Dawn

Octavia E. Butler Dawn (1987)
I'm not sure if it's me or her, but each Octavia Butler novel I read seems less satisfying than the last. I recall thinking that Parable of the Sower was tremendous, and that Mind of My Mind had its moments even if it wasn't quite so convincing, but this one became a chore after the initial novelty of the premise had worn off.

The premise is that the Earth is fucked following some sort of war, and the human race has wiped itself out but for a few survivors rescued by an advanced and apparently altruistic alien species. The Oankali as they are known keep these survivors in a craft resembling a primal Eden, and are reviving them one by one, here and there making improvements at a genetic level which will aid in their survival once they all get to go back to Earth. Among the first to be revived is Lilith, the symbolism of whom is probably fairly obvious, herself being named after the Biblical Adam's first wife according to sources you're all perfectly capable of investigating under your own steam. You would think she might appreciate not only being alive, but the Oankali having cured her cancer and given her a sort of healing ability to ensure that it will neither trouble her nor anyone upon whom she lays hands ever again; but the narrative is preoccupied with coercion, things done to people against their will ostensibly for their own good, power dynamics and the like, and so Lilith is none too happy about it. As the novel increasingly comes to resemble an episode of The Outer Limits, others are revived, and none seemingly any happier about the situation than Lilith. They don't really trust her, or the supposed goodwill of the Oankali. They don't believe they're on a spacecraft. Dawn doesn't quite stoop to an angry Ernest Borgnine demanding to be let off of this stinking ship because he gots a business to run, but it comes surprisingly close.

Now, Lilith decided, was the time to Awaken two more people. She Awoke two every two or three days, no longer worrying about Awakening men since there had been no real trouble. She did deliberately Awaken a few more women than men in the hope of minimising violence.

Very wise, because you know how those men can be quite rapey at times, and who knows what could happen? If it has a penis the chance is that it will thump someone and take their dinner money before the day is over. I understand that the circumstances of the novel are supposed to be weird and exceptional, and Butler is dealing in metaphors up to a point, and as a black woman author it might be deemed fitting that she should address certain subjects traditionally ignored by other writers, but Jesus - just a little bit of faith in human nature really would have gone a long way here, as opposed to just assuming that everyone, left to their own devices, is going to try to screw you in one way or another. The sheer misanthropy of this tale, or specifically in the portrayal of its human characters makes Ayn Rand look like Martin Luther King. It reads like the work of someone who never left the house at all in some unfortunate respects.

That said, I suppose as part of a trilogy there might be some purpose to such a bleak view being given in the opening act, one which may only become apparent in the second or third instalments; but even so, as an author so frequently praised for her wonderful characterisation, there seems to be precious little of it here. The Oankali are nicely written, particularly as a plausibly alien species with three genders, but then they aren't really explored to any extent greater than that of Lilith's resentful bewilderment. Considering Dawn as the work of an author who was quite clearly more than capable of holding both sentence and story together, I'm astonished at how little I found myself caring about any of this one.

An Incomprehensible Condition

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

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

But anyway...

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

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

Follow this link and buy everything you see.

The Pendragon Protocol

Philip Purser-Hallard The Pendragon Protocol (2014)
I've always enjoyed Philip Purser-Hallard's writing, and to the point of believing his name deserves to be at least as ubiquitous as those of Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds and all those other top billing English science-fiction authors, not least because I would say that for the most part his is probably the greater talent. He's wrought some genuinely wonderful stuff within those little patches of universe left behind by the passing of the man in the blue box, and so the prospect of his first major steps away from the shallow pools of the more conspicuously licensed reaches of genre fiction has been a source of great anticipation for me. With this in mind, I must confess to some eyebrow-raising when I first read that The Pendragon Protocol would introduce us to the technologically sophisticated Knights of a twenty-first century Round Table sworn to protect us all from villainy. It made me think of Torchwood, or Primeval, or anyone who ever considered tales of secret government agencies full of superheroes with access to alien technology as being anything other than sheer arseache of the worst kind; but, I told myself, such fears will almost certainly be unfounded given the author's track record.

Happily I was right, and whilst I wouldn't quite describe this as having a startlingly original premise, as does Simon Morden on the back cover - at least not given how many times Arthur's lads have been coaxed back onto the field by everyone from Stephen King to Alan Moore to probably Pee-wee Herman - as a novel it has defied my narrative expectations, and is in all respects pretty bloody formidable. The key to this being that the author has remembered to write a book which is actually about something, as opposed to just a bunch of guys grunting and romping away with swords and cellphones for a few hundred pages.

To start with, the psychological mechanism of these Knights as the most recent expressions of an archetype is ingeniously told, precluding the need for anything so cock-obvious and hokey as reincarnated spirits, agencies of higher powers by traditional fantasy terms, or indeed anything requiring suspension of disbelief. In this sense The Pendragon Protocol does at least some of what C.S. Lewis tried to do with That Hideous Strength but without the sneering. Futhermore, reviewing That Hideous Strength, Orwell wrote:

[Lewis's beliefs] weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader's sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict, one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.

Philip Purser-Hallard avoids this problem by means of simple narrative realism in combination with lively and unflinching investigation of the nuts and bolts of belief as it may relate to an objective reality without ostentatious demonstrations of divine power getting in the way. This refusal to stoop to the flashily miraculous allows the underlying argument of the text to really breath, to expand and to examine the greater context of belief - belief in the collective understanding of what constitutes human society, and so on. In other words, The Pendragon Protocol, rather than simply being Highlander with 'O' levels, demonstrates that belief in a Deity, a noble cause, the laws by which we define civilisation, or even that a piece of paper can stand for monetary value, are essentially aspects of the same understanding and are therefore closely related.

Jory Taylor, our main protagonist and current expression of the characteristics of the legendary Sir Gawain, here finds himself torn between two schools equating to mutually exclusive views of the moral environment he inhabits, specifically amounting to the establishment and to forces opposing the establishment, without either definitively revealed as either more corrupt or any less worthy than the other; and this seems to further translate into a dialogue between faith and belief as either a personal matter or something which comes from outside and which may be embodied in a collective institution.

Anyway, this is what I took from the novel, poorly expressed though my version may well be, which, if nothing else, is at least to say that this is a philosophically meaty read yielding some truly vertiginous revelations - at least to me - whilst rattling along at fair old pace without any sacrifice to the quality of language. To reduce that further into Daily Mail English, Philip Purser-Hallard has achieved that rare balance of a way above average intellectually stimulating novel you can read by the pool with a beer and a hot dog.  The Pendragon Protocol genuinely deserves to sell so well that we're all sick of hearing about it by this time next year, and I'm already looking forward to the second part of the trilogy.

The Food of the Gods

H.G. Wells The Food of the Gods (1904)
Considering the graceful perfection of Wells at his very best - as found in novels of such repute as to require no formal identification - one cannot help but be astonished by the mediocrity of his lesser works, of which this is one. The Food of the Gods concerns the development of a food substance which causes dramatic and continuous growth leading to the birth of a race of giants, amongst the inevitable rats the size of cows and other creatures which eventually came to serve as b-movie staples. The science is somewhat wonky, but the point is essentially that from which Michael Crichton extrapolated most of his career, namely a catastrophic scientific genii which cannot be stuffed back into its bottle. Here an emergent race of enormous supermen serve as a metaphor for reckless scientific advance, inspiring society towards an increasingly reactionary, even Fascist state as it attempts to control its mammoth progeny.

The story would be fine in itself, but for the manner of its telling. Whilst H.G. was more than capable of crafting a respectable sentence, this one reads like he wasn't really paying attention and was thus prone to birthing monstrosities of this sort:

And the earliness of this second outbreak was the more unfortunate, from the point of view of Cossar at any rate, since the draft report still in existence shows that the Commission had, under the tutelage of that most able member, Doctor Stephen Winkles (F.R.S., M.D., F.R.C.P., D.Sc., J.P., D.L., etc.), already quite made up its mind that accidental leakages were impossible, and was prepared to recommend that to entrust the preparation of Boomfood to a qualified committee (Winkles chiefly), with an entire control over its sale, was quite enough to satisfy all reasonable objections to its free diffusion.

That's a single ninety-nine word sentence in case you're still awake and happened to wonder, and although its length is atypical, its tone is fairly representative of the rest, at least leaving aside those passages which seem to have served as precursor to the more laboured Ealing comedies. These dominate the first part of the book, very much epitomising the sort of cosy catastrophe Brian Aldiss wrongly attributes to John Wyndham - all boggle-eyed rural types with funny names marvelling at what will they think of next, and the lisping Mr. Skinner who deliverth lengthy paragraphth of bumbling content-free phonetically rendered text thuch ath we have here prethumably entirely in the thervice of communicating how theriouthly fucking thide-thplitting it can be when thomeone thpeakth with a lithp, but poththibly altho to contheal the fact of Herbert having forgotten to include a fucking thtory. This aggravating tone wanes somewhat as we plod slowly towards the conclusion of the book, by which point the giant babies are all grown and now inexplicably talking like portentous aliens from episodes of Shatner era Star Trek with the ye and the yonder and why do the small ones beleaguer us so?

The Food of the Gods could have been up there with H.G.'s greatest hits, but it reads like the author lost interest early on and was trying hard to keep himself sufficiently amused to finish it off, and to finish it off mainly just for the sake of finishing it off. There was once a tremendous novel under here somewhere, but this is dire.

Dagon and other macabre tales

H.P. Lovecraft Dagon and other macabre tales (1967)
Lovecraft undoubtedly wrote some wonderful stuff, but in our rush to overcompensate for the obscurity in which his work languished whilst he was alive, we tend to overlook that he also wrote some utter fucking stinkers, to which end this second Grafton collection does much to redress the perceptual balance. Here we find many short stories, some juvenilia, fragments of shopping lists, and Supernatural Horror in Literature, which I already read and very much enjoyed back in April. Most peculiar and fascinating is In the Walls of Eryx, Howie's extensive expansion and revision of a much shorter work by Kenneth Sterling whom Wikipedia describes as a precocious Providence high school student who had befriended Lovecraft the previous year; peculiar and fascinating because it's full blown proper science-fiction with rockets on the front cover and set on a version of Venus reminiscent of that described by Edgar Rice Burroughs; and it's very, very good.

The other tales are similarly blessed with narratives happily lacking in spooky houses inherited from uncles whom no-one likes to talk about too much, but unfortunately that's about it for the good news. The writing is adequate, although of such portent that my inner ear heard many of these read out loud by Tony Hancock, with occasional customary asides to the obligatory nameless horrors feeling as though they should actually refer to either some bloke down the Dog and Duck, or the inland revenue, or at least someone played by Sid James.

Stone me. I might have known it would be you.

There are some interesting and unexpected Gernsbackisms in Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The Evil Clergyman, and Herbert West - Reanimator hints at having been written by someone alive in the age of electricity, automobiles and Harold Lloyd. This would be great if it didn't read like something plotted by an eight year old boy with a crayon, notably around the point at which Herbert decides he must commit murder so as to obtain a corpse sufficiently fresh as to allow him to bring it back to life. I mean aside from outgrossing himself, why is he even bothering? Does anyone actually know?

Then we have a further helping of those Dream Cycle tales in the vein of The Dream-Quest of Uninteresting Kadath, apparently influenced by Lord Dunsany and mostly sheer arseache. There's the weirdly self-referential The Unnameable which achieves the not unimpressive feat of somehow failing to take its own advice; and last but not least, the casual racism of Polaris and the aforementioned Herbert West; and not forgetting the formal evening wear racism of He and The Horror at Red Hook, in which the horror is specifically identified as immigration. Fancy that.

As an aside, I can't help but notice certain parallels with that whole neofolk thing, specifically the raging misanthropy, fear of an ethnically diverse present, and the forever harking back to some lost because it never existed in the first place Aryan Eden whilst mining the same as a source of even more terrible horrors. The message seems to be hey all you dole scrounging porch monkeys, my horror is bigger and more pure than your horror, or something of that order. Part of what makes In the Walls of Eryx such a refreshing change is its adopting an overtly anti-imperialist stance and siding with the oppressed natives, in effect taking the opposite view to that usually expressed by Lovecraft.

All that cosmic horror was great, but let's not get carried away here. Regardless of Lovecraft's supposed later and somewhat elusive refutations of earlier racist views, very little of what is found in this particular five-hundred page collection is really that great. Much of it is overwritten and turgid, very much the work of the man who bought us The Street in which our narrator pines for the days before all those blackies ruined everything; and whilst we're here he can shove The Transition of Juan Romero right up his arse too. So many of these tales seem sadly typical of the pampered only child sat in his darkened room as doting aunts cut the crust from his McDonald's hamburger for him, and he pens yet another veiled ode to mighty whitey, oblivious to his own distance from the wholesome Caucasian ideal being even greater than that of even those swarthy types who bring their thumpa-thumpa music and smelly food to the land of his fathers, or at least to the land his fathers stole from all of those red guys that no-one likes to talk about.

What a complete wanker.

Knitting with Coalsmoke

John Bagnall Knitting with Coalsmoke (2013)
I wouldn't ordinarily make the effort of setting virtual pen to imaginary paper for something so slim as a single forty-page small press comic book, but this one seems to have enough going on to justify an exception to the rule. I've been vaguely aware of the existence of John Bagnall for at least a couple of decades, and I'm fairly sure we've both contributed to the same periodicals at one point or another. I tend to think of him as a small press cartoonist due to former association with a loose group of individuals including Ed Pinsent, Carol Swain and others with whom his work exists at a similar tangent to the mainstream. I suppose, to commit an extraordinarily crass analogy, you might take it that I'm referring in this instance to the cartooning equivalent of obscure European cinema, tons of subtitles with nothing happening slowly in black and white, and before we get too carried away, I'm not saying this is a bad thing.

I'm out of my depth here in the sense of having drifted away from the small press many years ago, somewhat repelled by a glut of gratuitously self-referential autobiographical material, low content queerzines published by pierced middle-class teenagers now in their leathery fifties and still dressing like members of Haysi bloody Fantayzee, and general wank apparently justified by the idea that hey, at least I'm expressing myself. It still pains me to consider the ocean of horrible drivel in which the good stuff, such as what we have here, is but a drop; but anyway...

Bagnall doesn't really do strip cartoons so much as invoke details of times past, specifically of an England which will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the sixties or seventies. However, this is some way removed from Stewart Maconie chuckling over Spangles and the Bay City Rollers, or any Harry Enfield pastiche of a public information film. The nostalgia industry tends to focus on that which most people remember without prompts, and so our punk documentary - for arbitrary example - will be about the Sex Pistols rather than Eater, the Prats, and the Bears, despite that anything looming so large as to remain in the memory has usually become its own discreet phenomenon and as such can no longer quite be considered part of the general texture. John Bagnall's excavations, on the other hand, are all about the texture, the background noise we barely even noticed at the time, let alone ever had a chance to properly forget. His style is particularly well suited to the task, stark and simple lines tracing solid forms without strongly resembling anything which has gone before, thus allowing for these historical examinations to unfold without unnecessary caricature or kitschy nostalgia clogging up the signal.

There's something very haunting in these tales, or at least these anecdotes of subjects so small and lacking in quantifiable moment that I'm not sure they could be told by any better means than they are here. The silent panels showing the new town centre, or the trades which might be pursued by dexterous young men seem particularly affecting, unburdened by any editorial implication of a better, simpler world gone by, serving simply as an affectionate record of that which should be preserved if only for poetic reasons. This really is a beautiful piece of work.

Purchase your pleasantly musty copy here.

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915)
The Metamorphosis is, as everyone presently alive probably knows, the tale of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning as an enormous beetle much to the understandable distress of his family. I seem to recall its having been discussed at length in Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss's history of science-fiction literature, but I can't be arsed to have a look and see what the guy said right now. Clearly The Metamorphosis isn't science-fiction - which probably wasn't what Aldiss said in any case - but it's surprising how many other general categories it resists with equivalent certitude.

The story, which is much shorter than you may realise, focusses mainly on Samsa's physical deterioration, and the breakdown of communications with his sister and parents in whose home he lives as principle breadwinner. As is my custom, I gave this one some thought before reading, anticipating certain themes and by extension what sort of thing I should therefore be looking for. I imagined there might be something to gain from considering the general symbolism of the dung beetle, all the stuff about shit and death, maybe even the sun as a great celestial ball of poo rolled daily across the heavens as it was in ancient Egypt; but I was wrong. Samsa is not, it turns out, a dung beetle. In fact his precise entomological credentials are unclear, perhaps even irrelevant beyond their association with death, decay, and detritus, and the numerous descriptions mostly point to something along the lines of a cockroach. Furthermore, it seems I'm not the only one to get a bit ahead of myself in this respect, and two thirds of this edition are taken up with commentary and related essays to varying degrees of relevance and value. One guy argues that Samsa is in fact a woodlouse, based on his interpretation of a single somewhat vague sentence, although our boy potentially being a woodlouse makes no difference to anything. Another argues that the apple which Samsa's father hurls in anger at his six-legged son must be viewed as an apple from the tree of knowledge of the kind which the Biblical Eve famously found so nummy. This too is bollocks, as are many of the other available interpretations, because all the information you need is already present in the text, and I presume the apple to have been an apple simply because that's just the sort of thing Gregor's father would have had to hand.

Gregor, you see, has a shitty, soul-destroying job and more responsibilities than he can handle. Those of us who have found ourselves in such circumstances will therefore recognise his situation immediately and have no need for further explanation. Life repeatedly kicks Gregor in the sack, then asks him for a contribution towards its next shoe shine, over and over and over; and it isn't so much that he becomes a shit-eating beetle, but that he is revealed as one, or, as Wilhelm Emrich puts it in one of the more helpful essays Kafka does not create "surrealist" phenomena but, on the contrary, creates our reality with utter artistic truth. So it's an allegory, but not one upon which we should get too hung up in view of that which is allegorised, as detailed here in Kafka's diary:

...breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner.

Personally speaking, I've been there. The Metamorphosis rings a lot of bells, although it should probably be noted that the metamorphosis of the title most likely refers to the transformation of Samsa's family near the close of the story, a vaguely redemptive ending which Kafka himself grew to dislike.

The Metamorphosis is good enough to preclude the need for further discussion, and is not a difficult text by any description. Everyone should read it, and not least because even without its saying all that it says, it's also very funny.