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.

The Amber Spyglass

 

Philip Pullman The Amber Spyglass (2000)
I probably shouldn't have left it so long. I read the first two of the trilogy back in 2015 and somehow just couldn't quite get around to this one. I generally dislike trilogies, or at least those comprising a single extended story split into three - as distinct from three vaguely related stories sharing either characters, settings or concepts. I generally dislike works of such length because it takes an exceptional author to sustain my interest over so distended a word count, and not many really seem able to pull it off without a degree of droop entering the equation. Michael Moorcock, David Louis Edelman and Peter F. Hamilton have all managed it, as did Stephen Baxter - although the Xeelee books were mostly self contained. C.S. Lewis didn't, and it's probably not fair to comment on Tolkien given that I was about fifteen when I stalled at the beginning of the third volume; of course there are also trilogies by Brian Aldiss and Phil Purser-Hallard, and I still have one book to go in each case.

I had no trouble getting back into His Dark Materials, even if I couldn't quite remember all of what had been before. It opens well, and I had retained enough to keep me interested and not overly bewildered, although I've still no fucking clue who those little people with the dragonflies were supposed to be. Also there seems to have been some kind of switcheroo as to who was the villain, so I read on in the assumption that both of Lyra's parents were probably arseholes, and in the assumption that Pullman had discarded the fantasy tradition of moustache-twirling evil, instead writing something which works more like real life, at least in moral terms.

Lyra travels into the realm of the dead and rescues all of the ghosts for reasons I never quite understood, and the dæmons with which everyone on her world is born seem to be a metaphor for awakening sexuality, or at least the intellectual maturity which hopefully coincides with the advent of the same; and Dust is somehow related, although it's also dark matter - so Donald Trump probably wouldn't have much Dust whilst Carl Sagan would have lived his life enveloped in a cloud of the stuff, or something like that. I don't know. I was a bit lost as to why everyone was doing whatever they were doing and what they hoped to achieve. Like I say, I probably shouldn't have left it so long.

I enjoyed the wheeled beings, but the whole enterprise got bogged down in dreary Tolkienesque battles as the end drew near, so I switched my evening reading session to Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred for the sake of something to look forward to before I go to sleep. Despite all those sparkling images and delightful sentences, it was ultimately a relief to have finished the thing.

I'd been warned about His Dark Materials being an atheist diatribe, which would have been a problem because I dislike authors assuming their readers to be idiots, but thankfully the warning seems to have originated with someone more sensitive to such things than I apparently am. Pullman clearly doesn't think much of organised religion, and that's fine, but there's no obvious metaphors waggled in our face with the usual qualifier of don't you think this is terrible? If the book has a message, it's more or less delivered by John Parry:

'And this is the reason for all those things: your dæmon can only live its full life in the world it was born in. Elsewhere it will eventually sicken and die. We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can only live in our own. Lord Asriel's great enterprise will fail in the end for the same reason: we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.'

So try not to blow it whilst you're alive, because you almost certainly won't get a second chance. The narrative presents us with examples of those who blow it because they've spent too long worrying over things which don't matter - people who are, as a direct result, generally disagreeable fuckers. The tale works well enough, and it's a good point, and it's told with verve and imagination, but I'm sure it didn't really need to be as overextended as it is. So it's either good but could have been better, or I really shouldn't have left it so long.

Last Words

William S. Burroughs Last Words (2000)
Towards the end of his life, Burroughs began to experience difficulty using a typewriter, and so James Grauerholz gave him bound, blank books in which he could write as journals, the end result of which is what we have here. What entries Burroughs wrote were more or less daily, so I was sort of expecting something like:

Today was pretty boring. I didn't do much. I watched a film in the afternoon but I can't remember what it was called. It had that Robert Morley in it, so it was probably an old one. Beans on toast for tea. Phoned Ginsberg but he wasn't in, as fucking usual. I might mow the lawn tomorrow.

Whilst there's an element of diary to this material, it's minimal and mostly written in terms that made sense primarily to Burroughs himself, requiring an appendix which decodes certain innocuous passages as referring to him spending the day shooting a pop video with U2, for one example. So it's some of that, along with rambling ruminations on private theories, observations, memories, short scenes written as fiction, and a lot of cats.

It has been suggested that Burroughs became a crazy cat lady in later years, although with just six cats on the clock, I'd say that makes him a relative amateur - a part-timer, if you will - which I state without judgement as a fellow crazy cat lady supporting a congregation of somewhere between twelve and fifteen depending on the weather and whether or not we're counting strays or other members of the b-team; but then anyone who likes cats, as Burroughs clearly did, is okay by me.

However, reading Last Words as the final journal of a crazy cat lady helps make some sense of it in so much as that this is Burroughs' writing at its most private and personal, and so his weaknesses are revealed here and there; and whilst he was capable of great insight into the human condition, the nature of civilisation, reality and all the rest, he had his flaws even without the whole accidentally shooting her indoors thing. Novels have been played to his strengths, but here we encounter blind spots, his being ill-equipped to grasp, for example, why Carl Sagan regarded belief in things which don't actually exist as unhelpful. Burroughs has always inhabited a magical universe, but here it becomes clear just how attached he was to some of that stuff, and how susceptible he could often be to complete bullshit for the sake of poetry. Of course this doesn't make him a bad person, and in Last Words it seems to render him easier to understand as a fellow human being, or at least enables us - and by us I mean me - to identify with him a little better. Above all, Last Words leaves us with the realisation of how much Burroughs cared, and not just about his cats, but about the world we live in, and how poorly we treat each other. Admittedly this isn't anything new, but the emphasis is different; although that said, it's still very much Burroughs with random swerves in the narrative adding up to something which leaves impressions rather than describing anything in any linear sense.

Last Words is confusing but also quite moving, and it makes me realise how much I miss this guy. I can't believe it's been nearly twenty years.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
I've read nothing but good things about this novel - or I suppose novella given its brevity - many of them on the back cover, which promises wry humour and penetrating satire, a mind-expanding journey comparable to that of Swift's Gulliver, and as prophetic a science-fiction classic as the works of H.G. Wells. The main character is a sentient square inhabiting a two-dimensional realm who encounters the denizens of three, four, one, and no-dimensional spaces and thusly tries to get his head around it all. I suppose we've been spoiled, living at the arse end of the twentieth century and having grown up with either James Burke or Carl Sagan explaining this kind of thing by means of either computer animation or a snooker table; but I still have my doubts. My copy of Flatland is published by Signet Classics, but then I suppose there's no such imprint as Signet Adequates.

The prose is breezy and readable and stuffed with the sort of ornate phraseology which has self-published CreateSpace steampunk novelists coming in their pants - or issuing most tenaciously in their finest Sunday pantaloons if you prefer; but Flatland is essentially a novelisation of one of those curly and straight animations you used to see on Rainbow in the 1970s. The humour may indeed be wry, but the satire didn't strike me as particularly penetrating, and if you were expecting a sort of mathematical version of Gulliver's Travels, then you're likely to be seriously disappointed. Whilst not without its good points, albeit good points mainly communicating ideas now so commonplace that we've seen them turn up in episodes of Scooby Doo, Flatland is written by a Victorian school teacher and is about as much fun as you would expect given this pedigree. I assume the hierarchy of dangerous, presumably elliptical two-sided females, a triangular servant class, square gentlemen, and polygonal intellectuals is what the book's fans have identified as satire, but I don't actually see anything resembling commentary on the English class system so much as a pseudo-mathematical echo composed for the sake of chuckles. Similarly the subjugation of Flatland's females described on the back cover doesn't seem to be saying anything much about emancipation, and as for the supposed sex amongst consenting triangles, I guess I must have blinked and missed that one.

Flatland is a faintly amusing novelty, but let's not get carried away here. Just because something is old and a bit cranky, doesn't mean it's a work of genius.

With Friends Like These...

Alan Dean Foster With Friends Like These... (1977)
My recent reading of Splinter of the Mind's Eye didn't exactly get me foaming at the mouth for more Alan Dean Foster, but as soon as I saw this collection I recalled its cover as having been endlessly reproduced in a thousand books of my childhood as representative of either science-fiction novels or the aliens which tend to populate them. I'm pretty sure the same Michael Whelan painting turned up in the book of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a few of those history of science-fiction type affairs which were always otherwise full of Amazing Stories cover art. Anyway, intrigued by the realisation of Alan Dean Foster once having written fiction which wasn't tied into some film or television show, I coughed up the readies and here we are.

It seemed logical to assume that Alan Dean Foster's writing must have once been of a higher standard than is found in the aforementioned Star Wars novel, otherwise he would never have been asked to hack out the more generic stuff in the first place; and thankfully my assumption is borne out by at least half of the material here. What is surprising is how good the early Alan Dean Foster genuinely was, and how closely his writing represented a slightly more acerbic version of Clifford Simak. The themes were often pastoral, or spun upon significantly pastoral details - note the rustic folks on the cover sharing chocolate ice-cream cones with their extraterrestrial visitors - although lacking quite the same ecological angle. Oddly, these stories seem, if anything, politically a little rightwards leaning compared to those of Simak, although thankfully not so much so as to present significant appeal to assholes, I wouldn't have thought.

This is undeniably the sort of thing people mean when they talk about the pulps, particularly with the pacing, the inevitable twist endings, and the Gernsback-style futurism, and I say that mostly as a good thing; and it should probably be noted that the writing is poetic and quite lovely, abrim with pleasing images without quite tipping over into self-conscious parody; or at least it is up until about 1974 at which point I gather Foster began turning his hand to tie-in novelisation with greater frequency. That said, it should probably be noted that his taking to churning out adaptations of Star Wars, Dark Star, Star Trek and others didn't seem to mark any noticeable reduction in the copious output of his own original material. Nevertheless for some reason I just found those short stories written after 1974 mostly unengaging, not bad but lacking the sparky invention of Why Johnny Can't Speed or The Emoman or even the somewhat creaky Space Opera, a story which makes even Tharg's Future Shocks seem refined and ingenious. Still, there's nothing terrible here, and some potential clunkers which may conceivably improve with a second reading; and for a book I picked up with no expectation towards any of it being any good, I've been very pleasantly surprised.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Francis Wheen How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004)
Here's another existing at something of a tangent to my usual, but it's one of those books which could make for a slightly better world if everyone were to read it and take at least some of what is said on board. I suppose How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World might be regarded as a companion piece to Carl Sagan's excellent The Demon-Haunted World in so much as it's an extended essay on why believing any old bollocks on the grounds of it being either comforting or else relayed to you by a smiling man in a nice suit is maybe not such a great idea. I'd say it might also be regarded as a companion piece to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but although I remember enjoying that one up to a point, I've subsequently found it difficult to distinguish between my memories of the book and the disappointing evolution of Dawkins into a sort of atheist Richard Littlejohn.

Anyway, Wheen's focus is on culture, politics, society, economics and so on, roughly applying Sagan's genial sense of clarity to the world around us and examining the consequences of twatty thinking. Homeopathy, structuralism, and certain new age conceits all come in for a hugely entertaining kicking, and all building towards a thorough examination of why those who don't actually understand society or how the universe operates - looking at you and Cherie marinating in your Mexican shit bath, Tony Bliar - shouldn't be left in charge of any part of it because they invariably fuck it up for the rest of us; as they have done; as can be discerned by simply looking out of a window. Happily, Wheen seems to accept that as a planet we have to work with what we have right here and now, and that no amount of evangelical ranting, raving, or name calling is going to sterilise thousands of years of ingrained culture; as Dawkins seems to believe each time he demands we cut out all the religion and start being more sensible like what he is, apparently never really quite understanding why some might consider him poorly informed in certain respects.

I've never really understood economics or the mechanism of capitalism and debt, at least not beyond a fairly vague and left-leaning hunch of it all being a massive planet-sized nest-feathering exercise, but Wheen explains it all very well, and in terms that I found not only comprehensible but fascinating in a horrible watching a car crash sort of way; and it's reassuring to learn that my hunch seems to have been pretty much on the money. Doubtless there are plenty of amoral shitbags out there quite capable of launching a testy rebuttal whilst providing mathematical proof of shareholders being more important than outdated ideas of democracy, and how those kids actually enjoy making our cheap running shoes for us, but from my purely subjective viewpoint, I don't see how it would be possible to finish this book whilst retaining the sort of warped political mentality it challenges with such eloquence, unless you're just plain fucking stupid, or evil, or both.