Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files 05 (1982)

I was a 2000AD regular up until 1980, by which point I'd turned fifteen and had to make a choice between Sounds music paper or the comic book which was then bringing me regular instalments of Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, both of which were garbage. It wasn't a difficult choice. I hopped back on board a couple of years later. My friend Nick gave me his collection*, of which the earliest issue was, by sheer coincidence, the first prog I hadn't bothered to buy. His collection was patchy with substantial gaps, meaning I could at least tell that it hadn't suddenly returned to greatness immediately after I'd jumped ship, although it seemed to be back on track a couple of years down the line; and one of the strips which had served to remind me why I'd bought the thing in the first place was, of course, Judge Dredd.

Back in the Mean Arena days, Dredd had succumbed to whatever was happening to the other strips - one single episode after another reading very much as though they'd run out of things for him to do; but now that I was back on board I discovered the twenty-five part Apocalypse War, albeit with gaps which I was able to fill when Quality's colourised US reprints started to turn up in the local newsagent.

Thirty or so years later and I don't have any of those old progs. They all went back to the comic shop, one way or another, driven by a need for space and a fear of spending my entire life collecting a weekly comic which would still occasionally reward my dedication with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Age 13½ Months, or Really and Truly, or whatever else had presumably made the cut thanks to a deadline; and yet…

It was either this or back issues of the Quality reprint, and this big fat assemblage of no less than sixty-two consecutive issues seemed like better value. Being a chronological assemblage rather than a greatest hits this means about half of those strips included serve to remind me why I stopped buying, and so we have The Mega-Rackets which ran for what felt like five-hundred or more issues - actually just fifteen - a series of one or two part stories exploring the theme of what organised crime would look like in Mega City One, and mostly it looked like Chicago in the 1940s but with futuristic fins glued to the mobsters' trilbys, and men named Fingers or Lefty zipping through the skies in flying cars bearing a wearying resemblance to the Ford Model 18. To be fair, this sort of tale is fine in weekly instalments, but try reading a whole bunch in one sitting and—Jesus fucking Christ!

Of course, I considered the possibility that it might be just me, and that the somewhat murky reproduction of the original pages wasn't helping; but the contrast is astonishing once you get to the five-part Judge Death Lives wherein the lad responds to the invitation to gaze into the face of fear with:

It's probably one of the greatest single panels of almost any comic book ever, and as such represents the Judge Dredd strip at its very best so far as I'm concerned.

Judge Dredd - which, for what it may be worth, arguably represents the very essence of 2000AD comic in its purest form - is anything but straightforward, regardless of roots sunk deep into the British comics tradition of square-jawed just deserts. He's a cop who dishes out prison sentences for littering, who judges then carries out routine executions. He's been called a fascist, which implies an agenda bearing no relation to the character unless you consider all forms of authority inherently fascist. He's authoritarian for sure, but more like a law of nature and he is as such impartial - pitiless on one hand but above personal bias on the other. He's objectively harsh but fair - extremely unfair in humanist terms, but then life is unfair, as is most of the universe. This is why the strip has lasted four decades and has thus far resisted attempts to adapt it for the big screen, although at least the Stallone version kept some of the humour.

The humour is the element of contrast which sharply defines Dredd as anything but a superhero, and certainly not just Batman with a gun and a crash helmet. It's the traditional gallows humour of the British working class - if anyone remembers them - the sarcasm of English punk rock which informed those very first strips even when aimed at denizens of the junior school. I'd say the strip is Swiftian, even Rabelaisian - which it is - and is therefore probably not to be taken literally, except that feels like a bit of a slippery slope at the end of which I'd take to describing things as iconic, a sure sign of having disappeared up my own arse. Dredd operates more or less entirely on its own terms, which is probably why it feels so flat when the stories are reduced to answering the question, who do we have him fighting this week?

Anyway, I bought this for the Apocalypse War, which I recall as being amazing, and it turns out that I remember correctly. Carlos Ezquerra - the greatest Dredd artist in my view - illustrates the whole thing, maintaining the consistency with heavy, brutal lines which seem carved as much as drawn, and the story is so relentlessly bleak as to approach exhausting - despite the ever-present element of sarcasm and the peculiar intrusion of comic relief from Walter the Wobot and Maria, Dredd's landlady - who seems to follow in the tradition of the women to whom Tony Hancock once paid rent. How this single tale can pull in so many conflicting directions and still work is a marvel, never mind that it works so well - like standing in the blast of a jet engine for twenty-five issues.

*: They had been ruined when his house flooded and he was going to chuck them out. I took them home and dried them out two pages at a time on an oil-filled radiator.

American Victim

Meg McCarville American Victim (2023)
There was a bit of a commotion on social media when Amphetamine Sulphate published Four Circles, McCarville's previous volcanic eruption of righteous bile. I couldn't tell what had happened and felt disinclined to ask nosey questions, but the fallout seemed to be that Amphetamine Sulphate weren't going to be publishing this one which, as it so happens, provides substantial insight into the shit show which ultimately led to its publication by someone else, namely Ric Royer's Model City Books.

By her own testimony, Meg McCarville is a woman with issues who tends to find herself in unfortunate situations. The unfortunate situation was, in this instance, finding herself stalked by a nutcase who, amongst other things, dibbed her in to the FBI for alleged acts of terrorism which were obviously nothing of the sort, and all because he cared. He's identified in American Victim as Max Cady on Wheels, which seems fair, and whilst many of us will have met people like him, this goes a lot further than some disgruntled twat making a few prank phone calls. In fact it's terrifying, and even more terrifying than the aggressive-aggressive acts of sabotage dispensed by our boy is the fact that he gets to keep on keeping on, because while American law enforcement agencies excel in certain areas, not least of these being the dispensation of traffic citations, they're mostly fucking useless unless you're being menaced by an African-American with one of those candy bars that looks a bit like a firearm. If law enforcement did the job it purports to do, American Victim would have been a five-page pamphlet.

As ever, it's both a fucking tough read, and yet one which gets its hooks into you almost immediately because even at her absolute lowest ebb, Meg McCarville is very, very funny, wielding the kind of sarcasm which could have an eye out. It's Bukowksi with tits jammed on eleven, Lydia Lunch admitting she digs Kiss and rocking out, all directed by John Waters at his furthest remove from polite society and the closest I've come to writing with the face-punching intensity of an MOP album; and these aren't even necessarily its greatest strength, that being the words of truth spoken in dark, dark jest - truths that leave bruises.

I've gone through phases of surrounding myself with junkies and nobodies and ex-cons, but never in my life had I felt like I really fell in with the worst crowd until I found myself surrounded by phony progressive anarcho-feminist cunts and dopey woke boys (who really just pounded their politics so they can pound some psycho feminist pussy) who got into more of an uproar about someone getting misgendered even though they changed their pronoun every other week.

Honestly, this is one of the most powerful extended rants I've read in a long time, and anyone whose gag response has started kicking off would do well to remember that Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais and all those other sarcastic fuckers of yesteryear likewise delivered their testimonials with lashings of piss, vinegar, and castor oil. If you really want to understand the modern world, it's all here.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City

DBC Pierre Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020)
Up until this year I had assumed that DBC Pierre had jacked it in following the thorough slagging which I seem to recall Ludmilla's Broken English had garnered. I looked online but could find nothing more recent. Then taking another look just a few months ago I discovered at least three novels I'd somehow missed, so not only is he back, but it turns out that he hasn't actually been away.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is nothing less than a dissection of why everything is shit. Some will tell you that the idea of everything being shit is an erroneous assessment, even suggesting that we've perhaps forgotten about rickets, cot death, and Adolf Hitler. The reason it's an erroneous assessment is usually because you're old and not everyone who likes manga is necessarily a kiddy fiddler, which is racist to say, and all sorts of other poorly defined reasons which twenty-something victims of product placement wearing cat ears will generally hide behind slogans, flags, hashtags, retweets, and strength in numbers because it's all about how you feel, and you just a hater. Get over it. You're like really old LOL.

This is a story about a father who strives to separate his nine-year old daughter from her smartphone, and it could have gone the Richard Littlejohn route, except DBC Pierre is a master of nuance, with not a molecule out of place in his scathing testimony, no ambiguity, not even a gap by which to accommodate anything he didn't actually say - before anyone starts rolling their eyes over cancel culture or its alleged non-existence. This being the third of his novels that I've read, I can see the pattern and feel I understand the first two a little better. Pierre writes satire in the Swiftian sense, but his escalation of reality is so extreme as to border on the Bugs Bunny cartoons of the forties, with Will Self growing a vagina at the back of some rugby player's kneecap seeming almost sober by comparison. Yet, Pierre's prose is of such precision as to nail his narrative firmly to something we can only recognise as reality. If this one is almost science-fiction in its dabbling with cyberspace, social media, and quantum bollocks, it feels like the novel which William Gibson has been trying to write but never managed because he gets too hung up on designer labels and usually forgets to fucking say anything.

Lon sucked a blast of crisp air through his nose, rinsed it around as if to renew his brain as the world renewed around him. He didn't know if it was bad shit out and good stuff in - nobody knew if it was bad shit out and good stuff in any more. For Lon's money the Medinas hadn't been bad shit, Capital hadn't been a bad bank, waiting for the hair to arrive on your parts hadn't been a bad time to start talking teabagging, but now it was shit out, shit in, and nobody knew which was which any more, nobody seemed to care - it didn't matter if it was bad shit, there was no bad any more, there was no good, no scientific basis for either, it was all shit out, shit in.

The bad shit is, in case you haven't looked out of the window lately, pretty much the voracious ascendance of what Guy Debord described as the Spectacle and the devaluation of reality and human experience by ideology, even amorphous corporate driven almost ideology. Pierre communicates the divide with a shocking switch of narrative technique, the first hundred or so pages of poetic second person prose flipping to disorientating first person accounts sharing each page with a sidebar, essentially splitting the narrative into a plurality of cause and effect. This takes some getting used to. I read each first person account then flipped back to catch up on the sidebars, which sort of works. The sidebars comprise the kind of sub-newsy shite the internet chucks at you at almost every click which, in this case, informs what's going on in the novel and is in turn informed by it.

78177407943098723-0203437: Donkeyhooty de la Munchies announced he's going 'quad' and moving on to all fours for life. The move has been hailed by the wider Low-Responsibility Individuals community - better known as Loris - as a major step towards its recognition as a thriving lifestyle sector. Though not originally a Lori himself, Donkeyhooty aligned with the movement after being forced to defend his right as a quadruped to relieve himself in public, if only in parks and on verges. A recent survey reported that Loris have overtaken Emos as the lifestyle of choice for disaffected under-thirties, though they still rank well below haulers.

I've attempted to reproduce the author's de-emphasis by use of greyed-out text, which I assume attempts to invoke the attention span which is typically applied to such information. In contrast to the familiar human drama of the main text, the narrative unfolding through the sidebars jumps a shark every third or fourth page yet without diminishing the integrity of the whole, and anyone claiming otherwise - particularly anyone invoking hyperbole, overreaction or hysteria - might start by looking up either Richard Hernandez or Anthony Loffredo. Never in human history has there been a better time for the expression of self-loathing.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is not an easy book, and even though it works, and works well, the split narrative is too disorientating to facilitate anything you could describe as a comfortable ride, but it's undeniably and cathartically exhilarating as blast of random noise, like William Burroughs but with a much sharper focus; and I'm not sure I've read a more thorough, convincing, or funnier damnation of our times.

The Empire of Glass

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto (1764)
This is a very important novel, so I've been told, having originated the gothic tradition which led to Frankenstein and arguably to the entire science-fiction genre, amongst many other things. Brian Aldiss reckons it owes a lot to Piranesi, but I don't know who that is and don't feel sufficiently enthused to find out. The element which made The Castle of Otranto such a massive chart-busting smash back in the late 1700s was its fusion of realism with spooky or otherwise supernatural elements. Walpole was the first to do this, apart from a few other writers who sort of got there first, albeit with perhaps less emphasis on atmosphere.

It begins well, and even grips, as a wedding is postponed due to the groom having been crushed by an inexplicable giant helmet of the kind generally belonging to a suit of armour rather than to a male generative member. The father of the deceased has certain concerns regarding his familial claims to the castle of the title which will come to seem tenuous in the absence of a male heir and the grandchildren he was accordingly expecting. With this in mind, he decides to tell his wife to fuck off and become a nun so that he can marry the conspicuously younger woman who would have been his daughter-in-law had her fiancé not been crushed by a huge helmet. A series of supernatural occurrences follow - ghosts, a painting coming to life, and most notably an appearance of the former owner of the helmet - all representing fearful omens regarding our man's claim on his castle. Then a load of other people show up and talk about romance, inheritance, marriage and so on, which I found fairly difficult to follow and reminded me of eighteenth century novels which spend hundreds of pages debating what a certain young lady meant by leaving her handkerchief in the drawing room knowing it would almost certainly be discovered by some viscount she intends to shag.

The strangest thing for me was that The Castle of Otranto reads like a novel that wants to be a play performed on a stage with a full cast, much like certain examples of Who fiction reading like novels pretending to be telly. Walpole apparently admitted to the influence of Shakespeare in a later edition, presumably because it would have been pointless to deny it; and while we're here, I'm almost certain I recall old Billy including ghosts, fairies, and other supernatural beings in a few of the plays what he wrote.

I'm not widely read once we go back past the turn of the last century, but I've read enough to know the form, and enough to recognise the difference between that which is written in an archaic style with which I am unfamiliar, and that which simply could have been better. Gulliver's Travels was published forty years before The Castle of Otranto, for one example, and quite frankly pisses all over it - although to be fair Gulliver's Travels pretty much pisses over more or less everything which has been written since in most respects. The Castle of Otranto clearly has it's place and isn't entirely lacking in charm, mood, or merit, but as a landmark of literary history, it's kind of underwhelming.

The Third Policeman

 

Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (1940)

I've been aware of this one for a while but couldn't quite get past descriptions promising a comedy set in Ireland involving policemen. I've already read Puckoon and it wasn't that great.

Thankfully it turns out to be a comedy in the sense of Gulliver's Travels rather than Are You Being Served? and is both fairly dark and massively fucking strange. More than anything, I'd describe it as a surrealist novel given the peculiar, slightly disturbing atmosphere derived from our man inhabiting a world where the laws of physics work by the logic of dreams. Specifically, if you've ever had one of those dreams wherein you realise you know how to fly or to work some otherwise superhuman power, but you know it's a dream so you have to tell yourself to remember exactly what to do so that you'll be able to do it when you wake up - and of course you always forget - well, The Third Policeman feels very much like one of those; so I suppose we're talking the general vicinity of Beckett.

Additionally, The Third Policeman approximately constitutes Menippean satire, and although it thankfully never quite becomes fully aware of its being a novel - which has become something of an overused trope, I feel - most other signifiers of the form are here, notably the book within the book - in this case the works of de Selby, a pseudo-philosopher who believes that, amongst other things, night is caused by an accumulation of dark air rather than the occlusion of sunlight. Quite a page count is used up in discussion of de Selby's crackpot ideas, many of which seem to echo those of Charles Fort, funnily enough, to the point of later chapters being squeezed up to the top of the page by lengthy footnotes concerning the man's imaginary works. The point of this specific focus is oblique but works because it seems to describe the nightmarish world inhabited by our unnamed narrator. Among de Selby's ideas we find, for example, that a person who rides a bicycle every day will eventually become part bicycle due to an exchange of atomic material between rider and transport, and so the bicycle itself will become partially human; which is explained with a straight face and thus maintains the integrity of the novel as a whole, as distinct from turning it into some awful Douglas Adams gag-fest. So it's funny, but you don't have to laugh if it seems inappropriate, as it most probably will.

The scene was real and incontrovertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at.

Roughly speaking, we seem once again to be mapping the space between objective and subjective reality, which is possibly why so many of de Selby's peculiar ruminations seem to hint at the weirder findings of quantum theory - unless it's just me - as well as the aforementioned Fort. I can perhaps see why O'Brien claimed to have lost the manuscript when it failed to find a publisher back in the forties being as it sags a little in the middle, apparently spending an eternity in the police station - although that may well have been the point - but its growing reputation seems otherwise deserved.

Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories

Voltaire Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories (1775)
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.

While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.

Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.

This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.

Welcome to the Monkey House

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Welcome to the Monkey House (1970)
I never really intended to read my way through his entire back catalogue, but I guess he wrote so much, and so much which sold so well as to warrant an extended print run, that I suppose it's inevitable that I should still be finding titles I'm yet to read on the second hand shelves; and I usually buy them because there's always the chance of the latest find being one of the good ones. Usually it is, although sometimes it will turn out to have been Kurt going through the motions, meaning the jokes are still good but the whole gets to be a bit of a slog. Monkey House was purchased out of habit without particularly high expectations. I knew it was a collection of previously published material, and this would therefore be my fourth Vonnegut of such composition. I knew not to anticipate any massive surprises.

Happily, excepting a single book review, it turns out to be a collection of his short fiction, and therefore quite unlike other assemblages I've read which have been mostly of essays and the like. Even better is that it seems Vonnegut was well suited to the short form given how it obliged him to get straight to the point, sparing us any of the rambling post-modern gagfests which are either wonderful, or else serve only to remind me of Marx Brothers routines amounting to someone talking bollocks very, very fast. Most of these short stories were written prior to the success of Slaughterhouse Five,  back when he was still trying and are thus informed with a sense of the author hoping to appeal to an audience at least a little bit. Hence we get the apeshit satire, Jonathan Swift jammed on eleven and daring you to whine about suspension of disbelief, but relayed with a tight, vaguely populist sense of craft - like Player Piano distilled to something which doesn't go on far too long. There are a few which don't really do anything much, but everything here is kept short and punchy so its worth sitting through a few duds for the sake of Harrison Bergeron, More Stately Mansions or The Kid Nobody Could Handle. Vonnegut's strength has always been his humour combined with a razor sharp critique of Emperors failing to dress themselves accordingly, in which capacity Monkey House represents an impressive display of muscle.

Candide

Voltaire Candide (1759)
It seemed like time I dipped in a toe, never having actually read anything by the man whilst having lived with his influence for most of my existence. I'm actually listening to a Cabaret Voltaire album as I write this, funnily enough.

I was hoping for wacky proto-science-fiction, which Candide sort of isn't, but never mind. It turns out that I was thinking of Micromégas.

Candide describes the global journey of a young man identified as such, his progress notably incorporating the fictional land of Eldorado, vaguely situated in south America and probably commenting either on Thomas More's Utopia or else its legacy. The novel was a relatively new thing at the time of writing in so much as that it was still doing all sorts of weird things which no-one really seems to bother with these days. Candide is allegorical in the sense of Gulliver's Travels being allegorical - and I'm quite excited by the realisation that Voltaire met Swift whilst living in London - and so our hero's progress serves as a sequence of philosophical metaphors illustrating his ruminations on society, humanity, existence, and how these relate to the religious thought of the day. Specifically it's mostly concerned with whether or not we're living in the best of all possible worlds, as suggested in 1710 by Gottfried Leibniz as a means of accounting for the persistence of evil in a cosmos ruled over by a loving God. Voltaire found plenty of evil upon which to pass comment in 1759, and if he reaches an actual conclusion, I seem to have missed it, so I assume this is more about asking questions, ensuring that certain institutions feel duly uncomfortable, and taking the piss - although not quite to the extent of Swift.

As is probably obvious, I'm somewhat out of my depth here, so any or all of the above may actually be bollocks, but to continue regardless: Candide seems much softer focus than Gulliver, being closer to a ribbing than the weapons grade sarcasm of Swift, excepting infrequent incidents of rape, hanging and related horrors; although it could be that the translation has dulled the narrative's sharper edges. This one was handled by Lowell Bair who did a pretty decent job on Jules Verne as far as I recall, so who knows?

Candide seems fairly light, but was nevertheless a pleasure, and sufficiently so as to justify my keeping an eye open for the aforementioned Micromégas. Where my appreciation may be muted due to having precious little clue about the politics of 1759, the novel still represents a fascinating cameo of eighteenth century attitudes, not least those regarding science and evolution, with the relationship of ape to humanity being something which people were quite clearly thinking about.

Heavy Water

Martin Amis Heavy Water (1998)
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.

Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.

Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.

The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem Solaris (1961)
I've always avoided Tarkovsky, and by association, his adaptation of Solaris. I'm sure he's a cinematic genius, but I was introduced to his work as just the sort of thing you like. This is usually the kiss of death for me, almost always amounting to it being just the sort of thing I hate because the recommendation has come from an idiot who doesn't know me anything like so well as they think they do. The second occasion of my being told that Tarkovsky was just the sort of thing I like was facilitated by [name withheld in case he happens to be reading] who expressed this idea by lecturing me at length for a full twenty minutes before I was able to interrupt, pointing out that actually I had a hunch Tarkovsky's work probably wasn't my bag at all. He droned on regardless for another twenty minutes before I was again able to get a word in edgeways, this time attempting to diffuse the increasingly uncomfortable situation with levity.

'Go on,' I quipped, 'push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me…'

He spared me a stony glance then continued his monologue. I suppose it's possible that he'd never seen The Two Ronnies, just as I'd never seen Solaris.

Anyway, no-one ever described Lem's original novel as just the sort of thing I like, never mind acknowledging its existence as an early version of Tarkovsky's film taking the form of printed words describing what would eventually appear on the screen; and I gather he was pals with Philip K. Dick by some definition, so it therefore seemed to be worth a punt. Unfortunately, according to Mark Hodder, what I have here is a fairly poor translation.

Solaris presents some wonderful ideas, particularly regarding extraterrestrial life, here imagined in such a way as to reduce most other authors to hacks busily sticking lumps of plasticine to the foreheads of underpaid extras. The afterword describes it as something in the tradition of Swift, although it reminds me more of Kafka's more understated sense of parody. Accordingly, it's a philosophical novel about our place in the universe, our ideas regarding God and so on, all of which is regrettably rendered far too mysterious for its own good by the translation, or so I assume. I mean it's readable and doesn't come across as necessarily garbled, and the imagery works fine, but this telling of Solaris is in all other respects on the wrong side of ponderous by a good couple of miles, which is most likely why my eyes kept skidding down to the foot of the page. I just couldn't keep them pinned to whatever the fuck was failing to happen in narrative terms.

This was sort of a relief in so much as that after [title withheld in case its editor happens to be reading] I thought maybe my reading glands were broken. Time to look for a better translation, I guess.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
I'm sure I remember hearing that it was Céline who first came up with the three little dots signifying a pause, although I don't seem to be able to find any sort of confirmation for this. Never mind.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read something for a couple of decades now, at least since discovering his writing to be an influence on that of Billy Childish, and of course Bukowski, and - as I've eventually realised - pretty much everyone else I'd consider worth bothering with. His innovations mainly seem to have been in introducing a crude - although not lacking eloquence - working class voice to literature, and a willingness to examine all of the gritty details, stains, and skidmarks from which we extrapolate reality at least as much as we do from prettier, less disturbing sights. He was never too worried about delivering a crowd pleaser.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me . . . and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Journey to the End of the Night is roughly autobiographical, kicking off with our man's experience of the first world war and the unpleasant truths accordingly revealed.

People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds.

Driven to the end of his rope, Céline sits out some of the war in an asylum before being sent to French colonial Africa, itself only another variant of hell, from which point the narrative becomes oddly Swiftian, or at least more blatantly allegorical as he becomes a galley slave, rowing to the Americas.

Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the mist was so amazing that at first we refused to believe it, but then, when we were face to face with it, galley slaves or not, we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us…

It's probably just me but this passage immediately put me in mind of Bernal Díaz describing the Spanish forces first arriving in the Valley of Mexico in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain of 1568.

With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

Of course, if it isn't just me, then the parallel probably constitutes weapons-grade sarcasm, given Céline's time in the Americas representing only a minor improvement on his time in Africa, and that it is characterised by escalating absurdity.

'I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It's a civilising factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! . . . A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season . . .'

Indeed, this part of the novel might be taken as a descent into an underworld newly industrialised in the wake of the first world war.

The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

The power of Céline's testimony is such as to deliver something pithily quotable on more or less every other page, hence my thus far having used more of his words than my own. If there's a single theme to the novel it would seem to be humanity revealed as reduced to an industrial resource for the first half of the book.

'But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man. I even studied medicine at one time . . .'

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

'Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees . . . Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise.'

...and at the risk of hammering this one into the ground:

It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once and for all to this stench of oil, this vapour that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

The second half of the book describes Céline's return to France where he sets up a medical practice, which in narrative terms allows for further exposition and reflection on both his misanthropy and its attendant self-loathing. Unfortunately, this second half lacks the dynamic of the first, pinning its narrative to events of lesser consequence, and so feeling a little formless in places, at least to me.

Anyway, the significance of Céline should hopefully be apparent from the quotes, in so much as that as a writer he clearly strove to get to the bones regardless of stroked egos, sales, or pleasing images, and yet without going too far the other way and serving up what may as well be Lovecraftian disgust. That he is not so well remembered as might be the case is unfortunate but understandable given his later antisemitism, and not just the sort of thing we tend to pass off as being of its time, but properly antisemitic material written as a vocal supporter of Hitler and the axis powers.

In his defence, or at least in the defence of Journey to the End of the Night, there's nothing antisemitic here, and not even anything particularly racist, which seems noteworthy given the African setting of a few chapters, and when it was written. In fact, given Céline's generally poor view of authority figures, it's far from obvious how he could ever have ended up as cheerleader for the Third Reich. The key is most likely to be found in his enduring misanthropy.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals come into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something  . . .

Sadly it seems to be a thin line which divides this sort of general realism from that which gets so thoroughly pissed off at everyone apparently wallowing in their own shit as to get misty-eyed over anything punishing which just so happens to entail jackboots; so Celine's slide to the far right should probably be considered reactionary in the literal sense, a move facilitated by the desire to attribute blame - as he himself once acknowledged.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

It's a fucking shame, and that whole argument about whether it's possible to divorce a piece of art from the shithead who created it is more complicated than I have time to really consider right now, and is an issue which should probably be settled on a case by case basis; but for what it may be worth, Journey to the End of the Night is a genuinely great book, or at least the first half is a genuinely great book, regardless of anything else.

Science Fiction through the Ages

I.O. Evans (editor) Science Fiction through the Ages volume one (1966)
Idrisyn Oliver Evans, to give him his full name, wrote a ton of those Observer's Book of Nuggets style publications for bespectacled boys and undertook the translation of a number of Jules Verne novels - which is interesting because I understand there to be some piss-poor Verne translations out there. I actually fucking hated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although it turns out that the version I read had been anglicised by Mercier Lewis, which at least lets Idrisyn - if that was really his name - off the hook on one count.

It's hard to fault the choices made in this prehistory of science-fiction, excerpts from the writings of Plato, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire, Lucian of Samosata, Verne, Mary Shelley, and others. Unfortunately, few of the works quoted really yield satisfying extracts, and I'd suggest that at least Frankenstein and Gulliver's Travels should be read in their entirety. Isolated snippets reveal a nifty turn of phrase but not a whole lot else. Unfortunately the excerpts from things I haven't read aren't generally much better and left me mostly unmoved, and certainly unlikely to wonder any further about Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris or Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins. Edgar Allen Poe's The Balloon Hoax is reprinted in full, and I couldn't actually read beyond the first two pages, such was my dislike for how it was written.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the excerpt from what I take to be I.O.'s own translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues a great deal more than the one that I read; and Patrick Moore's account of Johannes Kepler's then untranslated Somnium is reasonably terrific; and the bigger picture afforded of the history of science-fiction as a genre is greatly more thought provoking than at least a few of these individual parts. Brian Aldiss identifies Frankenstein as the first true science-fiction novel, although much of his criteria seems contradictory. Frankenstein, he declares, may be termed science-fiction by virtue of references to technological developments of the day, galvanism and the like, whilst earlier efforts such as those of Swift or Lucian are deemed purely allegorical. This would be fine but for the remainder of Trillion Year Spree greatly favouring the allegorical over the technological - Philip K. Dick rather than Hugo Gernsback - as the truest form of the genre. Evans' book at least proves the futility of drawing such sharply defined lines by showing how the science Aldiss recognises in Frankenstein is only science as seen from a twentieth century perspective, and that it probably isn't fair to dismiss earlier more alchemical forms just for the sake of an argument.

This collection really should have been better given the sources, but then it wasn't so much bad as simply a little on the dry side; and on the other hand, I now really want to read Kepler's Somnium, so that probably counts for something.

Erewhon

Samuel Butler Erewhon (1872)
Erewhon is the second great satire of the nineteenth century, it says here, the other being Gulliver's Travels, but personally I'm not convinced. It seems too much like a sentence referring to those two giants of twentieth century rock music, David Bowie and Nick Lowe - I mean Cracking Up was a fucking great single for sure, but let's keep some sense of perspective here, because Erewhon really isn't a patch on Swift. Aside from anything else, Swift was funny.

Erewhon transports a curious traveller to a distant and vaguely allegorical civilisation of that designation serving as a parody of Victorian society. It's written in an engaging style and delivers plenty of novelty, but I'm not entirely convinced it works as satire. It reads as though Butler kept changing his mind about what he wanted the book to do even as he was writing it. It starts well, with our man detailing the eccentricities of the Erewhonian justice system in which illness and infirmity are penalised whilst acts we might regard as criminal indiscretions go unpunished. Given the present state of healthcare in the United States and the NHS in England, the thrust of Butler's argument translates into contemporary terms very well, not least because he composes a weirdly plausible argument as to why the crime of being poorly might warrant a jail sentence.

Unfortunately, once we're done with Erewhonian justice, there are too many mixed messages and it becomes difficult to tell just what he's satirising. Sometimes he satirises by exaggeration,  sometimes by inversion, and sometimes we're left with the impression that he's entirely serious; so Erewhon lacks the consistency or the sense of progression found in Gulliver's Travels. The presumably Victorian monetary system is parodied through Erewhon honouring two unrelated forms of currency, one of which is exchanged at the Musical Banks - whatever they are - and I can't actually tell how any of it relates to anything.

Then follows philosophical mumbling, some of which reads a lot like a vicar's son asking Mr. Darwin if there is not room for the Baby Jesus in his fanciful theory. I'm not sure which part of any of it constitutes satire.

There are no follies and no unreasonableness so great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct on reason only.

Butler was apparently quite the fan of Darwin but disagreed on certain fundamental points - points suggesting, at least to me, that he hadn't actually understood The Origin of Species in the first place. He seems to regard evolutionary theory and the process of natural selection as overly mechanistic, and Darwin's work is therefore parodied as The Book of the Machines - Erewhon's book within a book. The problem with this section, at least a problem for the notion of Erewhon as satire, is that Butler writes The Book of the Machines a little too well, makes some decent philosophical points, unwittingly predicts the technological singularity, and in doing so fails to deliver whatever the fuck the warning was supposed to be about in the first place.

'May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of its own, it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very different one to our own, there is therefore no higher possible development of life than ours; or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from our ours, therefore that it is not life at all?'

Erewhon is an interesting and occasionally thought-provoking novel, but is hamstrung by its own inconsistency. It may well be that, living as I do in 2017 rather than 1872, I have simply missed the subtleties which would seem obvious to the reader in Butler's time, but this still leaves the question of why Swift's novel works so much better than this one whilst requiring fewer allowances for the idiosyncracies of its vintage. Personally, I think there may be a clue in Butler's occasionally revealing narrative tone.

They have another plan about which they are making a great noise and fuss, much as some are doing with women's rights in England.

I appreciate he's not actually saying that women's rights are necessarily a bad thing, but there seems to be a somewhat insular subtext which creeps in at certain points of the narrative. He doesn't like change. He doesn't like anything too fancy. He's suspicious of big ideas. Erewhon isn't a bad novel, but I get the feeling that if its author were alive today he'd be the treasurer of his local model aeroplane flying club, his favourite band would be ELO, and he would have ceased posting on facebook following an argument in which he described Mike Read's UKIP Calypso as just a bit of fun.

Selected Short Stories

H.G. Wells Selected Short Stories (1958)
Wells' reputation has become such that I feel almost guilty in finding myself disliking anything he's written, although I suppose some of that which constitutes his reputation comes from less than reputable sources. I'll discount any recent resurgence of interest generated by the steampunk phenomenon on the grounds that anyone who glues a cog wheel onto a top hat is by definition an arsehole and is therefore incapable of forming any opinion worth hearing, which still leaves us with Wells as the father of modern science-fiction...

My view is that he is and he isn't. In Trillion Year Spree Brian Aldiss suggests that it was probably Mary Shelley - what with Frankenstein referencing then-cutting edge scientific principals relating to what happens when you run an electric current through a dead frog; except Aldiss then goes on to argue that science isn't really what science-fiction is about, despite already having dismissed Gulliver's Travels and the like. Personally I believe you may as well include Gulliver's Travels, or even Cervantes, because there's probably not much joy to be had in attempting to identify the first science-fiction novel. You just end up going around in circles. Whilst Wells was often pretty sciencey - at least in the stories everyone has heard of - he frequently verges off into fantasy, allegory, or just plain weird, at least as much as anything invoking steam or electricity - which is doubtless partially why Jules Verne apparently regarded him as a bit of a lightweight.

More than anything, Wells seemed to enjoy novelty. Of course there is an element of prophecy to the best of his tales, but from this lot, I'm inclined to wonder whether this might not have simply been the natural development of a writer elaborating on whatever core idea he was working with at the time. The twenty-one mostly short stories in this collection suggest the creative process of an author expanding on a series of quirky ideas, the sort of thing which might occur to you as you wash the dishes or stroll to the shop on the corner for a packet of fags.

A recipe which renders the diner weightless...

A hidden land of blind people...

A prehistoric bird hatches from a mysteriously preserved egg...

Space creatures intrude upon us just as we intrude upon lesser nations...

I assume that some of these ideas either had legs or simply caught Wells on a good day, resulting in the classics upon which his reputation was justifiably founded - The War of the Worlds and the rest. Perhaps the others either never really required novel length or just weren't very good. I may simply have detected a pattern which isn't there, and this might all be down to personal taste; but that said, once done with The Time Machine and The Country of the Blind - both of which I found enjoyable, there followed a run of nine stories ranging from either dull to barely comprehensible, with the bewildering Lord of the Dynamos representing the lowest ebb. Having read The Food of the Gods I was already aware of the possibility of not everything written by Wells having been a masterpiece, but I was surprised at how tough going this collection became so early on. Happily, for whatever reason, it picks up around halfway through with In the Abyss and remains more or less consistent up to the last page from that point on; but I'm still puzzled as to how these stories were selected, particularly given that he must surely have churned out a million of the things.

Whilst we're frowning, I could also have done without use of the term nigger in quite so many instances, but I suppose it comes with the era and the attitudes of the time, as probably exemplified in the aforementioned Lord of the Dynamos. Wells, lest we forget, held some initial sympathies with that whole eugenics deal, so I suppose we should at least be glad that he appears to have revised such views to the contrary in later years. He's still written some of the greatest science-fiction novels of all time so the reputation is justified, but I suppose they can't all be classics.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
I've read nothing but good things about this novel - or I suppose novella given its brevity - many of them on the back cover, which promises wry humour and penetrating satire, a mind-expanding journey comparable to that of Swift's Gulliver, and as prophetic a science-fiction classic as the works of H.G. Wells. The main character is a sentient square inhabiting a two-dimensional realm who encounters the denizens of three, four, one, and no-dimensional spaces and thusly tries to get his head around it all. I suppose we've been spoiled, living at the arse end of the twentieth century and having grown up with either James Burke or Carl Sagan explaining this kind of thing by means of either computer animation or a snooker table; but I still have my doubts. My copy of Flatland is published by Signet Classics, but then I suppose there's no such imprint as Signet Adequates.

The prose is breezy and readable and stuffed with the sort of ornate phraseology which has self-published CreateSpace steampunk novelists coming in their pants - or issuing most tenaciously in their finest Sunday pantaloons if you prefer; but Flatland is essentially a novelisation of one of those curly and straight animations you used to see on Rainbow in the 1970s. The humour may indeed be wry, but the satire didn't strike me as particularly penetrating, and if you were expecting a sort of mathematical version of Gulliver's Travels, then you're likely to be seriously disappointed. Whilst not without its good points, albeit good points mainly communicating ideas now so commonplace that we've seen them turn up in episodes of Scooby Doo, Flatland is written by a Victorian school teacher and is about as much fun as you would expect given this pedigree. I assume the hierarchy of dangerous, presumably elliptical two-sided females, a triangular servant class, square gentlemen, and polygonal intellectuals is what the book's fans have identified as satire, but I don't actually see anything resembling commentary on the English class system so much as a pseudo-mathematical echo composed for the sake of chuckles. Similarly the subjugation of Flatland's females described on the back cover doesn't seem to be saying anything much about emancipation, and as for the supposed sex amongst consenting triangles, I guess I must have blinked and missed that one.

Flatland is a faintly amusing novelty, but let's not get carried away here. Just because something is old and a bit cranky, doesn't mean it's a work of genius.

Planet of the Apes

Pierre Boulle Planet of the Apes (1963)
I was never a massive fan of the films although I liked the first one well enough. As it happens my first commissioned book cover was for The Planet of the Apes Chronicles by Paul A. Woods, essentially a collection of vaguely scholarly essays about the films, television series, and so on; at least I assume they were vaguely scholarly as I probably skipped a few of them. Nevertheless, Boulle's novel struck me as worth buying when I chanced upon a copy, it being sufficiently interesting in itself regardless of the films it inspired, even just as a piece of science-fiction history.

Although there were quite a few significant changes made to the story between this original novel and Charlton Heston shaking his fist at the Statue of Liberty, most seem well-made for once, given that Planet of the Apes is science-fiction by a fairly liberal reading of the term, having more in common with Gulliver's Travels than The First Men in the Moon. In fact, you might be better off reading it as a prequel to Will Self's Great Apes than as formative to the Charlton Heston vehicle. For starters, Boulle's apes are more technologically advanced than their cinematic descendants, and at least have technology sufficient to send experimental satellites into orbit, some with human test animals inside. Beyond this they're pretty much in the tradition of Victorian tables turned caricature, wearing suits, puffing away on pipes, driving cars - whatever Boulle thought would best shock us into taking a long, hard look at ourselves and the institutions of our society. Ape civilisation here is rigidly divided as a parody of the class system with gorillas as an arrogant aristocracy, orang-outangs as the stubbornly scientific class, and chimpanzees standing in for more or less everyone else.

Despite the bold text represented by this mirror image of ourselves as apes, and despite a lively and readable prose without too much in the way of fannying around, whatever Boulle was trying to say often seems oddly ambiguous with his focus shifting from animal rights to the absurdity of the class system, even taking a parodic swipe at the stock market at one point. Ultimately the statement is a broad one concerning human vanity and the misplaced faith we have in our own institutions. The conclusion is radically different to the one we saw on the screen, although it has to be said that the film actually makes more sense of its story in being significantly less reliant on coincidence and with less convoluted purpose. By contrast, Planet of the Apes with all of its laboured twists and raised eyebrows is of such Swiftian thrust as to count as a Surrealist novel. It's also a very good book, possibly just not the one you might have expected it to be if you've ever heard of Roddy McDowall.

Trips to the Moon

Lucian of Samosata Trips to the Moon (160AD)
Just to get the moaning over and done with, I think this is the fourth book I've bought from Ron Miller's Black Cat Press and the high quota of typos is beginning to annoy. Whilst it's fucking great to be able to get one's mitts on the kind of obscure and peculiar historical material in which Black Cat specialise, you would think someone might have bothered proof reading the things before loading the files up to Lulu. Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ had presumably been prod-uced by sub-mitting an old copy of the book through some sort of op-tical character recognition soft-ware resulting in weirdly hyphenated words occurring mid-sentence all the way through, former page numbers popping up mid-paragraph, and so on. In addition to this, I gather that whatever files were submitted to Lulu were almost certainly some Microsoft abomination - as opposed to a proper PDF - which can always be relied upon to change its mind about formatting at last minute when submitted to print on demand publishers, meaning

shitloads of

wonky paragraph breaks. It's not a massive problem, and doesn't really have to detract from the text or the pleasure of reading it, but it's kind of irritating, as is the fact of the footnotes to True History beginning at number seventeen and then even missing out a few of the associated explanations.

Lucian's True History, as reproduced herein, is reputedly the oldest surviving text which can be termed science-fiction by some definition, that definition being that it describes, amongst other things, a voyage to the moon made by a sailing boat full of philosophical types swept up in that general direction by the wind. Brian Aldiss discounts this as science-fiction due to the absence of anything pretending to be scientific even by second century terms, but Jesus - I'm not convinced it's really worth having the argument given the entirely unscientific science-fiction which has been written over the years, some of it by Brian Aldiss. I realise Frankenstein qualifies by virtue of medical details, but technology was never really the point of that story any more than it is of True History.

The point of True History is revealed in Lucian's Instructions for Writing History which is also handily reproduced herein.

In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed.

I get the impression that by this juncture Lucian had sat through one too many accounts of mighty warriors kebabing a hundred enemies with the single toss of a spear, and thinking something akin to fuck it, but in Greek or possibly Syrian, wrote True History thus inventing sarcasm. Absurdity is piled high, one ludicrous development after another, and so our lunar voyage is followed by excursions to an island made of cheese and inside a whale in which the ship finds itself trapped. It's comical, presumably intended to shame historians of the day into behaving themselves, and is a lot of fun even with my scant understanding of the philosophical giants out of whom Lucian seems to be taking the piss in the closing pages.

Also included is Lucian's Icaro-Menippus - a Dialogue in which Menippus takes to the air by the same means as Icarus, meets the Gods, and hears how they apparently regard most of the philosophers and theologians who follow them as a bunch of clowns. I'm not quite sure why Lucian specifically recruited the satirist who unwittingly lent his name to the genre of Mennipean satire for his tale, at least not beyond his quite obviously being a fan, but it places True History firmly in a tradition which led to Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, and others - in case that much wasn't obvious. In other words, it more or less does what science-fiction is supposed to do, even by the terms of Brian Aldiss; and it's a thumping good read, in case I haven't made that clear.

Search the Sky

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Search the Sky (1954, revised 1985)
Kingsley Amis has impressed upon me the wisdom of picking up anything I see by Pohl and Kornbluth, and although I was sort of looking for The Space Merchants, obviously I wasn't going to just walk past this one.

Search the Sky isn't either quite so bonkers or so convincing as Wolfbane but is mostly of the same generally high standard and takes a similarly Swiftian angle. Humanity has spread itself across the universe, with contact between increasingly isolated colonies rendered impractical by sheer distance. A ship arrives from one of the nearest colonies - as is anticipated every few hundreds of years - but the distant descendants of the original crew - the people on board the ship back when it first began its journey - seem idiotic. Ross, a young trader, wonders if this degenerative state has befallen the other outposts of humanity, just as it seems to have befallen both the visitors and the stagnating culture of his own world; and so he is let in on an extremely well-kept secret, namely that there is one ship which can travel faster than light, and thus is he charged with answering his own question.

Ross visits a succession of human colonies, each more ridiculous than the next, each sunk into ruin by failing political systems. Here the scope for parody is considerable, and the authors have a lot of fun with it, not least with the gerontocracy in which only the most aged are presumed to possess wisdom sufficient for leadership.

There was sickening fright on Helena's face. 'Didn't you hear? We have to vote for the best man. Oldest is Bestest, you know. That's what Democracy means, the freedom of choice. They read us the ages, and we choose which is oldest. Now please, Ross, hurry before somebody starts asking questions!'

Each failing society is characterised by the infantilisation and repression of the majority by a minority elite, although some examples make for better metaphors than others. Whilst the society encountered immediately following the gerontocracy makes its points through the agency of a matriarchal dictatorship, the lightness of tone steers it a little too close to The Worm That Turned from The Two Ronnies.

Finally we end up back on Earth to find a technologically advanced human civilisation apparently comprised of dunderheads, Laurel & Hardy fall guys, the inhabitants of a thousand sight gags ending with some guy left holding a tin tub up against the ceiling with a broom handle. These are more or less the people encountered in Kornbluth's The Marching Morons, so it's fairly entertaining. I must admit to a certain degree of unease when dealing with anything suggesting that an excess of stupidity is to the ultimate detriment of the human race - despite what I myself may or may not have implied about the devotees of certain television shows during the course of previous reviews. It's a sentiment which can sometimes appear to steer a little too close to eugenics for my liking - see also shitty neofolk acts bemoaning the fall of European culture without actually naming any names just in case anyone gets the right idea. Thankfully here the fall from grace is deduced as having arisen from the state of isolation experienced by the dividing branches of humanity, so scapegoats are mercifully absent.

Search the Sky is no Wolfbane, as I say, and the point of the narrative is sometimes defeated by its own meandering tone if you really want to be picky; but it's otherwise a decent read, and it's funny in all the right places.