The Epic of Gilgamesh

N.K. Sandars (translator)
The Epic of Gilgamesh (1960, material from 13th to 10th century BC)
Possibly an odd choice to be reviewed alongside such unimpressive offerings as the Star's Bottom cycle of Flanberry Beavis and Nobby Beverage's Doctor Who and the Terrific Award Winning Doctor Who Adventure, but I've just read it so here it is.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is probably the oldest surviving story on record, or at least the oldest story surviving in a form other than hopelessly fragmented; and I believe it survived as cuneiform script on clay tablets from various locations in and around Sumeria - modern day Iraq - which, so far as we can tell, seems to be where the first cities were founded back in the fourth millennium BC. Whilst we're here, I suppose it depends upon how geographical you like your definition of Muslim culture, but regarding Richard Dawkins' assertion that Islam has produced little of value in global terms, I would argue that cities and written script might be worth thinking about, but I digress.

I have no significant investment in Sumerian culture and therefore approach this one as a poorly informed outsider, so for anyone with any deeper understanding of those Mesopotamians, you might like to stop reading now because you'll probably just find the rest irritating. I have a reasonable understanding of the much later but developmentally parallel cultures of central Mexico, and so have attempted to appreciate Sumeria by similar terms with the assumption of its society having developed in pursuit of similar ends. It has been noted how both South American and North African civilisations built pyramid structures and might be deemed to have certain features in common. Conspiracy theorists tend to cite this common factor as evidence of ancient transatlantic contact, mistaking superficial resemblance for evidence and ignoring the detail of there being no archaeological support for the idea and, more significantly, that the notion of ancient transatlantic contact does not serve to explain anything requiring an explanation. Put simply, limited to certain materials and working at a comparable level of technology, early buildings founded upon a rectangular base will tend to be pyramids wherever they're built, that being the most logical structure for those working with similar and relatively limited means. Given that human societies tend to be formed from people sharing the same basic needs - food, shelter, security and so on - regardless of geography, I suggest that the cultural or philosophical structures they build as stories and theology will tend towards certain common forms, the philosophical equivalent of pyramids; and so, hoping there's something in this idea other than it being a string of pretty words, I read on and hope to understand something without too much contaminating bias.

Gilgamesh delineates the arguably spiritual journey of a culture hero who may be roughly identified with the fifth king of Uruk reigning around 2500BC, although as with the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, there doesn't seem to be any real way of telling whether the man inspired the legend or vice versa. The narrative describes how Gilgamesh battles and befriends Enkidu - a man of the wild possibly representing the natural and uncultured as distinct from the urban Sumerian-about-town. The two then embark upon a series of allegorical adventures, battling the Bull of Heaven - apparently symbolising drought, tempted by the treacherous Goddess Ishtar, and finally venturing into the underworld where Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, a survivor of the flood who will almost certainly become the Biblical Noah in more recent traditions. As one who has spent a lot of time obsessing over the Mexican stories that may be considered roughly parallel to this kind of tale, I am struck by both the overarching pessimism and similar narrative details. The former can almost certainly be attributed to the lack of security associated with life in the earliest cities, society being a new and conspicuously fragile structure dependent upon a lot of goodwill and the success of the harvest - conditions which no doubt also informed early Mexican society with the added emphasis of their world being one conspicuously at the mercy of the volcanoes. It is therefore logical that people living under such conditions should tell themselves stories which reflect this, and specifically stories which focus on the frailty of existence.

Gilgamesh is fascinating in this respect because, although one might argue a case for his being the first superhero - he has musclebound adventures and is described as two thirds God and one third human, however that's supposed to work - he is a superhero for the sake of contrast with a fleeting existence, the inevitability of death, and a death which in Sumerian lore did not appear to prefigure an afterlife so far as I can tell. Gilgamesh journeys to the underworld in search of immortality, only to learn that even he is himself both mortal and vulnerable to the unseen forces which define his world; and so he becomes a hero not because he stands above the rest of us, but because he is very much like us in all senses that matter.

The Epic of Gilgamesh isn't necessarily an easy read, but it's short, and very, very rich in detail, and amply rewards whatever effort the reader chooses to invest. Furthermore, as our oldest story by some definition, it informs more or less everything that has come after to a greater or lesser degree - at least with regard to western culture - not least the great Abrahamic holy books, the first seeds of which are to be found herein - serpents, temptation, men building big boats full of animals in order to survive a great flood and so on. So if it isn't obvious what I'm saying here, if you haven't read this, it really is worth your effort.

Gulliver's Travels

Very quickly, for anyone who may be interested, I've Lulued up a paperback collection of the first five years of these reviews - all added with more better grammar, and including a few I held back from posting for fear of pissing people off. It costs a fortune from my Lulu page - for which you should find a link on the right - and is shamelessly hawked at greater length here.

Now, returning to our regular programming, by special request, from December 2010:

Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Fuck! Can't believe it's taken me so long to get around to this one. I was expecting something within the range of worthy but dry and far too long, or at best moderately entertaining, but... wow! I can see why this is considered a classic and continues to inspire adaptations nearly three-hundred years later, albeit adaptations which miss the point and present it as a story about teeny tiny people whilst ignoring the other three quarters of the book with its giants, airborne islands, and talking horses. And the poo and wee, lots of pooing and weeing here.

It's a satire, and possibly one of the most sarcastic things I've ever read (I present this as a virtue by the way) and despite the talking horses and so on, it's also utterly convincing. For one moment the nerd in me considered that Gulliver may have breached some sort of dimensional rift and found himself alternately expanded to giant size in Lilliput or shrunk when in Brobdingnag (seeing as plants, animals and even weather conditions of those places are consistent to the native rather than the visitor), but then I realised I was missing the point.

Gulliver encounters at least four alien cultures wherein the excesses of human society, government, and progress are pushed to the point of absurdity, but human society, government, and progress being what they are, the absurdity remains plausible even at the lengths to which Swift took his creations. It's basically a great big four volume fuck off to everything that's stupid (in addition to satirising earlier, more earnest travel narratives) done with razor sharp wit, pornographic attention to detail, and plenty of bodily functions. Can't remember if the first instance of the latter is where the Lilliputians are obliged to dispose of one of Gulliver's turds with wheelbarrows, or if its the incident wherein he saves the Queen from burning to death by urinating upon her house; but the latter is the more pertinent seeing as it leads to Gulliver's exile; although the law demands that he submit to being blinded as punishment for taking a leak in public, regardless of the regal life saved by that act. It's bureaucracy gone mad. You couldn't make it up etc. etc...

The satire is gently introduced, piece by piece with a nudge and a wink, building up to Spinal Tap levels of parody when Gulliver arrives in Laputa, an island floating above the earth inhabited by a people whose science is so far advanced as to be entirely pointless: the pig method of ploughing a field by burying acorns and relaxing whilst the beasts turn the soil in search of food (presently requiring a lot more work than just ploughing it in the first place but the Laputans are convinced the method will one day prove worthwhile); the scientist busily attempting to separate turds into their constituent parts so as to reclaim the food that has been eaten. By the time Gulliver arrives in the land of the thoroughly civilised Houyhnhnms, he's clearly had enough of human society as mercilessly parodied in the preceding pages, and happily succumbs to Stockholm syndrome amongst this race of talking horses. Unfortunately, to the Houyhnhnms, Lemuel Gulliver is not much more than a civilised Yahoo, Yahoos being the brutish primal humans which plague their society and express displeasure by producing turds.

Being a classic, anything I may say about this book is probably irrelevant, but it's slightly shocking to realise that pretty much everything Swift was taking the piss out of is still with us only more so. Reading this actually reminded me of hearing Never Mind The Bollocks for the first time. Still relevant and still phenomenal.

The Invisible Man

H.G. Wells The Invisible Man (1897)
It seems strange to consider that only a decade separates The Invisible Man from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, both tales wherein the process of scientific investigation unwittingly exposes the darker, amoral side of its investigator. Stevenson's tale is very much the nineteenth century examination of morality with its main guy neatly bifurcated into good and evil just like the Christian and immediately post-Christian universe into which he was born. Wells' Griffin is on the other hand a man transformed rather than divided in Stevenson's sense - a man who, through the agency of science, believes himself beyond consequence and thus goes on a rampage. The Invisible Man is therefore, according to Wikipedia, an update of the Ring of Gyges from Plato's Republic, which I really should have remembered seeing as I only read the fucking thing a month ago, but never mind.

More significantly, The Invisible Man doesn't feel like a nineteenth century novel, and its compelling, amiable tone is perhaps indicative of why Wells is still deservedly regarded as a classic author. He communicates; his science is ingenious yet never overpowers its narrative; his phonetic renderings of regional accents entertain without intruding where so often such a device can come across as painfully twee or even render the narrative incomprehensible - as with certain short stories by the previously mentioned Stevenson; and he is often very funny without conspicuously trying too hard:

Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives, and he resolved to undertake such detective operations as time permitted. These consisted for the most part in looking very hard at the stranger whenever they met, or in asking people who had never seen the stranger leading questions about him.

On close inspection, this is a pretty thin tale and there's not actually a whole lot of story beyond bloke turns invisible, goes bonkers, but the telling is delicious, amounting to a robust meal - if culinary analogies aren't too much of a stretch.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
About six months ago I flew back to England taking with me Neal Stephenson's somewhat chunky Anathem as aeronautical reading material; and here I am once again crossing the Atlantic with another arguably classic science-fiction novel occurring within a post-apocalyptic monastic order. It's a coincidence entailing no more conscious choice on my part than what leapt out at me from the to-read pile; but an odd one, not least given that a significant theme of Miller's book is that of history repeating; and as with Anathem, whilst recognising obviously worthy qualities, I'm left somehow underwhelmed.

A Canticle for Leibowitz began as three novella length shorts in the pages of Fantasy & Science Fiction, so closely thematically linked as to inspire the author to a realisation of having effectively  written a single coherent novel following publication of the third. The story begins with efforts to posthumously canonise Leibowitz the scientist as a Saint by the brothers of a post-nuclear Christian order, the last outpost of reason in a new dark age of American history. Over the course of the next few hundred years - or the other two short stories if you prefer - civilisation is reborn, technology and science restored, mistakes repeated as they reinvent the weapons for which Saint Liebowitz was partially responsible first time around. In the story, Liebowitz is famously remembered as having regretted his work - doubtless a nod to both Oppenheimer and Einstein - and is thus posthumously revered, in case you were wondering.

The detail of the novel is often exemplary, notably circuit diagrams designed by Liebowitz treated as sacred relics, reproduced and illuminated by the monks without full understanding of what they represent; and some good meaty points are made - not least that, contrary to the doctrine of many a tub-thumping atheist, the church has traditionally been a patron of arts, culture, civilisation, learning, and progress. Furthermore, A Canticle for Leibowitz is beautifully written - I think I noticed Graham Greene referenced in comparison in some secluded corner of the internet, which seems fair enough; so much so that even those who don't really like science-fiction could probably be coaxed into reading it.

I guess the only problem for me was that for all that there may be to recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz, it felt very much like three novellas bolted together, and three novellas which each could have stood to be a little shorter. Whilst the detail is engrossing, it sometimes ambles along without really doing much. It's a good novel, but I'm not convinced it's a great novel, and as with Anathem,  the ambition of its ideas should surely have amounted to more.

The First Men in the Moon

H.G. Wells The First Men in the Moon (1901)
Aside from a few things at school, it took me a while to get around to H.G. and when I did it was The Time Machine which, against  expectation, left me somewhat ambivalent towards this author. I now realise why, and how I mistakenly took what I believed Wells to have been saying from what he actually said, or more probably, what he purposefully didn't say.

My error was in presuming Wells' narrative to be in essence a  precursor to the modern science-fiction novel, not - as is immediately apparent from The First Men in the Moon - the more recent expression of a much older literary tradition. I seem to recall a filmed version of this tale from the 1960s: bumbling good natured professors beating at lunar monstrosities with umbrellas as they climb back into their capsule and return to Earth just in time for the closing credits. The novel offers nothing quite so tidy or cosy, leaving one of its characters stranded on the moon, presumably to die following the last few forlorn chapters of his message beamed back to Earth that we may have an account of Selenite society unencumbered by the more bumptious opinions of Bedford, our narrator. The point of the story is not the deliverance of its characters up to a typically happy ending far, far away from the weird sublunar caverns of the insectlike Selenites, rather - like previous lunar excursion narratives dating all the way back to Lucian of Samosata's True History, written some time between the years 125 and 180AD - rather this story is wholly a commentary upon the society of its time.

Wells feared a mechanised culture run along utilitarian lines, so  his characters tend towards views through which we examine the subject - alternately scientific and authoritarian in this case - and which may not necessarily be the views of the author, hence The Time Machine leaving me with the erroneous impression that Herbert George was probably a bit of a tosser. Rather than editorialising, as a contemporary equivalent of this narrative might do, Wells presents a detailed vision of the Selenite hive dynamics of specially adapted worker drones and lets his reader decide whether it seems a desirable model, and what it may say about ourselves. It's effective, subtle and a refreshing change from the heavy-handed parables of later, lesser authors.

Additionally and possibly of no relevance whatsoever, it's annoying that something of such sly elegance could be mistaken for a boffo yarn about handlebar moustaches and nuclear-powered penny farthings by the larger unwashed herd of point-missing steampunk buffoons, but anyway...

The First Men in the Moon is justifiably regarded as classic literature, and now I see why Wells endures with such a reputation.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
The first true science-fiction novel according to Brian Aldiss, although to be fair, he acknowledges the distinction as subject to interpretation. Frankenstein is a tale in the gothic tradition, itself the brooding spawn of Romantic fiction with increased emphasis on horror and, to some extent, realism. Shelley's classic earns Aldiss' accolade by virtue of a monster born of scientific rather than supernatural means, an idea doubtless inspired by the experiments of Luigi Galvani who, having animated dead muscle tissue with electricity in the 1790s, had impressed upon the public the notion of the spark of life being essentially the same as the force Benjamin Franklin drew down from a thunderous sky in 1752.

For what it may be worth, I'm inclined to dispute that there's any such animal as the first true science-fiction novel, and even if I'm wrong, then I don't see it being Frankenstein. Once past the somewhat mammoth effort of unremembering all that Hollywood has done with the story, it's worth noting that the monster as science project is referenced in such ambiguous terms as to only distinguish Victor Frankenstein's dabbling as distinct from anything involving a higher power; even more curious is that there doesn't seem to be any overt reference to the reanimation of dead flesh or the recycling of body parts - unless I blinked and missed this element which has ultimately become central to the mythology; further, the cliché of materials harvested from graves is seemingly disputed in one passage where Victor describes making organs proportionally larger than normal for the sake of convenience.

In other words, the point is not the science itself so much as science as distinct from acts of God. As science-fiction, even Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History sits closer to Asimov than Shelley's tale in terms of narrative detail; and unlike Dracula - its roughly spiritual partner and successor - Frankenstein is a whole different ball game to the films it inspired.

Betraying those Romantic roots, the rural wilderness of Frankenstein is so greatly emphasised as to count for a character in its own right, as is also the case with Shelley's somewhat more laborious The Last Man. The wilderness is nature and the natural order, the precarious harmony secured by nineteenth century man in his rural idyll, a new Arcadia in the making as society began to enjoy the benefits of post-Renaissance advances in science and philosophy. Frankenstein is therefore a reminder that for all that we move forward, the wilderness remains neither friend nor enemy and may undo our advances at a stroke. Victor Frankenstein achieves a miracle, and yet the miracle bites him on the ass ultimately as a result of his own vanity and good old fashioned tough shit. The monster, for anyone who may not be aware, is some way from Karloff's growling colossus, a self-educated innocent happily describing the Emperor's lack of clothes at such bitterly eloquent length as to obscure identification of the tale's real monster.

I remain unconvinced of Frankenstein as the first true science-fiction novel, but then, I'm not sure it matters. It's still a true giant of western literature, having lost none of its power nearly two centuries later, and is easily one of the finest novels it has been my pleasure to read and to read again.

Dracula

Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)
Without actually bothering to reach over, pluck Trillion Year Spree from the shelf and check, I seem to recall Brian Aldiss attributing the success and enduring appeal of both Dracula and Frankenstein to the post-Darwinian demise of the notion of a human soul surviving the death of the body to live on in some form of afterlife, both Count and monster representing post-mortem existence in the absence of spiritual stuff. I may have remembered that wrong because having now read Dracula I've realised that it doesn't quite work, although it is true to say that both novels definitively belong to the industrial revolution. Nineteenth century advances in science play an obvious and integral role in the story of Frankenstein, although in Dracula this relationship is less clear, serving to influence the means by which the story is told rather than its detail. Specifically Dracula tells a traditional horror story using a rational perspective for the sake of contrast, scepticism and incredulity informed by contemporary mores expressed at almost every turn mainly for the sake of firing up the dry ice machine, pulling a spooky face, and whispering that the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere "modernity" cannot kill, as Harker puts it, or asking is there fate amongst us still, sent down from the pagan world of old, as does Van Helsing, later to emphasise the same point thus:

"Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like fine ladies at the opera."

In other words, just like Lovecraft a decade later, Stoker was hinting at spooky stuff beyond our ken whilst pioneering the language we would today associate with flying saucer types who describe sightings in the driest possible terms in the hope of someone else pointing out that it definitely sounds like it was an alien spaceship. The problem is that unlike Frankenstein - which I seem to recall as revelatory - once Dracula has done this, it doesn't seem to do much else, four hundred pages stood around in the mist looking mysterious and occasionally claiming to know stuff that would probably freak you out a bit if it told you, so it isn't going to tell you because it's all mysterious and stuff. Take this passage for example:

As I approached the house, I explained to him, I was startled to hear the word 'vampire' called out by a passer and looked up to see a huge bat making an ingress of the Count's window. Dracula chuckled in Romanian, his red eyes aglow from that medical condition which he had earlier described to me, telling me that he had just recently returned from a cricket match at which he had served as umpire and therefore that cry in the night would almost have certainly been a colleague attempting to draw his attention to the bat at his window. Of course he had himself been quite aware of the flapping beast, and it had startled him so as to cause him to drop his hot dog and indeed I saw there upon his lapels and around his mouth the tomato ketchup which had been so unceremoniously distributed by his startlement. My mind duly set at ease, I wished him well and took my leave.

It's okay. I made it up. That isn't really in the book.

Maybe it's just that a million cinematic Draculas have somewhat spoiled the story for me, but beyond the admittedly wonderful opening Transylvanian chapters, I found it difficult to sustain enthusiasm, and after our man shows up in Whitby, it just sort of dithers around for several hundred pages before returning the Count to his castle, thus rendering the bulk of the tale more or less pointless; and it's told in diary form thus striving for a realism which shoots itself in the foot in presenting characters who must presumably have spent four or five hours each day writing up their circular conversations about how they're really scared and would rather not get bitten, the most ludicrous being Mina Harker's:

Of course he wanted to be with me; but then the boat service would, most likely, be the one which would destroy the... the... the... Vampire. (Why did I hesitate to write the word?)

I don't know, Mina, but it really didn't help.

Dracula undoubtedly has its moments, and it's interesting to note that the main character is unambiguously identified as the undead Vlad Tepeş of Wallachia; yet like those goth types who go all weak at the knees for the whole vampire routine, it may look interesting, but there's not a lot else going on once you're past the window dressing. Whilst plodding through this, I paused to dip into Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People by Paul Woods and Gavin Baddeley for research purposes, and it's a bit embarrassing to admit that the non-fiction was about four-thousand times more interesting than Stoker's misty mumblings. Actually,  even Twilight was a better read, blasphemy though that may well be.

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
Reading this many years ago, back in the days when I would have considered three novels a year (excepting anything published by Target) good going, I read Brave New World and was left with the impression of a chilling, dystopian future resembling that of Orwell's 1984 but different. Now returning to Huxley's classic with a hopefully less gormless perspective, I'm struck by how much I missed first time around, or had at least forgotten; but probably missed given that I was something of a divvy back then.

The opening chapters - a guided tour of a factory wherein production line humans are mass produced from the egg thus doing away with motherhood, their embryos chemically predisposed towards future societal function - remain as powerful as ever; but the rest is a revelation. I'm not sure how I missed the industrial strength satire, but there you are. It appears that I have evolved from Delta to Beta Minus during the intervening years, which is nice.

Another aspect I somehow failed to spot first time around was quite how much this novel is embedded in 1930s England. There's minor dating with use of words like beastly or scenes occasionally suggesting The Man in the White Suit, although nothing so intrusive as, for example, John Wyndham's more Arthur Askified efforts; more overtly, there's a certain sensibility loosely tied into cultural details like D.H. Lawrence fucking off to live in Taos, New Mexico back in the 1920s; or even the rapid editing of modernist cinema evoked in  disjointed snippets of dialogue which bring chapter three to a close. These elements seem to betray the influence of Huxley's contemporaries, specifically people whose work remains outside of the mainstream even long after their passing so, drawing upon sources which never quite devolved to quaint - unlike the Ealing comedies which seemingly inspired Wyndham - Brave New World retains its immediacy. Such is its power that it's easy to forget the fact of it being written in the wake of the Great War with talking pictures, aviation, conspicuous promiscuity, and chewing gum as startling and new; and it probably doesn't hurt that Brave New World makes such a radically different statement to that of its arguably more popular successor 1984, as Neil Postman observed in his Amusing Ourselves to Death in terms that I'm lifting directly from Wikipedia on the grounds that I'd just look like a wanker if I tried to paraphrase something already so well argued:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

I'd hate to be so obvious as to start banging on about The X-Factor and Justin Bieber but, well - you know... As literal prophecy, Brave New World may creak a little, but as satire, it's unnerving.

A Voyage to Arcturus

 

David Lindsay A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
The greatest science-fiction novel ever written according to some, an incoherent pile of shit according to others, and a significant influence on the first two volumes of C.S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy. The most common complaint, if three minutes spent looking around on the internet are any indication, seems to be that A Voyage to Arcturus is  badly written, a complaint which I gather has gained such momentum over the years as to imprint the novel's cultural presence with a halo of testy defences. It's not very encouraging when even the back cover blurb quotes a review politely suggesting that its merits are conditional to sympathetic reading.

Typically, one summary nestled deep within the underpants of cyberspace and supplied by someone named Darius runs:

This really isn't a novel, and certainly not science-fiction. It is a bunch of parables, and parables that really make no sense. The book is mostly without any purpose. The only thing that kept me reading it was that I could not believe how bad it was, nor could I believe that anyone could recommend it or refer to it as a page-turner.

Followed immediately by:

Well, Darius, that just reveals the limited reach of your mind. Arcturus is a philosophical allegory, a post-Nietzschean Pilgrim's Progress. The inadequacy of successive perceptions is the point - all ultimately is illusion, facade and suffering. Twentieth century Gnosticism? A multidimensional Zen mandala? Probably both, and more.

This rebuttal, the work of someone named Schopenhauer, signs off with the suggestion that Darius should look elsewhere for phasers or lightsabers because clearly anyone picking up Lindsay's masterpiece and failing to recognise its genius would have been better off sticking with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and yes, I am being sarcastic just in case that wasn't obvious.

Whilst Schopenhauer defeats his own argument by revealing himself to be a bit of a wanker, and by suggesting that A Voyage to Arcturus might not be so much a novel as a multidimensional Zen mandala (there's no such thing by the way); and whilst the views of Darius may be perhaps a tad harsh, the sad truth lies, as always, somewhere between the two poles.

A Voyage to Arcturus, paradoxically contrary to the protests of its defenders, really isn't that badly written. The prose tends towards a certain purple quality with tinges of melodrama, but no more so than, for example, H.P. Lovecraft or A.E. van Vogt, but it does little to suggest anything fumbled for want of literary ability. The problem is that it just isn't very engaging. The visionary narrative unfolds with the pacing and logic of a dream, building up a steady rhythm of pleasantly strange images and experiences which ultimately amount to very little. Its supposedly great philosophical insights are not well expressed, and nor do they seem particularly profound - excepting I suppose the views of cretins who might be impressed by phrases like multidimensional Zen mandala.

As a tale in which a man is fired into space by dubious methods in order to have philosophical experiences amongst strangely allegorical beings, A Voyage to Arcturus is not so much early science-fiction as one of the last in a long line of novels in the loose tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac's comical history. It's fine so far as it goes, although D.H. Lawrence achieved the same brooding insights to  greater and more lucid effect without firing men into orbit or writing anything too closely resembling a philosophical shopping list.  Neither awful nor brilliant, just...

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1553)
A pedant might point out that the satirical writings of sixteenth century Franciscan monk François Rabelais might not really qualify as science-fiction in quite the same way as, for example, an episode of Blake's 7; but persons bringing Blake's 7 to the table have already betrayed themselves as simpletons and forfeited their stake in the argument so far as I'm concerned. Blake's 7 was bollocks even at the time, and Gargantua and Pantagruel features both giants and toilet humour, which is good enough for me. Some might say that's an unfair or even ludicrous comparison, but they're wrong.

No-one seems quite able to agree on the identity of the first modern novel, and the works of both Cervantes and Swift have been suggested as candidates presumably on the grounds of their having some sort of narrative progression. Whatever the case may be, it probably wasn't Gargantua and Pantagruel, the collected tales of a giant and his son belonging firmly in the tradition of early novels wherein people have long conversations about stuff. True, our heroes - mainly the giant Pantagruel and his human sidekick, Panurge - embark upon a series of adventures, visiting islands populated by the sort of beings which kept sixteenth century monks awake at night, notably a giant who eats windmills - but the ensuing japes and scrapes remain secondary to the discourse they inspire, representing a subtle difference of emphasis to the somewhat more dynamic Gulliver's Travels. This isn't a criticism. Simply an acknowledgement of this being an earlier work reflecting the efforts of an entirely different author.

Like Swift, Rabelais found endless entertainment in jokes about things plopping out of arses and landing upon human heads. Thus do we have the term Rabelaisian which may be applied equally well to both Gulliver's Travels and Viz comic, or at least Viz comic when it was funny. This was all something of a revelation for me, my previous experience of sixteenth century monks (which is more extensive than you might suspect) very much typecasting them as pious sorts with an abiding love for both Jesus and the Pope. Rabelais spends a lot of time chuckling over turds thrown as missiles, people drowning in lakes of piss, couples rubbing their bacon together, as he calls it, and taking the St. Michael out of God's alleged Earthly representative. He also spends a great deal of time discussing human concerns, society, morality and so on, and with an insight that seems refreshingly honest and open considering the writing of at least some of his contemporaries. I'm looking at you here, Fr. Sahagún.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is alternately both gripping and hilarious whilst at other times being somewhat repetitive and lacking in the energy which made Swift so engrossing, although in all fairness I  suspect this may be down to my being something of a thickie where the classics are concerned, so jokes about Pythagoras or Roman emperors tend to be wasted on me. As a satirical novel, it's pleasantly devoid of the misanthropy which infects the later books of Gulliver's Travels and is probably funnier in places, but despite all there may be in its favour, sadly it just hasn't aged as well.