Fred Hoyle - Ossian's Ride (1959)

 

Among the innovations bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, the broadest is surely the idea of progress, with both the development of technology and new ideas of biological evolution introducing the possibility of a world which changes over time, as opposed to having remained stable and essentially the same since origins described in the Bible. Much science-fiction has tackled the discovery of progress by one means or another, either as a warning or else as basic cheerleading. Hoyle is an oddity in that he seems almost to belong to the other tradition, the one mostly supplanted by science as progress. Among his best known achievements as an astronomer was the development of the steady state model of the universe in which the cosmos is understood to have neither a beginning nor an end with expansion explained by the continual and spontaneous creation of matter. The steady state theory was seemingly discredited* by the big bang theory; and in these two conflicting models I see a curious echo of variant ideas concerning evolutionary theory, specifically the regular Darwinian version which proposes a more or less constant rate of change conflicting with Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium wherein lengthy stable states are punctuated by short periods of rapid change which, curiously, seems somewhat descended from the catastrophism which predated Darwin.

The parallels aren't a perfect fit but, to get to the point, the world to come as Hoyle saw it in 1959, was one in which progress was very much an exception to the rule. Science-fiction has a generally lousy record in terms of prediction, but Hoyle's rural Ireland of 1980 is strikingly undeveloped given that electric power had begun to reach even the most isolated communities in the fifties, and his England of 1980 is familiar mainly from black and white movies, which at least contrasts with the promise of his futuristic Ireland, if not its description once we get there.

Ossian's Ride aspires to espionage, a technological spy thriller because we all want to know what's been going on in Ireland behind the Erin Curtain, as Fred calls it. We have reports of fantastic buildings and moving mountains, but the Emerald Isle is no longer so welcoming to visitors as was once the case, so British Intelligence sends a young mathematician to get to the bottom of it. What we find at the bottom of it is that the Irish government now puts everything into the development of science, meaning it has become a technocracy, if that's actually a word. So, while parts of Ireland remain rustic and without electricity or even basic plumbing, some areas have fantastic buildings a bit like Canary Wharf, and those moving mountains are actually huge nuclear powered machines the size of ocean liners which roam across the land depositing futuristic buildings hither and thither.

Our mathematician eventually deduces the mission of the Irish government and that some of the more futuristic ideas come from an alien mind sent from a distant star inhabiting the body of a human woman - an idea which Hoyle developed to better effect in A for Andromeda - most of which emerges during the final chapters. Up to that point, although competently written and certainly engaging, our boy's mission is mostly himself travelling across rural Ireland on foot, occasionally by public transport where he's able to obtain a bus timetable without arousing suspicion. There's an occasional skirmish with representatives of ICE, the Industrial Corporation of Ireland, but nothing of consequence beyond reminding us that our guy is a spy and it's mostly on the level of what happens in Famous Five yarns where crooks are defeated by ingenious use of jam jars and elastic bands. A lot of time is spent fixating on stuff about hiking, rucksacks, bed and breakfast, and where our boy eats that evening - sometimes a hotel restaurant, sometimes just a sandwich, sometimes breakfast at a farmhouse. I have to assume Fred had recently enjoyed a hiking holiday in south-west Ireland if the level of detail is any indication. In the books' favour, if less than gripping and carrying a significant tang of Bob Mortimer's Graham Lister, Hoyle at least keeps the greenface to a respectable minimum, so beyond a few references to Guinness, it's mostly just low-level stereotyping expressed as bewildering speech patterns, such as when Cathleen admits, 'It's sorry I am about those papers,' because that's how Irish people talk, see.

Ossian's Ride, which never quite gets around to explaining the reference made by its own title, is written with just the sense of poetry you might expect of a mathematician, but for all it's walking into walls on almost every other page, it has some interesting things to say once it stops banging on about what it had for breakfast and has a certain clunky charm which is difficult to dislike with conviction.

*: I say seemingly because I honestly don't feel qualified to weigh in on this. The big bang probably wins, but I nevertheless have a soft spot for Hoyle.

Aldous Huxley - Point Counterpoint (1928)

 

This is the fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel to which I referred a couple of weeks ago. I took another shot at it, and while I'd say chewy remains as good a description as ever, I got through it and even enjoyed it for the most part. Again we have a variation on previous Huxley novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay amounting to a non-linear essay on the state of the world communicated through the dialogue of a large and thus occasionally confusing cast. However, this one is distinguished by at least a few of those characters being based on persons either of Huxley's acquaintance or otherwise of cultural significance around the turn of the century - notably D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Baudelaire, and John Hargrave, advocate of the Social Credit movement which, although Utopian and authoritarian was vocally opposed to Fascism and later fought the BUF in the streets - which I mention mainly because Huxley's Everard Webley is often wrongly identified as having been based on Oswald Mosely.

Huxley appears in Point Counterpoint as Philip Quarle, himself a writer, and so the book approaches the fourth wall without quite breaking through in the form of notes and letters written by Philip Quarle referring to his own novel in progress:

The musicalisation of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia) But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven.  The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor Quartet.) More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems.

Of course, on the surface of it this means we have four-hundred pages of people talking about stuff, with the stuff being the point of the novel and that which is communicated with the most vigour. It could have gone tits up but Huxley was always exceptionally good at this sort of thing, delivering complex arguments and observations, even those built up on layers of nuance with pinpoint, near scientific accuracy - as distinct from Lawrence's more impressionist, intuitive approach to narratives of equivalent purpose.

Point Counterpoint is about the modern world, as it was in 1928, and about where we were going wrong, and where we continue to go wrong. It's about notions of progress in the wake of Darwin and the industrial revolution, and the infusion of such ideas into the realms of art, literature, politics, religion, and society; and, as usual, the Hux was right about fucking everything, here demonstrated through the mouthpiece of his impressively faithful D.H. Lawrence stand-in

'Our truth, the relevant human truth, is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they've got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the non-human truth isn't merely irrelevant; it's dangerous. It distracts people's attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory.'

If it's chewy - which it is - then Point Counterpoint is justifiably chewy, its subject being that old chestnut everything ever, and it isn't difficult to see why some regard it as Huxley's greatest. I feel I should probably go into greater detail but it would be easier if you just read the thing.

Drugs Are Nice

Lisa Crystal Carver Drugs Are Nice (2005)
I was dimly aware of the existence of something called Suckdog back when it was a thing, but couldn't tell if it was a person, a band, or what, and never investigated further because it sounded like it inhabited approximately the same territory as Costes and GG Allin.

For the sake of qualification, GG Allin was a rock dude who famously incorporated actual human poo into his stage act; and I'd once had a letter from Jean Louis Costes - because my mailing address had been in some fanzine or other - specifically a letter written on the back of a photocopy of a photograph of himself in the nip sporting a massive erection - which was at least thematically consistent with the tone of his correspondence. It was funny rather than annoying, but I didn't get the impression we'd have a lot to say to one another should I take him up on his offer, whatever it was.

At some point in the nineties I learn that Lisa Suckdog is actually a person and that she lives with Boyd Rice, which I hear because the band I'm in use the same distribution company. I'm not quite sure what to make of Boyd Rice - which is probably the whole point of Boyd Rice, it could be argued. His records are massively entertaining but something doesn't sit right - even given the possibility of stances adopted mainly for the sake of pissing off liberals. Gibby of World Serpent - this being the aforementioned distribution company - informs me that Boyd is now a father, but the kid has some sort of congenital birth defect. It's all very sad, although I can't help wondering how this squares with all the social Darwinian bollocks our man has taken to spouting, because the potential for contradiction seems unfortunately enormous, not to mention tragic.

So, given that Lisa Carver was romantically involved with both Jean Louis Costes and Boyd Rice, and given her occupation of cultural territory with which I'm roughly familiar, the autobiographical Drugs Are Nice seemed like it might be worth a look. Also, everyone seemed to think it was amazing.

For once, everyone turned out to be right.

I've got to the point where a lot of that transgressive stuff looks kind of samey, even predictable, and always reminds me of my friend Carl's sarcastic summation of the daily routine of certain performance artists of our mutual acquaintance which was, off with the clothes, on with the jam. This has very much been Lisa's territory, but rather than the usual Re/Search magazine style catalogue of routine shocks to the conservative and sensible, she understands the things she's done and has been able to learn from them and move on, rather than just going around in ever-decreasing poo-stained circles. She's had a tough fucking time too, and a lot of this will ring bells with anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship, or even a just plain averagely shitty relationship; so it's a tough, even brutal read in places, but rewarding and even curiously uplifting due to Carver's determination to find the good in even the worst of situations, because some times that's really the only option; and she does this without the whole thing reading like self-help literature which in itself seems like a minor miracle. She really knows how to pull a sentence together, and is consistently witty, and has a gift for metaphor - all of which differentiates her work from just about every other industrial music footballer's biography out there.

Speaking of which, for any industrial music trainspotters who might be wondering, Boyd Rice doesn't come out of this one too well, and the same goes for Anton LaVey, but everyone else does, or as well as could be hoped for. The world needs more like Lisa Crystal Carver and Drugs Are Nice will almost certainly be the best thing you could ever buy from the section of the book store where you find it.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Yukio Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)
I picked this up some years ago, vaguely recalling that the bloke from Death in June was a fan - which seemed like a recommendation back then. Mishima was Japan's most celebrated author, or one of them. If low on chuckles, The Sailor gets off to an intriguing start, assuming here that this is mostly thanks to the author as much as the translator. A young boy discovers a peephole which allows him to spy upon his mother while she's on the job with a random sailor. I gather that the boy forms a cruel, elitist gang with others from his school in order to torture the sailor for reasons which may or may not have become clear had I finished the thing; but I got to the page where the kids torture and kill a kitten and found that I had thrown the book across the room, which hasn't happened since Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can't deal with gratuitous animal torture because it upsets me, which I presume is the author's intent, and somehow it's always cats so it seems like nasty, lazy button pushing, a cheap effect; and the preamble about breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos just means you're an arsehole, Yukio.

Godzilla aside, I don't have any particular investment or even necessarily any interest in Japanese tradition or culture, so unsmiling men frowning into the sunset while thinking really hard about honour doesn't do much for me in and of itself. Wikipedia claims Mishima was bullied at school for reading books, which is doubtless why Noboru in The Sailor seems to be one of those lone wolf preying on the sheeplike herd of weak, sentimental humanity types, although I could be wrong because, as I say, I didn't actually make it past the end of chapter five. Had I done so, perhaps I would have discovered that Noboru is to be pitied rather than admired, but I guess I'll never know. Have you ever noticed how the aforementioned lone wolves always seem to be overcompensating for failing in the Darwinian terms they themselves often claim to have embraced? Show me almost any scowling, black-clad poetry binging representative of the spiritual elite, and I'll show you someone who wouldn't last five fucking minutes down Catford high street on a Saturday night.

My theory is that had Mishima been born American, and a couple of decades later, his work would have been mostly published on Amazon CreateSpace as eBooks, and he'd be spinning scowling patriotic yarns about freedom fighters defending the last of the white race against Obama's NWO. Luckily, he wasn't, and so we get to view his elegantly composed mania through an Orientalist lens, essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt because each word is set carefully in place with much honour like in one of those Samurai rituals or summink; so we imagine we're watching Kurosawa when actually it's probably closer to that nebulous shit beloved of Hitler and his pals, the honour of suffering and other Death in June albums in the making. Almost anything can be made to appear philosophical when you transgress the limits of just how seriously you are prepared to take yourself.

I could be wrong, of course, given that I didn't finish the thing; but honestly, I couldn't give a shit.

Silas Marner

George Eliot Silas Marner (1861)
...talking of Feminism, whilst I'm not saying that women haven't ever been airbrushed from history, or even that it hasn't been fairly common practice, but the dialogue wherein it is written that all women are amazing and all of their great works have been suppressed by the phallocrats, is bollocks. If you're unsure about this one, ask yourself which names are best remembered as giants of the nineteeth century novel. My admittedly Anglocentric answer would be Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, George Eliot, then maybe Dickens, then, I suppose, a load of other guys and assorted worthy but unreadables. Therefore great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Anyway, we read Silas Marner in school, except as I now realise it was a heavily abridged version excluding all of the bits which weren't directly concerned with Silas himself; which is pretty weird given that it's already a surprisingly slim and breezy volume by nineteenth century standards, and which probably explains why I don't remember anything much about it. A casual remark about George Eliot made by D.H. Lawrence brought me here, along with the revelation that not only was Mary Anne Evans (who wrote as George Eliot so as to evade detection by the penisoid phallocrat man-censors) from my general neck of the woods, but the village of Raveloe - in which Marner resides - seems to have been based on Bulkington, Warwickshire, which is where my dad lived for a while. I spent one of the shittiest Christmasses ever in Bulkington, and have got pissed in the pub upon which I presume the Rainbow in the novel may have been based.

Take that, Alan Moore*.

Silas Marner is a little more Victorian than I usually enjoy, being the pseudo-folkloric tale of a miser whose frozen heart is restored by an orphan with just deserts served to any bad 'uns who happen to be in the vicinity, but Eliot maintains an amazing balance for the duration, never quite allowing anything to slip over into sentiment for the sake of it, therefore allowing her message to unfurl, clear and undeniably righteous, without anyone ending up diabetic.

Eliot's Raveloe is actually Georgian and profoundly rural, seemingly so as to emphasise the onset of change - social and technological - by means of an environment traditionally resistant to the same, where few ever travel to neighbouring villages and everyone is firmly rooted into the soil. The novel was written during the decades which saw the rise of Darwinian thought, social reform, and an accordingly profound shift in the relationship between God and man; so that's what it's about.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from their threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.

Marner is done a great wrong, for which those responsible eventually pay so that it all works out very well for our boy by the end of the book, and all by the agency of what we may as well refer to as karma, but which amounts to cause and effect rather than the usual rewards dished out in recognition of piety. Eliot's initial religious faith was very much open to debate by the time she wrote Silas Marner, and this is reflected in the generally agnostic thrust of the narrative; that is, that she sees the use of religious instinct as morality, but feels no need to dwell on the mechanism - a potentially shocking message for at least some of her contemporaries, and one Eliot seemingly wishes to diffuse by emphasising morality as a constant.

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Because nothing is permanent but change, as Heraclitus apparently wrote, and change would have been a daunting prospect in nineteenth century England at least for the great body of the population. Silas Marner therefore serves as a sort of reassurance, affirming that change, no matter how scary, can be for the better.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' said Mr. Lammeter; 'one feels that as one gets older. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.'

The beauty of Silas Marner is that it presents this argument with subtleties and shade, no recourse to shorthand or the sledghammer pathos of much Victoriana, and is written in a hand which grips firmly, despite the complexity of those long, long sentences. This is a truly great book.

*: This possibly confusing comment refers to Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem which seems to place its author at the cultural centre of everything ever based on a series of spurious - and not even entirely accurate - coincidences associating various significant historical events and people with Northampton.

Erewhon

Samuel Butler Erewhon (1872)
Erewhon is the second great satire of the nineteenth century, it says here, the other being Gulliver's Travels, but personally I'm not convinced. It seems too much like a sentence referring to those two giants of twentieth century rock music, David Bowie and Nick Lowe - I mean Cracking Up was a fucking great single for sure, but let's keep some sense of perspective here, because Erewhon really isn't a patch on Swift. Aside from anything else, Swift was funny.

Erewhon transports a curious traveller to a distant and vaguely allegorical civilisation of that designation serving as a parody of Victorian society. It's written in an engaging style and delivers plenty of novelty, but I'm not entirely convinced it works as satire. It reads as though Butler kept changing his mind about what he wanted the book to do even as he was writing it. It starts well, with our man detailing the eccentricities of the Erewhonian justice system in which illness and infirmity are penalised whilst acts we might regard as criminal indiscretions go unpunished. Given the present state of healthcare in the United States and the NHS in England, the thrust of Butler's argument translates into contemporary terms very well, not least because he composes a weirdly plausible argument as to why the crime of being poorly might warrant a jail sentence.

Unfortunately, once we're done with Erewhonian justice, there are too many mixed messages and it becomes difficult to tell just what he's satirising. Sometimes he satirises by exaggeration,  sometimes by inversion, and sometimes we're left with the impression that he's entirely serious; so Erewhon lacks the consistency or the sense of progression found in Gulliver's Travels. The presumably Victorian monetary system is parodied through Erewhon honouring two unrelated forms of currency, one of which is exchanged at the Musical Banks - whatever they are - and I can't actually tell how any of it relates to anything.

Then follows philosophical mumbling, some of which reads a lot like a vicar's son asking Mr. Darwin if there is not room for the Baby Jesus in his fanciful theory. I'm not sure which part of any of it constitutes satire.

There are no follies and no unreasonableness so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct on reason only.

Butler was apparently quite the fan of Darwin but disagreed on certain fundamental points - points suggesting, at least to me, that he hadn't actually understood The Origin of Species in the first place. He seems to regard evolutionary theory and the process of natural selection as overly mechanistic, and Darwin's work is therefore parodied as The Book of the Machines - Erewhon's book within a book. The problem with this section, at least a problem for the notion of Erewhon as satire, is that Butler writes The Book of the Machines a little too well, makes some decent philosophical points, unwittingly predicts the technological singularity, and in doing so fails to deliver whatever the fuck the warning was supposed to be about in the first place.

'May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of its own, it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very different one to our own, there is therefore no higher possible development of life than ours; or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from our ours, therefore that it is not life at all?'

Erewhon is an interesting and occasionally thought-provoking novel, but is hamstrung by its own inconsistency. It may well be that, living as I do in 2017 rather than 1872, I have simply missed the subtleties which would seem obvious to the reader in Butler's time, but this still leaves the question of why Swift's novel works so much better than this one whilst requiring fewer allowances for the idiosyncracies of its vintage. Personally, I think there may be a clue in Butler's occasionally revealing narrative tone.

They have another plan about which they are making a great noise and fuss, much as some are doing with women's rights in England.

I appreciate he's not actually saying that women's rights are necessarily a bad thing, but there seems to be a somewhat insular subtext which creeps in at certain points of the narrative. He doesn't like change. He doesn't like anything too fancy. He's suspicious of big ideas. Erewhon isn't a bad novel, but I get the feeling that if its author were alive today he'd be the treasurer of his local model aeroplane flying club, his favourite band would be ELO, and he would have ceased posting on facebook following an argument in which he described Mike Read's UKIP Calypso as just a bit of fun.

She

H. Rider Haggard She (1887)
It's probably all those references in Alan Moore's Extraordinary Gentlemen which imprinted me with the thought that I might read this, which seems otherwise a little out of my way. I encountered a copy in a Rockport used book store which looked as though it might once have been a cow shed, and might even still be a cow shed on certain days, and I asked myself what's the worst that could happen? I vaguely recall seeing the film of She with Peter Cushing at some point, but never really cared enough to consider whether it might be based on anything, and yet here I am. Despite its status as the best selling novel ever - or whatever it says on the internet - I had a feeling I might not like it much. It sounds a bit Indiana Jones, and I never saw the appeal of him either.

She is a vaguely immortal white woman who somehow landed the job of Queen in a lost underground African civilisation, as encountered by a couple of adventuresome Cambridge chaps. In many ways it's of its time, as they say, although to be fair, it has much more going on than might be expected of a colonial Victorian novel. She was written at the height of both the British empire and faith in its civilising influence - give or take some small change - an era of social and scientific upheaval. Western society was only just beginning to get to grips with the idea of world history beyond the usual Biblical or classical realms. Jean-François Champollion and Karl Richard Lepsius had expanded Egyptology to an unprecedented understanding of ancient civilisation in general, and W.H. Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico had awakened public interest in cultures across the other side of the globe; colonial forces were exporting a steady stream of looted arts and crafts back to the European capitals where they would soon cast their influence upon Picasso, Braque and others; Darwin was shaking things up in his own way, and western society was beginning to at least understand why social reform might not be such a terrible thing.

What surprised me most about She is Haggard's acknowledgement of Africa's past as home to innumerable developed and sophisticated civilisations at least equal to their European contemporaries. Of course most of Africa's history has been ravaged, looted, and subsequently bulldozed flat so as to make way for the myth of superstitious cannibals in mud huts requiring our civilising influence and thus allowing us to feel a bit better about both the slave trade and the wholesale destruction of more or less an entire continent. Unfortunately Haggard's take on this was a present day reality of degenerate races who, having fallen from grace, were probably better off with us lot in charge; but in his favour he tends to propose such views as opinion rather than actively rewriting history; so the racism is low level, arguably understandable given the author's heritage, and with nothing shoved in your face too hard. Indeed, most of his attitudes to race are expressed as a fairly simple fear of the unknown, which at least works in context of an adventure without leaving too foul a taste. He praises as much as he condemns, and it seems clear that his overriding motive is to instil both his tale and his readers with a genuine sense of wonder regarding the ancient world and how it relates to the modern. This still leaves us with a race of spear-chucking cannibals who have somehow chosen a white woman for their Queen, but I've nevertheless read worse.

I've seen Haggard's prose criticised as clumsy, but for the most part I found it highly enjoyable, even engrossing in places, although it probably helps if you enjoy overwrought Victorians who have to describe every last fucking thing in pornographic detail and who never quite worked out where to finish a sentence; and it's Haggard's prose which keeps this thing moving along, at least up to the point at which we meet Ayesha, and they all take to standing around having rhetorical conversations in an Arabic language, here rendered as Marvel Shakespearean with all the yonder and thou hast and methinks. It's the yacking which unfortunately spoils the book for me, downgrading it to a chore. There's so much of it, page after page and mostly dull as fuck, and somehow none of it saying anything particularly interesting - which is a shame considering the potential for discourse on the subjects of race, mythology, and so on; because I suspect if She is actually about anything, it's Haggard's lament for the passing of mythology and mysticism, represented by Ayesha herself withering in the harsh dawn of science and the world to come, or something along those lines.

In terms of literary equivalents to Jim Davidson jokes, She barely registers at all when sat next to Lovecraft's party political broadcasts on behalf of the UK Independence Party, and there's a lot to like about the first half of the book, at least until her indoors shows up and it all turns to crap; which was possibly the other point H. Rider Haggard was trying to make, but never mind.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White The Once and Future King (1958)
I was about to read Philip Purser-Hallard's Trojans, the final part of his thus far exceptional Devices trilogy, when I saw this in the second-hand book store and bought it with the idea that a little homework couldn't hurt. Devices refers to large chunks of Arthurian legend, and I seem to recall White's book having been described as the definitive work bringing it all together into roughly the shape we recognise today; except it turns out that I was actually thinking of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of 1485 to which The Once and Future King itself refers and which I am similarly yet to read; but I've started so I may as well finish.

The Once and Future King, rather than being the definitive version, brings Arthurian legend into the twentieth century in so much as that it's a modern novel written in a contemporary style whilst relating a tale set in the twelfth century or thereabouts. All those Arthurian occurrences are traditionally dated to times prior to even Egbert of Wessex, the first Saxon king and arguably the first English king by some definition; so the six-hundred year relocation initially unsettled me. At first it seemed like White just needed a way of bringing Robin Hood into the Arthurverse - curiously something which likewise occurs in Philip Purser-Hallard's The Locksley Exploit albeit with more satisfying purpose, to my mind - which demands the reader avoid thinking too hard about what Richard the Lionheart may or may not have been up to around the same time.

Even more disconcerting, at least for me, was that the first of the four books of The Once and Future King turns out to be The Sword in the Stone, as famously adapted by Walt Disney. I've never seen the animated film but would guess it's probably fairly true to the book, given that the tone of the book, occasionally harking back to the absurdity of Cervantes as it does, somewhat foreshadows Harry Potter and even the Monty Python version of this tale. Try to read this without thinking of John Cleese and the rest:

Sir Ector blushed deeply and called out: 'Ah, Grummore, come over here a minute, will you? I want to introduce a friend of mine, old chap, a chap called Wood, old chap—Wood with a W, you know, not an H. Yes, and this is King Pellinore, Master Wood—King Pellinore.'

'Hail,' said King Pellinore, who had not quite got out of the habit when nervous.

'How do?' said Sir Grummore. 'No relation to Robin Hood, I suppose?'

'Oh, not in the least,' interrupted Sir Ector hastily. 'Double you, double owe, dee, you know, like the stuff they make furniture out of—furniture, you know, and spears, and—well—spears, you know, and furniture.'

I was expecting more frowning, more grunting, more faces set sternly against the northern wind, which isn't to say I was necessarily disappointed so much as that it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. White talks quite directly to his audience as though we're sat before him upon the hearth rug, and so we have references such as to Merlyn putting his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes, and we are left with a strong impression of The Once and Future King having been written for English school boys at the upper end of the 1950s educational ladder.

Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.

As an aside, even without the references to Merlyn and his unsettling knowledge of centuries to come, anyone who enjoyed Marc Platt's Lungbarrow as I did might appreciate why I should raise an eyebrow at this passage:

'Would you show me your home?'

'Certainly,' said the badger, 'though, of course, I don't use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don't meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people—but there, it's cosy.'

At the risk of committing what is probably literary treason, there's a problem with The Once and Future King, or at least I experienced one. It's nothing to do with kids turning into Disney owls, the twelfth century remodelling, the disconcerting contemporary asides, or any of White's screwing around with the source material, all of which is done with a purpose which becomes gradually apparent. The problem is that said purpose takes so long to emerge from the narrative. I can understand the writer not wanting to play all of his cards at once, but as soon as we're past The Sword in the Stone it really gets to rambling and bumbling to itself with no clear indication of where we might be heading, and while the book remains readable throughout, personally I was a little bored in places. I'm putting this down to my never having read Le Morte D'Arthur.

That said, the point of it all is beautifully expressed once it becomes apparent why White felt compelled to write in the first place. The Once and Future King evokes the age of chivalry in contrast to White's era, and unfortunately also to our own - it might be argued. His invocation of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the pseudo-Darwinian cult of power as its own justification, as given by Agravaine during the first chapter of the fourth book, is hard to miss.

'We could say that we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.'

White also seemingly predicted Death in June and other neofolk types who have built careers on simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, such as the controversial idea and image of Adolf Hitler as a great bloke who was only saying what everybody was thinking.

Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried the badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers.

Once this novel stops messing about and gets down to the business of what is on its mind, it becomes a formidable work, and so much so as to oblige me to forget having been bored; and given the chilling accuracy of White's analysis of the rise of the Nazis, his argument seems unfortunately well-suited to our own era, and to how we respond to what is happening in our world.

At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

I suppose now I need to read Le Morte D'Arthur.

The Brick Moon

Edward Everett Hale The Brick Moon (1869)
This is one of those books, or at least novellas, which lodged in my consciousness quite early on thanks to the fairly lurid cover of some pulp magazine in which it was reproduced having appeared in a big glossy book of science-fiction history I read as a kid, or at least which I took out from the library so I could look at the pictures as a kid. The narrative, which is fairly brief, describes an artificial moon built from wood and brick catapulted into orbit so as to provide Victorian mariners with some means of gauging longitude. Inevitably something goes wrong and the Brick Moon is launched ahead of time still with a load of people inside. Months pass before it is sighted in the heavens, following which communication is established through morse code signalled by the new satellite's inhabitants jumping up and down as observed with a telescope.

I'm going to avoid committing the customary rant about steampunk on the grounds that Hale's world may as well have been Georgian rather than fully Victorian if this novella is any indication, which is probably why I seem to recall The Brick Moon having been tagged as brickpunk somewhere or other, an assertion which can frankly piss off so far as I'm concerned.

The tale begins with lengthy discussion on the practicalities of launching an artificial satellite in nineteenth century America, possibly taking cues from Verne's From the Earth to the Moon of 1865, although this one is shorter and more fun, or more fun than whichever Verne translation I read. The technological level of Hale's enterprise is early industrial revolution but without much reference to even steam let alone anything else, hence the Georgian affectations which are similarly reflected in his literary style. Hale was a Unitarian minister, a big fan of progressive thought and not so keen on the practice of slavery, which I mention for the sake of clarity rather than because it is of any particular relevance to this book. Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, just a decade before, and is acknowledged in those animals marooned on the Brick Moon - goats, chickens and the like - quickly evolving into ostriches or beasts of burden so that those aboard might sustain themselves. Of course, Hale may have been taking the piss, but the generous spirit of his prose suggests it's more likely that he'd simply skipped a few chapters of Darwin's book.

America had not yet enjoyed a full century of independence from England when this was written, and so The Brick Moon is ultimately a hymn to political autonomy expressed as its people are seen to get on very well up there despite their isolation, not least thanks to lichen quickly evolving into trees and plants bearing fruit. Of course, none of it is particularly logical by contemporary standards even without pointing out that there probably wouldn't be any air up there in the ether, five-thousand miles above the Earth's surface; but Hale's testimony, stilted though it may well seem today, nevertheless wins us over. Political autonomy has taken on unpleasant associations in recent times what with Brexit and the Annoying Orange presidency and everything, but here it was a positive ideal and is communicated as such; and Hale really seems to be all about the positive and progressive.

The Brick Moon is a great book, one which really makes me wish he'd written more of its type, and one which leaves us with an impression of an author who was probably a nice guy, someone we would like to know. In terms of science-fiction history, The Brick Moon really should loom larger than presently seems to be the case.

Galápagos

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Galápagos (1985)
This is the fifth Vonnegut I've read and I think I'm beginning to notice a certain consistency running through his life's work. It's the peculiar and conversational digressions coming together to form a pattern from seemingly disparate elements which make his novels so distinctive and so readable, but which threatens to become a little repetitive if the book isn't doing whatever else it should probably be doing.

Galápagos riffs on the selfsame island which proved so important to Charles Darwin's work, using the setting as birthplace for a successor to the human race, an amphibious species with much smaller brains. Their origin story is told by means of a monologue tangentially concerned with our extinction and where we're going wrong. As you might expect, there's a lot to love about this tale with Vonnegut's voice as ever giving an incongruously warm and humane testimony regardless of how horrible his characters turn out to be; and funny too, of course.

The problem, which may actually be me rather than the book, is that it just goes on a bit longer than it really needed to, its length seemingly dictated by how much fun the author was having. I rarely read anything in a single sitting, so it's a pain when I come back to a novel for the second or third stretch and realise that whilst the names are familiar, I can't otherwise remember anything about these people; and given Vonnegut's characteristically over-involved level of detail, this means I become confused and then frustrated, and then I stop caring. A paragraph picked at random from any point between the first and last pages will be full of wry observations made in lovingly crafted terms, but the whole doesn't quite hold together as well as it might. This is still an inspired book in most respects, but he's written better.

The Midwich Cuckoos

John Wyndham The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Our house seemed to be full of John Wyndham novels when I was growing up, so I'm not quite sure why I've only now begun to get around to reading the things. Part of the reason may be a reluctance to buy any edition of a novel other than the one with which I am roughly familiar from childhood, having grown up with the thing even if this didn't actually entail my reading it. The Midwich Cuckoos with any cover other than the classic Harry Willock design, for example, just seems stupid and pointless to me; although given my now living in Texas, I don't suppose it makes much difference seeing as I don't really encounter much second hand Wyndham around our way. Conversely, my recent trip back to the old country included visits to second hand book stores - or shops, I suppose I mean - the shelves of which were positively groaning with Wyndhams; and as I approach fifty it has come to seem increasingly ridiculous that I haven't yet got around to reading some of these.

The story will probably be roughly familiar to most people of a certain vintage as having inspired Village of the Damned, and by association, much of Jon Pertwee's run on the TV show which shall not be named: a rural village experiences a blackout during which time it is entirely isolated from the outside world, something resembling a flying saucer seems to be responsible, and when normal service is resumed it transpires that all the woman of the village are abruptly with child, including the virgins. Sixty-one children are born, all with the same distinctive unearthly appearance - blonde hair and golden eyes - and all telepathically conjoined as a gestalt entity.

For what is a relatively simple story, Wyndham gets a hell of a lot done with this one. On one level it seems to address our shifting view of the world, or at least human civilisation, specifically the view which had recently shifted from a belief in the global conflict of 1914 to 1918 as having been the war to end all wars, to a new understanding of there perhaps being no discrete limit to the horrors which might be visited upon us. Additionally The Midwich Cuckoos explores the notion of the superman or coming race as invoked by both the Nazis and numerous science-fiction writers who probably should have known better, and so here we are rudely presented with the possibility that superman might not want to be our friend, even that the thing which defines him as superman is the very fact of his being our enemy in Darwinian terms. As with the best science-fiction, all of this adds up to an examination of ourselves, and one which must have seemed particularly pertinent during the first decade after the end of the second world war - the question being whether we can afford ethics in opposition to absolute evil, the evil being that which must cause our own extinction in this case.

Oddly, much of this novel reminds me of certain supposedly classic alien abduction cases, and it certainly ticks a lot of the boxes - mysterious energy fields, missing time, extraterrestrial miscegenation and so on; although the earliest archetypal report of its general kind, reputedly occurring to Brazilian farmer Antônio Vilas Boas, wasn't really known until February 1958. This probably isn't significant as the fleeting presence of a saucer in The Midwich Cuckoos suggests that Wyndham at least had one ear sporadically attuned to phenomena of the sort.

The Midwich Cuckoos, for all of its wonderful ideas delivered with the minimum of fuss, nevertheless doesn't score so well as either The Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes. The politely middle-class tone of the narrative may have aggravated Brian Aldiss, but there really wouldn't have been much point trying to tell this story as a variation on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The only real problem is that it sags somewhat in the middle, with one chapter after another related in conversation between our narrator and whoever happened to see something or else has some new idea about the children of the village. Still, one passes through the lull and the end wraps itself up with enough strength of character to leave an impression formed by the novel's more memorable passages, of which there are plenty; so jolly good show and everything.

The Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race (1871)
The Coming Race was hardly the first science-fiction novel to  rummage around within a hollow Earth. Journey to the Center of the Earth - to name but one of many - was published seven years earlier, and the general conceit probably goes back at least so far as Don Quixote's descent into the Caves of Montesinos in Cervantes' 1615 novel. The Coming Race would nevertheless appear to represent a seminal work of its type, and its popularity was once such as to seed public imagination with vril, the novel's mysterious energy source falling somewhere between nuclear power, electricity, telepathy, and the force from Star Wars. Mastery of vril is the reason for the technological superiority of that lot down there, as Bulwer-Lytton explained, inadvertently inspiring numerous occult types - Madam Blavatsky for one - seemingly ranging from those regarding vril as a metaphor for some existing esoteric force, to those apparently taking The Coming Race for fact disguised as fiction. Of the latter group one might arguably include Richard S. Shaver whose peculiar subterranean ramblings might be deemed heir to Bulwer-Lytton were they not so obviously sourced from a more personal, psychological mania, and vril seems to have become a totem for some of the weirder expressions of Nazism. Weirder still, at least to me, is that the name of Bovril, the popular pseudo-Marmitic English meat based drink derives from the idea of vril as life enhancing.

Anyway, before we go too far down that particular rabbit hole, it should be noted that Bulwer-Lytton's novel belongs more significantly to the utopian tradition, but taps into subterranean folk myth to a greater extent than others of its kind. The underworld as hell, if not uniquely Christian, seems to have been the exception to a general global rule. Most underworlds were traditionally a source of life, development, culture and so on, with the world as a metaphorical womb giving birth to the people and all which sustains them. This basic idea is found in Norse mythology, Sumer, Mexico, and pretty much everywhere else to greater or lesser degrees. Bulwer-Lytton's utopia is therefore home to a more developed race than our own, although the precise details of the warning delivered appear fairly loosely defined, or at least they did to me. Unfortunately I have a feeling this may be down to my own prejudices, specifically that which I expect to have been the sort of thing that would have mattered to a Victorian author of Bulwer-Lytton's credentials.

The Coming Race references ancient deluges in terms which suggest scientific foundations in the sort of catastrophism which squared fairly well with the emerging ideas of Darwinian evolution. Yet, whilst the novel appears to embrace Darwin up to a point, the Vril-ya - this being the name of the coming race in question - claim descent from frogs, which reads somewhat like a Christian parody of Darwin, not a million miles from the sort of critique asking where amongst its relatives was the orang-outang to be found. On the other hand, there's also the strong possibility that the supposed war between Church and Darwin has become somewhat exaggerated in recent times by the usual tub-thumping bores on both sides, and may not have been quite such a partisan affair as we have been led to believe. I suspect Bulwer-Lytton may not have given a great deal of thought to those aspects of his narrative which, with hindsight, seem as though they should be making some more strident observation, for he seems to find no contradiction in evolution discussed with such frequent references made to faith, and is more likely presenting a warning of the notion of progress as a virtue in itself. Progress was hardly a new idea in 1871, but the developed, or at least developing world was clearly still coming to terms with the idea of progress as something which could achieve such momentum as it did in the 1800s, and which had begun to reach into every aspect of modern life. Even humanity, so it seemed, was subject to progress, hence the disturbing possibility of more advanced expressions of humanity who might come to regard us as we did the less technologically orientated colonial subjects of the empire. Supermen and their mighty works would become popular during the century to come, notably with a great many folks who also enjoyed shouting and wearing uniforms, so it is interesting and possibly ironic on some level that Bulwer-Lytton describes the racial characteristics of the Vril-ya as close to Native American type, presumably by virtue of their having been the least understood ethnic group to have achieved levels of civilisation comparable to those of classical antiquity at the time of writing. Happily, the utopia of The Coming Race therefore constitutes relatively slim pickings for nutcases seeking Aryan material, excepting I suppose a few of the more obsessive Death In June types who could probably find some sort of ariosophic subtext in an episode of Dora the Explorer.

Established expressions of bullshit aside, The Coming Race is a fairly straightforward prompt towards the conclusion implied by Victorian notions of progress, that we might not necessarily be the pinnacle of God's creation, and that this is worth keeping in mind. Oddly I find this echoes Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in that it too makes a lesson of the perils of ideology becoming too far divorced from the reality it endeavours to inform, which is of course the big problem with most versions of utopia. I personally found this one a little more readable than Crime and Punishment, although I can see why it has failed to remain quite so popular as at least a few of its contemporaries, lacking as it does the wit and verve of Verne, Wells, Shelley and others - not a bad novel by any stretch, but one that was quite definitively of its time; and although I'm sceptical that Bulwer-Lytton can really have been said to have predicted nuclear energy, the appearance of robots in a novel published in 1871 is not unimpressive.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

H.G. Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
The more Wells I read, the more I appreciate how graceful was the best of his writing, here defined as those novels which have remained popular; and for this reason I kick myself for not having made the effort with them earlier. As Brian Aldiss points out in the faintly superfluous afterword - superfluous because most of his observations concern themes which are already made clear within the novel and require no further emphasis, I would say - Moreau is, roughly speaking, a successor to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with the man washed up on the beach confronting certain aspects of both himself and by extension the society from which he came.

Obviously, as I seem to recall being the great revelation of Ridley Scott's faintly annoying Prophets of Science Fiction show, Moreau may be taken as a commentary upon the practice of vivisection and as predictive of genetic engineering, although this sort of misses the point. Written in the wake of Darwin and Huxley breaking the once divine barrier by which humanity was regarded as separate from beast, The Island of Doctor Moreau more properly voices, I would suggest, Wells' fears regarding the industrialisation of mankind, flesh as a malleable commodity which can be turned to the will of an entirely human and hence fallible creator. The constructed beast folk might then be viewed as precursors to Karel Čapek's first robots, and much less the descendants of Stevenson's bestial Edward Hyde.

I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island.

A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

It's a simple message delivered with the irresistible force of Wells' meaty and yet often surprisingly lean prose, and the book is deservedly a classic. It's a shame that The Island of Doctor Moreau - a horror novel at least as much as it could be considered science-fiction - probably eventually led us to crap like The Human Centipede, but that's hardly Wells' fault.

Man After Man - An Anthropology of the Future

Dougal Dixon & Philip Hood
Man After Man - An Anthropology of the Future (1990)
Man After Man is apparently Dougal Dixon expanding on the success of After Man, a previous and similarly themed effort imagining the next few million years worth of animal evolution in the event of our disappearance; and this theme - imagining the next few million years of human evolution - if supposedly tainted with certain visuals pinched wholesale from artist Wayne Douglas Barlow, was hardly an original idea in the first place what with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and doubtless many others; and in any case Dixon's book worked well enough for me when I first read it a couple of decades ago.

Man After Man is far from perfect. The illustrations have a bit of a folksy quality, seem anatomically awkward and all with peculiarly flat noses; and the Hiver, or Alvearanthropus desertus - a future human predicted to evolve some two million years hence - for some reason resembles an ageing Jewish comedian of the 1950s - although whether that's necessarily a bad thing would certainly be subject to debate. Also off-putting is how, despite Darwin's theory of evolution being piss-easy to understand if you just bother to read the bloody thing, Dixon joins the millions who somehow manage to get it wrong in crucial places, which is disappointing given its being the central theme of the book. Not that he drops major clangers, but he takes a loose, somehow very seventies approach which allows our descendants to evolve not only telepathy but also race memory.

Niggles aside, I'm nevertheless won over by the sheer weirdness of this enterprise. It isn't a novel, or at least it isn't a novel in the conventional sense, but it's certainly a narrative, presented as pseudo-factual by the same terms as Stapledon's Last and First Men. The premise here is that humanity has destroyed its environment and will eventually abandon planet leaving behind a scattering of engineered humans. These people, or possibly creatures, are adapted to occupy specific ecosystems from which most animal life has been extinguished. Why this is done isn't really clear - one of several fumbled balls in a sequence which might otherwise resemble the hard science-fiction of Asimov and his pals. Anyway, Earth is vacated but for a decreasing populace of subsistence farmers and numerous peculiar mammals in the seas, forests, and deserts - all engineered from human DNA, and engineered with a level of intelligence equivalent to that of higher apes. The reasoning is screwy, but the ideas are fascinating because they kind of work, and it would be interesting to read something more traditionally resembling a story featuring Dixon's Plains-Dwellers or the somewhat nightmarish Parasite/Host creatures he imagines evolving in the more distant future; but of course part of the appeal of this projection is the setting, an era bereft of anything with much in the way of language that would provide the focus of such a story - at least nothing beyond your basic grunting Tontospeak. As the inheritors of a future Earth, these are by definition creatures we would have trouble understanding, which is why Man After Man works so well as a speculative history.

It could have been a little tighter in places - maybe having Homo mensproavodorum work out how to build boats the hard way like our own ancestors rather than by means of implausible racial memories of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; or expanding on the extraordinarily heightened environmental senses found amongst, for example, the Bushmen of the Kalahari rather than souring the recipe with telepathy. Also, the environmental message has about it a touch of Neil from The Young Ones, reiterating certain entirely too simplistic claims often made regarding overpopulation; yet still, it's difficult to avoid being drawn into the reality of this weird and fearsomely believable future Earth.