Nigel Kneale - Quatermass (1979)

 

As you may possibly recall, Quatermass IV was televised before it was novelised with this hitting the shops soon after. The scripts for the three previous serials had been published as paperbacks but this was a proper novelisation; and Nigel Kneale really knew his way around a typewriter so it's up there with the best of John Wyndham more than it's comparable with Fred Hoyle's ham fisted Ian Fleming impersonations. The prose is tight and swiftly-paced as you would most likely expect of a tie-in, but with just the right mix of grimly poetic flair to immerse the reader in truly harrowing visions of a dystopian near future extrapolated from the world of the late seventies. Youth gangs such as the Badders and the Blues terrorise the urban environment without quite drawing on the corny punk rock clichés doing the rounds in other dystopias of the time, and what civilisation remains hangs on a thread with law and order enforced by Pay Cops, a brutal South African contract security force. Television, seemingly the only remaining form of mass communication, is reduced to something like pirate productions limited to either news or populist garbage such as The Tittupy Bumpity Show with its outsized genital props doubtless extrapolated from a failure to understand what made Frankie Howerd funny. Meanwhile, a barely comprehensible alien machine has begun to harvest humanity's youth in great numbers, with those chosen running eagerly to their doom with all the guileless fervour of Heaven's Gate cultists anticipating hanging out with Captain Picard.

The ageing Professor Quatermass stumbles through these ruins, never quite sure where he is, dipping into reverie of times past, and ill-equipped to cope with anything of this cowardly and brutal new world while nevertheless hanging onto his grasp of science for dear life. He's bewildered, angry, and stale, the polar opposite of the action hero, even of Frank Miller's greying Dark Knight; and neither is Quatermass IV the typical action thriller neatly solving its puzzle box of modular problems. Here the action is mostly basic survival against terrible odds as the pensioner stumbles through an increasingly desperate sequence of events concluding with a hair's breadth reprieve brought about by our guy's tragically inevitable sacrifice. It may lack the brute force of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but it doesn't fall too far short and is frankly no fucking picnic.

Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it hasn't dated, and its focus on the breakdown of society remains as relevant now as  then.

'The past is more important.'

That's what she had said, quoting Joe Kapp's Clare. And he had denied it, meaning that it ought not to be. But it was. In the end, it was all a person was made of, like the skeleton he'd grown.

Reviews of the time were what you would expect, characterising Kneale as an angry old man shaking his fist at clouds, nowhere near so good as Blake's fucking Seven because if we've learned anything from this last century it's that new stuff is amazing and old people are boring, yeah? No-one really appreciates you pointing out when something everybody else likes is bollocks. They may say they do, but really they don't, and Kneale wasn't taking any prisoners here, which I personally find very refreshing. Quatermass IV is horror as much as it's science-fiction, concerned as it is with mass psychology and the extinction of the individual, a theme which ran through the previous three television serials; and the more we've convinced ourselves we're living in the best of all possible worlds, the less we like to hear claims to the contrary, and particularly not those so eloquent and so free of the taint of reaction as was this.

Envoy to New Worlds

Keith Laumer Envoy to New Worlds (1963)
I've passed Laumer's adventures of Retief as they've sat on the shelves of Half-Price many a time, never having been drawn to the character. Retief is, very roughly speaking, James Bond in space, and, with a couple of exceptions, I'm generally wary of science-fiction authors who specialise in the adventures of recurring characters. Initially, I knew of Retief only as a black and white comic from the eighties, an independent, but one of those independents which aspired to be DC or Marvel, or at least Eclipse or First. I never read the comic but saw the ads in the back pages of The Trouble with Girls - or something of the sort - and it looked fucking awful, one of those strips where everyone wears the exaggerated angry grimace of a biro rendering of Iron Maiden's Eddie drawn on the back of a denim jacket worn by a fourteen-year old boy in a rural English town between the years of 1984 and 1986. I didn't even realise Retief had been based on a series of novels until recently, and I own this mainly because it's an Ace Double sharing a spine with Flight from Yesterday by the magnificently peculiar Robert Moore Williams.

To get my facts straight, Retief is actually a diplomat, and is as such extrapolated from Laumer's time spent in similar employment here on earth, mostly Burma according to Wikipedia. The stories are short and to the point - this is actually a collection of six - and might be seen as thematically ancestral to Larry Niven, Star Wars, 2000AD, Red Dwarf, and all those other narratives in which aliens are basically funny foreigners. There are certain colonialisms here, as you might reasonably expect, so the recipe isn't promising; but nevertheless, it turns out that these tales of Retief are very enjoyable - too short to outstay a welcome, plenty of pleasantly weird ideas, breezily written, and with a refreshingly high quota of wit; and even with aliens as funny foreigners, there's nothing objectionable. Strangest of all, I found myself reading one particular page as an exchange between Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier in their Dad's Army roles, and somehow it worked. I'm not sure whether I'll be reading more, but that's definitely a recommendation.

Equator

Brian Aldiss Equator (1958)
Where unfamiliar Brian Aldiss paperbacks sat crumbling on the shelves of second hand stores are concerned, my rule of thumb has generally been to buy the novels but ignore the short story collections, because while the man wrote some amazing novels, the short fiction occasionally borders on unreadable. Equator comprises a couple of novellas, therefore resisting easy classification by length and so presenting something of a dilemma, but I bought it anyway because I liked the cover and didn't want to spend the rest of my life wondering whether I'd missed out on something incredible.

Unfortunately, Equator - which occupies the first two thirds of the book - is mostly crap and should probably be regarded as an unusually long short story. It's a Bond-style spy thriller in which some dude endures a wearying series of inconsequential scrapes and close shaves in pursuit of - yawn - some microfilm which will potentially reveal the truth about some recently arrived alien race, specifically that we probably shouldn't trust them. It reads as though Brian had failed to sell the story to whoever was publishing Ian Fleming at the time, and made a few changes so as to adapt it to the needs of his existing audience. There's some exotic detail because whatever the hell happens is partially set in Indonesia, but it's not very interesting.

Thankfully, Segregation - which makes up the full count of pages - is a little more engaging. I've always said Aldiss is at his best when writing wacky environments, and although Segregation is really just one of those boy's jungle adventure tales transposed to an alien world, the biology invoked is of weirdness sufficient to ensure that Aldiss at least had fun writing it, as seems to have been the case.

Destroyer

Andrew Hickey Destroyer (2017)
I may be getting my wires crossed, but I somehow developed the impression of Destroyer having been written as something akin to a warm-up exercise, and from what I recall of since deleted blog posts, Andrew Hickey appeared to regard his forthcoming Basilisk Murders as a more significant undertaking. Destroyer is a whole brace of toes dipped into the thriller genre, a form with which I'm almost completely unfamiliar - and ordinarily not actually that interested - but which I'd probably prefer to term mystery because it reminds me of the Georges Simenon novel I read a month or so ago.

Essentially it's breezy wartime scrapes as Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Alan Turing, and Aleister Crowley attempt to defeat an occult plot to deliver victory into the paws of those ghastly Germans; so it's highly stylised and possibly ludicrous given the cast, and yet Hickey achieves a perfect balance in all respects with characters obedient to the strictures of the genre whilst remaining unburdened by anything much in the way of clichés. This isn't tweedpunk, or whatever clueless arseholes might be calling it this week. Crowley has turned up in fiction, particularly of the sort I tend to read, with some frequency, often as a fairly generic force of indecency, and rarely ever as anything which I've found particularly satisfying. I have my doubts about the man but tend to think he deserves at least a little better than he's generally been given, so it's a pleasure to read of him in Destroyer as a character at least as rounded and intriguing as he seems to have been in life.

As a thriller, Destroyer is brief and well paced, and arguably lacking any great philosophical purpose, which nevertheless doesn't mean it lacks depth or that it isn't capable of throwing out a vivid idea or two every couple of pages.

'Indeed,' said Wheatley, 'and so we can never discover the answer to the question is Baldur real?, and nor should we want to, for it would spoil the mystery of life. But we can have an answer to the simpler question does Baldur represent something real?, and the answer to that question is of course an emphatic yes! for all true religion contains within it a kernel of truth.

As for flaws, it's genuinely quite difficult to find any. The entirely masculine cast is a bit odd, but as Andrew explained on his blog back in May:

One thing I should note about this, because many of my readers will care - every character in this book is male. I thought long and hard about doing that, and the nature of the genre it's pastiching would make it even more problematic to actually include anyone of another gender. I understand if this puts readers off, but want you to understand that it was a choice I thought about and didn't take lightly.

I spotted some typos and a couple of incongruous instances of repetition, most likely inevitable given that the author was probably writing four other books and recording an album simultaneous to the composition of this one; but given that Destroyer seems to be something Andrew Hickey wrote as an exercise in the spirit of experimentation, and that it's not even a particularly ambitious effort, one can't help but notice how even workmanlike Hickey is considerably better than the great majority of authors firing on all four cylinders. Destroyer is a modest but nonetheless impressive effort which promises much for whatever the next one turns out to be.

Avail thineself of a copy yonder, or Amazon if you want the eBook or the (significantly cheaper) paperback. I'm not going to provide a link because I'm sure you can find Amazon under your own steam, and because they support Breitbart, and because they happily stock a wide range of shite by white nationalists, much to the delight of those leaving antisemitic comments in praise of said books, which I only mention because I want to marry my boyfriend Barack Obama and I hate freedom of speech etc. etc.

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)
I had been trying to get hold of this one ever since I saw Dawkins rate it on one of those books you read as a kid shows, back when Dawkins was less annoying. The one I ordered from Amazon turned out to be an abridged effort printed for schools, about as thick as an After Eight mint and with half of the already reduced page count taken up by teachers notes and questions along the lines of why did the scientist think the Earth would become colder when the Black Cloud arrived? My friend Andy told me there was no point reading an abridged Black Cloud, so I didn't.

Nevertheless I kept looking because I'd promised myself I would find the thing, and was buoyed along by a vague childhood memory of my granny having fetched another Fred Hoyle science-fiction novel from the mobile library for me to read when I was ill. Only recently have I positively identified said novel as having been Into Deepest Space, not Neutron Star as I remember for some peculiar reason given that the latter title refers to a collection of short stories by Larry Niven. Anyway, I enjoyed Into Deepest Space immensely, so it was probably the first science-fiction novel I read, not counting Doctor Who books based on television shows.

Of course, Fred Hoyle was primarily a scientist, and one who now seems best known for having duffed up Stephen Hawking around the back of the bike sheds on occasions when the latter failed to cough up his dinner money, although the psychological underpinning of the battering was probably something to do with Hawking's theories supplanting Hoyle's steady state model of the universe. Hoyle seems to have been somewhat discredited in recent years, which is a shame as I still think the steady state is a nice idea and not entirely without merit, although some of the stuff he cooked up with that Chandra Wickramasinghe was obviously complete bollocks.

Anyway, I kept an eye open and thus made purchase of two cowritten novels - The Andromeda Breakthrough with John Elliott, and Seven Steps to the Sun with his offspring, Geoffrey Hoyle. They're pretty much unreadable, hard science diluted with a load of crap which I suspect some editor may have suggested would help sell the books - Ian Flemingisms and unconvincing references to the manly pursuit of smoking a pipe whilst making lurve to a beautiful woman. In spite of this, my search continued and has at last been rewarded.

Hard science-fiction is sort of the Paul Weller of science-fiction literature, I suppose - plenty of clenching and suggestions of commitment and less of the prancing around in dresses or talking about feelings; or page after page of top scientists having conversations about different kinds of proton, if you prefer - the kind of thing by which Isaac Asimov made his name. That said, in hard science-fiction terms, Asimov reads like one of Michael Moorcock's more inscrutably peculiar efforts compared to The Black Cloud.

The story is fairly simple - a massive cloud of dark gas approaches the solar system and comes to rest, blocking out the sun. The Earth freezes, everything begins to die, and it looks as though we're fucked until the point at which a group of plucky scientists realise that the cloud is intelligent and that communication is possible, and I won't spoil the rest. Most of this is told in a fashion which I would describe as plodding were I a less patient man, alternating passages reading more like essays than fiction, and droning conversations about protons and temperature differentials amongst numerous tweedy scientists, with the occasional light-hearted cricketing reference just to break it up a bit. It should be terrible, but the reader is quickly accustomed to this somewhat stilted style because that which is discussed, if not quite gripping, is certainly interesting.

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Charles Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn't believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because here we fucking go!!!

Seriously, in spite of itself, there's something in the tone and pacing of The Black Cloud which holds it all together. Despite the tweedier qualities, the somewhat predictable subtext of how everything would be better if we let scientists run the show, the suggestion of worldly experience which doesn't go much beyond handing in end of term papers and then enjoying a jolly old spot of cricket, despite all of its crankier qualities, The Black Cloud is an impressively solid novel, and - much to my surprise - one that has been worth every second of the wait. I suppose this is because, rather than having someone else come along to strip in details which might appeal to those who didn't actually want to read a science-fiction novel in the first place, Hoyle writes to his own strengths. There are some wonderful engrossing passages, not least the thoroughly convincing speculation on how intelligent life might develop within a cloud of interstellar gas, and even a few amusing steady state gags incorporated into discussion of the anthropic principal and even religion - one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys, as Hoyle puts it. The sobriety of the narrative lends the events of the story a greater and more chilling weight than one might experience were the tale to be told in more poetic terms. This shit could actually happen.

So Dawkins was right - The Black Cloud really is a classic.

The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson The Mind Parasites (1967)
Once was that I held Colin Wilson in relatively high regard, at least as the one author of cranky pseudoscience literature who stood a chance at being right about some of it. Somebody had given me a copy of Mysteries, of which I read about half. I tried it a couple of times, on each occasion losing interest around the halfway mark, at which point Colin started bringing in theories too wacky even for me. Later I realised that most of the good stuff had actually come from T.C. Lethbridge who wrote some broadly fascinating books about dowsing and the like. Mysteries tied Lethbridge in with some of Wilson's own ideas, most notably the one about a ladder of selves, which seems to work quite well as psychological analysis without requiring that one should take it as a literal description of the mechanism of the human mind.

Later I picked up The Outsider from a charity shop, but ended up giving it away because I couldn't be arsed to read it. The Outsider was amazing according to apparently everyone, an important book in the truest sense; and then my friend Paul Woods, who I seem to recall having had some dealings with Wilson in his capacity as a criminologist, always spoke very highly of the man, albeit not quite so highly as Wilson spoke of The Mind Parasites, his own novel:

Is it not time that we create a new type of novel? I think of a hatchet biting into a tree and making the chips fly, not an evasion of reality or a description of it, but an attack on it... What is needed is an existential realism. Like the social realism of the Soviets, yet biting much deeper; its attitude is not passive or pessimistic. In a qualified sense, it might be called practical; it wishes to change things. What it wishes to change I prefer to leave unsaid, it can be inferred from this book.

Really? This was a new type of novel? I was expecting some sort of - dunno - a mash-up of William Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Guy Debord, massive ideas flying about left, right and centre, a book reading like nothing I have ever read before.

The Mind Parasites gets off to a tremendous start as a more contemporary take on Lovecraft's squelchy mythology with mysterious blocky cities discovered several miles underground, events unfolding with the chilling realism of a Quatermass serial; after which it all goes very much tits up. The underground city is revealed to have been a red herring for reasons which either remain unclear or are so poorly described that I've forgotten them. The true culprits are the mind parasites, malign incorporeal entities dwelling in the depths of the collective unconscious, or some other place which probably makes more sense if you've read either Jung or Huxley. These entities are the cause of war, racism, cruelty, inequality, suicide, boredom, accidents at work, and Doctor Who having been shite since it came back on the telly. Were it not for them we would all be telepathic supermen, at our full potential and qualified to lead the common herd of humanity to its destiny and all that good stuff. The thing that bothers me is that I suspect Wilson may actually have believed at least some of this crap.

A few years ago I made fumbling attempts to identify a literary genre which I provisionally named dinnerpunk based on it comprising poorly written yarns which come to their authors as they mow the lawns of their Surbiton homes as Marjorie is preparing dinner. They've read Biggles, several Ian Flemings, and it can't be that hard considering some of the fairies who make a living of it, so they're jolly well going to have a go. Dinnerpunk fiction tends to be written from an entirely male perspective, suggests a conservative view of the world, usually one fixating on some peculiar detail such as aviation history - because nutters are always into planes for some reason - and amongst the cast of chaps and renowned scientists, there's nearly always somebody identified simply as the Colonel. Dinnerpunk is the written equivalent to Bob Mortimer's Graham Lister character. It knows doctors and dentists, professional people...

Regrettably, after the tremendous start described above, The Mind Parasites reveals itself to be not merely a disappointment, but to be fully-leaded weapons grade dinnerpunk.

Neither is there any evidence to indicate that the crew of the Pallas intended to build a new civilisation on another planet. There were only three women on board. The number would surely have been higher if any such plan had been contemplated?

I should jolly well, say so. Our heroes are a team of top scientists who travel around in a gang of about fifteen for most of the book, routinely pooling their psychic powers to make the world a better place. Human history is a litany of woe thanks to the mind parasites, because it was them what made us do all that bad stuff like Hitler and that, which ironically is itself a typically right-wing narrative, the enemy and source of all woe being those people or things over there; it's because of them that we can't have nice stuff. Freed of the mind parasites, we are able to travel around in gangs of fifteen making stuff more good, even psychokinetically sending the moon crashing into the sun because that was where the mind parasites was all coming from innit. Except the mind parasites are actually ourselves, or at least ourselves what have failed to evolve into thinking, reasoning supermen, people who know doctors and dentists. Meanwhile the black nations of Africa unite and rise up against the white man because the mind parasites make them do it innit, just in case you mistakenly thought they might have had any other better reason to be pissed off.

Frankly, it's a complete fucking dog's dinner besides which even Lindsay Gutteridge's dinnerpunk tour de force Cold War in a Country Garden may as well be The Mayor of Casterbridge. The psychological discussion amounts to pseudoscientific bollocks of the kind which invariably namechecks Velikovsky, Gurdjieff, Madam Blavatsky and the usual wankers; there's barely a story to speak of; and there's a faintly unsavoury aftertaste of Hubbardry - telepathy, Nietzsche, supermen blah blah blah - except Hubbard could at least string a decent story together. This is like bad van Vogt stripped of all charm and art.

He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed so unfinished and shabby. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilisations.

I suspect Colin Wilson, whilst he may have been prone to a degree of ukippery, probably wasn't entirely a man without merits, but none of them are to be found in The Mind Parasites which was most certainly never a new kind of novel by any description. It's not often that I'm driven to such harsh words with regard to a book, but this really was a complete load of shit.

Andromeda Breakthrough

Fred Hoyle & John Elliot Andromeda Breakthrough (1964)
A boldly exciting work of imagination... filled with physical excitement and intellectual stimulation... much of it reads like a James Bond adventure, it proclaims upon the back cover, presumably referencing Completed in Triplicate, that obscure Ian Fleming novel wherein Bond spends the entire story in a laboratory frowning at things seen under a microscope. The rest of the back cover is taken up with glowing praise for all the mighty deeds of Hoyle and Elliot which aren't this novel.

A for Andromeda was a 1961 BBC television serial written by Fred Hoyle - renowned astronomer and cosmologist famous for kicking Stephen Hawking's head in on numerous occasions - and John Elliot, widely respected and eminently talented author of television plays. The story begins with a radio signal picked up from the vicinity of the Andromeda galaxy, a signal delivering instructions for the building of an advanced computer which, once running, itself delivers instructions for the creation of artificial life, specifically a seemingly human woman who grows to adulthood in a matter of days. This being the BBC in the early 1960s, I gather most of the drama took the form of men with moustaches holding forth in either laboratories or governmental offices which, in the absence of competition, proved so exciting as to justify a sequel, 1962's The Andromeda Breakthrough.

This is of course the novelisation. Unlike A for Andromeda, the television serial still exists in its entirety and is available on DVD, but as I keep trying to explain to people regardless of their utter incredulity, I like reading books and for the most part I couldn't really give a shit about TV, so here we are.

Fred's later novel, Seven Steps to the Sun co-written with  Geoffrey Hoyle, is a weird and extraordinarily clunky effort, a long, long way from being one of the best things I've ever read, and distinguished by this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Andromeda Breakthrough benefits from the involvement of a writing partner qualified by his ability to string sentences together rather than by his being fruit of the author's loins, so it's reasonably well-written, avoids the clichés one might expect of this sort of novel, with no obvious pantomime villains and the rulers of the somewhat implausible middle eastern country of Azaran turning out to be entirely reasonable people despite the kidnappings; and the story is decent enough, a suitably Quatermassy apocalypse, although it may be stretching the point a bit when we learn that the beings of Andromeda merely pretended to desire the destruction of life on Earth so as to shock humanity into getting its ecological act together.

The problem is that for all its virtues Andromeda Breakthrough is very, very dull, a presumably faithful adaptation of a conspicuously studio-based television serial, all men in white coats frowning at clipboards and suggesting calls to the ministry. It may have worked well enough on the screen in 1962, but fifty years later and in an entirely different medium, some of the magic has gone.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (1972)
Collecting the first three of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels, two of which I vaguely recall from their comic strip adaptations in 2000AD. Whilst not really one of the mighty Tharg's more memorable offerings, the art of Carlos Ezquerra was impressive as ever, and it clearly did enough to instil curiosity sufficient to inspire my plucking this anthology from the shelf of Half-Price Books thirty or so years later.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1961), The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970), and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972) are, as I expected, ripping futuristic spy-thrillers, unlikely to have one scrabbling for a well-worn copy of Plato's Republic in search of some obscure reference or other, but then that was never really their job.  I'd say Slippery Jim diGriz - the rat of the title - is essentially James Bond in space with a slight counter-cultural twist and a more well developed sense of humour, although being as I haven't actually read anything by Ian Fleming since I was about twelve this may well be bollocks; but hopefully you get the idea.

We have bank robberies, Robin Hood moments, time travel, typically futuristic gadgetry and overpowered security guards revealed to be wearing women's knickers beneath their uniforms - all somehow amounting to a suggestion of diGriz as a young Malcolm McDowell doing comedy turns to camera whilst his long-suffering boss, played by Leo McKern, fumes in silence. It's nothing deep and it's probably dated, but it's also nicely written and a lot of fun. These are the sort of novels you whiz through over the course of a long afternoon, and I suppose my only criticism is that welding three of them together like this somehow misses a point, although it's surely worth noting that I found myself reading all three in quick succession without a trace of boredom.