The War in the Air

H.G. Wells The War in the Air (1908)
The general consensus seems divided as to the quality of Wells' later work, or at least his less well-remembered work. My take is that, based on what I've read, you're probably better off sticking with War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon, and the ones you've already heard of because they're mostly at least as amazing as their respective legends would have it. In the Days of the Comet is decent, but probably not so astonishing as earlier novels, and The Food of the Gods is massively underwhelming - an interesting story struggling to free itself from beneath a duvet of creaking gags and supposedly comic characters. The War in the Air struggles with similar whimsy but mostly keeps the balance to just the right side of readable. Of course, history itself has somewhat overtaken this novel and readers may need to remind themselves of what a wonder powered flight must once have seemed. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men foresaw the aircraft as such a radical invention as to inspire what would become a new religion, and in the art world there were the Italian Aeropainters - about whom no-one really likes to say too much these days - but the miracle of aviation has since been lost somewhere within the general thrust of technological progress.

Once again, Wells tends to fall flat as an author of predictive science fiction, his flapping flying machines belonging to the same oubliette as the feeding tubes which Hugo Gernsback had believed would put an end to the misery of mastication. Although this isn't to suggest that this novel lacks purpose or fails to say anything of interest, and certainly it predicted the change in the zeitgeist brought about by the first world war, if not necessarily the means by which it was fought. Our main character is one Bert Smallways of Bromley, Kent. Smallways - who probably would have worked just as well without his speech rendered in phonetic south London - is one of Wells' working class types who thankfully manages to stay just the right side of turning into Will Hay or George Formby, and who finds his parochial existence cast rudely upon the wider world stage through a faintly improbable encounter with an inventor. Manned flight is developed and swiftly spreads, and the entire world is suddenly at war. Combatants are no longer obliged to fight along a limited earthbound front and are now able to attack the enemy from above, far behind the traditional lines. Finding himself aboard a German airship as it bombs New York, Smallways accordingly comes to a realisation.

Hitherto he had rather liked the idea of war as being a jolly, smashing, exciting affair, something like a Bank Holiday rag on a large scale, and on the whole agreeable and exhilarating. Now he knew it a little better.

Technological progress has forever changed the dynamic of war, as did, it could be argued, the first world war a few years later.

Nowhere in the world any more was there a place left where a Smallways might lift his head proudly and vote for war and spirited foreign policy, and go secure from such horrible things.

Wells takes a typically pessimistic view, and so The War in the Air effectively bombs the human race back into the stone age, the message being at least as much to do with human nature as the technological progress which allows us to express its worst aspects.

The development of science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that the old separations into nations and kingdoms were no longer possible, a newer, wider synthesis was not only needed but imperatively demanded.

Wells' view is that such a synthesis is vital but unlikely because we as a species tend to take for granted the universal nobility of our own intentions, so the argument is, as ever, not whether we can do something, but whether we should. The above principal applies just as well now as it did in 1908 and might be considered with regard to the sort of cultural homogeneity and amplification of stupidity which the internet has brought about.

The War in the Air is far from Wells' greatest but its only real failing is, arguably, that it would have worked as well with about half the page count. Otherwise, it's respectable, and only truly suffers through War of the Worlds and others having been such tough acts to follow.

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.

Seven Days in New Crete

Robert Graves Seven Days in New Crete (1949)
Robert Graves was the renowned author of I, Claudius and a noted scholar of Greek myth, and by association mythology in general. I had no idea that he'd ever tried his hand at science-fiction, and I stumbled across this whilst seeking the aforementioned I, Claudius, and it makes absolute sense that his science-fiction should take such a distinctively mythological orientation. I say science-fiction mainly on the grounds of it belonging to the genre of Utopian writings which we may as well call science-fiction because why the fuck not, but it's a long way from even Olaf Stapledon's version of future humanity. The narrator of Seven Days in Crete wakes to find himself magically summoned by witches from the future, and so ensues three-hundred pages of typically Utopian form in which our man explores his futuristic surroundings and asks questions.

The future here follows on from some point at which the human race decided to retrace its footsteps, returning to the pre-technological idyll of Crete, or thereabouts. Magic is real. Society is divided into five basic classes or estates. What writing remains is preserved on communally held plates of silver and gold with even the complete works of Shakespeare having been reduced to a few pithy paragraphs; and the written word is the preserve of a small elite. War is conducted by means of a game resembling football, and the price paid for this Utopia is ultimately revealed to be ritual human sacrifice. I realise Graves' model for New Crete was old Crete, but I was surprised at the parallels with Ancient Mexican society - everything but the pyramids, more or less.

The problem with Utopian fiction is, by my reckoning, that it tends to be quite dull, as Thomas More is my witness. Commentary upon Utopian fiction therefore tends to work towards exposing the bodies upon which purportedly perfect societies are invariably built, which in itself can be a little predictable. Graves evades the pitfalls of the form simply through being such a good writer, one to whom the dull or merely functional sentence is apparently a stranger. He finds the wonder in the weird world of New Crete, spicing his observations with a faint tang of cynicism, but never so much as to spoil the tone; and this is significant because all of the magic and witchery and general rustic folksiness are of such a kind which commonly lends itself to somewhat more turgid narratives in my experience, the sort of thing which usually suggests the author has spent the last six or seven hours skipping amongst the toadstools in a chiffon robe saying oh wow, that's like really amaaaaazing... cough cough George MacDonald...

Being better than that, Graves steers us towards a conclusion which feels absolutely right and necessary for the purpose of the tale, even if it doesn't come as a huge surprise - excepting possibly some of the grislier details. I'm still not absolutely sure what the main theme could be as there seem to be a number of possibilities. Seven Days in New Crete may simply be a criticism of the Utopian ideal as expressed in literature, or a warning against the sort of naivety by which one may be swept up in the enthusiasm for progressive but unworkable solutions, particularly in hasty response to - for obvious example - the horror of the second world war in the case of this novel. Certain aspects suggest the story may offer some sort of commentary on the Soviet Union, albeit by oblique means, namely the parallel folksy reductionism which replaced the more progressive elements of Soviet society; or even that the novel may itself serve as an argument for a certain degree of reductionism, a return to a model of civilisation with far less moving parts to go wrong.

Maybe it's all of the above.

In any case, Seven Days in New Crete is nothing if not thought provoking, and makes for one hell of a better read than the great majority of its Utopian kind.

Man After Man - An Anthropology of the Future

Dougal Dixon & Philip Hood
Man After Man - An Anthropology of the Future (1990)
Man After Man is apparently Dougal Dixon expanding on the success of After Man, a previous and similarly themed effort imagining the next few million years worth of animal evolution in the event of our disappearance; and this theme - imagining the next few million years of human evolution - if supposedly tainted with certain visuals pinched wholesale from artist Wayne Douglas Barlow, was hardly an original idea in the first place what with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and doubtless many others; and in any case Dixon's book worked well enough for me when I first read it a couple of decades ago.

Man After Man is far from perfect. The illustrations have a bit of a folksy quality, seem anatomically awkward and all with peculiarly flat noses; and the Hiver, or Alvearanthropus desertus - a future human predicted to evolve some two million years hence - for some reason resembles an ageing Jewish comedian of the 1950s - although whether that's necessarily a bad thing would certainly be subject to debate. Also off-putting is how, despite Darwin's theory of evolution being piss-easy to understand if you just bother to read the bloody thing, Dixon joins the millions who somehow manage to get it wrong in crucial places, which is disappointing given its being the central theme of the book. Not that he drops major clangers, but he takes a loose, somehow very seventies approach which allows our descendants to evolve not only telepathy but also race memory.

Niggles aside, I'm nevertheless won over by the sheer weirdness of this enterprise. It isn't a novel, or at least it isn't a novel in the conventional sense, but it's certainly a narrative, presented as pseudo-factual by the same terms as Stapledon's Last and First Men. The premise here is that humanity has destroyed its environment and will eventually abandon planet leaving behind a scattering of engineered humans. These people, or possibly creatures, are adapted to occupy specific ecosystems from which most animal life has been extinguished. Why this is done isn't really clear - one of several fumbled balls in a sequence which might otherwise resemble the hard science-fiction of Asimov and his pals. Anyway, Earth is vacated but for a decreasing populace of subsistence farmers and numerous peculiar mammals in the seas, forests, and deserts - all engineered from human DNA, and engineered with a level of intelligence equivalent to that of higher apes. The reasoning is screwy, but the ideas are fascinating because they kind of work, and it would be interesting to read something more traditionally resembling a story featuring Dixon's Plains-Dwellers or the somewhat nightmarish Parasite/Host creatures he imagines evolving in the more distant future; but of course part of the appeal of this projection is the setting, an era bereft of anything with much in the way of language that would provide the focus of such a story - at least nothing beyond your basic grunting Tontospeak. As the inheritors of a future Earth, these are by definition creatures we would have trouble understanding, which is why Man After Man works so well as a speculative history.

It could have been a little tighter in places - maybe having Homo mensproavodorum work out how to build boats the hard way like our own ancestors rather than by means of implausible racial memories of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; or expanding on the extraordinarily heightened environmental senses found amongst, for example, the Bushmen of the Kalahari rather than souring the recipe with telepathy. Also, the environmental message has about it a touch of Neil from The Young Ones, reiterating certain entirely too simplistic claims often made regarding overpopulation; yet still, it's difficult to avoid being drawn into the reality of this weird and fearsomely believable future Earth.

Last Men in London

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

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

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

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

Gnomes

Wil Huygen & Rien Poortvliet Gnomes (1976)

And so we dip a toe into that peculiar netherworld of fiction presented as fact, often an overlooked genre and probably because  whether or not it constitutes any form of storytelling tends to depend on the book in question. The Book of the War or, I suppose, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men are probably good examples, titles easily identified as literature by the presence of a narrative; Stewart Cowley's Spacecraft 2000 to 2100AD seems more ambiguous, possibly because the writing made for a poor match to the wonderful illustrations of Chris Foss and others, amounting to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe with much better pictures.

Huygen and Poortvliet's seventies smash is essentially Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady with gnomes, adopting a conversational sketchbook format which works well, maintaining an amiable tone whilst cancelling out the potential for anything too excessively twee with a wealth of anthropological detail - the life expectancy of gnomes, geographical distribution, common illnesses, and so on. It's convincingly thorough, beautifully painted, and very difficult to dislike. Furthermore, whilst there's nothing too smart-arsed here - gnomes taking crystal meth or rocking out to the MC5 - the absolutely familiar folklore is captured with such a fresh approach as to make one forget that these are related to those little plaster guys who sit around in gardens holding fishing rods.

Since reading The Goblin Reservation wherein widely respected author Clifford D. Simak introduces gnomes to the science-fiction landscape for the very good reason that he felt like it, I've come to appreciate the pointy-hatted ones like no other folkloric creature. There's something pleasantly autonomous about our friend, the gnome, something that resists coercion by authors. There were no gnomes in The Lord of the Rings because their presence would have made Tolkien's great work seem ridiculous, spoiling the frowning thrust of its self-important bluster; conversely, any writer peddling ironic gnomes, post-modern gnomes, gnomes with fucking piercings who listen to Skrillex - can be automatically dismissed as an arsehole thus saving us the bother of reading their work.

Unsurprisingly, Gnomes closes with an ecological message; but it's valid, worth repeating, and is entirely in keeping with the theme. This book shouldn't work at all, but it's both a delight and an education. At the risk of sounding like an absolute twat, I can't help but wonder if Gnomes hasn't tapped into something more deeply philosophical than is immediately apparent.

That's me in Pseuds' Corner then.