Mars by 1980

David Stubbs Mars by 1980 (2018)
This is approximately the book I was hoping Paul Griffiths' Guide to Electronic Music would be, give or take some small change. As promised by the cover, it traces the history of the form from Russolo to the present, albeit with a fair bit of lateral waggle once we're past John Cage. Of course, the term electronic here encompasses plenty which isn't strictly electronic but which is at least progressive in forging an unorthodox path either at odds with, or at least adjacent to the mainstream. I suspect that any respectable attempt to cover this broad field will be obliged to take a subjective route if only for the sake of focus, which is what Stubbs does, and why his account succeeds for the most part.

Somehow this is the first time I've read about a great many of these people in this sort of detail, and the first thing I've read which has bothered to admit that Russolo's ambition - for one example - far outstripped his achievement. The reasonably lavish background detail on both Schaeffer and Stockhausen is also greatly appreciated, as is Stubb's reluctance to waste time and brain cells on Switched on fucking Bach. Of course, given the unashamedly subjective composition of this particular journey, I was left with at least a couple of questions. If Stubb's criteria for who made the cut depended on extent and spread of subsequent influence - which I suppose justifies the presence of Depeche bloody Mode - the relative absence of SPK, Hawkwind, vapourwave and more or less all rap music seems a little puzzling, although not enough so as to unbalance the whole.

The title refers to the historically Gernsbackian thrust of electronic music as something which looks to the future, a quality which might be deemed inherent to the exploratory nature of the form; then asks whether or not this is something we have lost in recent times. It's a good question, although I'm not convinced that it can have a single coherent answer, depending as it does on who and when we're asking. I personally suspect that there's something in Lawrence Miles' ghostpoint which proposes that innovation itself may have ceased for our culture, replaced by cyclical revision with each leap forward being no more significant than the latest smartphone - nothing but updates as far as the eye can see; but it's a pessimistic view and possibly works only as a rhetorical generalisation. Stubbs seems to conclude that the current standard bearers for electronic music demonstrate the same creative vitality as their ancestors, despite the increasing ubiquity of the form, and he's probably right.

The only problem I see with this account is that as an argument for the revolution remaining continuous, it hangs together, but only just, being stretched thin across a dizzyingly broad span of digressions and rabbit holes - all fascinating, but which tend to distract from the theme as a result; but this is a minor quibble which shouldn't really be taken as a complaint given that the journey seems to be the point here, and frankly it doesn't get much better than this.

I've always thought David Stubbs was a great writer, but this is exceptional beyond my expectations.

The Eleventh Tiger

David A. McIntee The Eleventh Tiger (2004)
While I may regularly gnash teeth over written fiction which wants to be telly, I realise there's probably a line to be drawn, and as usual I'm specifically talking about Who tie-in material because I've read a ton of it and still dig one out from time to time if I'm in the right mood. To generalise, the good stuff - such as written by Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Miles or Lance Parkin - tends to work as science or at least speculative fiction regardless of certain characters or concepts having been on the box when we were little. The bad stuff gives the impression of having been written by persons who really, really, really love Doctor Who but who haven't actually read anything which isn't Doctor Who. Their work is usually characterised by pages dominated by dialogue, a reliance on clichés and sentiment, and a tendency to describe events as they would appear if dramatised for telly, right down to the invocation of specific camera angles.

David A. McIntee is possibly a bit of an anomaly in so much as that his books quite clearly strive to invoke the atmosphere of what we would have seen on the box, right down to the pacing and descriptions of what may as well have been low budget visual effects; and he's clearly happy to be an author of fiction which aspires to be telly; and yet he gets it right with thoughtful if admittedly breezy prose which does what it does without giving me cause to yell oh fuck off prior to hurling the book across the room - which is actually quite unusual. He even manages knowing postmodern chuckles without coming across like he's trying too hard.

'It's been a busy day, Doctor, as I'm sure you understand. One minute those kids are just running around chaotically, but the next minute they're focused and everybody's kung-fu fighting.'

'Those kids are fast as lightning,' Barbara added.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Are they indeed? And was it, perchance, dear boy, a little bit frightening? Hmm?'

The Eleventh Tiger takes place in nineteenth century China and is so determinedly true to its mileau that it recreates the somewhat plodding pace of certain Hartnell era stories, particularly the mostly historical ones. I found it a little difficult to follow presumably through not being quite so invested in Who as I was in my thirties, but on the other hand I wasn't quite bored, and it's intermittently gripping.

I bought The Eleventh Tiger when it came out, and it was one of the last to be published before it all went tits up, so far as I recall, meaning it's taken me seventeen fucking years to get around to reading the thing - which strikes me as weird - but I guess I'm glad I did, at least for the sake of closure.

The Fall of Chronopolis

Barrington J. Bayley The Fall of Chronopolis (1974)
As a reformed Who junkie, The Fall of Chronopolis piques my interest not least for how much Time Lord stuff it seems to have foreshadowed. Bayley patently wasn't the first to write about a time war with combatants erasing great swathes of enemy history - and I'm not even sure it was Fritz Leiber, come to think of it - but the quota of this material which has since been reincarnated within The Book of the War and all from which it was drawn seems significant - there's even a ruling entity identified as the Imperator. Okay, so Bayley may not have been the first, but he was possibly the first to wrap his time travelling combatants in pomp, ritual and pseudo-religious symbolism; and in case you're interested, I've checked, and the television Time Lords were still vaguely utopian Star Trek knock-offs with a thing for white plastic when this was written.

But anyway, who gives a shit? Let's talk about the novel.

Chronopolis probably isn't Bayley's greatest, but it's decent. The only female character is a victim figure who is raped on at least four occasions, which is troubling, but probably shouldn't be the focus of ensuing discussion about the merits of the novel in any more general sense, arguably being an issue of that which Bayley failed to include or address rather than what we actually have here.

The story runs that time travel has become so common as to blur most distinctions between past and present, with different eras reduced to what may as well be geographical locations, and all in the name of something acknowledged as God. This society is at war with the Hegemony, which is itself from the far future, represented in the present by the Traumatics, the equivalent of a Satanic sect. There are paradoxes and a lot of playing around with different kinds of time as means of accounting for the same, so it's pretty damn weird and often very, very confusing, but rewards the effort of hanging on and powering through the more bewildering passages; and in case you were wondering, it's all about predestination, free will and that sort of thing. So it's chewy, but mostly in a good way, excepting for having failed the Bechdel test so profoundly as to border on impressive.

London Fields

Martin Amis London Fields (1989)
Now I remember why I was supposed to avoid this one. All the characters are horrible and therefore lack relatability, or some other quality which people who don't actually read books doubtless regard as essential; and apparently Amis could learn a thing or two from Agatha Christie when it comes to plotting a murder mystery; and there are all those long, long words to consider…

It's all bollocks. Even in the event of relatability being an actual thing, the notion of these characters being horrible only truly works if you were expecting the cast of The Wizard of Oz, and whilst there's an argument to be had that Guy Clinch and Keith Talent are grotesques, I've actually known Keith Talent a few times, and mostly I quite like him for all that he's a bit of a cunt.

To start at the beginning, the story is that Nicola Six, a massively self-involved posh bird, foresees and orchestrates her own murder at the hands of a lover for reasons explained in the novel, albeit without yielding anything which could be distilled into a single tidy sentence. She's playing the sexual field, as is everyone else here, so it's probably going to be some crime of passion, leaving us with the question of whether it will be Guy or Keith; except not, because it doesn't really matter that much, this simply being the Christmas tree from which everything else is hung.

One might wonder how Amis came by the anthropological balls to write someone so resolutely of barely-working class stratum as Keith Talent whose dropped aitches and dedication to pub sports patently comes from something more immersive than watching a few episodes of EastEnders; and, for sake of qualification, I personally found Irvine Welsh writing about life amongst the betting shop clientele unconvincing and even slightly insulting. Amis, however, gets it absolutely spot on, even acknowledging the discomfort of the cheap holiday in someone else's misery with Sam Young, the author who is writing the book we're reading, hanging out with Keith, and trying not to let too much of himself or his alien values get in the way. In other words, it's complicated. Much of the narrative is a comment on this sort of anthropological exercise, notably the awful Crossbone Waters, the book within our book.

Amongst the most severely retarded of the critics seem to have been those taking issue with all the digressions, all that unfamiliar talky stuff going on in between the stage directions of someone walking across a room and then taking an object from a shelf. Woss 'e on abat nah? they ask. Woss'at got t'do wiv anyfink? Amazingly, all that extraneous word stuff is there to communicate the subject of the novel which, believe it or not, isn't primarily a murder mystery in the spirit of The Mousetrap. It's about determinism and free will, so far as I'm able to tell, with everyone set on a track seemingly leading to a particular inescapable destiny, much like the environmental collapse occurring in the background; and more than being subject to fate, the characters form the substance of their respective destinies - which I assume to be the reason for all the allusions to D.H. Lawrence, an author preoccupied with class and environment as inherent qualities of the individual, which is certainly true of Keith Talent. We tend to have forgotten about the approach of the millennium in 2019, but it was a big deal at the time.

The biggest surprises for me were firstly, just how funny this book is, albeit darkly funny and without cracking jokes; and secondly, how much of it reads like a significant influence on Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go, which similarly explores the end of days by chasing three archetypes along their respective intertwined destinies.

Peculiar Lives

Philip Purser-Hallard Peculiar Lives (2003)
At the risk of repeating myself, I sometimes find it quite difficult to maintain warm, fuzzy thoughts about Doctor Who fandom, which is awkward because I used to quite enjoy Doctor Who and would like to be able to continue to do so on some level without inadvertently finding myself reminded of the toxic idiocy practised by about 85% of the shitehawks who will inevitably turn up to pitch in at the faintest whisper of its name. When I say Doctor Who, I really mean the novels, and mostly - although not exclusively - the novels published after the show was cancelled but predating its resuscitation as an advertising franchise in 2005. As with Who itself, there was something progressive about those books, an exploration of relatively new territory, an expansion of horizons, and I vaguely recall someone suggesting that the New Adventures were intended to bring new science-fiction authors to the fore. The New Adventures ceased in 1997, but their momentum was sufficient to spawn entire series of related novels with the serial numbers filed off: the Bernice Summerfield books, Time Hunter, and of course Faction Paradox. This seemed like a positive development to me because I was quite keen to read more by the people who had brought us Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Death of Art, and others; but it seems that I've been out of step, and the thing Who fans really want is more Doctor Who, or anything which we can pretend is Doctor Who - cosy adventures in time and space reminding us of teatime all those years ago, an endless string of quirky time-travelling eccentrics having scrapes and solving crimes and occasionally cracking a joke which we'll all recognise as a cheeky reference to something which happened in episode three of The Dalek Masterplan.

Tee hee.

Did anyone here buy the adventures of the time-travelling police station? Me neither. It was like Dixon of Dock Green from when we were kids, and the building itself jumped backwards and forwards in time, and it was populated by these really barmy characters, yeah?

I have nothing specific against pulp adventures, or cliches, or corporate entertainment, or even things which - God help us - aspire to corporate entertainment, and it doesn't all have to be Crime and Punishment - which is handy because I find Dostoyevsky unreadable; but I despair at how few of those surfing this tsunami of increasingly repetitive time travel thrills and spills aspire to anything greater, and how the few who do tend to get lost amongst the many who just want to see what would happen if something a bit like the Daleks encountered something a bit like the Ice Warriors.

Time Hunter was born from a Doctor Who novella called The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahony and published by Telos Books. When the BBC reeled in all of its most lucrative licences, Telos elected to continue their series of novellas with the lead transferred to that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Honoré Lechasseur. I've read both The Cabinet of Light and now this one, and I still don't really understand what the deal is, why the title identifies him as a Time Hunter, or why I should care; but it doesn't matter because Telos always seemed to favour authors with some genuine ability to write, as opposed to simply publishing anything by anyone who liked Doctor Who a very, very lot.

Nothing if not ambitious, Philip Purser-Hallard's second novel takes on the eugenic elephant in the historical room of twentieth century science-fiction, daring - where many have preferred to mumble something about people being of their time before wandering off to see whether Neil Gaiman is still signing stuff - to draw attention to certain themes common to all those futuristic Gernsbackian supermen, and the Third Reich; and in a display of prowess bordering on the ostentatious, he writes it as a sort of sequel to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and writes it in a pitch perfect homage to Stapledon's style, and the bad guy is George Bernard Shaw in a false beard. So there's a lot which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given the subject, and yet the narrative is all nuance, not one slogan or generalisation, and a beautifully rendered and atmospheric period piece.

Practically speaking, the story falls somewhere between Wyndham's Chrysalids and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and, as befits both the subject and the genre, is mostly a discussion of morality, transcendence - a theme which runs through much of the author's other works - and how these relate to evolution and the mythology of the same. For the purposes of the reader who just really, really, really, really needs someone to have an adventure in time and space just like on the telly, this kind of leaves Honoré Lechasseur without anything much to do, arguably sidelined in his own novel, but with this being due to the novel's great success at doing what it sets out to do, no-one with a brain could reasonably object.

Even now, with Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy on shelves in actual high street book stores, he seemingly remains a best kept secret, but one day the reading public will surely catch up, and they'll go back to this one - if they can find a copy - and realise that it was obvious all along.

Nameless

Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham Nameless (2016)
Just to get it out of the way before anyone writes a tittering ten-volume slipcased comparison of the parallels, yes, I suppose this might be Grant Morrison revisiting H.P. Lovecraft because he saw Alan Moore do it; and I suppose the confessional we both liked the idea of creating a 'Lovecraftian' horror story without recycling H.P. Lovecraft, might indeed be suffixed with unlike certain other writers, not mentioning no names or nuffink; but otherwise, let's all just get over it. No conspicuously bearded Machiavellian allegories to see here, and aside from anything else, this might be one of the best things Morrison has done, possibly.

Oddly, more than anything, Nameless reminds me of Johan Harsted's 172 Hours on the Moon at least in terms of locale and atmosphere, although it's otherwise much better, obviously; and while it's a different story, arguably closer to all those films in which Bruce Willis saves the earth from collision with an asteroid, Nameless ticks quite a few of the same boxes as The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham. In fact, if you don't mind that we have Titans and Outsiders rather than Great Houses and the enemy, this is the closest we've had to a Faction Paradox comic book since Image's Lawrence Miles title went tits up back in 2003.

So what's it all about, Alfie?

We have an asteroid, possibly a chip off the old destroyed fifth planet, about to hit Earth, and which can only be understood in mystical terms, hence the astronauts covered in protective sigils; and it's fucking scary, and you'll just have to read it because that's all I'm going to give away. The art comes from another one of those guys who isn't quite all of the way there with his faces, but the whole is otherwise of such elaborate beauty that you don't mind in the least, and which almost gives the book the weight of something by Jean Giraud. The narrative is more like a piece of music than any conventionally linear scrape in space with rockets and monsters, and Morrison's afterword states this as having been intentional, which is nice because it works so well, doing that Nic Roeg thing of making sense despite that it feels like it shouldn't. There's also a heaping helping of mystic horseshit, but nothing which is allowed to get in the way of the story, and it all holds together beautifully without requiring that we skip to the reference section at the end of the book.

That said, I could have lived without the details borrowed from Mayan culture, presumably by way of Carlos Castaneda given the loose way in which terms such as tonal and nagual are tossed around regardless of original meaning in the actual language from which they derive; but the book works so well that I even got over that hump. Damn that Grant Morrison. Why can't they all be this good?

Seaton Point

Robert Dellar, Ted Curtis, Rob Colson etc.
Seaton Point (1998)
This is a collaborative novel cooked up between seven different authors, each presumably contributing a passage here, a passage there, editing each other's work and so on. The process of its creation hasn't exactly made for a smooth narrative, but then that's the whole point, relating more to oral traditions of storytelling because it is forgotten that the modern novel of single authorship came into being only in the modern era, as we are told in the introduction.

I thought it might be stranger than it was to read this now. Robert Dellar, who instigated this enterprise, was a good friend who recently passed on at the age of fifty-two, someone I've known for decades. It was odd to realise that I'd never read this book while he was alive, and when we last spoke and the subject came up he was surprised that he'd never got around to slipping me a copy. I think it was simply that my attention had been elsewhere when the thing saw print. I knew of it mainly through the involvement of Rob Colson, with whom I travelled to Mexico in 2005, and I've known all but two of the other writers in a social context at various points of our respective lives. So I suppose there has always been the worry that I might hate the thing for whatever reason.

Roughly speaking, Seaton Point captures the psychological landscape in which a few of us were living for much of the eighties, nineties, and beyond. I was never quite part of a gang, but a lot of my friends seemed to be people who had fallen into the orbit of the Brougham Road squatting community in Hackney, London - loosely coalesced around bands such as the Apostles and the Assassins of Hope and numerous fanzines. They were, I suppose, my Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, my beat poets, my Bromley contingent - but hopefully without too many of the wankier associations summoned by any of those references - so, even in 2017 with me living on a different side of the planet, these are probably my people in so much as I ever had people. Andy of the Apostles would have called us the dispossessed, which seems as good a term as any; and so Seaton Point is inhabited by those left behind, the horrible fuckers who couldn't fit in if they tried, those rejected as lacking redeeming or interesting artistic qualities even by those making arts council funded punk documentaries, the working class as we were known in less aspirational times, the nutters, the weirdos, the alkies, the transexual vampires...

The narrative lurches in and out of reality, much in the same way as reality itself tends to do if you're paying attention, and so we have drugs, sex, violence, toilet humour, and psychogeography drafted in to tell of an ancient demon imprisoned in the basement of a tower block, a man trapped in an elevator in the same surviving on mystic yoghurt dispensed from a spigot, and their bid for freedom. With seven authors at the wheel, there are a lot of characters flying around, not all of them entirely likeable and it's easy to get lost, but I'm not sure it matters whether or not one is able to keep track of every last name, because the point still works despite the confusion.

Blokey sat in flat 67, his earplugs partly protecting him from the onslaught of industrial electronic bollocks about fascist barbarian armies rolling across the icy wastes of Northern Europe. As one million decibels of tripe by Coil vomited mercilessly from the speakers, the dice man stroked the sawn-off shotgun lying across his lap as if it were a furry animal.

That's my favourite paragraph, and I suspect it came from Dellar given his generally poor regard of industrial electronic bollocks. I've  read a few things by Ted Curtis, notably the exceptional Darkening Light, as well as Rob Colson's brilliant - at least from what I can remember - Descent of a Man, which he really needs to get into print one of these days; so I recognise occasional elements which remind me of specific contributors, but the focus remains, as ever, on the story which may be taken as an explanation as to why everything is shit, if you like, or if you don't like, then there are plenty of chuckles, albeit often unusually dark chuckles. My first thought was that this is Rachel Redhead rewriting Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go as a sequel to Trainspotting, which as a recommendation should probably be taken all three ways, assuming you can appreciate that as a recommendation. Martin Amis is invoked in the introduction, although not in particularly glowing terms. I haven't actually read any Martin Amis, but I've read plenty of Will Self and I'm told it's the same thing; so if you like, this is Will Self with less public school and more diarrhoea blah blah Rabelais blah blah Hogarth blah blah Reader's Wives - I'm sure it can't be too hard to work out what I'm saying here; and it has the greatest closing sentence of any novel I've ever read, which I won't give away for obvious reasons.

Seaton Point is both horrible and brilliant, and arguably a record of an era of human experience presently getting airbrushed from history as the nostalgia industry grows and grows, replacing more and more of what actually happened with Stewart Maconie chortling away over how they changed the name of Opal Fruits to Starburst. In this sense it's probably also an important book, but you wouldn't want to say it to its face.

Weapons Grade Snake Oil

Blair Bidmead Weapons Grade Snake Oil (2016)
Here's another one for which I painted the cover, and I should probably also mention that I'm friends with Blair and he sought my opinion on an earlier draft of this novel, and also - no word of a lie - I used to deliver his mail back when I was a postman, although we didn't know each other at the time. Therefore it might be argued that my impartiality is somewhat compromised here. On the other hand it's not like anyone is paying me to write this, so screw you.

Anyway, you may notice at this juncture how I've turned a little red in the face, and I'm looking at my shoes whilst rocking from side to side as though suddenly having found myself in an embarrassing predicament. This is because I feel somehow obliged - possibly in the subconscious hope of countering any potential accusations of bias on my part - that I had my doubts when I heard Blair was writing a Faction Paradox novel; and mainly because I'd disliked his Señor 105 novella By the Time I Get to Venus to the point of it making me feel quite uncomfortable because it's always awkward when someone towards whom you feel well disposed produces something against which all your senses rebel. I'd rather not get into why I disliked it, but I vaguely recall having had a similar reaction to some short story or other, something in one of the Obverse collections; and an acquaintance who should probably remain anonymous - which shouldn't be too difficult given that I don't actually know his offline name - expressed a concern that Blair's book might attempt to make the Faction cool, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere with more skulls; and yes - that would be a bad thing.

On the other hand, Blair Bidmead's Now or Thereabouts, was the high point of the short story collection A Romance in Twelve Parts; although when he asked me to take a look at an early draft of what seemed to be called The 2nd Second, I nevertheless made that fearful gumph swallowing noise made by characters in Viz comic prior to the inevitable encounter with dad's slipper. Once I actually got to reading the thing my sighs of relief were of such force as to sweep several cats out into the yard. Whatever it was that had given me cause for doubt, he'd stopped doing it, and there was a more confident tone to the prose, and the ideas were good and the jokes were funny. Thank Christ for that, I thought.

Weapons Grade Snake Oil is better still, or at least I got more from it, which might also be something to do with my reading it as a proper book rather than as a first draft on a screen - I don't like reading from screens of any description. It's basically a heist novel, the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels of the Faction Paradox canon, I suppose, which I'll qualify by adding that I liked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, just in case that detail seemed ambiguous. That said, given how frequently Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels swerves into self-parody, I would imagine that writing this one must have been something of a balancing act, despite which, it skips along at a fair old pace without missing a step. Half of the novel revisits the Eleven Day Empire, the city built inside eleven days taken from the British calendar back in 1752, which is nice seeing as we haven't seen much of the city since Lolita devoured it whole in Lawrence Miles' The Shadow Play. Bidmead delves significantly into the Faction toybox with serious relish, not so much in trying to serve up a crowd pleaser as just for fun; and not saying previous novels in this series have been necessarily lacking in chuckles, but there's something quite joyous about Blair's approach, massive ideas flung hither and thither with reckless abandon, ideas which might seem patently fucking ridiculous under other circumstances cheerfully crayoned into the story and forced to behave themselves, sort of - the princess of Pluto who lives inside an elephant persuaded to take part in just one last perfect crime...

It's the kind of thing which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given all the obscure references which are there if you want them, which personally I didn't given that you'd have to pay me to watch an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures; but the lad done good, as they used to say at the football matches. It's the sort of writing Steven Moffat never quite manages, albeit in a different medium, because Blair makes the effort to actually do something with those massive ideas rather than just letting them sit there looking pleased with themselves. Oddly, in terms of tone, Weapons Grade Snake Oil is arguably the most Miles-ian contribution to the Faction Paradox series since the man himself was writing, but if that doesn't work as a recommendation, try Iain M. Banks with better jokes and less fannying around. Let's hope he has a few more like this up his sleeve.

The Indestructible Man

Simon Messingham The Indestructible Man (2004)
I was having a shitty day and I wanted comfort food, and then I remembered that there were still a couple of these old BBC Who novels I'd never got around to reading, and this one seemed a safe bet due to a vague memory of someone or other saying it was amongst the better efforts.

It isn't. At least I hope it isn't. It's been a while since I was obsessively buying a couple of these things every month, and while there have been a few stone cold classics which I've revisited and found to actually be humungously shit, I know there were some decent ones - Ghost Devices, The Taking of Planet 5, Christmas on a Rational Planet and so on, all of which I've revisited and found worth the effort; but - to get to the point - rose-tinted spectacles or not, I can't quite bring myself to believe that this represents anything but the lower end.

It's essentially Doctor Who vs. Captain Scarlet with Patrick Troughton dematerialising in the world once painted for us by Gerry Anderson through the magic of string puppets. To be specific, it's the world several years after the events of Gerry Anderson's UFO as retrofitted to Captain Scarlet continuity so that the saucer people from UFO were actually the Mysterons. In case it isn't obvious from the cover with Wendy Padbury's face photoshopped onto a tinsel-wigged Anderson dolly bird, there are problems with this whole concept.

Firstly, there's no real reason for Captain Scarlet fanfic to exist. It was fine as a kid's puppet show. Excepting maybe action figures, Dinky toys and annuals at Christmas, it never needed to be anything else.

Secondly, the serial numbers have been filed off for the obvious legal reasons so that, for example, SPECTRUM becomes PRISM, and Ed Straker's SHADO becomes Hal Bishop's SILOET - shadow, silhouette, and Straker was played by Ed Bishop - do you see? The problem with this is that it becomes irritating quickly, bordering on unbearable by the time we arrive at bootleg Thunderbirds continuity with Brains recast as Boffin - because apparently that name was the next best alternative - and Tracy Island as Sharon Island.

Seriously? Sharon Island? That's what you came up with?

Thirdly, with just the details described thus far, we might have been all right but for how fucking grim this world has become. Society has broken down, much like in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta - so we have death penalties, paramilitary law enforcement, slave labour, rape, murder, death, broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care. I vaguely recall an episode of Captain Scarlet where our boy is sacked from SPECTRUM and ends up pissed with a five o'clock shadow in some dive bar asking what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this just before he falls of his stool like the hopeless radgie cunt he has apparently become, all of which turns out to be a ruse designed to lull the Mysterons into a false sense of security; and while it was grim, this is considerably grittier and nastier; and children's television characters being raped whilst taking heroin was amusing up until about 1979 at the most recent; so just no.

Fourthly, none of the above would have been an insurmountable obstacle were it simply written a little better, like with a hint of something other than a book clicking its heels together and wishing it were on the box, and in doing so mistaking tension and pacing with that vague impersonation of a Lynda La Plante voiceover which people who'd much rather be writing screenplays tend to equate with hard-hitting drama; because books are just telly with no pictures innit.

At last he turned, taking in Alex Storm's pockmarked, brutal face. A face that hid a searing intelligence. Oh, and a psychotic homicidal personality.

Why does that need to be three sentences, particularly when only the first actually does what a sentence is traditionally supposed to do?

Oh, and a psychotic homicidal personality.

See, that's just an isolated description of something, and not even a very good one given that the pertinent psychosis hardly requires statement because there isn't really such a thing as a light-hearted homicidal personality; and the tale shifts point of view from page to page, so oh, and used as though we're party to actual thoughts is simply annoying and reads like an author trying too hard; or who just doesn't read much.

The air was sweet with decay.

Dude, learn to fucking write.

The thing with TV tie-in fiction, or indeed anything using material established in another medium, is that at least some of the labour is already done for the author, allowing them to invoke a familiar character rather than endure all the usual donkey work of writing a book - usually amounting to having Patrick Troughton exclaim oh my giddy aunt every few pages in this case, although admittedly The Indestructible Man seems more or less untroubled by that particular cliché. Unfortunately this also leads to authors not bothering to do the rest of the work they might normally be required to do when writing a novel, instead just pinning a series of name tags to some half-assed plot and trusting that it'll be screened as an episode of a television show in our respective mind's eyes, but probably with better effects. This is why I would say it's actually harder to write this kind of thing well than it is to generate original material, because hands up who remembers Stingray? does not in itself constitute world-building any more than Peter Kay asking the same question constitutes comedy.

Fuck it, why not...

Fifthly, it turns out that the surviving Tracy brother - or rather the surviving Sharon brother tee-hee - very much enjoys the music of Scott Walker, which is probably harmless, but nevertheless seems to relate to one of those aspects I always loathed about written Who fiction, namely the bit where the author gives us a nod to his fave bands, which is almost always either the Cure or the Smiths, and just reads like okay, I know I can't write but I'm doing my best, and I'm aware that I haven't quite got these plot details to add up to an even number, but hey! Who likes Love Cats? What a classic!

I get the feeling I'm expected to submit an imaginary high-five. This guy digs the Cure! Wow! How cool is that!? It never works for me. If anything, it has the opposite of the presumably desired effect because apparently I hate the music beloved of most Who authors - particularly the Cure and the Smiths - so from my perspective it's like having someone you don't know digging you in the ribs as prelude to an uncomfortable conversation falsely predicated on a shared love of Jonathan King and Skrewdriver.

Of course, none of the above will have mattered to a section of the readership, because the narrative, what it does, or how well it does it are subsidiary to the cast of characters, the boxes ticked, the continuity slot it occupies between The Space Pirates and The Menagerie, or the fact of it carrying a particular logo on the cover. For some, the quality of the story will be its least crucial aspect, which is I suppose how so much of this stuff has managed to get itself published over the years.

Yet, in spite of all of the above, The Indestructible Man isn't terrible, although I realise that you'll have to squint one fuck of a lot to read that as praise. It's an annoying book and I didst groan and wail and gnash my teeth with some frequency, but mostly it manages to keep from becoming boring, despite everything. I think the tragedy - if that isn't an overstatement considering that none of this really matters - is that there was probably a half-decent novel in here. It's hard to care about the characters, so oddly, their shoddy construction doesn't really get in the way so much as it might, and the narrative just about holds together as an averagely intriguing mystery while we try to work out just what the hell the Myloki formerly known as Mysterons actually are, knowing full well the answer will probably be a massive disappointment.

So there you go. The Indestructible Man was better than I suppose I expected in so much as that it hints at the potential to have been readable; but could have been worse is hardly a recommendation.

Count Zero

William Gibson Count Zero (1986)
It was the only one I hadn't read, and I have a feeling I may even have owned a copy once before without ever having got around to it, so despite everything I thought why not? The reason why not can be gleaned from the contents of the aforementioned everything - or at least everything I've read except Pattern Recognition, which is great - namely that whilst William Gibson wields a positively breathtaking turn of phrase and his sentences are frequently assemblages of great poetic beauty, his novels can be mystifyingly dull and incomprehensible. At least that's how I've found a few of them, and Count Zero is unfortunately in this tradition. His narrative is all about surface, fixating on the details of gadgets, gizmos, products, and labels, which initially makes for a fairly vivid read but gets repetitive after a while, particularly in combination with largely interchangeable personality-free characters whose job is seemingly to provide definition for the gadgets, gizmos, products, and labels. I suppose otherwise the book would just be a list of stuff.

As I've probably said in previous reviews of Gibson novels which I'm probably just rewriting because I can't be bothered to go back and read what I've already said, and in any case the same applies here, I suspect he's making some sort of point about the shared hallucination of society as an artificial construct held together only by everyone agreeing to play the game; and I suspect Gibson's cyberspace is a metaphor for this; as are the attendant references to voodoo and numerous loa which appear throughout this one, but not with quite the frequency or depth to make it as interesting as - just off the top of my head - Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go. On the other hand, I took the talking book version of Distrust That Particular Flavour - Gibson's collected essays as read by himself - out of the library recently, and he just sounded like some dribbling hipster burbling on about buying really rare Soviet wristwatches on eBay, so perhaps the focus on surface is really all there is to this stuff.

Surface was more or less all I could follow after the first fifty or so pages, that being the point at which I'd ceased caring who was who, what they were doing, or why. I made it to page two-hundred with forty left to go, then Mark Hodder sent me a few chapters of his next book so as to get a second opinion, and it looked about a billion times more engaging than this droning shite; and then David Bowie pegged it, and life suddenly felt too short to bother with Zero on the Clapometer.

Perhaps one day I'll give it another go and I will enjoy it a little more, but right now I just can't be arsed.

Head of State

Andrew Hickey Head of State (2015)
Full disclaimer: I painted the cover. I sort of know the author, and in fact he asked me if I wanted to read an earlier draft of this novel prior to publication - which I declined as I dislike reading off a screen and wanted to wait for the finished thing; and I get massive shout outs and nuff respeck on the closing page. My impartiality may therefore be somewhat open to question blah blah blah...

Fuck it. This is a great book, and I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with any of the above any more than it derives from the stark contrast of my having recently emerged from an agonising trawl through all four-billion chapters of Perdido Street Description - I mean Perdido Street Station.

Actually, to be honest, I passed on the offer of getting to read the earlier draft because I was a little worried that I wouldn't enjoy it and would thus find myself in the awkward position of disliking the work of someone I generally admire, and the entire internet would become an expanded version of Father Ted's increasingly uncomfortable encounters with novelist Polly Clarke, author of Bejewelled with Kisses. Andrew had sent me a few excerpts in the vague hope of providing some inspiration for the cover image, or maybe just for the sake of feedback, and I noticed the entire thing appeared to be written as a series of first person accounts, and that one of those accounts took the form of the self-conscious blog entries of a young journalist, somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries to my mind. It all seemed so heavy-handed that I really wasn't sure there was any advice I could give, for the same reason that I'm not sure I could really give any useful advice to China Miéville aside from write a better book. On the other hand, despite these misgivings, I've read Andrew's fiction before, and also his non-fiction which itself demonstrates a profound understanding of how fiction works, and his track record has been pretty fucking great, so I assumed and hoped it would all work out in the end with further rewrites, which it did and with knobs on.

I had a feeling that, regardless of the above, Head of State would have plenty going for it once polished up a bit, but I had no idea it would pupate into something quite so solid, quite so impressive as it has. Andrew wrestles prose with the skill of a master of many years standing, setting narratives against one another, lightly scenting passages with secondary and even tertiary levels of meaning, nesting stories within stories, even speaking directly to the reader without so much as a hint of either points or literary ability stretched beyond natural reach. It may help that behind all of the curtains, Head of State is a fairly simple story at least some of which is about the means by which that story is told, and the way in which the story is told actually constitutes a fairly essential plot detail. It's the kind of thing Grant Morrison has tried to do in comics on occasion, but here it works better, related with a somehow friendlier tone by an author who seems quite keen that the reader should understand what he is trying to say; and to further extend the analogy, of all the Faction Paradox novels published since This Town Will Never Let Us Go, in certain respects Head of State seems the thematically closest to the writing of Lawrence Miles, albeit a slightly happier Lawrence Miles who listens to the Beach Boys. I should probably stress at this point that Head of State doesn't read so much inspired by as in sympathy with. It's very much Hickey's own thing, and does much which eludes other writers, not least being that Rachel Edwards' somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries are actually supposed to be irritating and self-conscious and as such work perfectly within the context of the whole. Similarly impressive is our token conspiracy driven right-wing gun nut written as a rounded, believable, even sympathetic character rather than a check-list of hate-filled clichés driving around in an El Camino with Kiss on the tape deck. Andrew's powers of characterisation are such that even the most unpleasant characters speak to us on some level without need of the whining qualification of oh he's only racist because when he was just a kid... which is entirely consistent with what I understand to be Andrew's generally humanist view that the great majority of people are essentially decent in some respect, regardless of evidence to the contrary; and whilst we're here, his clear and erudite understanding of the American political landscape makes a refreshing change from the usual sub-Frank Miller bollocks.

Looking at the individual pieces, this is an incredibly ambitious novel, not least in terms of how it is written, and there's an awful lot which could have gone horribly wrong, but it's the tidiest piece of work I've read in some time.

The Synthetic Man

Theodore  Sturgeon The Synthetic Man (1950)
This being the second novel I've read by Sturgeon, I must conclude that biology, mutation, and outsiders were common preoccupations of his writing as this one also features a group of freaks trying to make their way in the world. It's been a while since I read More Than Human, and I can't actually recall much of it beyond this distinguishing feature and the fact of it being extremely well written, but the freaks of The Synthetic Man - the earlier novel for what it may be worth - have banded together for safety as part of a travelling side show. The pseudo-gothic freak show has become something of a cliché, and without really caring enough to look anything up, I suspect it's probably been trotted out by Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and others with some frequency - although I personally thought Lawrence Miles used it very well in Interference - but Sturgeon writes with such lively confidence that it feels like a new idea, which is pretty good going for something published over half a century ago.

Kiddo, as he is known, turns out to be something much stranger than the robot implied by the title - at least to me - as Sturgeon asks us to consider the possibility of there being another form of life here on Earth unlike anything with which we are familiar, thus far undetected because it has no effect on us, nor we on it. Further to this we get Kiddo growing up as female in order to elude the wrath of its misanthropic sideshow owner - not simply the bold use of a transgendered main character at a time when this would have appeared quite shocking to at least a few of the readers, but a main character who is transgendered for reasons of narrative and theme rather than as a simple example of the freakish.

Sturgeon writes well with the warmth and authority of someone who weaves tales, as opposed to simply filling pages and making a living from the pulps. For want of a better description it's van Vogtian surrealism communicated with the simple clarity of Ray Bradbury, and The Synthetic Man has been a real find. I really need to keep an eye open for more by this guy.

Warlords of Utopia

Lance Parkin Warlords of Utopia (2004)
Older readers may perhaps recall how when the Doctor Who television show was cancelled in 1989, never to return, Virgin publishing took it upon themselves to continue the series as a range of novels; and I'm almost certain I remember reading some suggestion of how this was also supposed to be a means of bringing exciting new voices to the field, new writers who might go on to greater things in the wider field of science-fiction. Sadly, it didn't really happen like that, given that those who went on to do anything in the wake of the New Adventures mostly ended up churning out yet more Doctor Who, which doesn't really count as greater things in the wider field of science-fiction.

No it doesn't.

Happily though, there were exceptions to this sweeping generalisation, Lance Parkin being one of them, which was nice given his having written some of the more interesting bits of post-televisual Who fiction. Warlords of Utopia was apparently formulated as a vehicle for yer man in the phone box, but ended up as part of Faction Paradox mythology as mapped out by Lawrence Miles and others, and I suspect may be the better novel for it. Whether by accident or design, it amounts to the biggest, most stupid idea you could possibly conceive hammered into a novel and forced to behave itself, with a premise rating at least eleven on the Destroy All Monsters scale: there are hundreds of alternate versions of history in which Rome never fell, all of which have teamed up for a massive multiversal pagga with all the versions of history in which Hitler won the war, happily allowing for at least one scene featuring the Council of Hitlers, hundreds of iterations of Chaplin's stunt double all ranting away beneath one of those impossible domes that Albert Speer never quite got around to building. If it isn't immediately obvious why this alone should qualify Warlords of Utopia as a wonderful thing, you may be dead and should consult medical advice at your earliest convenience.

Actually, it could all have gone horribly wrong, particularly when you consider the dog's dinner that is All New Doctor Who Adventure Time with those tales of similarly preposterous ambition which may as well have been episodes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for all the dignity of their telling, Billie because we want to, because we want to Piper turning into Q from fucking Star Trek and all that bollocks; but no - the golden rule is, I would suggest, if you're going to do something really stupid, then it's best to take it extremely seriously, which is what we have here.

Apparently homaging Robert Graves' I, Claudius - which I really must get around to reading - Parkin writes with the tremendous weight and authority of an historical novelist whilst maintaining a perfect balance between keeping it moving along without tipping over into anything too lurid, no mean feat given the presence of the Council of Hitlers. Not only this, but on top of everything he even instils the novel with purpose beyond narrative acrobatics and gratuitous adventure. Although unfamiliar with Graves, I briefly wrestled with Thomas More's Utopia, at least enough to recognise shared themes and related devices; except this one's a lot more interesting than Utopia, planting its ideal society on firmer ground in acknowledging that there can be no such thing as a truly ideal society, only an approximation; and at least offering a consistent rationalisation of the more contentious aspects of slavery, criminal justice, and expansionism of such a society allowing us to read without too much wincing. By comparison, More's book occasionally has the tone of a small boy insisting he saw a dinosaur.

This world has fallen to the barbarians.

I realised this with such a start that Angela asked what was wrong. That had been Rome's ancient struggle. We had triumphed against the tribalism, intolerance and illiteracy of those around us. Provinces like Britannia had been given cities, roads, and a written language. We had lifted them from savagery. What would have been left behind if Rome had ... gone away? Ruins. These Britons had tried to comprehend the grandeur that was Rome, they had done their best. They had innovated in places, but this had led to the creation of dangerous vehicles and ugly buildings. They had embraced the Christian religion which teaches that the world is a broken, sinful place but the next life will be better.

References are well made without labouring any point so much as to suggest anyone winking at the reader - Plato's Republic, which is of course pertinent to the notion of an ideal Rome surrounded by variations on its theme, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle at the other end of the scale, and of course the Doctor Who and the Iron Legion comic strip to at least give the majority of folks reviewing this something upon which to focus and make tee hee noises before deciding that it took too long for us to find out who the baddies were.

Sorry. Did I sound a bit dismissive there?

I remember this novel being good, and it has improved with each reading. This is my third time, and I would say that Warlords of Utopia is exceptional - one of the best and strangest and yet most convincing alternative histories I've read - a narrative pie fight at a chimp's tea party which dares to take itself seriously, and comes through without so much as a hair out of place.

Of the City of the Saved...

Philip Purser-Hallard Of the City of the Saved... (2004)
For anybody unfamiliar with this one, the setting of the title is a city the size of a spiral galaxy existing beyond the end of time wherein all the human beings who ever lived - and even some of the fictional ones who didn't - find themselves resurrected to eternal life. Neanderthals coexist with cybernetic posthumans, ancestors with distant descendants, and death is only a memory because everyone is both immortal and immune to injury whilst they remain within the city limits. It's heaven allegorised as science-fiction, an idea already tackled in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books, apparently, although not having read them I couldn't really say how well they compare. On the other hand, I think I've read this three or four times now, and it's frankly fucking brilliant, as acknowledged by Lawrence Miles, editor of the Faction Paradox novels and never one to heap praise upon the undeserving, when interviewed by Andrew Hickey on Resonance FM's Reality Check podcast:

I am going to blow my own trumpet here, because I think I was quite a good writer of the Doctor Who books, but as an editor, I really, really came into my own. Phil Purser-Hallard wrote what was basically an eight out of ten book, and I said no, do that bit different, do that bit different, and turn it into a nine out of ten book. I am possibly more proud of the fact that I edited Of the City of the Saved... than I am of any of the books I actually wrote myself, because although I wrote a lot of books that I think, looking back, are quite good - that was the book which was already good, and I can't say that about any of my own books, that any of them were really good, because I look at them now and go yeah, I could do that better. [Of the City of the Saved...] was my proudest achievement.

Rightly so, I would suggest; but before we lose sight of the fact that this novel is already built upon one of the most ludicrous premises imaginable in terms of how improbably distant its setting is removed from any familiar, definitively experienced environment, it should also be remembered that here we have cameos from resurrected fictional characters, and a story the size of a galaxy told from fifteen or sixteen very different viewpoints, and Philip K. Dick himself shows up thinly disguised as a character named Rick Kithred.

By rights, this should have been the biggest, most disastrous soufflé in literary history, a deck of cards Eiffel Tower erected in the path of a hurricane, a 250 page kick me sticker, and yet not only does it hold together beautifully, the sheer scale of such an unlikely triumph accounts in part for why it works. There's a saying about the common problem of debut novels being authors who try to do far too much, and this is of course a prime example, except the basic ideas are so beautifully worked as to yield a story which seems simply tightly packed with wonders as diverse as its setting - possible evidence for the quality of the material being the continuation of the story in more recent Obverse anthologies edited by the author.

Ridiculous ambition is rarely in itself the problem so much as writers whose ideas are much bigger than the scope of their ability to communicate the same cough cough Stephen Moffat blowing up the fucking universe every five bleeding minutes which happily isn't a problem because Philip Purser-Hallard writes with the confidence and ability of someone who clearly loves his medium and greatly enjoys his art.

Thus far, I've seen only one review attempt to identify problems with this book - namely that appreciation is too greatly reliant on foreknowledge of the characters involved, and so it becomes a bit tiresome spotting all the cameos by resurrected celebrities. Even aside from the fact of Of The City of the Saved... being published as one of a series of loosely interconnected titles - which you would have to be an idiot to miss - I don't really buy the first point at all, or find the novel lacking any vital piece of information which may aid in either the reader's understanding or pleasure; and secondly I think I missed almost all of the star guests anyway, so that aspect made very little difference to me.

Having read Philip K. Dick until he was coming out of my arse - if you'll pardon the repulsive simile - or at least coming out of a sort of notional second century arse that's since been eclipsed by the iron rectums of imperial Rome - Purser-Hallard's depiction of said author is a joy, immediately familiar and entirely justified. Also, I'm fairly certain the possibly underused Dedalus character is a homage to James Joyce given the form taken by his narrative. There were other characters whom I suspect may have been borrowed from elsewhere, but nothing that impacted on the wonderfully florid momentum of the narrative, at least not for me. The conclusion, as Daphne Lawless has pointed out, echoes that of Robert Graves' Claudius novels, which I assume was entirely deliberate given the novel being, amongst other things, a discussion of free will and security as mutually exclusive in an environment which may as well be heaven; but otherwise you'll have to argue that one amongst yourselves.

It does a whole lot of fascinating and different ontological things, and I'm not going to sit here listing all of them when it would be easier for you just to read the book; but I will say that it does them with a smile on its face - and a smile quite unlike that slightly off-putting smirk of Douglas Adams congratulating himself - and it does them with the conviction of an author who knows what he's talking about, as opposed to just throwing in a few pseudo-religious allusions for the sake of texture. Even on top of everything else, I've a feeling this novel may also offer some form of commentary on our contemporary culture in which nothing is ever quite lost, and the past remains forever with us - a variation on William Gibson's idea of there no longer being any such thing as the future, which in turn feeds into Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go. This may equally well be simply a pattern I've read into the text, perhaps the inevitable crosstalk thrown up by so many rhythms all running consecutively.

This is the sort of environmentally bizarre novel I always hoped Larry Niven would write, but sadly he never quite got there; and whilst we're making free with the comparisons, we might also consider the very best of Iain M. Banks, the previously mentioned Douglas Adams, and even a touch of Alastair Reynolds or maybe Charles Stross, but in each case without whatever qualities have kept their books from creeping up into my own personal top ten. Of the City of the Saved... remains among my favourite science-fiction novels of the last few decades, and Lordy I wish there were more of such calibre.

Burning with Optimism's Flame

Jay Eales (editor) Burning with Optimism's Flame (2012)
Despite my salivating each time some new Faction Paradox commodity extends itself into noumenal reality, it's taken me an age to get around to this one, and partially because it first appeared as I was up to my eyeballs in writing Against Nature. Initially I was cautious on the grounds of fearing there might be some short story coincidentally duplicating one or more of my own vague ideas or themes, and so I wished to avoid the collection as a source of possible influence - not least due to having heard that Daniel Ribot's La Santa Muerte was not only set in Mexico but would also feature a certain Death Goddess who briefly turns up in my own extended leaflet. Since then it's just been a case of it slowly rising to the summit of a mountainous to-be-read pile.

I had been primed with slightly lowered expectations by internet mumblings along the lines of it's not as good as the last one, is it? - referring of course to 2011's A Romance in Twelve Parts, the previous Faction Paradox collection. Thankfully and possibly inevitably said mumblings translate to it's not identical to the last one, is it?, for the tone and focus of this anthology is somehow quite different. It feels more like an extension into mainstream science-fiction writing, by which I mean Isaac Asimov and all of those guys, as opposed to Babylon fucking 5 or any of those Doctor Who affiliated Short Trips collections but with more skulls. Jay Eales, it turns out, really knows how to pull an anthology together, as distinct from just asking a load of mates to come up with stories. I'm still not entirely sure how the title figures in all of this, whether it refers to some overarching theme I've failed to spot, but whatever the book does, it does it exceptionally well for the most part.

As has probably been said by someone or other, the beauty of Faction Paradox is that it really doesn't have to be about Faction Paradox to the point that no-one has yet really demonstrated that it's definitively about either the shared universe created by Lawrence Miles and others, or even just something so vague as a certain aesthetic. Some of the connections made here are accordingly very tenuous indeed, but it doesn't really matter because the only legitimate reason to pick up a book so far as I'm concerned is in anticipation of good writing, which is what you get.

Admittedly I found the opening stories a little variable - either too subtle for their own good or a little closer in spirit to Neil Gaiman than I generally like in one case, although they're all decent in their own ways. Nevertheless, the contrast - at least for me - when I came to Kelly Hale's contribution was almost shocking - a woman apparently incapable of writing a dull sentence whose work exudes the sort of effortless class that draws the reader in without the need for any obvious narrative hooks; and this quality recurs throughout the collection making the necessity of clear ties to some unifying mythology entirely peripheral.

Stephen Marley's All the Fun of the Fear, for one example, seems particularly tenuous as Faction Paradox literature, but if you can't appreciate a story in which the moon is seen to appear in the heavens wearing a hat, then maybe books aren't for you after all. Similarly sickeningly impressive are contributions from Simon Bucher-Jones, Jonathan Dennis, Sarah Hadley, and Philip Purser-Hallard all of which inspire questions as to why these four aren't yet at the stage of finding themselves buried in gold by eager publishers in the style of Edifis at the end of Asterix and Cleopatra.

They each respectively pack enough ideas for a decent novel into short form; and to concede a couple of specifics, Remake / Remodel begs the question of whether we might ever expect a full-length Faction Hollywood book, and Philip Purser-Hallard's wonderful ecclesiastically themed De Umbris Idearum only makes me resent the time and brain cells I wasted on Mary Doria Russell's Godawful Sparrow, all the more demonstrating as it does that strong religious themes can make for elegant science-fiction in the right hands.

I seem to have ended up gushing again, which can probably be safely dismissed as symptomatic of a lack of impartiality on my part. This book hasn't actually changed my life, and may not be the greatest collection I've ever read; but nevertheless it takes its subject mythology in a variety of unexpected directions, and does so with consistent style, and is as such difficult to fault; even though I didn't get to do the cover. Mutter. Mumble.

Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle (1967)
This one has been on my mind for a few months now, but it was re-reading Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go which brought it to the top of the pile, there being some major themes shared by the two.

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by intangible as well as tangible things, which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

Which might be deemed to account for:

'I just think it's dangerous, that's all,' Valentine tried to explain, although he suspected he wasn't going to make much of an impression. 'You know there are kids now who grow up copying the TV ads? That's just, you know... how they see themselves. They don't want to be like people, they just want to be like the characters in the ad breaks. That's how they want to look and dress and... everything.'

Debord and the Situationist International came to my attention through a series of articles in Vague magazine, way back whenever the hell that was - not particularly engrossing articles, and Vague spent way too much time banging on about the sodding Sex Pistols Jubilee boat trip and Genesis P. Orrible, but I apparently absorbed enough for a few of the basic ideas to sink in; at least enough for connections to be made when The Apostles released their Smash the Spectacle EP - possibly the greatest punk rock record ever committed to vinyl - and when Will Self, Alan Moore, and Stewart Home all began dabbling in psychogeography.

Society of the Spectacle is, I suppose, an expansion of certain ideas generally associated with Karl Marx, although it could be argued that the Situationist International itself was as much about art as politics, or at least philosophy. Marx himself developed a fairly profound understanding of the mechanism by which society works to the point that ideology may seem a slightly limited term when applied to the larger body of his ideas. Marxist analysis might itself be deemed to go beyond politics, or at least party politics, and in many cases serves to explain the mechanism of society, and particularly capitalist society, and as such may as well be regarded as a soft science. Debord expands and refines Marxist analysis as it applies to the increasingly media-driven world of the 1960s and beyond; and for the most part it seems so well observed as to be alarming in so much as it's hardly a rosy picture which is painted; but then it is almost certainly better to understand a problem than not, particularly if we are ourselves a part of that problem.

Debord suggests that human society, with so few exceptions as to make no difference, must be viewed as spectacle, the spectacle being a representation of that society, specifically not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images - consensus reality, if you prefer, in which everything is defined as commodity. As consumers of commodity, we are separated by the spectacle, deprived the possibility of the common experience which would allow for contemplation of anything external to the spectacle. It's a fairly simple idea, and yet it's surprising how difficult it can be to truly express all of its subtleties. Debord did well, although Society of the Spectacle does require that one pay attention. I found some of the later points mystifying, although online testimonials seem to suggest this edition printed by Black & Red of Detroit might not be the best translation available.

The Situationist International could be viewed as an artistic response to the spectacle, a sort of derailing through acts falling somewhere between the Dadaist and the revolutionary which, distancing themselves from established and traditionally rational artistic narratives, defy commodification and strive to expose the spectacle for what it is, or summink. Debord's book is therefore a description of the territory, or even the canvas, and is as such an analytical rather than creative tool in respect to the more definably artistic currents of the movement.

The problem with all this is of course that the spectacle by its inherent nature reduces everything to commodity, including that which sets itself against the spectacle; and so the revolution is televised, and probably on pay-per-view, and thus rendered as sterile as that against which it was initially opposed:

Spectacular consumption which preserves congealed past culture, including the recuperated repetition of its negative manifestations, openly becomes in the cultural sector what it is implicitly in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable. The flagrant destruction of language is flatly acknowledged as an officially positive value because the point is to advertise reconciliation with the dominant state of affairs - and here all communication is joyously proclaimed absent. The critical truth of this destruction - the real life of modern poetry and art - is obviously hidden, since the spectacle, whose function is to make history forgotten within culture, applies, in the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means, the very strategy which constitutes its core. Thus a school of neo-literature, which simply admits that it contemplates the written word for its own sake, can present itself as something new.

It has been pointed out by its critics that the Situationist International is itself only a commodity and Situationism now amounts to flash mobs and hidden camera shows. This reduction of signal to noise can be seen in examples like that of psychochronography, the invention of a Doctor Who fan and self-published author who presumably decided that the Situationist concept of psychogeography held just the right sort of pseudo-intellectual weight to be applied to analysis of a children's television serial. Psychogeography being the deduction of narrative from physical space, the premise of psychochronography is therefore inherently absurd, purporting to deduce meaning from that which already exists exclusively as meaning, which not only leaves us with yet more overreaching spectacular juvenilia we really don't need, but serves to further clog up cultural bandwidth by the reduction of analysis itself to mere packaging.

None of this should make any difference to that which is observed in the Society of the Spectacle providing one is able to read without too much crosstalk of the kind described above; and I would suggest that as analysis it remains as relevant as ever; and whilst I see no value in placing Debord's book on a pedestal, it should be read, and it deserves better than to be remembered as a footnote to lesser works.

This Town Will Never Let Us Go

Lawrence Miles This Town Will Never Let Us Go (2003)
This potentially could have been one of the greatest novels ever written, or at least one of my own personal all-time favourites, and I mean in terms of top three rather than merely a right ripping read. This Town Will Never Let Us Go should have ideally fallen somewhere between William S. Burroughs and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 - albeit Slaughterhouse 5 had it focussed on culture rather than war; and it comes so close. Rather than conceding to chapters, it divides into six hours, each subdividing into sixty real time minutes of narrative, and its probably happy coincidence that these six groups of sixty invoke a sum perspective of 360°, like a pack of cards thrown into the air landing in such a way as to tell a story, and not only the right story, but the only story they could possibly tell. That anyone could mistake this for anything so crude as the Doctor Who spin-off it's okay to lend to your friend who likes Grant Morrison is both profoundly depressing and proves the novels central point about the reduction of complexity to a series of meaningless soundbites; although I suppose in all fairness there's so much going on that it may take a few reads to appreciate its subtleties.

To start at the beginning, or at least a beginning, one detail of Lawrence Miles' Faction Paradox mythos centres upon the notion of a War in heaven fought by powers we would be unable to understand, and that some of these powers, fearing what humanity may one day become, have sterilised human culture around the beginning of the twenty-first century, eliminating our potential for progress and thus resulting in what you now see as the world outside your window, or more accurately, the world as seen on your television screen - all meaningless wars, crap boy bands, and hamburgers. Faction Paradox itself is, I suppose, Miles' notional Sex Pistols - if that isn't too liberal an analogy - presenting the possibility of opposition to this ghost point of humanity, as he terms it.

Faction Paradox has ostensibly been here since the start of the universe. This is why the posters seem so familiar, and not just because you saw them on your way home from a club while you were still off your face, not just because the blacks, whites and glaring reds smashed their way into your impressionable skulls while you didn't know what you were doing. Faction Paradox is all about history, about breaking a military deadlock that's been around forever, and if it hasn't been around forever yet then that's the way it'll seem soon.

I don't see much of a Philip K. Dick influence in Miles' writing, although it may be a thematic relative, and both authors share more or less the same archetypal enemy, namely entropy, the forces which would reduce everything to gubbish or kipple or grey static; or in this case, human culture as a serpent endlessly eating its own tail. So not only does This Town Will Never Let Us Go strive to be something more than a science-fiction novel, it could be argued that it's not even fiction in the strictest sense, such is its documentary quality:

These supermen, these great empire-builders, these wonderful people capable of fighting battles which intersect with the town in such a casual fashion... if they can destroy individual buildings from a distance of a billion, trillion miles, or cause an individual to be struck down by lightning without ever leaving their homes, then why does the War exist at all? Why these "rockets", these things which tear open the pavements and leave such huge, gaping wounds in the sides of pizzerias?

Again, the only answer is that the War requires it. It's often said that the War is in some way about history, about the way it shapes the future, about the design it leaves imprinted on the face of the world. Why bomb the squares? Why send the missiles through the streets, burning away any pedestrian or vehicle that might get in the way?

Because otherwise, how would anybody know there was a War, at all?

I say documentary because in terms of actual content, it's surprising how little of the narrative serves the framework by which the discussion is supported. That is to say that it's there if you want it, and to provide a semblance of order, but the narrative is secondary to what is being said, hence the occasionally ludicrous - or at least almost entirely mythic - details such as Miss Ruth in her celestial tower of unlabelled video cassettes, or Valentine's symbolic voyage into the underworld as a weird inversion of the myth of Orpheus, all conducted in the spirit of what ultimately may be taken as a quest for meaning:

'I just think it's dangerous, that's all,' Valentine tried to explain, although he suspected he wasn't going to make much of an impression. 'You know there are kids now who grow up copying the TV ads? That's just, you know... how they see themselves. They don't want to be like people, they just want to be like the characters in the ad breaks. That's how they want to look and dress and... everything.'

The cast of characters seems initially problematic, all being conspicuously young and lacking significant experience beyond that typical of any members of their age group who understands the world almost exclusively through television - in other words the same boring fuckers who turned up in all those Doctor Who books time after time to ask what do we do now?; except, I guess that is partially the point, or at least that less generic characters may have got in the way of the story. These are youthful people, not fully formed and still learning the rules presented in contrast to a future without possibilities, change, or anything too divergent from that which appears in the media for the sake of a story.

There is a danger this all could have come across as being a bit too pleased with itself for its own good, like one of William Gibson's commentaries on the superficiality of modern media which were never actually so interesting as that which they criticised - thinking mainly of his earlier novels here, by the way - and I presume this comparison may not be entirely arbitrary given the reference to sky the colour of television near the beginning of the third hour, a perhaps deliberate echo to the increasingly mythologised opening sentence of Neuromancer. If occasionally skating dangerously close to the edge, Miles nevertheless largely avoids the pitfalls of self-conscious post-modernism by occasionally taking the piss out of either himself, or at least our expectations:

You take a family heirloom, any heirloom, say something passed down by your grandfather. You take it back in time and you give it to your grandfather when he was a child, so he can pass it down to you. Where does the heirloom come from, who makes it in the first place, insoluble conundrum, yaddah yaddah yaddah, God in Heaven even pointing out that it's tedious is tedious. (Metacliché: something so drab that it can't even be safely deconstructed any more).

Where does this leave Miles, one might wonder. Stood on thin ice, I suppose, as a novel which seemingly aspires in part to the directness of a pop song - and actually uses the term pop song without irony - stretches to the length of a sprawling concept album. It's not so much that Miles' observations lack truth as that they occasionally seem to lack perspective, apparently deriving from the views of someone with their nose pressed to one specific screen, and so that which proposes to take an apparently global view of culture, comes across as ironically parochial in some respects, for example:

There are things they've forgotten. They've forgotten that for every human being who worships a starlet, there are two who loathe her beyond measure.

This in reference to the rise and fall of Tiffany Korta, the pop star at the centre of the novel, the human sacrifice I suppose. It's not that she doesn't get the job done in terms of narrative, but comments such as the above define a focus which will only work for a limited group of people rather than, I would argue, culture as a whole, because for every three people with a strong opinion on someone resembling a conflation of Shakira and Christina Aguilera, there are another twenty who couldn't give a shit, and thirty who've never heard of her. I would suggest that culture as a coherent whole is too big to be one thing, and if it were, would be optionally dominated by no strong opinion either way and none of the above, so with the best will in the world, Tiffany Korta is reduced to the level of a conversation about a 1970s television show, which seems inconsistent to her role in the story. It probably doesn't help that as we enter the fifth hour certain aspects of the narrative suggest an understanding of culture in which the story of the Sex Pistols were accurately encapsulated by The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. There's a certain naivety which isn't quite concealed by the arch commentary.

'I used to belong to this group,' he says. 'This... kind of... revolutionary group. I thought it was revolutionary. When I was seventeen.'

'Everything is, when you're seventeen,' says Inangela the great wit and prophet.

Yes, exactly, although I'm still not sure any of this necessarily diminishes the sum total of the book which, even without the precise nature of the events described in terms so clear as those dedicated to their effect, and even with the potential cynicism of reducing human behaviour to a pattern of sentiment and habit imposed upon impermanent matter, still does what it set out to do with a fairly satisfying conclusion. It also leaves a somewhat pessimistic aftertaste, mainly because of the nature of that to which it sets itself in opposition, spectacle and hysteria:

Their ability to take new risks and think new thoughts is diminished, for fear that they'll make it happen again, or perhaps bring on something even worse. Words vanish from the English language. Certain ideas become unspeakable. The world becomes less complex, and as it becomes less complex the probability of anything this remarkable taking place again is reduced. And so on and so on, until all things are equally flat and secure and no thought can be tolerated at all.

I began this, my third or fourth re-read, roughly convinced of This Town Will Never Let Us Go as being amongst the greatest novels ever written, at least that I've read, which admittedly may not be saying much. Absorbing a lot more detail this time around, so far as I can tell, I'm more aware of its possible failings, in spite of which I think I've probably got more out of it too.

Oh bollocks. I can't deny it. Warts and all, this remains a truly phenomenal novel.