How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Francis Wheen How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (2004)
Here's another existing at something of a tangent to my usual, but it's one of those books which could make for a slightly better world if everyone were to read it and take at least some of what is said on board. I suppose How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World might be regarded as a companion piece to Carl Sagan's excellent The Demon-Haunted World in so much as it's an extended essay on why believing any old bollocks on the grounds of it being either comforting or else relayed to you by a smiling man in a nice suit is maybe not such a great idea. I'd say it might also be regarded as a companion piece to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but although I remember enjoying that one up to a point, I've subsequently found it difficult to distinguish between my memories of the book and the disappointing evolution of Dawkins into a sort of atheist Richard Littlejohn.

Anyway, Wheen's focus is on culture, politics, society, economics and so on, roughly applying Sagan's genial sense of clarity to the world around us and examining the consequences of twatty thinking. Homeopathy, structuralism, and certain new age conceits all come in for a hugely entertaining kicking, and all building towards a thorough examination of why those who don't actually understand society or how the universe operates - looking at you and Cherie marinating in your Mexican shit bath, Tony Bliar - shouldn't be left in charge of any part of it because they invariably fuck it up for the rest of us; as they have done; as can be discerned by simply looking out of a window. Happily, Wheen seems to accept that as a planet we have to work with what we have right here and now, and that no amount of evangelical ranting, raving, or name calling is going to sterilise thousands of years of ingrained culture; as Dawkins seems to believe each time he demands we cut out all the religion and start being more sensible like what he is, apparently never really quite understanding why some might consider him poorly informed in certain respects.

I've never really understood economics or the mechanism of capitalism and debt, at least not beyond a fairly vague and left-leaning hunch of it all being a massive planet-sized nest-feathering exercise, but Wheen explains it all very well, and in terms that I found not only comprehensible but fascinating in a horrible watching a car crash sort of way; and it's reassuring to learn that my hunch seems to have been pretty much on the money. Doubtless there are plenty of amoral shitbags out there quite capable of launching a testy rebuttal whilst providing mathematical proof of shareholders being more important than outdated ideas of democracy, and how those kids actually enjoy making our cheap running shoes for us, but from my purely subjective viewpoint, I don't see how it would be possible to finish this book whilst retaining the sort of warped political mentality it challenges with such eloquence, unless you're just plain fucking stupid, or evil, or both.

Mort

Terry Pratchett Mort (1987)

I read this whilst staying at my mother's house in England. There didn't seem much point in my taking books for the visit seeing as she has plenty and tends not to read rubbish, so there's always something worth a look, and she has eclectic tastes - everything from Sophocles to Dickens to Julian Barnes to Terry Pratchett. Actually, I was a little surprised to see Pratchett paperbacks amongst all her other stuff during my previous visit, myself having initially failed to get on with his writing, so I tried one and found I enjoyed it despite misgivings hatched some years before; and now it seemed like it might be time to have a shot at another.

The aforementioned misgivings are based on an assumption, itself based on the first ten pages of my initial attempt to read Guards! Guards!, specifically an assumption of Pratchett having been more or less Douglas Adams with wizards. I haven't read Douglas Adams in many years, and to be fair I may find that my impression of his writing has changed since I last read anything, but what I recall is of an excessive reliance on understated absurdity - that being as good a catch-all term for his style as any, I suppose; in other words, an emphasis on a fairly repetitive type of humour derived from the contrast between the muted tone of the description and that absurdity of that which is described, and in Adams' case described as though by an indignant rural English clergyman wishing not to appear overly demonstrative.

Pardon me, but I couldn't help noticing a spaceship made of fudge and piloted by hippos parked just behind the village hall. I wouldn't mind but the ladies of Mrs. Wiggins' coffee morning appear somewhat flustered.

Yes - ha ha, but it gets fucking exhausting after twenty or so pages, regardless of whatever else the story may be trying to do; or at least it does for me because it seems quite predictable and all a little obvious. Terry Pratchett tends to do roughly the same sort of thing, although when I finally got around to taking another shot at Guards! Guards! I realised that he does it a lot better. His prose is more poetic, feeling less forced, and less like something serving principally to deliver a series of gags, resulting in what feels a little more solid and satisfying as a story.

For all that, whilst I enjoyed Mort - in which the grim reaper takes on a gangly, feckless teenager as his apprentice with hilarious consequences - I didn't enjoy it anything like as much as I thought I would, and in places it really felt unfortunately like a better written Douglas Adams with wizards. The characters are pretty thin, which would be okay under the circumstances but for being just a little too thin for me to be able to remember or care who was who each time I returned to the book, and so it all became a chore, and sadly of less appeal than the small box of gentleman's interest publications I found in the spare room amongst the things which never made it into the boxes of my crap shipped when I moved to the States four years ago. Mort's understated absurdity expressed as a zinger more or less every other paragraph might have benefited from the contrast of improved scene setting, something to invoke a bit of atmosphere, but then again, it could be just me - reading in a no longer familiar environment, head spinning from jetlag, a recent minor illness, and meeting people I haven't seen for years on an almost daily basis. On the other hand, when comparing notes with my mother, it turned out that she hadn't much enjoyed Mort either; so whilst my impression of Pratchett as a fairly decent writer and possibly a national institution remains more or less undiminished, I guess this just wasn't one of the better ones.

My Name is Legion

Roger Zelazny My Name is Legion (1976)
I don't really know much about Zelazny beyond his having co-wrote Deus Irae with Philip K. Dick, although I'm fairly sure I recall having read some interview in which Zelazny claimed to be no more than an organising influence on what was essentially Dick's novel, which squares with my recollection of it reading very much like undiluted Dick, so to speak; on the other hand, internet rummaging yields interviews in which Philip K. Dick downplays his own involvement to more or less a couple of chapters. Anyway, Deus Irae more closely resembles others by Philip K. Dick than My Name is Legion, so whatever.

My Name is Legion might be deemed a variation on John Brunner's Shockwave Rider in so much as it centres upon a man, specifically a freelance secret agent, who has pulled all his punch cards from those big old governmental computers with all of their flashing lights and reels of magnetic tape, and now has no official existence; and so he lives off the grid and tackles ecological crimes, broadly speaking. It's an odd book, tightly written and divided into three short stories. It's detective fiction which communicates in short, terse sentences which occasionally flower into lengthy, fairly intensive philosophical dialogues of a kind which you can see would have seemed a good fit for Dick's narrative. In fact, it reads sort of how A.E. van Vogt might read had his books been written by someone substantially less weird.

The only problem is that for most of its page count My Name is Legion feels like three short ecologically-themed stories connected by a gimmick, namely the private detective of no fixed identity. The point of the collection becomes clear at the close of the final chapter, but after a lot of time spent wondering, at least in my case, why it should really matter that this bloke exists outside of his own information-based society. The Shockwave Rider, for example, contrasts its own fugitive from official record with the expressly totalitarian world in which he lives, but the environment of My Name is Legion does not seem significantly worse than that of America in the seventies - room for improvement, but some way short of truly Orwellian; and while we're here, even the ecological aspect seems a little understated.

Ultimately it becomes clear that the book is about guilt, accountability, and humanity as it relates to its own conscience, and once everything comes together, it all makes sense in a fairly satisfying way, although it would have been nice to have some indication of where it was all heading a little earlier on. I probably wouldn't consider My Name is Legion a classic, but it has its moments, and the philosophical digressions are of sufficient quality as to suggest I should make the effort to keep an eye out for Zelazny's other books. This one feels like a respectable but otherwise lesser work of someone who was probably capable of better.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Alan Dean Foster Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978)
Yes, I know, but I used to gaze at this as it sat on the shelf amongst all those other lurid science-fiction titles in the little room with the books at the rear of Martins newsagent, from which I dispensed my paper round. This was the pre-VHS age, back when it was only really possible to relive the moving image by reading the book. I was twelve or thirteen and my mind boggled at the possibility of there being a book comprising an as yet untold tale of Luke and Leia and the rest, something which wasn't a film but seemed more legitimate than a comic strip, particularly when that comic strip involved a giant green rabbit; but being a novel and therefore short on pictures, it was War and Peace so far as I was concerned, as were most books not featuring the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor. Splinter of the Mind's Eye was for bigger boys, and so I never bought it or read it; and found it difficult to resist when I saw this copy more recently, seeing as how I am now myself a big boy.

Rummaging around in the February 1980 issue of Amazing Stories, as you do, I find an article on Alan Dean Foster in which Tom Staicar writes:

George Lucas contacted Foster to work with him on the story to be used as the sequel film. At that time, Lucas had to be cost-conscious about special effects requirements as it was not yet known whether Star Wars would break even or not. The writer was told to keep expensive starships and planetary vistas to a minimum and, with this in mind, Foster and Lucas developed the story.

So this would have been the second film had the first one gone tits up. I read The Empire Strikes Back as a comic book adaptation, and I'm almost certain that I've seen the film several times, but I still can't remember a fucking thing about it beyond lots of snow and freeze-dried Han Solo, so I'm not sure this wouldn't have been the better film; although of course all of this is predicated upon one regarding Star Wars as something other than a steaming pile of horse shit in the first place, and I go back and forth on that one.

One consideration which becomes apparent whilst reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye is that Star Wars is fine as a film, and it really doesn't need to be a book. I still think it's a shame how its arrival more or less killed off the thoughtful, largely dystopian science-fiction movie of the seventies, replacing it with a Dorito-chugging blockbuster narrative amounting to Flash Gordon with knobs on, condemning us all to forever experience mainstream culture as something aimed at a twelve-year old; which was never really the fault of Star Wars itself which, as a film, promised only certain specific things and did them extremely well. It was Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon treated as a biblical epic of the fifties or sixties. As such, it never really needed to be deep or meaningful with well-rounded characters, because epic was the whole point.

This, I would suggest, is why it doesn't quite work on the printed page, or at least doesn't for me. Splinter of the Mind's Eye is pretty much a sword and sorcery quest narrative, much like Star Wars itself, in which Luke and Leia hear about a powerful gemstone which amplifies the Force, and set out to obtain the gemstone only to be thrown in prison by the local big imperial cheese on this swampy, jungle planet, but he throws them in the same cell as these big, hairy monsters, hoping the big, hairy monsters will either eat or shag them, but Luke used to read about big, hairy monsters when he was growing up on Tatooine and so he knows their language and so they team up and the big hairy monsters bend the bars of the cell and they get away and go to look for the gem, and they have roughly the sort of adventures which befell Frodo Baggins before locating the gem, but someone has grassed them up to Darth Vader who decides that he also wants the gem, and some other stuff happens. Luke occasionally looks at Leia's bum as she's bending over to pick something up and thinks Cor! I wouldn't half like to have a snog with her because he doesn't yet know she is his sister, and Leia occasionally complains about getting her princess clothes all muddy, and the little, fat robot makes an electronic farting noise and the English robot says that he shouldn't have to put up with it, and I realise I probably should have read the thing when I was twelve and better able to appreciate it.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye isn't bad, although it may be significant that I'm left without any real idea of why it should be called Splinter of the Mind's Eye. By the time he came into the orbit of George Lucas, Alan Dean Foster had acquired a reputation as someone who wrote fast and who understood the moving image. I suspect it would be unfair to call him a hack, just as it would be unfair to term Star Wars mass-produced generic science-fiction landfill, given that both date from an era in which some level of craft was still required. The narrative of the book was familiar even back in 1978, and as a novel it attempts to squeeze characterisation from characters with no real depth, but at the same time it's tightly written and efficient if lacking in surprises. Strangest of all, Splinter of the Mind's Eye has made me want to watch Star Wars again, which I suppose must count for something or other.

The Man in the Velvet Mask

Daniel O'Mahony The Man in the Velvet Mask (1996)
This one seems to have been at the receiving end of more than its fair share of gongs over the years, gongs scoring swift removal from the stage by means of a long stick with hook on the end to a chorus of booing. This may be, I would respectfully suggest, because it's a Doctor Who tie-in novel and has thus been read mainly by Doctor Who fans, at least a certain quota of whom seem to prefer books which may be read whilst pretending to watch a children's television programme. The Man in the Velvet Mask is too violent, so it is said, and the Doctor's companion keeps getting her kit off and having it off with a nude and presumably tumescent man, and this is not something which would have happened in the television show - has been one such criticism, and one which apparently misses the point that The Man in the Velvet Mask isn't a television show; and as for the supposed sex scenes - Jesus - it's not like O'Mahony describes it going in and out or anything, and mostly such scenes tend to acknowledge its occurrence rather than getting into the spunky details. Certainly I found it difficult to masturbate to anything described herein.

More recently, some fucking genius pointed out that The Man in the Velvet Mask was a direct rip-off of a storyline in Grant Morrison's Invisibles comic, apparently basing this on the role of the Marquis de Sade as a character within the story because, you know, that's how it works; like with that Sandman comic which was totally a rip-off of A Midsummer Night's Dream blah blah blah totally iconic blah blah...

I couldn't actually say how much this novel has in common with Morrison's comic, having long since wiped my arse on my copy of Unreadables issue five, but if there was anything I'm pretty sure I would have noticed when I first read this back in the nineties.

Anyway, I remain relatively uninformed and accordingly undecided where the Marquis de Sade is concerned, presently maintaining only a vague impression of him having been a genuinely despicable man with either some interesting ideas, or some average ideas which have since been interpreted as interesting. I'm gearing up towards reading something at some point, admittedly with a certain reluctance informed by excerpts from The 120 Days of Sodom having been printed in some old Come Organisation fanzine I once had - all thoroughly beastly and stomach churning as I recall; and at the age of seventy, de Sade married a fourteen year old girl, which strikes me as just a teensy bit Jimmy Savile, quite frankly.

On the other hand, he apparently had some fairly interesting stuff to say regarding liberty, free will, morality, and generally not feeling like you have to say sorry; and this seems to be, more or less, where The Man in the Velvet Mask comes in.

In some ways, it foreshadows Lawrence Miles' Christmas on a Rational Planet, another Who novel which came out a few months later, or might even be viewed as a dry run for O'Mahony's Newtons Sleep, both of which deal with the Age of Reason and conflicting views of the universe as either ordered or chaotic dependent, I suppose, on the potential existence or nature of God. My reading of this book is that we see what happens when de Sade gets to create his own ideal world, but his philosophy pushed to an extreme more closely resembles its ideological opposite, specifically the severe reductionism and rationality of fascism as expressed by the French revolution; and here I can see that even my own sentences contradict themselves even before I get to the full-stop, so it's probably safe to say that there are some grey areas in this novel, and that either the narrative could have been a little more helpful, or else I read too fast. I appreciate how this isn't the kind of narrative which would have benefited from characters explaining the plot to each other every third page, and as something more fluid, roughly maintaining an atmosphere equivalent to German expressionist cinema of the twenties, it nevertheless does its job and generally does it very well, asking questions without necessarily providing answers.

Doctor Who as a series has had a tendency to overuse the sort of plot in which it turns out that Henry VIII was a Zygon, and thankfully this one steers clear of that approach, instead creating a reality which seems almost aware of its own fictional standing.

'I am going to try and escape,' the Doctor announced, coming to a sudden decision. 'My whole life is like this. I am imprisoned, I escape. I am imprisoned again, again I escape. My life is a sequence of cells, dungeons, oubliettes, caves and traps, again and again.

Meanwhile the Doctor's companion is adopted by a chaotic travelling theatre led by the wild and amoral Fantômas, seemingly a variation on the character created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas appears to represent a counterpart to de Sade, manifest only as a mask worn by a series of different actors (yes, I know - I've just noticed that too), just as de Sade is himself an automaton based upon the Prisoner referencing Monsieur le 6, now an inmate of his own gaol. Lines are further blurred as the theatrical troupe effect to perform one of de Sade's plays, a variation on Juliette, from which Deputy Minski is additionally extrapolated - meaning here that the O'Mahony Minski presumably draws on Minski the cannibal from de Sade's novel, the novel of which the play described in this novel is presumably meant to be either an early draft or inversion. Then on top of all the masks, fictions, and lives lived as theatre, we have Citizen Debord, I'm guessing named after the author of The Society of the Spectacle, if this zinger is anything to go by:

Debord gazed at her over the top of his spectacles.

Maybe it isn't specifically Guy Debord, but given that That Society of the Spectacle was significantly concerned with society as an artificial or even psychological construct, you can maybe see how I might have picked up that impression.

The Man in the Velvet Mask is beautifully written, which sadly didn't seem to count for much with those sections of its audience who would have appreciated a few more references to Daleks, and mercifully it really isn't Doctor Who and the Fifty Shades of Gray any more than it's recycled Grant Morrison by virtue of common settings and characters. Unfortunately it all becomes a bit too Luis Buñuel for it's own good by the time we reach the closing chapters, sagging a little under the weight of accumulated allusions, reflections, and inversions which tend to reduce the clarity of what is said regarding determinism, fate, the Doctor facing his own dissolution and so on. On the other hand, you might easily argue that this at least gives readers such as myself something to work with. It's a puzzle, but a fascinating one, and if you can't appreciate that, then you can't appreciate nuffink.

'Whatever you see fit!' he called. 'The triumph of virtue, the misfortunes of vice! Who said the play had to be like the book?'

Wanted

Mark Millar, J.G. Jones & Paul Mounts Wanted (2004)
Possibly weirdly, I didn't even realise this had been made into a massive box-office destroying Dorito sales vehicle starring Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and a massive box-office destroying Dorito sales vehicle starring Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which some people seem to think was decent; and I'm surprised at how much pleasure is to be had from not knowing something.

Anyway, films I'll probably never watch aside, Wanted is another of those big screen - because I'd rather eat my own shit than describe something as epic - revisionist superhero tales which turns up every couple of years; except it sort of isn't because this one's about superpowered bad guys who have managed to eliminate the caped forces of justice from their version of reality - acknowledged here as just one of many - and now rule the world from behind the scenes as an elite cabal. It also has the psychology of an Eminem album - what with the blue collar desperation, violence, father issues, self-loathing and so on - which I imagine is probably deliberate given that the main character so closely resembles the lad.

Obviously this isn't going to be for everyone, not least considering the stomach churning shock and horror splattered liberally all around because that's what Mark Millar does. He's shot himself in the foot a few times, justifying at least some of the accusations made by his detractors, not least being misogyny and homophobia; but when he gets the balance right, deftly scoring the weight of the sick bucket against reasons for which you might need one in the first place, it's some pretty fine stuff. It's relentlessly both gruesome and funny, much like the Shit-Head character who is more or less the Thing formed from the collected faeces of the 666 most evil beings ever to walk the earth... There's a little Hitler in there, a touch of Ed Gein, half a pound of Jeffrey Dahmer... He can make his body diarrhea soft, bloody constipation hard, or any consistency in-between.

My theory is that Mark Millar is more or less the Whitehouse of comics, referring here to the power electronics band rather than the bespectacled publiciser of controversial 1970s television shows. It's horrible not for the sake of sales or gratuitous shock, but because if you buy into slaughter as a form of entertainment, then you probably need a good kicking - delivered here by means of the sort of detail which wouldn't have made it into, for example, a 1980s Punisher comic; and I feel my theory is vindicated by the last two pages of the book, harking back to the gleeful conclusion of Millar's earlier Insiders, as featured in Crisis comic way back whenever, inverting the stereotypically redemptive cliché towards which the narrative appeared to be heading, and which would have been essentially dishonest.

He doesn't always get away with it, but Wanted is fucking brilliant; and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable.

Trips to the Moon

Lucian of Samosata Trips to the Moon (160AD)
Just to get the moaning over and done with, I think this is the fourth book I've bought from Ron Miller's Black Cat Press and the high quota of typos is beginning to annoy. Whilst it's fucking great to be able to get one's mitts on the kind of obscure and peculiar historical material in which Black Cat specialise, you would think someone might have bothered proof reading the things before loading the files up to Lulu. Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ had presumably been prod-uced by sub-mitting an old copy of the book through some sort of op-tical character recognition soft-ware resulting in weirdly hyphenated words occurring mid-sentence all the way through, former page numbers popping up mid-paragraph, and so on. In addition to this, I gather that whatever files were submitted to Lulu were almost certainly some Microsoft abomination - as opposed to a proper PDF - which can always be relied upon to change its mind about formatting at last minute when submitted to print on demand publishers, meaning

shitloads of

wonky paragraph breaks. It's not a massive problem, and doesn't really have to detract from the text or the pleasure of reading it, but it's kind of irritating, as is the fact of the footnotes to True History beginning at number seventeen and then even missing out a few of the associated explanations.

Lucian's True History, as reproduced herein, is reputedly the oldest surviving text which can be termed science-fiction by some definition, that definition being that it describes, amongst other things, a voyage to the moon made by a sailing boat full of philosophical types swept up in that general direction by the wind. Brian Aldiss discounts this as science-fiction due to the absence of anything pretending to be scientific even by second century terms, but Jesus - I'm not convinced it's really worth having the argument given the entirely unscientific science-fiction which has been written over the years, some of it by Brian Aldiss. I realise Frankenstein qualifies by virtue of medical details, but technology was never really the point of that story any more than it is of True History.

The point of True History is revealed in Lucian's Instructions for Writing History which is also handily reproduced herein.

In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed.

I get the impression that by this juncture Lucian had sat through one too many accounts of mighty warriors kebabing a hundred enemies with the single toss of a spear, and thinking something akin to fuck it, but in Greek or possibly Syrian, wrote True History thus inventing sarcasm. Absurdity is piled high, one ludicrous development after another, and so our lunar voyage is followed by excursions to an island made of cheese and inside a whale in which the ship finds itself trapped. It's comical, presumably intended to shame historians of the day into behaving themselves, and is a lot of fun even with my scant understanding of the philosophical giants out of whom Lucian seems to be taking the piss in the closing pages.

Also included is Lucian's Icaro-Menippus - a Dialogue in which Menippus takes to the air by the same means as Icarus, meets the Gods, and hears how they apparently regard most of the philosophers and theologians who follow them as a bunch of clowns. I'm not quite sure why Lucian specifically recruited the satirist who unwittingly lent his name to the genre of Mennipean satire for his tale, at least not beyond his quite obviously being a fan, but it places True History firmly in a tradition which led to Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels, and others - in case that much wasn't obvious. In other words, it more or less does what science-fiction is supposed to do, even by the terms of Brian Aldiss; and it's a thumping good read, in case I haven't made that clear.