Iceman

J.M. DeMatteis & Alan Kupperberg Iceman (1985)
This was a four-issue limited series from before the comic grew up - an era for which I've been feeling increasingly nostalgic. Iceman, as you may know, was from the first line-up of the X-Men, the sixties incarnation which quietly blew my mind before I was old enough to be certain that these weren't real people. He's a fairly obvious attempt to duplicate some of that Human Torch magic but it worked for me; and I guess it still works for me considering I've just read this thing.

Iceman is one Bobby Drake, essentially a variant on Peter Parker, Richard Rider and others. He's a teenager, old enough to be a role model, but not so old as to seem inscrutably adult to anyone under twelve. He's slightly neurotic, and his adventures tend to be seasoned with thought bubbles full of stuff about not wanting a career in accountancy, contrary to the wishes of parents, and the potentially terrible consequences of what will happen if some girl discovers he's really a super-powered mutant; and so on and so forth. If the Marshall McLuhan references seem a bit thin on the ground, it's because Iceman is approximately aimed at twelve-year old boys.

As such, whilst it's hardly life-changing, the series nevertheless does its job very well - telling a story which is surprisingly unpredictable given the rigorously traditional mechanism of its telling. Visiting his parents, Iceman realises that he fancies the girl next door. Naturally she turns out to be a time-traveller fleeing from a terrible authoritarian father figure, unwittingly instigating a series of events which result in Bobby Drake accidentally murdering his own father before he's born, subsequently ceasing to exist and ending up in a realm of non-existence. It's actually a bit like Faction Paradox if Faction Paradox had been created by Jack Kirby in the late sixties; and it could be argued that the series is really just a series of hoops through which Iceman is made to jump, but who cares?

Kupperberg's art is a little uneven, but comes into its own with those peculiar Kirby-inspired outer realms, and DeMatteis keeps you reading, all the while presenting just enough of a glimpse of a truly peculiar background cosmos to demonstrate why Marvel were consistently shitting all over the rivals back in the mid-eighties.

Earth's Last Fortress

A.E. van Vogt Earth's Last Fortress (1960)
I assumed this was the original printing of Children of Tomorrow under a different name, but picked it up anyway. It turns out to be the novel I've already read as Masters of Time. In fact I vaguely recall having read Masters of Time with the feeling I'd already read it under another name, yet I can find nothing to support this on the internet beyond that it was originally a short story called Recruiting Station which doesn't ring any bells at all. So I've a feeling I've read this one three times now, but I don't know, although the confusion seems par for the course with van Vogt. It could just be the stark impact of the opening paragraph leaving me with an impression of more familiarity than is actually the case.

She didn't dare! Suddenly, the night was a cold, enveloping thing. The edge of the broad, black river gurgled evilly at her feet as if, now that she had changed her mind, it hungered for her.

Her foot slipped on the wet, sloping ground; and her thoughts grew blurred with the terrible senseless fear that things were reaching out of the night, trying to drown her now against her will. She fought up the bank, and slumped breathless onto the nearest park bench, coldly furious with her fear. Dully, she watched the gaunt man come along the pathway past the light standard. So sluggish was her mind that she was not aware of surprise when she realised he was coming straight toward her.

Of course, it would be thrown out of a writing class for crimes against literature, which really says more about writing classes and literary conventions than it does about Alfred Elton.

Earth's Last Fortress is about a war fought across all of time and space wherein the all-powerful forces of the Glorious recruit combatants from each era of human history, and if you want to pretend this was a prequel to Faction Paradox, it actually sort of works. Beyond that, I couldn't really tell what it was about the last time I read it, or possibly the last two times, not with much conviction; but on this occasion I believe I've found the key.

The words scarcely penetrated, though all the sense strained through, somehow. His mind was like an enormous weight, dragging at one thought, one hope. He said, fighting for calmness now, 'Commander, by your manner to this tentacle and its master, I can see that you have long ago ceased to follow its conclusions literally. Why? Because it's inhuman. The Observer is a great reservoir of facts that can be coordinated on any subject, but it is limited by the facts it knows. It's a machine, and, while it may be logical to destroy me before you leave the ship, you know and I know that it is neither necessary nor just, and what is overwhelmingly more important, it can do no harm to hold me prisoner, and make arrangements for a Planetarian to examine the origin of the message that came to me.'

He finished in a quiet, confident tone. 'Captain, from what one of the men told me, you're from the 2000s AD. I'll wager they still had horse races in your day. I'll wager, furthermore, that no machine could ever understand a man getting a hunch and betting his bottom dollar on a dark horse. You've already been illogical in not shooting me at sight, as you threatened on the communicator; in not leaving the ship as the Observer advised; in letting me talk here even as the attack on your enemies is beginning—for there is an attack of some kind, and it's got the best brain on this ship behind it. But that's unimportant because you're going to abandon ship. What is important is this: You must carry your illogic to its logical conclusion. Retrieve your prestige, depend for once in this barren life here on luck and luck alone.'

Last time I tried to read this I didn't come away with much more than a basic anti-authoritarian message, but now I recognise a variation on one of van Vogt's most common themes, namely the opposition of conventional linear logic to the non-Aristotelian ideas he seems to have picked up from Korzybski's general semantics. Actually, I'm half inclined to wonder if this story, or at least this version of the story might not have been informed by van Vogt's falling out with L. Ron Hubbard's increasingly authoritarian promotion of Dianetics through the newly inaugurated Church of Scientology. I'm not entirely sure the dates add up, unless van Vogt undertook any rewriting when this one came to be published under this new title, and similarly I don't know much about van Vogt's involvement with Dianetics or his reasons for severing ties with Hubbard in the early sixties; but nevertheless I found myself wondering whether the Glorious might not serve as allegory to where Hubbard took what van Vogt saw as a useful psychological methodology. They seem to represent inhuman systems imposed upon human thought, eugenics, and the negation of individual will, although these things are of course similarly associated with aspirant utopian political systems arisen in the wake of the second world war, to which van Vogt also had a stated objection.

I probably got more from this reading than on previous occasions, but still found it became somewhat knotted up in its own convoluted narrative by about a third of the way through; and yet it remains enjoyable because baffling van Vogt is often more rewarding, or at least more thought provoking, than the more lucid tales of a lesser author.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá The Umbrella Academy: Dallas (2009)
I was interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. They were mostly interested in my Faction Paradox novel, Against Nature. The interview was conducted over Skype, and it was fun but exhausting. My original intention had been to present the brooding, unflappable façade of a sort of English Henry Rollins but without the weightlifting, but I suspect I came across more like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black. I kept catching myself in the webcam feed, going cross-eyed and whirling my hand in the air whilst feebly scrabbling to make the word stuff come out good.

That night, I was woken at three in the morning by the cellphone I never use - except to receive sales calls which aren't even for me - beeping to let me know that it needed recharging so that I may receive more calls from people trying to sell car insurance to my mother-in-law. I then found myself unable to get back to sleep until about 6.50AM, having lain awake for several hours giving full consideration to just how mad I sounded during the interview, and whether it would be practical to trace the invention of the beep which a phone makes when it's low on juice at three in the fucking morning back to a single individual and to smash their kneecaps with a hammer. I got up at seven to feed the cats, then went straight back to bed for yer actual sleep and a couple of hours of weird, unpleasant dreams in which Adrian Meredith, my junior school bully, coerced me into buying his girlfriend's gold necklace back from the pawn shop to which he had flogged it.

I woke at ten to discover that Jello the cat had shredded an entire bog roll for the third day running, and so I was not in the sunniest of moods, in contrast to the rest of Texas which was already 98° in the shade. I needed coffee, toast, and the routine of my daily hour or so of reading, but I couldn't face Vonnegut's dreary debut novel. I needed comfort food, so to speak, something colourful and fun requiring no expenditure of brain cells, and so I picked this.

The more I read by Gerard Way, the more I appreciate that he's very much doing his own thing. Obviously there are traces of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, but Umbrella Academy somehow manages to be even more esoteric without ever quite descending into non-sequiteurs. The story ducks and weaves like Nic Roeg, Bill Burroughs, or any reference to weird European cinema you care to make, whilst also doing something suspiciously reminiscent of a garish Saturday morning cartoon serial; and where with Morrison, you can occasionally spot the gaps and sense how pleased with himself he gets over certain layered references, Way has none of that awkward self-consciousness, just confidence and expertise. The story is fucking peculiar, and the art is gorgeous. I've no idea what any of it's about, but it made my day much, much better than it had been.

The Star Virus

Barrington J. Bayley The Star Virus (1970)
In a 1999 interview, Michael Moorcock - Bayley's friend and collaborator - asks Juha Lindroos:

Did you know William Burroughs loved The Star Virus and wrote to tell me he'd used it as inspiration? The idea of people as a virus very much appealed to Burroughs, who enjoyed at least some of Barry's work, though I don't know how much he read. Burroughs definitely recognised the originality of mind.

Whatever you may make of such a recommendation, it seems to say something about the quality of Bayley's writing, which in turn raises questions as to why he isn't better remembered.

I don't know. I suppose it's all to do with marketing.

Anyway, the quality of the writing really stands out as incongruous with something which has become so difficult to find and apparently resistant to reprinting. The guy really paints pictures, beautifully drawn sentences and a love of unusually baroque imagery suggesting genuine confidence - a man very much at one with his typewriter, and who probably didn't really have to write science-fiction, but thank God he did. It's so much better when sprung from conscious choice rather than necessity.

This being my second Bayley - or fourth if you count a couple of fairly long and thoroughly peculiar short stories - I'm beginning to notice themes and preoccupations - the nutty scientist who seems more John Dee than anything of Asimov's heritage; plant life exerting control over humanity; and unexpected, inexplicable structures underlying our existence, even our history. The Star Virus is a significantly philosophical novel seemingly concerning free will and whether it plays a role in the course of the future, or destiny if you must; and it manages to do this with space pirates, rockets, an inscrutable alien civilisation, and a star drive based on the perception of an observer; and all of this without reading like the work of anyone else, or at the risk of alienating anyone who just happens to be in it for the planets and the monsters. It achieves something quite complex whilst appearing fairly straightforward.

Seeing as I've already given the game away, the virus in question is the projected spread of humanity across the galaxy - this being contrary to the established history of the universe in relation to something older and more abstract. In case it isn't obvious, and in the event of anyone reading who might care about such things, you could quite easily read The Star Virus as inhabiting the same basic cosmos as Faction Paradox, if that helps, and certainly it is writing of this kind which I would say has been ancestral to the aforementioned mythos, whether directly or otherwise.

Liberating Earth

Kate Orman (editor) Liberating Earth (2015)
Here's another one for which I painted the cover, thus once again potentially presenting a question of how impartial my review is likely to be, the answer to which is - I would hope - business as usual. The only difference would be that if I hated it, I wouldn't bother posting the review online because it's uncomfortable when someone you vaguely know produces tripe, and we all have to sit around saying well done, old bean, and nobody quite knows where to look.

Thankfully Liberating Earth is a long, long way from being tripe, as roughly anticipated on the grounds of having been edited by Kate Orman who can generally be relied upon to pull a half-decent story together with the words in the right places and everything. A few emails ago as we were discussing what was to be on the cover, I  recall references to the more metaphysical designs which so often graced the jackets of science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties - the Yves Tanguy with space rockets school of illustration, roughly speaking. Such is the tendency I was hoping to channel here - and pedants with too much time on their hands may like to play spot the difference with a copy of the Consul edition of The Outer Reaches collection as edited by August Derleth - and now, having read the thing, I see the sense in this.

Liberating Earth is a collection of short stories with alternate and often genuinely weird versions of terrestrial reality as the unifying theme, all chained together as part of a larger narrative by Playing for Time, Kate Orman's own sequential contribution; so you could probably read it as either a novel or individual stories depending on your preference. I actually found it a little difficult to follow the precise details of the larger story, Playing for Time, as a consequence of it being divided into nine parts, which wasn't a problem. It seems to hold together in so much as it feels like it all adds up and is nevertheless enjoyable. Playing for Time is also more or less the token Faction Paradox element of the recipe, with the remainder relating to the mythology by slim terms, or at least at a bit of an angle and often in spirit rather than furnishings. Hopefully this shouldn't be a problem for anyone requiring a certain quota of grandfathercidal teenagers in skull masks; and it certainly wasn't for me because - to swing back around to the point begun in the previous paragraph - the collection as a whole goes a long way towards invoking the spirit of some of the great science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties, less in terms of any nostalgic tendency as the sheer range of mood and theme, and the thrill of having no idea of what you're going to get. Everyone will doubtless have their favourites, and there were a couple I personally found a little chewy - which is probably more to do with my own preferences than the quality of the stories. Those which stood out as possibly exceptional for me were E.H. Timms' Dreamer in the Dark, Red Rover Red Rover by someone identifying herself only as Q, and Kelly Hale's wonderful Project Thunderbird, another presentation of evidence in the mystery of why publishers aren't simply throwing massive wads of cash at her. Similarly noteworthy is Annie's Arms by Xanna Chown presenting a sort of surreal, suburban horror which put me in mind of the stark contrasts of the first Siouxsie & the Banshees album - all very John Heartfield. Also we have the highly entertaining The Vikingr Mystique by Dorothy Ail, a sort of Thelma & Louise with space Vikings. The last thing I read involving space Vikings was a short story called Indifference by Brian Aldiss, which intrigues me slightly given that Ail's Nordic seeker of pillage is named Aldis with one s. For what it's worth, The Vikingr Mystique pisses all over the Aldiss story, in the event of there being any conscious homage involved.

Finally and possibly my favourite is Rachel Redhead's Judy's War, partially because it demonstrates the great range of the collection, and partially because it's a genuine pleasure to see her work in fancy-pants print at last. I read her self-published The Raithaduine Saga and concluded that once you're past the occasionally loose sense of grammar and the fact of it being so bloody long, it has a lot in its favour. Redhead's prose disregards established science-fiction or literary conventions, weaving a bewildering path strewn with weapons-grade jokes, huge, crazy ideas, and sudden narrative swerves which seem entirely her own. At times it reads like A.E. van Vogt channelling Vicky Pollard or maybe some of the earlier, slightly more warped John Waters movies - which I suggest as a recommendation in case that isn't obvious: she probably isn't likely to get commissioned to write anything so respectable as the next Young Bond novel, but she writes with the kind of mad genius which can't be faked, and which by definition needs to cut its own path. I hope she realises that her writing has a lot more going for it than many of the things from which I gather she has drawn influence, and I hope this is the first of many such appearances in print.

Liberating Earth is great. Now can we have a full-length Kate Orman novel, pleeeaaase.

...and in case you were wondering...

Erasing Sherlock

Kelly Hale Erasing Sherlock (2006)
Nosing around on the internet in search of Erasing Sherlock reviews for the sake of comparing notes in the event of there being some major detail of the narrative which I've somehow missed, I encounter:

The way Holmes is described I could not avoid imagining our modern day Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role - although the novel might have been written with Jeremy Brett in mind as Sherlock was not even a twinkle in the eyes of Moffat/Gatiss at the time.

I suppose I'm not really entitled to my usual upswell of wrath given that I tend to picture Sherlock Holmes as Basil Rathbone - or Peter Cook at a pinch - and that while I'm almost certain I enjoyed whichever book it was I read as a kid, I more recently found the same author's The Lost World borderline abominable; but nevertheless, I like to think of Erasing Sherlock as a novel rather than as something which didn't quite get the funding to become a brill television show; and as for fucking Cucumber, give me fucking strength, and once you've given me fucking strength kindly fucking fuck the fuck off.

...and yes, that sound you heard was indeed my sneering.

Anyway, Erasing Sherlock began life as a time travelling Holmes novel which won an award of some kind, and justifiably so, and was then reborn as a Faction Paradox novel without, so I gather, too much tweaking given how it was already in that same thematic ball park. The story is roughly an expansion of that detail of quantum theory in which the act of observation changes that which is observed. Here we have a time travelling student observing the great detective as part of her doctorate, changing the nature of that which is observed specifically by shagging him; which turns out to be part of some larger experiment investigating whether or not it is possible to change the past, in this case by erasing the historical figure of Sherlock Homes, hence the title.

As may be apparent from the above, this all works on a number of layers. At one end of the scale we have the notion that the events of the narrative reduce Holmes to a merely fictional character - just as he is in the universe in which this novel was written - which might also be deemed to pertain to the macrocosm of how an author relates to her characters. One interpretation might be that Kelly Hale specifically wished to relate to this character in sexual terms, thus I suppose presenting further commentary as an aspect of fan fiction; although this isn't something which is made explicit in the text, and Holmes is far from an idealised fantasy figure, but it's there if you want to look for it. That said, I tend to dislike supposedly erotic fiction usually because it bears more relation to the clichés of advertising than to that which it purports to evoke, but Kelly Hale writes it really well, focussing on the texture and poetry rather than peddling typically gushing crescendos. Thankfully this isn't Fifty Shades of Sherlock; and yes, I'm sure some loser has already engaged themselves with that particular pointless exercise, and there will be the inevitable dreamy picture of sodding Cucumber on the cover of the resulting shitty Amazon eBook.

If I have any criticism of Erasing Sherlock, it is only that it feels at times a little like characters waiting around for the massive explosions of the final chapter, in the meantime busying themselves with the intrigue of picking over various plot details to see what happens; but having said that, I've a feeling this may be more to do with me than the novel, given that I'm not predisposed towards an interest in either Holmes or detective fiction as a genre, and it has been quite difficult to read some of this one with all sorts of feline drama going on at the other end of the bedroom - Kirby producing massive lung-destroying human-size turds in the litter tray, Tony trying to roger the kittens and all sorts of stuff you don't really need to know about. The salient points are that Erasing Sherlock is a wonderfully observed and rendered piece of fiction which manages to do at least a little more than just have adventures and solve puzzles, and as everyone keeps saying, Kelly Hale should be a household name on the strength of the quality of her prose; and if you're incapable of reading this one without thinking ooh Cucumber, maybe you should stick to your beloved Jason of Star Command DVDs, or just cease to exist altogether. Either would be acceptable.

The Weapon Shops of Isher

A.E. van Vogt The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951)
As mentioned on previous occasions, I'm still unable to leave a van Vogt title on the shelf of a store if it's one I haven't read, despite so many of them having bordered on the incomprehensible, simply because when he's good, he's amazing - at least in my opinion. Happily this turns out to be one of those titles that justifies the headaches incurred whilst trying to unscramble some kind of sense from The House That Stood Still or The Beast or any of the others. I had high hopes, having enjoyed The Weapon Shop, one of the three short stories from which this is cobbled together, and thankfully those hopes have been rewarded.

The Weapon Shop - here meaning the short story, although what I have to say applies equally to this novel - is a wonderfully tight serving of van Vogtian surrealism set in the authoritarian interplanetary empire of Isher. The weapon shops of the title represent the only significant obstacle to the empire imposing totalitarian rule over its people. Weapon shops spontaneously appear on busy city streets and can vanish just as easily; no agent of Isher is able to enter a weapon shop, nor purchase any of the weapons, their being for sale exclusively to the common citizenry. One undercover agent of Isher who manages to enter a weapon shop is expelled by the side door and finds himself instantaneously transported to the planet Mars and thus obliged to spend many weeks getting back to Earth. More than any other van Vogt title I've read, this one seems to foreshadow certain aspects of The Prisoner television series in terms of mood.

As may be obvious from the above paragraph, the weapon shops serve as a slightly peculiar metaphor for the right to bear arms. As a subject, I'm in two minds about this one, and have no wish to turn this review into an essay on the pros and cons of gun control. I can appreciate the view - as taken here by van Vogt - that totalitarian dictatorship cannot be imposed upon an armed citizenry, or at least I can appreciate the sentiment on principal. In practice I'm not sure the idea really holds water given that governments intent upon the complete - or as complete as possible - control of their people will generally find a way regardless of gun ownership, and this is without accounting for the considerable drawbacks of having so many people walking around packing heat. It's probably also significant that van Vogt weakens his own argument by having his cake and eating it: the guns sold by the weapon shops are defensive only and cannot be fired in anger, or with ill-intent, or even when hunting certain animals.

Nevertheless, the story works regardless of its own ill-fitting metaphor as an examination of the relationship between an all-powerful state and its own dissident element, how much dissent is permitted and so on; and it works not so much because the message necessarily yields any great revelation as because this is van Vogt doing what he does best, and doing it really well. The narrative swallows itself whole a couple of times, so concentration is necessary as it is with most of his novels; but this one is fairly rewarding, allowing the reader to fill in most of those details I'd swear he omits on purpose for the sake of keeping everything slightly off balance. Given the nature of Isher, the time paradoxes, the surrealism, and the supposed threat from impenetrable shops which materialise from nowhere, and which are indestructible through not being composed of normal matter, you could probably regard The Weapon Shops of Isher as a precursor to Faction Paradox if you squint a little, or if not a precursor, then at least a distant aunt. Granted that the majority of his novels are frankly fucking weird, I can see why A.E. van Vogt's posthumous reputation lags some way behind that of many of his golden age contemporaries, but it still seems a bit unfortunate in consideration of the few which are as good as this one.

Warring States

Mags L. Halliday Warring States (2005)
I had quite a poor impression of this one prior to this - my second or possibly third re-reading - recalling Warring States as either impenetrable, or merely a reconditioned version of one of those Doctor Who adventures in which a series of scrapes leads to the grand finale of everyone meeting up in the town square just in time for our hero to ram the magic quantum sink splodger of destiny up his own arse, reversing the timestream and saving the day. Happily my impression turns out to have been completely wrong, although I can nevertheless see how it came to be formed, even without accounting for the fact of my having had considerably less of a working attention span back in 2005. I seem to recall beginning Warring States two or three times before achieving the momentum to get all the way through, and in recent years I've put this down to it being a novel which was published more or less without editing or even proofreading; except I can't remember who told me that so I'm not sure how true it may be, and in any case I've only noticed one significant typo somewhere near the beginning.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Warring States was a lot more enjoyable this time around, and with hindsight some of my initial criticisms have been similar to those levelled at my own Faction Paradox novel, Against Nature*, specifically that it's impenetrable with no clear indication of who is doing what or why they're doing it. Whilst I'm inclined to suggest that this sort of thing is only a problem when one can't be bothered to read the actual words which appear as print on the page, I must admit I still found it occasionally difficult to retain just what motivates Cousin Octavia and the others, what objective drives them forward through the narrative.

It's not so much that these details are glossed over as that, I would say, the level of descriptive detail pouring from the narrative is rich and quite intense, demanding that one pay attention, and so some elements become muddied here and there. That said, I suppose the setting of the Boxer Uprising does not easily lend itself to the sort of passages in which one might pause to catch breath. However, through the use of a special technique of thinking about the words as I read them, I was able to keep the important details in mind - that Cousin Octavia is seeking the quality of immortality associated with the mummified relic from the Warring States era of ancient Chinese history, for one example; and so ultimately my main criticism of this novel is that I probably could have done with a little more background detail, specifically with regard to the Boxer Uprising, the Warring States era of ancient Chinese history, George Morrison and so on. The narrative seems to assume one will be familiar with the setting and historical details, but then apparently I myself did the same thing despite my best efforts to keep everyone in the loop. Never mind.

Leaving aside such criticisms, this is actually a fairly rewarding novel, or at least certainly more so than I realised. There are some nice ideas - particularly a sort of written equivalent of that stuff in Chinese action films where people run up walls and the like. There is a lot going on here, and a lot which invites the reader to think about just what may or may not be happening. My initial reservations included a minor objection based upon this being the Faction Paradox novel which wasn't really about anything, just people in skull masks having an adventure in time and space. Thankfully, I also seem to have been wrong on that score, although what Warring States is about seems dependent on some understanding of Chinese folklore, yin and yang, the union of opposing forces, and all that sort of business. At least I think it does.

So in summary, this is a much better novel than at least some may realise, but you really do need to pay attention because it isn't going to do all the work for you.

*: Which you need to buy if you haven't already done so. Don't worry about reading it. Just buy it.

The Big Time

Fritz Leiber The Big Time (1958)
What a strange and wonderful world we live in that I who have never brought forth seed unto the world should receive a 1961 Ace Double as a Father's Day gift from a mother-in-law whose existence was entirely unknown to me but a half decade ago in a completely different country; and pertinent for said Ace Double featuring The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, himself a master of stories which ask how the hell did that happen?

There's probably no such thing as a new idea, and Leiber was hardly the first to write about the weirder possibilities of time travel, but nevertheless, anyone familiar with the Faction Paradox mythos of Lawrence Miles and others, specifically the War - as subsequently pasteurised for the back story of the All-New Super Doctor Who Super Show - really needs to take a look at Fritz Leiber's Change War, of which The Big Time is the first book.

The Change War is a conflict the width of the universe, spanning the entire course of history with two equally matched forces continually mucking about with each other's past, changing the present and - oh you must know the drill by now, surely?

The Big Time takes place entirely in a bar, a brothel it could be inferred, a place outside of time and thus immune to the influence of the war where combatants from all across the span of human and even non-human history stop in for a drink and a bit of a rest. The two major powers are dubbed Snakes and Spiders, and The Place is sympathetic to the latter, although it remains in doubt as to whether anyone understands the true nature of these higher powers, even whether anyone has ever directly encountered them. Amongst those patrons ensconced in the bar when it suddenly finds itself cut off from the rest of causality are a Nazi officer, a Venusian satyr, an eight-legged Lunar creature, and a girl from ancient Crete; and so with such emphasis on events occurring elsewhere, it reads somewhat like a stage play - even the work of a weirder, funnier Harold Pinter - doubtless a result of Leiber's theatrical background; so, if the reference means anything to anyone, The Big Time is probably an absentee beat generation father to Faction Paradox:

It's sweet to jigger reality, to twist the whole course of a man's life or a culture's, to ink out his or its past and scribble in a new one, and be the only one to know and gloat over the changes—hah! Killing men or carrying off women isn't in it for glutting the sense of power. It's sweet to feel the Change Winds blowing through you and know the pasts that were and the past that is and the pasts that may be. It's sweet to wield the Atropos and cut a Zombie or Unborn out of his lifeline and look the Doubleganger in the face and see the Resurrection-glow in it and Recruit a brother, welcome a newborn fellow Demon into our ranks and decide whether he'll best fit as Soldier, Entertainer, or what.

The Big Time is packed with mind-bending ideas and heavy with potential subtext - an allegory of the cold war and the machinations of those Leviathan superpowers moving around at impossible distance from all that is human and therefore comprehensible, a novel which sides with the poet for the reason that poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

Being Fritz Leiber, there's something of a bebop element: berets are definitely worn, espresso consumed, bongos pounded with gay abandon:

Mark had drawn a Greek hetaera name of Phryne; I suppose not the one who maybe still does the famous courtroom striptease back in Athens, and he was waking her up with little sips of his scotch and soda, though, from some looks he'd flashed, I got the idea Kaby was the kid he really went for. Sid was coaxing the fighting gal to take some high-energy bread and olives along with the wine, and, for a wonder, Doc seemed to be carrying on an animated and rational conversation with Sevensee and Maud, maybe comparing notes on the Northern Venusian Shallows, and Beau had got on to Panther Rag, and Bruce and Lili were leaning on the piano, smiling very appreciatively, but talking to each other a mile a minute.

Some reviewers describe The Big Time as incomprehensible. Although I don't think that's really fair, it does require that its reader pays attention, and in places it feels a little like a conversation with someone who is off their cake and won't shut up. It's disorientating for sure, but if it's a choice between that and space ranger Glenn Tandy scowled with tired eyes at the radar image lit up on his detector screen, I'd rather take the option in which it is assumed I have a brain. It's perhaps not quite so delightfully hatstand as Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas, but neither is The Big Time anything to be sniffed at.

A War of Witches

Timothy J. Knab A War of Witches (1993)
A slight shift in emphasis here, A War of Witches being anthropology written as autobiography rather than fiction as such. Back in 2006 when Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox imprint, I recall suggesting on some forum or other that Knab's book might be deemed to inhabit some of the same territory and might thus be of interest to those missing their not particularly regular dose of Factiony goodness; which I still stand by, particularly as A War of Witches had a considerable influence on my own more recent contribution to the mythos with Against Nature.

Timothy J. Knab is, as I understand it, a reasonably big name in the vague field falling somewhere between the anthropology and ethnography of Mesoamerica, and during the 1970s he spent time living amongst the indigenous people of rural Puebla, some miles east of the Valley of Mexico. To be specific, as he relates the tale he does a great deal more than just have a bit of a holiday in someone else's lack of facilities, making close friends with numerous Nahua families and himself becoming a curandero - which seems like pretty good going for a white guy living in a place with limited access to electricity and where it isn't even a given that your neighbour will speak Spanish.

As D.H. Lawrence observed in Apocalypse, written in 1931: In the lowest stratum of society religion remains pretty much the same, throughout the ages, and so it is in Knab's Sierra de Puebla where the pre-Hispanic religion remains pretty much unchanged despite the garnish of a few obscure saints - so obscure as to be unknown outside the region. In other words, whilst the cathedrals of indigenous Mexican faith may have been bulldozed five hundred years ago, there are still places where they never got the memo.

What makes this account potentially so fascinating to those who may not be familiar with the culture for which it gives vivid account, is that it approaches the supernatural Nahua world on its own terms - getting right in there without the lab coat or attendant rationale which would reduce the subject to a sterile itinerary of quaint rural customs; and happily, neither does Knab adopt any approach in common with the new-age types who might mistakenly imagine themselves somehow attuned to the Nahua way of life. Rather, he lets the people and their beliefs speak for themselves, and in terms which no-one should find impenetrable or unfamiliar.

In learning the curandero's art and uncovering the genuinely terrifying history of witchcraft in the Sierra de Puebla, Knab recovers such detail of obscure potions, rites performed in certain caves, methods of killing foes without detection, and dream interpretation as to force the conclusion that calling this stuff mumbo jumbo is missing the point, because it's absolutely real for those involved. There are plenty of great books full of names and dates with regard to indigenous Mexican history, but this one attempts to tell you what it actually felt like as Knab spends afternoons idly sipping coffee or cane alcohol with scary old people who make veiled references to witchcraft murders, what the things under the ground want, and a recent crucifixion that no-one likes to talk about for obvious reasons.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Dicky Dawkins, and tend to agree with his attitude to that which is lazily termed spirituality, A War of Witches highlights the flaw in his somewhat reductionist view of religion. It would be easy to dismiss that which Knab encountered as a combination of suggestion and sleight of hand, except such dismissal presupposes certain conditions which aren't entirely applicable and that there is nothing to be learnt here - which is far from the case. Of all the books I've absorbed on this subject, A War of Witches is one of the most illuminating and makes for genuinely gripping reading.