Candide

Voltaire Candide (1759)
It seemed like time I dipped in a toe, never having actually read anything by the man whilst having lived with his influence for most of my existence. I'm actually listening to a Cabaret Voltaire album as I write this, funnily enough.

I was hoping for wacky proto-science-fiction, which Candide sort of isn't, but never mind. It turns out that I was thinking of Micromégas.

Candide describes the global journey of a young man identified as such, his progress notably incorporating the fictional land of Eldorado, vaguely situated in south America and probably commenting either on Thomas More's Utopia or else its legacy. The novel was a relatively new thing at the time of writing in so much as that it was still doing all sorts of weird things which no-one really seems to bother with these days. Candide is allegorical in the sense of Gulliver's Travels being allegorical - and I'm quite excited by the realisation that Voltaire met Swift whilst living in London - and so our hero's progress serves as a sequence of philosophical metaphors illustrating his ruminations on society, humanity, existence, and how these relate to the religious thought of the day. Specifically it's mostly concerned with whether or not we're living in the best of all possible worlds, as suggested in 1710 by Gottfried Leibniz as a means of accounting for the persistence of evil in a cosmos ruled over by a loving God. Voltaire found plenty of evil upon which to pass comment in 1759, and if he reaches an actual conclusion, I seem to have missed it, so I assume this is more about asking questions, ensuring that certain institutions feel duly uncomfortable, and taking the piss - although not quite to the extent of Swift.

As is probably obvious, I'm somewhat out of my depth here, so any or all of the above may actually be bollocks, but to continue regardless: Candide seems much softer focus than Gulliver, being closer to a ribbing than the weapons grade sarcasm of Swift, excepting infrequent incidents of rape, hanging and related horrors; although it could be that the translation has dulled the narrative's sharper edges. This one was handled by Lowell Bair who did a pretty decent job on Jules Verne as far as I recall, so who knows?

Candide seems fairly light, but was nevertheless a pleasure, and sufficiently so as to justify my keeping an eye open for the aforementioned Micromégas. Where my appreciation may be muted due to having precious little clue about the politics of 1759, the novel still represents a fascinating cameo of eighteenth century attitudes, not least those regarding science and evolution, with the relationship of ape to humanity being something which people were quite clearly thinking about.

Utopia

Thomas More Utopia (1516)
I tried this many years ago, prompted by curiosity arisen from reading Lorraine Stobbart's Utopia – Fact or Fiction?, an academic text found in the Mesoamerican section of Foyles. Stobbart's book - which I believe was originally composed as a dissertation for some degree course, either literary or anthropological - examines the possibility of Utopia having been inspired by obscure accounts of Mayan society in the Yucatan.

It is hard to believe that in more than four-hundred-and-seventy years which have passed since the book first appeared, no-one has seriously challenged the interpretation of Utopia as a work of fiction.

So that's what drew me to More's book, and specifically to a Dover edition edited, and presumably translated, by Ronald Herder. Unfortunately it bordered on unreadable, so I abandoned it after about fifteen pages, gave it to Andy Martin, and was thusly left with an unfavourable impression of More's great work:

...events transpiring to bring characters together in order that lengthy speeches may be delivered. I read something similar in Thomas More's Utopia in which some geezer bores his friends shitless with an exhaustive account of what he saw in a mythic foreign land where no-one goes hungry and Sting is president or something - I don't remember it too well, the details weren't overly riveting. Anyway, I never finished Utopia.*

I think I bought this edition mainly because it was there, or perhaps some misplaced sense of either guilt or unfinished business. Anyway, this one is translated by one Paul Turner and is frankly gripping, which just goes to show what damage can be wrought by a dull translation; and just to get it out of the way, whilst Cortés and his band of enterprising ruffians were the first Europeans to arrive in and report upon Mexico and its people, it's true that they weren't absolutely the first. There were at least two individuals shipwrecked and integrated to a greater or lesser degree into Mayan society years before Cortés, as mentioned in early accounts by Bernal Díaz and others. I suppose there may have been others we've forgotten who somehow managed to get some subsequently buried relación back to Europe, but it really doesn't seem very likely. Furthermore, I'm reasonably familiar with the ins and outs of Mayan society as were around the start of the sixteenth century, and not only is Utopia distinctly lacking in parallels, but for the most part it quite obviously describes something both allegorical and completely different, and that would be my guess as to why no-one has seriously challenged the interpretation of Utopia as a work of fiction, Lorraine Stobbart. Just because you've stuck a question mark on the end and made a spooky face, doesn't mean there's an actual mystery.

Thomas More, as much older readers may recall, was Henry VIII's consigliere, the man with the unenviable job of pointing out when his Royal Highness was taking the piss, which, it could be argued, occurred on at least five occasions. Paul Turner's introduction paints More as having been highly intelligent, good humoured, principled, and with a keen understanding of when it was probably best to keep his thoughts to himself. Henry eventually had him wacked for failing to display sufficiently explosive enthusiasm in regard to all those divorces and beheadings, rather than for anything More actually said. Utopia therefore tactfully sets forth a model of civilisation which certain countries might like to adopt, or at least take notes, not mentioning no names or nuffink; because had More made such proposals directly, it probably wouldn't have gone very well for him. The narrative pretends to take a vaguely autobiographical course with More meeting his real life friend, Peter Gilles, a magistrate of Antwerp whilst overseas on official business.

'There's this bloke you should meet,' says Gilles. 'He's really interesting. He's just got back from this place called Utopia.'

'Sure,' says More agreeably. 'Whatevers.'

'I just come back from this place called Utopia,' says the really interesting man once an introduction is effected. 'Blinding, it was.'

'Tell me more,' says More, and thus does the really interesting man embark upon a sentence of one-hundred pages duration telling of all the things seen in Utopia, most of which seem one fuck of a lot more civilised than what you have in certain countries, not mentioning no names or nuffink. More occasionally interjects with something like, 'well, I don't know if I agree with that and I'd say the government of our own amazing king back in England probably has the right idea,' but you can tell he's just being diplomatic.

Some have interpreted More's proposed perfect society as a nascent form of Communism, although probably for the same reason one might regard Christianity as a nascent form of Communism in terms of not acting an arsehole, refraining from stealing things, and avoiding undue emphasis placed on material property. Also it should be kept in mind that this was a perfect society as envisioned by a sixteenth century man with certain prejudices of his own, and is thus better read as a stimulus to thought than as a manifesto; but most significantly, it's a genuinely wonderful book - at least in this translation - and one which should be read more widely today, given that the popularity of certain orange presidents has rudely proven how much we, as a society, have still to learn.

*: Taken from my review of something or other on a long extinct forum and reprinted in this amazing collection, which you should definitely buy, what with Christmas coming up and everything.

Seven Days in New Crete

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

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

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

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

Maybe it's all of the above.

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

Warlords of Utopia

Lance Parkin Warlords of Utopia (2004)
Older readers may perhaps recall how when the Doctor Who television show was cancelled in 1989, never to return, Virgin publishing took it upon themselves to continue the series as a range of novels; and I'm almost certain I remember reading some suggestion of how this was also supposed to be a means of bringing exciting new voices to the field, new writers who might go on to greater things in the wider field of science-fiction. Sadly, it didn't really happen like that, given that those who went on to do anything in the wake of the New Adventures mostly ended up churning out yet more Doctor Who, which doesn't really count as greater things in the wider field of science-fiction.

No it doesn't.

Happily though, there were exceptions to this sweeping generalisation, Lance Parkin being one of them, which was nice given his having written some of the more interesting bits of post-televisual Who fiction. Warlords of Utopia was apparently formulated as a vehicle for yer man in the phone box, but ended up as part of Faction Paradox mythology as mapped out by Lawrence Miles and others, and I suspect may be the better novel for it. Whether by accident or design, it amounts to the biggest, most stupid idea you could possibly conceive hammered into a novel and forced to behave itself, with a premise rating at least eleven on the Destroy All Monsters scale: there are hundreds of alternate versions of history in which Rome never fell, all of which have teamed up for a massive multiversal pagga with all the versions of history in which Hitler won the war, happily allowing for at least one scene featuring the Council of Hitlers, hundreds of iterations of Chaplin's stunt double all ranting away beneath one of those impossible domes that Albert Speer never quite got around to building. If it isn't immediately obvious why this alone should qualify Warlords of Utopia as a wonderful thing, you may be dead and should consult medical advice at your earliest convenience.

Actually, it could all have gone horribly wrong, particularly when you consider the dog's dinner that is All New Doctor Who Adventure Time with those tales of similarly preposterous ambition which may as well have been episodes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for all the dignity of their telling, Billie because we want to, because we want to Piper turning into Q from fucking Star Trek and all that bollocks; but no - the golden rule is, I would suggest, if you're going to do something really stupid, then it's best to take it extremely seriously, which is what we have here.

Apparently homaging Robert Graves' I, Claudius - which I really must get around to reading - Parkin writes with the tremendous weight and authority of an historical novelist whilst maintaining a perfect balance between keeping it moving along without tipping over into anything too lurid, no mean feat given the presence of the Council of Hitlers. Not only this, but on top of everything he even instils the novel with purpose beyond narrative acrobatics and gratuitous adventure. Although unfamiliar with Graves, I briefly wrestled with Thomas More's Utopia, at least enough to recognise shared themes and related devices; except this one's a lot more interesting than Utopia, planting its ideal society on firmer ground in acknowledging that there can be no such thing as a truly ideal society, only an approximation; and at least offering a consistent rationalisation of the more contentious aspects of slavery, criminal justice, and expansionism of such a society allowing us to read without too much wincing. By comparison, More's book occasionally has the tone of a small boy insisting he saw a dinosaur.

This world has fallen to the barbarians.

I realised this with such a start that Angela asked what was wrong. That had been Rome's ancient struggle. We had triumphed against the tribalism, intolerance and illiteracy of those around us. Provinces like Britannia had been given cities, roads, and a written language. We had lifted them from savagery. What would have been left behind if Rome had ... gone away? Ruins. These Britons had tried to comprehend the grandeur that was Rome, they had done their best. They had innovated in places, but this had led to the creation of dangerous vehicles and ugly buildings. They had embraced the Christian religion which teaches that the world is a broken, sinful place but the next life will be better.

References are well made without labouring any point so much as to suggest anyone winking at the reader - Plato's Republic, which is of course pertinent to the notion of an ideal Rome surrounded by variations on its theme, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle at the other end of the scale, and of course the Doctor Who and the Iron Legion comic strip to at least give the majority of folks reviewing this something upon which to focus and make tee hee noises before deciding that it took too long for us to find out who the baddies were.

Sorry. Did I sound a bit dismissive there?

I remember this novel being good, and it has improved with each reading. This is my third time, and I would say that Warlords of Utopia is exceptional - one of the best and strangest and yet most convincing alternative histories I've read - a narrative pie fight at a chimp's tea party which dares to take itself seriously, and comes through without so much as a hair out of place.

The Shockwave Rider

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider (1975)
Having enjoyed The Stone That Never Came Down many years ago and a couple of his earlier, pulpier novellas more recently, I've been generally well-disposed towards John Brunner; and having almost certainly seen The Shockwave Rider described as important somewhere or other there was just no way I could leave this copy sat upon the shelf in the store. The Shockwave Rider has the reputation of being a sort of proto-cyberpunk novel, which turns out to be something of an understatement as its protagonist, Nick Haflinger, flees the sort of oppressive, corporate society foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, changing identity over and over by means of the computer virus with which he's infected the net. Of course there were numerous, even earlier predictions of the worldwide web and our increased reliance on computers, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe of 1946 being just one astonishingly prescient example, and electronic data networks were already happening when this was written; but nevertheless, for 1975, The Shockwave Rider is still pretty astounding in terms of how much it predicted and what it got right.

Even so, the second time I read Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down I found it a little didactic, and the same is true of this one: big and admittedly wonderful ideas and some great, rounded storytelling that becomes a lecture by the time our lad arrives in Precipice, a perfect society where everyone behaves themselves and everything is wonderful contrasted with the corporate hell from which Haflinger has fled. Precipice is a utopia in the Sir Thomas More vein and is unfortunately about as engaging, and to be honest the last hundred or so pages felt like being stuck in an SWP meeting - a simile I should probably clarify by explaining that I have experienced the SWP essentially as a cult which borrows socialist trappings without demonstrating any real connection to or understanding of the causes it purports to champion. In short, The Shockwave Rider started well but soon became so worthy that I found it difficult to either care or concentrate on what was happening upon the page, and by the end I was pretty much lain back, thinking of Texas, and waiting for it to be over; which is a shame for a book that kicks off in such fine form.

The Time Machine

H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)
I was a little underwhelmed by this the first time I read it although I can no longer recall quite why; possibly due to the initially surprising contrast between the vast reputation of one of the most famous science-fiction novels of all time and it being such a short and relatively quiet little book. The story will most likely be familiar to everyone reading this - a fairly straightforward spin on earlier travelogues such as Thomas More's Utopia or even Robinson Crusoe, aside from this particular terra incognita being our distant future thus affording Wells the opportunity to offer comment on his society, its notions of progress, and the increasing class divide.

The Time Machine probably doesn't really do a great deal more than just that, but crucially it did what it does before everyone else, and did it so well as to remain pretty much the perfect science-fiction novel more than a century later. Its message is as relevant today as it ever was, and the passage of time has taken nothing from the clarity of the prose, and I'd go so far as to suggest that if you don't like this one then you've got something wrong with you.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume two (2003)
Another vivid illustration of the Oscar Wilde maxim stating how talent borrows, genius steals - you might argue that not one single original idea is to be found here, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen succeeds by virtue of how it's put together. Alan Moore once again recycles the characters of every book he's ever read whilst Kevin O'Neill's work grows ever closer to a warped version of the illustrations which graced Punch magazine in the early years of the twentieth century. Not only does this second volume mash up all the usual suspects with Rupert Bear, Tiger Tim, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carpenter, all the while telling us with a straight face that Hyde Park was named in honour of Robert Louis Stevenson's transformed misanthrope and H.G. Wells' Dr. Moreau was related to Gustave the symbolist painter; but it juggles all these balls with its entire story bolted onto the underside of The War of the Worlds. It should by all rights be a complete pig's ear, tantamount to the absolute worst crap devised by the sort of moron who would consider Daleks versus Klingons high concept, but somehow it's wonderful, and absolutely original despite being comprised entirely of stolen material. Particularly impressive are the new lives given to these characters beyond the novels from which they derive, particularly Hyde and Mina Harker - the latter having had a somewhat underwhelming minor role in Dracula where her main function was apparently to be ill for a long time whilst failing to suspect there could be anything weird about waking up with a sore neck each morning. Here she's a lot more interesting - blasphemy though that may be - not least during a surprisingly touching erotic interlude shared with Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. As a rule I tend to dislike romance or sex in fiction, not through squeamishness but simply because authors so often get it horribly wrong, and it can be difficult to enjoy a book once you've started to feel sorry for those responsible in the wake of some horrendously juvenile attempt to get all sticky and squirty.

Only the inevitable supplementary prose section at the end lets the volume down, as tends to be the case with DVD extras in general. It's a travelogue of every fictional land, city or realm Moore could come up with off the top of his head. Although I didn't notice anything pinched from Tolkein or Clark Ashton Smith, it seems otherwise exhaustive, taking in Alice's Wonderland, More's Utopia, and all those places to which Swift's Gulliver travelled just for starters. It's the sort of background detail that would work in the strip, but is actually kind of dull as a list set down in plodding narrative form when a list set down as a list would have served just as well. More than anything else it feels like an extended exercise in continuity - which is of course precisely what it is - so it probably depends on how many references you get in order for it to work, but even then forty pages of dense text seems excessive.

Still, with a main feature of such quality, I'm not complaining.

The Republic

Plato The Republic (approx. 375BC)
In which Plato, philosopher and mathematician of Classical Greece, student of Socrates and tutor to Aristotle, author of Socratic dialogues, founder of the Athens Academy and by association - so it might be argued - western philosophy and the entire methodology of modern science, tells us:

When they are young, children should only tackle the amount of philosophic training their age can stand; while they are growing to maturity they should devote a good deal of attention to their bodies, if they are to find them a useful equipment for philosophy. When they are older and their minds begin to mature, their mental training can be intensified.

I suppose this is why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Plato, or at least to reading things which have pointed me in the general direction of reading Plato, these being in no particular order Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Andrew Hickey's Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and Richard Flowers' aNARCHY rULES.

Additionally, having spent a great deal of time immersed in Precolombian Mexican culture, I've come across numerous aspects of Nahua theology bearing apparent comparison with Plato's theory of forms. Said theory very generally holds that each object has an immaterial essence describing its properties in relation to which the physical form is merely an imperfect manifestation. I have long been keen to further the model of Precolombian Mexican cultures as essentially civilised and progressive by some definition, or at least very different to the popular and sanguinary image that Mel Gibson chose to reiterate in his shitty film. My basic theory has it that, for the most part, Mexica and related cultures differed from those of Ancient Greece and Rome only in terms of regional detail and methods by which intellectual achievement was preserved for the benefit of generations to come. Alphabetic script was well adapted to this latter task and so we are able to look back on Greece and Rome with due reverence. On the other hand, Mixteca-Puebla pictographic script was unfortunately less suited to the preservation of philosophical rhetoric, and oral tradition could only carry so much over to the Postconquest era given the general demonisation of the Prehispanic past, a demonisation which unfortunately continues to this day.

So with this in mind and to get to the point, it seemed like time I made the effort to read Plato rather than relying on what I imagined he might have said.

Plato was the student of Socrates, and many of his dialogues reputedly capture the philosophical discussion of his esteemed tutor and associates, which is handy seeing as Socrates himself never bothered writing any of that stuff down. What we have is therefore, in essence, some blokes talking about stuff for a few hundred pages, although the significance of this should be not underestimated given the topics discussed and the methods by which they are debated. Socratic dialogue approaches a subject - in this case society - and bombards it with questions, rhetorical and otherwise, so as to test its limits and assess relative values until a conclusion can be asserted. It's the basis for the modern scientific approach which favours evidence over supposition, and I guess Greece was either where it began, or at least where it was first described in surviving media.

The Republic builds a perfect society consistent with the values of Socrates, Plato, Glaucon and assorted buddies dropping in for a beer and a chin wag about life and that during the course of the narrative, so aside from what philosophical ideas arise during the course of debate, it's also precedent to Thomas More's Utopia and its kin. Thanks I suspect to Desmond Lee's sympathetic translation and insightful notes, The Republic is nothing like so dry as I feared it might be, and is even illuminating in places. That said, I found it a little difficult to get beyond the formula for this perfect society  delivered as part and parcel with all sorts of crazy shite that suggest not so much the cultural differences of people living in a very different world as a basic failure to understand human nature. Most obviously absurd is the notion of a society which takes infants from their mothers at birth, and which communally raises its children without the supposed weakening influence of familial affection. It's this sort of uninformed idealism which somewhat undermines Plato and his pals as being the enlightened champions of reason to which they clearly aspired, but never mind.

Equally curious - and equally redolent of more recent aspirationally totalitarian states - is the dim view Plato takes of poetry, and seemingly of artistic expression itself:

'...we shall have to follow the example of the lover who renounces a passion that is doing him no good, however hard it may be to do so. Brought up as we have been in our own admirably constituted societies, we are bound to love poetry, and we shall be glad if it proves to have high value and truth; but in the absence of such proof we shall, whenever we listen to it, recite this argument of ours to ourselves as a charm to prevent us falling under the spell of a childish and vulgar passion. Our theme shall be that such poetry has no serious value or claim to truth, and we shall warn its hearers to fear its effects on the constitution of their inner selves, and tell them to adopt the view of poetry we have described.'

I didn't quite get this at first, but then I thought of all those Doctor Who fans insisting on the mighty power of their belovedly brilliant marketing franchise by virtue of everyone else thinking it's brilliantly brilliant so your (sic) just jealous; and thinking of them in respect of all the wonders they'll never experience because, lacking screamingly brilliant jokes about brilliantly wearing a fez and shit, anything not directly related holds no interest. It's that sort of militant resistance to curiosity in respect of anything beyond the immediate object of fixation that I find terrifying, and I guess it put the wind up Plato too.

The Republic is an interesting historical document, and almost certainly fascinating if the Greeks are your thing. Oddly, and rather gratifyingly, it presents a snap shot of a society at an equivalent level of intellectual development to that of Mexico, superior in some respects, markedly inferior in others - which is what I had hoped for, but didn't really anticipate finding. I'm glad I read it, but I'm equally glad that it wasn't longer.