We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Philip K. Dick We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (1987)
Well, there it is: the fifth and final collection of his short stories, so that's it for me and Dick's fiction, excepting re-readings, and unless he smuggled anything more explicitly imaginary into The Exegesis - which I've still been too scared to read - and ruling out the possibility of anyone finding the lost manuscript of Return to Lilliput, or of Dick himself writing a few new ones.

The stories here date from 1963 up until the man's death, so a much greater span of years is encompassed than in all four previous collections put together, and the dates suggest the author reaching a saturation point past which he no longer felt so inclined to hammer out the short stories at quite such a rate, presumably preferring to concentrate on novel length material. The quality of the stories reflects this to some extent, with a few of these more or less amounting to generic Dick-by-numbers in comparison with later efforts. For example, flicking back to Holy Quarrel to look up the names, I still can't quite remember what it was actually about beyond that I didn't enjoy it much, in contrast with previously unpublished material such as the wonderful Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked wherein Dick examines his own convoluted attitude towards women and relationships through a sort of theologically ponderous written equivalent to funny animal comics; and on the subject of self-aware literature, I'd swear that The Day Mr. Computer Fell out its Tree is Dick taking the piss out of his own style and themes, possibly during a moment of boredom.

There are some true greats here - The War with the Fnools, A Game of Unchance and Not By Its Cover - but of those which failed to appear in much earlier short story collections such as The Golden Man and The Turning Wheel, I can sort of see why they didn't make the cut on previous occasions; and if you squint at just the right moment you can actually see what looks like Phil beginning to tire of the short form, and this is most apparent when comparing those stories which either summarised or else ended up embedded in novels with those obliged to deliver all their major ideas in one twenty page dollop.

Without bothering to go back and re-read my own reviews, I have an impression of this being the most uneven of these five collections, with a few fairly dull efforts and Phil's not-particularly-welcome views on abortion to sour the picture; but the lows are nicely balanced by a few of his absolute absurdist best, and everyone is entitled to fire off a few blanks every now and then.

Lordy - what a great writer he really was.

Supreme: The Return

Alan Moore & about a million others Supreme: The Return (2000)
I'm not sure there's much I can say about this collection that I haven't already said about its predecessor, but anyway...

Supreme is the creation of Rob Liefeld, the man who effectively drove me away from caped escapades in the early nineties, either with the mighty colonic force of his scratchy art, or else its unfortunate and baleful influence on everyone else. Supreme was Liefeld's version of Superman with the serial numbers filed off, publication enabled by his own Image Comics imprint when whoever was paying his wage at Marvel refused to cave in to the demands of an artist who always made Wolverine look like he was in the middle of doing a poo, and a pretty fucking tough poo at that. I presume Liefeld recruited Alan Moore because of his ability to do word stuff good just as Moore received a hefty phone bill or something, but whatever the case, this was the result. Moore did what he could, at least managing to produce something which reads as though he enjoyed writing it, but if Sexton Ming has taught us anything it is that you can't polish a turd.

The stories are fine such as they are, and the heavily stylised flashbacks to a supposed prehistory of Supreme in the style of Simon, Kirby and others are ruthlessly well-observed, and the jokes are funny, particularly the running gag of how close our boy comes to realising that he's a character in a comic book; but at heart it's still Taco Bell regardless of how it's served, and it fails to nourish in the same way as Alan Moore's work usually does. The pastiche flashbacks to golden age Supreme worked well enough in the first collection, and even seemed to have purpose beyond nostalgic chuckles, but here they were starting to get on my tits.

Yes - a dog wearing a cape; we get it, for fuck's sake...

Funnily enough, I picked up a copy of the Supreme comic from Liefeld's original run at some flea market a few months ago, mainly out of curiosity and because despite being a near mint foil-stamped collector's edition published over two decades earlier, it cost just twenty-five cents. It's about as horrible as I imagined it would be - page after page of caped sides o' beef grimacing at each other with faces made of hernias and ruptured sphincters, frowning generals muttering darkly about imperatives and national security, and the emotional complexity of one of the more retarded Kiss albums. Oddly though, I can see the appeal, and even being an el Camino driving po' mullet-having uncle to Moore's more sophisticated version, the crappier Supreme seems more honest. Liefeld may be a terrible artist, but his art is immediately recognisable and is absolutely consistent. It's a guy trying his best, regardless of his best being pure shite, as opposed to Alan Moore and Rick Veitch slumming it so as to pay off a few bills. More oddly, this means the Liefeld version has a quality which is lost in Moore's mish-mash of genres and in-jokes, much as I would rather read the latter than the former.

I wouldn't say The Return is actually crap so much as that somehow it just ain't right. It's certainly worth a look, but the publisher's suggestion that it rivals Moore's own Watchmen for fresh perspective on the genre strongly suggests that of those responsible, only the bearded one had the first fucking clue about what he was actually doing here.

The Pilgrim's Progress

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress (1684)
This book is among the greatest literary masterpieces in the world, writes Dr. Ronald Johnson of something called Accelerated Christian Education. Few books so captivate attention while provoking insight into Christian character.

Bunyan was an English puritan living in an age when it was pretty tough being an English puritan, and thus was he locked up for continuing to preach his beliefs. Whilst in the stripy hole he wrote principally so as to keep himself from going batty, to keep himself on the straight and narrow:

...but yet I do not think
To show all the world my pen and ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;
I did it my own self to gratify.

Neither did I but vacant seasons spend
In this my scribble; nor did I intend
But to divert myself in doing this
From worser thoughts which make me do amiss.

Amongst those works written during his years of porridge we find The Pilgrim's Progress, describing the allegorical journey of a Christian man travelling to the kingdom of Heaven with emphasis on that which might impede his getting there. The tone of The Pilgrim's Progress is determined by Bunyan's desire for absolute clarity of meaning. Whilst the work may well have been written entirely for his own pleasure, he left no room for misinterpretation by any third party:

Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man i' the clouds and hear him speak to thee?

Whilst this speaks well of Bunyan's desire to communicate, I'm really not sure what it does for the book as a supposed literary masterpiece, an honour which I would argue applies more to its cultural impact than to the actual content. The principal character of part one is named Christian, and those he encounters on his journey tend to be identified with a similarly heavy hand, and so much so that it's kind of on a level with a seventeenth century Dora the Explorer as our boy meets Boastful and Selfish and turns to the imaginary camera to ask, I wonder what sort of fellows these will be? Perhaps they shall be fine and generous companions who speak with much modesty, before blinking a couple of times and then repeating the sentence.

It's not that the story is in any sense badly written, but with every possible outcome of each interaction a foregone conclusion based upon the relative and well-advertised piety of those involved, you kind of know what's going to happen, which kind of sucks some of the fun out of reading. I appreciate that it was 1684, but I'm not a complete stranger to literature of that general period, and Cervantes, Aphra Behn, Rabelais, and Cyrano de Bergerac all managed considerably better, or at least gave their readers something to chew over with a bit more substance than that of a rusk. I know Gulliver's Travels came a couple of decades later, but the contrast between the two makes this one read as though written by an idiot.

Clearly it wasn't written by an idiot given that simplicity was Bunyan's stated intention, and it remains a fairly engaging read for something in which everything is spelled out in ten foot high block capitals. As for the insight into Christian character promised by the nice man from Accelerated Christian Education, the insight is mostly on the level of how a Christian man likes God, enjoys praying and being honest, but he certainly does not appreciate the devil, temptation, or telling lies.

'Do you like the devil?,' we might ask him.

'No sir, I do not!' he would probably reply in strident tones.

Who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

Then again, Accelerated Christian Education is an organisation of biblically literalist nutcases responsible for schoolbooks claiming that the Loch Ness monster can be explained by Noah having a few baby dinosaurs on the ark. It makes perfect sense that Bunyan's masterpiece should hold such appeal for fundamentalist types with their profound distrust of grey areas, complex arguments and facts.

Accordingly, our Christian leaves a wife and four children in order to seek God, and yet nowhere is it suggested that this abandonment of his family could signify any degree of negligence, vanity, or self-interest, because he's doing it for the right reasons.

'Indeed, Cain hated his brother, because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous; and if thy wife and children have been offended with thee for this, they thereby show themselves to be implacable to good, and thou hast delivered thy soul from their blood.'

Well, that's all sorted then. As is typical of the fundamentalist, good deeds don't count for shit unless you're a fully paid-up club member and subscriber to the right periodicals. The nicest guy in the world is still going to hell if he fails to abase himself before the proper authorities for no reason given other than that it's all a joyous mystery and that this is simply the right way; and it's true because it's true, as Christian points out to the cunningly named Ignorance:

But thou camest not in at the Wicket-gate that is at the head of this way; thou camest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore I fear, however thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city.

Christian arrives in God's city at the end of the first book - the allegory specifically being that his pilgrimage represents acceptance of Christ and all that good stuff. Christian's abandoned and presumably less righteous wife and four children get to redeem themselves in book two, which initially kicks off as a repeat of book one as they come to their senses and decide to follow in Christian's shoes. On the way they are joined by characters with names such as Mercy and Great-Heart, then are eventually relegated to non-speaking roles in their own tale as their manly companions and protectors stand around pontificating upon biblical lore and how it is easier for camels to pass through the eyes of needles. I suppose a more active role in the exchange of opinions might have interfered with said wife's admirable womanly meekness or something. I wouldn't say that failing the Bechdel test or unnecessary sneering at Catholics - as occurs in a couple of instances - determines a piece of fiction as necessarily worthless, but forgetting to include a fucking story really doesn't help.

John Bunyan's great talent as a writer can be found in the fact that he actually made a fairly engaging read of this tale for all its flaws, its repetitive and sanctimonious observations, and its seemingly regarding the reader as a simpleton. The Pilgrim's Progress is an historically important book, just not a very good one.

Zenith: Phase One & Two

Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell
Zenith: Phase One (1987) Zenith: Phase Two (1988)
I was going to do just the first of these two, but you know how it is once you've started and you can't have just one. Plus I've been fiending for this shit since 1994 when I found myself obliged to make a choice between my large collection of 2000AD comics and regular access to a lady's vagina.

Zenith was Grant Morrison breaking into mainstream comics, or at least breaking into mainstream comics which people read. If you look closely you will notice that it's essentially his take on Brendan McCarthy's Paradax mashed up with Alan Moore's version of Marvelman with a load of Moorcock chucked in for good measure. This isn't a criticism, only an acknowledgement of Zenith wearing its influences on its sleeve, at least for most of Phase One. This is because the methodology of Morrison's writing is, at its most basic, tantamount to that thing you do when expecting a visitor, so you have a quick think about which book will create the strongest impression as your guest arrives, and you turn in your swivel chair to face them with the world's least convincing chuckle.

'Oh hello! You'll have to excuse me - I was just brushing up on my Kierkegaard.'

This is why so much of Morrison's dialogue, particularly early on in his career, is often so arch and affected and so damn teenage. It's portentous horror movie straplines as conversation.

'Are you Gideon Stargrave?

'As often as possible, but you know how it is these days.'

Possibly the funniest example of this that I've yet seen was an issue of the Thundercats comic in which Morrison was busily getting the Moore-by-numbers thing out of his system with first person narrative captions and traumatic back story as substitute for character.

My name is Liono. I am ten years old, followed by junior Liono being bummed flat by one of the older kittens at Thundercat school or something of that sort, closing with the aspirationally chilling Yeowell zoom-in on tear-stained whiskers, and again My name is Liono. I am ten years old...

This isn't a bad thing, but it's a bit comical if you don't get it right and then go on record stating that you taught Alan Moore everything he knew in an autobiography reading much like that of Spawny Get from Viz comic.

As I shagged my massively titted supermodel girlfriend on that pile of sweets, I suddenly had a great idea for a bold new direction for Batman. So I turned to my famous friend John Andrew, the drummer from Kingmaker, and I said...

Anyway, I was more easily pleased in 1987 when Zenith first turned up in the pages of 2000AD, but it still seemed like a huge, bold statement in comparison with the rest of the comic. Phase One still works for me, but mainly because I remember how great it looked first time around. Here in 2012, I can't help but notice how thin it actually is, but the disparity is not so pronounced as to diminish the pleasure of reading it once again. Phase One barely has a story at all, but gets away with it through having just the right book in its hand as it turns to greet you with studied nonchalance, and a genuinely wonderful sense of timing; plus all the jokes still work, which is sort of the same thing. Surprisingly Yeowell's artwork now looks quite ropey, all those big wide faces with their tiny, piggy eyes, but he makes up for it with deft use of shadow; and by the time we come to Phase Two he's absolutely nailed it. The same goes for the writing, which by Phase Two has built up just enough mythology to make things interesting when it all falls apart; and by Phase Two I'd remembered just what made Zenith so great.

As with a lot of Morrison's work, it's all about surface - much like Zenith himself - and here with surface presenting a thoroughly convincing illusion of depth. It seems telling that our boy now regards Zenith as having been a mere job, just one path trodden on his road to stardom. Zenith, having originated in 2000AD, was Morrison doing the sort of nutty shit he does best with some IPC gorilla stood at his side forcing him to behave, perhaps giving him licks every time a Crowley quote looked like it was turning into one of those dreary, meaningless essays. The Invisibles was, by some definition, Zenith without the restraints which saved it from its own author and thus made it readable.

In just two collected volumes this story goes from something that could almost have been published in one of those horrible eighties fanzines with two seventeen year-old nobodies from Chichester presenting their own extraordinarily po-faced take on the X-Men, to something which is at least as loud and exciting as the first Sex Pistols album. We meet a superhero who is essentially a twat, and another who is probably Michael Heseltine with a heart, and Lovecraft gets raked over with a little more vigour than usual, and Morrison reveals his true genius in explaining exactly why a real Superman couldn't end world hunger, war, or any of that stuff - part fourteen of Phase Two, in case you're interested; and all of this whilst casually waving its arse at Margaret Thatcher. Warts and all, Zenith is still fucking brilliant.

The Five Faces of Fear

Jay Eales The Five Faces of Fear (2013)
Darn - I really should have got around to this one sooner, and I'm not sure quite why I didn't. My general dislike of eBooks would be one significant factor. I find the whole Kindle deal unpleasant, and not really at all like reading a book as I recognise it; so with forty or more big, fat paperbacks stacked in a tall, sexy pile awaiting my attention, it's easy to forget I also have a specifically new arrangement of zeros and ones stored on that black square thing. Additionally I realise I have begun to resent these Señor 105 novellas by some peculiar psychological convolution of association.

Señor 105, for those who don't know, is a masked and vaguely supernatural Mexican wrestler who has adventures in the tradition of some of the weirder Luchador films. He was created by Cody Schell, and the plan was for one of these eBook novellas to appear every few months in the general spirit of a comic book or the pulp magazines of the thirties and forties - to which Señor 105's escapades allude to some degree. The thing which pisses me off, and which forms the core of my great big metaphysical ball of bad vibes, is the love and effort which has gone into this series in contrast with the general indifference which has greeted it.

So far as I am aware, the main Señor 105 sales drive has been on Gallifrey Base, an internet forum populated by Doctor Who fans. Señor 105 first appeared in an Iris Wildthyme story, Iris Wildthyme being a character created by Paul Magrs who turns up in some of his Doctor Who fiction; so I suppose you could call this a spin off of a spin off of a spin off, if your criteria is centred upon degrees of separation from the logo of a corporate entertainment franchise.

Gallifrey Base has about four million members, and there's a fair few of them hanging around in the section specifically concerned with books, which is the virtual arena in which our man has had some coverage. Señor 105 novellas are short - so they don't take too long to read - they're cheap, they're fun, and they're eBooks so it's not like the space they take up on a shelf is valuable space which could be better employed as home to The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who Sink Plungers and Plumbing Accessories or some other indispensable masterpiece; and guess what? Ignoring the fact of my having written one, they're pretty damn readable and pretty damn great.

Despite this, sales have been depressingly limited because - well, take a wild fucking stab...

—Here, take a look at this. You might like it.

Does it feature that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor?

—No, but it's still pretty good.

I don't understand.

You do something nice for people. You spend an hour or so preparing chicken in walnut sauce, and they'll tell you it looks delicious but they're really in the mood for McDonalds, and would you like us to bring you back an Egg McMuffin, and oh you should try one - they're really nummy.

Anyway, to get to the point, The Five Faces of Fear is another hit, or should have been. Jay Eales writes tight yet breezy prose with confidence and the sort of attention to certain kinds of detail which make him a perfect fit for this sort of story. His Mexicana rings true, giving this the genuine feel of a written equivalent to Luchador movies with familiar Cantinflas types staggering in and out of the pulquerias in the background, and even that same peculiarly pensive pacing one sees in certain films of that era, and specifically films which saw no contradiction in wedding ludicrous slapstick to high drama, although this is probably unavoidable if one of your supporting characters is a sentient gas inhabiting a balloon.

Sheila was positively fizzing with excitement. Señor 105 had asked her to undertake a secret mission for him. For this vitally important escapade, she had decided to wear her most inconspicuous balloon, one that was the colour of sand. Rodrigo had done his bit to help by drawing a big curly moustache and sunglasses on it with marker pen.

Without giving too much away, the story is pacey and all very enjoyable, roughly speaking Señor 105's own version of the X-Men's Days of Future Past. It's dramatic where it needs to be and funny where it needs to be without pulling faces or planting whoopee cushions on your chair. It doesn't contain the meaning of life, but then it doesn't need to.

The Five Faces of Fear is another wonderfully written little gem which will probably remain ignored for no good reason whatsoever, and now I need to download the one by Stewart Sheargold.

Available from this site right now for peanuts. Just buy it.

The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book

Isaac Asimov, George R.R. Martin & Martin H. Greenberg (editors)
The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book (1983)
I think it was our birthday - that is my wife and myself having both been born on the same day - and we were celebrating at J. Arthur's with the rest of her family. J. Arthur's is a fussy, slightly pretentious San Antonio restaurant of middling standard, more properly known as J. Alexander's but I tend to think of the place as J. Arthur's in reference to the rhyming slang. I opened the present from Bess's mother and it was this book. I experienced a moment of confusion, mistaking the title for an actual weight loss guide and thinking that my mother-in-law was perhaps suggesting I could stand to cut down on the pies, which seemed a little rich given the average girth of everyone else sat around the table. Closer inspection, or more properly actual inspection, revealed it to be an anthology of science-fiction shorts with fatness as the unifying theme. Oh okay, I thought, getting it at last. Bess's mother tends to be quite unpredictable with her prezzies, but she always chooses well so I looked forward to reading the thing.

Unfortunately the theme is followed with varying degrees of fidelity and success from one story to the next, with Stephen King's Quitters, Inc. at the most tenuous extreme with its brief few paragraphs about how packing in the fags can give you a bit of an appetite. Being what might be termed a chubby chaser in so much as I personally prefer the fuller figure or even the considerably fuller figure to the no more lettuce for me, I'm stuffed types, I was hoping for some decent, possibly Swiftian science-fiction examinations of fat as an issue - body image, social conditioning, metabolism, cultural significance, dietary myths, eating disorders and all that sort of thing. Unfortunately, of the stories which actually use those few extra pounds as anything other than plot texture, mostly it's just freakish sedentary fatties failing to stick to a diet written with faint traces of sneering. I expected better because Asimov of all people has ever been - or at least seemed like - champion of the awkward fucker who doesn't fit in, so it's disappointing to find that he too reduces everything to the less cake, more exercise diet.

Oh well.

It's not a bad collection. Vance Aandahl's Sylvester's Revenge and William Tenn's The Malted Milk Monster are decent, and Orson Scott Card's Fat Farm is actually pretty great despite it being by Orson Scott Card, a man who famously knows what's best for the rest of us due to certain unpleasant religious convictions. There's nothing truly terrible here - excepting possibly Stephen King's gratuitously unpleasant offering - but it's all a bit underwhelming. Contrary to the claims of Asimov's introduction, The Science Fiction Weight-Loss Book didn't particularly inspire me to eat less either, so J. Arthur's overly-rich and needlessly salty menu still has the lead on that score.

So there's me with a spunk garnish on my salad next time I'm in the place...

The Ticket That Exploded

William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
The Ticket That Exploded is one of Burroughs' more intense cut-up novels in that the cut-up texts tend to dominate with not much in the way of more conventional forms to dilute the flow of information; and those parts of the narrative comprising regular, instructional texts about the operation of tape recorders and suchlike tend to be punctuated by means of hyphens rather than full stop with no additional concession to sentence structure, thus blurring the distinction.

Cut-up text is of course not so much random words and phrases as words and phrases selected for their apparent meaning from otherwise effectively random words and phrases. As with much of Burroughs' writing of this kind, impressions are formed by the images which seem to be described, and so a narrative appears to emerge as you read, even if it's hardly a linear narrative. One supposed purpose of the cut-up is divinatory or at least revelatory, allowing either the future or the truth to be revealed as a pattern within the otherwise random juxtaposition. Being as The Ticket That Exploded seems mostly written as random juxtapositions, it feels like certain truths of modern life and western society skinned and sanded down to expose the workings - not pretty to look at, but that's what's really going on here.

Word evokes image does it not? - Try it - Put an image track on screen and accompany it with any soundtrack - Now play the soundtrack back alone and watch the image track fill in - So? What is word? - Maya - Maya - Illusion - Rub out the word and the image track goes with it -

A lot of this reminds me of Debord's spectacle, specifically the separation of that which exists from its own image:

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by intangible as well as tangible things, which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

This is probably nothing new in terms of either Burroughs or whatever it was I said about any of his other books, but it's worth saying, and worth noting how Burroughs managed to give each novel its own distinctive flavour despite that he was doing something essentially quite repetitive for most of his career. This one feels closer to science-fiction in the traditional sense than at least a few of the others, and still without following any conventions of the form, aside from a curious nod to Henry Kuttner's Fear; and on the subject of such references, I'm also intrigued to have here found a mention of New Worlds magazine and specifically Barrington Bayley, to whom Burroughs credits some innovation or other. I don't know much about Bayley, beyond having enjoyed The Four-Colour Problem. I had an impression of him essentially being the English Burroughs tribute act, but it's nice to think that there may have been some two-way exchange of ideas between these writers.

Actually, apropos of nothing and seeing as we're here, I can't help but notice that almost everyone with whom Burroughs ever shared a cup of tea and an iced bun turns up in one of his books except for Porridge, despite them having been such amazing bezzies and all that. Curious.

But anyway...

Get it out of your head and into the machines. Stop talking stop arguing. Let the machines talk and argue. A tape recorder is an externalised section of the human nervous system. You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture.

So we are recordings of ourselves, or something along those lines. This is one of those books you really need to read for yourself, because what it says is fairly important - once you've divined it from the entrails - and there's no point trusting to the version in summary of what is, after all, only a review.