Cock & Bull

Will Self Cock & Bull (1992)
I've always regarded 1993's My Idea of Fun as Self's debut novel, but coming back to Cock & Bull after at least a couple of decades, I realise it was this. It's actually a pair of novellas, Cock and Bull - hence the title, and even without a recurring character, the two comprise the yin and yang of a central theme which might be seen to lack balance were it further bifurcated. That theme, for what it may be worth, is genitalia - the organs which have driven human society forward from the very beginning by one means or another. No-one could possibly accuse Self of lacking ambition, but how the hell does one write about cocks and fannies without all the centuries old accumulation of bullshit, porn, and ideology getting in the way and defeating its own analysis? Self deftly defuses context by shifting everything a few feet to the left, and so we have Carol who finds she has grown a penis in Cock, and the eponymous star of Bull who wakes one morning to find a working vagina has opened up behind his knee just above the calf - the placement seeming necessary so as to circumnavigate the possibility of anything so reductionist as straightforward transgender fiction, Cock & Bull being closer in spirit to Kafka's Metamorphosis. It's about the smelly, wrinkly biology and how we deal with it, how we square it up with the fictions by which we've deodorised our toilet parts.

'There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.'

That being one perspective given herein, specifically by the Oxford don who narrates Cock to the author as they meet on a train like characters in a Graham Greene short story; but not even the bias of the author himself, the one recording this narrative, is exempt from scrutiny as the don seemingly glares out of the page to observe:

'You're typing me, boy, aren't you? You're turning me into something that I'm not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!'

A couple of pages later we read that:

Carol and Dan's life was thus exactly like literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuou, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.

This tendency to populate the novel with smaller models of itself achieves an admittedly gruesome climax in the person of Razza Rob, the foul stand-up comic.

'Razza is an ironist. You probably didn't notice' - but naturally, Bull gritted mentally, you did - 'but all these cunt jokes are just that: cunt jokes. They aren't jokes about women at all. They have nothing to do with women. Razza is cutting the archetypal cunt out of the woman - and displaying it for the world to see, and appreciate, that it's just a cipher - an empty category on to which people project their own distorted attitudes. After all, what's a hole once one removes it from the ground?'

Naturally, with horrible inevitability Razza Rob is subsequently revealed as entirely bereft of irony, and Juniper's somewhat forced rationalisation seems particularly timely given certain contemporary narratives wherein sexuality - and usually female sexuality - is divorced from biology in resumption of nineteenth century ideas about those feminine lady-brains.

Self's conclusion seems neatly summarised by the pejorative meaning of the title, although this is hardly a neatly binary discussions drawing yes, no, good, or bad conclusions, and as such it might arguably provide clues as to where so many of us get it wrong. The novel is an illusory medium which probably shouldn't be too easily mistaken for either anything directly allegorical or even conclusive regarding human society, but Self's satire comes about as close as we're likely to get in this instance, and it also helps that it's fucking funny for reasons which Razza Rob wouldn't have understood.

The Turing Test

Paul Leonard The Turing Test (2000)
If this Who novel following on from something first read back before I had pubes suggests an emerging theme, I should probably make it clear that it's really just comfort food for my eyes. My reading time is otherwise presently taken up with proofing print copies of my own five volume Mexico Diaries. I've spent the last five years editing the thing, and whilst I consider it at least sufficiently entertaining to have been worth the effort, it's pretty tough ploughing through all five of the cunts for the millionth time and still finding typos. Anyway, the point is that I needed light relief, hence The Turing Test.

The Turing Test was, as you probably know, part of a series of novels which kept Who going during the decade or so of it being off the air prior to its 2005 revival as a massive steaming pile of shite. This one followed on from the slightly underwhelming Paul McGann movie, and has been remembered as one of the better books, although not necessarily by me - which I'll come to in a moment.

To give credit where it's due, the BBC Who novels pulled some interesting moves in their time, facilitated by their collectively working as a larger ongoing narrative. At this point of his notional existence, the Doctor had been left stranded on Earth following not only the destruction of his home planet but also the retroactive erasure of his past; so he doesn't know who he is and the TARDIS may as well be just a wardrobe. He doesn't seem to age, and he doesn't know why, and he's living his life one year at a time with the vague understanding of something due to happen around the year 2000. I gather the point of this was to really get the writers earning their tuppence ha'penny, and to see if Doctor Who still worked with more or less all of the established props and references rendered off limits.

The Turing Test occurs during the second world war and draws in Alan Turing, Graham Greene, and Joseph Heller as both characters and authors; furthermore, the novel is divided into three parts, each one a first person narrative written in an approximation of their respective styles. The story, just to get it out of the way, concerns an impenetrable code which, so it transpires, derives from alien visitors rather than Nazis, hence Turing. Graham Greene additionally worked for MI6, aside from being a novelist, so that's how he figures, and Joseph Heller knew how to fly a plane, and at one point they need to fly a plane…

In its favour, The Turing Test is a novel which is quite happy to be a novel, with none of the usual passages half-wishing they were on telly. It's been a while since I read either The Power and the Glory or Catch-22, but Paul Leonard seems to do a decent job of capturing the voices of their authors, so far as I'm able to tell. Additionally in its favour, The Turing Test tries to say something beyond simply plugging up a few hours of your time with adventures. Specifically, it presents comparisons by which we might consider the question of what is human - hence the title - with variant flavours represented by the Doctor, the aliens, Greene's somewhat dour pessimism, Heller's humanism, Turing's vulnerability, various Nazis just doing their jobs, and so on and so forth.

It's ambitious and generally exceptionally well written, and it almost works but sort of doesn't, or didn't for me. I felt the same way the first time I read it however many years ago. The problem is that, I would guess, Leonard put so much work into impersonating Turing, Greene, and Heller that he lost his grip on the dynamic of the story, which just seems to drift along for a few hundred pages without any clear objective in sight, pissing away the goodwill of the reader - me in this case - until we come to the final third and suddenly notice that here is a writer who has taken the author of Catch-22 and made him have an exciting adventure with Doctor Who from the telly, which is just silly. The Turing Test has its feet in two camps and is neither one thing nor the other - too ponderous to be gripping, too juvenile to provoke much thought. Its not a bad book by any means, but I really feel it should have been better.

The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene The Power and the Glory (1940)
First recommended to me about a decade ago on the grounds of it being set in Mexico, I initially had some trouble with this one. I made several attempts to read it, but found it, at the time, too relentlessly depressing; and this surprised me because I'd always thought I liked Graham Greene. So I've come back to it a couple of years later and, for no reason I can identify, I find myself very much enjoying the thing, and appreciating it as having been written with a certain lightness of touch which maintains a general idea of optimism even as the narrative becomes relentlessly grim. I have no idea why I never noticed this before and must therefore unfortunately assume that I was once fairly stupid, or at least less perceptive than I have apparently become; unless it was just a case of right time, right place 'n' shit.

The Power & the Glory occurs during one of the darker passages of Mexican history, the forties during which the priesthood had been outlawed and were accordingly persecuted by populist rightist forces of the kind which manifested in Mexico as the Red Shirts, counterparts to Black, Brown and Blue Shirts found across the Atlantic. Our man, never formally identified, is a Catholic priest on the run from the authorities, whose flight and subsequent capture mirrors certain aspects of the life of Christ, albeit vaguely, and whose story serves to map Greene's impression of Mexico in the thirties at the lower end of the economic totem pole - the land where life is cheap and no line is clearly drawn.

The Chief said, 'You heard what he did in Houston. Got away with ten thousand dollars. Two G Men were shot.'

'G Men?'

'It's an honour - in a way - to deal with such people.' He slapped furiously out at a mosquito.

'A man like that,' the lieutenant said, 'does no real harm. A few men dead. We all have to die. The money - somebody has to spend it. We do more good when we catch one of these.'

It's a novel about faith, obviously, but one which, rather than boring us all shitless by trying to sell a product, picks up its subject in wolfen teeth and gives it a good fucking shake.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic too, and what he had experienced was vacancy - a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.

Opposing forces are given an equal footing in this novel, and we can appreciate the position of those hunting our unnamed priest as well as we can appreciate the inevitability and poignancy of his martyrdom; and the equal footing is expressed as the rhetoric of differing moral standpoints, so it goes substantially deeper than merely appreciating that even bad guys love their mothers. Most impressive about this, is that Greene has essentially told a story with an affirmative - if not actually what you would call happy - ending, despite that it is the story of a man whose life is turned to shit and which gets progressively worse leading up to his eventual execution. It's a story in which the composition of our environment is not only subsidiary, but borders on irrelevant to our understanding of our environment.

I'm just glad that I got there in the end.

Welcome to the Arms Race

Justin Isis Welcome to the Arms Race (2015)
Justin Isis is an enigma, at least from where I'm perched in Texas with the rest of creation perceived only through my little social media portal. I first encountered him when he sent me a friend request on facebook, apparently having read something I'd written - which is noteworthy because that sort of thing doesn't happen too often. He seemed to be either an Englishmen or an American living in Tokyo, and his interests combined with a slightly airbrushed looking facebook photo led me to assume he was probably some kind of idoru. Westerners fixated on the more lurid expressions of Japanese culture have historically irritated the living shit out of me, and yet Justin Isis seemed cut from a very different cloth to your average weeaboo.

I'm familiar with the term weeaboo because I'm down with the kids on the streets.

Actually, I'm not. I wasn't even down with the kids on the streets back when I was a kid on the street, or at least adjacent to it. I'm somehow in my fifties without quite knowing why, and new for the sake of new gives me a headache. I feel as though I'm stood on a beach, with all the proper culture safely behind on dry land. Before me is the ocean of all the shite that probably doesn't matter - Imagine Dragons, autotune, Japanese animation, Minecraft, YouTube commentators, drippy nostalgia, MST3K, cosplay, Doctor fucking Who, what a twenty-four year old thinks about almost anything, Pokémon Go, Chvrches, adult fans of My Little Pony, iPhone, eBook, anything else named by means of a self-conscious lower case vowel preceding an upper case consonant, and all other hopelessly passive distractions which have helped create the developmental vacuum in which evil fucking shitehawks like Breitbart, Infowars, and more or less all of our current political pantheon have been able to flourish; or, it's simply that I don't understand this stuff because it is of greater complexity than I have patience to decode for what I intuitively suspect may be very little reward. Either way, I know what I like - as the saying goes - and I find myself with an uncomfortable insight into those generations preceding my own whining that the bass is too loud, and I can't hear the words, and why don't you just put VH1 on or something, watch the Beatles or one of the classics - bit of Spandau Ballet, that'll do…

Justin Isis fascinates me because, stood on a possibly similar beach he gazes out and is able to understand what he's looking at and is able to deal with it, to reweave it into something of worth which carries what I feel to be the same weight as culture with which I'm more familiar. He is able to translate ephemeral culture in a meaningful way, and most crucially of all, he writes novels which aren't trying to be fucking films! In fact there's a couple of these which are probably unfilmable.

The lesser lights leaned backward on their own transmission-sculptures, indifferent to the performance fluids and ritual songs drifting down from the deep intervals. An and Non took broadcast armour from the lesser lights, rotating the transmission-sculptures into their own speech orbitals and adjusting their size, shape and cardinality to suit the local reign.

Welcome to the Arms Race comprises short stories, or short fiction, or possibly simply short pieces of writing, depending on which term works best. Most of these tales have a flavour as traditional as any Graham Greene you might care to mention yet without really resembling anything I've read before, utilising bold splashes of modernism and not even the faintest suggestion of mere technique being its own ostentatious virtue. Isis identifies as a Neo-Decadent writer, which is a thing you can look up, in addition to being author of the Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence, in which it is written:

No precedence is given to the Decadent writers of the 19th century, their modes or milieu. Neo-Decadence is more likely to cross 1990s video game dialogue with the structure of a 16th century picaresque to discuss a drug deal in present day Mongolia. Fealty and earnestness can only hold back progress. We do not have saints, and we consume our idols.

...and while we're here:

Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic; these are the cliches of the ranks of the dead. Style is a mute scream in symbols - that's all.

In practical terms, Arms Race adds up to what all those William Gibson novels promised but never delivered, with the rich, texture of maybe Clark Ashton Smith and the firework display innovation of Michael Moorcock at his most outrageous - which is my scrabbling around trying to describe something I didn't expect would be able to exist in this century, more than it is necessarily indicative of perceptible influences or even sources. As literature it reminds me of vapourwave - another new fangled phenomenon I would not have encountered were it not for Justin Isis - the repurposed or even stolen blended into something new and bright and fizzy. Most of these stories concern themselves with fictions of one form or another, people who are written, without quite going the full Borges and directly addressing the reader, although the mood is similar - playful and pretty much fearless, not too worried about pushing any of your usual buttons, not even during the unrelenting narrative barrage of M-FUNK VS THA FUTUREGIONS OF INVERSE FUNKATIVITY, science-fiction in a universe where all of those Sun Ra albums were documentaries - the sort of thing which logically should have fallen flat on its arse as a bad joke, but which takes flight with such jerky grace as to beg the question of why no-one tried it before.

It will sound like hyperbole, but I don't really care: unless I missed something - which is admittedly not beyond the realms of possibility - this collection does what literature hasn't done in a long time, and what I'd forgotten it can do, and should do; and even with the cheeky steals, homages and general thievery, it does it in a way which feels absolutely new without any of the usual ooh ooh look at me, you won't have heard of this, but I have bollocks. I'm still not entirely convinced that Justin Isis isn't an idoru of some description, but maybe it doesn't matter.

Twenty-One Stories

Graham Greene Twenty-One Stories (1954)
Here I am once again finding myself in the embarrassing position of having remained mostly unmoved by the works of an undoubted literary giant, thus sneering forth from the conspicuously unlofty position of my massive pile of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica tie-in novels: Graham Greene is okay but he's no Terrance Dicks.

This collection was on the syllabus of my English literature 'O' level class taken back in 1785, and I remembered enjoying it, and making occasional mental notes to find a copy and read it again some day, and there it was in the book store, the same edition with the same cover and everything. More recently I took several shots at Greene's The Power & the Glory, giving up each time, finding it simply too depressing; so I was hoping this might constitute a sort of combined reintroduction and inoculation by which I might give the cunt another go because I dislike giving up on a book, particularly when I'm fairly sure it has some value which I am simply unable to appreciate, for whatever reason.

Anyway, I guess maybe we only read one or two of these as part of our class, there being very little which rings any significant bells. On the other hand, I am reminded of the difficulty I had with The Power & the Glory, namely that while I don't think it's really necessary to either like or identify with characters in order to appreciate their stories, there are some seriously disagreeable fuckers here. The Destructors for example tells of a bunch of urchinous types destroying someone's house, working so as to systematically reduce it to a pile of rubble in the owner's absence. It's weirdly fascinating, and the point is that destruction can be a creative act, according to some bloke on the internet, but it makes for some fucking depressing shit when read in a hospital bed whilst hooked up to a drip during a thunderstorm, as I was. I realise Graham Greene wasn't directly responsible for my hospitalisation, but he might at least have shed a little light upon the darkness from time to time.

His theme seems to be salvation under appalling circumstances, finding the small but beautiful in even the most relentlessly grim of situations. Mostly he succeeds, I suppose, but I was left wondering if it was worth the trouble in many cases. There's the girl in A Drive in the Country seeking to escape her miserable suburban existence, driven into the arms of a man who suggests a suicide pact as an alternative to the certainty of everything being shit forever, which in turn drives her back to a miserable suburban existence which she now accepts as liveable shit. Woo hoo. Is that a Huey Lewis & the News album I hear playing in the background?

There are powerful and poignant moments, and bags of atmosphere, and a tremendous sense of place with stories set in Africa and Mexico, and it's quite clearly myself in the wrong here, but I simply expected more. Instances such as the crushing yet wonderful conclusion of The Blue Film, for example, seem bogged down with the greater aggregate weight of horrible people doing horrible things for no good reason. The Hint of an Explanation seems to offer some sort of redemptive message in the priest having found God and by extension his calling, true happiness and so on during a confrontation with profound malice, but it would be more convincing if that malice weren't such a cock-obvious pantomime villain - a man named Blacker who wants to get hold of a communion wafer in order to defile it, as it was implied in my English class back in 1785.

'What do you mean, sir?' someone asked, as I recall.

'Who knows?' Dave Rodan, our teacher, responded. 'Maybe he wanted to shit on it or something?'

Yeah, because that really happens, just like all those Muslamic gangs kidnapping human babies and selling them to Chinese restaurants innit. Facetiousness aside, Greene's need for some negative force within his narrative sometimes seems to undermine the integrity of the whole, and so the whole effects to smother whatever small light he may have wished to shine at the end of the tunnel.

I don't know. He was patently a great writer with a wonderful technique and clear compelling prose, but I just expected to enjoy it a little more than I did. I loves me some grim as a rule, but this made me want to watch Mexican daytime television shows.

172 Hours on the Moon

Johan Harsted 172 Hours on the Moon (2008)
About a mile from where I live is a little free library, as they're called. It's a large, brightly-painted wooden box with a glass door mounted on a pole where someone's garden borders the sidewalk. There are apparently a few of these around now, and not just in San Antonio. The idea is that you bring along some old book, leave it inside the box, and take one of the many from the shelf within. It's a neat idea, and means you get a book you might not ordinarily have picked had you seen it in a store. I suppose it's also a slightly twee idea, it could be argued, and each little free library tends to provide a window into the psychology of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. My nearest little free library, being bang in the middle of Alamo Heights, has one fuck of a lot of self-help books on offer, but this title looked interesting, so I took it and left another in its place.

Aside from Twilight - which was excellent obviously - and a pile of Who books if you absolutely insist, I'm more or less a stranger to young adult fiction, and I'm not even sure I entirely understand why such a bracket needs to exist. I wasn't a big reader as a kid or as a teenager, but I coped well enough and even enjoyed all of the usual titles thrust our way at school - Jane Eyre, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, Dickens and so on and so forth. I didn't read these with the feeling that they were necessarily above my head, or that they failed to address my concerns as a teenager. By the time I'd left school I was reading Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs without having been told to do so; and on reflection, I was no child genius - in fact I was pretty fucking thick in most respects; and I tend to regard those who read Asimov, Crime and Punishment or even Plato whilst they were still at school with some degree of envy and admiration. So by contrast I take the impression that young adult fiction must therefore pander to some extent, otherwise there would surely be no need for such a distinction. Harsted himself writes that in his opinion, young adults are just as smart as a lot of grown-ups and can usually take whatever you throw at them.

Well anyway, 172 Hours on the Moon is a horror story set inside a science-fiction novel. Three teenagers are selected by means of a global lottery to go to the moon for the somewhat implausible reason of this getting everyone into the idea of going to the moon again, causing funding to thus flow freely because everyone loves teenagers or summink. So they go to the moon with some grown-ups who do all that flying the spaceship stuff, and it turns out that there's a secret abandoned NASA base up there, left over from the seventies and still working. The reason for the base being abandoned turns out to be scary moon ghosts resembling the very people they are causing to shit themselves, terrifying doppelgängers who bust airlocks, sabotage spacesuits, leave passive-aggressive messages on computers, and all the sort of stuff you would probably expect them to do unless you've never watched television or been to the cinema. Annoyingly we don't actually find out anything about the doppelgängers, beyond that they probably have something to do with 6EQUJ5, a genuinely mysterious signal picked up by SETI astronomers back in the seventies; so the novel is a few hundred pages of teenage whining which suddenly turns itself into Isaac Asimov for just long enough to remind you of the scary scenes in whichever CGI thriller you saw last, then ends with the revelation of the doppelgängers having arrived on Earth.

It's not a bad book, and it chugs along nicely once we're all acclimatised to the three main characters being more or less complete wankers, but it doesn't actually have a story, which is a problem. Everything it does is done so as to allow the narrative to hold a torch beneath its chin and go boo! in your face on page 244, and to then keep going boo! for the remaining hundred or so pages, and that's all it does so far as I could tell; and as for our heroes...

The windows were fogged up. The breath of eight people was creating condensation in the capsule, and Mia had to wipe the glass at regular intervals to be able to see out. Not that there was much to see. The stars that had so engrossed and transfixed her were starting to bore her. They weren't changing; nothing was changing.

Interstellar travel eh? Talk about booooooooring. I mean just shoot me now, except that won't happen 'cause you never let me do anything. I hate you. It's so unfair.

Characterisation consists of one of our crew being in a band and also a fan of the Talking Heads because they were like in her dad's record collection and like some of that old stuff from when the bloke who wrote the book was growing up is like really fetch.

Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen.

Okay, I didn't not enjoy this. It does what it does efficiently but suffers from a lack of ambition, as I would guess must be inevitable when an author presupposes his audience won't be interested unless they are specifically able to recognise themselves somewhere in there. Harsted is interviewed in the appendix, and he insists that he has not presupposed anything of the sort, but I have too say it sure reads a lot like he has. I suppose there may have been some subsidence during translation from the original Norwegian, although when Mia bemoans the death of her beloved iPod in response to learning that the team may be stranded on the moon for up to a year before a rescue mission can reach them, I have a feeling this isn't simply an interference pattern that's emerged from somewhere beyond the language barrier. I suppose that at forty-nine years I'm some way outside the age range of the target audience, although that didn't stop me enjoying Twilight and I don't even have ovaries.

Given that people who don't read books tend to be, almost without exception, thick fucking cunts, if whining teenagers are no longer able to read books told from any perspective other than that of whining teenagers, then we're screwed. Personally I don't really care as I'll be dead by the time we get to our first president who's never read a book but can ace all six levels of Pokémon: Omega Ruby; and 172 Hours on the Moon was free, which is still better than a kick up the arse, I suppose.

Storyteller - A Found Book

Storyteller - A Found Book (2013)
Storyteller began life as a list of also available from the same publisher titles found in the back of some old paperback by Nick Campbell who, so intrigued by the notion of what sort of missing-presumably-overlooked stories might be told by novels such as Strangers from the Sea or Grandad With Snails, posted the list online; which in turn prompted Cavan Scott to observe that this would be a great writing game, specifically to have a bunch of writers take those titles and see what they come up with. Being as I would guess at least a third of the books I've ever read have been picked up on the strength of some weird promise suggested by the title, I can see the appeal of this, and so we have this short story collection with a contents page reading a little like the track list of a Nurse With Wound album. The contributors are mostly Obverse Books regulars who happened to be around on that day, from what I can tell, united by the love of telling a story for the sheer joy of telling a story; and the book has come out as a benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust in memory of Matt Kimpton, a contributor to Obverse's first Faction Paradox anthology, amongst other things, who suffered from the disorder and who died entirely too soon.

It makes for a surprisingly pleasant change to read a collection such as this in which the only common theme is that of storytelling itself; and that Storyteller is quite unlike those anthologies wherein individual efforts feel like strategically submitted pitons hammered into the vertical surface of a career. Here we have an assemblage of genres, none of which are allowed to overpower their supporting tales, so expertly told as to amount to a collection which should appeal to anyone with a genuine love of the written word. For the sake of balance, to at least confer some value on my praise, I will admit to experiencing two minor hiccups - one story reading more like a television programme than I want from something appearing on a printed page; and Richard Wright's contribution, an otherwise absorbingly unpleasant horror tale which made use of a character repeatedly identified as the Texan Slug. It's possible that I'm being oversensitive here given that I live in Texas, but I have a feeling the term Texan is used in what is at least a partially pejorative sense, reliant upon a mutual understanding of the stereotypical fat, ignorant burger-chugging Texas bully boy. It's not that such people don't exist, but to me it reads somewhat like the Lazy Mexican or the Scheming Nigerian and as such carries a bit of an aftertaste, despite Wright's obviously stellar credentials as an author. Nevertheless, these are minor details, and it would probably be stranger had I failed to raise an eyebrow at some juncture during three-hundred pages of thirteen very different authors.

Particular stand-outs for me were Nick Campbell's Grandad With Snails - a sort of Graham Greene with the Max Ernst turned up a notch; Sarah Hadley's excellent Put Our More Flags, possibly my favourite of the collection and the best science-fiction short I've read of this kind since John Wyndham's Dumb Martian, to which it bears some comparison; Cody Quijano-Schell's hauntingly peculiar Seal Morning; and actually, pretty much all of the others. This is not only the best Obverse collection I've read - keeping in mind I still have at least two others sat in waiting on the pile at the side of the bed - but it's the best multiple author anthology I can recall having read in ages.

Available here, or as a real version here.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
About six months ago I flew back to England taking with me Neal Stephenson's somewhat chunky Anathem as aeronautical reading material; and here I am once again crossing the Atlantic with another arguably classic science-fiction novel occurring within a post-apocalyptic monastic order. It's a coincidence entailing no more conscious choice on my part than what leapt out at me from the to-read pile; but an odd one, not least given that a significant theme of Miller's book is that of history repeating; and as with Anathem, whilst recognising obviously worthy qualities, I'm left somehow underwhelmed.

A Canticle for Leibowitz began as three novella length shorts in the pages of Fantasy & Science Fiction, so closely thematically linked as to inspire the author to a realisation of having effectively  written a single coherent novel following publication of the third. The story begins with efforts to posthumously canonise Leibowitz the scientist as a Saint by the brothers of a post-nuclear Christian order, the last outpost of reason in a new dark age of American history. Over the course of the next few hundred years - or the other two short stories if you prefer - civilisation is reborn, technology and science restored, mistakes repeated as they reinvent the weapons for which Saint Liebowitz was partially responsible first time around. In the story, Liebowitz is famously remembered as having regretted his work - doubtless a nod to both Oppenheimer and Einstein - and is thus posthumously revered, in case you were wondering.

The detail of the novel is often exemplary, notably circuit diagrams designed by Liebowitz treated as sacred relics, reproduced and illuminated by the monks without full understanding of what they represent; and some good meaty points are made - not least that, contrary to the doctrine of many a tub-thumping atheist, the church has traditionally been a patron of arts, culture, civilisation, learning, and progress. Furthermore, A Canticle for Leibowitz is beautifully written - I think I noticed Graham Greene referenced in comparison in some secluded corner of the internet, which seems fair enough; so much so that even those who don't really like science-fiction could probably be coaxed into reading it.

I guess the only problem for me was that for all that there may be to recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz, it felt very much like three novellas bolted together, and three novellas which each could have stood to be a little shorter. Whilst the detail is engrossing, it sometimes ambles along without really doing much. It's a good novel, but I'm not convinced it's a great novel, and as with Anathem,  the ambition of its ideas should surely have amounted to more.