The Shape of Things

Damon Knight (editor) The Shape of Things (1965)
I still find it hard to leave one of these on the shelf, which is partially nostalgia for anthologies such as this more or less having been my introduction to science-fiction which wasn't based on a TV show or else written by Philip K. Dick. Also, there's the exciting promise of getting something you didn't expect, of not really knowing quite what the fuck will happen once you get between the covers. I really don't know how anyone can resist.

Of course, these days there's also the appeal of revisiting what have become old favourites, but it's the surprises which keep me coming back, and not least because there are still surprises to be had. In this case one big one turns out to be The New Reality by Charles L. Harness. I don't recall having heard of the guy and I know nothing about him, but The New Reality is absolutely top shelf material, notable as a version of reality as construct within the eye of the beholder of some vintage, predating all those recent revisitations of the theme, and even predating the likes of Dick's Eye in the Sky. I'm sure Harness himself was only riffing on some previous telling of the story, one I've probably read and forgotten, but nevertheless he makes the convention his own.

As with any anthology, there are a couple which don't quite make the grade, but with this one the good stuff is of such quality as to render the duds forgiveable; and the good stuff from Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury are all very good indeed. Also, it's nice to read Knight's introduction to van Vogt's Dormant and to find that he did, on occasion, have a good word for the guy after all; so, very satisfying, all round.

Adventures on Other Planets

Donald A. Wollheim (editor) Adventures on Other Planets (1955)
The cover alone was difficult to resist, even without the promise of short stories by three of my all-time favourite science-fiction authors, and Robert Moore Williams whose King of the Fourth Planet I recently enjoyed above and beyond expectation; although that said, it's a slim volume so there's probably not much to add beyond that I enjoyed it.

I read Simak's Ogre in a collection back in March, and although I still find it faintly bewildering, it's nevertheless enjoyable and full of typically nutty ideas, and in this context serves to illustrate the sheer poetry of Simak's prose; which isn't to say that it's necessarily sandwiched between clunkers so much as that the collection allows one to appreciate how Simak's writing might almost be deemed a genre in its own right.

Murray Leinster's Assignment on Pasik is a little underwhelming I suppose, but Robert Moore Williams' contribution - presumably the short which was expanded as the aforementioned King of the Fourth Planet - more than compensates as a vaguely philosophical take on van Vogt; and van Vogt's own heavily sculpted The Rull gives sufficient cause to confirm that Damon Knight was talking out of his arse; and Roger Dee's The Obligation is also decent.

Science-fiction as a genre has an unfortunate reputation of tending to peddle the same old crap over and over, particularly work of this vintage, and this collection is as good a refutation of the argument as any. Sure, there are spaceships and aliens and intrepid Earth people setting foot on other planets, but once we're past those basics, there's some truly screwy, unpredictable shit going on in this one.

Battlestar Galactica

Glen A. Larson & Robert Thurston Battlestar Galactica (1978)
I always assumed that the sudden shift of emphasis in cinematic science-fiction around the time of the first Star Wars movie was probably something to do with some great leap forward in special effects making it easier to depict a dogfight in space, but then I spent at least a few months of my youth assuming the punk explosion happened because the invention of the synthesiser made it easier to form a band. With hindsight I suspect it's mostly been down to politics, both the films and the punk rock.

Before I go off on one, I should probably point out that I don't believe in well-coordinated Machiavellian government organisations deciding we all need to start believing this or that, so buy a Ted Nugent album; rather I believe that it can sometimes look that way simply because ideas or enterprises of a particular ideological complexion will tend to receive better funding during times when the political mood of the country or its leadership is already leaning in the same direction.

Science-fiction cinema of the fifties, at least in America, often tapped into a sense of fear analogous to McCarthyism. Following the sixties, during which previously underground liberal notions rejecting the black and white morality of previous generations became more or less mainstream, science-fiction cinema began to question authority and to recognise moral grey areas, and so we had Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, THX1138, Zardoz, and even Logan's Run. An increasingly contemplative tendency within science-fiction cinema was growing up, developing a conscience, and then George Lucas did his thing and we're back to Flash Gordon expressed as Star Wars and a thousand variations on the same.

My theory is that, roughly speaking, thirty years had been long enough for us to forget that the second world war had happened for a reason. The war had become something belonging to the older generation, and as for the causes, we no longer needed to look any further than the simple existence of evil as something to which we were opposed. Unfortunately Vietnam made it impossible to reduce such horror to the basic colours of a Saturday morning serial, not least because, if we were going to insist upon the existence of bad guys, then Vietnam made it look a lot like that might be us, at least from one angle. We needed good and evil back, along with the happy simplicity of horribly complicated situations reduced to shorthand. Bad guys we understand may cause us to examine ourselves, so better that we don't even try; better that we just boo, hiss, and throw the occasional rotten tomato.

Of course, Star Wars eventually developed grey areas, but in 1978 it was still a fight against evil as something which wears black, barks orders, and is evil because it's evil; and this is even more apparent in the cheap knock-offs which lacked even the wit and subtlety of Star Wars, and so we come to Battlestar Galactica.

I actually loved the Ronald D. Moore version, and probably because it does almost the exact opposite of the Larson television series from which this novelisation derives. The problem with the original stems from the notion that because Star Wars was Flash Gordon, then Wagon Train in space should work just as well, and so it did providing you weren't too fussy about everything else being the standard mainstream television cheese of the time except on a spaceship - the proud general who cares more about his men than what the politicians may have to say, the rebellious kid who comes through in the end, and the idea that none of us can imagine anything better than a few hours spent goofing off on the golf course, or just hanging around the casino. It all seems very much tied into the peculiar American self-image of the respectable rebel who takes no crap from the stuffed shirts or the British, and maybe cuts a few corners, but nevertheless likes to picture himself reading Plato in front of ionic columns, all fancified and shit. I suppose it's fine in a way, but it's very simplicity renders it insubstantial and when you look too close - like maybe when you write a novel about it - it all begins to seem a bit crappy.

Robert Thurston learned his trade directly from Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight and others, and clearly isn't without authorial credentials of some description, but he's working from a television script. He does his best, even padding out the Cylons with some sort of back story. It makes them more interesting, but the tale doesn't really need them to be interesting, just evil; and so the novel ends up shooting itself in the foot over and over. Cylon philosophy is absolutely alien to us, and yet understandable because it is logical, regarding the universe as an ordered environment tarnished with the invasive presence of humanity; at least up until we find the Cylons working with the insectoid Ovions in contradiction of their own xenophobic principles, meaning their principles aren't worth much because actually they're just evil evil evil; by which point the heroes are struggling to fly tankers loaded with precious spaceship fuel from the Ovion mines back to the Galactica whilst the Cylons go apeshit. It's almost a variation on the last thirty or forty years of American foreign policy, which would be fine were it not trying to invoke our sympathy quite so hard, and to invoke our sympathy by laying it on so thick as to make The Waltons look like Hungarian Constructivist cinema.

Anyway, as a novel it's readable in so much as the show on which it was based was watchable, but it's pretty obvious that it exists because affordable VHS video recorders didn't; but even without the above, there's still a lot of horseshit to wade through, much of it betraying a typical seventies fixation on astrology and the zodiac as something meaningful. Unfortunately, even with some redeeming features stemming from the author's obvious efforts to make the thing resemble a bit of writing, Battlestar Galactica leaves you with that feeling you get after an eight hour viewing marathon, and not even a Battlestar Galactica viewing marathon - we're talking Family Feud or Wheel of Fortune.

Therefore ugh.

The World of Null-A

A.E. van Vogt The World of Null-A (1948)
Just to get this out of the way before we begin, quite aside from the peculiar mention of someone called Tharg on page thirty-one of the Berkley edition - possibly the earliest albeit non-canonical reference to the editor of the galaxy's greatest comic - chapter thirty-two concludes with:

Gosseyn nodded absently. A few moments later he watched the three guards ease the vibrator into the elevator, and then Prescott motioned him to enter.

This vibrator seems to feature prominently towards the end of the novel, you may be interested to know. Snurf. Snurf.

I bought this because it's van Vogt and I've developed the habit of buying his books on sight on the grounds that it would be stupid not to even with a minor risk of brain damage. The World of Null-A proved irresistible through its reputation of being one of his weirdest, which is probably also why I'd put off reading it for so long.

The author's own introduction provides a testy defence against Damon Knight describing the novel as one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published in his essay Cosmic Jerrybuilder, although said defence comes across a little like Salvador Dali's later and less coherent ramblings explaining in third person how only Dali can do this because his thoughts are made of many golden circuits, with circuits pronounced cir-kweets as he rolls his eyes at the camera; but on the other hand:

There was in van Vogt's writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that's sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else's writing inside or outside science fiction... Damon feels that it's bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It's like he's viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he's building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.

Well, if Philip K. Dick thought it had something interesting going on, then chance is it's probably worth a look, I reasoned.

A.E. van Vogt had a thing about evolved humans, new modes of thought and the like, a fixation which even took him so far as a brief period of flirtation with L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics, for one example. The World of Null-A and its two sequels were inspired by and serve to somehow demonstrate Alfred Korzybski's theory of general semantics and non-Aristotelian logic, this being the Null-A of the title. General semantics actually looks a hell of a lot like plain old lateral thinking from my own admittedly uninformed standpoint, only revolutionary in context of more staid perspectives inherited from certain nineteenth century tendencies, but it seems like it made Alfred Elton happy so what the fuck?

Like much van Vogt, the language is demanding, dramatic to the point of absurdity, and dense; the narrative is often bewildering, not least when our main character is killed at the end of one chapter, then revealed as safe and well and living on Venus in the next; and the story is carried by an unsettling sense of drive, constant motion which never once lets up, or allows its reader to pause and wonder what the hell is happening or why. Imagine Patrick McGoohan breaking into your home, grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you for fourteen hours solid whilst growling the scripts of all seventeen episodes of The Prisoner from start to end, possibly with The Residents covering John Barry in the background.

It can be hard fucking work at times, and it's certainly not for everyone, but it's undoubtedly unique, and probably in a good way. Of the now surprisingly numerous van Vogt novels I've read and enjoyed, The World of Null-A is possibly more coherent than Quest for the Future - if not quite so weird - and heavier going than either The Weapon Makers or The Mind Cage, but it certainly delivers in its own peculiar way. I still don't really get what the deal is with non-Aristotelian logic but it was fun not getting there.