Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

Solaris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Masque of a Savage Mandarin

Philip Bedford Robinson Masque of a Savage Mandarin (1969)
I bought this specifically because Mark Hodder ordered me to do so. Read this, he barked on my facebook page, it's mental! I'm paraphrasing, but he communicated this recommendation with such conviction that I could only shrug, order a copy from Amazon, and hope that he hadn't been posting whilst three sheets to the wind.

Masque of a Savage Mandarin is the work of an author who otherwise wrote only text books about computers, and does indeed seem to be one of those lost masterpieces you always hear about, just as Mark Hodder said it would be. It's science-fiction in so much as it probably wouldn't quite fit into any other category, but shares some common features with earlier allegorical novels such as Huysman's Against Nature*, or even the work of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and those guys. The Mandarin of the title is an enlightened individual - at least on his own terms - one who seeks to elevate a neighbour by experimenting on him, by destroying both the man's ego and the societal conditioning which limits his behaviour, effectively performing a lobotomy by means of a pseudo-scientific machine which sends invisible rays through the apartment wall that divides them.

It's darkly comic, thoroughly engaging, and exceptionally well-written - so well-written that the fact of this being Robinson's only novel is baffling. I suppose one distinguishing feature of greatness is knowing to say nothing when you've already said it all, which is at least consistent with the quality of this solitary work. When I say comic, I mean to invoke the kind of wry humour associated with Peter Cook or Tony Hancock, whom I name because Masque of a Savage Mandarin seems similarly tied to its era, and might even be read as a distant, more philosophical relative to Hancock's The Rebel in some respects, not least in its pursuit of the absurd. It appears to represent a response to the decade in which it was written, and specifically to the then recently popularised notion of humanity on the verge of some great evolutionary surge, a mystic revelation to be brought forth in all that stuff about the Age of Aquarius, whatever that was. The Mandarin is in some small way attempting to force this great evolutionary surge on his hapless neighbour, but of course destroys the man in the process, the foundation of his aspiration being built upon an illusory understanding of the world. At least that's how it seemed to me, and it's a lot funnier than I've made it sound.

This really is a wonderful book, and I have no idea why I should only have heard of it this year.

*: As distinct from the one I wrote which is available here and you need to buy right away, unless you've already bought it in which case you probably need a second copy by now; and in case you're "waiting for the paperback" (as were a number of my friends who obviously were no longer quite so close as to bother reading the fucking link), this is the paperback. If you can't be arsed, just say so for fuck's sake. Great news, Loz - I'll definitely want one when the paperback comes out blah blah blah... wankers. Consider yourselves off my Christmas card list, fuckers.

The Silent Thunder Caper

Mark Hodder The Silent Thunder Caper (2014)
Just to get it out of the way, I had some initial doubts about this one. Aside from my being pretty much a stranger to detective fiction in general, the somewhat cartoony cover just didn't inspire confidence, which I realise is probably a facile observation but it would be stupid to deny that cover art has no influence on my initial impression of a novel. Happily, holding a physical copy in my hand dispels all doubts, it being a pleasantly chunky doorstop of a hardback, beautifully put together and reminding me of the Dean & Son hardback children's editions of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and other classics my grandfather used to buy for me as a child in a sadly premature effort to introduce me to culture; and the cover works very nicely out here in the physical universe, and in a way which it doesn't on a screen for some peculiar reason.

As for detective fiction and the possibility of me being out of my depth, I dipped a toe into an anthology of Sexton Blake material some months back, most of which I enjoyed, so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, and not least because it's written by Mark Hodder - he who once so cruelly poured admittedly eloquent and descriptive scorn upon my overachieving sphincter back during our college days, despite my defence of it having been a bad pint, or something.

Anyway, down to business: Sexton Blake as some readers may already know is the star of a long running detective serial of over a hundred's years vintage, now under the wing of Obverse Books. Roughly speaking, he's the Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid of a punch-up, but the more you read, the more he begins to feel very much his own distinct character. Mark Hodder, having been a fan of Blake for a long time and curator of Blakiana, the dedicated website, was a great choice as author to the first of what will hopefully be a long-running series. Even aside from the sort of attention to detail he brings to the regular cast of Blake, Tinker, Mrs. Bardell and others, his Burton & Swinburne novels have already shown him to be a thorough and expressive hand when it comes to period pieces of this kind. The Silent Thunder Caper strikes a fine balance, perfectly evoking the atmosphere of a time in which even the humble telephone was relatively new-fangled, achieving nostalgic effect without parody, and somehow avoiding any suggestion of affectation - the sort of thing you get when a nineteen-year old reads himself some Lovecraft and decides to have a go. Most surprising of all - at least to me - is how happily The Silent Thunder Caper sits in two places at once, constituting both solid Blake and a great Mark Hodder novel with the sort of political convolutions, elaborate plotting, and earthy humour which have served the Burton & Swinburne books so well. As ever, Hodder delivers an accomplished and thoroughly classy narrative, and anyone who has ever enjoyed his superior pedigree steampunk will find a lot to love here.

If not for the sake of comparison but nevertheless serving as such, this hardback also reproduces G.H. Teed's The Wireless-Telephone Clue from an issue of Union Jack first printed in 1922, an earlier Blake story serving as introduction for some of the characters of The Silent Thunder Caper. Teed seems to have been generally acknowledged as one of the best Sexton Blake authors, and his tale sits quite comfortable alongside Mark Hodder's continuation as both complement and contrast with a narrative which could probably have been condensed to a couple of pages in terms of incident, yet remains engrossing for a hundred or more.

I'm pleased and genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

Infernal Devices

K.W. Jeter Infernal Devices (1979)
I sometimes prepare myself for a book by taking a look at its online reviews, a habit which isn't always as useful as it might be, given that the worst aspect of any cultural trend will almost always be its stupid fucking fans; and so it transpires that the details we need to recall here are that K.W. Jeter invented steampunk, and Infernal Devices is the very first steampunk novel because it's written by the man who invented it, and steampunk is Victorian science-fiction and H.G. Wells is the most famous steampunk man, and Infernal Devices isn't very good because it isn't proper steampunk and doesn't have a description of a polished brass computer every five fucking pages.

Whilst Jeter certainly coined the term steampunk, I suppose Infernal Devices as where it all started makes sense if one indubitably finds one's probiscis applied as though with some fixative to the surface of that most delightfully steampunky diversion, the screen of the zoetrope upon which one may view really brilliant shows about steampunk on the Discovery Channel, or perhaps even Mr, Zuckerberg's most marvellous internet, as opposed to, you know - reading a sodding book. Even without invoking the mighty pen of Moorcock, there was even a fucking steampunk comic strip published prior to this, namely Bryan Talbot's eminently readable Luther Arkwright, but never mind because oooh look, a steampunk Dalek, cogs, brass and pistons, handlebar moustachioed computers named Montague tee hee...

Anyway, I've always sort of wondered about Jeter, what with him being so much a buddy of Philip K. Dick as to end up as one of the characters in VALIS; whilst at the same time being put off by the knowledge of his having written sequels to Blade Runner, presumably meaning the shit film rather than the superior novel from which it was crudely rendered.

I can see why Infernal Devices wasn't such a hit with at least the more picky representatives of the aviator goggle wearing tosspot community, being as it doesn't do much in the way of ticking those steampunk boxes which have apparently since become a requirement. This, I would suggest, is in its favour, at least placing it alongside the works of Michael Moorcock and Mark Hodder in being a period piece written by someone who was actually trying to write a novel, if you'll excuse my possibly acerbic tone. In sharp focus, the composition of said novel is lovingly upholstered, rich in texture, and tending to the sort of digressions one might expect from the literature of the era to which it eludes, and as an American author writing about Victorian England, Jeter has done exceptionally well to capture a certain mood and to avoid incongruous Transatlantic slips of any sort.

On the other hand Infernal Devices sits at the halfway point between a sort of Platonic ideal of H.G. Wells, and Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth with all its fishy halfbreeds, and as such it romps along nicely at the pace of something read on the beach, and accordingly works better if you don't make too close an inspection. The narrative seems a little incoherent, with one scrape resolved and replaced by another seemingly for the sake of keeping it moving whilst we await the conclusion. Certain elements don't quite go anywhere, and others seem a little flimsy, notably the time travellers who aren't really time travellers so much as individuals who have found a means by which to study the future, and who have studied the future to such an extent that they now sound like extras from a Guy Richie film; and while I suppose the idea works up to a point, what this place needs is a goddamn enchilada stand and similar exclamations just seem to suggest that not much real thought has gone into these particular characters or their story. At certain intervals the narrative feels improvised, but, as I say, he sort of gets away with it by telling the story by means which give you a reason to keep on reading.

Unlike the novels of Moorcock or Mark Hodder, this really is just a romp with no justification for its setting beyond why the hell not? This edition features one of those afterwords explaining how much you enjoyed the classic you've just read, mumbling some incoherent crap about audience hankering for that which is obviously constructed by human hand, as opposed to the dehumanising curved forms of current technology; which isn't really the same as Infernal Devices actually being about anything. Still - pretty good nevertheless, and I've definitely read worse.

The Casebook of Sexton Blake

David Stuart Davies (editor) The Casebook of Sexton Blake (2009)
I've never been particularly drawn to detective fiction, so this collection is some way outside my normal fare; but Obverse Books have acquired the rights to publish new Sexton Blake material, and Mark Hodder has written one, and I'm probably going to be writing one - or at least attempting to do so - so here I am, doing my homework like a good boy.

Sexton Blake was, according to the usual internet sources, either the poor man's Sherlock Holmes or the Sherlock Holmes who wasn't afraid of a bit of a scrap every once in a while, depending on where you look. More helpfully, he was a character who emerged from the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century as written by numerous authors, and who most recently appeared with name changed to Victor Drago in the short-lived Tornado comic back in 1979; at least up until the publication of Mark Hodder's The Silent Thunder Caper this year. The parallels with Holmes are difficult to miss, but Blake - whose character remains both consistent and distinct throughout the writing of the six different authors collected here - has sufficient appeal of his own to explain his having remained generally popular for more than a century. I've not read any of Conan Doyle's Holmes since my school days back in the late 1600s, and having recently read and strongly disliked The Lost World I'm disinclined to renew my acquaintance with Arthur's works, but based on what little I can recall, Blake seems an altogether more fallible, likeable, and plausible character. He detects, but not to the point of absurdity or to the detriment of the story. He misses details here and there, and so there's no the angle at which this goldfish bowl is placed clearly indicates that the gentleman who purchased the bus ticket was wearing women's knickers, most likely a pair stolen from his wife's sister; and I doubt he could be portrayed on the telly by anyone quite so annoying as Cucumber.

I realise that with this collection being what it is, it's unlikely to include any of the real stinkers, but all the same, these seven tales testify to Blake as considerably more engaging than I expected him to be. As Mark Hodder points out in the introduction, each provides a genuinely fascinating snapshot of the times, specifically England at the turn of the century. The writing is generally lively and not lacking in gentle humour. As tales churned out to a series of deadlines, it seems they were at least churned out with a generous spirit, being well written above what one might anticipate considering their supposedly inauspicious origin. Additionally, there's a sense of experimentation here, of wishing to avoid the bed-wettingly generic or gung ho which one might, perhaps wrongly, associate with detective fiction; and so Blake and Tinker play for England in The Football Mystery, or turn the other cheek and let a criminal escape, having decided that the poor fucker has already suffered enough in The Black Eagle. My only criticism is that I generally found these stories to be longer than seemed necessary - particularly The Slave Market - which is either down to the word count required by the original publishers or my being unaccustomed to the genre.

I may have groaned at the size of this thing when it first came in the mail, but I'm nevertheless glad to have read it.

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.

A Red Sun Also Rises

Mark Hodder A Red Sun Also Rises (2012)
I'm afraid it takes a lot to get me reading anything popularly and presently identified as steampunk, and whilst it may be absolutely unfair to suggest that Mark Hodder is the only author of the entire bunch worth bothering with, most of the rest are still to do anything which draws my attention. The problem here is that I can't help but feel sceptical towards a phenomenon that so strongly identifies itself as a brand, a franchise, even a lifestyle - collect the set, now wear the brass goggles and join in with the cosplay fun - cosplay being a word I tend to associate with hopeless wankers on the grounds of my being a fully grown man.

It's not even that I'm necessarily opposed to a wilfully superficial romp, and I certainly have no problem with Victoriana, but I tend to prefer my fiction to do something I'm not expecting, to take chances, to make random swerves off in occasionally ludicrous directions; just anything but recycle something that's already been written, to which end all those top hatted adventurers twiddling moustaches at some generically feisty female acquaintance as the dirigible sails overhead might as well be Pokémon cards so far as I can tell, although from what I gather there's generally a bit more imagination evident in Pokémon.

The most profoundly gormless facebook comment I ever saw was in response to a status message submitted by Mark Hodder, specifically a status message which had expanded to a leisurely conversation about beer and weather. Amongst various remarks and replies, some person had left a one word comment, just steampunk on its own for no obvious reason other than this being the genre with which Mark has become associated; sort of like walking up to Stewart Lee as he's in the middle of a conversation with friends, wiping the drool from your chin and saying 'funny jokes' out loud in the expectation of chuckling recognition and pats on the back because yes, we do all indeed love those funny jokes.

I really don't know how he puts up with it.

Anyway, science-fiction often serves to pass comment on the era in which it is written by allegorical means, and this is particularly true of Mark Hodder's science-fiction. The Victoriana seems to be not only his native mythology - for want of a better term - but, for this author, a significant key to understanding the present given that, it could be argued, our society came together during the nineteenth century and by a bolder, more transparent design than it has been at any time since. In other words, whilst Mark Hodder may well write for chuckles, there is more going on with this author than, I would dare to suggest, at least a few of his brass-plated contemporaries.

A Red Sun Also Rises roughly mashes up Mark's usual themes with an Edgar Rice Burroughs style extraterrestrial excursion yielding a fiction more redolent of the era in which it is set than any of your Reynolds or Baxters, thus neatly avoiding the problem of present concerns imposed upon another age, effectively addressing that age in its own language - so there's no talk to the hand or I'll be there for you, nor any deeper incongruity. Being essentially the tale of a missionary, it examines colonialism, cultural relativism, and the dynamics of colonial interference, the ways in which the colonised are changed by the colonisers; much of which amounts to a basic and quite insightful examination of class effected most vividly when the natives of Hodder's alien world are themselves transformed into a comic echo of Victorian society; so it's philosophically meaty without once coming across as a lecture.

What additionally distinguishes A Red Sun Also Rises is the explosive imagination at work in a narrative that flies off in all sorts of peculiar and unexpected directions without once worrying about whether the aviator-goggled reader on the Clapham omnibus is getting his proper quota of dirigibles and steam-powered computing engines. Ever since all those historical characters of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack were warped into ludicrous shapes, Mark Hodder has shown a consummate skill in forcing even the most absurd narrative twists into a working story - lunatic ideas to match even the edible dinosaurs of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series, things you just shouldn't do in a novel, which he does regardless and passes off without a hiccup.

Genuinely wonderful stuff.

Neuromancer

William Gibson Neuromancer (1984)
This was of course the one that arguably started that whole cyberpunk thing, dark, gritty, noir tales of hi-tech crime written as a reaction to a published wave of crappy sword and sorcery shite at the end of the 1970s, if the official version is to be believed. This sort of accounts for the -punk element I suppose, and was the last time the suffix made sense in a literary context, at least to me. Excepting Mark Hodder's writing, I still don't quite discern any pronounced strand of rebellion within steampunk as a genre, but never mind.

William Gibson enjoyed success with short stories later collected as Burning Chrome and was then commissioned to produce a full length novel which became Neuromancer; except Blade Runner came out just as he was getting stuck in, obliging a rewrite for fear of readers assuming he'd simply tapped into Ridley Scott's version of Philip K. Dick. After no less than twelve revisions of the first two thirds of the novel, he ended up with something that won a shitload of awards, helped spawn an entire genre, and which kicks off with one of the greatest opening sentences of any novel I've read:

The sky above the port was the colour of television...

Although the sentence in full is actually the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel, which reads to me like an overstatement and is as such symptomatic of my problems with Neuromancer.

Like all William Gibson, it's beautifully written, and I mean quite breathtakingly beautifully written, each sentence a string of startlingly vivid images popping away in your reading gland like 1970s space dust. The sheer texture alone is incredible, and notably works much better here than in the short stories which might be considered groundwork, most of which struck me as merely slick for the sake of it - although as Gibson has himself argued, that is to some extent the entire point of his emphasis on surface detail.

The problem for me was that Neuromancer is actually kind of exhausting, the narrative becoming a relentless series of imagistic explosions defusing any attempt at emphasis. Ice, 3Jane, Aerol, Wintermute, Flatline - all the names of either main characters or narrative elements recurring page after page throughout the book, and yet I reached the end without a fucking clue as to who or what any of them might be, or what had happened beyond some vague impression of crimes committed in cyberspace - and I got that detail from Wikipedia. I know my concentration hasn't been great this week, but I'm not normally this bad, and I've had the same problem with William Gibson on previous occasions. Mona Lisa Overdrive was similar but a bit more comprehensible, and more recent books such as Pattern Recognition have more than justified the author's sterling reputation, so whatever he was doing, I guess he managed to stop doing it after about 1990.

What a philistine I am, to be sure.

Zenith Lives!

Stuart Douglas (editor) Zenith Lives! (2012)
As a kid, Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone so impressed me in those Sherlock Holmes films as to necessitate a trip to the library in search of Arthur Conan Doyle's originals; but beyond that - and I suppose Victor Drago, the Sexton Blake that never was in the short lived Tornado comic - detective fiction has never really grabbed me. Even as Obverse announced this collection of stories featuring Sexton Blake's albino nemesis, I was thinking of Nils-Olof Franzén's Agaton Sax, probably because they're both fictional detectives and the latter was published in England with illustrations by another Blake, and they both have an x in their names. Therefore it's fair to say that I don't really know Sexton Blake from a hole in the ground, but here I am offering my pearls of wisdom regardless.

The first Sexton Blake story appeared in 1893 and the character has been solving crimes and getting into fights ever since - roughly speaking the Sherlock Holmes whose pint you really shouldn't spill, with Zenith amongst his more distinctive foes.

Mark Hodder was an obvious choice of author for this collection, his being a long time Blake aficionado - owner of the world's largest collection of Sexton Blake periodicals no less - and somewhat nifty with a biro in his own right. Of course he delivers the goods, perfectly invoking time and place without recourse to nostalgia or writing as though perched before the typewriter sucking on a pipe with Max Miller blasting away in the background. Zenith's pulp origins are acknowledged without The Blood of our Land reading like a pastiche, and as always Mark Hodder writes with a sense of purpose and moral conscience which elevate his narrative some way above being mere romp.

Others here are perhaps less faithful to the general tradition of Blake, but nonetheless enjoyable for all that the Zenith character is in part used as springboard more than subject.

Paul Magrs' All the Many Rooms roughly amounts to Michael Moorcock at his nuttiest remixed by Nurse With Wound, even resorting to non-sequiturial lists of names and somehow getting away with it - which I'm not sure I've seen before. It actually reminds me a little of the sort of thing Moorcock once published in New Worlds magazine, and I mean in a good way.

Speaking of Moorcock, he too is present - arguably another obvious choice having cut his publishing teeth at the offices of Fleetway's Sexton Blake Library, later writing Seaton Begg, his own idiosyncratic interpretation revived here for Curaré.

George Mann and Stuart Douglas round up the collection with neat little tales, both relatively low on incident but told with such engaging prose that it's not a problem. I only really know of George Mann as editor to a couple of excellent Solaris Books anthologies a few years back, but he's very clearly a talent in his own right; as is Stuart Douglas, despite his own protestations to the contrary.

Zenith Lives! may take some liberties with the Sexton Blake tradition, but is nevertheless a great collection, possibly Obverse's best thus far in terms of consistent quality. Having recently acquired the rights to originate and publish new Sexton Blake material, I'd say the detective is in good hands with Obverse, and it would be nice to see lengthier efforts from at least Mark Hodder and George Mann very soon.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

Mark Hodder The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man (2011)
As I may have mentioned in preamble to an earlier review, I find it difficult to stir up much enthusiasm for steampunk due to its being a trend populated, so far as I am able to tell, principally by arseholes besides which 1970s Bay City Rollers fandom seems contemplative and dignified. I'm all for getting out the dressing up box from under the bed every once in a while, but it's all becoming a bit generic: brass goggles do not necessarily render one either interesting or a paragon of original thought, and the tone of a children's TV presenter imploring viewers to be lions adopted by websites helpfully explaining that steampunk is Victorian science-fiction so that even morons can join in the fun causes all right-thinking people to frown.

Sure, I could turn the other way; but I dislike stuff that is shite clogging up the cultural bandwidth and making it that much more difficult to get through to the stuff which isn't shite.

The novels of Mark Hodder, Michael Moorcock and perhaps one or two others number amongst the stuff which definitively isn't shite (and there's a book jacket blurb if ever there was), science-fiction with a nineteenth century emphasis which actually bothers to do something besides ticking boxes on the standard issue steampunk inventory.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, like its predecessor, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is an alternate historical novel reading like a ripping yarn which achieves a degree of intimacy with its subject far beyond what seems to be found in more generic efforts, dissecting class, imperialism and the ethics of society to depths one might not immediately expect from something which appears to pay homage to both Spike Milligan and The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town - unless that was just me. Rather than simply turning its historical characters into action figures, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man gets into a serious degree of biographical detail, yielding a genuinely meaty and provocative read without sacrificing either lightness of touch or the occasional pleasure of a tooth-grinding pun.

Regarding authors of this century who've done so well as to have book covers blessed with the quoted testimonials, I'm finding myself increasingly disappointed by those beautifully written inflated word counts wherein Neal Stephenson, Eric Brown, Charles Stross, or Alastair Reynolds deliver none of the wonders described by the bloke from the New York Times. Novels seem to promise so much more in 2012, a literary experience, something which won't use the wrong soup spoon or moon you from the back window of the coach with tackily airbrushed pictures of spaceships and the like. Mark Hodder establishes himself as not only leaving a paper cut some degrees above the subgenre with which he is dubiously associated, but as a damn sight more readable than most of his contemporaries in the wider field of science-fiction. The Philip K. Dick award is entirely deserved.

The Land Leviathan

Steampunk = Wank
Presenting that venerable gentleman Mr. L. Burton's indubitably hasty treatise upon why the Steampunk genre must be regarded as wank.

Steampunk was arguably created by Michael Moorcock in the late 1960s in his thoroughly readable Sir Oswald Bastable novels wherein the eponymous hero had a series of Victorian style adventures in hot-air balloons and the like. This was of course entirely in keeping with the 1960s countercultural fascination with Victoriana, vaguely Edwardian shite, science-fiction and so on. If it hadn't been Moorcock, someone else would have done it, and it's probably telling that Moorcock himself has on occasion appeared ambivalent or even sceptical regarding the success of the baby he prefers to call steam opera. In a 2009 Guadrian review of Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection he wrote:

Steampunk reached its final burst of brilliant deliquescence with Pynchon's Against the Day and his Airship Boys. Once the wide world gets hold of an idea, however, it can only survive through knowing irony. Its tools, its icons, its angle of attack are absorbed into the cultural mainstream. The genre has started to write about itself, the way Cat Ballou or Blazing Saddles addressed the western. Steampunk no longer examines context and history but now looks ironically at its own roots, tropes and clichés.

Steampunk, generally speaking, updates Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, speeding them to thriller pace whilst retaining their settings, themes, and literary styles. Its recent incarnation seems to have been spawned by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's collaborative The Difference Engine, essentially a cyberpunk novel set in the Victorian era which transposes all that fetishistic technology for steam driven ancestral equivalents.

Fine... whatever...

Given the unwritten law defining the point at which a phenomenon has definitively hit rock bottom as proportional to the sum of cultural units distinguishing the Sex Pistols from Gary & the Gonads, the redundancy of anything declaring itself steampunk without either qualification, apology, or due embarrassment was recently heralded by the arrival of the steampunk What I Really meme reproduced below.

The What I Really meme, for those presently mouldering in blissful ignorance, is a frequently copied internet image comprising six illustrations exposing the side-splitting disparity between one's occupation, and the details of that of which others believe one's occupation to be comprised. To hilarious effect.

Personally I find the chucklesome gulf between perception and reality tends to be all the more amusing when the images demonstrate some conceptual variance as opposed to being, for example, a random assortment of cock-obvious images snipped off the back of a steampunk themed cornflakes packet, or have I fucking missed something? I can see perhaps what the artist's friends and mother may be getting at, but does society really view this person's occupation as frowning whilst wearing a fancy jacket and having a metal arm? I mean does it really? Or would that third panel be better served with a blank space given that society, by whatever definition, probably doesn't give a shit and has better things to do?

Okay so Michael Moorcock's efforts were decent, and both Stephen Baxter and Mark Hodder have bothered to write genre novels that go somewhat further than tittering over brass spacecraft with union flags painted across the heavily riveted prow; but now there are steampunk clothing outlets, lifestyle magazines, comics, action figures, bands, conventions, and doubtless comedians soon taking to the stage in flying goggles to crack jokes about most diverting occurrences befalling one on the way to the dirigible emporium. Aside from a few writers, steampunk is looking a lot like the biggest pile of cock to knob-cheese up our cultural bandwidth since Doctor Who nosedived in 2005. It's a one-trick literary subgenre, not a youth movement, unless the 153,954 who like the Steampunk facebook page really do wax up their moustaches every weekend and get hammered on absinthe and drawing room techno. The entire schtick is so hopelessly mannered that you could bang out your average steampunk novel on a child's origami fortune teller, never mind that generic coal-fired Babbage engine.

The comically Victorian + technology = steampunk and so we end up with The D'Israeli Undertaking, The Mafeking Modem, and The Splendiferous Escapades of Mr. Quentin Internet because this is a genre in which everything is worked out in advance and which succeeds (supposedly) through parody and collage and not a whole lot else. It probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that more than one former author of dispiriting TV tie-in fiction should have recently added the genre's proverbial string to his soulless, workmanlike bow, because once you've read the novels by the fuckers who actually can write, you're left with people who regard Terrance Dicks as some sort of literary gold standard.

It feels like Star Wars all over again, the tide of balls-achingly easy populism sweeping away anything that is thoughtful, at odds with the norm, anything that strives to do more than just romp along like an E.E. 'Doc' Smith hero with an issue of Dazed and Confused stuffed in his back pocket; and perhaps this is itself a clue as to the success of this phenomenon. It's a return to ripping yarns and morally unambiguous superheroes, the comforting familiarity of Victoriana spruced up with a touch of console game and a knowing wink just to confirm that this is where the cool kids hang out, the cool kids as opposed to all those nerds and sad sacks with their Isaac Asimov and hilariously intact virginity.

Of course, this is all an overreaction on my part - hyperbole being my job - and has no bearing on authors such as Michael Moorcock, Mark Hodder, or Paolo Bacigalupi - who has of late been cropping up in steampunk must-read lists for no good reason I can think of. It's bollocks and it will all blow over in due course I'm sure, but until then, a little less mindless recycling for its own sake and a little more use of critical faculties can hardly be a bad thing; and if this rant has dissuaded just one person from turning their hand to an already overpopulated subgenre, then good.

On which note:



Michael Moorcock The Land Leviathan (1974)
Including one slightly peculiar novelisation of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, this is my tenth Moorcock novel, and the number strikes me as strange seeing as he was never an author whose works I sought with particular fervour. The book stores of my childhood  bulged with a million Moorcock titles, all involving elves with swords so far as I was able to tell. This was off-putting because I've never truly warmed to elves. They seem like the self-absorbed teenagers of the faerie realm, all very pretty but otherwise lacking the honesty of gnomes. In any case, I was probably misled by wispy cover paintings and the name Elric sounding a bit like it could be headed in that general direction.

More recently I got the habit of picking up the odd second hand Moorcock title if it appeared to maintain a respectable distance from anything involving dragons or magic and was cheap. I'd read his Constant Fire in a second hand copy of the New Worlds anthology and been impressed at the sheer insanity of the tale, so had come to view him as a good risk. This caution now seems strange through the benefit of hindsight and my having noticed that I've reached double figures with the man's work, and actually, it's all been pretty great.

The Land Leviathan continues the tale of Sir Oswald Bastable from The War Lord of the Air, a man lost in alternate histories full of Victoriana that we would now recognise as steampunk but for the fact that Moorcock has purposes other than smirking at the reader whilst wearing aviator goggles. The Land Leviathan, like its predecessor, uses the trappings of empire to criticise the hypocrisies of the era and mindset it parodies, and impressively goes for the big one in terms of moral redress - a world in which a new African empire modelled to some extent upon that of Rome crushes the United States in response to centuries of slavery imposed upon the black race.

Read that summarising sentence again and take a moment to consider just how kak-handed and painful this could have been in the hands of a less able writer. Not only does Moorcock succeed in dealing with issues of great moral complexity, naming names without the suggestion of anything reduced to a slogan, but he makes it compelling, saying everything he needs to say in a novel that's barely much over the length of a novella. The Land Leviathan is unassuming and genuinely wonderful, and its author just went up a level in my own personal league table.