Robert Heinlein - Podkayne of Mars (1963)

I disliked Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's alleged classic, probably more than anything else I read that year, and it's taken me about a decade to get over my subsequent aversion to the man's work - which I appreciate is ridiculous given the undeniable quality of at least a few of his books. Stranger didn't really have a story as I recall, being mainly the rambling account of a displaced Martian accepted into the circle of Jubal Harshaw, a massive bore who spends the entire novel expounding on his theories of this, that, and the other. Harshaw is a vehicle for Heinlein's own views on polygamy, incest and other sixties fixations - a pompous libertarian windbag as Rudy Rucker described him - who takes near infinite delight in the brilliance of his own testimony. I skimmed the last two-hundred pages and vowed to never do that to myself again, to which end I adopted the formula that anything written after Stranger should probably be given a wide berth.

After fifty pages of Podkayne with no actual story forming in support to a first person narrative taking suspiciously familiar delight in its own testimony, I realised that, despite all of the above, I hadn't bothered to make any mental note of the year Stranger in a Strange Land was published and had been ill-equipped to veto anything else I happened across in the used book store.

To be fair, it could have been worse in many respects, not least being that the central character and narrator is a fifteen-year old girl who somehow doesn't find herself sexually attracted to a much older man who writes science-fiction novels and who is probably named Bob or something like that; and her testimony is mostly witty and generally less annoying than that of Jubal Harshaw. The story here is that Podkayne and her younger brother travel to Venus with their uncle, and some stuff happens at a pace and in terms suggesting that Heinlein was having a stab at a literary novel rather than another ripping adventure, which sort of works as a travelogue with all the interesting stuff being the background detail of future civilisation, the rigours of space travel and so on. The slambang adventure described by Theodore Sturgeon on the back cover presumably refers to the espionage subplot which eventually develops - something to do with a bomb on the spaceship which I found difficult to follow over the noise of Podkayne jabbering on about life, the universe, and everything, and also because I was bored.

It isn't terrible, and I've a feeling I may simply have picked the wrong day to read it, but it will probably be a while before I give it another shot.

Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (1972)

 

I've spent the last forty years of my life avoiding Tarkovsky's Stalker - although it's actually more a case of not bothering with than actively avoiding. The reason for this is that it was shown by the film club when I was at art college, and somebody told me I really needed to see it because it was amazing and just the sort of film you love which, as usual, was pretty much the kiss of death for me. It wasn't that I even disliked the woman who told me this but, for all of her many wonderful qualities, I simply didn't trust her judgement on this occasion.

This unfortunate initial impression was cemented a couple of decades later when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my cousin's lectures, this time inspired by his having just got back from some Tarkovsky related event. As always, his lecture took the form of a leisurely paced droning monologue so delivered as to make it very difficult for anyone to interrupt, and composed with the apparent assumption of my never having heard of Tarkovsky, and possibly having no idea of what films are either. My cousin is five years younger than me but went to a much better school, you see, so has often felt duty bound to impart his greater wisdom.

I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the film and had reason to believe it might not be my sort of thing, but he took no notice. After about thirty fucking minutes of this, as he paused to draw breath, I took the opportunity to quip, 'Go on, then - push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me.' This was an allusion to Ronnie Corbett's shaggy dog stories from The Two Ronnies, and an attempt to reiterate my lack of interest in a light-hearted and humorous way so as not to give offence. He momentarily gave me the blackest of black looks, then continued for another twenty minutes, the condescending fucking cunt.

What eventually brought about my own personal Tarkovsky glasnost was my friend Carl telling me he'd been reading Roadside Picnic - on which Stalker is based and which I hadn't heard of because my cousin was apparently right about me being a massive thickie; but I tend to trust Carl's judgement on most things, so I took the plunge and finally watched it on Netflix or Hulu or one of those.

It was good, as I probably knew it would be, and it looked amazing, but then Blade Runner also looks amazing, and I don't know if Stalker was quite worth the forty year wait. It felt like it should do more than just look amazing whilst hanging about on the screen for far too long.

'It's based on a book that's supposed to be great, although I've never read it,' I told my wife as we sat down to watch. Then, after about seven hours, I added, 'You know, I don't think I'll bother with the book after all.'

I wasn't actually aware that she'd ordered me a copy from Amazon as we were watching because our birthday* was coming up. I'd assumed she was just fiddling with her phone as usual. Amazingly she didn't say anything.

To get to the point at long last, I finally understand the reputation this thing has garnered over the years, and I suppose Stalker is an extension of that, although the movie is very much a remix of the novel rather than a faithful rendering. the premise is, as you may know, that aliens have visited our planet leaving behind all sorts of fascinating super-advanced garbage just as we might leave crisp packets and plastic forks behind following a roadside picnic, if we're louts. The visitation sites coincidentally foreshadow the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in so much as that you wouldn't want to live there and all sorts of weird and deadly effects apply, and so we have stalkers - as they are called - who brave the Zones and retrieve flying saucer detritus which they sell to the scientific community. Much of the detritus is bewildering or just plain deadly, but occasionally something will turn out to be a self-recharging battery, so here we have the ancestral form of all those shitty science-fiction shows about what secretive government departments do with all the stuff that falls from the sky; except Roadside Picnic is mostly wonderful, fairly close to being a masterpiece, and is also entirely believable and true to life, being about the people more than it's about the weirdness. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in her introduction:

There are no superbrilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it's not cheapened. the authors' touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

The use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.

I punched the air when I read that, and the pages that follow live up to the promise of the introduction; although that said, I found I got a little lost around halfway, mainly because I was subconsciously trying to match the narrative to what I could recall of the movie, which wasn't actually a whole lot. Anyway, having recognised that the movie was only loosely related, I started again at the beginning which, oddly enough, was a pleasure more than it was a chore.

Roadside Picnic is about the people, how they relate to the unknown, and the fact of the aforementioned unknown being absolutely unknowable - which is a pleasure to find in a genre that has tended to be more concerned with figuring it all out. Because we all live with the unknowable, even if we're just talking about death, Roadside Picnic feels like real life in a way which can't be said of your Asimovs or your Heinleins; and so it can also be read as being about religion, or even about the Soviet state as was - without actually criticising the Soviet state in any direct sense for obvious reasons. If Roadside Picnic is about anything, then it's arguably about everything.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can't do a thing! We can't stop it, we can't slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It's not because we do bad work. And it's not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

If anyone is still reading, sorry for taking so long getting to the point and so inadvertently summarising how long its taken me to recognise the brilliance of this novel in some form or another, but we all got there in the end. Whatever garbage you were about to read, read this instead.

*: We have the same birthday.

The Star Beast

Robert Heinlein The Star Beast (1954)
Having got back into the habit of picking up second hand Heinlein if there's something interestingly weird on the cover, I continue to be surprised at how many of them turn out to be juvies. I suppose there might be an argument that most science-fiction is for kids, but it's not an argument I'm interested in having, and at least when Heinlein was writing for the kiddies, he mostly managed to keep the stories free of wife-swapping and the like.

Anyway, I've generally enjoyed his children's books - the only major variance from his regular work usually being the presence of at least one plucky yet studious schoolboy busily having an adventure. This is an odd one in that it's thicker than usual - about one-hundred and twenty pages worth of story expanded to more than twice that length. The Star Beast is a family pet, a sort of eight-legged dinosaur which talks in a voice resembling that of a little girl. His name is Lummox - although he later turns out to be approximately female - seems about as intelligent as a talking canine sidekick in a cartoon, but then turns out to be a stranded representative of an extremely alien and advanced race whose intelligence is of such development that we don't even recognise it. Lummox also eats metal, and gets into trouble as quirky pets tend to do in this sort of story, and all of those pages which we probably didn't need are thus occupied with droning legal conversations about who owns Lummox, how we negotiate with his race, and so on and so forth. Thus something which might have translated fairly well into animated Disney - at least back in the day when Disney had some charm - becomes something of a route march through page after page of barely consequential yacking with so little descriptive seasoning that much of it may as well have been written as a movie script.

Well, whatever you may say about Heinlein, he writes well in lively sentences and is conspicuously capable of spinning a yarn; so it's easier to appreciate what The Star Beast does well than it is to dwell on a few incidences of droning.

The Door into Summer

Robert Heinlein The Door into Summer (1957)
It's taken me a while to forgive Heinlein and grudgingly accept that he may have written some greats. The Door into Summer gets off to a tremendous start, then races along in consistently tremendous style for more or less the duration. There's no way of saying it without annoying someone or committing what will almost certainly resemble sneering, but Heinlein writes like a guy who knows regular people and has had sexual intercourse. He writes like a proper author, an author of books written for persons who like to read more than they care about signing up for a genre which doubles up as their identity.

This is a novel about time travel, and an ingenious one which avoids the usual time travel twists that have since been done to death. It's a novel about an inventor and his cat, and the cat features prominently as much more than just some arbitrary pendant to the main character. Heinlein really got cats, it seems, and writes at satisfying length about them, and also about people who don't get cats and what's wrong with them; so that scores points with me.

Unfortunately he almost blows it at the end by having his main character turn up in a nudist colony, then travel forward in time to marry a little girl once sufficient years have passed for her to have become a woman. They're not related, despite her being referred to as his niece, but it seems a needlessly creepy development reminding us that this is the author of Stranger in a Strange Land, and also that persons referring to themselves as inventors usually have something wrong with them.

So it's a great book, and you can see why Heinlein has been so revered over the years, but you may prefer to pretend you didn't hear a couple of comments made near the end.

Rocket Ship Galileo

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

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

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

Astounding

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
During the thicker, chewier novels, I'll occasionally take a break around the half way mark to read something—or even anything which feels a bit less like being at work; because I like to enjoy what I read, that usually being the entire fucking point of reading something in the first place. Sometimes if I discover that I've actually been reading an overextended gusher of piss bladdered by an idiot who doesn't deserve my patronage - as occurred with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I'll give up, just stop reading, perhaps even hurl the book across the room and switch to something better. This didn't really feel like an option with Moby-Dick, given that the first hundred or so pages are astonishing and that it has a certain reputation, but I reached the point where I needed a break, and in fact ended up taking two separate holidays - about half way and then again just before the end - still with no fucking whale in sight. I read no less than ten other, considerably more enjoyable books during those two periods of rest. Some of them were comic books, although I'm not sure that necessarily has any bearing on Melville's inability to hold my attention, aside from that Superman was, on this occasion, more interesting than - off the top of my head - the entire chapter describing a bit of stick against which harpoons may be propped when not in use.

Actually, the chapter about rope was probably worse.

Fucking rope.

To start at the beginning, I assume we all know what Moby-Dick is and what it does, more or less. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, having read Superman comics, my twenty-first century expectations may perhaps be unfairly accustomed to the sweet, sugary taste of an instant populist fix, meaning I'm unlikely to be well disposed towards an entire fucking chapter about a piece of rope the more plodding, archaic narratives of the nineteenth century; although actually I've read plenty of novels approximately contemporary with this one and haven't had a problem, or at least no problem of the kind I encountered trying to frog march my attention span towards the chapter in which shit actually happens. It may be that Moby-Dick had less work to do in 1851, back when the world's oceans were as much unknown territory as outer space became during the century which followed; and it's worth remembering that the majority of the novel inhabits the realms of water, air, fire to a lesser extent, and with earth as nothing more reliable than the deck beneath the feet of its unfortunate cast. So it's a novel which creates a world of its own, far removed from anything familiar, and maybe that was enough in 1851.

The first one-hundred or so pages, during which Ishmael meets and forges a rudimentary friendship with Queequeg, his future shipmate, are wonderfully vivid, strange and engrossing, and seem to promise much for the rest of the book. Then we set sail, meet Ahab, and settle into a droning testimony about whales and how to kill them which surely didn't need to be anything like so long as it was, and which feels as though the author is desperately scrabbling for fascinating facts by which to keep us interested while nothing happens due to no-one having yet spotted the whale which took Ahab's leg. I can see how the immersive level of detail - mostly gore and slaughter reduced to an industrial process - and the duration of its long-winded delivery might serve to impress upon the reader just how much of a whaling trip is spent hanging around, and how much is at stake, but it nevertheless reads like the work of someone without anything much to say who nevertheless doesn't know when to shut up. Even D.H. Lawrence noted:

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick. He preaches and he holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

Melville will tell us that at this juncture the delivery of my news must apply itself to a more earthy subject than might delight listeners' ears, namely that I would deliver information concerning and detailing my intent to adjourn to a secluded spot so fashioned for the broad and impolitic custom of its dispensation, rather than guys, I'm going for a shit, okay?; and it becomes exhausting, just as America's love of ceremony, capes, ionic columns, and the longest, long speeches ever has always been exhausting, and an overcompensation. Should any of it deliver us unto anything of consequence, it would be fine or at least appropriate, but it doesn't. The Ahab of myth may be a man driven by his own mania, but the guy in this book is just a bit of a cunt, and probably less nutty than you would expect of a man who once had his leg bitten off by a whale; and the novel may well be about the death of God, or proof of how little the universe cares about any of us, but Melville seems to depend on scale alone for the communication of his message, whatever it was - if he even knew.

The literary potential of whaling as a metaphor is astonishing, at least as of the mid-nineteenth century, given the whale as the largest living creature then known to mankind - something more like an ecology than an animal. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine developed a theory about the influence of the whale on human history - all founded on many world cultures supporting creation myths based around giant oceanic monsters - Tiamat and Cipactli to name but two - and the apparent global prevalence of solar symbols combining a circle with a chevron which, my friend suggested, might be derived from whale vertebrae. There was more to it, and although it was overly reliant upon coincidental resemblance and didn't really explain anything which wasn't already supported by a decent explanation, the idea was nevertheless an impressive attempt to grapple with our experience of reality and the assumptions we make about it; and I really feel that Moby-Dick should have done the same thing, but better.

Devil on the Moon

Kenneth Robeson Devil on the Moon (1938)
It's taken me a while to work out what or who Doc Savage is or was. I first heard of him in reference to the disastrous George Pal movie adaptation in the pages of Starburst when I was a teenager. The name was a new one on me, and the piece assumed I would either know who the hell they were talking about or else might at least be capable of making an effort to catch up. This, as an aside, seems a more civilised way of going about things, crediting the reader with some intelligence, as distinct from the contemporary approach which would doubtless endeavor to catch our attention with Doc Savage was kinda like the Commander Shepherd* of his day.

Later I saw some of that movie, and I vividly recall a stereotypical Oirish person who wears a green bowler hat and goes around with a pig under his arm, but I can't find any reference to this character on the internet, and although Monk in the books has a pet pig, the resemblance seemingly ends there. Maybe I imagined it.

Anyway, there are a million volumes of these things to be had in the second hand places around our way, and I figured I should at least try one. The Man of Bronze was the first in the series, and I was holding out for a copy but it never seemed to show up, so I nabbed this one on the grounds of it having a promising cover.

Stan Lee has cited Doc Savage as a prototype for the entire superhero genre, which seems fair. He predates Superman and even got there first with an arctic Fortress of Solitude - which is even identified as such. He has adventures, fights crime, and so on and so forth. Most of the books were written by Lester Dent, Savage's creator, as was this one, although they're all credited to the collective nom de plume of Kenneth Robeson. Dent and his colleagues churned these things out for most of the thirties and forties, and as you might expect they have a pulpy quality - if you'll pardon what has become a somewhat condescending term - emphasis on action, peril, fast-pacing, intrigue, and characters painted in bold colours. That said, Dent knew how to work a satisfying, occasionally arresting turn of phrase beyond the basic requirements of delivering generic thrills, and I particularly liked the scene setting.

The Spanish Plantation was situated in Virginia, near Washington, and its old Colonial architecture was pleasantly distinguished. There was a colored orchestra and a sign which advertised chicken dinners. It was a nice place.

Occasionally we get splashes of the genuinely weird.

But the victim screamed terribly; the ends of his fingers bulged like stepped-on wieners under the pressure, and one fingertip split and emptied crimson.

Somehow I couldn't quite tell what the story was about, except that it involved a lot of kidnapping, plus the intimation of a bad guy controlling everything from somewhere on the moon. It's something to do with certain European countries which Dent leaves unnamed despite that he's obviously referring to Germany, Poland, and others then gearing up for the second world war. The anonymity strikes an odd note, almost implying a reluctance to offend any readers who might have thought Hitler was lovely, but there's nothing in the text to suggest unsavoury sympathies. Some genius on Goodreads has pointed out instances of sexism in the book but, well, you know…

Devil on the Moon didn't change my life, but there's really nothing much to be said against it and it's good of its kind. I'm more likely to pick up one of these than to bother with another Heinlein, for example.

*: Apparently a character from a console game called Mass Effect, which I had to look up for the sake of a contemporary reference. I don't actually know much about the world or characters of console games because games are for fucking idiots.

First Flight

Chris Claremont First Flight (1981)
I tried and I tried and I almost did it, but with forty pages to go, my reading glands rebelled and my hand reached for something else as though under the influence of some mysterious external force. I've got a lot of time for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comic book for seventeen years, but whoever told him to try his hand at a novel should take a long, hard look at themselves. I first noticed this title on the shelves of Half Price Books about a decade ago, and I've never been tempted because, to judge a book mostly by its Top Gun-esque cover, it looked fucking terrible.

Well, what do you know?

Somewhere under here, there's a decent story in the general vein of Heinlein, and Claremont knows how to put a sentence together; but pull back and you'll notice that the arresting image he's conjured is actually sprayed on the side of a van heading for Los Angeles with the best of the Doobie Brothers blasting from the eight track and the driver, who would probably benefit from a trip to the barbers, has just addressed you as man. The problem is that where Claremont has been father to many a beautifully written comic book, they're mostly written in collaboration with artists, and if I've taken anything from First Flight it's that the art of a good Claremont story does a share of the heavy lifting. It's not actually bad, but once we've established the narrative with snappy dialogue, it feels as though something is missing, that we should be staring at some galaxy-spanning vista drawn by John Byrne or whoever; because as it stands, the prose communicates very little of the wonder of space travel or our first encounter with an alien species, instead leaving the reader with a vague feeling of it having happened. I found myself drifting off because the characterisation is the only thing which holds the attention, and the characterisation is actually a lot like what I read in those X-Men comics all those years ago. At one point I noticed that our people were on a different spacecraft, having apparently made the transference while I was thinking about something else.

While, we're here, notice how the cover depicts spunky young pilots climbing into their individual starfighters - or summink - ready to scramble, or whatever it is that starfighters do. Well, whatever is going on here, isn't actually in the book so far as I can tell.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Yukio Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)
I picked this up some years ago, vaguely recalling that the bloke from Death in June was a fan - which seemed like a recommendation back then. Mishima was Japan's most celebrated author, or one of them. If low on chuckles, The Sailor gets off to an intriguing start, assuming here that this is mostly thanks to the author as much as the translator. A young boy discovers a peephole which allows him to spy upon his mother while she's on the job with a random sailor. I gather that the boy forms a cruel, elitist gang with others from his school in order to torture the sailor for reasons which may or may not have become clear had I finished the thing; but I got to the page where the kids torture and kill a kitten and found that I had thrown the book across the room, which hasn't happened since Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can't deal with gratuitous animal torture because it upsets me, which I presume is the author's intent, and somehow it's always cats so it seems like nasty, lazy button pushing, a cheap effect; and the preamble about breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos just means you're an arsehole, Yukio.

Godzilla aside, I don't have any particular investment or even necessarily any interest in Japanese tradition or culture, so unsmiling men frowning into the sunset while thinking really hard about honour doesn't do much for me in and of itself. Wikipedia claims Mishima was bullied at school for reading books, which is doubtless why Noboru in The Sailor seems to be one of those lone wolf preying on the sheeplike herd of weak, sentimental humanity types, although I could be wrong because, as I say, I didn't actually make it past the end of chapter five. Had I done so, perhaps I would have discovered that Noboru is to be pitied rather than admired, but I guess I'll never know. Have you ever noticed how the aforementioned lone wolves always seem to be overcompensating for failing in the Darwinian terms they themselves often claim to have embraced? Show me almost any scowling, black-clad poetry binging representative of the spiritual elite, and I'll show you someone who wouldn't last five fucking minutes down Catford high street on a Saturday night.

My theory is that had Mishima been born American, and a couple of decades later, his work would have been mostly published on Amazon CreateSpace as eBooks, and he'd be spinning scowling patriotic yarns about freedom fighters defending the last of the white race against Obama's NWO. Luckily, he wasn't, and so we get to view his elegantly composed mania through an Orientalist lens, essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt because each word is set carefully in place with much honour like in one of those Samurai rituals or summink; so we imagine we're watching Kurosawa when actually it's probably closer to that nebulous shit beloved of Hitler and his pals, the honour of suffering and other Death in June albums in the making. Almost anything can be made to appear philosophical when you transgress the limits of just how seriously you are prepared to take yourself.

I could be wrong, of course, given that I didn't finish the thing; but honestly, I couldn't give a shit.

The Female Man

Joanna Russ The Female Man (1975)
Feminist science-fiction, so I am reliably informed, and one for which I was on the lookout on the grounds of Joanna Russ giving good account of herself in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, and The Female Man being listed amongst the ten greatest science-fiction novels of all time by someone or other, and because it sounded interesting; and yet I'm underwhelmed, doubtless - as some might suggest - because I have a penis and should have stuck to Robert Heinlein writing about mighty men piloting phallic rocket ships.

The Female Man seems to feature four versions of the author meeting up and comparing notes. One of them is from Whileaway, a supposedly far future Feminist utopia. I think my problem stems in part from certain themes having a didactic cadence, where Russ herself has stated that this was not her intention. As a general non-linear and arguably subjective fist shaken at useless arseholes and persons who make life unpleasant, it mostly works, or is artistically valid and at least as much so as the occasional descent into misogyny by Burroughs or Bukowski - here assuming that Whileaway represents a critique of Feminist utopia rather than something to which we might necessarily aspire. Most men are indeed useless sacks of shit, so I don't have a problem with this being pointed out, particularly as Russ seems to take a dim view of nearly everyone. The problem is that whilst certain passages suggest there might be a lot more humour here than is obvious from first glance, it's mostly lost amongst all the grousing and whining, and this muddying of the waters is further exacerbated by the random modernist structure of the narrative - another author doing the Burroughs thing but never quite striking the right balance. The problem, to really break it down, is that The Female Man is a little boring - the rigged matches against sad, saggy, priapic men get a bit obvious and repetitive, and the cubist progression of one scene to the next becomes a chore. I can't disagree with anything she says, but the telling gets in the way. I have no idea how it could have made the top ten anything.

Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

The Mote in God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
This may have been the most boring novel I've ever attempted to read. It's less hateful than Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but that's hardly a recommendation. I'd promised myself no more Niven because whilst he has some great ideas, they are often the only thing going for an otherwise irritating novel; but Pournelle seemed kind of interesting when I read about him in Charles Platt's second Dream Makers book the other month, and I suppose I must have wondered about the title at some point.

I started, then eventually decided I couldn't read another word at around page three-hundred. The next two things I tried reading both featured cats being killed - albeit accidentally in the case of Sid Vicious - which depressed me, inspiring a return to Mote on the grounds of feline destruction being one sin it seemed unlikely to commit; but after another couple of days with less than a hundred pages to go, I realised that it really was as dull as it had appeared during the previous sitting.

The story is set against a backdrop of humanity as a well-established galaxy spanning empire which encounters alien life for the first time and is thus obliged to have a bit of a rethink; and somehow they found a way to make it about as interesting as a sales report.

Niven's weird alien civilisation is kind of engaging up to the point at which it started to remind me of the cantina in Star Wars or something written by Douglas Adams, as always seems to happen; and no - I don't actually care whether or not he got there first and should thus be hailed as the father of smirking aliens who crack knob gags. The rest is your basic military science-fiction bearing a suspicious resemblance to sixties Star Trek:

'Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?'

'Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we've hydrogen to spare.'

Unless I imagined it, the great majority of the text seems to be taken up with important space navy types holding ponderous conversations about how such and such an alien discovery is likely to influence the political economy of such and such a colony world. This is savoured with military protocol and ensigns screaming sir, yes, sir. It gives the impression of an author enamoured with his own martial testimony, imagining that a military background has furnished him with an experience so much richer than the rest of us could begin to imagine, and now he's going to afford us a glimpse of the magic by describing nervous young recruits summoned to the offices of grizzled old warhorses covered in medals. What heady days those were!

Additionally, it's not particularly well written and every other page seems to throw in some element that doesn't make sense.

'We'll have to go through it,' Whitbread's Motie said. She twittered to Charlie for a moment. 'There are alarms and there'll be warriors on guard.'

'Can we go over it?'

'You'd pass through an x-ray laser, Horst.'

'God's teeth. What are they so afraid of?'

I've read that passage seven or eight times, and I still don't understand why Horst would pass through an x-ray laser. I can't tell whether it's a prediction or a facetious comment which says something or other about Horst, most likely suggesting that he lacks a due sense of caution, but even with this potentially being the case, the phrasing doesn't quite work; and there are similar weird semantic hiccups throughout.

While we're here, there's one human woman in the entire book, who is naturally married off to some military dude at the end. The sexism wouldn't ordinarily bother me, except it's clearly symptomatic of a wider problem. Stephen Baxter and even Peter F. Hamilton did this sort of thing so much better.

So yes, well done, lads - you've knocked Heinlein right off his throne with this one.

The Crossing Line

Fabian Nicieza etc. The Crossing Line (1990)
'Back on the Shakespeare, I see,' observed my wife as I lay in bed reading my sad little mylar bagged stack of Avengers comics. I didn't blush because there didn't seem to be much point. I freely admit that I bought the six issues of The Crossing Line because I was rifling through the used comic book racks at Half-Price when I noticed one of these with guest starring Alpha Flight proclaimed on the cover.

'Ooh Alpha Flight!' squealed the little voice within, and they had four of the six issues there in the racks which seemed nice and tidy, and for just a dollar a pop, and it was easy enough to find the other two online, and why the fuck not? In any case, half of my facebook friends list - admittedly the half I've unfollowed so that I don't have to read their characteristically inane reportage on cosplay, Funko Pops, or watching four thousand episodes of Charmed in a single sitting - are either Harry Potter fans, grown men presently engaged with a Puffin Books reading marathon, or people who are actually able to discuss what Steven Moffat was trying to say in such and such a terminally shite Who episode, so fuck you!

Anyway, I've been trying to read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Jesus Christ it's boring. It hasn't quite reached Heinlein standards of loathsome which is why I'm still dutifully ploughing through page after page of space opera tedium, but I needed a break, and this seemed sufficiently unlike The Mote in God's Eye as to serve as a palate cleanser. Being a kid's superhero comic from the nineties, it quite naturally takes itself far too seriously, but no more so than Mote's wearying starship commanders responding to security breaches and other important sounding military shit.

The Crossing Line is a story of terrorists hijacking a British nuclear submarine, and how the mighty Avengers rush to the scene to save the day only to find themselves embroiled in a massive clusterfuck with Canadian and Russian superhero teams who had the same idea, just as the forces of Atlantis once again decide to wage war on the surface dwellers. There are probably about five persons with speaking roles in the entire story who don't have super-powers, or who haven't acquired super-powers by the last issue, so it's like that Simpsons comic in which the power plant blows up, irradiating the entire town of Springfield, transforming everyone into superheroes. It's deeply fucking ludicrous, but is a lot more fun than A Mote in God's Eye, and the fact of almost every single character being able to fly or to shoot beams from their hands roughly shuffles the story closer to science-fiction than most caped material; and besides, describing this as deeply fucking ludicrous implies that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't.

By my understanding, the appeal of eighties Marvel lay in its being a huge shared universe viewed only one small piece at a time through reading the comics and trying to work out who was who, what they could do, and what the hell was going on; so storytelling aside, it appealed to anyone who liked to collect sets of things as a kid, anyone who ever decided that their Shogun Warrior model kits could inhabit the same continuity as Micronauts action figures. That's how this stuff first drew me in, and how it still works up to a point. I'm older and wiser, but it's still kind of interesting trying to work out who the fuck these other Avengers were supposed to be, given that I don't even remember them from back in the day and otherwise recognise only Captain America and the Vision.

Whilst Fabian Nicieza has written some ropey stuff in his time, he always had something interesting going on, and was distinguished amongst the Marvel script droids of his era as someone with a distinctive style, even with themes common to his writing - specifically a pronounced tendency to draw from the real world politics of the time in ways which seem quite perceptive once you get past the people in costumes cracking jokes whilst fighting. This also means that we get to see not only George W. Bush in a nineties Marvel comic, but even the Thatch!

The Crossing Line is, as I guess we have probably established, ridiculous, although it differs only from more recent Grant Morrison efforts in method rather than substance, but it doesn't matter. It does everything it sets out to do and held my attention for a couple of hours without inducing either depression or embarrassment. I doubt anyone will ever collect this material as a graphic novel, but maybe it's fine as a stack of six comic books.

Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

John W. Campbell (editor)
Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (1956)
Isaac Asimov said of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, that the man was the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely. By agency of his magazine, Campbell was first to publish many of the greats - Asimov himself, Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, and of course the mighty A.E. van Vogt. It's therefore probably inevitable that the stock of his name has lost some of its currency in recent years, just as has that of Hugo Gernsback, arguably Campbell's spiritual forebear in the field. Campbell popularised a very specific strain of science-fiction - two-fisted, deeply conservative men having space adventures whilst reeling off lists of scientific statistics, the sort of thing which led to Star Wars, Alien, and the rest. I can't be arsed to dig out my copy of Brian Aldiss's Trillion Year Spree, but I expect he will have said something along those lines; and assuming he did, he will have had a point.

Campbell was unfortunately of his time in the sense of Oswald Mosley and senator Joseph McCarthy being of their time, with all kinds of unsavoury views regarding race, socialism, and the institution of slavery, as Michael Moorcock reported in an editorial piece entitled Starship Stormtroopers, essentially a brief history of authoritarian currents in science-fiction literature:

He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

The more I know about Campbell, the less I like, and yet I'd nevertheless rather not see him chucked down the same oubliette as Gernsback. Whilst I agree that his talent and reputation may be historically overplayed, and that as a person he sounds absolutely ghastly - as I'm sure Sir Kenneth Clark would agree - for better or worse, his influence upon the genre is undeniable, and his legacy is not entirely lacking in redeeming qualities. Just like Gernsback, Campbell's vision was arse, but it was populist, bestselling arse, and providing you keep in mind that it was arse, there's nevertheless some pleasure to be gained.

The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology came out in 1952 as a mammoth hardback assemblage of twenty-two short stories by what were then the biggest names. I gather it was one of the first anthologies of its kind, and as such left an indelible stamp on the genre as a whole. This collection is one of several paperbacks reprinting just eight of those stories, because paperback technology of the time was supposedly not quite up to reprinting the whole thing; and I picked it up, still buzzing from reading a Murray Leinster collection and hoping to keep the magic going.

Leinster's fiction very much ticked all of the Campbell boxes, but as with A.E. van Vogt, I nevertheless find the atmosphere and peculiar narrative twists compelling and often so odd as to actively undermine the square-jawed subtext; which isn't to say that they're anything deep, just immensely enjoyable. That said, I've noticed a peculiar quality of Leinster's view of the alien entirely in keeping with what Moorcock regards as the authoritarian tendencies of Campbell's lads. First Contact is a variation on The Aliens from the collection of the same name, in which humans encounter extraterrestrials in deep space. Whilst the encounters are not overtly fraught with hostility, they seem informed by the paranoid cold war politics of the time, and bizarrely so. Both tales spin upon the supposed inevitability of alien species who really want to be able to trust each other but somehow know this to be impossible, and so they must destroy each other.

Well duh.

It makes for odd reading in 2016, but it helps that Leinster reaches an amicable conclusion, in part revealing the folly of xenophobia; which makes a pleasant change from the alien as foul bug-eyed Communist and, I suppose, might even get its message to those needing it with greater efficacy than would a more overtly liberal tale. Although that said, The Aliens seems particularly weird for having an out and out declared xenophobe on the crew of its ship, and one stated as having been chosen specifically so as to provide a variant perspective to that of the ship's more reasonable captain - all seeming very pertinent right now, of course...

Ugh... yeah - getting back to this book, the first story is Asimov's Nightfall which I read in 2008 and thought was amazing. Almost everyone I know who has read Asimov, read and enjoyed his work as teenagers then later came to regard his writing as big on ideas but otherwise piss poor and very much overrated. I didn't actually read anything by him until 2008, by which point I would have been in my forties, and I thought he was fucking terrible, particularly those Susan Calvin stories; until someone pointed me in the general direction of the good stuff, or what seemed to be the good stuff, and thus was my opinion revised, or at least modified. Yet reading Nightfall now, it too seems horribly clunky - an admittedly nice big idea somewhat lost beneath thirty pages of dreary conversation amounting to a couple of one-dimensional characters describing the story to us.

Protons, you say? So what kind of properties might one of those have?

Anyway, I picked this from the shelf thinking I could hardly go wrong given the names on the cover, but ultimately, aside from a half decent Leinster, an averagely pleasant - and conspicuously well written Simak - and A.E. van Vogt's eye-wateringly peculiar Vault of the Beast, it's all a little underwhelming. Possibly excepting the slog of Nightfall, there's nothing terrible here, but it fails to live up to the promise of Paul Lehr's wonderful cover painting, and dammit - this collection really should have been better.

Cosmic Checkmate

Katherine MacLean & Charles V. De Vet Cosmic Checkmate (1962)
Having written mostly short stories, Katherine MacLean is one of those authors who came up through Astounding, Galaxy and the like and who appears to have subsequently slipped through the net. On the strength of The Diploids collection, this seems a terrible shame. Even without considering whatever factors you may wish to consider regarding her being a woman writing in what was a predominantly male field, I'd suggest it's really only the greater page count clocked up by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and the like which could possibly justify her not having been ranked alongside them as one of the giants. She wrote well, and she wrote her own highly distinctive kind of story - science fiction concerned mostly with systems theory, games logic, social interaction and biology. It's difficult to confuse a good MacLean with the work of anyone else.

Cosmic Checkmate is written in collaboration with Charles V. De Vet, whom I hadn't heard of and apparently doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page. Being unfamiliar with the guy, it's difficult to say for sure what his contribution to Cosmic Checkmate might have been; but given that MacLean's involvement is obvious, and that this is fairly disappointing for a book with her name on the cover, I guess De Vet's ideas encompass all those elements which just aren't that interesting.

Our story takes a lone human to the one planet which refuses to have anything to do with Earth's galactic empire. There he finds a bizarrely formal pseudo-human society with all sorts of elaborate honour codes evolved from its unorthodox biological cycle - most likely all designed by Katherine MacLean and very interesting too. Honour demands that the fate of our man and the galaxy depend upon him playing an elaborate chess-like game upon which the alien society is founded. Beyond this, the narrative is unfortunately just not that engaging, and briefly inspired bursts of MacLean - or what I would imagine must have come from her - don't really elevate the tale above something which you read until the point at which you've finished reading it, which is a pity. Even in the context of stories in which the protagonists decide the fate of something much bigger than themselves over a game of chess - never the most mind-boggling subgenre - Cosmic Checkmate just isn't that good. There's a fairly pleasing conclusion about the benefits of a varied and multicultural society - both social and biological - but it really should have been tagged onto a better story.

The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
I've now read most books published by most of the authors I really, really like. I have therefore reached that point of realisation that if it's considered a science-fiction classic and there it is right in front of me on the shelf in the second hand place, then I may as well bag me a copy providing it isn't Heinlein. Whilst Ursula played a blinder with The Left Hand of Darkness, it somehow didn't quite inspire me to run out and grab everything else carrying her name. I'm not even sure why not, but anyway, here I am four or five years later, submerging that toe to greater depth.

The Lathe of Heaven is characteristically beautifully written in so much as that it reads like a proper book - you know, even Margaret Attwood might enjoy it; and I suppose it belongs to the satirical tradition of science-fiction in the broadest sense. At least it has enough in common with later Philip K. Dick as to account for why a LeGuin quote should in particular have graced the covers of so many of his novels when Granada reprinted them back in the eighties.

Our man in The Lathe of Heaven has dreams which change the world, leaving only himself with the memory of how things were before his own subconscious somehow influenced reality. He seeks psychiatric help, but the psychiatrist only primes his patient with suggestions leading to dreams which depopulate the Earth and bring on an alien invasion. There's no explanation for how the dreams of one person can have such a devastating effect, but that's hardly the point of the novel, and the point of the novel is, I suppose, that one should be careful what one wishes for. It's neither inordinately original nor particularly profound, but nevertheless makes for just the kind of well-rounded, satisfying read you probably expect from Ursula LeGuin. I suppose my only criticism, if we really need one, is that it felt like an overly extended short story rather than a novel in the sense of The Left Hand of Darkness and so doesn't seem to quite attain escape velocity equivalent to that of the aforementioned, although of course they're both very different books.

Still - very readable and better than a kick up the arse.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
If I might briefly wax psychogeographically, seeing as I'm about the only fucker left who has yet to twist that particular baseball cap around backwards in a pitiful attempt to get down with the kids - I have a friend who used to live in Dickens' old house, or specifically in one of the houses in which Dickens grew up in Chatham, Kent. This is Glenn Wallis of the group Konstruktivists, authors of the album Psykho Genetika which remains one of the most psychologically disturbing slabs of abstract noise you're ever likely to hear. I didn't exactly know Glenn at the time, but had been writing to him for a year or so and was slightly in awe of him. He'd hung out with Throbbing Gristle, and as such seemed to be a peripheral figure on a weird and engrossingly dark musical scene. When Throbbing Gristle were denounced as Fascist in the NME - or whichever worthless rag it was - owing to the cited Nazi salute given by a black clad supporter, it had actually been Glenn, not saluting but reaching up to retrieve his pint from where he'd left it on top of a speaker; and now he had invited me over for a cup of tea, and there was a blue plaque on the house as testimony to Dickens previous residence.

Inside fell some way short of what you might expect of such a hypothetically prestigious dwelling, being as it had somehow been converted into distinctly crappy flats by a slum landlord who occasionally threatened to kill people's pets. The basement served as communal kitchen and lounge, but was used mainly for the consumption of heroin, judging by all the needles. Into this environment Glenn and his new wife had just brought their newborn baby, a daughter they named Jade. They were trying to move out, because it was a seriously crappy situation.

Of all the grim places in which I've ever seen friends endeavour to exist, Dickens' old gaff remains one of the worst; and it wasn't just the squalor or the lack of room or sharing with junkies, the place was saturated with the kind of ingrained darkness which H.P. Lovecraft would have denounced as overwritten - The Exorcist meets Trainspotting or something in that general direction. I still have no idea how anyone could have spent a night under that roof.

Now I realise this was simply the spirit of Dickens Past causing me to shit myself in vindictive pre-emptive payment  - precompense, if you will - of that which I must set to digital paper.

Okay. So I remember enjoying A Christmas Carol as a kid - read inevitably when I was at school - but that's been it. Something has always put me off Dickens, and here I am, nearly fifty and still to tackle a second helping from the greatest writer who ever lived aside from that Shakespeare. At least I'm told he's the greatest writer who ever lived, time and time again, and A Tale of Two Cities is the biggermost selling novel in history, so maybe it's just me.

It's the names which put me off.

I beseech you, Mr. Whimplestropper, for all the goodness which may gladly reside in thine over-generous heart, cast ye not that hamburger into the road where it may provide succour only to stray dogs, instead let it nourish my charge, young Barnaby Tugspangle.

Oh piss off.

Admittedly this impression derives from four million Dickens-based costume dramas every bastard Sunday teatime when I was growing up, as opposed to my actually - you know - reading the fucking things; so I was hoping I might be proven wrong; and I went for A Tale of Two Cities having encountered the French revolution in a few other places of late, plus word on the street was that Chuck had eased off on the funnies with this one, so...

Okay. I can see the craft and accordingly the appeal. Mr. Dickens does indeed bake an exceedingly fine sentence, set a deliciously fulsome, near tactile scene, and upon these he doth build many intriguing and well-rounded characters; and in theory he weaves a wonderful story, delivering chuckles as well as sound moral principles unto an age which really needed a lot more going on in that department. Dickens speaks up on the behalf of the poor, the downtrodden, the starving, and even the just plain useless back in an era when such were routinely regarded as one social stratum above talented pets which had learnt to walk on their hind legs; and A Tale of Two Cities concerns itself with the hysteria of the mob and those injustices which may be perpetrated in its name, a topic which seems now more relevant than ever...

I tried and I tried and I tried but I just couldn't do it. I made it to page two-hundred and still found myself entirely unable to give a shit about anyone. I even looked on Wikipedia, studying the synopsis in order to reassure myself that I hadn't missed anything, and unfortunately I hadn't, but still it went on and on and on - blah blah some sort of legal shit blah blah blah soppy woman getting married without giving me any idea as to why I'm supposed to care yap yap yap yap yap yet another tosser with a silly name, and each time anyone asks a fucking question, what could have been a yes or no answer turns into why indubitably I would do you the honour of gifting something by way of confirmation, and so it becomes my very great pleasure to admit to you, my very dear friend, that the situation is indeed in exact accord with your summation just as you have described it rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb...
 

It's like being stuck in a lift with my cousin Paul.

I really don't like to give up on a book, particularly as I even managed to finish Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - albeit skimming the final hundred pages - which has to be one of the worst things ever written, but Dickens was really kicking my ass here, and it's not as though I'm a stranger to fiction of this era. I'm sure A Tale of Two Cities has many wonderful qualities, but I found myself entirely unable to appreciate any of them, and I just couldn't face another couple of hundred pages of this droning bollocks. I always knew I probably wouldn't enjoy Dickens, and so in future I will endeavour to exercise more faith in my own uninformed prejudices, which is probably the exact opposite of what the author intended, which is ironic.

SOS from Three Worlds

Murray Leinster SOS from Three Worlds (1966)
I've not yet digested a huge wealth of this guy's work, but on the strength of this and a short story collection read a few years back, I suspect there may be some grounds to consider the Leinster overlooked in terms of the history of science-fiction literature. In some senses he was probably your archetypal pulp author, and it perhaps isn't too surprising that he also wrote adventure, historical, western, sea, and suspense stories according to the blurb inside the front cover. Perhaps unsurprisingly, SOS from Three Worlds scores low as poetry, but nevertheless demonstrates considerable craft - a beautifully constructed hand-tooled sideboard rather than a mass-produced formica carbuncle. Furthermore, it's hard science-fiction in the Asimov sense, at least providing you keep in mind that space travel may actually be impossible so we have to make a few allowances otherwise we won't have a story; and as hard science-fiction, Leinster does a great job, communicating all sorts of fancy ideas about space travel, extraterrestrial medicinal practice and xenobiology with infectious and engrossing enthusiasm. The three episodic tales assembled here share a certain hokey quality as basic transpositions of the frontier doc riding his horse from town to town curing whatever may ail ye, but it's an amiably hokey quality rather than an obvious assemblage of familiar clichés, even with the cute animal companion providing routinely good-natured goofy chuckles.

Shoving my eyes up the internet, I notice that the Leinster actually hasn't been overlooked and seems well remembered as a popular author of a million novels, some ground breaking ideas, and a few tie-ins to shows such as The Time Tunnel; but from reading this one, and considering some of the more recently published shite presently clogging up the shelves of Half Price Books, and the fact that people still worship fucking Heinlein, I'd say Leinster's legend deserves to loom at least a little larger, and not least because you really get the sense of him having had a great time writing this one, and considering recent developments, it's always nice to remind oneself of golden age authors with stated progressive views, such as are found here.