August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965 (1965)
This one is dated to the month of my birth, beyond which I don't have anything interesting to add regarding these unrelated facts aside from makes you think, dunnit?

Fritz Leiber's Stardock is one of his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales, a series I've given a wide berth up until now because I didn't like the sound of it. Leiber writes like a dream when he's writing something interesting - expressive and arguably unique in the history of this sort of literature; but Stardock is unfortunately more or less what I expected it to be, namely the adventures of bearded men who point at distant objects and exclaim behold! The bearded men in this case are engaged in mountain climbing in search of the inevitable treasure, and they both get to knob sexy faerie ladies, and it's sixty looong pages which I read in a single sitting because I knew I'd end up skipping the rest if I took a break. It's probably great if you like that sort of thing and I don't, but it's nice to know my instincts regarding whether I'm going to like something or not seem reasonably on point.

Thankfully, it's mostly uphill for the rest of the trip. Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again is characteristically nourishing; and Sally is one of those tales in which Asimov did something other than invite us to figure out the puzzle, so that's jolly nice; and this issue's vintage reprint was David H. Keller's The Worm from 1929 - then much younger than this magazine is now - which isn't anything mind blowing but does a job.

Frank R. Paul's cover illustrates The Man from Mars, his one page speculative essay on Martian biology. It's preposterous but charming and, dating from 1939, somewhat refutes the claim - which I read somewhere or other and have probably repeated - of Simak being the first writer to depict alien intelligence as something other than inevitably hostile.

The finest of the selection is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dark Room featuring a cast of mostly vodka-Martini guzzling fifties men and which is as such absurdly dated but works in spite of itself, and because Sturgeon's prose has a uniquely jazzy energy which crackles off the page.

A Planet for Texans

 

H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire A Planet for Texans (1958)
I picked this one up out of curiosity for the same reason I picked up Fritz Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas - because that's where I live. Also, it was the only science-fiction novel in the bookshop of the Texas State History Museum in Austin and I vaguely remember enjoying Piper's Little Fuzzy. A Planet for Texans was originally published as half of an Ace Double and later won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, whatever that is.

The premise is something about Texans being so ornery that the entire state secedes from planet Earth, and I gather the novel strives to examine some political point along vaguely libertarian lines, something inspired by H.L. Mencken proposing a political system incorporating the occasional assassination of candidates as a legitimate part of the governmental process. At least this is what it says on Wikipedia.

Considering that I was half expecting something ghastly about a planet of rootin' tootin' racist fatties, it could have been worse; but it also could have been better. Texas here is invoked by desert, cows, barbecue, and the sort of Texans it's fairly easy to avoid, even in Texas - namely ranch dwelling shitheads with too much money; so there wasn't much I recognised from my daily existence and I've been here for a whole decade. The only problem with Little Fuzzy, so far as I recall, is that about half the book was spent in a court room. Unfortunately this time it feels like it's almost the whole thing, although maybe something different happened during the pages where I was asleep. Unless I've read it wrong, it seems to be a conversation about libertarian stuff for 126 pages, with a few mentions of cows and barbecue thrown in here and there for the sake of local colour.

A Spectre is Haunting Texas isn't without its problems, from what I remember, but it was at least a lot more fun than this.

The Fall of Chronopolis

Barrington J. Bayley The Fall of Chronopolis (1974)
As a reformed Who junkie, The Fall of Chronopolis piques my interest not least for how much Time Lord stuff it seems to have foreshadowed. Bayley patently wasn't the first to write about a time war with combatants erasing great swathes of enemy history - and I'm not even sure it was Fritz Leiber, come to think of it - but the quota of this material which has since been reincarnated within The Book of the War and all from which it was drawn seems significant - there's even a ruling entity identified as the Imperator. Okay, so Bayley may not have been the first, but he was possibly the first to wrap his time travelling combatants in pomp, ritual and pseudo-religious symbolism; and in case you're interested, I've checked, and the television Time Lords were still vaguely utopian Star Trek knock-offs with a thing for white plastic when this was written.

But anyway, who gives a shit? Let's talk about the novel.

Chronopolis probably isn't Bayley's greatest, but it's decent. The only female character is a victim figure who is raped on at least four occasions, which is troubling, but probably shouldn't be the focus of ensuing discussion about the merits of the novel in any more general sense, arguably being an issue of that which Bayley failed to include or address rather than what we actually have here.

The story runs that time travel has become so common as to blur most distinctions between past and present, with different eras reduced to what may as well be geographical locations, and all in the name of something acknowledged as God. This society is at war with the Hegemony, which is itself from the far future, represented in the present by the Traumatics, the equivalent of a Satanic sect. There are paradoxes and a lot of playing around with different kinds of time as means of accounting for the same, so it's pretty damn weird and often very, very confusing, but rewards the effort of hanging on and powering through the more bewildering passages; and in case you were wondering, it's all about predestination, free will and that sort of thing. So it's chewy, but mostly in a good way, excepting for having failed the Bechdel test so profoundly as to border on impressive.

The Einstein Intersection

Samuel R. Delany The Einstein Intersection (1967)
My wife picked this up as we were browsing in the used book store, handing it to me with the words, this looks like the sort of thing you would read. It did, and I had an outstanding mental note to get around to reading something by Delaney at some point or other, so I ignored the possibility of mockery and took it as a challenge.

The Einstein Intersection won a Nebula award, and I can sort of see why, at least up to a point. Delaney's writing is wild and literary, word jazz touching on Fritz Leiber, a distant cousin to beat poetry, so it's not insignificant that Gregory Corso should be referenced at the beginning of one chapter.

While day leaned over the hills I passed the first red flowers, blossoms big as my face, like blood bubbles nested in thorns, often resting on the bare rock. No good to stop there. Carnivorous.

I squatted on a broken seat of granite in the yellowing afternoon. A snail the size of my curled forefinger doffed his eyes at a puddle big as my palm. Half an hour later, climbing down a canyon wall when yellow had died under violet I saw a tear in the rock: another opening into the source-cave. I decided on nighting it there, and ducked in.

See what I mean?

The story occurs in some kind of post-human realm wherein this world of Einsteinian laws, having intersected with a universe following a different set of rules, has changed—changed, strangely, wonderfully, incredibly, as it claims on the back cover. I can sort of follow what happens, and see how this intersection relates to the narrative, but as to what any of it may be about, I haven't a fucking clue. Delaney himself suggests it's about myth in one of a number of excerpts from his journal - quoted at the head of certain chapters - in which he discusses the process of writing the book we are actually reading; which is nice, but unfortunately left me suspecting I'd rather have read Delaney's journal. The Einstein Intersection is stuffed with memorable and intriguing images, and I particularly enjoyed the canonisation of Ringo Starr as a mythic figure on equal footing to Orpheus, but I'm afraid I otherwise found it to be a bit of a dog's dinner.

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.

His Share of Glory

C.M. Kornbluth His Share of Glory (1997)
As a fairly general rule I tend to approach an author of unfamiliar stripe by first dipping into the short stories, from which platform I then attempt to assess whether or not I'm likely to enjoy lengthier works. His Share of Glory seemed nevertheless a slightly daunting proposition because although it does indeed collect the short fiction of the highly praised C.M. Kornbluth, it collects all of it, or at least almost all he wrote alone and extracurricular to collaborative efforts with Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and others; so it's a 670 page hardback of such constitution that ne'er-do-wells could quite easily use it to smash the windows of jewellery stores. Reading His Share of Glory has therefore, in some respects, been a less casual undertaking than I would like, but being a birthday present from the world's greatest mother-in-law - who presented me with the Ace Double edition of Fritz Leiber's The Big Time on a previous occasion - it would have been churlish to get too sniffy about it, and not least because Kornbluth was clearly a remarkable writer.

As his still glowing reputation attests, Kornbluth was patently amongst the more talented of the Futurians - a moderately political New York based science-fiction fan group with a membership roster including Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim and others; and it's probably worth noting that he died relatively young and said reputation is thus founded on less than two decades of paid work. His characters tend to be lively, believable, and informed by strongly literary sensibilities. The stories they inhabit tend to be playful, rich in imagery and memorable phrasing, with the jerky narrative motion of van Vogt played more for comic than traditionally pulpy dramatic effect, so there's occasionally a faint tone of Marx brothers lending an absurdist spin to the proceedings, and the sort of bizarre embellishments which suggest Kornbluth's fiction as ancestral to Michael Moorcock's stranger material, or even that of Terry Pratchett in a certain light. One further element he at least had in common with these two is that of genre never once being allowed to take precedent over the progression of the narrative, or over its author taking infectious pleasure in the process.

Of Kornbluth's short stories, The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag seem to be the best known, and understandably so, but he had plenty others of equivalent quality where those came from. Shark Ship predates Neal Asher's nautically themed weird fiction by nearly half a century; and Two Dooms divided the United States between Japan and the Third Reich a couple of years before The Man in the High Castle, and to more chilling effect for my money. The final eight stories of the collection were written to specific commissions and as such read a little like Kornbluth channelling E.E. 'Doc' Smith in terms of concessions to fifties space opera, but generally it seems he would have had trouble had he ever been asked to write a dull sentence; for example, The Last Man Left in the Bar:

'Bartender,' in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty green El Greco sky which might be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn't. It was the Seal.

Of course, 670 pages of this would be disorientating, which is probably the only weakness of either this collection, or the fact of my having attempted to digest it in one go over the duration of a couple of weeks. Kornbluth possibly shouldn't be read in such huge chunks, at least not his short stories, being as some of those more eccentrically narrated lose cohesion without due concentration. At least that was how it seemed as I worked my way through, although considering the sheer volume of material here, the guy is entitled to have fired off a few blanks now and then.

In the event of this reading like an ambiguous verdict, the points to remember are that at his best, Kornbluth was fucking tremendous, and there's quite a lot of his best to be found here.

This collection was produced - by the way - by NESFA Press who've been doing some good work keeping certain authors in print, producing similarly exhaustive short story collections by the likes of Judith Merril, Murray Leinster, A.E. van Vogt, Cordwainer Smith and innumerable others; and I've encountered a rumour of their perhaps presently wrangling over the rights to gather together all of Clifford D. Simak's short fiction, volume or volumes I would crawl naked over broken glass to own, as they say, should the rumour turn out to be true. Aside from anything else, this should therefore be considered an enthusiastic recommendation.

Beyond Lies the Wub

Philip K. Dick Beyond Lies the Wub (1987)
I bought all five volumes of Dick's short stories ages ago, well before I'd made my way through all of the novels, and I've since somehow lost track of which of these I've read; so for the sake of completism - not to mention the sake of reading yet more stuff by an author I like - I'm beginning again with volume one. Adhering to a fairly strict chronological order, this collection opens with the previously unpublished Stability dating from 1947, with the rest being stories dated to a nine month period spanning 1951 to 1952; so although Dick had already written and failed to find publishers for the mainstream novels Gather Yourselves Together and Voices From The Street, these tales were written prior to his first full length science-fiction efforts and thus represent his earliest surviving formal excursions into the genre.

Perhaps inevitably, this is an oddly uneven collection, its stories informed by the process of Dick feeling his way forward through a genre which wasn't quite his first choice. He tries different approaches. Some of them work, and some don't, although amongst the more successful are those revealing a powerful A.E. van Vogt influence such as the aforementioned Stability, a typically surreal van Vogtian account of a winged man arriving at an office only to find himself berated by an authority figure for the invention of a device of which he knows nothing. Even more interesting is perhaps that Stability is run through with the typically Dickian theme of change in opposition to the dreaded forces of stasis or decay, so as with Gather Yourselves Together, we see how much of what made the guy tick was already present and fully realised even in his oldest narratives.

Similarly Paycheck and the novella, The Variable Man - presumably Dick getting in training for his first novel length science-fiction story - both feature distinctly van Vogtian running men attempting to make sense of the irrational worlds in which they find themselves. Elsewhere there's whimsy of a form which seems almost reminiscent of John Wyndham or Fritz Leiber in The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and the wonderful The Preserving Machine wherein classical music scores are transmogrified into living creatures capable of, it is hoped, surviving a cataclysm; and it is from the humour of such tales that Dick's distinctive and familiar voice begins to emerge. Roog and The Little Movement exemplify this voice - small ideas beautifully and succinctly explored by means which resolutely remain a narrative, never once reducing to only a vehicle for novelty. The same is true of The Skull, an ingenious tale which might be seen as precursor to both Moorcock's Behold the Man and every crap Steven Moffat script wherein the Doctor materialises the TARDIS inside his own grandad's bumhole, but which nevertheless remains a neat little paradox, a story written over half a century ago which ties time into a fancy little bow and still delivers the unforeseen forehead slapping revelation despite all those crap time travel shows we've sat through since.

Contrary to what one might expect, the more overtly Dickian stories of the collection also seem to be the earliest, which at least seems to support the idea that he knew what he was going to say from the beginning, but took some years learning how best to say it. Other stories contained herein reveal possible instances of experimentation with Asimov's penchant for problem solving and the like, and it never seems to work so well as when Dick is writing true to himself; not every last one is a classic, but a good number of them are clearly top shelf.

The Mind Spider

Fritz Leiber The Mind Spider (1961)
As I may have mentioned a while back, Fritz Leiber's 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 all that good stuff. It features in the 1958 novella The Big Time and a handful of short stories, so to describe it as a series is possibly extravagant. Some, although by no means all of those short stories appear in this collection as the flip side of an Ace Double - enough at least to suggest a common theme even allowing for the couple that don't quite fit, and that The Mind Spider itself is apparently a Cthulhu mythos tale - this information gleaned from Wikipedia rather than anything conspicuously tentacular that stood out whilst reading it.

Anyway, none of this really matters so much as the quality of the stories which, whilst lacking anything genuinely mind-blowing, is nevertheless high. Leiber seems adept at narratives which swerve wildly in unexpected and occasionally van Vogtian directions, although his syntax is less angular and therefore easier on the brain. The Haunted Future - one of the longest here - serves to illustrate this, retaining the unsettled flavour of the surreal incidents of its first few pages even after the red eyes glaring from the dark are explained. It's not his best stuff, but it's good enough to keep the reader picking away until there's nothing left in the box, if a confectionary analogy isn't stretching the point too far.

First He Died

Clifford D. Simak First He Died (1951)
First He Died is better known as Time and Again, the title it gained upon reprint. I read Time and Again only a couple of years ago, but saw a copy of this earlier incarnation amongst the titles some person had up for auction on eBay. I'd already bagged Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique collection, David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, and George MacDonald's Lilith off the guy, and somehow I just couldn't leave this one behind, even given that the bid would mark my crossing over from reader to collector.

Anyway, I still can't tell if this is quite the same as the retitled version. There are scenes I don't recall having read first time around amongst other apparent discrepancies, although quickly comparing the two, flipping from one copy to the other, I strongly suspect  they're identical and this is simply a book which improves quite dramatically with repeated reading. Certainly I don't remember it striving for quite such philosophical depth last time, or at least not doing it so well.

First He Died is yet another curiously early novel about a time war, predating Fritz Leiber's The Big Time by nearly a decade, and of course the All-New Doctor Who Comedy Slam by half a century, and whilst we're here, let's not hold back from pointing out that Asher Sutton, the novel's protagonist returns from a mysterious region of space cut off from the rest of the universe, reborn with two hearts and a secondary nervous system - not sure if that one rings any bells.

Sutton, who somehow arrives on Earth in a ship which should never have flown - the engines don't work and it isn't even airtight - discovers he will one day publish a philosophical text entitled This is Destiny which discusses the fundamental truths of existence, the universe and the place of humanity therein. The trouble is that humanity isn't going to like what he has to say, not least because of the immense influence this book will have on future history; and so war has broken out between those factions who wish to prevent Sutton writing his book, and those sympathetic. Curiously, this results in two future versions of This is Destiny, only one of which is true to Asher Sutton's vision, which in turn presents an odd parallel to the alternately titled editions of the novel we're reading; and if this weren't in itself sufficiently self-referential, Sutton travels back to 1977 in search of an ancestor and finds himself discussing the subject of his magnum opus with a character called Old Cliff:

'But destiny? you said something about destiny?'

'Interested in it, lad,' said the old man. 'Wrote a story about it once. Didn't amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days.'

For some time I've regarded Clifford D. Simak as something like the rural Philip K. Dick, a cleaner living, more traditional counterpart to the urban paranoia of his junior, but nevertheless similar. As authors, whilst they may be worlds apart, they both speak from a blue collar perspective, telling stories of the little guy who works hard and generally tries to do the right thing; and their respective careers were in each case engaged with repeated attempts to reach a broader understanding of the universe. Dick regarded that which we experience as the universe to be possibly illusory, whereas Simak held it to be real, but perhaps ultimately beyond our comprehension. Also they both made use of a middle initial and had some of the same letters in their names...

Whereas Dick made frequent and occasionally inscrutable reference to historical philosophy, Simak kept it simpler - just a brief nod to Henry Thoreau in First He Died and the rest otherwise discussed without bringing in anything beyond that which is directly experienced by the characters of the novel.

'We've lived by faith alone,' said Sutton, ' for eight thousand years at least and probably more than that. Certainly more than that. For it must have been faith, a glimmer of some sort of faith, that made the Neanderthaler paint the shinbones red and nest the skulls so they face toward the east.'

'Faith,' said Dr. Raven gently, 'is a powerful thing.'

'Yes, powerful,' Sutton agreed, 'but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a staff to lean upon, the expressed hope and conviction that there is some great power which will lend us aid and guidance.'

This idea is the foundation of Simak's writing, and one which in its deceptive simplicity has probably denied him a posthumous reputation of the kind now enjoyed by Philip K. Dick. Simak writes simple, communicative sentences in the voice of occasionally somewhat homespun characters. That which Asher Sutton will one day write in his great work is likewise straightforward:

We are not alone.

No one ever is alone.

Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.

Read a little too quickly, it seems to amount to hey like we're all brothers so let's all just try to get along, mkay? but of course such would hardly require elaboration by means of an entire book; and with this arguably being Simak's first full novel - Cosmic Engineers and Empire both having been guided by John W. Campbell to varying degrees - you can tell he's really going for it, piling on all his biggest ideas, making concessions to no-one but his own conscience and hoping some sense will result; and it sort of does, or at least it did for me during this second reading.

Destiny by Simak's terms might almost be considered an inversion of all those 1950s supermen, utopian science-fiction futures with man - and it usually was quite specifically man - stood at the technological pinnacle of creation. Sutton's Destiny is more like an understanding of the equilibrium of existence, or at least its potential, with all that lives as part of an indivisible whole, and one illustration Simak provides of this is that not even a cell can be considered a single discrete organism given the presence of mitochondria. In essence, First He Died strives to communicate a quite subtle philosophical model without recourse to either religion or even the language by which it might best be communicated; and this seems to provide a glimpse of Simak's almost existential view of the universe, a view which, by the by, might also be characterised by his writing time travel as a psychological rather than temporal process - an idea later revisited in Time is the Simplest Thing in which the past is revealed to be an empty stage from which all trace of life has vanished; and all this even without getting into Asher Sutton as a man returned from death with the potential to save humanity from itself...

First He Died or whatever you want to call it is a bit of a mess in terms of traditional narrative, and yet seemed to me quite straightforward first time around, mainly due to Old Cliff's insistence on communicating everything through the medium of folks who just like to sit on the stoop awhile with their faithful hound chewing a straw and maybe getting in some whittling; but don't be deceived, these still waters run surprisingly deep.

Masters of Time

A.E. van Vogt Masters of Time (1944)
How odd that I should be prompted to dribble on about time war by Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, then only a few days later, I come across an even older example. The opposing factions in van Vogt's characteristically peculiar Masters of Time are the Planetarians, and the forces of a distant future Earth referring to themselves as the Glorious. I suspect the message here may be similar to that of The Big Time, specifically a sceptical regard of military authority as illustrated by neither side being particularly well-defined or necessarily motivated entirely by noble intentions - possibly not such a surprise given that Masters of Time was written as World War II continued to bluster on across Europe and around the Pacific. Of course, being van Vogt, it's sometimes difficult to tell quite what's going on as the story fires off at random, darting about the room like that furry thing Sylvester McCoy never quite managed to catch in old episodes of Vision On; having said which, it nevertheless opens with one of the most memorable first chapters of any of his books that I've read:

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.

Sometimes I just don't know where to start with this guy - a novel that begins with She didn't dare!, or the image of someone coldly furious with their own fear; he writes like Flash Gordon redone as German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, no sentence failing to punch you in the face or do something weird requiring you skip back and read it twice just to be sure. Our heroine, as introduced above, is saved from suicide by the not entirely human Dr. Lell who sends her to work at his Calonian recruitment station, which somehow ends up in a war waged across the span of human history, Roman legionaries fighting side by side with Zulu tribesmen and British Tommies, eighteen parallel Earths and God knows what else. It's tough to follow in places, but as ever with van Vogt, the texture carries the story. On first reading, Masters of Time falls short of being one of his greats, but there's some astonishing writing in here, and I suspect it  rewards further efforts.

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.