Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon

Hergé Destination Moon (1950) Explorers on the Moon (1953)
The first Tintin book I read as a child was either Flight 714 or Destination Moon, and the second was whichever of those two hadn't been first. We lived on a farm in rural Warwickshire serviced every two weeks by a mobile library, a sort of bread van full of books arranged upon shelves in the back, the arrival of which I found both magical and mysterious. I was working my way through their selection of Angela Banner's Ant & Bee books when I first noticed Tintin, which probably gives some indication of my age at the time. The cover of either Flight 714 or Destination Moon - whichever it was - intrigued me, displayed on the lower shelves with other larger format books such as Asterix in Spain, which I recall finding annoying because the characters on the cover seemed somehow arrogant. Then one day I guess my mother decided I was old enough to cope with Tintin, so that's where it started.

I read most of the Tintin books over the next couple of years, then graduated to Asterix's altogether wittier adventures, having at last overcome my weird aversion to the cover of the Spanish one. The books vanished from my shelves over the years, eventually reducing to just the hardback Tintin and the Lake of Sharks; and then the other night, seeking some more succinct, less aggravating relief from Tolkien, I realised I actually have a good few of these books and with no memory of their having returned to my collection, which is weird; so fuck it - Destination Moon, let's go, seeing as it's probably fifty years since I first read the thing, or indeed anything featuring Tintin.

Destination Moon and its sequel might be deemed hard science-fiction by certain definitions. Space travel was hardly a new idea in the fifties, having been a staple of the pulps for at least half a century, but Tintin belonged to an approximately sober, essentially realistic world for which Gernsbackian superscience would have been a poor fit. The forties had seen major advances in rocketry in the wake of the second world war, so it was only natural that Tintin should poke his investigative nose in at some point. Naturally the story conforms to the traditions of its kind, and so the first moon rocket is designed by Tintin's friend, Professor Calculus, then piloted by Tintin himself with all arrangements made according to nods, personal favours, and whoever feels they might like to give it a go. It's all very casual, even improbable, and yet it works because the story in which these characters are embedded is solid, as rigorously scientific as it can manage without quite lecturing. The timing is perfect and the art is breathtaking - both wonderfully simple and yet capable of dynamic elegance while conveying a technical sophistication which leaves your mouth hanging open.

So I'm reading something I probably first read when I was five, and yet it works just fine, not once leaving me feeling as though Destination Moon should be beneath me in the same way as - sorry - Harry Potter. Hergé apparently credited his readers with some intelligence and avoided talking down to them, and the humour, if gentle, is slapstick and more or less timeless aside from the slightly disconcerting realisation of just how much of it relies upon Captain Haddock's love of whisky. Being Tintin and hence a detective story at heart, there is inevitably a thread of nefarious deeds by representatives of foreign powers, typically culminating in revelations, exposure of the culprits, and arrest, but the thread runs through the story without overpowering it or turning it into Dick Barton; and it all remains quietly gripping, which is impressive when we consider the medium - a story told mostly inside a control centre then a rocket, with panels wherein those speaking are squashed into the lower third by dialogue. The sense of restraint induces a certain rhythm which carries everything along, so that when we come to the infrequent splash pages of that red and white chequered rocket in space or on the moon or about to take off, it's shocking and breathtaking all at once because it feels vaguely real, and it doesn't matter in the slightest that technology has since made such formative designs seem antiquated, along with the notion of a spacecraft piloted by levers and buttons.

Regardless of Hergé's having shot himself in the foot on several occasions with the institutional racism of the very first stories - and that whole grey area one tends to encounter with persons who collaborate during a Nazi occupation - lessons had been learned by this point and there's something good natured and wholesome about Tintin without it being preachy, sappy, or sentimental. The characters are likeable without bearing the burden of providing role models, and there's no dumbing down. Tintin was a wonderful start for me, progressive and inspiring my interest in a much wider world than the one I knew. I'm impressed that it has lost none of its power, and that it's still fun.

Art Sex Music

Cosey Fanni Tutti Art Sex Music (2017)
If the suggestion that any one thing ever changed my life holds any meaning, then Throbbing Gristle are probably right up there with Doctor Who and Asterix the Gaul, at least in terms of broadening my horizons. I bought the records, live tapes, and any fanzines I could find. At one point I was even writing long and, I suspect, extraordinarily juvenile letters to Cosey; and she wrote back - and replies in the plural running onto the second side of the sheet of paper before arriving at her distinctive signature with the first two letters of Cosey written so as to resemble a pair of knockers. So although I've sort of fallen out of love with that whole weirdy music thing to some extent, I couldn't really not read this, her autobiography.

I went fully off the boil with Chris & Cosey's music around the time of 1990's Pagan Tango. It sounded bland and uninspired to me, and still sounds bland and uninspired. I said much the same about their Union Chapel performance nearly a decade later in an issue of the Sound Projector, which supposedly got back to them and prompted raised eyebrows and frowning. Having once corresponded with Cosey, I felt slightly shitty about that, like I'd betrayed some trust; but the fact of it was that I genuinely believe they had lost the plot half way through recording Techno Primitiv, musically speaking, and after sitting through a couple of hours of it I just didn't feel like kissing arse. So tremendous guilt is to account for how much I really wanted this to be a great book, which unfortunately it isn't.

On the other hand, Art Sex Music isn't terrible either. Cosey has had an interesting life, more than her fair share of genuinely weird career twists, and I have the impression that she's a genuinely decent person - an impression garnered from the aforementioned correspondence and through our having a whole shitload of mutual friends, plus she likes cats; so the story itself is interesting, even fascinating in places, but something is perhaps lost in the telling.

Firstly, it's far too long for anything written in what occasionally resembles the prose of a footballer's autobiography in which I opened the door and there stood none other than my famous friend Ray Reardon, the snooker champion. Cosey doesn't actually seem to have known Ray Reardon, but she has even more famous friends than Grant Morrison, including at least two distantly mutual acquaintances I'd cross the fucking M6 during rush hour to avoid. One of the tosspots in question I recall turning up to our lectures at Maidstone Art College, neither student nor teacher but some forty-year old bloke from the town apparently interested in literature, poetry, performance, and screwing a string of vulnerable eighteen-year old girls who had fallen for his leather trousered sales pitch. The fucker still crops up everywhere, usually in association with Marc Almond for some reason, and here he is again; and there's another even bigger shitehawk who I'm not going to identify, and who has evidently somehow managed to Zelig his way into the Cosey Fanni Tutti narrative, thus briefly transforming me into Father Jack bellowing how did that gobshite get on the television? And I'm not even talking about Porridge here.

So there's that element, and also the stumbling block of my profound loathing for the art establishment with particular emphasis on performance art; and the fact of my having become a sort of amalgam of Hank Hill and Kenneth Clark when it comes to other people's sexuality, much of which I generally regard as ghastly, particularly free love and polygamy - this based mainly on everyone I've ever known to have swung on that particular vine being a complete fuck-up, emotionally speaking. Accordingly, I additionally found myself skipping the accounts of Cosey's career as a stripper. I just couldn't bring myself to read it, and instead found myself turning up the volume on the television and telling the boy to go to his room.

I suppose one might justifiably wonder why I read the book at all; but, in spite of the above reservations - or my musty hillbilly prejudices, depending on how you look at it - I've always liked Cosey. I think she's interesting and has been involved in some great music; and I've always enjoyed Throbbing Gristle, and it's good to read a version of their story which doesn't revolve around it all having been Porridge's idea. Genesis doesn't come out of this very well, as you may have heard, and while I've seen it suggested that Tutti is herself not without a certain bias, I have my doubts. Her testimony seems balanced and consistent with what I know of her through both mutual friends and our ancient correspondence. Whatever flaws she may exhibit, the preservation of any of her own delusions doesn't appear to be a factor. I haven't read Simon Ford's Wreckers of Civilisation*, but it seems to have come to represent a version of the Gristle story which this account sets straight, and that at least has to be a good thing. Art Sex Music isn't an amazing autobiography as I've seen claimed by a few industrial music arse-kissers, but it describes an arguably amazing life and is nevertheless worth a look, and I might even be persuaded to pick up some of those more recent Carter Tutti discs as a result.

*: I met Simon Ford around a friend's house, and he was introduced to me as someone writing a book about Throbbing Gristle. He asked me if I had a copy of the Adrenalin 7" single which he needed for reference. Given that said single really wasn't that difficult to get hold of, then costing about fifteen quid from Record & Tape Exchange, and that we're referring to a single by a band about whom he was supposedly writing an entire book, it didn't fill me with confidence in his efforts.

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.