Busted Synapses

Erica L. Satifka Busted Synapses (2020)
I don't really keep any sort of finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction and don't have much of an idea of whether it genuinely exists or what it is - and obviously I'm talking about the written word here, having significantly less interest in the more corporate forms. This means that, from where I'm standing, Erica L. Satifka is either one of the best authors we have right now, or I simply haven't noticed the good stuff because the shelves at Barnes & Noble seem to be chock full of things which would really, really like to be on telly when they grow up. Stay Crazy was great, if you remember that one, and Busted Synapses may be better, or is at least as good.

Certain parts of the publicityplex have been mumbling about cyberpunk, which sort of works, but nevertheless feels to me like an appeal to persons who wear aviator goggles at fan events. True enough, here we have the notion of many tentacled corporations as inherently evil combined with something resembling virtual reality, neither of which were invented by William Gibson, and frankly this is a damn sight better than most of his body of work with the possible exception of Pattern Recognition. Busted Synapses isn't an adventure, isn't the cool new flavour, shifts no paradigm, and inhabits the regular unskilled existence of people I immediately recognise from the real world; which is nice because I'd argue that we don't need either Star Captains or plucky day-saving teenagers in 2020. Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should. The call centers, screen addiction, and human populace reduced to economic resource will be known to most of us. The rest is extrapolated from where we are right now, but not by a whole lot, and not enough to leave us cosily reflecting on how at least things aren't yet this bad because they sort of are but for the small print.

There's a chance Erica L. Satifka may eventually tire of comparisons with Philip K. Dick, because she's certainly no copyist and comparisons made with himself usually refer to something blandly cinematic from an adaptation rather than his actual novels; but Busted Synapses is inhabited by those same doomed outsiders we met on Mars fiddling about with their Perky Pat layouts in Palmer Eldritch - or possibly their relatives - and the company is just as faceless, just as lacking in basic humanity as in both Dick's oeuvre and Trump's America. Additionally, Satifka's focus is sharp and without distracting diversions down mystical or otherwise psychological side roads. My only complaint is that this focus means for a short, snappy novel where I could have stood to spend more time reading, although I suppose that's barely even a complaint.

Publishers need to start throwing money at Erica Satifka because on the strength of what I've read, what the world needs right now is more of her work, or work of equivalent quality. Popular and intelligent don't have to be mutually exclusive, and this sort of thing - which aims resolutely higher than the usual bingeworthy consumer product - makes the world a better place.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Don't Hide the Madness

 

Steven Taylor (editor) Don't Hide the Madness (2018)
...or William S. Burroughs in conversation with Allen Ginsberg as the subheading promises, which began life as an article for the Observer vaguely intended to promote Cronenberg's attempt to film Naked Lunch. The idea was that the editor would hang around with Burroughs and Ginsberg for a couple of days, recording their conversation on tape in the hope of a written piece being mined from this wealth of source material. Handily, Taylor already knew Ginsberg well, and Burroughs as a friend of Ginsberg, and there were a few others hanging around and chipping in - James Grauerholz, various friends and neighbours and so on. Don't Hide the Madness is three-hundred pages of transcript whittled down from eleven cassette tapes of the gang yacking away without any obvious attempts to steer the conversation.

Taylor claims to have edited out the really inane stuff, so we don't get to hear Ginsberg spotting an apparently discarded shoelace in the corner of the room, then pick it up to discover that it's actually string, then spend the next twenty pages talking about how it really, really, really looked like a shoelace. We do, on the other hand, get to sit in on them talking about guns, which is mystifying, being mostly a series of numbers presumably describing what type of gun someone is waving around.

Yet, as with real life, attention wanders and certain points keep swinging back around, restoring our focus; which keeps the emphasis fairly light, conveys a touching sense of moment which might have been otherwise lost, and even communicates the more intensive subjects by allowing for nuance, and which might not have been quite so engaging had it been pared down to just Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, and the stuff directly relating to Burroughs as author.

I don't remember particularly liking the Cronenberg movie on the one occasion of my seeing it - although I don't think his work is really my thing - but Burroughs' take on it, which is generally positive, is fascinating; not least because it all seems to tie into wider discussion of the ugly spirit, to which Burroughs attributes blame for his having shot his wife all those years ago. This comes up because at the time of recording, and of the release of Naked Lunch, Burroughs was looking into exorcism, and had been subject to some sort of spiritual cleansing by a local shaman. It's the kind of discussion which might inspire the rolling of eyes and general grumbling about new age bollocks under other, more formal circumstances, but here it's revealed as simply the easiest way to discuss and deal with something which otherwise resists analysis in more coldly analytical terms. The pay off, should we need it, is that Don't Hide the Madness actually explains pretty much everything you ever needed to know about Burroughs and his writing, but delivers the information as low-key conversational dialogue which communicates a hell of a lot more than the traditional lists of names, dates and places. As a particularly weird consequence, it very much separates the author from his work in revealing Burroughs as a genuinely nice guy, someone who would be fun to hang around with, or at least I thought so.

He loved his cats, so he's fine by me.

A Planet for Texans

 

H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire A Planet for Texans (1958)
I picked this one up out of curiosity for the same reason I picked up Fritz Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas - because that's where I live. Also, it was the only science-fiction novel in the bookshop of the Texas State History Museum in Austin and I vaguely remember enjoying Piper's Little Fuzzy. A Planet for Texans was originally published as half of an Ace Double and later won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, whatever that is.

The premise is something about Texans being so ornery that the entire state secedes from planet Earth, and I gather the novel strives to examine some political point along vaguely libertarian lines, something inspired by H.L. Mencken proposing a political system incorporating the occasional assassination of candidates as a legitimate part of the governmental process. At least this is what it says on Wikipedia.

Considering that I was half expecting something ghastly about a planet of rootin' tootin' racist fatties, it could have been worse; but it also could have been better. Texas here is invoked by desert, cows, barbecue, and the sort of Texans it's fairly easy to avoid, even in Texas - namely ranch dwelling shitheads with too much money; so there wasn't much I recognised from my daily existence and I've been here for a whole decade. The only problem with Little Fuzzy, so far as I recall, is that about half the book was spent in a court room. Unfortunately this time it feels like it's almost the whole thing, although maybe something different happened during the pages where I was asleep. Unless I've read it wrong, it seems to be a conversation about libertarian stuff for 126 pages, with a few mentions of cows and barbecue thrown in here and there for the sake of local colour.

A Spectre is Haunting Texas isn't without its problems, from what I remember, but it was at least a lot more fun than this.

The Hawkline Monster

 

Richard Brautigan The Hawkline Monster (1974)
This was the first Brautigan I ever read, mainly because Reuben - with whom I was sharing a house at the time - shoved it at me and said, you must read this because it's amazing. This would have been 1984, possibly the first half of '85, and while I did indeed think it was amazing, it has somehow taken me thirty-five years to follow up on its promise with others by the guy; but I think I now understand why.

The Hawkline Monster bills itself as a gothic western, although as with Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, it borders on science-fiction, or at least hangs out in the same part of town. Its cast comprises fairly typical Brautigan types, freewheeling and easily distracted as they deal with something which is probably almost magic realism with the inevitable interludes for shagging. The monster of the title is an accumulation of powerful and sentient light living in the basement, which comes with its own similarly sentient but long-suffering shadow. As often seems to be the case with Brautigan, the symbolism is positively pregnant with possibilities which the author leaves pretty much to the reader, not least of these being some slightly screwy parallel with the Biblical creation myth in which God says, let there be light, and so there is and the light brings shadow into being - which would probably be the devil; although this light is a complete cunt while its shadow seems to be a fairly sympathetic character. For what it's worth, as a reformed Who obsessive, I also couldn't help but notice some fairly solid parallels with Marc Platt's Ghostlight, although I've no idea if Brautigan served as inspiration. Along vaguely related lines, The Hawkline Monster might also be considered one of those novels which foreshadows the whole Faction Paradox thing without too much squinting.

It's a genuinely wonderful book - tight, witty, and truly peculiar without feeling the need to pull funny faces - and is in all sense a masterpiece; except for some reason it doesn't feel anything like so personal as a few of his other works. It's unmistakably Brautigan but it feels as though the conversation he's having is with himself more than the reader. This is an observation rather than a criticism, but I guess it at least explains my thirty-five year gap as much as anything does.

Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids

 

John Wagner, Alan Grant & Ian Gibson
Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids (1982)
While Verdus seemed like an essential purchase, this collects material which I vaguely remembered reading as a kid, and there it was in the store next to the first volume so it seemed worth a punt. Day of the Droids didn't make quite such an impression on me first time round, and I can see why. It does a job and it has its moments, but it reads somewhat like an attempt to repeat the formula - our man Sam on a one-man mission to put down an entire robot revolution, albeit this time back home on Earth. The sheer absurdity which made Verdus work is still in evidence, but here it feels a little as though Wagner was scrabbling around for things to send up. The cheery stupidity of Hoagy, Sam's assistant, is sufficiently chucklesome, but the robot version of Woody Allen's version of the Mafia feels a bit of a stretch, or at least it did to me and still does. As a whole, Day of the Droids is entertaining as fuck, yet falls some way short of the surrealist riot which was Verdus. I don't quite follow why anyone would have built pinstriped robot hoodlums, and Ian Gibson had apparently reached the point by which he couldn't be arsed to make them look even vaguely mechanical so we may as well be looking at extras from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Also we have Carlos Sanchez Stogie, a robot cigar created because IPC had adopted an anti-smoking policy, so Wagner came up with a robotic alternative to Sam's usual cigar based - it says here - on Carlos Ezquerra. Although Stogie is a lot of fun and it could be argued that Wagner here predicted e-cigarettes, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Ezquerra. I never met the man but I'm sure there was more to him than pronounceeng everytheeng like thees with occasional references to tacos.

I've seen it suggested that Alan Grant's run on Robo-Hunter was where it all went downhill, and yet his Beast of Blackheart Manor - the second strip in the collection - avoids the pitfalls of Droids for all that it's more or less Scooby Doo with robots. Grant actually manages to do something slightly different with Sam Slade and Gibson's art is clean, tight, and more dramatic. It's hard not to wonder whether somebody complained about Day of the Droids' gradual slide into sketchy panels full of wavy lines resembling a sort of amalgamation of Monet and Carl Barks.

Beyond this I have no coherent recollection of later Robo-Hunter strips beyond something headachey drawn by that bloke who drew everyone as massive pairs of eyes surrounded by cross-hatching, so if it was Alan Grant's fault, Blackheart Manor thankfully wasn't necessarily any indication of what was to come.

More "Things"

 

Ivan T. Sanderson More "Things" (1969)
This is the follow up to Sanderson's "Things", incredible though that may seem, which I haven't read and am now unlikely to read, having read this one. Sanderson's name stood out from the shelves in the book store because I've noticed him mentioned in a few other cranky paranormal tracts as some sort of authority, which seemingly translates to overwritten prose and the founding of various clubs and societies catering to the interests of those who wouldst know the truth of that which conventional science has been unable or unwilling to explain. As a rule I'm sympathetic towards this sort of thing because it's entertaining, depending on the writer, and very occasionally it makes you think dunnit?

Some of that which Sanderson reports is fairly interesting because just maybe there's something in it, and he writes well up to a point, beyond which he unfortunately invokes a retired colonel droning on at the fireside, endlessly amused by his own testimony. He knows doctors, dentists, professional people, so these accounts of African dinosaurs, sasquatch, and persons who live under the sea must be considered serious business, presumably unlike the same accounts when delivered by nutters and airy-fairy types.

This is all well and good until one notices the considered pondering attended upon Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin's 1967 encounter with bigfoot, as captured on a minute or so of film which probably everyone in the world has seen by this point. The two sides of the argument are clearly presented and evidence weighed, leading to conclude that it's probably real because we can't absolutely confirm that it's some guy in a suit, particularly as more recent testimony from the guy who was commissioned to make the suit and from the one who got to wear it in the film might be just some stuff they made up for a laugh. Having recently re-watched the footage, it looks a lot like a guy in a suit to me. In fact, if you remember the episode of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge where a disgruntled Alan walks back and forth across a stage to demonstrate a dignified gait to Rebecca Front's amusing impersonation of Vivienne Westwood, well that's how the Patterson-Gimlin sasquatch walks.

In the wake of this, it becomes difficult to take the rest of the book seriously, and Sanderson's blowhard persona becomes increasingly aggravating regardless of how many doctors and dentists he's had the pleasure of knowing as personal friends, and no matter how often he attempts to distance himself from the crackpots like some Fortean equivalent of Uncle Tom. Brad Steiger, for one example, would probably count as a crackpot on the Sanderson scale, not least because he writes in pulpier and more populist spirit, and if Steiger's books cheerfully encompass absolutely anything and everything weird regardless of how potty the source, they make for a better, even more thought provoking read where Steiger's angle is usually an amiable and free-wheeling what the fuck? - as distinct from stuff which is probably bullshit bolstered up on a blustering display of authority.