Side Effects

Woody Allen Side Effects (1980)
In reference to the usual objections, please refer back to this review. Otherwise, I'm afraid this is still mostly very funny, and funny beyond simply cracking jokes or overloading the reader with non-sequiteurs.

Our project is coming to a close—unsuccessfully, I am sorry to say. Funding has been cut off, our foundation board having decided that the remaining money might be more profitably spent on some joy-buzzers.

The Kugelmass Episode, for one example, allows the aforementioned Kugelmass to enter literary classics and get busy with the great female characters of fiction, and so feels oddly like a Borges homage albeit with sex and wisecracks. Being the work of Woody Allen - even without referring to more recent transgressions - we begin with an understanding of this collection being maybe one step up from Mad magazine or whatever, because humour is generally regarded as a low form unless dignified by age, as is the case with Rabelais, Voltaire and those guys; but Allen's satire was often both literate and pointed, and would surely deserve to be held in higher regard had he not allegedly pissed on his chips.

That said, of the three collections I've read, this has been the first to hint at anything we probably would have rather not discovered, specifically in Retribution which strikes a peculiar note in describing a man who seduces his girlfriend's mother and, in doing so, becomes suddenly irresistible to the former girlfriend who tries to rekindle the original relationship:

 

'Marrying Mom has made you my father.' She kissed me again and just before returning to the festivities said, 'Don't worry, Dad, there'll be plenty of opportunities.'

Which gets a great big prudish ewww from me, not least because the story's near twenty pages seem curiously lacking in the usual zingers; so it's quite difficult to separate the art from the artist with that one. Of course, it should be remembered that Allen was never convicted of anything, and no evidence of abuse was found; but it's hard to avoid being reminded of the whole shitshow when reading Retribution in particular.

Never mind.

American Victim

Meg McCarville American Victim (2023)
There was a bit of a commotion on social media when Amphetamine Sulphate published Four Circles, McCarville's previous volcanic eruption of righteous bile. I couldn't tell what had happened and felt disinclined to ask nosey questions, but the fallout seemed to be that Amphetamine Sulphate weren't going to be publishing this one which, as it so happens, provides substantial insight into the shit show which ultimately led to its publication by someone else, namely Ric Royer's Model City Books.

By her own testimony, Meg McCarville is a woman with issues who tends to find herself in unfortunate situations. The unfortunate situation was, in this instance, finding herself stalked by a nutcase who, amongst other things, dibbed her in to the FBI for alleged acts of terrorism which were obviously nothing of the sort, and all because he cared. He's identified in American Victim as Max Cady on Wheels, which seems fair, and whilst many of us will have met people like him, this goes a lot further than some disgruntled twat making a few prank phone calls. In fact it's terrifying, and even more terrifying than the aggressive-aggressive acts of sabotage dispensed by our boy is the fact that he gets to keep on keeping on, because while American law enforcement agencies excel in certain areas, not least of these being the dispensation of traffic citations, they're mostly fucking useless unless you're being menaced by an African-American with one of those candy bars that looks a bit like a firearm. If law enforcement did the job it purports to do, American Victim would have been a five-page pamphlet.

As ever, it's both a fucking tough read, and yet one which gets its hooks into you almost immediately because even at her absolute lowest ebb, Meg McCarville is very, very funny, wielding the kind of sarcasm which could have an eye out. It's Bukowksi with tits jammed on eleven, Lydia Lunch admitting she digs Kiss and rocking out, all directed by John Waters at his furthest remove from polite society and the closest I've come to writing with the face-punching intensity of an MOP album; and these aren't even necessarily its greatest strength, that being the words of truth spoken in dark, dark jest - truths that leave bruises.

I've gone through phases of surrounding myself with junkies and nobodies and ex-cons, but never in my life had I felt like I really fell in with the worst crowd until I found myself surrounded by phony progressive anarcho-feminist cunts and dopey woke boys (who really just pounded their politics so they can pound some psycho feminist pussy) who got into more of an uproar about someone getting misgendered even though they changed their pronoun every other week.

Honestly, this is one of the most powerful extended rants I've read in a long time, and anyone whose gag response has started kicking off would do well to remember that Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais and all those other sarcastic fuckers of yesteryear likewise delivered their testimonials with lashings of piss, vinegar, and castor oil. If you really want to understand the modern world, it's all here.

The Underwater Menace

Nigel Robinson The Underwater Menace (1988)
I wasn't quite up to processing Voltaire at bedtime, so I toggled Candide and His Legion of Colourful Pals with this, a novelisation of a childrens' show from the sixties, praying it wouldn't be anything like so annoying as Tomb of Valdemar, my previous helping of time-travelling comfort food. It's a simple story which no-one likes, I reasoned, so there's less that can go wrong.

Amazingly, this actually turned out to be the case. The Underwater Menace was criticised for, amongst other things, its fish people - mutated humans effected by gluing stuff found in a box under the sink to the actors' faces - despite that the television serial was unfortunately wiped so only three people presently alive have actually seen it. Of course, the problem with shit effects is that they remind us we're watching a low budget kids show and not something really graet and proper and grown up like Babylon 5. I'm sure there will be persons who have criticised the writing on this one, but I can't see the point. This stuff was never meant to compete with A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I'm not sure The Underwater Menace actually has a story. I mean, take a look at the ingredients:

• Atlantis survived submersion.
• Primitive types who can be influenced by white person stood behind statue of tribal God speaking in a funny voice.
• Companions captured and immediately subjected to either hard labour or medical experiments.
• Mad scientist.

Seriously, if you still need a fucking synopsis of what happens, you've got something wrong with you; and pointing out that it's all a bit basic seems a little redundant, no?

The Underwater Menace is Edgar Rice Burroughs, more or less. It has a job to do, and the book at least does it well, because Nigel Robinson knows how to write and hasn't somehow misread the commission, assuming it to be a portentous voice-over for super duper audio dramas based on bingeworthy television shows. The narrative is stripped down, as you might expect, but is clearly quite happy to be a novel comprising words printed on pages; and it's written with just enough flair to keep it interesting, even to justify its existence over simply being a substitute for something else. It's corny as shit for sure, but I prefer to view it as a familiar song played well, taking my pleasure in how much this actually reminds me of one of Richard Shaver's weird fantasies, and the beautiful simplicity of a mad scientist who wants to blow up the world because he's mad, and that's exactly the sort of thing a mad scientist would do. Well duh…

Sometimes that's all you need.

Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories

Voltaire Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories (1775)
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.

While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.

Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.

This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.

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.

Science Fiction through the Ages

I.O. Evans (editor) Science Fiction through the Ages volume one (1966)
Idrisyn Oliver Evans, to give him his full name, wrote a ton of those Observer's Book of Nuggets style publications for bespectacled boys and undertook the translation of a number of Jules Verne novels - which is interesting because I understand there to be some piss-poor Verne translations out there. I actually fucking hated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although it turns out that the version I read had been anglicised by Mercier Lewis, which at least lets Idrisyn - if that was really his name - off the hook on one count.

It's hard to fault the choices made in this prehistory of science-fiction, excerpts from the writings of Plato, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire, Lucian of Samosata, Verne, Mary Shelley, and others. Unfortunately, few of the works quoted really yield satisfying extracts, and I'd suggest that at least Frankenstein and Gulliver's Travels should be read in their entirety. Isolated snippets reveal a nifty turn of phrase but not a whole lot else. Unfortunately the excerpts from things I haven't read aren't generally much better and left me mostly unmoved, and certainly unlikely to wonder any further about Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris or Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins. Edgar Allen Poe's The Balloon Hoax is reprinted in full, and I couldn't actually read beyond the first two pages, such was my dislike for how it was written.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the excerpt from what I take to be I.O.'s own translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues a great deal more than the one that I read; and Patrick Moore's account of Johannes Kepler's then untranslated Somnium is reasonably terrific; and the bigger picture afforded of the history of science-fiction as a genre is greatly more thought provoking than at least a few of these individual parts. Brian Aldiss identifies Frankenstein as the first true science-fiction novel, although much of his criteria seems contradictory. Frankenstein, he declares, may be termed science-fiction by virtue of references to technological developments of the day, galvanism and the like, whilst earlier efforts such as those of Swift or Lucian are deemed purely allegorical. This would be fine but for the remainder of Trillion Year Spree greatly favouring the allegorical over the technological - Philip K. Dick rather than Hugo Gernsback - as the truest form of the genre. Evans' book at least proves the futility of drawing such sharply defined lines by showing how the science Aldiss recognises in Frankenstein is only science as seen from a twentieth century perspective, and that it probably isn't fair to dismiss earlier more alchemical forms just for the sake of an argument.

This collection really should have been better given the sources, but then it wasn't so much bad as simply a little on the dry side; and on the other hand, I now really want to read Kepler's Somnium, so that probably counts for something.