Analog November 2011

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 2011 (2011)
I am often stopped in the street by strangers who ask me, what is this thing we call science-fiction? I can't help but smile as I give my reply - always the same reply - which is that just as Albert Einstein explored the boundaries of theoretical physics, so too do science-fiction authors such as Runcible V. Bottywang or Melvin Felch investigate the outer limits of science, imagination, and wonderment; and I leave my eager audience with the recommendation that they perhaps catch a few episodes of a certain television serial called Babylon 5. If it amuses me to explain that which most soon-to-be science-fiction fans will surely discover for themselves, it is a kindly amusement, for it isn't a bad question.

So what is this thing we call science-fiction?

You might respond with the name of some computer video game set on an amazing alien planet which you've recently enjoyed, but it is also Star Trek and Doctor Who and even a little movie you might just have heard of. It was quite popular in my day. Star Wars, I believe it was called.

This issue of Analog opens with Adam Troy-Castro's With Unclean Hands in which his Andrea Cort is sent to the homeworld of the Zinn, a once-powerful race now on the long path to extinction. She's expected to sign the approval for a simple prisoner transfer, but why are the Zinn so eager to take custody of an unremarkable human murderer? Cort becomes suspicious when she makes friends with a Zinn child - or fotir - named First Given, whose behaviour seems odd even for an extraterrestrial comprising bags of organs suspended beneath a carriage of spindly legs. Cort travels to the island upon which Simon Farr, the serial murderer, is allowed to live in relative liberty. It seems that humanity will receive a futuristic star drive in return for Farr, but Andrea Cort realises that a brutal crime is being planned against an innocent, and that the price is too high.

There's more but I can't be arsed to type out the whole fucking thing, particularly given that I found it a chore to read; and possibly excepting Jerry Oltion's Rocket Science, this issue didn't do much for me at all; and when the stories turn out to be mostly duds, the book reviews you find in these digest magazines are sometimes worth a look, usually featuring either something you've read and enjoyed or something you may potentially enjoy in the future. For what it may be worth, I've written this review of the November 2011 issue of Analog in the style of its book reviews - inconsequential musing as preamble, then a detailed description of characters, plot, and almost everything that happens, with finally a closing sentence telling us whether it was any good; and this issue of Analog is massively underwhelming. Here's some of what Don Saker wrote about Peter David's novelisation of a Transformers movie.

This one is a lot of fun. It starts with the truth about the Apollo program: despite what the world believes, Armstrong and Aldrin had a secret mission on the moon. They were sent there to explore an alien starship that crashed in 1961. They brought back some of the alien tech that they found there.

Curtain up in the present day. Sam Witwicky, human friend of the Autobots, meets British scientist Carly Spencer and immediately falls in love. But there's more than love on the agenda: the ship that crashed on the moon was a Transformer vessel, the evil Decepticons have learned of its cargo, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

I know it doesn't all have to be J.G. Ballard, which I state as someone who isn't even a fan of the guy, and yes I'm the proud (or at least not significantly ashamed) owner of a collection of about fifty-million X-Men comics, but Jesus fucking Christ - robots that turn into cars. Call me cynical, but a line must be drawn somewhere before we all end up falling out over the uneven continuity of fucking Paw Patrol.

I don't think I've ever read an issue of Analog which didn't have something wrong with it on some level. There have been flashes of inspiration here and there, and I genuinely believe Stanley Schmidt to be a decent guy; but the magazine has seemingly spent most of its publishing history as exciting and imaginative tales for an audience of people who are otherwise deeply suspicious of excitement, imagination, strangers, anything fancy, and colours which aren't either brown or light gray.

Thankfully this is the last of my unread issues.

Never again.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963 (1963)
Here's another one of these, costing peanuts and picked up from the second hand place mainly because Simak is mentioned on the cover. It also seemed like I should have another go at enjoying J.G. Ballard, but A Question of Re-Entry isn't quite the lost astronaut tale I might have hoped for, instead concentrating on those sailing up and down the Amazon in hope of locating his capsule. As with most Ballard that I've read, it's well written with a reasonably literary flourish but the narrative just sort of floats along without doing much of anything and I couldn't get on with it, and the missing astronaut element may even have been tagged on so as to justify publication in one of these digests for all the difference it makes. That said, at least I finished the thing, in contrast to Roger Zelazny's Nine Starships Waiting which I gave up after about five mystifying pages.

In addition to the usual short stories, Fantastic was in the habit of reprinting forgotten or otherwise mislaid works from before the dawn of the science-fiction and fantasy digests, of which three turn up in this issue. Guy de Maupassant's An Apparition is distinctly underwhelming, the plot being that it's a ghost, which most of us will have guessed from the title. I've encountered the name of Maupassant as significant in the history of literature, but this example contains few clues as to why. Marginally more whelming is Jean Richepin's The Wet Dungeon Straw which is essentially a slightly depressing shaggy dog story but is peculiar enough to be enjoyable. Finally Austyn Granville's His Natal Star features a person who finds himself subject to the gravity of a distant star, and enough so as to cancel out the pull of the Earth. The story, such as it is, is mostly our man walking around on the ceiling marveling at all those tables and chairs up there, but it worked for me.

Coming at last to the main feature, Simak's Physician to the Universe - which it turns out I haven't read before - is odd even by Cliff's standards, sustaining the atmosphere of a de Chirico painting, albeit one depicting a swamp, for the full forty or so pages. Here Simak does that van Vogt thing of having each paragraph bring more questions than it answers and when the end delivers resolution, it actually sort of doesn't and leaves us more bewildered than ever. This is something I enjoy about Simak's writing, namely that his explanations often serve to emphasise the sheer scale of the mystery more than they illuminate. Here his protagonists are exiled to a swamp serving as a form of limbo - locales which Simak has used more than once to place his characters outside of space, time, and  conventional reality. Somebody will one day write a thorough examination of Simak's oeuvre, it patently being of a depth and complexity sufficient to warrant such an undertaking, and light will hopefully be shed on the significance of the swamp to which he returns time and again. Until then I don't have much idea, but it's fun to ponder.

Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin Words Are My Matter (2016)
Ever since I first read LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods in the Gaurdani, I knew she was one of the good ones, someone who understood in a world of complete fucking idiots. She found a lot to like about The Stone Gods but spent a couple of massively enjoyable paragraphs rolling her eyes and sighing over Winterson's refusal to acknowledge that a novel in which someone colonises an alien planet can be termed science-fiction - on the grounds that science-fiction is such a boy thing or some such bollocks amounting to the usual snobbery one tends to experience with proper authors. The review is reprinted in this collection, along with a few similarly righteous and massively satisfying truths fired off in the general direction of Margaret Atwood; so I couldn't not buy the thing.

I'm not usually too stoked at the prospect of a writer writing about writing, but LeGuin's essays are packed with insights of the kind which I'd assumed were just me and probably no-one else in the universe. She dissects the relationship between proper writing and that which has come to be termed genre, bursting a multitude of self-important bubbles along the way, and even tackles the myth about whether people really are reading less these days and which people we're talking about when we make such generalisations. For what it may be worth, she doesn't believe that we are reading less, which is encouraging.

LeGuin proves similarly fascinating when discussing the work of other writers - both as reviews and dedicated essays harvested from various literary mags. Here she sheds fresh light on H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and others with such clarity and enthusiasm as to have inspired my purchase of a novel by at least one of the names I hadn't heard of - and naturally there are a few. She brings a refreshing feminist perspective to her subject while remaining even-handed and generous throughout, preferring to focus on positives even when dealing with books she clearly didn't enjoy and so eschewing the didactic tendencies of Atwood and Winterson.

Finally, we end with a diary written while at a writers' retreat on some island, with pleasing emphasis on the wild bunnies she encounters. It's not often I find myself wanting to hang out with an author as a result of having read their work, but Ursula really does come across as having been a genuinely wonderful person. We could do with a few more like her, generally speaking.

Sore Sites

Will Self Sore Sites (2000)
It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Self wrote a regular column for Building Design, a weekly magazine for architects. Sore Sites assembles a whole shitload of those columns into a single volume which has garnered the sort of appraisal you would expect on Goodreads, which only makes me wonder why some of these people bother to read Will Self at all if they're going to get pissy, as they invariably do, over his use of words in making the sort of observations he tends to make.

For what it may be worth, even as a fan of the dude, this one initially struck me as quite a hard sell. Nevertheless, it works, and it informs, and is insightful and funny in all of the right places. The author freely admits that he understands architecture only in so much as that he has opinions, and often the same sort of opinions as the rest of us, which is why he - as a layman, albeit an erudite one - was hired to write for Building Design in the first place, because you're not going to get this sort of perspective from anyone who has won an award for a series of concrete blocks. Being Self, the digressions greatly outweigh the strictly architectural content somehow without actually straying from the topic, and so mixed in with the aggregate we get autobiographical observations concerning typography, literature, Eric Gill, J.G. Ballard, the London Underground, fatherhood, pretty much everything, of which my favourite was this takedown of some miserable performance art thing.

But the reality was a couple of upper-middle-class twerps who'd turned their sub-designer house in Camberwell over to a bunch of grown-up children performing inadequate party turns. I'm as pretentious as they come but this really stuck in my craw.

The thing that stuck presumably being the fifty quid admission, the sponsorship, and that these kinds of performers do what they do because they can't think, or write, or paint, or print; and... the audience pay to see them for the same reason.

Sore Sites is funny, surprisingly illuminating, and works far better as a psychogeographical monologue than the great majority of pointless wank presuming to hijack the term.

Dead Babies

 

Martin Amis Dead Babies (1975)
I'm still trying to work out who or what the title refers to. So far I have the possibility that these babies are all, like, dead inside, man; or it's Keith Whitehead who, being a chubby dwarf, may be seen to have the appearance of a baby; or it's the emotional neoteny of everybody concerned; or it's something to do with the spunk flying in all directions, not many of which are conducive to procreation - shorthand, I suppose, for wank, inadvertently suggesting that the book reviews itself; or it's all of these. Nobody fucking knows. I seem to recall a couple of actual dead babies and the term is used as a slightly bewildering expletive by a couple of the characters, but that seems too obvious a correlation given these being of no greater consequence than any of the other routinely transgressive occurrences passing along on Brucie's literary conveyor belt without anybody really caring one way or the other.

Dead Babies describes a house full of Hooray Henries and prototype Sloane Rangers, mostly over-moneyed sixties burnouts, getting shitfaced and screwing each other in a variety of increasingly baroque configurations with no clear separation as to how much of it is hallucinatory. They're all irredeemably horrible, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Keith, and much of the novel reminds me of dismal eighties parties where I spent most of the evening trying to avoid the attentions of some speeding fucknugget determined to lecture anyone who would listen about either Jim Morrison or William sodding Blake. Also, there's gratuitous animal abuse for some reason or other.

Of course, it's beautifully written and is as such sort of compelling, but I still have no idea as to what end or what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I can see why the late Simon Morris was a fan to the point that I found myself unconsciously awaiting narrative punctuation from a list of Dr. Hook's ten greatest albums, but it left me as cold as almost all J.G. Ballard I've ever tried to read, and I get the impression ol' Jimmy may have been an influence to some extent. The aforementioned Simon Morris described Amis' London Fields as a pointless narrative that's like a joke without a punchline, while London Fields strikes me as the much better book, like Dead Babies done right, written by someone who wanted to write a book rather than just wave his dobber in your face for a couple of hundred pages. I expect Kenneth Clark would have described Dead Babies as absolutely ghastly - due to that doubtless being Marty's intention - and I'm inclined to share that view. In televisual terms it's Abigail's Party repopulated with the cast of Lindsay Anderson's If… without the nuance of either, the written equivalent of those bloody awful Allen Jones paintings of boobs squozen forth between rubber straps.

The tragedy is that I can't even bring myself to hate it. I've read much, much worse, and Dead Babies is just kind of dull but for the poetry of its composition. I suppose it would be a very boring world if we all liked the same thing.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

 

Frank Hampson Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future (1951)
I picked up a few of these collected editions for pennies back in the nineties in some remaindered book store and only recently realised I'm still yet to read them all; and this particular one - collecting a year and a half's worth of Eagle strips amounting to the first Dan Dare story - is now several hundred quid on eBay, so that's nice, or possibly just weird.

My Dare standard was formed early on from a stack of Eagle annuals my dad passed onto me when I was a kid and probably at the right age to appreciate them without any of the strip's shortcomings getting in the way. The shortcomings aren't really anything worth getting too upset about given that this was a children's strip from the fifties, published by a man of certain religious convictions, and which probably shouldn't be judged by whatever standards one might apply to, off the top of my head, the oeuvre of J.G. Ballard; but it nevertheless feels like this first epic represented an experiment in progress with Dare still finding his feet, not least in a technical sense. What doubtless worked well as seventy-seven snappy weekly instalments seems a little jittery when digested in just a couple of sittings; and strangest of all is that the lettering - of all things - is particularly ropey, suggesting panels of artwork drawn to some vague notion of a script, complete with speculative speech bubbles which were either too large, too small, or poorly situated once time came to add the dialogue. It's not a massive problem, but it's something which requires a little getting used to whenever yet another explanation wanders out of its balloon to spill across the background. Also, in the absence of original artwork, the reproduction in this volume - taken directly from issues of the comic - tends to look a little overexposed here and there, which is a shame because Hampson's drawings were obviously painstaking and beautiful. I'm sure this was the best they could do in 1988, but it's nevertheless odd that the whole should seem so technically uneven in comparison even to the American comics of the time.

Still, I'm not complaining because even poor reception is unable to diminish the imagination and inspiration which informed this thing, even as it took these first faltering steps. Of course, it's Biggles in space and is as such an expression of the values of its time. The attitudes are entirely colonial and patriarchal, derived from a notion of authority figures as essentially decent, even altruistic. Sir Hubert Guest huffs and puffs when he realises he's sharing his spaceship with a woman and that the cabin will doubtless soon be full of washing lines strung with her unmentionables, but he gets over it, and Professor Jocelyn Peabody is at least spared the more traditional indignity of providing brainlessly imperiled eye-candy fit only to be rescued from the clutches of beastly foreign types. Venus is more or less colonial Africa but its people are treated with sympathy and, excepting the Mekon himself, ideology is the villain rather than those in its sway. The Treens recall colonial attitudes towards black Africans up to a point, but don't seem inherently malign and their bad guy status comes mostly from a misguided devotion to the ruthless logical superscience of the Mekon - not too hard to work out where that came from so close to the second world war. I gather this story was written back when Venus was still considered potentially habitable, and even that Arthur C. Clarke was consulted regarding the composition of the complex alien ecosystem and civilisation into which Hampson deposited our heroes. So even if we only experience the background detail in passing, it's convincing.

Naturally there are a few narrative howlers, my favourite being the fact that the Mekon had a full-sized replica of an Earth city built apparently just for the look on the faces of his human captives when he gratuitously blows it up. There's also the final battle to consider. The Treens are revealed as hating sports - just like the bad eggs they are - and have therefore destroyed all of their horse equivalent animals many years before as scientifically inefficient, or something like that. Spotting these details as a weakness, Space Fleet wins the day by shipping battalions of horseback fighters to Venus to storm Mekonta, the capital - specifically grenadier guards and a whole shitload of Tom Mix inspired cowboys direct from Texas. It's the sort of plotting which doubtless filled the heads of small boys in the fifties and is patently fucking ridiculous, but scores highly on its raw peculiar charm.

Following on from those Eagle annuals, I renewed my acquaintance with Dan Dare when 2000AD reincarnated him as Sid Vicious back in 1977, a version which seems not too fondly remembered and which has been criticised as a ropey, opportunistic besmirchment of the values represented by the original strip. While it's true that Belardinelli's Dare may have been a revision slightly too far, it's interesting to note that Hampson's Dare was itself likewise occasionally ropey, hamstrung by technical problems, and nothing like so confident as we may choose to remember. However, the art was great, and its generous, altruistic spirit still resonates regardless of contemporary wibbling concerns about things being of their time in the usual pejorative sense. I don't actually know if anyone ever found the original artwork since this edition was put together, or even if any efforts may have been made towards restoration in the intervening years, but Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future remains worthy of preservation, regardless.

The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6

Michael Moorcock (editor)
The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6 (1970)
In his introduction, Moorcock states that he prefers to simply call this fiction, while the back cover qualifies the SF as referring to either science or speculative fiction. I've never liked speculative fiction because as a term it makes me think of Margaret Attwood and Jeanette Winterson sneering about how space travel is such a boy thing, but I like science fiction as something incorporating all the weird shit which doesn't quite fit anywhere else - which is what we have here.

New Worlds was never scared of printing weird shit, and I'd say some of the best stuff from the magazine was also the weirdest, at least if we're to take a sciencey man smoking his pipe as he heads for Mars in a rocket with his robot best friend to be baseline normal. Surprisingly, whilst there's some reasonably strange stuff here, the collection feels sober by the standards of the well from which it is drawn, and is subsequently not so great as it might have been - as though someone might even be reigning it in a little, although I suspect this impression to be only a pattern emergent from possibly unfair comparisons with the magazine.

In Reason's Ear by Hilary Bailey - who sadly passed just months ago - stood out for me, as did Moorcock's The Delhi Division, a story which demonstrates how his own weirdly non-linear narratives were always so much more readable than those of the many who seem so obviously inspired by him, I guess some of whom also feature in this collection. Langdon Jones' The Eye of the Lens has an immensely promising start with page after page of dry, dreamlike descriptions of imagined machines, evolving into something even stranger, then goes on for a bit and eventually overstays its welcome, which is a shame. There's also J.G. Ballard's The Killing Ground which reinforces my hypothesis that Ballard simply isn't for me; and then there are the rest, and they're mostly pretty darn great - certainly nothing you would want to skip - but I somehow felt my brains should have been dripping from my ears by the end of this lot, which wasn't the case; so I guess that's a recommendation, but just not one entailing any significant quota of fists pumping the air.

The Terminal Beach

J.G. Ballard The Terminal Beach (1964)
I didn't get on very well with Ballard last time, finding Vermilion Sands to be kind of like reading one of those fucking awful David Hockney paintings of a Californian swimming pool. Having now read this one, I'm still not absolutely convinced about the guy, but the collection does at least have a little more in the way of texture. The Terminal Beach comprises twelve short stories - no shared narratives as with Vermilion Sands, although the beach theme reoccurs throughout and is specifically addressed in The Reptile Enclosure:

But I think the psychological role of the beach is much more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt to escape from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea...

So it's about thresholds, I guess, which makes sense given that Ballard writes at length about the future and just what the hell we're going to do when we get there, whether allegorically as with The Drowned Giant, or arguably more literally as with the story after which the collection is named - a thoroughly depressing portrait of life in the wake of environmental collapse. The surreal imagery, elegant prose, and general focus is such that you really don't have to regard Ballard as an author of science-fiction if you don't want to, and such categorisation seems mainly to acknowledge that it's simply a better fit than whatever else you might want to call it - as with Burroughs, Moorcock, Ursula LeGuin, Will Self and others.

The people of Vermilion Sands led lives of bland Mediterranean luxury. Whilst there's not too much of that here, Ballard nevertheless writes with a slightly detached quality so that while we witness effects we do not directly experience them, excepting possibly the violence of the bloke who - from what I can work out - willingly has his eyes pecked out by gulls in The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon, apparently as some sort of Oedipal gesture which went way over my head. It's not that any of these stories lack emotional content, or that Ballard should have included more injured puppies, but beyond the admittedly satisfying surrealism, I've found it difficult to fully engage with some of this material, or to really see why it might be desirable for me to do so. It might be the lack of humour, although clearly there are some nods in that direction and not everything has to be Spike Milligan; but in places it felt as though I was reading through a codeine haze.

Here among the blocks you at last find an image of yourself free of the hazards of time and space. This island is an ontological Garden of Eden, why seek to expel yourself into a world of quantal flux?

It makes sense quoted in isolation, but came across as generic philosophical landfill in context of the tale from which it is taken. Sometimes making some fucking sense can really help a story, you know?

Okay, so I enjoyed The Terminal Beach, albeit with certain reservations; and I'd say this is down to my own tastes rather than necessarily to Ballard's ability as a writer, although I still say his reputation is probably inflated somewhat out of proportion. Admittedly I've yet to read High-Rise or Crash or any of the other supposed classics, so I'll happily revise my opinion should I need to do so; and having read this lot, I can now at least imagine the possibility of the aforementioned being as wonderful as everyone seems to think they are.

New Worlds 157

Michael Moorcock (editor) New Worlds 157 (1965)
Here's another oddity, specifically a magazine, albeit a magazine published as a standard paperback - as I guess were other issues of Moorcock's New Worlds. Someone sent me this through the post, I made a mental note to read it at some point and it went onto the shelves, there to remain unread because I rarely bother with periodicals - which is an explanation of how my brain works rather than some sort of manifesto. I know Fantasy & Science Fiction to be wonderful, and Asimov's and Analog have their moments, but if I read the magazines I'd never find time to read books, and there's so much I still want to read and I don't even know if I'll be alive long enough to get through all of it.

Anyway, New Worlds ran for a long, long time, and was pretty much the English magazine of new science fiction. It had a reputation for innovation, for taking risks on weirdos, and as such is probably directly responsible for at least some degrees of the fame enjoyed by Brian Aldiss, Moorcock himself, Harry Harrison, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and others. There's nothing historically remarkable about this particular issue beyond that it seems typically solid. Colin Fry's Ernie and Langdon Jones' Transient sort of make you wish that at least one of them had gone on to bigger, better publicised things, whoever they were; and Moorcock contributes something which ended up in one of the Jerry Cornelius books, but mostly this serves as a fascinating snapshot of its milieu, an era when science-fiction was something you read, nine times out of ten, which seems a more civilised state of affairs than is presently the case. Being a periodical, there's an editorial concerned mostly with a convention at which fancy dress was still termed fancy dress, and there's a review of Ray Bradbury's newie - Dandelion Wine apparently, and very good it sounds too - and, best of all, a terse advice column written by one Dr. Peristyle, apparently Brian Aldiss in stealth mode.

All I ask of a story is that it tells a story. Why do writers insist on trying to give me more? asks Betty Pierce of Diss, Norfolk.

I suppose the answer is that there are writers who write for the likes of you, madam, Aldiss responds, but the good ones hope to avoid you.

Excellent.

I might have to hunt down a few more of these.

The Cornelius Chronicles

Michael Moorcock The Cornelius Chronicles (1977)
I had two of the four volumes collected within this housebrick a while back, having picked them up cheap under the impression of Jerry Cornelius probably being important for some reason or other; but I ended up giving the collection away without having read the thing, and I'm not quite sure why beyond that I wasn't a big reader in the nineties. Having since recognised Moorcock as a fucking genius, I'd been quietly kicking myself on this particular score for a while, so here we are, back where I started, and this time I have all four in a single volume and my brain is probably better attuned to this sort of stuff than it once was.

Truthfully, I'd been put off Jerry Cornelius by association with Grant Morrison's Gideon Stargrave strips in Near Myths magazine which, according to Moorcock, were essentially photocopies of his own character coloured in with a slightly different crayon; but Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time novels were decent enough to suggest that I should at least give Jerry a look, and on close inspection I see Moorcock was right, and that Gideon Stargrave is indeed a poor substitute for the real thing - Blink 182 when you could be listening to the Sex Pistols. It was specifically the affected flamboyance of Gideon Stargrave which always irritated the living shit out of me, so I'm amazed to read the genuine article and see that it can be done right, with wit, and without coming across like one of those seventies teenagers who used to walk to school with a Gentle Giant album under his arm and without the bag which would have prevented the rest of us seeing what he had and just how cool he was, how far ahead he was compared to everyone else. He'd probably even done it with a girl and everything.

Anyway, enough about that guy. I'd been warned that Cornelius is best read by just diving in, holding on tight, and not worrying too much over whether or not it makes sense. This was sound advice, although it's not so disjointed as I anticipated - at least not in the sense of a William Burroughs novel being disjointed. The Final Programme (1966) and A Cure for Cancer (1971) at least seem to follow vague stories, or else give a good impersonation of doing so. I've a feeling that it may be the latter - scenarios and set pieces arranged so as to suggest narrative without quite amounting to one, with the novels following a non-linear logic of their own, like a dream or a piece of music, or - if this isn't too obvious an observation - one of the weirder psychedelic albums of the era to which these stories refer.

It's significant that Jerry Cornelius is absolutely of his time, the sixties arguably being the point at which the ideas of the European avant-garde in art entered the mainstream and suddenly you had pop music taking its cues from Pierre Schaeffer or Marcel Duchamp. Hindsight has possibly dimmed the significance of this particular great leap forward, coming as it did with an intellectual dimension expressed as young people rejecting whatever behavioural models had already been set up for them by their parents' generation, but reading these novels is a great reminder of how dangerous such ideas once seemed, even the fact of their being ideas.

'These old fashioned rules no longer apply. Your sort of morality, your sort of thinking, your sort of behaviour—it was powerful in its day. Like the dinosaur. Like the dinosaur it cannot survive in this world. You put values on everything—values...'

'I think I can see a little of what you mean.' Marek lost his composure and rubbed at his face. 'I wonder... is it Satan's turn to rule?'

'Careful, Herr Marek, that's blasphemy. Besides, what you are saying is meaningless nowadays.' Jerry's hair had become disarranged as he talked. He brushed it back from the sides of his face.

'Because you want it to be?' Marek turned and walked towards the stove.

'Because it is. I am scarcely self-indulgent, Herr Marek—not in present-day terms.'

'So you have your own code.' Marek sounded almost jeering.

'On the contrary. There is no new morality, Herr Marek—there is no morality. The term is as barren as your grandmother's wrinkled old womb. There are no values!'

I get the impression this is additionally what Moorcock was doing with narrative, rejecting the tightly woven plotting of Sexton Blake and others in favour of something weirder, more organic, and certainly more provocative. What has surprised me most about reading this is suddenly realising where all those loopy sixties spy thrillers came from, The Prisoner, The Avengers, and ultimately Austin fucking Powers. Even the current, painfully self-conscious television version of Doctor Who looks a lot like it's trying hard to be Jerry from where I'm sitting. To veer off at a fairly substantial tangent, the position of Moorcock as a writer seems very much parallel to that of Hawkind, the band with which he has been closely associated, as memorably summarised by Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions in issue seven of The Sound Projector:

If you look at the whole of that so-called industrial scene from Cabaret Voltaire to Marilyn Manson, the band with the most far reaching influence wouldn't be Throbbing Gristle, but Hawkwind! This is something that they rarely mention in the press, as Hawkwind have this reputation as a British hippie band who do science-fiction and theatrics and therefore must be naff. Zoviet France have told me they were very keen on Hawkwind; SPK were well into Hawkwind back in Australia; and what are Graeme Revell and Brian Williams doing nowadays? Making soundtracks for science-fiction films - I rest my case! I think it's about time Hawkwind were reassessed. I have long been tired of those outfits who cite influences no-one has heard of, or can stand listening to. Back in the early '70s, Hawkwind were the first band I was aware of to popularise the idea of sonic attack, infra and ultra sound as a weapon. Listen to Sonic Attack on Space Ritual. That of course has long since been taken up by that whole noise scene, but Hawkwind were rarely acknowledged. If you look at the information war thing, you'll notice that Hawkwind had the post-modern writers, Michael Moorcock and Bob Calvert working with them. Though Moorcock is best known for his very popular science-fiction and fantasy genre work, it's more accurate to call him a postmodernist or at least a modernist. Moorcock pointed many in the direction of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard and - stone me, he even wrote for Re/Search. When Hawkwind's In Search of Space came out in the early seventies, it came with a booklet of very similar material to what the London Psychogeographical Society, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Iain Sinclair, and Tom Vague have been doing more recently. Whenever I used to see Psychic TV, I thought Hawkwind. Whenever I saw Throbbing Gristle I thought Hawkwind without the lights and without the tunes. That combat clothing thing - Hawkwind!

Of course, members of Hawkwind get walk-on parts in the third and fourth Cornelius books, so maybe the above isn't too great a digression. Reality logically intrudes upon Jerry Cornelius because it is our world to which his story refers, even at its wildest. Jerry is dead for much of The English Assassin (1972), or at least dead in some of its variant realities. Notable amongst the alternate worlds described in this volume are the proto-steampunk variants featuring Oswald Bastable from Moorcock's The War Lord of the Air, and Zenith from the Sexton Blake continuity for which Moorcock has also written, and there's the world - possibly our own - in which Jerry Cornelius is a fiction and A Cure for Cancer is only a novel. Generally speaking, The English Assassin is a parody of the establishment and the class system, rendered comic and ultimately stripped of meaning at a party with a guest list encompassing Frankie Howerd and numerous members of Hawkwind, amongs others. Over and over, it reveals institutions and traditions in collapse, returning to inert cultural material by a process of entropy, or even just boredom:

In the third bedroom of the Casa del Monte, seated on a black walnut panelled Lombardy bed, covered in seventeenth century carvings, the most corrupt and feeble-minded publisher in America sipped his vodka and tonic and stared sourly at his tennis shoes while one of the Oxford dons bored him with a long and enthusiastic description of the joys and difficulties involved in doing Now We Are Six into Assyrian. It was what they both deserved.

Whether intentional or not, this establishes Rupert Murdoch and J.R.R. Tolkien as essentially variations on a theme, or at least it does from where I'm sat. Only the lower orders - those with less to lose - survive more or less unscathed, as suggested at the close of the book with Mrs. Cornelius scoffing candy floss and contemplating bingo on the beach as she watches her offspring build sandcastles. When Moorcock novelised The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle he recast Irene Handl's nameless cinema usherette as Jerry's wonderfully coarse mother and its not difficult to see why. She is solid and eternal, unaffected by the broad sweep of history, history being for her, I suppose, a bourgeois affectation - more Jerry's concern:

The image of a Britain become a nation of William Morris wood-carvers and Chestertonian beer-swillers drove him deeper into his jungle and caused him to abandon his books. He was only prepared to retreat so far. He was forced to admit, however, that the seventies were proving an intense disappointment to him. He felt bitter about missed opportunities, the caution of his own allies, the sheer funk of his enemies. In the fifties life had been so appalling that he had been forced to flee into the future, perhaps even help create that future, but by the sixties, when the future had arrived, he had been content at last to live in the present until, due in his view to a conspiracy amongst those who feared the threat of freedom, the present (and consequently the future) had been betrayed. As a result he had sought the past for consolation, for an adequate mythology to explain the world to him, and here he hid, lost in his art nouveau jungle, his art deco caverns, treading the dangerous quicksands of nostalgia and yearning for times that seemed simpler only because he did not belong to them and which, as they became familiar, seemed even more complex than the world he had loved for its variety and potential.

Note the emergent sixties obsession with Victoriana, which Moorcock rewrote as that which we now recognise as steampunk. The Condition of Muzak (1977) completes the cycle and serves better than any of the other books to define just what it has all been about, namely the complex degrading to the simple, great art, culture, or even thought reducing to background music; and furthermore that the process of entropy is itself inherent to the existence of that which it destroys:

'If time could stand still,' said Hira reflectively, 'I suppose we should all be as good as dead. The whole business of entropy so accurately reflects the human condition. To remain alive one must burn fuel, use up heat, squander resources, and yet that very action contributes to the end of the universe-the heat death of everything! But to become still, to use the minimum of energy—that's pointless. It is to die, effectively. What a dreadful dilemma.'

This final part of the story is framed within a variant of reality in which Jerry is revealed as a struggling musician and a bit of a loser, someone destined to fail, with all of those other, more glamorous realities quite possibly having been just his drug-addled juvenile fantasies, in turn serving to emphasise just how pathetic is the reality of this, his last and lowest plane of existence.

The Cornelius Chronicles are about change, the nature of change, the future, our expectations, and history as a construct; or they are in so much as they can be said to be about any one thing; at least I think they are. It's hard to tell because this is one fuck of a lot of non-linear narrative to get through, and it's routinely bewildering, even boring in places - some of which may be intentional - but as promised, the whole really is worth the effort expended in sticking with it. This is one of those rare books which could potentially change either your life, or at least the way you see the world.

Moorcock really is a genius.

Vermilion Sands

J.G. Ballard Vermilion Sands (1971)
I'm not sure quite why it's taken this long for me to get around to reading J.G. Ballard, but this one - picked from the shelf of Oxfam in Coventry purely because it was Ballard and it was there - probably wasn't the greatest place to start. Vermilion Sands comprises short stories set in and around a resort populated by faded Bohemian types and the idle rich, a fantasy playground of the future as it is described on the jacket, and were this not the first thing I'd read by the guy I could probably confidently describe it as Ballardian by virtue of the cloud sculptures, singing statues, psychotropic houses and so on.

'Do you read a lot of poetry?' I asked, indicating the volumes around her.

'She nodded. 'As much as I can bear to.'

I laughed. 'I know what you mean. I have to read rather more than I want.'

Oh someone peel me a grape, for fuck's sake! Whilst it's all very imaginative and beautifully written, like most utopias of the idle rich, it's also extraordinarily dull, regardless of the surrealism. In fact it's kind of like reading one of those fucking awful David Hockney paintings of a Californian swimming pool. It's not totally without merit, obviously, but Roxy Music's In Every Dream Home a Heartache - which does roughly the same thing - lasts five minutes rather than two hundred pages. I think part of the problem is that it's difficult to tell quite what Ballard is trying to say here, and a clue may be found in his preface which seems to suggest he rather longed after sipping fancy cocktails by the pool in the company of Joan Collins and Andy Warhol.

Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere - above all, in sections of the three-thousand mile long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future - not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

T'rrific, and while we're at it lets also bring back that horrible seventies version of airbrushed deco illustration in which everyone is reduced to the fat pastel sausages of an extra from Yellow Submarine. Wouldn't that be just weapon, yeah?

I'm probably being overly harsh, or maybe I'm just too thick too have appreciated Vermilion Sands, but I really expected much more than an admittedly tuneful Ringo Starr solo album from this author. Moorcock did something similarly louche in his Dancer's at the End of Time books, but I found his version funnier and much more engaging. Sorry.

Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...

Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino & many, many others
Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...
Doomworld (1978)
Dark Encounters (1980)
Resurrection of Evil (1981)
This time it was J.G. Ballard boring me shitless, in combination with which a load of personal aggravations - significantly one of the cats breaking her leg - conspired to reduce my attention span as applied to literature which is probably important and good for you but isn't much fun to actually read; and these three collections were just sat there promising comforting retreat into a less troublesome past, so...

I was twelve when Star Wars came out, and naturally I was excited about the whole thing before I'd even seen it. I'd read the two giant-sized Marvel specials - weird collectors editions the size of tabloid newspapers - and I'd read that first issue of Starburst, and a couple of those other tie-in making of magazines they just couldn't get into the newsagents fast enough. I was excited because this was a film which looked like real life rather than special effects, even Gerry Anderson special effects. The robots seemed like real robots, as did the spacecraft; and I know we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, but no-one ever really understood what the hell happened in that film, and the adventures of Luke Skywalker promised to be significantly more exciting. Star Wars didn't disappoint when it arrived, although on close inspection I realised it somehow lacked the bite of the strips I'd begun to follow in 2000AD comic; and neither did the action figures disappoint, nor Star Wars Weekly which reprinted the two collectors editions and then went off somewhere else altogether, following its own trajectory.

These three volumes collect the first fifty or so issues of the American comic, as reprinted in shorter weekly helpings in the English version. Star Wars Weekly was never anything like so essential as 2000AD for me as a kid, although some of the back up strips came fairly close - Warlock, Guardians of the Galaxy,  Micronauts and so on. The main feature seemed variable, and suffered from each episode having been broken down into awkward lengths for the sake of a weekly schedule, but it still had its moments, or so I recall, although nostalgia has bitten me in the ass before...

A New Hope as it has since become known, adapted by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin - apparently drawn using a nail on a sheet of hardboard - is pleasant enough, and interesting for its featuring the first version of Jabba the Hut as played by Graeme Garden of The Goodies. With the adaptation out of the way, the story takes a brief detour through a slightly shite but hugely enjoyable Han Solo version of The Magnificent Seven, before really getting into gear with Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino at the controls. But for a few digressions and fill-in issues, the first two volumes of these collections more or less represent a continuing story, one which deftly avoided doing too much which could be contradicted when The Empire Strikes Back came out. The story is nicely paced, laying down intriguing plot points far in advance of their being required to explain anything, and delivering regular big ideas sufficient to keep it interesting. Of course, one problem with the comic is that it tends to expose Star Wars lack of any actual characters, or at least no-one deeper than they killed his mum and dad and now he wants revenge, or the rough and ready outlaw with a heart of gold and the like. This isn't really a problem in the film, at least not in the first one, given that scale and spectacle were the main point; and it did both pretty well, so all you really needed from anyone was at the level of the lowly farm boy who had a date with destiny. Whilst the comic strip could never really hope to achieve the scale of the celluloid, it had the next best thing in the form of Carmine Infantino's weird angular style, a sort of Vorticist translation of traditional Japanese art. Doomworld - set around a city-sized sailing ship rigged together from the trunks of underwater trees on a planet without dry land - impressed the shit out of me when I was a kid, and amazingly it has stood the test of time, albeit as something patently angled towards younger teenagers; and subsequent episodes of Luke and pals battling representatives of the House of Tagge actually work better than I remember them doing, possibly benefiting from being read over a few more concentrated sittings. Inevitably there's a degree of clunk and cliché because it's Star Wars, but I swear Carmine Infantino's art could be some of the most beautiful stuff Marvel have ever published, regardless of yer Kirbys and yer Ditkos, so it seems churlish to roll one's eyes at yet another creaking instance of C3PO testily pointing out that R2D2 has just made him look a right cunt.

Sadly it wasn't to last. Al Williamson's art on the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back is beautiful but, as with the film, the fucking thing doesn't actually have a story.

Luke is over here, then he's over there.

Let's hope he doesn't run into Darth Vader.

Oh shit - look what they did to Han Solo.

The End.

Even as an easily satisfied teenager I thought it was bollocks and stopped buying the comic, which seems to have been the right choice going by the remainder of the third volume. Having adapted Empire, it's as though the story fell and hit its head and was never quite the same again. Carmine Infantino's beautiful art gets buried beneath the linework of a roster of lesser talents, Archie Goodwin drops in and out of the mix, and we get a succession of shorter, less ambitious adventures, essentially filler material. Luke and Leia guest in a dinosaur-infested Doug McClure vehicle, or a story from the 1974 Star Trek annual, or Larry Hama's impressively dire The Third Law in which her nibs goes to the banking planet to take out a loan so the rebels can buy more X-Wing fighters; and oh what a coincidence, Darth Vader just happens to be there as well, making a loud farting noise as Leia meets with the chancellor, waving a hand in front of his face and commenting, 'I would say there was a Brussels sprout on the end of that one, your royal highness.'

That doesn't happen, but it comes close in places. The Third Law isn't actually a Davy Jones strip from Viz, but it could have been.

Never mind. Nothing lasts forever, and the point to remember is just how good the first two volumes are. Apparently they're not considered Star Wars canon, but really - who gives a shit? I'd still take Doomworld over almost anything which has appeared on the big screen since the first one.