Stricture

Isabelle Nicou Stricture (2022)
Here's another which qualifies as a proper book, with bits I didn't understand and everything; although to be fair, Nicou's prose - or possibly Kaycie Hall's translation from the original French - is precise and clear in its description of people, events, and the ambiguous or even fantastical means by which they are associated. I'd say it's this last aspect which fosters the atmosphere of a waking dream, which leaves us unsure as to what we've just read.

Nicou's seemingly pseudo-autobiographical character is a young woman attempting to make sense of having been in thrall to her mentor, a professor of philosophy; and the existential hinterland of her musing as she strives to break free draws associations with King Lear, the science-fiction of Jules Verne, and alien abduction, amongst other examples of magical thinking. It's a cloud of shifting meaning somehow rendered in sharp focus which remains nevertheless quite difficult to describe beyond listing a few of the sign posts. Probably inevitably, reading Stricture felt a little like reading Sartre's Nausea - albeit without the undercurrent of revulsion - which possibly may say more about how little French literature I've read than it does about what Nicou was trying to do; but, for what it may be worth, I kept reading Stricture because it felt as though I was getting a lot from it, even if what that was eludes easy quantification.

Rocket Ship Galileo

Robert Heinlein Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
I loathed Stranger in a Strange Land with such force as to inspire the promise that I would never read another Heinlein, but Alec Nevala-Lee's history of Astounding has given me cause to lift this embargo, because I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed those I read before I came to the aforementioned four-hundred pages of egocentric shite. So here we are again.

Rocket Ship Galileo may be among the squarest tales ever told - pipe-smoking scientist helps three rocket crazy young lads to build a spacecraft by which they fly to the moon, with all the science done right, equations and calculations described in detail, and no agricultural language or references to beastly habits. It's almost a variation on the lunar expeditions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells as they would have been serialised for fifties America by the guy who wrote Biggles, but - as I now remember why the man had such a reputation - Heinlein not only makes it work, but it's positively gripping. He ticks every last box on the John W. Campbell checklist - five page lectures about sub-atomic particles, plot elements hung upon obscure features of trigonometry, lengthy discussions of structural integrity whilst our three smart young lads address everyone as sir and behave unlike teenagers have ever behaved in the real world - and yet Rocket Ship Galileo dazzles, page after page, somehow swanning around like a jaunty insurance salesman with pipe clenched firmly in its wry grin without a predictable sentence or narrative twist in sight.

I still don't know how he came to write Stranger, and there's no way I'm touching anything written later, but I'm glad I got over the hump. I'm already looking forward to the other two I picked up at the same time as this one.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Theodore Sturgeon Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered but for this novelisation having been written by Theodore Sturgeon. I think I saw the movie as a kid, but I'm not absolutely certain, and I recall being underwhelmed by what I saw of the subsequent TV series which, given my unconditional juvenile love of anything starring a vaguely futuristic vehicle, doesn't seem to speak well of the enterprise. Momentarily ignoring what Sturgeon did here so as to examine his source material, Voyage is essentially a variation on Gerry Anderson's formula with characters and situations packed in around the edges of the technological lead role - typically a fast car which shoots house bricks or something; which is in turn an essentially Gernsbackian misreading of Jules Verne; and so Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is Twenty Thousand Leagues reimagined by a dunce, a man who dared to ask what anyone ever saw in Nemo, suggesting the story would be a lot more fun and exciting if we were to reinvent him as a guy one could respect such as a police officer or a solid military man, someone who knows doctors and dentists. As with Star Trek and others of its general type, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is adventure with safety features, framed in a tidily modular setting with regular guys and associated squares at the controls, none of that weird beatnik stuff to confuse you or keep you awake at night.

Against all odds, Theodore Sturgeon managed to squeeze something pretty damn readable out of this near terminally beige commission. Charles Bennett, co-author of the original script, seems to have had an otherwise reasonably impressive track record, so I assume his role was to elevate Allen's basic ideas above grade school level. I don't know how much Sturgeon kept of what Bennett wrote, but it's fairly easy to forget this was ever a movie, which is probably a good thing. Sturgeon's prose is intense and jazzy, twisting and turning in such a way as to blur the focus of what we're actually reading, but throwing out such wild images and ideas that it doesn't really seem to matter that it's founded on what may as well have been an unusually dull episode of Stingray. Additionally, he makes an effort with the science, or at least more of an effort than whoever came up with the original plot, so even if Asimov's title remains unchallenged, the reader can squint a bit and just about get past this being a story in which the sky catches fire.

Assuming the novel inherited these details from the script, it's interesting - even amusing - that the good guys, the progressive, radical thinkers should be conservative uniformed Americans who know when to say sir, while the dangerous, backwards-looking bureaucrats are sceptical European types; but Sturgeon manages this aspect without either hint of an agenda or diluting the occasional ecological digression. Following the maxim of how lousy books can make for decent movies, it's pleasing to find that the equation can work both ways.

Amazing Stories (February 1946)

Raymond A. Palmer (editor) - Amazing Stories February 1946 (1946)
I found this in a comic book store. It was falling apart, missing the final three pages and back cover - although I don't get the impression they featured anything vital - and flakes of yellowing paper came away each time I read it; but it was three dollars and the cover promising material by both Richard Shaver and Robert Moore Williams made it an essential purchase.

Palmer is credited only as managing editor - Bernard George Davis being listed as the actual editor - but his influence seems overpowering, this influence being expressed as a carnival barker's huckster enthusiasm for scientifiction and the idea that if we are able to imagine it, then one day it will happen - a position I recall having been taken by Bez of Happy Mondays during some television interview wherein he described what he liked about Star Trek. Palmer's editorial accordingly suggests that the contents of the magazine should be read as prediction as much as fiction, giving as an example the notion that readers of Amazing would not have been too surprised by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, having encountered such weaponry in the magazine many years earlier. Palmer, in true pseudoscientific spirit, actually seems to have regarded Einstein as merely a fellow visionary, and suggests that many of his theories were obviously wrong, as demonstrated by tales published in previous issues because if you can imagine faster than light travel, then one day it will happen.

The divide between imagination and reality was clearly an issue with Richard S. Shaver, arguably the star of the magazine at this point. Shaver's I Remember Lemuria had already been rapturously received and Palmer was quite happy to capitalise on its success. The protagonist of the story tells of his being kidnapped by a race of degenerate subterranean beings called the Dero, whereupon he learns how the Dero have influenced human history by use of special rays which cause people to act with evil intent. It's a paranoid fantasy which seems fairly typical of certain types of schizophrenia, and Shaver seems to have related what he believes to have been actual events as fiction, so as not to cause panic as the legend has it.

While Shaver's tales weren't the revelation claimed by Palmer and others in mythology-building articles featured elsewhere in this issue, and nor did they necessarily constitute classic material, neither were they quite the incomprehensible pulp turds recalled by more stringent critics. The worlds and beings described are patently those of a man with mental health issues, and the plot of Invasion of the Micro-Men in this issue is as prone to absent-minded swerves as any of Shaver's fiction, but there's nevertheless something fascinating and compelling here - plus I suppose it could be argued that he foresaw nanotechnology ahead of the curve. This issue transposes the author's usual concerns to outer space with the Dero replaced by their interplanetary equivalent, the Jotun, degenerate inhabitants of abandoned caverns on a myriad of worlds, but tolerated by the utopian Nortan race, who are elevated and therefore almost certainly white. As with the Dero, the Jotun aren't so much evil as simply irresponsible and prone to mischief. Naturally they have a tendency to kidnap Nortan women for their wives, transforming them - so it is primly hinted - into freaks, which I take to mean that they give them comically massive tits by means of special enlargement rays. Even as we read, we can sort of sense Shaver wrestling with thoughts he doubtless regarded as dirty and therefore part of whatever was wrong with his head, itself expressed as the dominant theme of malevolent, invisible influence - whether it's those special rays or tiny men in the bloodstream.

Robert Moore Williams' The Huntress of Akkan is, roughly speaking, Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss but with its team of plucky, hard-boiled adventurers mysteriously transported to another world. It's pleasant enough, and although it hints at some of the strangeness of Williams' later efforts, it lacks their ponderous and peculiar allegorical quality.

The rest of the magazine is competent but about what you would expect of its kind - pulpy and sort of predictable but not actually offensive; and Final Victim by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse isn't anything special. The pseudo-factual articles are more speculative than scientific, pretty much Charles Fort with a few grudging nods towards Einstein and the like; and there's The Bearded White Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen which suggests that Quetzalcoatl was almost certainly Caucasian, which is pure bollocks. If anyone familiar with this idea should still, in 2019, be wondering why it's all bollocks, it's because 1) the native records from which this legend derives were all written half a century after the conquest and represent an after the fact attempt to rationalise it, and b) some indigenous Mexicans actually could grow beards.

So it's underwhelming, but fascinating as an historical document, dating from before science-fiction was really a thing in the same way as it is now, even before the advent of the science-fiction paperback. Amazing Stories inhabited a world in which its genre was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, a few other bits and pieces here and there, and then these generally frowned upon magazines with their lurid covers and arguably more in common with the trashier end of Hollywood than all that fancy book learnin'. Yet, there's worth here, even imagination, and if it amounts to compost in literary terms, then we should keep in mind that things grow very well in compost.

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.

Master of the World

Jules Verne Master of the World (1904)
There's this place high up in the mountains, so high up that no-one can get to it. There's something going on up there, flames - lightning maybe, and everyone is worried that it might be a volcano. John Strock tries to climb up to have a look but it's too high, and then he gets a mysteriously anonymous letter suggesting that he should mind his own business. Next come strange reports of a very, very fast car, and later there are reports of a very, very fast boat. John investigates and encounters the boat, but it flies away with him inside. It's piloted by the Master of the World, a man who doesn't say very much and who doesn't seem very friendly, but he crashes the amazing car-plane-boat thing he's invented, and so that's the end of that.

All of this is padded out with speculation, page upon page of it. One might surmise that this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier. Could it then be that this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier? Let us examine the reasons why this thing which has been described might actually be one and the same as the other thing described earlier; then eventually it dawns on us, the truth is revealed - this thing which has been described is actually one and the same as the other thing described earlier!

I vaguely recall a movie adaptation of this novel which I saw as a kid, and one which sort of worked because the cinematic Master of the World had invented a superweapon, a huge dirigible with propellers from which he presumably menaced the rest of us. Unfortunately in the book he just has this car-plane-boat thing which now sounds a bit ludicrous, and his alleged mastery of the world is seemingly because he's the fastest. Verne's Master doesn't seem particularly interested even in maintaining a small circle of pals, never mind ruling over anyone, and so the plot mostly resembles the mumbled invention of a four-year old kid whose attention is divided between playing with his Lego and making up a story which, on close inspection, actually turns out to be Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea but with wheels.

I've had this problem with Verne before, and doubtless someone will tell me that I've read a lousy translation. Unfortunately, I actually enjoyed Master of the World in so much as that I found it highly readable, even engrossing, in spite of its fucking stupid story; and whilst I recognise Verne as having been very much an ideas man, the gulf between those ideas and his seemingly elegant prose is a complete pillock flouncing about in a cape, pulling scary faces and expecting you to be surprised at revelations of the bleeding obvious. So I'm not saying he was a bad writer, only that they weren't all stone cold classics, and that he had some sauce saying whatever it was he said about the work of H.G. Wells.

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.

Nemo: The Roses of Berlin

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Nemo: The Roses of Berlin (2014)
This time it's the daughter of Verne's character invading a Nazi Germany combining elements of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The villainess is herself from H. Rider Haggard's She with cameos by Dr. Mabuse from the Norbert Jacques novel and nods to Verne's The Master of the World, Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and doubtless a ton of other stuff I didn't notice. Once you're done with the trainspotting aspect, The Roses of Berlin is generally fun, and the art is obviously wonderful, but somehow it feels a bit phoned-in compared to previous Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and when Nemo observes:

This strange place is putting me on edge. I'm nearing fifty. Perhaps I'm too old for all this...

Well, I mean it is Alan Moore, the guy who can barely scratch his arse without it allegorising five different things, and the same Alan Moore who recently announced he was packing in the comics; and the later duel between the youthful Nemo and the ancient Ayesha seems potentially symbolic when the timeless immortal accuses the newcomer of stealing from her. As to what it might actually be saying, if anything, I have no idea. I suppose it could be something along the lines of old masters not getting the recognition they deserve, that being what Moore seemed to be suggesting when he recast Harry Potter as the Antichrist elsewhere in the saga.

True enough, I was born in the sixties and I read a lot, but I barely get some of the references made here, which isn't something I'm particularly proud of; so I guess Nemo might be an exercise in pinning certain fading cultural artefacts to the present simply because they should be remembered, and remembering them enriches contemporary culture for the better. So that's good.

The Mysterious Island

Jules Verne The Mysterious Island (1874)
It seems that appreciation of Jules Verne is somewhat reliant upon which translation you happen to be reading, for there are apparently many. I hated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and everyone in it, so hopefully that was one of the ropey versions. Conversely, I enjoyed From the Earth to the Moon well enough, and have generally found this one to be likewise a decent, if slightly insubstantial read. Both turn out to have been translated by Lowell Bair and for the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend this is entirely the work of Jules Verne - as opposed to Verne given particular emphasis by the aforementioned Bair - because it'll get too complicated otherwise.

The Mysterious Island reads more or less like somebody novelised a few issues of Understanding Science, the sixties kids' magazine building up week by week into etc. etc. First we meet our balloonists, all chaps of good progressive stock, plus a plucky hound and an African-American man included presumably as representative of racial equality and the abolitionist cause against slavery - which is nice although Verne doesn't actually seem to give him much to say, so mostly he's just hanging around following orders and sawing up logs or whatever. Oddly, although this novel continues what I presume must have been Verne's fascination with America as a newborn civilisation doing its best to get things right, we still find some influence of the typically nineteenth century notion of class as an inherent quality; so with the African-American Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged as a roughly equal partner, we're apparently left with a gap which is quickly filled by Jupiter the orang-utan, tamed and rendered a loyal servant at least until Verne gets bored of the idea and he vanishes from sight barring a single reference near the end. I mention this only because it struck me as odd.

Our boys find themselves marooned on the island in what might be read as a re-run of Robinson Crusoe, or perhaps even an inversion. Being enlightened men they immediately throw themselves into the task of civilising the wilderness by means of all their scientific knowledge, smelting iron, making tools, even fashioning glass for their fancy cave, and with no time for Crusoe's philosophising or even much thought beyond their present circumstances. Just like the America from which they came, they're building a new world rather than looking to the horizon in hope of getting back to the old one, so there's a lot of talk about how to make rope, drain lakes, the manufacture of wire for telecommunications and so on; and against all odds, it's actually very readable, even engrossing. This I find of particular interest given the poor reputation of what has come to be regarded as Gernsbackian science-fiction, so named after the editor of Amazing Stories who favoured this kind of technologically-fixated narrative, much to the more recent annoyance of Brian Aldiss; and yet it is only a variation on what Verne wrote.

The Mysterious Island is additionally a sequel of sorts to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in so much as that it ends with Captain Nemo revealed as the hidden author of certain mysterious occurrences on the island. This conclusion feels a little tagged on given the mysterious occurrences having been mostly underwhelming, but I suppose it keeps the novel from being a couple of hundred pages about the best way to build a boat. There's a possibility that Bair's translation may lose some of the poetry of the original because I otherwise have to wonder why this should be regarded as a classic. This isn't so much a criticism of any failings it may have so much as to acknowledge that it doesn't really do very much as a narrative; but then for something which doesn't do very much, it's nevertheless a highly satisfying read.

The Brick Moon

Edward Everett Hale The Brick Moon (1869)
This is one of those books, or at least novellas, which lodged in my consciousness quite early on thanks to the fairly lurid cover of some pulp magazine in which it was reproduced having appeared in a big glossy book of science-fiction history I read as a kid, or at least which I took out from the library so I could look at the pictures as a kid. The narrative, which is fairly brief, describes an artificial moon built from wood and brick catapulted into orbit so as to provide Victorian mariners with some means of gauging longitude. Inevitably something goes wrong and the Brick Moon is launched ahead of time still with a load of people inside. Months pass before it is sighted in the heavens, following which communication is established through morse code signalled by the new satellite's inhabitants jumping up and down as observed with a telescope.

I'm going to avoid committing the customary rant about steampunk on the grounds that Hale's world may as well have been Georgian rather than fully Victorian if this novella is any indication, which is probably why I seem to recall The Brick Moon having been tagged as brickpunk somewhere or other, an assertion which can frankly piss off so far as I'm concerned.

The tale begins with lengthy discussion on the practicalities of launching an artificial satellite in nineteenth century America, possibly taking cues from Verne's From the Earth to the Moon of 1865, although this one is shorter and more fun, or more fun than whichever Verne translation I read. The technological level of Hale's enterprise is early industrial revolution but without much reference to even steam let alone anything else, hence the Georgian affectations which are similarly reflected in his literary style. Hale was a Unitarian minister, a big fan of progressive thought and not so keen on the practice of slavery, which I mention for the sake of clarity rather than because it is of any particular relevance to this book. Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, just a decade before, and is acknowledged in those animals marooned on the Brick Moon - goats, chickens and the like - quickly evolving into ostriches or beasts of burden so that those aboard might sustain themselves. Of course, Hale may have been taking the piss, but the generous spirit of his prose suggests it's more likely that he'd simply skipped a few chapters of Darwin's book.

America had not yet enjoyed a full century of independence from England when this was written, and so The Brick Moon is ultimately a hymn to political autonomy expressed as its people are seen to get on very well up there despite their isolation, not least thanks to lichen quickly evolving into trees and plants bearing fruit. Of course, none of it is particularly logical by contemporary standards even without pointing out that there probably wouldn't be any air up there in the ether, five-thousand miles above the Earth's surface; but Hale's testimony, stilted though it may well seem today, nevertheless wins us over. Political autonomy has taken on unpleasant associations in recent times what with Brexit and the Annoying Orange presidency and everything, but here it was a positive ideal and is communicated as such; and Hale really seems to be all about the positive and progressive.

The Brick Moon is a great book, one which really makes me wish he'd written more of its type, and one which leaves us with an impression of an author who was probably a nice guy, someone we would like to know. In terms of science-fiction history, The Brick Moon really should loom larger than presently seems to be the case.

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.

The Coming Race

Edward Bulwer-Lytton The Coming Race (1871)
The Coming Race was hardly the first science-fiction novel to  rummage around within a hollow Earth. Journey to the Center of the Earth - to name but one of many - was published seven years earlier, and the general conceit probably goes back at least so far as Don Quixote's descent into the Caves of Montesinos in Cervantes' 1615 novel. The Coming Race would nevertheless appear to represent a seminal work of its type, and its popularity was once such as to seed public imagination with vril, the novel's mysterious energy source falling somewhere between nuclear power, electricity, telepathy, and the force from Star Wars. Mastery of vril is the reason for the technological superiority of that lot down there, as Bulwer-Lytton explained, inadvertently inspiring numerous occult types - Madam Blavatsky for one - seemingly ranging from those regarding vril as a metaphor for some existing esoteric force, to those apparently taking The Coming Race for fact disguised as fiction. Of the latter group one might arguably include Richard S. Shaver whose peculiar subterranean ramblings might be deemed heir to Bulwer-Lytton were they not so obviously sourced from a more personal, psychological mania, and vril seems to have become a totem for some of the weirder expressions of Nazism. Weirder still, at least to me, is that the name of Bovril, the popular pseudo-Marmitic English meat based drink derives from the idea of vril as life enhancing.

Anyway, before we go too far down that particular rabbit hole, it should be noted that Bulwer-Lytton's novel belongs more significantly to the utopian tradition, but taps into subterranean folk myth to a greater extent than others of its kind. The underworld as hell, if not uniquely Christian, seems to have been the exception to a general global rule. Most underworlds were traditionally a source of life, development, culture and so on, with the world as a metaphorical womb giving birth to the people and all which sustains them. This basic idea is found in Norse mythology, Sumer, Mexico, and pretty much everywhere else to greater or lesser degrees. Bulwer-Lytton's utopia is therefore home to a more developed race than our own, although the precise details of the warning delivered appear fairly loosely defined, or at least they did to me. Unfortunately I have a feeling this may be down to my own prejudices, specifically that which I expect to have been the sort of thing that would have mattered to a Victorian author of Bulwer-Lytton's credentials.

The Coming Race references ancient deluges in terms which suggest scientific foundations in the sort of catastrophism which squared fairly well with the emerging ideas of Darwinian evolution. Yet, whilst the novel appears to embrace Darwin up to a point, the Vril-ya - this being the name of the coming race in question - claim descent from frogs, which reads somewhat like a Christian parody of Darwin, not a million miles from the sort of critique asking where amongst its relatives was the orang-outang to be found. On the other hand, there's also the strong possibility that the supposed war between Church and Darwin has become somewhat exaggerated in recent times by the usual tub-thumping bores on both sides, and may not have been quite such a partisan affair as we have been led to believe. I suspect Bulwer-Lytton may not have given a great deal of thought to those aspects of his narrative which, with hindsight, seem as though they should be making some more strident observation, for he seems to find no contradiction in evolution discussed with such frequent references made to faith, and is more likely presenting a warning of the notion of progress as a virtue in itself. Progress was hardly a new idea in 1871, but the developed, or at least developing world was clearly still coming to terms with the idea of progress as something which could achieve such momentum as it did in the 1800s, and which had begun to reach into every aspect of modern life. Even humanity, so it seemed, was subject to progress, hence the disturbing possibility of more advanced expressions of humanity who might come to regard us as we did the less technologically orientated colonial subjects of the empire. Supermen and their mighty works would become popular during the century to come, notably with a great many folks who also enjoyed shouting and wearing uniforms, so it is interesting and possibly ironic on some level that Bulwer-Lytton describes the racial characteristics of the Vril-ya as close to Native American type, presumably by virtue of their having been the least understood ethnic group to have achieved levels of civilisation comparable to those of classical antiquity at the time of writing. Happily, the utopia of The Coming Race therefore constitutes relatively slim pickings for nutcases seeking Aryan material, excepting I suppose a few of the more obsessive Death In June types who could probably find some sort of ariosophic subtext in an episode of Dora the Explorer.

Established expressions of bullshit aside, The Coming Race is a fairly straightforward prompt towards the conclusion implied by Victorian notions of progress, that we might not necessarily be the pinnacle of God's creation, and that this is worth keeping in mind. Oddly I find this echoes Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in that it too makes a lesson of the perils of ideology becoming too far divorced from the reality it endeavours to inform, which is of course the big problem with most versions of utopia. I personally found this one a little more readable than Crime and Punishment, although I can see why it has failed to remain quite so popular as at least a few of its contemporaries, lacking as it does the wit and verve of Verne, Wells, Shelley and others - not a bad novel by any stretch, but one that was quite definitively of its time; and although I'm sceptical that Bulwer-Lytton can really have been said to have predicted nuclear energy, the appearance of robots in a novel published in 1871 is not unimpressive.

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

Mark Hodder Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (2011)
Just to get the disclaimer out of the way, and hopefully to scare off any part-timers who happen to have wandered in by accident, it's not so much that I necessarily regard steampunk - that is Victorian science-fiction as one website helpfully and twattily described it - as wank in and of itself, so much as I dislike bandwagons and cultural trends packaged with the sort of cock-obvious cynicism designed to attract the maximum quota of suckers in the shortest space of time. Steampunk qualifies for the sheer step lively, quizling, purchase your brass aviator goggles here and thusly join in the fun at your earliest convenience factor, and because it looks cute as computer generated clockwork Victorians chasing Matt Damon around a cinema screen. It's the drippy comic with a Dave McKean cover aesthetic for the twenty-first century, a fancy and ornate wrapping for what, nine times out of ten, will turn out to be, at very best, a low calorie Flash Gordon serial with handlebar moustaches and oodles of side-splitting Englishness. If you're one of those people busily clogging the arteries of our collective cultural bandwidth with anything that involves chucklesome use of the word velocipede - either by producing it or supporting it - my message to you is, generally speaking, either embrace the habit of original thought, or go fuck yourself, whichever seems easier.

That feels better.

From the general thrust of the above, one might imagine I would have a tough time with Mark Hodder's Burton & Swinburne novels. It is true that I have approached each with a degree of trepidation, but this is because we've known each other on and off for many years, at least since we met at Maidstone College of Art back in the eighties, and it's always a bit terrifying when a friend writes something, and there's the fear that you might find you hate it. Anyway, this being the fourth of Mark's novels that I've read, such fears have diminished over time, as I've come to appreciate that he really can write, and that he's never really written steampunk in quite the sense that brings on the red mist. Indeed, he terms his novels alternate history - albeit alternate history of a form which by happy coincidence seems to be popular at the moment - and the more I read, the more I view this as a legitimate identification.

Whilst inspiration drawn from the writings of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne hardly seems unusual at present, Mark Hodder distinguishes himself in drawing thematic inspiration, rather than simply presenting a dirigible heavy pastiche of that which they wrote. I expect I've said it before, but this, I would suggest, sets him quite clearly in the tradition of Michael Moorcock's steam opera novels, dissecting the mechanism of empire rather than just pointing at it and smirking. The two previous books in this series have in addition built up a good narrative head of Moorcock-style absurdity in terms of events spiralling dramatically out of control, but Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon takes a more measured approach, mimicking the steady pace of a travelogue as suggested in the title. It's still bonkers, but unfolds with what seems a more confident tone, as is certainly appropriate given that this would seem to be the one in which the underlying message is examined in greatest depth and with most clarity. That message, as with at least Wells and Moorcock, is an unambiguous and quite severe critique of both imperial and capitalist values:

'Christian? Do you then stand in opposition to Darwin's findings? Do you also believe that your God favours some races over others?'

'I use the word merely out of habit, as a synonym for civilised,' Cornewall Lewis protested.

'Then I'm to take it you don't consider the Arabians civilised, despite that they invented modern mathematics, surgical instruments, soap and perfume, the windmill, the crankshaft, and a great many other things; despite that they realised the Earth is a sphere that circles the sun five hundred years before Galileo was tortured by your Christian church for supporting the same notion?'

Hodder's point seems to be that much of our current political systems were born to and remain most vividly caricatured by the Victorian era - or thereabouts - hence his targets, their environment, and the form or narrative by which they are exposed:

'Perhaps some still do,' Wells replied. 'But it's the fluid quality that makes language an excellent tool for imperialists. Force people to speak like you and soon enough they'll be thinking like you. Rename their villages, towns, and mountains, and before you know it, they're inhabiting your territory.'

To soar to a possibly hitherto unprecedented level of pretension, I would suggest Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon might almost represent a sort of narrative colonisation of the genre, taking it back from all the brass-goggled velocipedists, making it do what it was meant to do. Certainly Hodder's alternate nineteenth century has evolved a long way beyond the gurgling clichés - not actually much steam here, but a lot of very weird biology. It perhaps owes something to Edgar Rice Burroughs in this respect - if I'm remembering him right - but it's very much his own creation, formed according to purpose rather than ticking cosily familiar boxes, and with good reason:

The problem, as I see it, is that we don't truly understand the nature of the past. We mythologise it. We create fictions about actions performed to justify what we undertake in the present. We adjust the cause to better suit the effect. The truth is that the present is, and will always be, utter chaos. There is no story and no plan.

Having a more measured pace, I found Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon a little more chewy than its predecessors, although arguably also a little more flavoursome if that makes any sense whatsoever. It represents a new height scaled for the Hodder, and a renewed promise of even better to come.

Doctor Omega

Arnould Galopin Doctor Omega (1906)
It's nice to see a ton of vintage science-fiction titles returned to print through Black Cat Press, and Arnould Galopin's Doctor Omega is but one of many, purchased out of curiosity and because I'd actually heard of it. The reason for my having heard of it was a 2003 reprint offered for sale by numerous retailers of Doctor Who fiction. This earlier edition was translated from the French, or specifically adapted and retold as it stated on the jacket by Jean-Marc and Randy L'Officier who had seen in the original novel an apparent precursor to William Hartnell era Doctor Who, and thus was it marketed as a sort of ur-Who, if you will. I was curious, but the suggestion that material had been added in order to emphasise parallels with a 1960s television show annoyed me a little for reasons that should be frankly obvious to anyone with critical faculties - specifically that due to my being a fully grown man I am capable of appreciating written material without requiring that it be tied in to a fucking TV show.

Happily this new edition is a different translation - by renowned artist and author Ron Miller who also appears to be the driving force behind Black Cat - and one which I assume to be faithful to the original, and which makes use of Bouard's illustrations. My one gripe is that this version seems a little typo-prone in places, occasionally yielding sentences like I am you will not regret having taken me along; but on the positive side, the material is otherwise of such standard as to remain enjoyable and surprisingly absorbing regardless.

The main character is a crochety, elderly scientist with white hair who titles himself Doctor, which is as far as the resemblance goes and makes me particularly glad I never bothered with the 2003 edition. More striking is the obvious influence of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, particularly with space travel effected by means of an anti-gravitic substance, here named repulsite rather than cavorite. Galopin even appears to playfully acknowledge the influence of the Wells novel as Fred, one of his three space travellers, anticipates their arrival on the moon and is repeatedly set straight by Doctor Omega who reminds us that they are in fact heading for Mars. This may be taken as additionally significant in that Doctor Omega reputedly represents the first science-fiction novel to visit the red planet, thus anticipating Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis and the rest. H.G. Wells of course brought his Martians to Earth, and this is perhaps acknowledged in the form of a familiar heat ray device which crops up in the later chapters.

Doctor Omega is a travelogue, visiting a Mars populated with wild and dangerous animals and pseudo-tribal people as though it were a more exotic dark continent. It lacks the politics of Wells or the slightly harder science of Jules Verne, and is thus content to simply present itself as an adventure; and as such it bursts with imagination and is hard to fault. Why anyone would feel the need to "improve" on this by adding references to a television show is beyond me.

Available here.

From the Earth to the Moon

Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
I was left massively underwhelmed by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a novel seemingly so dry and plodding as to leave me with the impression of Verne as an overrated institution, particularly when compared to the eminently more readable H.G. Wells with whom he so often shares a sentence. Shortly after forming this impression, it was pointed out to me that I had most likely read a poor translation, so I picked up From the Earth to the Moon to show Verne's disembodied spirit there were no hard feelings, and in hope of a good read. Alarm bells began to ring around the chapter in which one retired colonel type delivers a series of announcements comparing the strength to weight ratio of iron and aluminium, each droning suggestion prefixed by his friend exclaiming hurrah!, which becomes annoying after seventy pages.

Two dud translations in a row, I sneered to myself, rather a coincidence, wouldn't you say?

'Or could it simply be,' I replied out loud for the sake of a faintly amusing image which could later be incorporated into a review, 'that Jules so-called Verne was just a bit shit?'

Apparently not according to Arthur B. Evans whose 2005 essay  Jules Verne's English Translations makes for slightly depressing reading, presenting the possibility that you're actually very lucky to pick up a random Verne translation which hasn't made a complete pig's ear of the original; and my From the Earth to the Moon it turns out, as translated by Lowell Bair, isn't among the good ones. Knowing this actually rendered it a little more readable for me, allowing for some focus on what may have been said in the original rather than the somewhat cak-handed means by which it has been reduced to English. Even knowing as much, this apparently hobbled version does pick up somewhat after the chapter in which a man wearing a top hat says hurrah! over and over, thus unwittingly inspiring another four-thousand trilogies in Worthington P. Bonio's The Penny-Farthing Interface series of generic steampunk landfill moneyspinners; and it was impossible to resist the charm of the following paragraph:

Among the groups of all kinds which assailed him, the "lunatics" were particularly aware of what they owed to the future conqueror of the moon. One day several of these poor people, rather numerous in America, came to him and asked to be allowed to return to their native land with him. Some of them claimed to be able to speak the lunar language and offered to teach it to him. He good-naturedly indulged their innocent mania and agreed to deliver messages to their friends on the moon.

From the Earth to the Moon seems admittedly dry in terms of its story, a clear precursor to the hard science-fiction of Asimov and others, being mostly concerned with the mechanics of building something capable of hurling nineteenth century people into space. The incredible thing is that for the most part, Verne's calculations seem to have been on the mark, right down to Florida as a good place from which to launch such a mission, the practicalities of a renewable air supply, and so on; and even told as a series of conversations about gravity, escape velocity, thrust and the like, once over the potholes, it's still quite readable even given the presumably mangled narrative.

I suspect I've thus far been quite wrong about this author, so next time I'll make certain it's one of the better translations.

Last Men in London

Olaf Stapledon Last Men in London (1932)
About five years ago I bought a copy of the Penguin Books combined edition of Stapledon's Last and First Men and Last Men in London. I was interested mainly in the former title - it being widely regarded as a classic - but getting the follow-up thrown in for free seemed like a bargain. As it turned out, I found Last and First Men unusually chewy, and so it's taken me half a decade to brave its sequel. During that time my edition has crossed the Atlantic Ocean and been marked by my cat Fluffy, thus adding a potent and unwelcome olfactory dimension and further reducing its appeal. It had occurred to me that Fluffy's contribution might even be considered criticism, but it's actually more likely that he was simply a bit freaked out when we moved house, and there was my Olaf Stapledon sat at the top of the box just begging to serve as canvas for his territorial concerns. Anyway, having come to loath the idea that I might ever leave a book unfinished once purchased, I bought a fresh second-hand copy so as to be able to read without noseplugs.

Last and First Men describes many millions of years of future history as experienced by eighteen successive races of humanity, the last of these being the semi-telepathic inhabitants of Neptune of which the narrator is purportedly a representative. In places it's fascinating, in others, dryer than a mouthful of Jacob's crackers washed down with a pint of peanut butter whilst crossing the Nevada desert, or at least that's how I remember it. There's a strong possibility that my brain was smaller back then, and I was therefore more stupid and thus less able to appreciate its worth, but I suspect it may simply have been that Last and First Men is just a very long and somewhat uninviting narrative. Whilst its classic status is undeniable, sitting down and reading the thing is another matter entirely.

Last Men in London takes a different approach, examining Stapledon's present through the eyes of our Neptunian narrator which, possibly because it deals with a more familiar environment, I found significantly more engaging, so much so as to foster the false impression of it being the shorter novel which actually it isn't. Written in 1932 with the naked inhumanity of the great war haunting the collective human consciousness, Stapledon had a great deal to discuss - observations on militarism, pacifism, education, sexuality, culture and so on - and so it makes perfect sense to recall how he regarded both this novel and its predecessor as philosophical works rather than science-fiction in the sense of Wells or Verne. It's a valid proposition, for certainly they read as such, but all the same it's probably not philosophically profound compared to the writing of at least a few of his contemporaries; but perhaps that is an unfair assessment to make nearly eighty years after the fact.

Still, given Stapledon's interest in future human evolution, it's quite a pleasure to read as he pulls apart the superman archetypes of his era, and the myths which so fascinated writers like A.E. van Vogt and L. Ron Hubbard; and for all that I've more enjoyed many other novels, Last Men in London is nevertheless eminently readable. I'm not sure if this means I'm less stupid than in 2008, but oddly I find myself tempted to give Last and First Men a second chance.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2007)
I initially found this volume of Moore's continuing revision of  characters from literary history into a single fictional continuum a wee bit underwhelming. Each block of narrative is punctuated with numerous pages of vaguely related text which somewhat disrupts the overall flow, not so much because comics necessarily make for easier reading than unalloyed prose but rather because page after comic book sized page of such small print can be quite off-putting. Additionally, it isn't always immediately obvious how these textual digressions relate to the rest of what's happening besides joining up a load of continuity for the sake of it.

However, my friend Steve suggested I persist with the book, pretend I'm on holiday, stuck in a caravan in the rain with only Black Dossier to keep me occupied. So I knuckled down and I'm sort of glad I did, although the five page stream of consciousness Kerouac pastiche was just a little too unreadable for my tastes, so I settled for the online summary which explained that, had I bothered to read it, I would have found it to be a canny exploration of the Burroughsian idea of language as a virus which itself relates directly to the theme of Black Dossier as a whole. Personally I think Moore would have been better off writing it as a direct pastiche of Burroughs, but never mind.

Anyway, this third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is enjoyable enough, although it really doesn't have a story so much as a sequence of events sagging under the weight of references to everything from Coronation Street to Dan Dare to Enid Blyton's Adventures of the Wishing Chair - imagine a washing line hung with the underwear of every fictional character ever to grace a page - although many of said references are quite obscure, requiring one to be looking in the right place at the right time. There's a danger of the story amounting to who would win in a fight between Cybermen and Klingons? although it's intent is clearly more ambitious even if it lacks overt expression. It seems significant that James Bond is here shown as a hero of the establishment: brutal, cowardly, misogynist and anti-intellectual - a revised Bulldog Drummond lacking even the honesty of said reactionary forebear - and hence the enemy and bowdlerisation of earlier, arguably more imaginative heroes and heroines. In this respect Black Dossier seems to be a criticism of the history of fiction itself, how that which once inspired the imagination has devolved to unit-shifting logos with moral content included only where it suits the genre. This may be how Moore viewed the mainstream movie adaptation of his first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, with all the finer points ironed out and homogenised for the big screen; and I'm probably not the first person to notice how many times James Bond gets his arse kicked in Black Dossier - unless the Sean Connery association is simply coincidence.

The conclusion, revealed in a line about Verne's Nautilus and Wells' cavorite inspiring submarines and rocket ships, would seem to be that there's no such thing as just a story, that it all comes back into our collective consciousness whilst perhaps also serving as barometer for the same, and that we should take a bit more care over the sort of stories we tell because fact and fiction tend to be related. Unfortunately I have a feeling this message may not be obvious unless you're looking for it, which it might be argued defeats the point of the message in terms of communicating to those who most need to hear it, but never mind.

Anyway, my second, more considered reading of Black Dossier was certainly more rewarding than the first, and the pastiches of William Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse were in particular a delight. Bit lumpy in places but undeniably nourishing.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume one

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume one (2000)
This is steampunk apparently, or at least it's steampunk according to something or other I recently saw floating somewhere on the electronic Sargasso Sea of the internet before a patch of drying paint proved too much of a distraction and drew my attention elsewhere. Fair enough really - it's important to know whether or not something is steampunk, isn't it? It's important to have that clarification, wouldn't you say?

I seem to recall having given up on comics when I first became aware of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the trade paperback of which I spotted in the window of some comic shop as I hurried past. The last I'd seen of Alan Moore had been either intermittent and seemingly impenetrable issues of From Hell - a few of which I'd missed thus rendering the story all the more difficult to follow - and 1963, which was fun but hardly what you would call a square meal; but it was the involvement of Kevin O'Neill which really caught my eye. I think I'd somehow forgotten he ever existed.

He's definitely one of the weirder artists to spring from the pages of 2000AD. You might say he covers up his not actually being able to draw with all that weird and slightly bi-polar detail somehow reminiscent of the sort of stuff that schizophrenics scrawl across the walls of their bedrooms with magic marker, except his figure-work is revealed as pretty much spot on under close inspection - it only looks like it isn't due to the harsh, angular style. About the most objective comment one can make would be that his art is unique, and I love it myself, although I'm still not sure why.

Anyway, resenting any money whatsoever spent on a comic book in case it turned out to comprise either Sean Phillips potato print art or wearying references to chaos magick, I borrowed The League of Extraordinary Gentleman from our local library and realised I had indeed been missing out, and that the world of comics had not simply devolved into a self-conscious mass of Wolverine deconstructions simply because I'd been looking the other way. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, as even remote tribes living in what's left of the Amazon basin surely know, was Moore's Victorian version of Justice League America with characters recycled from existing fiction. It might constitute some sort of comment on the nature of storytelling, and certainly it subverts the general Victorian model of the establishment as in any way progressive or morally upstanding, but the most important thing is probably that it's a huge amount of fun. There's no real reason why the novels of H.G. Wells shouldn't all have occurred in the same universe as those of H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and this does nothing to devalue any literary territory because it succeeds in its own right rather than representing an exercise in nostalgia; and if anything, I at least prefer this Nemo and this Mina Harker to those appearing in moderately underwhelming works by Verne and Stoker.

Ignoring a somewhat unsatisfactory prose story which appears as an appendix, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman manages to be both ridiculous and yet brilliant at the same time - an absolutely solid and explosive piece of work.