Land of the Giants

Murray Leinster Land of the Giants (1968)
I have no particular attachment to the sixties television show, but will buy a Murray Leinster on sight if I don't already have it. Land of the Giants was an Irwin Allen production wherein a sub orbital passenger flight - specifically a ship called the Spindrift - somehow ends up on a planet very much like Earth, except that the ship and its occupants are now mere inches high. I made the Aurora model kit of the Spindrift without having seen the show when I was a kid, and the one I watched on Netflix just last year may well be the first and only episode I've seen. The show - which seemed okay of its kind, but didn't really inspire me to watch further - is a mystery at least as much as it's science-fiction, prompting the viewer towards the idea that the Spindrift has simply been miniaturised and that they're all still on Earth; but I gather that as the series progresses, it is revealed that they're not on Earth, but a planet which just happens to have developed a society very much like that of America in the sixties, on a planet where evolution has somehow produced the same species as are found on Earth, but improbably larger.

Leinster expands on what we saw on the screen, even changing a few significant details, and emphasises the basic weirdness of the premise by waving science at it. Of course, Land of the Giants piled improbability upon improbability, so Leinster's science - which is necessarily speculative - merely accentuates the general loopiness of biologically impossible human beings over seventy-foot tall, amongst other things, presenting the intriguing prospect of Land of the Giants having been a precursor to Lost, or at least a distant cousin to The Prisoner.

Leinster had already written tie-in fiction for Allen's Time Tunnel, which after all drew heavily on his earlier, unrelated novel of the same name, so he understood the form. Nevertheless, Land of the Giants reads very much as though it may as well be entirely his own material. The Gollancz SF Masterworks reprints probably won't be happening any time soon, but Leinster shouldn't be dismissed as some hack. He wrote tight, entertaining prose, liberally speckled with startling images and big ideas, or at least absorbingly weird ideas, and it's a pleasure to see him craft something truly peculiar out of a fairly generic sixties telly product without subverting anything by application of the sort of ironic revisionism upon which Alan Moore and others have based entire careers. Even when serving up what may as well be a TV dinner, Murray Leinster's work nevertheless feels like a labour of love.

Fantasy and Science Fiction 586

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy and Science Fiction 586 (2000)
Skipping two whole decades on from my previous issue, by the turn of the century Fantasy & Science Fiction has a new editor and is generally more readable - closer to the modern incarnation with which I am loosely familiar. I assume there must have been a point at which it no longer seemed practical to serialise entire soon to be published novels in the digests, and so this issue presented a much lighter, more enjoyable read, having been spared Robert Silverberg droning on about castles and fealty for a million pages. Gregory Benford comes across as a bit of a bore, and is a poor substitute for Asimov, but the rest is otherwise a major improvement. Not everything here is amazing, but neither is any of it lousy; and Brian Stableford's tale of mandrake farming in ancient Rome gets a thumbs up from me, as does Nancy Etchemendy's telling prediction of the current political climate in America; and Amy Sterling Casil's satisfyingly screwy account of George III supplying beings from outer space with mints sort of illustrates why Fantasy & Science Fiction has historically pissed over much of the competition.

Granite City Blues

Josh Peterson Granite City Blues (2019)
It took me a while to get settled with this one, if settled is really an appropriate term here. Josh Peterson writes the dense autobiographical narrative of an existence which endures despite poverty, degradation, meth, and kiddy fiddlers. It's transgressive literature if anything is transgressive literature, although I doubt Peterson - or indeed anyone with a brain - would be entirely happy with the categorisation. I have the impression that, having set up shop, Amphetamine Sulphate have become subject to all manner of unsolicited submissions from persons actively setting out to write transgressive literature, and I recall Mr. Best himself darkly muttering something about bad copies of Sotos. Anyway, Granite City Blues gets off to what initially seemed a poor start blending Peterson's somewhat forensic analysis with references to or quotations from Whitehouse, Burroughs, Sotos - your basic transgressive box ticking, then a run through of certain books or records - which Simon Morris did to better effect in his books; and it isn't that any of this is without value, or a point, or that snippets of insight don't come as part of the collage, but it feels somehow obvious - at least initially. The references are the sort of thing which, as I say, have worked for Simon Morris, possibly because Morris' narrative voice is a little more conversational with his motives better communicated. Here they are distracting, particularly embedded within such a dense monologue delivered with a cadence approaching that of a medical textbook. I was struggling, and if it's any indication of why, I found a 204 word sentence on page eighty-four.

That said, this opening section yields a fairly satisfying summary of two inspirational authors whom I assume to be respectively Peter Sotos and New Juche - neither directly identified presumably through Peterson wishing to avoid ticking boxes on the transgressive reading list which, if so, suggests that he's at least aware of the pitfalls. I've never read Sotos, so I'm not getting into that fucking argument, but for what it may be worth...

The former exudes a consistent acknowledgement of the pain of a life lived where the latter seemed to have found a natural talent at soothing it. The former has my respect more for being true to who they are (or were), rather than any boastful suppression of instinct; without which we'd lack the society from which these men allegedly transgress.

Anyway, as I say, such instances of anonymity seem to suggest a need to maintain a certain thematic purity, or at least that Peterson wasn't sat in some darkened room with just a candle and a Maurizio Bianchi album, frantically scribbling his descriptions of sexual acts previously seen only in Johnny Ryan comics, occasionally pausing to throw back his head and cackle, 'Just wait until those fools read this!' Indeed, when it comes to self-image, self-mythologisation, or any of that shite, Josh Peterson seems refreshingly lacking in ego.

There are some reading who may still be in possession of some of those trash samizdat that I self-published. I'm inviting you to piss on them. To photograph yourself or your girlfriends or your female friends or really whomever, pissing on them, so that I can clearly see both the person urinating and the target and the stream of urine.

Given this last point, I'm inclined to wonder whether the opening pages might not represent some kind of test, something to separate the wheat from the chaff; although it probably isn't anything quite so deliberate.

People act as if you actually want or choose to be whomever you are, when rather only a very small percentage of us ever accept and decide to enjoy the lack of options.

References to obscure authors, noise gigs and so on, tend to present an impression of an author speaking directly to a limited audience of personal acquaintances, maybe a circle limited to those who liked the last one on Goodreads; which is fine but makes it a frustrating, even pointless read for those of us outside the circle. However, once we're past the references to Whitehouse, the tone seems to shift towards something broader and which communicates one hell of a lot more, even if it isn't necessarily anything we're going to enjoy hearing. The sentences reduce to double figures, and Granite City Blues draws closer to the thing promised by its title as Peterson picks apart his own existence and attempts to make sense of it in moderately less clinical terms than I recall from Missing, or even from the first twenty or thirty pages of this one. He's thus far had an interesting life - in the Japanese sense of interesting - and one I'm fairly happy to read about as having occurred to someone other than me; and, as is probably obvious, adversity is nothing if not educational and so you could probably learn one hell of a lot from this book.

Peterson is almost the New Juche of shitty urban America in terms of understanding his environment and in being equipped to analyse it without arbitrary moralising; and there's even a brittle sort of poetry to his analysis. Regardless of the opening bars, this is a great book, possibly with greater to come, going by his present trajectory.

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem Solaris (1961)
I've always avoided Tarkovsky, and by association, his adaptation of Solaris. I'm sure he's a cinematic genius, but I was introduced to his work as just the sort of thing you like. This is usually the kiss of death for me, almost always amounting to it being just the sort of thing I hate because the recommendation has come from an idiot who doesn't know me anything like so well as they think they do. The second occasion of my being told that Tarkovsky was just the sort of thing I like was facilitated by [name withheld in case he happens to be reading] who expressed this idea by lecturing me at length for a full twenty minutes before I was able to interrupt, pointing out that actually I had a hunch Tarkovsky's work probably wasn't my bag at all. He droned on regardless for another twenty minutes before I was again able to get a word in edgeways, this time attempting to diffuse the increasingly uncomfortable situation with levity.

'Go on,' I quipped, 'push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me…'

He spared me a stony glance then continued his monologue. I suppose it's possible that he'd never seen The Two Ronnies, just as I'd never seen Solaris.

Anyway, no-one ever described Lem's original novel as just the sort of thing I like, never mind acknowledging its existence as an early version of Tarkovsky's film taking the form of printed words describing what would eventually appear on the screen; and I gather he was pals with Philip K. Dick by some definition, so it therefore seemed to be worth a punt. Unfortunately, according to Mark Hodder, what I have here is a fairly poor translation.

Solaris presents some wonderful ideas, particularly regarding extraterrestrial life, here imagined in such a way as to reduce most other authors to hacks busily sticking lumps of plasticine to the foreheads of underpaid extras. The afterword describes it as something in the tradition of Swift, although it reminds me more of Kafka's more understated sense of parody. Accordingly, it's a philosophical novel about our place in the universe, our ideas regarding God and so on, all of which is regrettably rendered far too mysterious for its own good by the translation, or so I assume. I mean it's readable and doesn't come across as necessarily garbled, and the imagery works fine, but this telling of Solaris is in all other respects on the wrong side of ponderous by a good couple of miles, which is most likely why my eyes kept skidding down to the foot of the page. I just couldn't keep them pinned to whatever the fuck was failing to happen in narrative terms.

This was sort of a relief in so much as that after [title withheld in case its editor happens to be reading] I thought maybe my reading glands were broken. Time to look for a better translation, I guess.

Islands in the Sky

Arthur C. Clarke Islands in the Sky (1952)
Here's another early Arthur featuring a cast of nerds, squares, Poindexters and Brainiacs who point at things and then furnish each other with detailed scientific explanations as to what those things are, and in the case of Islands in the Sky, they're mostly rockets and space stations. This one's a juvie, but is nonetheless enjoyable for all of its edumacational aspirations thanks to Clarke's clear, engrossing prose - and I would have added timeless to the description but for Islands being so firmly nailed to the early fifties that I'm sure some hipster will already have it filed under some ludicrous invented classification, ovaltinepunk or something of the sort. If you're sat there clapping your hands and squealing at the idea of ovaltinepunk as an exciting new retro-genre, please kill yourself now.

Anyway, a wholesome and duly studious young lad wins a competition on the telly, and the prize is a visit to a space station, and thus do we have a novel. Whilst Clarke is rightly praised for having forseen all sorts - not least being the communication satellite - most striking from a twenty-first century perspective is that this was written in a world without computers, and of complex calculations performed on a slide rule, and of apprenticeships undertaken once you've left school; so it's more interesting in terms of the history of futurism, which I didn't expect.

It's striking just how much Clarke failed to predict; which is thrown into sharp relief when the novel occasionally puffs itself up like Kenneth Clarke to point out that actually, this isn't one of your ghastly magazine stories, even though the lineage is earlier acknowledged in a passing reference to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space.

It wouldn't do in a Shakespeare play for all the characters to be floating around in mid-air. So the actors had to use magnetic shoes—a favourite dodge of the old science fiction writers, though this was the only time I ever found them used in reality.

Still, the whole thing is written with such enthusiasm and affection as to negate any pleasure taken in the irony of something so resolutely of the fifties seeming so pleased with its endearingly wonky predictions.

Sons and Lovers

D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
Sons and Lovers was Lawrence's third novel and first proper chart topper, with the general consensus seeming to hold that this was Dave finally getting right everything which had been wrong with The Trespasser - or if not the general consensus, then I've definitely read such a claim made somewhere or other. I'd probably say yes and no in so far as that he went on to write better - at least from what I can remember - and The Trespasser isn't anything like so poor as its reputation seems to imply.

Sons and Lovers is loosely autobiographical, being a thinly veiled account of Lawrence growing up in Eastwood, his family life, then relationships with women analogous to Jessie Chambers and Frieda Weekley - all of which is complicated by his strong emotional attachment to his mother. This aspect has meant that Sons and Lovers tends to be discussed as an Oedipal novel, but as with much of what Lawrence wrote, that which he describes is often too complex in its detail to be well suited to such labels, which is presumably part of the reason for him writing; and the suggestion of him eventually hating and resenting his overpowering matriarch really does this book a disservice, reducing everything to primary colours. Along similar lines, Lawrence's sexuality has often been subject to debate, and those who take an interest in such matters will possibly notice that, as young men go, Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers could hardly be described as priapic, but nor does he seem particularly effeminate. Sometimes glib description doesn't always work.

I'm not sure whether this was necessarily something of which Lawrence was conscious, or is simply part of a pattern I've tended to notice of late, but there's a serious gulf between language and the reality it attempts to describe, and Sons and Lovers is interesting for the reason that attempts to reduce it to descriptions of relationship dynamics inevitably end up describing something which isn't this novel. Instead, the reader is immersed in emotional and sensual currents which form the narrative without ticking boxes, naming names, or fossilising the possibilities of where the tale could go with the introduction of absolutes. This also means that the book is probably much longer than it would need to be were it a simple delivery system for the ideas it proposes, because the only way to faithfully record the relationships it describes are as currents within a much larger whole; which is why The Trespasser seems a little snappier in some respects. In other words, there are points at which it's difficult to tell whether all of the gushing will amount to anything, although this aspect is a necessary part of the experience; and for what it may be worth, that experience is ultimately intensely moving and very rewarding in ways which few writers achieve without either sentiment or villains.

Dog

Daniel Bristow-Bailey Dog (2019)
I feel vaguely privileged to know the author of this through social media, which is why I have a copy - it being a short story produced in a numbered run of one-hundred as an A5 booklet. A man orders dog from the menu of what is described as a traditional restaurant, partially because he's drunk and partially out of curiosity, and it all goes downhill from there. I'd say it reminds me a little of Will Self, but the comparison is probably just me being lazy on the grounds that were Dog to feature a robot I might invoke Isaac Asimov. I'd say it's allegorical, although what I probably mean is that, being a short story, Dog is under no obligation to obey reality - which also relates to what it's about, roughly speaking: the realities we make for ourselves when the truth is too awful to contemplate, which seems quite timely given all the shite going on in the world right now. The realities here are pretty horrible, but as always we tell ourselves it's okay, that it isn't how it looks; and yet it is. Awful truths are allowed enough of a description to work within the story without putting anyone off their lunch, so Dog is almost like the Amphetamine Sulphate title that's okay to take home and introduce to your parents, which is a compliment. Somebody out there needs to be chucking money at Daniel Bristow-Bailey and begging him to write more.