The Dr. Who Annual 1974

Edgar Hodges, Steve Livesey, Paul Crompton & others
The Dr. Who Annual 1974 (1973)
I am aware that nostalgia has informed a fair few of my recent reading choices, and here we are again. I was eight and I can still vividly remember tearing the wrapping from this one that Christmas morning; and of course I thought it was amazing, because television crossing over into the real world, or at least print, didn't seem that common at the time; and if you were obsessed with Who, as I was, there wasn't really much you could do about it when it wasn't actually on the box, aside from eating the choccy bars and impersonating various monsters in the playground. Inevitably my annuals went the way of all childish things, or at least some childish things, leaving me with just memories, and memories which have given me cause to wonder.

Had Listen - the Stars! been anything to do with John Brunner's novella of the same name, and was Menace of the Molags really just Childhood's End with the judicious insertion of Jon Pertwee?

Not quite, is probably the answer to both of those - not that it honestly matters either way - but I've very much enjoyed revisiting this thing, having nabbed a relatively cheap copy from eBay. That said, I'm not even sure I read any of the six text stories back when I was eight, although I definitely enjoyed looking at the pictures, and I read the comic strips over and over. That whole thing about how comic books get kids reading has often struck me as something of an overstatement, although it's doubtless true that it gets them to read more comic strips.

Naturally I found an online review of this annual wherein a man who has probably never had sexual intercourse sneers at stories lacking originality and our cover star repeatedly referred to as Doctor Who, concluding that the 1974 annual seems an unusually childish collection which is unlikely to appeal to mature older readers. Nevertheless, it worked for me when I was eight.

Now that I'm older and wiser, while I concede that it's a bit basic in places, its charm remains undiminished. I've no idea who wrote the stories beyond that it probably wasn't Arthur C. Clarke, but the art of Edgar Hodges and Steve Livesey is gorgeous - vivid and dynamic with just enough of an unsettling tone to match the telly version as it was at the time without giving anyone nightmares. The stories to which this wonderful art is pinned are, as I say, a little basic, mostly setting up weird encounters without quite knowing what to do with them. Old Father Saturn, for one example, introduces us to astronauts from one of the ringed planet's moons, newly revived from many millennia spent trapped in suspended animation at the bottom of our ocean. Unfortunately it turns out that they can't breath Earth's atmosphere, so they turn green and die, and that's the story; but as with most of what we have here, it pushes so many familiar Who buttons and pushes them so well that you don't really care about what shortcomings there may be. At least I didn't.

As with most annuals of the time, this one is padded with factual pieces, brain teasers, puzzles and the like, which is interesting because the spacey stuff and rocketry was offered with the then recent moon landing still very much lodged in the public imagination, and it's clear that readers of 1974 were committed to the idea of the future improving on the present, and that many of them would be living on Mars by the year 2000; and this breezy futurist optimism informs most of the stories too. The Dr. Who Annual was a product, a corporate tie-in, and a means of getting parents to cough up, but the 1974 edition nevertheless seems to have been a labour of some love and as such has more character than can be written off as only the glow of nostalgia.

Slavers of Space

John Brunner Slavers of Space (1960)
This was first published as the b-side to Dick's Dr. Futurity as part of an Ace Double. It's set in a universe wherein humanity is served by both robots and androids - the latter being biological servitors grown in a vat, approximately human but distinguished by their blue skin. You can probably tell where this is going, can't you?

This is my third Brunner of the sixties, and as with both Enigma From Tantalus and The Repairmen of Cyclops, something about either the tone, the pace, the situations, or the author's turn of phrase primes my mind's eye to visualise the narrative as Tom Baker era telly Who, albeit without Tom Baker; which is odd because Wikipedia mutters something about his fellow writers having considered him a little too heavily influenced by American science-fiction. Anyway, Slavers is paced oddly as though it wanted to be a big house novel in the vein of Jane Austen, with its main character belonging to a sort of futuristic plantation family, engaging in duels and Mardi Gras, then wandering off into space in hope of returning the wallet of a murdered man to his surviving relatives.

Those later Brunner novels I've read have been prone to a greater degree of soapboxery than I generally enjoy, because while it's nice when a book demonstrates a bit of a theme, even a social conscience, it's also nice when an author hasn't taken the readership to be the kind of morons who require everything spelled out in ten-foot high rainbow letters with Ben Elton stood to one side still cracking jokes about Thatcher. This one is about racism and inequality, you may be surprised to learn, but is problematic if we assume the blue-skinned androids to be a direct stand-in for Africans sold into slavery, which they clearly are. Our hero's curiosity is aroused when a human is murdered apparently while defending an android from a brutal assault. He accordingly develops a vague awareness of an android's lot being a perhaps less than happy one, then goes off into space in search of the murdered man's nearest and dearest, seemingly because he hasn't got anything better to do. Subsequent investigations reveal the uncomfortable possibility of certain androids being humans who've been dyed blue, brainwashed, and sold into slavery; and the big revelation at the end is that there's no such thing as an android, and the creatures we've been calling androids - and presumably have had wiping our arses for us all this time - are actually enslaved humans. So it's bad that we treated the androids like shit, but worse still that they're as human as we are.

Slavers of Space suffers for its fight against racism being waged with more than a faint whiff of Alan Partridge in the air, being mostly about our guy, lacking anything which engages directly with the minority with which Brunner seemingly expects us to sympathise, a minority which only eventually gets the benefit of empathy on our terms, namely just as soon as we've figured out that they're legitimately human. There are some nice images, and it's a long way from being anything you could describe as run of the mill, but still, there's something unsatisfying about this one, and I didn't much like the aftertaste.

Dr. Futurity

 

Philip K. Dick Dr. Futurity (1960)
Back in 2008, suddenly self-conscious of being nowhere near so well or widely read as I felt I ought to be, I didst vow firstly to read for an hour each night before bed and again in the morning where possible so as to always have a book on the go, and secondly to try to write a review of everything so as to oblige me to think about each title in some kind of depth and so hopefully to learn something from the experience. It's probably not a coincidence that this coincided with my discovering the internet and the realisation of being suddenly able to track down relatively obscure books I'd never even seen in a store without having to pay a fucking fortune, of which Dr. Futurity might count as one of the first; and now I'm reading it again because a second copy has turned up glued to the reverse of John Brunner's Slavers of Space as an Ace Double, and - interestingly enough - just a few months short of the ten year anniversary of my first having read it when I began this journey, if you'll excuse the inherent wankiness of my referring to it as a journey.

This time, I'm better prepared through having read a ton of van Vogt in the interim, and I got a lot more from the book. Dr. Futurity tends to have been overlooked as a formative early work in the general public haste to adapt Dick's every last note left out for the milkman as a shit blue and orange action thriller starring one of those actors no-one can ever remember the name of. I believe it remains in print as part of a collection entitled Three Early Novels - also including Vulcan's Hammer and The Man Who Japed - the publicity of which describes its components as considerably more straightforward than his later novels blah blah Ubik blah blah Blade Runner* blah blah… So the dialogue would seem to have it that he was still finding his feet here, which is only partially true. By this point he'd written the majority of his so-called mainstream novels which would remain unpublished until after his death, so he knew how to write, just not how to get published or taken seriously, which I suspect may have been significant in his turning to science-fiction.

Dr. Futurity conspicuously reads like an attempt to get to grips with the genre in so much as that it's more or less a pastiche of A.E. van Vogt, of whom Dick was very much an admirer. That said, many of the themes to which Dick would return in later novels which Ridley Scott has heard of, were already in place - the cats, the black-haired women, the absentee God, the appreciation of boobs, and most significantly the notion of our reality as something false laid over the way things should have turned out, in this case a version of America which resisted colonisation by Europeans.

'Your forefathers,' Stenog said, 'the early Christians, I mean, hurled themselves under chariot wheels. They sought death, and yet out of their beliefs came your society.'

Parsons said slowly, 'We may ignore death, we may immaturely deny the existence of death, but at least we don't court death.'

'You did indirectly,' Stenog said. 'By denying such a powerful reality, you undermined the rational basis of your world. You had no way to cope with war and famine and overpopulation because you couldn't bring yourself to discuss them. So war happened to you; it was like a natural calamity, not man-made at all. It became a force. We control our society. We contemplate all aspects of our existence, not merely the good and pleasant.'

For the rest of the trip they drove in silence.

The presence of such themes probably shouldn't come as too great a surprise given that he'd been ticking most of the same boxes since Gather Yourselves Together from the early fifties.

The most distinctive aspect of this one however, is how faithfully it mimics van Vogt, working its science-fiction as weird atmospheric philosophy rather than technological speculation in the vein of Asimov and those guys. Jim Parsons, the protagonist of Dr. Futurity, is propelled forward through a dreamlike narrative characterised by seemingly random twist and turns very much in the style of Alfred Elton, and even the prose adopts the jarring, angular quality which van Vogt employed in keeping us on our toes whilst prompting more questions than are ever fully answered.

On all sides of him, meters and controls.

 

A.E. van Vogt developed his style with the intent of limiting his reader to the powerfully subjective psychological experience of a main character.

 

I had a lot more to digest this time with Dr. Futurity, but Dick unfortunately also channels some of the confusion one tends to encounter in a van Vogt novel; which, in combination with this tale of impersonators impersonating the impersonators who went back in time to change the past which had already been changed by someone impersonating the first impersonator, makes for a bit of a knotty read at least for the final chapters - not unenjoyable, just knotty.

*: Okay, so it actually mentions Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but they were obviously thinking about Blade Runner.

In the Days of the Comet

H.G. Wells In the Days of the Comet (1906)
I've tended to avoid what I regard as later Wells, generally meaning anything written since The First Men in the Moon. Whilst the quality of his prose may well have remained high, I have the impression he simply ran out of decent ideas, or was at least floundering to some extent; but admittedly this is only a very vague impression based on The Food of the Gods being largely crap and finding myself massively underwhelmed by most of the later short stories that I read, or at least forced myself to finish for the sake of disliking them with authority. I only picked this up because it's so unusual to come across a copy of a novel other than one of the big five, and against all expectations it's not the pile of crap I expected it to be.

That said, it falls off a little in the second half, never quite attaining the escape velocity necessary to achieve the potential promised by the first hundred or so pages, but by that point I didn't even mind, my initial expectations having been set so low. The story is a fairly simple one entailing a passing comet saturating the Earth's atmosphere with a gas which stops everyone acting like wankers. John Brunner pretty much recycled the idea in The Stone That Never Came Down without either the comet or anything you might reasonably describe as an improvement. For Wells' take we experience everything that was wrong with English society at the turn of the century through the eyes of a working-class lad in a coal mining community. His girlfriend has just run off with the son of the landowning lord of the manor, and he's not fucking happy.

In that time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and toil and hot passions before they had the chance of even a year or so of clear thinking; they settled down to an intense and strenuous application of some partial but immediate duty, and the growth of thought ceased in them. They set and hardened into narrow ways.

Wells talks about class, privilege, capitalism, industrialisation of labour, and the use of media by which a population is taught to embrace its own servitude and demonise anything which threatens the status quo. But for period details, at times it reads as though it could have been written just months ago, invoking unfortunate parallels which bring serious weight to Wells' argument. It's been a long time since I read any Thomas Hardy, but the first half of the book strongly suggests what little I recall of his passion for social reform.

The comet passes, assuaging the fears of any person suspecting they may have been conned into reading something other than science-fiction, and a green gas envelops the globe, and everyone wakes up with a new awareness of the error of their ways. Unfortunately, as often tends to be the case with utopian novels, it's not very interesting after that - mostly characters having recriminations about how they could ever have been so foolish as to vote for the Annoying Orange, arguments which were better put in the first half of the book for having been expressed in a spirit of anger rather than one of amiable bewilderment. So it ends on a positive note - but for the suggestion that it will take the passing of a narcotic comet to stop us voting Adolf Hitler back into power, over and over, never learning a single fucking thing - but a positive note that just kind of trails off into nothing. This might be a problem but for the sheer power of the first half of the book - not Wells' greatest novel, but his greatest first half of a novel, I'd say.

My Name is Legion

Roger Zelazny My Name is Legion (1976)
I don't really know much about Zelazny beyond his having co-wrote Deus Irae with Philip K. Dick, although I'm fairly sure I recall having read some interview in which Zelazny claimed to be no more than an organising influence on what was essentially Dick's novel, which squares with my recollection of it reading very much like undiluted Dick, so to speak; on the other hand, internet rummaging yields interviews in which Philip K. Dick downplays his own involvement to more or less a couple of chapters. Anyway, Deus Irae more closely resembles others by Philip K. Dick than My Name is Legion, so whatever.

My Name is Legion might be deemed a variation on John Brunner's Shockwave Rider in so much as it centres upon a man, specifically a freelance secret agent, who has pulled all his punch cards from those big old governmental computers with all of their flashing lights and reels of magnetic tape, and now has no official existence; and so he lives off the grid and tackles ecological crimes, broadly speaking. It's an odd book, tightly written and divided into three short stories. It's detective fiction which communicates in short, terse sentences which occasionally flower into lengthy, fairly intensive philosophical dialogues of a kind which you can see would have seemed a good fit for Dick's narrative. In fact, it reads sort of how A.E. van Vogt might read had his books been written by someone substantially less weird.

The only problem is that for most of its page count My Name is Legion feels like three short ecologically-themed stories connected by a gimmick, namely the private detective of no fixed identity. The point of the collection becomes clear at the close of the final chapter, but after a lot of time spent wondering, at least in my case, why it should really matter that this bloke exists outside of his own information-based society. The Shockwave Rider, for example, contrasts its own fugitive from official record with the expressly totalitarian world in which he lives, but the environment of My Name is Legion does not seem significantly worse than that of America in the seventies - room for improvement, but some way short of truly Orwellian; and while we're here, even the ecological aspect seems a little understated.

Ultimately it becomes clear that the book is about guilt, accountability, and humanity as it relates to its own conscience, and once everything comes together, it all makes sense in a fairly satisfying way, although it would have been nice to have some indication of where it was all heading a little earlier on. I probably wouldn't consider My Name is Legion a classic, but it has its moments, and the philosophical digressions are of sufficient quality as to suggest I should make the effort to keep an eye out for Zelazny's other books. This one feels like a respectable but otherwise lesser work of someone who was probably capable of better.

The Shockwave Rider

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider (1975)
Having enjoyed The Stone That Never Came Down many years ago and a couple of his earlier, pulpier novellas more recently, I've been generally well-disposed towards John Brunner; and having almost certainly seen The Shockwave Rider described as important somewhere or other there was just no way I could leave this copy sat upon the shelf in the store. The Shockwave Rider has the reputation of being a sort of proto-cyberpunk novel, which turns out to be something of an understatement as its protagonist, Nick Haflinger, flees the sort of oppressive, corporate society foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, changing identity over and over by means of the computer virus with which he's infected the net. Of course there were numerous, even earlier predictions of the worldwide web and our increased reliance on computers, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe of 1946 being just one astonishingly prescient example, and electronic data networks were already happening when this was written; but nevertheless, for 1975, The Shockwave Rider is still pretty astounding in terms of how much it predicted and what it got right.

Even so, the second time I read Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down I found it a little didactic, and the same is true of this one: big and admittedly wonderful ideas and some great, rounded storytelling that becomes a lecture by the time our lad arrives in Precipice, a perfect society where everyone behaves themselves and everything is wonderful contrasted with the corporate hell from which Haflinger has fled. Precipice is a utopia in the Sir Thomas More vein and is unfortunately about as engaging, and to be honest the last hundred or so pages felt like being stuck in an SWP meeting - a simile I should probably clarify by explaining that I have experienced the SWP essentially as a cult which borrows socialist trappings without demonstrating any real connection to or understanding of the causes it purports to champion. In short, The Shockwave Rider started well but soon became so worthy that I found it difficult to either care or concentrate on what was happening upon the page, and by the end I was pretty much lain back, thinking of Texas, and waiting for it to be over; which is a shame for a book that kicks off in such fine form.