Four Circles

Meg McCarville Four Circles (2019)
I assume these would be four circles of hell, or thereabouts. This is the first Amphetamine Sulphate title to be issued with the warning that some of the content may upset readers of a nervous disposition. It didn't particularly upset me but then maybe it wouldn't being as I've only ever had consensual sex, and that's a bit of an unfortunately grey area within these pages. I was bothered by something which happened to a cat, not least because this is the third book in a row to go there - excepting the recent Niven and Pournelle yawnfest - but Meg was clearly unhappy about the occurrence, so at least we're on the same team. Otherwise, it's a ninety page dirty bomb of terrible sex, grinding poverty, disease, meth, crack, sweat, and arseholes detonating over and over right into your face like a sort of explosive diarrhoea singularity, and I don't get the impression she made any of it up, because had she done it probably wouldn't have been quite so relentless. Some of it may upset you, or it will hopefully upset you and thus serve as an indication that regardless of whatever else you may have going on, you're approximately sane; but as for trigger warnings, what little I've read of de Sade was worse, and somewhere there will be someone who was once traumatised in such a way that digestive biscuits now send them into a psychological tailspin.

Meg McCarville gets through this nightmare whilst somehow managing to retain a sense of humour and providing the rest of us with one hell of an education. Weirdly, it reminds me of nothing so much as a real life Johnny Ryan cartoon. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but given that she's written it all down, I'm glad that it's been published.

I knew there was a reason why I've never been drawn to crystal meth, and Meg McCarville articulates it quite well.

The Mote in God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
This may have been the most boring novel I've ever attempted to read. It's less hateful than Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but that's hardly a recommendation. I'd promised myself no more Niven because whilst he has some great ideas, they are often the only thing going for an otherwise irritating novel; but Pournelle seemed kind of interesting when I read about him in Charles Platt's second Dream Makers book the other month, and I suppose I must have wondered about the title at some point.

I started, then eventually decided I couldn't read another word at around page three-hundred. The next two things I tried reading both featured cats being killed - albeit accidentally in the case of Sid Vicious - which depressed me, inspiring a return to Mote on the grounds of feline destruction being one sin it seemed unlikely to commit; but after another couple of days with less than a hundred pages to go, I realised that it really was as dull as it had appeared during the previous sitting.

The story is set against a backdrop of humanity as a well-established galaxy spanning empire which encounters alien life for the first time and is thus obliged to have a bit of a rethink; and somehow they found a way to make it about as interesting as a sales report.

Niven's weird alien civilisation is kind of engaging up to the point at which it started to remind me of the cantina in Star Wars or something written by Douglas Adams, as always seems to happen; and no - I don't actually care whether or not he got there first and should thus be hailed as the father of smirking aliens who crack knob gags. The rest is your basic military science-fiction bearing a suspicious resemblance to sixties Star Trek:

'Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?'

'Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we've hydrogen to spare.'

Unless I imagined it, the great majority of the text seems to be taken up with important space navy types holding ponderous conversations about how such and such an alien discovery is likely to influence the political economy of such and such a colony world. This is savoured with military protocol and ensigns screaming sir, yes, sir. It gives the impression of an author enamoured with his own martial testimony, imagining that a military background has furnished him with an experience so much richer than the rest of us could begin to imagine, and now he's going to afford us a glimpse of the magic by describing nervous young recruits summoned to the offices of grizzled old warhorses covered in medals. What heady days those were!

Additionally, it's not particularly well written and every other page seems to throw in some element that doesn't make sense.

'We'll have to go through it,' Whitbread's Motie said. She twittered to Charlie for a moment. 'There are alarms and there'll be warriors on guard.'

'Can we go over it?'

'You'd pass through an x-ray laser, Horst.'

'God's teeth. What are they so afraid of?'

I've read that passage seven or eight times, and I still don't understand why Horst would pass through an x-ray laser. I can't tell whether it's a prediction or a facetious comment which says something or other about Horst, most likely suggesting that he lacks a due sense of caution, but even with this potentially being the case, the phrasing doesn't quite work; and there are similar weird semantic hiccups throughout.

While we're here, there's one human woman in the entire book, who is naturally married off to some military dude at the end. The sexism wouldn't ordinarily bother me, except it's clearly symptomatic of a wider problem. Stephen Baxter and even Peter F. Hamilton did this sort of thing so much better.

So yes, well done, lads - you've knocked Heinlein right off his throne with this one.

The Crossing Line

Fabian Nicieza etc. The Crossing Line (1990)
'Back on the Shakespeare, I see,' observed my wife as I lay in bed reading my sad little mylar bagged stack of Avengers comics. I didn't blush because there didn't seem to be much point. I freely admit that I bought the six issues of The Crossing Line because I was rifling through the used comic book racks at Half-Price when I noticed one of these with guest starring Alpha Flight proclaimed on the cover.

'Ooh Alpha Flight!' squealed the little voice within, and they had four of the six issues there in the racks which seemed nice and tidy, and for just a dollar a pop, and it was easy enough to find the other two online, and why the fuck not? In any case, half of my facebook friends list - admittedly the half I've unfollowed so that I don't have to read their characteristically inane reportage on cosplay, Funko Pops, or watching four thousand episodes of Charmed in a single sitting - are either Harry Potter fans, grown men presently engaged with a Puffin Books reading marathon, or people who are actually able to discuss what Steven Moffat was trying to say in such and such a terminally shite Who episode, so fuck you!

Anyway, I've been trying to read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Jesus Christ it's boring. It hasn't quite reached Heinlein standards of loathsome which is why I'm still dutifully ploughing through page after page of space opera tedium, but I needed a break, and this seemed sufficiently unlike The Mote in God's Eye as to serve as a palate cleanser. Being a kid's superhero comic from the nineties, it quite naturally takes itself far too seriously, but no more so than Mote's wearying starship commanders responding to security breaches and other important sounding military shit.

The Crossing Line is a story of terrorists hijacking a British nuclear submarine, and how the mighty Avengers rush to the scene to save the day only to find themselves embroiled in a massive clusterfuck with Canadian and Russian superhero teams who had the same idea, just as the forces of Atlantis once again decide to wage war on the surface dwellers. There are probably about five persons with speaking roles in the entire story who don't have super-powers, or who haven't acquired super-powers by the last issue, so it's like that Simpsons comic in which the power plant blows up, irradiating the entire town of Springfield, transforming everyone into superheroes. It's deeply fucking ludicrous, but is a lot more fun than A Mote in God's Eye, and the fact of almost every single character being able to fly or to shoot beams from their hands roughly shuffles the story closer to science-fiction than most caped material; and besides, describing this as deeply fucking ludicrous implies that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't.

By my understanding, the appeal of eighties Marvel lay in its being a huge shared universe viewed only one small piece at a time through reading the comics and trying to work out who was who, what they could do, and what the hell was going on; so storytelling aside, it appealed to anyone who liked to collect sets of things as a kid, anyone who ever decided that their Shogun Warrior model kits could inhabit the same continuity as Micronauts action figures. That's how this stuff first drew me in, and how it still works up to a point. I'm older and wiser, but it's still kind of interesting trying to work out who the fuck these other Avengers were supposed to be, given that I don't even remember them from back in the day and otherwise recognise only Captain America and the Vision.

Whilst Fabian Nicieza has written some ropey stuff in his time, he always had something interesting going on, and was distinguished amongst the Marvel script droids of his era as someone with a distinctive style, even with themes common to his writing - specifically a pronounced tendency to draw from the real world politics of the time in ways which seem quite perceptive once you get past the people in costumes cracking jokes whilst fighting. This also means that we get to see not only George W. Bush in a nineties Marvel comic, but even the Thatch!

The Crossing Line is, as I guess we have probably established, ridiculous, although it differs only from more recent Grant Morrison efforts in method rather than substance, but it doesn't matter. It does everything it sets out to do and held my attention for a couple of hours without inducing either depression or embarrassment. I doubt anyone will ever collect this material as a graphic novel, but maybe it's fine as a stack of six comic books.

Weapon X

Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X (1991)
I missed this one first time around, having given up on Marvel a few months earlier from what I can recall - probably a good thing as Weapon X, had I seen it, might have sucked me right back in, it being the absolute opposite of all that Liefeld inspired crap which was dragging the medium down into a grimacing slurry of katana swords and improbably massive tits. Weapon X is exactly the sort of thing which first got me hooked on all those caped books.

For those who've been living in a monastery since 1974, Wolverine is a character rather than a superhero, a violent feral mutant with the ability to recover from almost any injury no matter how disgusting. It's surprisingly difficult to trace his lineage back to Superman or any of his sunny pals, and Wikipedia points out that Wolverine is one of a certain superhero archetype which seems to have emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Since he first appeared in an issue of the Incredible Hulk, Marvel had kept the origin of the character vague and mysterious, occasionally hinting at his being the reluctant fruit of some dubious military experiment, and for a while there was a lot of mileage in all of this muttering and whispering. Of course, what with Marvel being Marvel and the whole deal with how you won't believe your fucking eyes as we finally reveal the pulse pounding secret origin of whoever inherited amazing powers from an ancient sorcerer this week, the mystery wasn't to last; and by now, had I been paying attention, I probably would have known what brand of underpants Wolverine was wearing when they squirrelled him off to that secret laboratory. Anyway, back to 1991 when we still didn't really know…

Barry Windsor-Smith, writes, draws, and doesn't give a whole lot away, telling this story in generally impressionistic style with hints requiring the reader to join the dots - snatches of dialogue combined with images from other parts of the story as a sort of narrative collage, no thinky bubbles, no one explaining what they're doing for the sake of an easy ride. Weapon X is disorientating, brutal, and beautiful, one of the most elegant looking comic books I've seen and at least of a standard equivalent to the work of Jean Giraud. The disorientation serves the atmosphere of the tale rather than obscuring the sequence of its events, which are in any case loosely familiar from Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and even Jurassic Park, I suppose. The end result makes even the more commonly praised examples of the medium seem clunky and childish, and yes, even Watchmen and its like.

Weapon X was originally serialised in Marvel Comics Presents, a biweekly anthology which I vaguely recall as having been otherwise somewhat ropey; which is indicative of what I loved about Marvel at the end of the eighties, specifically the sheer variety of ideas and quality without anyone feeling the need to slap a warning on the cover reading grown-ups only, no kids allowed! As the comic book became a teenager, wearing long trousers, listening to Gentle Giant albums and trying really hard to enjoy them, Marvel - at least for a while - was just getting on with doing what it had always done to the best of its abilities. Too bad it all went tits up.

My Amazing Adventures with the Sex Pistols

Dave Goodman My Amazing Adventures with the Sex Pistols (2006)
As may be obvious from the title, this is written in a conversational tone by someone for whom writing books doesn't come naturally, so it reads a little like a footballer's autobiography - no actual descriptions of how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend, Joe Pasquale, but we're skating pretty close; and yet in spite of this, Goodman's book threatens to be the best thing ever written about the Pistols for most of its page count - keeping in mind that I'm yet to read Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, and it's been at least a decade since I read anything by Rotten or the Vermorels. Dave Goodman was the Pistols' sound engineer, arguably their first producer, and a staple of their entourage in the early days. Amazing Adventures therefore differs from a great many of the other books - fixated as they seem to be with pound shop Situationism and layers of irony attributed to something which was actually pretty straightforward - in being an account of gigging with the Pistols before anyone had heard of them, back when it was still fun. As such, it dispels most of the mythology, not least the one about them being unable to play, and constitutes an amiable, even heart warming ramble through a much misrepresented period of rock history and even MacLaren comes out of it quite well.

If you've been in a band of even vaguely punky disposition, and if you've recorded in a London studio, you will almost certainly recognise Dave Goodman as one of an archetype. I've known at least two Daves, former hippies more through a love of booze and space fags than ideology, always a bit older than anyone in the band, working class and very, very funny. In my limited experience, the best thing about going into the studio is usually the engineer.

All the same, this isn't to say the engineer should necessarily consider writing his memoirs, hilarious though those tales may be. Goodman comes across as a likeable bloke, but one with a slightly inflated understanding of his own importance, and clearly one who has gone beyond the veil when it comes to the consumption of recreational substances - gone beyond the veil and decided to live there judging by the final ten or so pages. Somewhere near the end we begin a page with something or other about the legal arguments surrounding The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, then finish the next one reading about Tony Blair and George W. Bush conspiring to suppress the release of Dave's Wedding Day single, fearing that the knowledge it reveals will bring western capitalism crashing down around their ears - just as soon as the kids hear the song and decide they've had enough. Wedding Day is described as Anarchy in the UK re-recorded with new lyrics written by Goodman. I had a look on Discogs, but they don't seem to have any copies, or even to acknowledge its ever having existed. It's a shame the book ends as it does, but is probably consistent with this being the same guy who made those pointless Ex Pistols records.

So I went from recognising the type from studio engineers I've known, to feeling as though I've actually been in a band with this guy, which is a bit tiresome given a couple of the nutcases for whom I've squozen an accordion over the years.

Sea of Love

Simon Morris Sea of Love (2019)
As lead singer of the Ceramic Hobs, I'm very happy to report that adventures and escapades are part of my daily routine, and I just had to write and tell your readers what happened to me the other day. We had just played a pop concert, and I was heading to the dressing room in happy anticipation of the usual entourage of leggy lovelies who follow us up and down the country. I opened the door, and imagine my surprise when…

Relax.

I'm joking, although I suppose that's how it will read to someone, somewhere. Whilst repeating certain themes - not least being the shagging - Sea of Love marks the continuing development of Simon Morris's writing. I wouldn't say there's necessarily more structure here, but the flow is more organic, more confident, and with less of the weird sticky out bits. He's always had plenty to say and he's getting better at saying it with each new title, to the point that this one approaches mainstream writing, although keeping in mind here that by mainstream I'm not really talking Da Vinci Code. We still have the incongruous listing of product as a springboard for memory, but at a reduced level of focus. My understanding of the work of Guns N' Roses was increased quite considerably by Civil War, whereas I'm still pretty much in the dark about the novels of James Herbert after reading this, which I mention so as to indicate shifting emphasis rather than as a criticism.

Sea of Love deals with relationships and is, again, loosely autobiographical. Vaguely knowing Simon, I think I know a few of the names tactfully omitted, although the knowledge doesn't make much difference to my understanding, such as it is, because this isn't Confessions of a Ceramic Hob.

My guess, or at least what I take from this book, is that it's about memory. The novels of James Herbert spark memories of youth and, by association, formative sexual fumblings, the sort of details which still blaze in the memory for having been recorded in such primary colours; and the history is echoed in the present day to the point of the past and present becoming the same thing, sort of. Once beyond a certain age, our early years come to resemble a foreign country and so require a more intense form of scrutiny through having sunk below the background noise of daily existence; and in being subjected to a much harder form of recall, they inhabit the present.

At least that's what I think is happening here, along with Morris's efforts to make something useful from the process.

Some children, maybe not all of us but many, do experience very strong and intense sexual feelings during childhood and one thing I cannot stand is any interference in this from adults. It is for children of a roughly similar age only. Attempted interference with it by generation after generation of bullying adult puritans on one side and the fucking paedophiles on the other. If we can even remember it properly it's almost impossible to talk about rationally. The memories come back and we push them away. 'My dreams are low and sick and must be addressed: they're a young girl's dreams.'

Despite elements which might preclude Sea of Love from publication as an extended letter to Fiesta, never mind anything with a gentle pink cover, the tone of the book is profoundly compassionate, much as it is with a good few of the other Amphetamine Sulphate books; which is something I'm not sure anyone could have predicted this time two or three years ago. This imprint has transcended the horror and novelty we might have anticipated and is becoming something quite vital, and something which at least suggests the history of literature is far from over; and Simon Morris's books - admittedly possibly by virtue of numbers as much as anything - seem to exemplify this most. His progression has been such that I can hardly wait to see where he ends up next.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 345

Edward L. Ferman (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 345 (1980)
Freed from the tyranny of the to be read pile, I find myself at liberty to scour my shelves for anything which escaped the net first time around, titles I may have owned for a while without actually noticing my failure to have read them. This is one of a dozen or so issues of the digest magazines - a category also including issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories - mostly excavated from the crappiest of thrift stores out of a sense of pity in the belief that, being magazines rather than books in the normal sense, their existence is on a more ephemeral footing, thus requiring that I rescue them. Of course, being arguably more ephemeral than your regular book store novels, such magazines seem to present an elevated possibility of weird obsurities by persons who only had one decent story in them, or whose work never made it into an anthology. On occasion I've bought these magazines from news stands as they were published - mainly just for the sake of poking a thermometer up science fiction's bottom in order to assess its health at time of purchase - but I've never been a regular subscriber, because I've always had too much waiting to be read as it is without asking for extra homework.

Anyway, here we are. In February 1980, I was a regular reader of the Star Wars and Doctor Who comics, plus 2000AD, and Tornado; I bought Sham 69's Hersham Boys album and was thinking about buying Never Mind the Bollocks; and I received a Valentine's Day card from the girl I fancied at school, which turned out to have been sent by her friends in jest, prompting me towards a period of bitter introspection. Fantasy & Science Fiction was a long, long way off my radar.

This is probably the most underwhelming issue of the magazine I've encountered, although to be fair, it has been a nevertheless pleasurable delve even if the rewards aren't what I had hoped they might be. Most of the book is taken up with the final quarter of Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, published in instalments for some reason, which is readable but dull as fuck. I've read Silverberg before, and if not consistently amazing, he wrote well when it suited him. Lord Valentine's Castle is possibly symptomatic of the late seventies upsurge in fantasy fiction, the stuff against which Gibson's Neuromancer was supposedly a reaction just as the Damned had been a reaction against Pink Floyd, should you subscribe to that reductionist and not entirely workable theory. To me it reads like Silverberg going to see Star Wars, noticing the success of Frank Herbert's Dune, then deciding he wants in on the action.

Unfortunately I am no more able to read fantasy than I am able to attend renaissance fairs dressed as a fucking minstrel. As soon as I read a sentence suffixed with my Lord, my brain shuts itself down. For this reason I managed only three pages of Tanith Lee's Cyrion in Bronze - also in the issue - then gave up. I made it through Silverberg's contribution, but without much enthusiasm. I have a theory that fantasy is mostly written by and for dunces. They lack the skill to describe the existing world with any sort of insight, and, lacking imagination, are only able to compose using a well established cast of characters and ideas already found within the public domain - elves, wizards, castles, magic by which plot can be moved forward without the need of complicated explanation, vampires, imps, plucky young farmhands, and so on and so forth. Successful fantasy, what little of it there may be, is either exceptionally well written or else does something unexpected with its staples - which I suppose leaves us with Simak, Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, and maybe a couple of others. Lord Valentine's Castle, like much of the genre, may as well be a novelisation of the drama imagined by small boys playing with action figures, my Lord.

Jack Massa's The Daydream Enhancer and Robert Grossbach's All Things Come to Those Who Weight are okay, at least short and sweet; and Fud Smee by Connor Cochran - writing as Freff - is mostly great but for an underwhelming conclusion. Cochran is better known as an illustrator, but Fud Smee seems like the best thing in here by some way, so it's a shame he didn't write more, or at least have more published.

Actually, the best thing in here is probably Asimov's The Finger of God, an essay on why Hitler lost and why the US bombed Japan even though the war was pretty much over. Asimov's writing is well suited to this sort of analysis, and this essay capably illustrates why he enjoyed such a stellar reputation. I only wish I liked his science fiction novels as much beyond the one or two which were exceptional.

The rest of the magazine comprises reviews, notably by Joanna Russ who made her name with The Female Man, which I still haven't read. Her reviews are insightful if a little dense, and she clearly had no fear of naming names when some beloved science fiction sacred cow curled off a stinker, doubtless accounting for the small ad in the rear of the magazine campaigning for her removal from its pages. I expect she opined something harsh but fair about Heinlein. That said, her better reviews don't inspire me to rush out and buy anything any more than Baird Searles' amusingly withering review of Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time has me looking for the DVD on Amazon.

I've read better issues of this magazine, but this was still interesting and has left me well disposed towards Joanna Russ on the grounds that she was probably doing something right in annoying the mysterious TDC of Glen Burnie, Maryland.