway. The Treens recall colonial attitudes towards black Africans up to a point, but don't seem inherently malign and their bad guy status comes mostly from a misguided devotion to the ruthless logical superscience of the Mekon - not too hard to work out where that came from so close to the second world war. I gather this story was written back when Venus was still considered potentially habitable, and even that Arthur C. Clarke was consulted regarding the composition of the complex alien ecosystem and civilisation into which Hampson deposited our heroes. So even if we only experience the background detail in passing, it's convincing.

Naturally there are a few narrative howlers, my favourite being the fact that the Mekon had a full-sized replica of an Earth city built apparently just for the look on the faces of his human captives when he gratuitously blows it up. There's also the final battle to consider. The Treens are revealed as hating sports - just like the bad eggs they are - and have therefore destroyed all of their horse equivalent animals many years before as scientifically inefficient, or something like that. Spotting these details as a weakness, Space Fleet wins the day by shipping battalions of horseback fighters to Venus to storm Mekonta, the capital - specifically grenadier guards and a whole shitload of Tom Mix inspired cowboys direct from Texas. It's the sort of plotting which doubtless filled the heads of small boys in the fifties and is patently fucking ridiculous, but scores highly on its raw peculiar charm.

Following on from those Eagle annuals, I renewed my acquaintance with Dan Dare when 2000AD reincarnated him as Sid Vicious back in 1977, a version which seems not too fondly remembered and which has been criticised as a ropey, opportunistic besmirchment of the values represented by the original strip. While it's true that Belardinelli's Dare may have been a revision slightly too far, it's interesting to note that Hampson's Dare was itself likewise occasionally ropey, hamstrung by technical problems, and nothing like so confident as we may choose to remember. However, the art was great, and its generous, altruistic spirit still resonates regardless of contemporary wibbling concerns about things being of their time in the usual pejorative sense. I don't actually know if anyone ever found the original artwork since this edition was put together, or even if any efforts may have been made towards restoration in the intervening years, but Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future remains worthy of preservation, regardless.

Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust

K.H. Scheer & Walter Ernstling Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust (1961)
I remember seeing a shitload of these in WHSmith when I was a kid, and yet only recently have I come to realise that Perry Rhodan is the main character of the series rather than its author. I hadn't bothered with any of them because I generally prefer to start a series at the beginning for obvious reasons, but it turns out that this was the first one, so here we go.

Actually, it's a translation of the first two, Perry Rhodan having been a weekly digest first published in Germany - each week a new novella amounting to sixty or seventy pages of text. A minimum of research has revealed that Perry endured for decades - still keeping to that weekly schedule - was massively popular, and seems to have given birth to the story arc, from what I can tell. By story arc I mean self-contained tales which form part of a larger narrative within an even broader evolving continuity, as distinct from three or four novels with the same setting or the sort of stuff Edgar Rice Burroughs used to churn out. Maybe there have been earlier story arcs, but I can't think of any right now.

As with both Doctor Who and 2000AD comic, the pressure of a weekly schedule compelled the creators to a certain degree of homage, borrowing, or whatever you would prefer to call it, and the legend accordingly has it that Perry Rhodan has been caught up in more or less every conceivable science-fiction scenario at one point or another, and so we begin the saga with first contact.

These books have a reputation for being somewhat pulpy. This one is more uneven than anything, albeit uneven with a certain pulpy sensibility in evidence here and there. The story is quite slow, even laborious as it tells of Rhodan's historic moon landing in detail which clearly foreshadows the Apollo missions and reads very much like the work of Arthur C. Clarke. Our guys encounter the scout ship of an advanced alien race stranded on the moon, at which point traces of pulp become discernable. One of the aliens is a female called Thora, summoning unfortunately intrusive images of Songs of Praise - at least for me; and we learn that the marooned Arkonides have become a degenerate race, meaning they've reached the peak of evolutionary perfection but now spend all day sat on their fat asses watching telly. This is literally why they're stranded on the moon - because they can't be bothered. Rhodan returns to Earth with a couple of the livelier Arkonides, obliging all of those nuclear superpowers of the sixties to unite and cooperate, having at last realised that Earth is just one planet at the edge of a much larger galactic civilisation. This last element of the story actually seems to have drawn inspiration from accounts of the space brothers as related by Adamski and all of those other flying saucer abductees of the fifties.

So it isn't great literature, but neither is it the worst thing I've ever read, and it's easy to see why Perry Rhodan was popular. The writing is a little uneven, and the narrative occasionally treads water - presumably stretching things out just enough to make up a page count - and the characters creak a little, but it was written - or at least translated - by people with some ability, and doesn't suffer from any of the ineptitude I've seen perpetrated by certain more recent authors. There's a sort of screwy enthusiasm here, that of a fairly stupid story told well, and perhaps Perry deserves to be remembered with a little more dignity than has generally been the case.

Voices from the Sky

Arthur C. Clarke Voices from the Sky (1965)
This is a collection of Clarke's opinion pieces, essays from magazines, and even an award acceptance speech. I picked it up assuming it would be fiction, but it isn't a problem because he writes this sort of thing well, even seeming a little more confident talking about communications satellites and space travel without having to wrap the ideas around a cast of fictional characters. Clarke is of course celebrated as having predicted the communications satellite, and what is written here further illustrates the significance of this, and how much it has changed our society - although the man himself demonstrates healthy reticence when it comes to blowing his own trumpet, which is probably for the best given certain other predictions. Whilst Clarke was unusually insightful regarding his thoughts on where technology would take us, Voices from the Sky serves as a reminder that science-fiction reveals more about the time during which it was written than anything genuinely predictive, despite its best intentions. Clarke's hit rate probably doesn't significantly improve on that of poor old Hugo Gernsback, and for every premonition of the internet, there's some screwy dead end counterpart - how global communication will oblige the entire world to learn English, and we'll be looking into accelerated sleep machines which allow us to get by on just two hours, making it easier to communicate with people in countries where it's the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, his essays are fascinating, even where he's been proven wrong; and if certain inevitably colonial attitudes seem a little musty in places, as with Kenneth Clark - of Civilisation fame but no relation - his understated, slightly astringent sense of humour never fails to lighten the tone.

Islands in the Sky

Arthur C. Clarke Islands in the Sky (1952)
Here's another early Arthur featuring a cast of nerds, squares, Poindexters and Brainiacs who point at things and then furnish each other with detailed scientific explanations as to what those things are, and in the case of Islands in the Sky, they're mostly rockets and space stations. This one's a juvie, but is nonetheless enjoyable for all of its edumacational aspirations thanks to Clarke's clear, engrossing prose - and I would have added timeless to the description but for Islands being so firmly nailed to the early fifties that I'm sure some hipster will already have it filed under some ludicrous invented classification, ovaltinepunk or something of the sort. If you're sat there clapping your hands and squealing at the idea of ovaltinepunk as an exciting new retro-genre, please kill yourself now.

Anyway, a wholesome and duly studious young lad wins a competition on the telly, and the prize is a visit to a space station, and thus do we have a novel. Whilst Clarke is rightly praised for having forseen all sorts - not least being the communication satellite - most striking from a twenty-first century perspective is that this was written in a world without computers, and of complex calculations performed on a slide rule, and of apprenticeships undertaken once you've left school; so it's more interesting in terms of the history of futurism, which I didn't expect.

It's striking just how much Clarke failed to predict; which is thrown into sharp relief when the novel occasionally puffs itself up like Kenneth Clarke to point out that actually, this isn't one of your ghastly magazine stories, even though the lineage is earlier acknowledged in a passing reference to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space.

It wouldn't do in a Shakespeare play for all the characters to be floating around in mid-air. So the actors had to use magnetic shoes—a favourite dodge of the old science fiction writers, though this was the only time I ever found them used in reality.

Still, the whole thing is written with such enthusiasm and affection as to negate any pleasure taken in the irony of something so resolutely of the fifties seeming so pleased with its endearingly wonky predictions.

Earthlight

Arthur C. Clarke Earthlight (1955)
I hadn't really planned on reading any more Arthurs, but there I was in Half Price, and - for the first time in many years - without a to be read pile higher than the Empire State waiting for me back home, and thence did my eye come to rest upon a triumvirate of Arthurs, and the other two had great covers; and thusly didst I then recall the pleasure taken in previous Arthurs I had read many years ago, specifically taken in the economy of his prose, cool and clear as spring water lending an unexpected frisson of novelty to subjects which might be deemed a little dry under other circumstances.

I'm not sure why I've written that first paragraph in Marvel Shakespearean, but the point is that I've bought some more Arthur C. Clarke, of which this is the first. Naturally it's hard science-fiction - as the genre has come to be known - meaning speculation based upon scientific principles which are already fairly well understood, and nothing straying too deeply into the realms of aliens, time travel, hyperdrive, or anything too severely hypothetical. That said, our tale is set upon the moon, with colonies established on both Mars and Venus, Earthlight having been written before data from the Mariner or Venera space probes somewhat dispelled the possibility of the latter.

Earthlight is mostly speculation pinned on some story about a dispute between the Earth and moon which loosely alludes to the European colonisation of the Americas and the subsequent declaration of independence. The characters aren't very interesting because it's basically a novel about nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs living on the moon with war breaking out because someone returned someone else's compass late and had quite clearly been using it to play darts, or summink. In fact, the central third of the novel is almost entirely unreadable, being mostly nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs discussing vectors. Thankfully, Clarke really comes into his own when describing a weird and unfamiliar environment, such as are the lunar surface and outer space itself, so the first and final third of the novel are surprisingly gripping, even evocative for something so otherwise dry; seemingly suggesting the possibility of Earthlight being Clarke's attempt to transpose E.E. 'Doc' Smith style space opera into a working universe of known science; and certainly it foreshadows Stephen Baxter more than almost anything else I've read. Some twit on Goodreads described it as appallingly sexist due to the complete absence of female characters, but it seems a bit of a redundant observation, all things considered, and this would be a generally amazing book were it not for the big chunk of espionage landfill clogging up the central section.

Children of the Void

William Dexter Children of the Void (1955)
With Children of the Void, I think I've finally identified a previously unrecognised science-fiction subgenre. I'm tentatively naming it Theosophic science-fiction, in reference to its scrambling towards some image of a cosmos subject to the secretive or otherwise hidden influence of a Godlike figure or figures. Characteristic of the genre - and which arguably excludes Philip K. Dick, although he's clearly related - are novels of occasionally allegorical persuasion utilising science-fiction tropes as support for what otherwise reads like mythology, and making frequent use of telepathy, subterranean realms, idealised or angelic alien visitors, mind control exerted by unknown forces, and other conditions commonly associated with certain forms of schizophrenia. So far I have William Dexter, Richard S. Shaver, and Robert Moore Williams on the list, and George Adamski's accounts of trips aboard flying saucers tick most of the same boxes - keeping in mind here that Shaver similarly claims the events described in his fiction to have actually happened to him. It's been a while since I read Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race but I've a feeling it may also count.

Without getting bogged down in what some other fucker is welcome to write up for Wikipedia if they care that much, I'm not proposing that Theosophic science-fiction should be considered an actual school so much as that it's a distinct type just as Menippean satire is a distinct type, the essence of which can be distilled to A.E. van Vogt rewriting Madam Blavatsky, or thereabouts; so it's arguably cranky, and may count as outsider art in so far as that it's never going to achieve the relative respectability of Asimov or Clarke - although 2001 might have made the list had Arthur thought to include an underground race of mole-people.

I resent the term outsider art, but we're generally talking about novels which may eschew certain literary or grammatic conventions to tell stories with a peculiar dream-like quality not unlike those of the aforementioned van Vogt. It is this quality, often dismissed as a basic inability to tell a coherent tale, which has marginalised the authors under consideration, possibly meaning that I'm the first to attempt to define this thing as an actual literary tradition, and I suggest that it's worth defining as a literary tradition - albeit a vague one - for the sake of discussion. These books have elements in common, not least that they make for very weird reading. I like it very much when a novel surprises me, and Shaver, Dexter, and Williams score very high in this respect.

Anyway, this one came to my attention when someone took the piss out of its admittedly ludicrous cover art on Tumblr, or one of those things - as you will see if you scroll to the foot of the page. It made me laugh but I felt sorry for the book, and a little research revealed it to have formerly been Children of the Void by one William Dexter, rather than Zorgo the Red's Come Be My Friend. Sadly, it seems Dexter's publishers weren't significantly more respectful of his art than whoever mocked up Come Be My Friend. The bat-winged creatures of the planet Varang-Varang are eight rather than hundreds of feet tall, and both front and back cover blurb refer to Earth torn from its orbit and sent hurtling through space. Not only does this not happen in the novel, but it's not even referenced as anything likely, so they were probably thinking of the aforementioned Varang-Varang, upon which our heroes spend some time, and which has enjoyed an unpredictable orbit.

As with World in Eclipse, to which this is the sequel, here we have a fairly straightforward morality tale about how it's good to not blow ourselves up with atomic bombs, in this case expanding the idea to suggest that despite our differences, we're all brothers, that we're all - quite literally - children of the void. This understanding is achieved through a series of scrapes and encounters experienced by Denis Grafton, our narrator, as he travels between worlds in a flying saucer piloted by creatures called the Nagani. They become lost in the tunnels beneath the surface of the near dead world Varang-Varang, then escape to an Earth depopulated by the events of the previous novel - specifically to Crystal Palace and south-east London, which was nice for me seeing as that's my old manor. The Anerley Road even gets a mention.

I would guess that Dexter was inspired by either Wells or Wyndham, as his prose has some of the same qualities, sober or even stately whilst retaining a conversational tone. The story is narrated very much in the style of a travelogue, even incorporating peculiar references to the typewriter our man has on board the Nagani saucer; and as with van Vogt, there's a sense of constant motion combined with a disorientating absence of focus. We're never quite sure where the story is going, or what anyone is trying to achieve, but the pace is such that this never becomes a problem. Children of the Void is one of the weirder things I've read this year, and it came as an immense pleasure after the turgid and surprisingly predictable plod through Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

The Outward Urge

John Wyndham & Lucas Parkes The Outward Urge (1961)
If the name of Lucas Parkes sounds familiar, it's because it's one of the pseudonyms under which Wyndham occasionally wrote, and The Outward Urge was published as a collaboration with himself so as to distinguish it from Triffids and the others, it being quite different in tone. Without bothering to check the dates, I'd say it's more or less Wyndham doing an Arthur C. Clarke, or if that doesn't work, then very much foreshadowing Stephen Baxter's vaguely dynastic tales of realistic space exploration. The Outward Urge begins with the slightly annoyingly named Ticker Troon helping to build a space station in Earth orbit, then sequentially visits the moon, Mars and Venus through successive generations, finally concluding in the general vicinity of the asteroid belt with one of Troon's descendants.

Technically, it's hard science-fiction, as we used to call it back when I were a lad. Wyndham's environmental and technological predictions are based on what was understood to be possible at the time of writing, so rockets travel at rocket speed, and if the Venusian landscape upon which George Troon sets up his first dome seems implausibly habitable, it's nevertheless come a long way, conceptually speaking, since C.S. Lewis wrote Perelandra. As a novel leaning heavily on the issue of how to survive on other planets, The Outward Urge is a little dry by Wyndham's usual standards, although is thankfully free of the creaking slapstick seen in a couple of his lesser novels; but is approximately as readable and compelling as you would expect of the author of Triffids. Although it's possibly worth noting Wyndham having predicted Reagan's star wars initiative, novels of this kind often tend to reveal more about when they were written, and this is particularly true of The Outward Urge, dominated as it is, by cold war politics. So it's a mostly decent read, and particularly so in the case of the Martian episode, but probably not essential.

Return to Mars

Captain W.E. Johns Return to Mars (1955)
A thoroughly good egg of military credentials, and his son - also spiffing - are engaged in a manly hike across Scotland when they find themselves inconvenienced by a spot of rain. They take shelter in an outhouse, and are then discovered by the owner of the outhouse - an eccentric boffin who has been working on his own spaceship, a craft resembling one of those so-called flying saucers. Naturally, the egghead recruits this lucky pair of complete strangers as companions to accompany him on the maiden flight of the Spacemaster, as it is called.

Thus began Johns' Kings of Space to which this is the sequel. Johns, as you may recall, wrote a million novels about the adventures of Biggles, another thoroughly good egg of military credentials. I'm only familiar with Biggles through the many parodies he has inspired, and so I had certain expectations of this one - some of which have been born out, although most have lain fallow.

The novel's initial tendency to reel off statistics of astronomy and physics suggests didactic motives and the influence of either Asimov or Clarke; oddly though, I get the impression that while Johns may have recalled a few science lessons at a very good school, and may even have attended a jolly interesting lecture at the village hall some years before, he seemingly felt that he otherwise knew as much as anyone really needed to know, and so forged ahead without too much time wasted on research. So the novel freewheels a lot whilst nevertheless bristling its moustache as one might expect.

A man of tremendous energy, as small men often are, he had had a great deal of experience in the tropics of disorders caused by instincts, malaria, sandfly fever, and the like. A feature of his nature was a sense of humour that could make a joke out of trouble. He also possessed, often to the Professor's bewilderment, a wonderful vocabulary of RAF slang. When Tiger had put the project before him, asking him if he would attend some patients on Mars, he had, not surprisingly accused him of being "round the bend."

Watch out, everyone! That Toby is a loose fucking cannon!

Despite the sort of level-headed temperament from which such words were born, it seems Johns was a sucker for pseudoscience, using the novel as a means of speculating upon the origin of flying saucers, invoking the alleged destruction of Atlantis, and telepathy as something we are only just beginning to understand.

Tiger frowned. 'I'm not so sure of that. People think more about these things than they used to. Governments, fearing a panic, may have made light of Flying Saucers and tried to account for them in all sorts of ridiculous ways. But nowadays the public are not so easily fooled, and a lot of people believe in them.'

Whilst the saucer phenomena was still in its first decade at the time of writing, scepticism regarding the same was similarly in its infancy, from what I can tell. Even so, John's position - either open-minded or gullible depending on how you look at it - has surprised me, as has most of the novel. The story and situations are fucking ludicrous - it being a children's book written for a generation of good little soldiers - and yet it holds together through being surprisingly well written and espousing none of the usual colonial attitudes one might associate with its vintage. If anything, Return to Mars seems relatively progressive in carrying a vaguely ecological message and even referring directly to the benefits of a welfare state. There's only one girl in the whole thing and she doesn't have a lot to say, but I suppose at least she isn't making tea, sewing or being conspicuously demure. Most unexpected is that Johns occasionally achieves poetic insight beyond the requirements of the genre, as when Rex encounters his first alien.

 

This was altogether different; an event so tremendous, so deeply moving that it awoke in him sensations not to be described in words. For there were no words to fit the case. He felt it was not true. He wanted to tell himself that this simply wasn't true. But he knew it was true. And he knew he wasn't dreaming. Here before him was the answer to the age-old question: were the people of Earth alone in the universe? They were not. What would be the effect of those three simple words on Earth when people knew what he knew? The limitless fields of speculation opened up made his brain reel.

Return to Mars is far from the greatest thing I've ever read, and is frankly ridiculous in all ways but for those I had anticipated - based on things other than actually reading the work of this author; but for what it is, this is a decent book beyond expectation, and I'll be sure to pick up Kings of Space should I happen to see it, although possibly not anything of Biggles.

A for Andromeda

Fred Hoyle & John Elliot A for Andromeda (1962)
A for Andromeda was, as you probably know, a television drama written by Fred Hoyle - astronomer of note and the man who coined the term big bang - and John Elliot, BBC scriptwriter. It's therefore hard science-fiction in, I suppose, the vein of Arthur C. Clarke, and could probably be said to foreshadow at least Carl Sagan's Contact in having been spun upon a message from deep space containing instructions by which our heroes build something futuristic. In Contact they build a device which opens one end of a wormhole leading back to the distant planet from which the message originated. In A for Andromeda they build a really massive futuristic computer, which in turn grows an artificial life form as an interface between itself and the scientists who first detected the message. The TV show was 1961, the book a year later, and Harold Wilson's speech about the white heat of technology came along in 1963, presumably in response to a general mood or feeling of which this was similarly an expression, even a warning.

It starts off fairly well, and the general sobriety of the subjects invoked are such as to allow for even wonder-fuelled discussions of computers the size of buildings seeming more breathtaking than hokey. It's not Arthur C. Clarke, but it manages a decent impersonation thereof for at least the first hundred pages; after which it becomes difficult to tell quite what the story was trying to do as it gets bogged down in cold war politics. Flashes of inspired narrative come and go, but the political intrigue begins to drone a little.

Decent, but it falls some way short of amazing.

Martha Washington Saves the World

Frank Miller & Dave Gibbons
Martha Washington Saves the World (1999)
Last time I thought about it, Give Me Liberty seemed like the best thing Frank Miller had done - the jewel in the proverbial crown of a generally great writer; but the last time I thought about it was probably somewhere around the end of the previous century, back when I made a weekly trek to the local comics shop to buy this kind of thing. I haven't read any Frank Miller since then, and have accumulated a vague impression of him as the guy who wrote that comic about big-titted prostitutes getting murdered, and who courageously spoke up for the rights of corporate America as it stood defenceless against bearded Vegetarians with banners upon which hurtful remarks had been scrawled in angry letters. I believe the crux of Miller's argument ran thus:

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

I'd take a guess and say his racist seventy-year old nan from Cheltenham probably wrote those words, filling in for her famous grandson while he was otherwise engaged in composing dialogue for fictional big-titted prostitutes, but I could be wrong. Furthermore, it turns out that Martha Washington Goes to War - which I seem to remember enjoying at least as much as I enjoyed Give me Liberty - is somehow based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which can't be good.

Give Me Liberty is set in a dystopian future America - or the present, I suppose it might be argued - and follows the life of one of its most underprivileged and generally shat upon daughters. She somehow survives the ghetto, joins the peace corps, and makes her own way to er - greatness, I suppose. The broad appeal of the saga, at least for me, was the contrast of harsh political realism with the absurdity of events on the world stage spiralling out of control in  Martha Washington Goes to War, and then by the time we get to the final part, she's out in space meeting aliens. The narrative of this one is more or less a mash up of Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, both by Arthur C. Clarke, so at least he's borrowing from the best.

Beyond these details, Martha's latest war is waged against Venus, a global artificial intelligence which now seems to control almost everything. As a story it's okay, but it doesn't quite do enough to keep my mind off the unsavoury possibility of this being some Libertarian rant about either the evils of socialism or the right to bear arms; and I can't tell if this is something Miller has embedded in the narrative, or just my reading it from a perspective other than that with which I read the earlier instalments. On the other hand, no big-titted prostitutes were eviscerated in the telling of this story and Dave Gibbons artwork is as gorgeous as it has ever been, so I guess it gets a thumbs up. All the same, I can't help wonder whether I've either missed something, or - on the other hand - might be overthinking it. As a strong, black female lead written without sexual overtones, Martha is great, but her story seems to have thinned out somewhat after the initial Give Me Liberty segment, and a little voice inside me keeps hinting that she might only ever have been Frank Miller's beard, in a manner of speaking; but like I say, maybe I'm overthinking it.

Cosmic Checkmate

Katherine MacLean & Charles V. De Vet Cosmic Checkmate (1962)
Having written mostly short stories, Katherine MacLean is one of those authors who came up through Astounding, Galaxy and the like and who appears to have subsequently slipped through the net. On the strength of The Diploids collection, this seems a terrible shame. Even without considering whatever factors you may wish to consider regarding her being a woman writing in what was a predominantly male field, I'd suggest it's really only the greater page count clocked up by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and the like which could possibly justify her not having been ranked alongside them as one of the giants. She wrote well, and she wrote her own highly distinctive kind of story - science fiction concerned mostly with systems theory, games logic, social interaction and biology. It's difficult to confuse a good MacLean with the work of anyone else.

Cosmic Checkmate is written in collaboration with Charles V. De Vet, whom I hadn't heard of and apparently doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page. Being unfamiliar with the guy, it's difficult to say for sure what his contribution to Cosmic Checkmate might have been; but given that MacLean's involvement is obvious, and that this is fairly disappointing for a book with her name on the cover, I guess De Vet's ideas encompass all those elements which just aren't that interesting.

Our story takes a lone human to the one planet which refuses to have anything to do with Earth's galactic empire. There he finds a bizarrely formal pseudo-human society with all sorts of elaborate honour codes evolved from its unorthodox biological cycle - most likely all designed by Katherine MacLean and very interesting too. Honour demands that the fate of our man and the galaxy depend upon him playing an elaborate chess-like game upon which the alien society is founded. Beyond this, the narrative is unfortunately just not that engaging, and briefly inspired bursts of MacLean - or what I would imagine must have come from her - don't really elevate the tale above something which you read until the point at which you've finished reading it, which is a pity. Even in the context of stories in which the protagonists decide the fate of something much bigger than themselves over a game of chess - never the most mind-boggling subgenre - Cosmic Checkmate just isn't that good. There's a fairly pleasing conclusion about the benefits of a varied and multicultural society - both social and biological - but it really should have been tagged onto a better story.

The Wailing Asteroid

Murray Leinster The Wailing Asteroid (1960)
The Wailing Asteroid belongs to the science-fiction subgenre populated by persons who discover weird abandoned space stations full of mysterious control panels, although there's a chance I may actually be confusing an entire subgenre with the Space Patrol strip in the 1966 TV Comic annual. Anyway, this is Rendevous With Rama on a budget, loosely speaking, the story of a thoroughly Gernsbackian hero-inventor who builds his own spaceship - far in advance of anything either the Russians or his fellow Americans have been able to come up with - in order to investigate an ominous asteroid which is approaching Earth whilst emitting worrying noises - the asteroid I mean, not the bloke.

The novel is firmly of its time as they say, roughly representative of the great bulk of magazine science-fiction we tend not to remember or reprint these days because it wasn't written by Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov, which is a shame. The female characters are seemingly brought along so that the men have something nice for their tea at the end of a hard space-day's exploring, but there's probably not much joy to be had getting pissy about it, and the sexism is fairly low-key, if not actually highly entertaining. Leinster's style is brisk and chatty, working just fine regardless of the reader's age - neither too dense for the kids nor too simplistic for adults, and it's probably not great literature, but neither is it in any sense bad, and it thankfully never reads like a book which wishes it were on the telly. Perhaps ironically and certainly bewilderingly, The Wailing Asteroid was adapted for the big screen as The Terrornauts starring, amongst others, Charles Hawtrey. I'd never heard of it until I read this thing, and all I can find online is the cinematic trailer, which suggests that the production was faithful to Leinster's original, if otherwise as creaky as fuck with effects which make seventies comedy sketches taking the piss out of bad special effects - visible strings with sparklers to suggest rocketry - seem almost slick. The novel is lacking a character who pulls faces and comments oooh - that's a nice big one, so I've no idea what they did with Charles Hawtrey.

Anyway, despite what one might expect from that which I've described thus far, The Wailing Asteroid takes all sorts of genuinely unexpected twists and turns, avoids most of the potential clichés, or at least only commits amusing ones, and squares well with the main reason why I would ever pick up a science-fiction novel in the first place - namely the promise of the unexpected, that one should have no idea as to what will happen. This is why I've avoided giving away too much of what our guys and gals find when they reach the asteroid. I'm not saying it's wonders beyond imagination, but the book follows its own path rather than just ticking off the usual boxes in the style of anything involving evil empires, plucky rebels, and rag-tag fleets.

There's no such word as rag-tag, by the way. It only ever appears in sentences describing large numbers of crap spacecraft and is never used in real life, so if we could all stop perpetuating it, that would be great.

Pardon me.

Anyway, yes - The Wailing Asteroid is great; probably not quite a lost classic, but certainly a lost thumping good yarn.