Trans*

Rachel Redhead Trans* (2017)
For what little it may be worth, I remain conflicted on the subject of trans identity, referring here to trans persons being specifically identified as trans persons. On some level - or at least in a perfect world - I feel it shouldn't be necessary, and that if - for example - a woman wishes to dress as one of the Mario brothers and identify as Jimmy, then she's a dude in all senses that matter, should be regarded as such, and the contents of those bright red plumber's dungarees are no more my business than anything to be found within either the underwear or sexual proclivities of any other random stranger. I also wonder if meticulously labeling all points on the sexual spectrum is useful, or whether it's actually divisive, perhaps even helping to isolate and define particular communities and so making them easier targets for those disposed towards witch hunts. I've known persons of many variant sexual persuasions and gender identities and have always found it difficult to truly square anyone with the existing labels, or to think of such persons as significantly different to myself in any meaningful way; unless they're into ELO, obviously.

On the other hand, I'm not going to pretend my views, as stated above, amount to anything, given that I'm referring to issues which affect me only in so much as that they affect the kind of society I inhabit. Also, sometimes you just have to stand up and be counted because, it might be argued, the above position can easily be mistaken for trans erasure from a certain angle, this being the notion that trans people don't exist - an idea which doubtless serves witch hunting types just as well. Trans* responds to an unnamed article suggesting that there are no trans characters within genre fiction. Having written innumerable such characters, Rachel Redhead assembled this collection as a refutation - excerpts and scenes from her four million previous novels, mostly just character sketches, and some new material too. Much of what we have are segments of much larger, more complicated stories, but I've always felt Rachel Redhead's strengths to be in the details and the people more than the bigger picture, so the reduced context doesn't actually seem to matter.

As a writer, she almost seems to be evolving towards her own genre, something touching on fantasy, although that's never entirely what it's about - Twilight rewritten by van Vogt on one of his weirder days, punk rock soundtrack, that sort of thing. It has the manic quality of a particularly gossipy telenovela, some pulp elements, and the intensity of a story having a conversation with itself. Sometimes it's a little hard to follow quite what's happening, but there's a kind and generous spirit here, one which manages to shine through even the occasional - and not unjustifiable - revenge fantasy, and that's what makes this stuff so readable. I gather there's a fair bit of autobiographical detail informing these accounts of transition, and clearly there's a lot which serves as metaphor to the horror of feeling trapped within the wrong body or gender. So even with the most wonderfully surreal twists - the robot who always knew she wanted to be a washing machine being a personal favourite, although that one didn't make this collection - everything is nailed down to a solid emotional core grounded in Redhead's experience.

I can't tell whether what I've just written is actually a massive pile of bollocks, but it feels about right, and hopefully I've communicated that there's something worthwhile going on here. I sometimes think she needs an agent or possibly an editor, but Rachel Redhead really has something which is actually worth editing or er… agenting, or whatever it is they do so, you know - one to watch.

172 Hours on the Moon

Johan Harsted 172 Hours on the Moon (2008)
About a mile from where I live is a little free library, as they're called. It's a large, brightly-painted wooden box with a glass door mounted on a pole where someone's garden borders the sidewalk. There are apparently a few of these around now, and not just in San Antonio. The idea is that you bring along some old book, leave it inside the box, and take one of the many from the shelf within. It's a neat idea, and means you get a book you might not ordinarily have picked had you seen it in a store. I suppose it's also a slightly twee idea, it could be argued, and each little free library tends to provide a window into the psychology of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. My nearest little free library, being bang in the middle of Alamo Heights, has one fuck of a lot of self-help books on offer, but this title looked interesting, so I took it and left another in its place.

Aside from Twilight - which was excellent obviously - and a pile of Who books if you absolutely insist, I'm more or less a stranger to young adult fiction, and I'm not even sure I entirely understand why such a bracket needs to exist. I wasn't a big reader as a kid or as a teenager, but I coped well enough and even enjoyed all of the usual titles thrust our way at school - Jane Eyre, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, Dickens and so on and so forth. I didn't read these with the feeling that they were necessarily above my head, or that they failed to address my concerns as a teenager. By the time I'd left school I was reading Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs without having been told to do so; and on reflection, I was no child genius - in fact I was pretty fucking thick in most respects; and I tend to regard those who read Asimov, Crime and Punishment or even Plato whilst they were still at school with some degree of envy and admiration. So by contrast I take the impression that young adult fiction must therefore pander to some extent, otherwise there would surely be no need for such a distinction. Harsted himself writes that in his opinion, young adults are just as smart as a lot of grown-ups and can usually take whatever you throw at them.

Well anyway, 172 Hours on the Moon is a horror story set inside a science-fiction novel. Three teenagers are selected by means of a global lottery to go to the moon for the somewhat implausible reason of this getting everyone into the idea of going to the moon again, causing funding to thus flow freely because everyone loves teenagers or summink. So they go to the moon with some grown-ups who do all that flying the spaceship stuff, and it turns out that there's a secret abandoned NASA base up there, left over from the seventies and still working. The reason for the base being abandoned turns out to be scary moon ghosts resembling the very people they are causing to shit themselves, terrifying doppelgängers who bust airlocks, sabotage spacesuits, leave passive-aggressive messages on computers, and all the sort of stuff you would probably expect them to do unless you've never watched television or been to the cinema. Annoyingly we don't actually find out anything about the doppelgängers, beyond that they probably have something to do with 6EQUJ5, a genuinely mysterious signal picked up by SETI astronomers back in the seventies; so the novel is a few hundred pages of teenage whining which suddenly turns itself into Isaac Asimov for just long enough to remind you of the scary scenes in whichever CGI thriller you saw last, then ends with the revelation of the doppelgängers having arrived on Earth.

It's not a bad book, and it chugs along nicely once we're all acclimatised to the three main characters being more or less complete wankers, but it doesn't actually have a story, which is a problem. Everything it does is done so as to allow the narrative to hold a torch beneath its chin and go boo! in your face on page 244, and to then keep going boo! for the remaining hundred or so pages, and that's all it does so far as I could tell; and as for our heroes...

The windows were fogged up. The breath of eight people was creating condensation in the capsule, and Mia had to wipe the glass at regular intervals to be able to see out. Not that there was much to see. The stars that had so engrossed and transfixed her were starting to bore her. They weren't changing; nothing was changing.

Interstellar travel eh? Talk about booooooooring. I mean just shoot me now, except that won't happen 'cause you never let me do anything. I hate you. It's so unfair.

Characterisation consists of one of our crew being in a band and also a fan of the Talking Heads because they were like in her dad's record collection and like some of that old stuff from when the bloke who wrote the book was growing up is like really fetch.

Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen.

Okay, I didn't not enjoy this. It does what it does efficiently but suffers from a lack of ambition, as I would guess must be inevitable when an author presupposes his audience won't be interested unless they are specifically able to recognise themselves somewhere in there. Harsted is interviewed in the appendix, and he insists that he has not presupposed anything of the sort, but I have too say it sure reads a lot like he has. I suppose there may have been some subsidence during translation from the original Norwegian, although when Mia bemoans the death of her beloved iPod in response to learning that the team may be stranded on the moon for up to a year before a rescue mission can reach them, I have a feeling this isn't simply an interference pattern that's emerged from somewhere beyond the language barrier. I suppose that at forty-nine years I'm some way outside the age range of the target audience, although that didn't stop me enjoying Twilight and I don't even have ovaries.

Given that people who don't read books tend to be, almost without exception, thick fucking cunts, if whining teenagers are no longer able to read books told from any perspective other than that of whining teenagers, then we're screwed. Personally I don't really care as I'll be dead by the time we get to our first president who's never read a book but can ace all six levels of Pokémon: Omega Ruby; and 172 Hours on the Moon was free, which is still better than a kick up the arse, I suppose.

Children of the Night

Dan Simmons Children of the Night (1992)
Thus endeth the reading project which began with my decision to read some vampire stuff in order to see what the fuck was up with that shit, from which I drew the unexpected and possibly blasphemous conclusion that Twilight is, pound for pound, superior to the somewhat overrated Dracula. I picked up Children of the Night because I wanted to see what contemporary authors writing for a readership other than teenage girls were doing with the undead fanged rascals, and because I heard somewhere that Dan Simmons was a decent enough spinner of yarns.

Children of the Night is set in roughly contemporary Romania following the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, presenting a sober, scientific take on vampire biology that seems in places reminiscent of Michael Crichton and the like. Furthermore, this Dracula is the man himself, Vlad Tepeş of Wallachia, still hanging on after five centuries. The historical detail is thoroughly researched, evocatively rendered, and I could have stood to read a great deal more of it. Unfortunately, after this extremely promising start, it turns into a generic thriller of the kind traditionally read on beaches: brilliant doctor woman refuses to play by the rules but gets results, high speed chase across Romania, some moderate shagging, exploding helicopters, ancient ceremony at scary castle interspersed with admittedly convincing conversation about vampire DNA...

Of course, it's nevertheless fast-paced, readable, even unputdownable as I expect the Daily Mail probably enthused at the time, but interspersed as it is with tantalisingly superior passages from the immeasurably more interesting perspective of Vlad himself, it adds up to a McDonalds happy meal washed down with a decent Cabernet Sauvignon; which is nice, but I'm afraid I expected more. Weird though I'm sure it will sound, Children of the Night turns out to be just another vampire novel that isn't as good as Twilight.

Twilight

Stephenie Meyer Twilight (2005)
A poorly plotted and so-badly-written-it-could-be-Dan-Brown abstinence porn version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer minus the jokes for self-harming teenage girls wherein a personality-free human doormat gushes over the discovery that vampires are not only real, but are also cute boys, so cute in fact as to resemble pouting tousle-haired members of boy bands...

Well, the half of the movie adaptation I managed to squirm through before I'd had enough seemed to confirm most of the above, so I approached the book with certain expectations; kind of difficult not to when the thing is fucking everywhere. Whilst Twilight the novel may not necessarily be the greatest story ever told, much to the general enghastment of my flabber, most of that which has been said of it appears to be bollocks, and I would say it is of sufficient quality as to cast its harshest critic in the role of miserable old fucker crucifying a romance primarily written for teenage girls on the grounds of it being a romance primarily written for teenage girls.

So, to address that which should probably be addressed. Twilight is first and foremost a romance. The entire point is gushing teenage obsession - something it conveys very well with a language which whilst economical compared to, for example, Voltaire, nevertheless tells its story with due flair. Harsh words have been written regarding the main character - Bella if you've been living on Mars these last few years - and her supposedly repetitive drooling over the statuesque Edward the vampire, and again most of it seems to miss a whole lot of points. Bella serves as an everywoman into which the reader may project herself without any overly specific quirk that would obstruct identification - a love of pork pies and gangsta rap for example: she's neither blank slate nor doormat. Her taste for Jane Austen and Debussy remains understated, complementing the story whilst remaining otherwise neutral; and her supposed passivity seems something of a misreading, perhaps mistaking simple realism for the unfortunately fashionable conceit that if your female character hasn't shot someone by page ten then she may as well be Strawberry Shortcake; and for the record, Twilight does have a sense of humour, and to suggest otherwise seems to say more about the expectations of individual readers.

The vampires themselves, specifically Edward, are frequently described in overwrought terms providing constant reminders of their unearthly beauty. Whilst some critics seemingly found this repetitive, Meyer's creatures quite intentionally border on the alien, something absolutely inhuman and belonging to a world other than our own. To this end, it's also a nice touch that the creatures are written as some bizarre evolutionary quirk from which popular vampire legends are derived and to some extent misconstrued. Furthermore, even if you didn't get this, Bella's take on Edward's alleged perfection does a pretty good job of reminding us what it's like to be a seventeen year old girl and in love to the point of nausea; and as I've never actually been a seventeen year old girl, not even when I was seventeen, that's impressive.

Then there's the accusation of it being abstinence porn, which I'm not sure is really even worth addressing, and the poor plotting perceived by Stephen King, the man who brought us the terrible clown-spider-thing of It so ingeniously defeated when some kids pulled off its legs. These criticisms overlook Twilight being first and foremost a romance, something concerned primarily with emotion and love-that-cannot-be and which wouldn't greatly benefit from descriptions of a big stiff vampire hampton going in and out of a human fanny; and which doesn't require a labyrinthine Alan Moore Rubik's Cube of a plot in order to work.

Twilight is engaging, well written, and does what it sets out to do extremely well. The fact that it worked for me, a fat old geezer who also reads Will Self and Rabelais, must surely count for something. Having read plenty of truly horrendous Doctor Who novels in my time, I know bad writing when I see it, and Stephenie Meyer, at least with this one, succeeds.

Children of Tomorrow

A.E. van Vogt Children of Tomorrow (1970)
I promised my brain I'd lay off the van Vogt for a while, at least give it time to heal before tackling The World of Null-A which has been sat upon my shelf exuding quiet psychological menace for the last few months, that being the one in which he really pulled out the stops, so it is said; but faced with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, I realised I should probably line my stomach beforehand, figuratively speaking, scoff an industrial strength metaphorical haggis before subjecting myself to all that moaning goth flavoured fizzy pop.

For those yet unfamiliar with the mind of van Vogt, he was the author who specialised in dream imagery, peculiarly Expressionist sentence structure, random elements shoehorned into the plot roughly every eight-hundred words, unrelated short stories welded together and forced into coherence with much frowning and pipe smoking and so on: Flash Gordon directed by Max Ernst, irredeemably weird and astonishingly good when struck with the right balance.

Unfortunately Children of Tomorrow turns out to fall some way short of his better novels. If ever the reader experiences problems with van Vogt, it's usually because the narrative is too fucking weird for its own good and makes no sense. This one is initially promising but just doesn't go anywhere. The story tells of pilots returning to Earth from many years spent in deep space to find their children have grown into teenagers and are all confirmed gang members. The gangs in question are run along curiously puritanical lines, civic-minded youths who frown upon kissing and the neglect of one's homework. This clearly represents some sort of commentary upon the generation gap - Blackboard Jungle turned upside down and filtered through van Vogt's peculiar theories of psychology and social interaction - but it's not well communicated. Alfred Elton's oddly mannered people work better when running through the convoluted maze of his random approach to plotting, and are less engaging as subjects in their own right. The one brief glimpse of characteristic genius occurs when teenager Bud Jaeger briefly resumes his many tentacled alien form for reasons which are never quite made clear, which sadly only serves as a reminder of how good this novel should have been.