Second Person

Gabi Losoncy Second Person (2017)
Gabi Losoncy was one of the names with which I was not familiar from that first splurge of Amphetamine Sulphate titles, hence my only just getting hold of Second Person now, having figured I may as well bag the lot given the standard which has been established. It's a bit of an oddity even as an Amphetamine Sulphate book, novella, chapbook, whatever you want to call it - one of those monologues habitually labelled intensely personal when we're not quite sure what else we can say, but actually quite broad in its aim in so much as that Losoncy seems to be addressing each and every one of us individually in hope of establishing the sort of relationship which might almost categorise Second Person as self-help literature. At least that's the first thing that came to mind.

Losoncy is also, broadly speaking, an artist working in sound, performance, or somewhere in between, so I gather, although I'm unfamiliar with her work, of which Second Person seems to be both an account and an instalment. The text is precise, but unusually dense, written in long, long digressive sentences packed tight with information. Read at normal speed one experiences information overload whilst accumulating an impression of understanding; so it works, for me, a little like A.E. van Vogt of all people, although coming from the opposite direction - a rush of information rather than too little or deliberately vague. If possibly not absolutely essential, there is nevertheless something to be gained from a slower, more measured reading, thus reducing the manic word salad to more easily digestible details. Whether read as a literary waterboarding or as introspective analysis at the lesser velocity, meaning is transmitted, and transmitted in sufficient quantity as to make it worth reading, even if I wasn't always clear on the import of what I had just read; which, oddly, also reminded me of trying to read A Brief History of Time; and while a cynic might equate the above analysis to I didn't understand a fucking word but I should probably say something nice innit, I would refute this by pointing out that not once did I find myself bored, or inclined to skip to the end in search of an explanation. So yes, I found the narrative so intense as to render it quite difficult to translate in a literal sense, but it was obviously doing something which I liked very much.

The Outsider

Albert Camus The Outsider (1942)
Here's another one I probably should have made the effort to read thirty years ago, but better late than never, I suppose. The Outsider is the deceptively straightforward tale of an average man committing murder for no good reason, placed on trial, then sentenced to death. The prose - admittedly the translated prose - is tight and efficient, sticking to the basics without quite succumbing to the shorthand of a thriller. It passes along with so little drama that one begins to wonder what all the fuss has been about, where is the ponderous depth most of us will have anticipated? The revelation comes in the last few chapters as we recognise themes which, so it turns out, have been there all along.

I heard something that I hadn't heard for months. It was the sound of a voice; my own voice, there was no mistaking it. And I recognised it as the voice that for many a day of late had been buzzing in my ears. So I knew that all this time I'd been talking to myself.

The Outsider has been described as an existentialist novel, and its central figure is distanced from his own existence in much the same way as Nausea's Roquentin, but its thoughts are otherwise elsewhere. At the risk of sounding like Fred Flintstone attempting to get his head around A Brief History of Time, my reading is that the novel is about morality in the absence of God, or specifically how we relate to it, if at all, having decided that we're done with all the melodrama and gnashing of teeth undertaken for the sake of appearance. Meursault observes his own life and subsequent detention as though it's all happening to someone else, which Camus seems to propose is what is left once you subtract the hysterics, and what is left is faintly absurd because life is faintly absurd.

It's a quiet realisation, but its impact is significant once you realise what the book is doing; hence, I suppose, it's reputation as a classic.

The Black Cloud

Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud (1957)
I had been trying to get hold of this one ever since I saw Dawkins rate it on one of those books you read as a kid shows, back when Dawkins was less annoying. The one I ordered from Amazon turned out to be an abridged effort printed for schools, about as thick as an After Eight mint and with half of the already reduced page count taken up by teachers notes and questions along the lines of why did the scientist think the Earth would become colder when the Black Cloud arrived? My friend Andy told me there was no point reading an abridged Black Cloud, so I didn't.

Nevertheless I kept looking because I'd promised myself I would find the thing, and was buoyed along by a vague childhood memory of my granny having fetched another Fred Hoyle science-fiction novel from the mobile library for me to read when I was ill. Only recently have I positively identified said novel as having been Into Deepest Space, not Neutron Star as I remember for some peculiar reason given that the latter title refers to a collection of short stories by Larry Niven. Anyway, I enjoyed Into Deepest Space immensely, so it was probably the first science-fiction novel I read, not counting Doctor Who books based on television shows.

Of course, Fred Hoyle was primarily a scientist, and one who now seems best known for having duffed up Stephen Hawking around the back of the bike sheds on occasions when the latter failed to cough up his dinner money, although the psychological underpinning of the battering was probably something to do with Hawking's theories supplanting Hoyle's steady state model of the universe. Hoyle seems to have been somewhat discredited in recent years, which is a shame as I still think the steady state is a nice idea and not entirely without merit, although some of the stuff he cooked up with that Chandra Wickramasinghe was obviously complete bollocks.

Anyway, I kept an eye open and thus made purchase of two cowritten novels - The Andromeda Breakthrough with John Elliott, and Seven Steps to the Sun with his offspring, Geoffrey Hoyle. They're pretty much unreadable, hard science diluted with a load of crap which I suspect some editor may have suggested would help sell the books - Ian Flemingisms and unconvincing references to the manly pursuit of smoking a pipe whilst making lurve to a beautiful woman. In spite of this, my search continued and has at last been rewarded.

Hard science-fiction is sort of the Paul Weller of science-fiction literature, I suppose - plenty of clenching and suggestions of commitment and less of the prancing around in dresses or talking about feelings; or page after page of top scientists having conversations about different kinds of proton, if you prefer - the kind of thing by which Isaac Asimov made his name. That said, in hard science-fiction terms, Asimov reads like one of Michael Moorcock's more inscrutably peculiar efforts compared to The Black Cloud.

The story is fairly simple - a massive cloud of dark gas approaches the solar system and comes to rest, blocking out the sun. The Earth freezes, everything begins to die, and it looks as though we're fucked until the point at which a group of plucky scientists realise that the cloud is intelligent and that communication is possible, and I won't spoil the rest. Most of this is told in a fashion which I would describe as plodding were I a less patient man, alternating passages reading more like essays than fiction, and droning conversations about protons and temperature differentials amongst numerous tweedy scientists, with the occasional light-hearted cricketing reference just to break it up a bit. It should be terrible, but the reader is quickly accustomed to this somewhat stilted style because that which is discussed, if not quite gripping, is certainly interesting.

Four days earlier in London a remarkable meeting had been held in the rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society. The meeting had been called, not by the Royal Astronomical Society itself, but by the British Astronomical Association, an association essentially of amateur astronomers.

Charles Kingsley, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, travelled by train in the early afternoon to London for the meeting. It was unusual for him, the most theoretical of theoreticians, to be attending a meeting of amateur observers. But there had been rumours of unaccounted discrepancies in the positions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Kingsley didn't believe it, but he felt that scepticism should rest on solid ground, so he ought to hear what the chaps had to say about it.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because here we fucking go!!!

Seriously, in spite of itself, there's something in the tone and pacing of The Black Cloud which holds it all together. Despite the tweedier qualities, the somewhat predictable subtext of how everything would be better if we let scientists run the show, the suggestion of worldly experience which doesn't go much beyond handing in end of term papers and then enjoying a jolly old spot of cricket, despite all of its crankier qualities, The Black Cloud is an impressively solid novel, and - much to my surprise - one that has been worth every second of the wait. I suppose this is because, rather than having someone else come along to strip in details which might appeal to those who didn't actually want to read a science-fiction novel in the first place, Hoyle writes to his own strengths. There are some wonderful engrossing passages, not least the thoroughly convincing speculation on how intelligent life might develop within a cloud of interstellar gas, and even a few amusing steady state gags incorporated into discussion of the anthropic principal and even religion - one in the eye for the exploding-universe boys, as Hoyle puts it. The sobriety of the narrative lends the events of the story a greater and more chilling weight than one might experience were the tale to be told in more poetic terms. This shit could actually happen.

So Dawkins was right - The Black Cloud really is a classic.

An Incomprehensible Condition

Andrew Hickey An Incomprehensible Condition (2011)
Seven Soldiers of Victory may be one of the greatest comic book series Grant Morrison has ever written - which I state as someone who isn't always particularly well disposed towards the man - and there may even be an argument for it being the greatest comic book series ever written by anyone, depending on the flavour of that which floats your boat. To suggest that it was both deep and multilayered may be misleading for its depths are quite unlike the narrative cat's cradle of Watchmen, and more in the way of a certain richness of thematic resonance. Specifically, there's so much in there of which very little is absolutely vital for at least a basic understanding of the whole, and there may even be certain pertinent details which have emerged from the creative process without having been put there in any formal sense. Bravely, Andrew Hickey here attempts to draw together some view of the larger picture of Seven Soldiers of Victory, roughly speaking that which forms the landscape at the edge of the frame.

To first dispense with a few minor niggling concerns, An Incomprehensible Condition initially appeared as a series of essays on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, Andrew's generally superb blog. I personally think there's a lot of scope for internet material repackaged as print, not least because I dislike reading from a screen for any length of time, but in order to truly benefit from the transition, the material needs to become a book, rather than simply a website pasted onto pages of text. In this respect An Incomprehensible Condition mostly works, although I found the footnotes providing links to assorted websites a little disconcerting, and the tone occasionally retains a little too much of that which was better suited to a more ephemeral medium - by which I mean the occasional asides (I generally take the view that there always needs to be a really good reason for anything rendered in parentheses), confessions of the occasional blind spot, and certain jokier remarks. It's not that An Incomprehensible Condition doesn't work in print, because it really does. I just feel that it could have been somehow tighter with a little more tweaking. For example, whilst the rhetorical who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist? is a point well made, it becomes overstated and unnecessary with repetition, not least because the morality of ancient civilisations held to account by contemporary standards has always struck me as something open to more expansive debate than can be encompassed by a solitary zinger, regardless of how disgusting or inhumane their practices may have been. Finally, there's also the matter of layout with the captions of certain illustrations shunted along to form the uppermost line of the following page, which just looks a bit clumsy.

But anyway...

Regardless of the above, An Incomprehensible Condition provides an absolutely compelling read, which should not be taken for granted given the almost comical breadth of subject matter brought in for the purpose of discussing something which remains quite difficult to define. Hickey invokes William Blake or Stephen Hawking in support of some seemingly tenuous association with the previous statement, roughly nailing it down then asking or is it? like some sort of weirdly ontological James Burke before launching off in the general direction of either John Bunyan or black hole physics. That sentence undoubtedly reads like a parody, but nevertheless this is what happens as the fabric of Seven Soldiers is pulled apart, or at least invoked, taking the book a long, long way away from the descriptions of who fought who in which issue of My Greatest Adventure which a more literal-minded author might have produced; and because this is an investigation of themes rather than a series of Top Trumps, it works as a narrative in its own right regardless of the material to which it refers. Inevitably, it bewilders in places, but it also sets you to thinking, punting the reader off in unexpected directions which is only what any good book should do.

As the two persons and one basset hound comprising my regular subscribers may well be aware, Andrew Hickey is, in addition to anything else, the author of Head of State, a forthcoming Faction Paradox novel from Obverse Books. Given the impressive showing here, the weight of his philosophical arguments and the originality of his perception, I would say that novel should be eagerly anticipated.

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