The Moon Maid

Edgar Rice Burroughs The Moon Maid (1923)
After the previous three, I had no real intention of dipping any additional toes into Edgar, but this was in a second hand book store in Kenilworth, England, exactly opposite the charity shop from which I'd bought my first Edgar back in 2011; and my brain had somehow already flagged The Moon Maid as worth a look, for some reason.

It starts well, at least reminding us that Burroughs knew how to pull a sentence together, but before we've even come to the foot of the first page, we're told that the war which has been waging since 1914 is at last over, and that the Anglo-Saxon races have won - which has obviously come as a massive relief to everyone, even the losers who apparently always knew themselves to be a bad lot. To be fair to Edgar, I'm fairly certain he's referring to the Anglo-Saxon as something distinct from the forces of Communism - then making quite a commotion in the east at the time of writing - rather than specifically distinct from other racial groups. Nevertheless, it strikes an unfortunately ambiguous note.

Next we realise we're reading a variation on that narrative device, so popular at the time, where our man strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious explorer at the gentleman's club, and the mysterious explorer is naturally busting to spill the beans on his recent most diverting escapade in the celestial planet of Neptune, or similar. For reasons best known to himself, Edgar goes one better in The Moon Maid, and our guy strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious adventurer who just so happens to be channeling his own future self, or possibly his son from a few decades down the line, and the son has been to the moon. My friend Neil once had an idea for a movie comprising just a continuous car chase, but which incorporated flashbacks to previous car chases throughout, and the flashbacks would also feature flashbacks to earlier car chases. I'm not sure if Neil ever read The Moon Maid.

Anyway, whichever narrator we eventually end up with, he goes to the moon in the company of his most hated enemy, who also happens to be a technical genius - so that makes perfect sense. They crash inside the moon, because it's hollow with numerous rudimentary civilisations dwelling therein, the first encountered being the Kalkars, a race of cannibalistic centaurs resembling the bastard offspring of Jason King and Germaine Greer if the cover of this edition is any indication. As usual, these creatures are more or less American Indians so there are spears aplenty, various incidents of failing to recognise the inherent superiority of whitey, and so on and so forth. Our guy's most hated enemy runs off to teach the Kalkars how to make guns because he's a wrong 'un through and through, and bringing him to the moon was a huge mistake. The Kalkars were commies in an earlier version of the book, for what that may be worth. Our guy teams up with the noble underdogs, as usual, having fallen in love with a right tasty moon lady of normal human physiognomy, which is handy. You can probably guess the rest.

The great shame is that Burroughs had a genuinely wonderful way with words, an elegant prose at least equal to that of Wells, which keeps you reading no matter how fucking stupid the story gets; and he wasted these not inconsiderable talents on this barely coherent garbage resembling the much older lunar satire of Cyrano de Bergerac and others, but rendered in wax crayon without the satire.

This was definitely the last one for me.

Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin Intercourse (1987)
Intercourse is the tract wherein Andrea Dworkin famously stated that all men are rapists and that heterosexual sex is rape, just like the joyless dungaree wearing dyke she was. However, bothering to read the book reveals that she never said anything of the sort, and that her argument as set forth herein is not actually unreasonable. That being said, it's no walk in the park either. Dworkin is not an easy read. She's absolutely uncompromising and unwilling to soft soap, prettify or simplify her argument. The reader is expected to shut the fuck up, pay attention, and no fidgeting if they know what's good for them; and actually, it is good for them, certainly potentially educational.

Essentially it's nothing less than the history of sexual politics mapped out in our changing, evolving attitudes, at least for the last five-hundred or so years, as revealed in the fiction of Tolstoy, Lawrence, Hemingway and others. Dworkin pulls apart established models of human intercourse, social and sexual, with surprising deference reflecting her genuine appreciation of at least a few of these authors, but she pulls no punches and is very good at revealing that which has been staring us in the face all along and which suggests we, as the testicular half of a species, might like to think about growing the fuck up.

To be specific, Dworkin doesn't say anything as blunt or stupid as all sex between men and women is rape, but rather that it can't be anything but rape within the context of the patriarchal structures which inform society; and she's unfortunately right. The revelation is just how much is tied in with those structures, in which respect she's also very thorough, extending her analysis to the extremes of the Nazi death camps and how even there we find echoes of the man sticking his thingie in because he believes it to be his due. It's a solid argument, but one of such composition that there's not much point trying to break it down. Intercourse is, by some definition, an academic narrative, but the dialogue by which it sets forth its argument seems partially intuitive and therefore possibly of such complexity as to defeat being broken down into anything bite-sized.

Intercourse is intense but incredibly rewarding, and if you haven't read it, there seems a reasonable chance that it probably isn't what you think it is. If you're not already on board, it may be time to get over whatever has been holding you back and listen to what the woman had to say.

Also - for what it may be worth - I found Dworkin's filleting of Bram Stoker's thoroughly mediocre Dracula highly satisfying because I was beginning to think it was just me.

Mask of Chaos

John Jakes Mask of Chaos (1970)
This is another of those Ace Doubles, and hence a title which has found its way to my bookshelf mainly by virtue of being stuck to the back of Barrington Bayley's The Star Virus. Typically I assumed John Jakes would turn out to be another forgotten pulp-by-association science fiction author, maybe even one in the vein of Robert Moore Williams if I was lucky. However, a quick pog at Wikipedia reveals this to be an obscure formative work by some guy who went on to shift novels by the truckload, mostly historical jobs set around the time of the American civil war and of the kind which tend to get adapted as television miniseries. North and South was one of his, if you've heard of that. I hadn't, but my wife watched it when she was a teenager. Patrick Swayze was in it and I understand there may have been some shagging and people saying that they do declare.

Mask of Chaos gets off to a start at least as promising as its wonderful cover, fast-paced and yet written with enough flair to suggest Jakes was at least trying, and with a pleasant sense of van Vogt-style Dadaism at work. There's an inventive if slightly peculiar use of language, such as space off as an expletive; but for all its screwy promise, the narrative quickly settles to a certain level of cheese which isn't exactly bad, but tends to limit one's expectations as to how good the rest of the thing is likely to be, or at least it limited my expectations:

'Poetess,' she corrected. 'That's not my real line. That's only what I write on customs forms. My real occupation is woman.'

'Yeah, I can certainly see that.'

The heavy attempt didn't go over. 'You think I'm playing word games. Wipe it. I'm not. There's little enough love out in the stars the way it is. If anybody should know that, from what Fochet explained about you, it should be you. I write poetry as a hobby. Otherwise I'm a full-time, professional woman. I've been a mother, a wife, a mistress, a sweetheart. Sometimes paid, sometimes not, depending on my need, the man's need, and the atmosphere of the situation. Do you realise, Mike, how many women on the inhabited planets work at all kinds of professions except the one profession for which they were specifically engineered? Ninety-nine point nine percent of the women everywhere are like that. Women, and everything but. But I'm a professional. Needless to say, it's not a recognised occupation. The authorities on most planets disapprove of seeing it on forms. I've learned to write poetess pretty fast.'

'I'll bet you're good at it.'

'At being a woman?'

'Yeah.'

She smiled, really smiled, then. Dazzling.

'I am. Be good and you might find out.'

Phwoar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

Mask of Chaos maroons our boy, Mike - a cyborg whose name is an inexplicable contraction of Micropig - on a world where everyone wears a mask. He hooks up with Ab, poetess and professional woman who provides the brains to his brawn, and then the two of them just sort of hang around in the vicinity of the story for the next hundred or so pages. The masks are worn because everyone is horribly disfigured, although we never discover why so it's probably some heavy-handed allegory. Mike and Ab find themselves in opposition to this masked society for no adequately explained reason given that the society in question doesn't seem particularly oppressive or dystopian. They spend most of the novel embroiled in a game - a deadly game in which the prize is etc. etc., which seems to be one of those deals such as we saw in Rollerball or any number of crappy future sport strips in 2000AD comic. Of course, it could have gone either way given that a story is as much how it is written as that which it is written about, but the problem here is that we don't actually find out what the objective of this game might be, how our couple are expected to win it, or what is at stake. There's some mumbled explanation about a game without rules, suggesting Jakes scrabbling at whatever van Vogt was trying to do in The World of Null-A, but it feels like an excuse, particularly as the same absence of either dynamic or purpose infects the story as a whole.

Mask of Chaos isn't bad, but it's hard to say what it actually is, which is a pity for something which starts off so well and with such original promise.