Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921)
Women in Love has been hailed as Lawrence's greatest novel in certain quarters, and while it's undoubtedly up there, I'm not convinced. As you may already know, Women in Love began life as the second half of The Rainbow before evolving into its own thing, and so continues the lives of Ursula and Gudrun whom we met in the first book while inevitably reiterating certain themes of the same, notably expressing the then revolutionary notion of women as capable of leading an independent existence, or at least one not entirely reliant upon the goodwill of men; but I'm not convinced that this is all it's trying to do.

Rather, if we take The Rainbow as a summation of human progress, society, and ethics dating from Biblical times to the modern era - as represented by the stratified generations in the novel - then Women in Love is principally looking forward to speculate on where we go from here.

It was written as a modern novel in a world wherein electric lighting was still very much a novelty, and accordingly borrows from adjacent modernist territories, particularly the visual arts which reoccur as sign posts - or possibly scratching posts - throughout the book, which itself orders its chapters in a sequence suggesting pictures at an exhibition with the reader moving ponderously from one scene to the next as most of the actual narrative motion occurs somewhere off the side of the page. As with individual paintings in an exhibition, each new chapter brings a different emphasis in terms of mood, colour and subject. Chapter six opens with what could easily be a description of a painting by Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec, introducing Minette who is unmarried, pregnant and fearless - much like Boccioni's similarly employed Modern Idol of 1911. If she seems a harshly lit character, it would probably be more accurate to suggest that she is simply described without sentiment, a description underscored by the then fashionable African totems and Futurist art at the house she shares in Bohemia, as such providing contrast to the tradition and conservative values espoused in chapter eight. Further to this contrast, the stately Breadalby House is acknowledged by Gudrun as resembling an old aquatint, while in chapter eleven the larger estate inspires Ursula to comment that one could have lovely Watteau picnics here.

The divide - here referring to culture and tradition as much as to class - is further emphasised by the mechanisation of the mine workers described in chapter nine, as a new sort of machinery in terms which echo the Futurists whilst unfortunately foreshadowing both Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. Lawrence was clearly aware that where we go from here would be violently mechanistic, having written at least some of the novel during the first great war. Women in Love spends much of its page count engaged in destruction as a creative act, specifically destruction of the old order right down even to basic Victorian sentiment and the comfort of tradition. Gudrun and Ursula are school teachers, modern women teaching the science which has given birth to the twentieth century and even the possibility of the future being more than a simple continuation of the past. Even the title, Women in Love, seems possibly ironic, either a focus shifted to those who were traditionally the object of love and so denied autonomy in the socially sanctioned expression of the equation; or perhaps a bitter comment on love as a more violent and visceral institution than Victorian society would have had it.

Even if, as has been pointed out by Kate Millet, Lawrence's women can never be more than Lawrence's idea of women - an accusation which I rather feel misses the point - the sheer balls of this novel being titled Women in Love in 1921 shouldn't be taken for granted, nor that Ursula and Gudrun are the principal characters, the ones who react against everything herein, not least being the views of the author as voiced through Rupert Birkin. Lawrence was here attempting to cut through the bullshit, including his own bullshit.

Women in Love destroys nineteenth century sentiment without mercy or favouritism, even revealing newly embraced notions of progress as red in tooth and claw, with Gerald Crich exposed as a ruthless objectivist machine in The Industrial Magnate; with the supposed innocence of even children shown as essentially cruel in Rabbit.

What, one might wonder, does Lawrence presume to build in the wake of all this revelation and destruction? I don't know, and I'm not sure he knew, instead finding himself obliged to settle with approximations of what he didn't want and a vague notion of the direction in which we should probably be heading. Inevitably some of the proposed way forward allows for Lawrence's poorly quantified desire for a relationship which allows for a big strapping male friend on the side, but this is a personal preference rather than a manifesto, and I don't think the retroactive application of fashionable gender related neologisms is likely to help anyone in this instance. Otherwise, he's mainly asking questions which no-one had thought to ask in the presumed hope of getting an answer which wasn't too stupid.

There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of chaos, what then?

The novel is the response, I guess, approximately summarised thus:

'You can only have knowledge, strictly,' he replied, 'of things concluded, in the past. It's like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.'

Women in Love was a massively ambitious undertaking, a novel which, in stylistic terms, seems to map rather than describe the emotional and symbolic meaning of that which befalls Gudrun, Ursula, Rupert, and Gerald; so it isn't a realistic novel and arguably has more in common with symbolist art or even Boccioni's states of mind paintings than with the nineteenth century page turner. Unfortunately it's also much longer than it really needs to be to express that which it expresses, which is possibly a hazard of the exploratory nature of its composition - itself a doubtless deliberate echo of Lawrence's own life at the time, particularly as he leaves England in search of whatever may be out there. So if it's not Lawrence's greatest novel, then it was at least his most daring as of 1921 - assuming The Lost Girl, which I've still to read, doesn't turn out to be five-hundred pages of potato prints with rude words written around the circumference. It's also a bit on the chewy side.

Anachrophobia

Jonathan Morris Anachrophobia (2002)
Regardless of all of the usual claims made on behalf of Doctor Who, most of which tend towards hyperbole, its appeal and its greatest strength is to be found in its sheer weirdness, in my opinion, and by weirdness I mean that which unsettles and borders on horror rather than mere whimsy. My earliest memories of the television show are of scenes which disturbed me because they were unlike anything else I'd seen either on the box or out here in the real world - Pertwee menaced by a flapping gargoyle and the weird electronic visual effects of innocents zapped by nightmarish beings. Although my oldest memory is of that particular scene from The Daemons of 1971, I'd presumably already watched bits and pieces of the show because I recall informing my mum that it'll be okay for me to watch this from now on because it doesn't scare me as much as it used to, which was probably a lie. I was five, and from then on I kept watching until it was no longer practical to do so, and its greatest appeal remained, for me, in just how fucking weird the thing often was. Not even the less adventurous, more generic stories were quite able to diminish this aspect, for even when we were reduced to the primary colours of our jolly adventurers being chased along a corridor, the collaborative effort of the show had developed this back story of which we never truly received more than tantalising glimpses, ensuring that new revelations served only to increase the mystery.

So we had this race of near-omnipotent semi-immortals who may or may not have engineered the development of the universe for reasons we couldn't even understand, and in doing so had reduced themselves to sterility, even something akin to senility; and the Doctor is quite naturally one who chose to flee from this awful society. They routinely travelled in time, changed history, and their people were grown from looms, and so this was a civilisation genuinely beyond our imagination, revealed by means of hints rather than anything so reliable as a statement, generally foiling attempts to consolidate any of this back story as canon, canon being something which usually matters most to those who have missed the point and would prefer neatly modular adventures in which escapade five neatly concludes just in time for escapade six and everything remains the same. This is why it all went tits up around the time of that half-human on my mother's side bollocks. It wasn't that the idea contradicted an established continuity so much as that it was blatant button pushing targetted at those whom some focus group had identified as being in the market for a fun time travelling Byronic dreamboat; and, like the notion that David Tennant and John Simm could have attended the same time-kindergarten, it was an attempt to root the whole thing into something more familiar, something safely quirky like one of those cool Tim Burton movies.

Anyway, it seems the viewing public didn't really want Who as dreamy Mr. D'Arcy after all, at least not back in 1996, so the property - as marketing executives and twats so charmingly refer to it - crept back to the book shelves, notably less weird than it had been, but still trying, and nothing like so bland as it would become once it got back on the box.

I was a sucker for this shit up to the age of forty, dutifully buying a couple of these things a month, and I distinctly recall this one being amazing; except my reading age has increased since then just as my tolerance for foolishness has decreased, so revisiting Anachrophobia has been a mixed pleasure.

To first dispense with initial objections, Anachrophobia really picks up in the last five or six chapters, meaning that it's a bit of a slog up until that point - hundreds of pages of a base under siege, running down corridors, doors slammed just in time to shut out slow moving monsters, essentially all the cliches.

But he had to look back. He glanced back up to where the creatures were standing.

As one, they turned to look at him.

Unfortunately this means it reads as a book which would rather have been a television show, and to such an extent that there were passages during which I swear I could sense Moffat feeling pleased with himself. Of course, some will doubtless regard a book which captures the atmosphere of a television show as a triumph, to whom I'd say you might be better off watching the box instead, maybe leave the books to those of us who actually enjoy reading, yeah?

Also there's the additional problem of occasional touches of what reads like fiction aimed at young adults - because apparently they can't handle proper fiction and need to feel that what they're reading somehow includes them, addresses their concerns as young people; so rather than simply describing something, we're told how Anji feels about it. It reminds her of her granny's kitchen, because we all have grannies, and many of our grannies will have had a kitchen. It suggests Geoffrey from Rainbow smiling and suggesting, 'maybe you too sometimes feel a bit grumpy like Zippy?'

However, as with a few of the shitier shows on the telly, we have that weird back story to compensate for failings of the author's imagination. The back story running through these Who books as of 2002 was that the Doctor's entire race had been erased from history leaving him without a memory and in a very different universe, again relayed as rumours and vague mythology, and it was more than enough to keep things interesting. On top of which, Anachrophobia - once we're done with all the corridors and Doctor, look out! - is a genuinely peculiar allegorical novel almost in the vein of Kafka. Here we have two societies at war, purposefully kept at war for awful reasons which would have doubtless warmed Ayn Rand's objectivist little heart; and this is told in terms of what might almost be surrealist cinema between the wars, which is at least preferable to imitating something from the telly. Once it gets going, Anachrophobia is sufficiently gripping to erase the awkwardness of the earlier chapters, and actually reads like a book rather than a book impersonating some other medium, so that's good, and means I didn't entirely imagine having once enjoyed this one.

The Pawns of Null-A

A.E. van Vogt The Pawns of Null-A (1956)
It turns out to be six years since I read The World of Null-A, to which Pawns is sequel, and I've read a ton of van Vogt in that time so you would really think that I might have got to grips with it by now, wouldn't you? By it, I mean general semantics, as developed by Alfred Korzybski - not so much a philosophy as a mental technique with which van Vogt was very much preoccupied for most of his writing career, and which seems to inform a great many of his novels, arguably none more so than the Null-A trilogy.

I'd prefer to avoid repeating myself, but for anyone yet to receive the memo, van Vogt is not an easy writer by any description, and his novels may initially read as weird, disjointed, and amateurish if you don't realise that he's doing what he's doing on purpose, so initial impressions may sometimes be tantamount to looking at a Jackson Pollock and announcing that a child could have done it. A typical van Vogt narrative will be speckled with seemingly random, disorientating swerves described in harsh, angular sentences which deliberately leave out some of the information you might hope to find because the author is expecting his readers to do at least some of the work. These characteristics are partially informed by van Vogt's fascination with general semantics, so he's usually trying to do more than just tell a story about rockets and space monsters, although it's not always clear what that may be.

I've read up on general semantics, and it seems to amount to simple critical thinking based on an awareness that language should not be mistaken for reality. Although there appear to be certain elements in common with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, I'm not convinced it doesn't directly contradict Rand's assertion that reality exists independently of consciousness, and in any case, Korzybski never tried to pass it off as a philosophy. Unless I've misunderstood, most of Debord's Society of the Spectacle could be considered consistent with general semantics, and it seems significant that van Vogt reminds us that the map is not the territory on more than one occasion in this novel. My problem is that the Null-A of the title stands for non-Aristotelian logic, and that we are told this is a non-Aristotelian tale about a non-Aristotelian detective, and van Vogt clearly believes this to represent a great intellectual leap forward with a fervour which remind me unfortunately of all the claims Hubbard once made for Dianetics. It's a whole new way of seeing, we are told, and it could make the world a better place; and yet I'm fucked if I can work out what it is that I'm supposed to have noticed here. It might be argued that critical thinking itself was revolutionary in the time this novel was written, an era during which America was still very much segregated and not so long after Adolf Hitler had built a war on a massive pile of invented shit; although it could also be pointed out that we haven't really come that far, and that we currently have a president who, much like Hitler, just makes shit up because he likes the sound of it - and it should therefore probably still seem revolutionary in 2018, whatever it is. So I'm all for critical thinking - assuming that to be the core of general semantics - but I still don't understand how it figures in this novel, or at least how it figures in this novel in particular.

Our tale follows Gilbert Gosseyn, our Null-A detective, across the galaxy as he attempts to defuse the somewhat ambiguous plans of a potential universal dictator named Enro. The text is typically dense, requiring that the reader keep any number of subsidiary elements in mind as events unfold on the understanding that they'll probably come in handy later; and whether or not they do probably depends on the reader's concentration and how much work they feel like putting in. Personally, I found myself sagging around the half-way mark, so I suppose I could have enjoyed this one more than I did. There are some pleasantly peculiar ideas here, and the narrative grips in most of the right places, and we don't have to sit through any of Alfred Elton's weird ideas about sexual inequality; and it was mostly respectable, but maybe just not so good as I felt it should have been.

Jupiter's Circle

Mark Millar & others Jupiter's Circle (2015)
Here's another revisionist superhero book, a prequel to Jupiter's Legacy, about which I couldn't actually remember much aside from having liked it; and it's another revisionist superhero book building on the back story of contemporary characters by impersonating the forties and fifties. Just like Watchmen, one might well observe, and so it's probably no coincidence that the tale should open with our heroes battling a telepathic octopus from outer space. However, this one feels quite different to most variations on this theme which I've read, and I like it more. It's essentially hokey pipe-smoking caped escapades in a world of Leave It to Beaver and J. Edgar Hoover, more or less Justice Society of America with consequences. The twist is that the dark psychological underbelly of Jupiter's Circle is relatively mild in comic book terms, more Harvey Pekar than Rick Veitch's Bratpack wherein the masks conceal fetishism and personality disorders. The lightness of touch makes for a massively refreshing change and allows Millar to set an authentic tone with big, colourful stories powered by mad science and special kinds of ray, the contrast of which gives all the more weight to how these people relate to the real world and each other. We even get walk-on parts by Bill Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Ayn Rand without so much as the faintest trace of showing off; and Rand doesn't come out of it very well, which is gratifying. We've now clocked up nearly eighty years worth of superhero comics, a genre with certain very obvious limitations, and yet I don't think I've ever read one quite like this. I know Mark Millar's shot himself in the foot a couple of times, but Jesus - hats off to the man when he can still come up with stuff such as we have here.

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.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)
I've avoided this one for most of my adult life without quite having formulated a coherent reason why, and in the end it was Andrew Hickey's testimony which changed my mind, inspiring me to the realisation that I had no good reason to not at least just try the thing.

You've almost certainly come across every idea in it before, in a watered-down form from a million wankers who think they're being amusing by repeating things other people have said, he suggested, having anticipated most of my reservations, but if you can get past that, it's a good book. Most of its innovations have been absorbed into the countercultural mainstream, so it won't blow your mind or anything, but if you can get past that, you might well enjoy it.

At the risk of sounding affected, I was already bored thoroughly shitless by the supposed twenty-three phenomenon by about 1982, the year of Psychic TV's impressively disappointing debut album. I too had read William Burroughs, and had assumed everybody nicked it from him. There was a feature about Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! books in Vague, which I never bothered reading - it being too much trouble with colour images printed over faint text - so I never made the link. In the late eighties I provided artwork for a relatively popular fanzine called Hoax!, which seemed to be another variation on Re/Search with a load of fairly predictable Porridgey obsessions thrown in, but I liked the guy who put the thing together. Well, I liked him up to a point, but I didn't share his fixation with conspiracy theories, and I got tired of drawing stuff I wouldn't otherwise have drawn and drawing it for free - notably a cover for the second issue of Hoax! which I now recognise as having been an exercise in ticking off boxes on the Illuminatus! check list. In fact, having now read the trilogy, I realise that Hoax! was pretty much a straight exercise in recycling Wilson's material wholesale because plagiarism is the new originality blah blah blah...

By the time Grant Morrison came out with The Unreadables - recycling his own juvenilia as Robert Anton Wilson recycled via Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius with the plates switched, I was about ready to punch the next giggling imbecile to tug at my sleeve and point out that something or other had just cost him - oooh fancy - twenty-three pence chortle chortle...

As Andrew suggested, I have indeed encountered much of this material before, often without realising it; and of course it would be churlish to refuse admission to members of the Rolling Stones on the grounds of Primal Scream being a big pile of wank, so let's do this.

Firstly, as you might gather from the title, Illuminatus! is concerned with conspiracy theory in so much as that conspiracy theory forms the fabric of the narrative, serving as the language by which the book describes whatever the hell it's trying to describe. By conspiracy theory I mean the idea that secretive organisations or forces might be controlling human society from behind the scenes. I've never really given much credence to this sort of thing, mainly because I don't believe any of those supposedly in charge of human society possess either the resources or the intelligence necessary to maintain a contrary façade or to orchestrate anything resembling a tangled web of subterfuge. In other words, there's probably a story behind the Kennedy assassination, but I seriously doubt it's even half so interesting as everybody seems to think. That said, I believe that human society - and particularly where large governmental systems have formed - tends to behave like a living organism, subject to the will of its own internal manias without much in the way of conscious influence on the part of those involved, and that this often very much has the appearance of the kind of society we would inhabit were any of the conspiracies true. So conspiracy theory can serve as a useful metaphor for the discussion of human activity on an historical scale, which is partially what Wilson has done.

It's not just Wilson though. Himself and Robert Shea were both working for Playboy when they came up with this thing - apparently inspired by cranky letters sent in to the magazine - each writing sections to play off the other as a sort of narrative duel utilising the premise of all conspiracy theories being equally valid. The story roughly follows a private detective named Saul Goodman - doubtless inspiration for Bob Odenkirk's character in Breaking Bad - investigating the disappearance of a magazine editor, a person presumed silenced by the conspiracy, whatever it may be. The narrative serves as a framework upon which are hung all manner of conflicting theories and versions of human history, at least a few of which involve Atlantis, the Bavarian Illuminati, Hassan-i Sabbah, various Lovecraftian entities, Adolf Hitler, John Dillinger, and everything else ever.

It's mostly bewildering, not least with the narrative switching from first to third person every so often, and with different passages blending into one another with no break to differentiate scene or subject. There are strong elements of satire alternating with parodies of other writers - notably Ayn Rand - then Joycean streams of consciousness, and even the main characters realising they're in a book. Whilst the prose is such as to make for generally pleasurable, even thought-provoking reading, you may as well give up on  expectations of finding a coherent story in here. It seems to have one - something about a golden submarine, a rock festival, and a monolithic single-celled entity named Leviathan - but spends most of the page count having a fight with itself. Wilson's writing is apparently influenced by William Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, and to me Illuminatus! reads a little like a hybrid of Burroughs and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books in its tendency to switch between the vaguely hard-boiled and ponderous or even inscrutable philosophical discussion; and there are eight hundred fucking pages of it.

Probably for the sake of argument, Illuminatus! adopts the value system which I later found so aggravating about Hoax!, namely that no single view holds greater validity than any other, so nothing is necessarily more true or even more interesting than anything else, meaning we are obliged to accommodate a certain quota of complete bullshit - at least as I see it. Shea and Wilson therefore jam conflicting fantasies of human history up against each other so as to create confusion, and the point of this is that we might learn to be more picky about which ideas we let into our heads, or at least accept that those already incumbent might have gained access under a false pretext. The confusion seems to be a variation on Burroughs' cut-up technique, destroying the familiar patterns in order to discern what others are to be found.

Some of it is fascinating, and some of it is just annoying or boring - which probably isn't deliberate but may be inevitable given that the authors probably didn't envision Illuminatus! condensed to two-hours of screen time with a grimacing Sean Connery in hot pursuit of a mysteriously robed foe - at least not literally, the escapades of agent 00005 notwithstanding. The subject of the trilogy is more or less the nature of reality and how we experience it, so the book isn't above invoking the eternally yawnsome Timothy Leary alongside a load of guff equivalent to how quantum physicists and tribal shaman are the same thing, which they aren't, but I suppose it's forgiveable. Philip K. Dick did kind of the same thing with a more reader-friendly voice, and without quite such a page count.

More disappointing still is that every single reference to pre-Colombian Mexican culture - more or less inevitable in a book involving conspiracy theories and pyramids - is drivel of the kind suggesting that research in that specific area didn't even stretch to a  library book. For starters, there's no such thing as a Great Pyramid of the Maya, the references to Tlaloc actually refer to Chalchihuitlicue, and the famed Feathered Serpent was neither feathered nor in any sense serpentine and thus has no place in a list alongside either the mythic serpent which devours its own tail or old Snakey from the Garden of Eden; and I know it shouldn't really matter in a novel which spends at least some time hanging around in Atlantis, and the whole point is to illustrate approximate truths as worth more than absolutes; but if you're going to smuggle an indeterminate quota of complete bollocks in with the good stuff, you really need to make sure the good stuff is of a certain standard.

Anyway, against all odds, Illuminatus! achieves that for which it was written, and manages to be more or less entertaining throughout, and certainly philosophically provocative - which is more than can be said of almost everyone following in its footsteps, most of whom really needn't have bothered, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty; but eight-hundred pages! I still don't quite get why it needed to be so long, but whatever. It didn't blow my mind, although I still sort of wish I'd read this prior to exposure to at least some of the drivel it inspired, directly or otherwise.

I think that's a recommendation.

Let's just say that it is.

Dawn

Octavia E. Butler Dawn (1987)
I'm not sure if it's me or her, but each Octavia Butler novel I read seems less satisfying than the last. I recall thinking that Parable of the Sower was tremendous, and that Mind of My Mind had its moments even if it wasn't quite so convincing, but this one became a chore after the initial novelty of the premise had worn off.

The premise is that the Earth is fucked following some sort of war, and the human race has wiped itself out but for a few survivors rescued by an advanced and apparently altruistic alien species. The Oankali as they are known keep these survivors in a craft resembling a primal Eden, and are reviving them one by one, here and there making improvements at a genetic level which will aid in their survival once they all get to go back to Earth. Among the first to be revived is Lilith, the symbolism of whom is probably fairly obvious, herself being named after the Biblical Adam's first wife according to sources you're all perfectly capable of investigating under your own steam. You would think she might appreciate not only being alive, but the Oankali having cured her cancer and given her a sort of healing ability to ensure that it will neither trouble her nor anyone upon whom she lays hands ever again; but the narrative is preoccupied with coercion, things done to people against their will ostensibly for their own good, power dynamics and the like, and so Lilith is none too happy about it. As the novel increasingly comes to resemble an episode of The Outer Limits, others are revived, and none seemingly any happier about the situation than Lilith. They don't really trust her, or the supposed goodwill of the Oankali. They don't believe they're on a spacecraft. Dawn doesn't quite stoop to an angry Ernest Borgnine demanding to be let off of this stinking ship because he gots a business to run, but it comes surprisingly close.

Now, Lilith decided, was the time to Awaken two more people. She Awoke two every two or three days, no longer worrying about Awakening men since there had been no real trouble. She did deliberately Awaken a few more women than men in the hope of minimising violence.

Very wise, because you know how those men can be quite rapey at times, and who knows what could happen? If it has a penis the chance is that it will thump someone and take their dinner money before the day is over. I understand that the circumstances of the novel are supposed to be weird and exceptional, and Butler is dealing in metaphors up to a point, and as a black woman author it might be deemed fitting that she should address certain subjects traditionally ignored by other writers, but Jesus - just a little bit of faith in human nature really would have gone a long way here, as opposed to just assuming that everyone, left to their own devices, is going to try to screw you in one way or another. The sheer misanthropy of this tale, or specifically in the portrayal of its human characters makes Ayn Rand look like Martin Luther King. It reads like the work of someone who never left the house at all in some unfortunate respects.

That said, I suppose as part of a trilogy there might be some purpose to such a bleak view being given in the opening act, one which may only become apparent in the second or third instalments; but even so, as an author so frequently praised for her wonderful characterisation, there seems to be precious little of it here. The Oankali are nicely written, particularly as a plausibly alien species with three genders, but then they aren't really explored to any extent greater than that of Lilith's resentful bewilderment. Considering Dawn as the work of an author who was quite clearly more than capable of holding both sentence and story together, I'm astonished at how little I found myself caring about any of this one.

The Father-Thing

Philip K. Dick The Father-Thing (1987)
This is the third volume of Dicks' short stories, assembled by the order in which they were written and following on directly from those collected as Second Variety. The big surprise for me as I plough through these five collections with only a vague idea of how much of this material I've read on previous occasions, is how much I'm not actually enjoying it, at least not in terms of my expectations. It could be, as I found when recently making my way through a Kornbluth collection of such volume that it could have been used to stun cattle, that God did not mean for us to read quite such a massive stack of short stories by any one author in one go, and that the twenty-three featured here probably worked better as single servings in the pages of If, Galaxy, Fantasy & Science-Fiction and others as nature intended. On the other hand it might just as well be the case that Philip K. Dick was simply doing too much, hammering these things out on a near weekly basis and thus forgetting to include the jokes that tend to make his stories so readable. There's nothing actively poor here, and certainly nothing I either regret reading or would necessarily wish to avoid reading ever again, but I really found my attention drifting at certain points.

Again the influence of A.E. van Vogt is fairly pronounced with Strange Eden resembling The Enchanted Village, and notably so in Null-O which serves in partial homage to both van Vogt's The World of Null-A and Jonathan Swift, what with the tone and its featuring a character named Lemuel. It seemingly serves as a refutation of van Vogtian supermen with a few probable jabs at bullshit of Ayn Rand type, as do The Golden Man and a few of the other stories, although the majority seem dominated by themes relating to cold war paranoia and related predictions of nuclear apocalypse. Sometimes it works - as with The Turning Wheel with its amusing portrayal of Scientology after the bomb - but at other times, it's easy to forget who wrote these.

Still, the three or four outstanding shorts are of such quality to justify the collection as a whole, so I'm not complaining; and it's also nice to remind oneself of what The Golden Man looked like before Nicholas Cage got hold of the rights and decided to set down the story he thought Dick had really been trying to tell, the little bollix.