Zanthar of the Many Worlds

Robert Moore Williams Zanthar of the Many Worlds (1967)
To continue thematically from yesterday, as with and the Daemons, Zanthar likewise builds upon the ancient astronaut thing while being subject to a puzzling reception on Goodreads. The latter is represented by a consensus view of Zanthar as an Edgar Rice Burroughs knock off, specifically John Carter of Mars, except it isn't anything like as amazing as Edgar Rice Burroughs because, you know, how could it be? The ancient astronaut aspect is, for what it may be worth, more like an outgrowth of Williams' seemingly singular worldview.

As a follower of Merritt - more so than he was of the aforementioned chortling Klan apologist - it shouldn't be too surprising that Williams whisks a brilliant two-fisted theoretical physicist off to an alien world in order to liberate strange beings from their despotic masters. More surprising is how much this one lurches so wildly from the alleged formula, and that Edgar's barmy army should have failed to notice the difference. Robert Moore Williams suffered from schizophrenic episodes and was subject to visions and voices, possibly not so much as to impair his ability to function from one day to the next, but it granted him a certain perspective and one which is vividly expressed in his otherwise notionally mainstream writing. Zanthar returns to certain themes and tropes characteristic of the author and his psychological landscape - the spy rays, the telepathy, a universe ordered according to a sort of theosophical hierarchy - in this case a demonic underworld of endless layers, and a universal force which pervades and affects all. If it's Jon Carter, then it's very much a psychedelic take on the same and can occasionally be as disorientating as you might expect of an idealistic older pulp writer who'd been hanging around with flower children.

Though each knew that physics had begun to lose its walls and barriers of all kinds that had existed for the world of materialistic physics had begun to go down, neither was prepared to face the reality that lay back of this hypothesis. As the great ship flew silently at enormous speed over the Pacific Ocean, each discovered within himself the truly enormous gulf existing between intellectual understanding of the universe and the actual experience of it. They were like hipsters who had read all the books on LSD, only to discover on the first trip that the books hadn't told the whole story.

See? Exactly like Edgar Rice Burroughs!

I'm being sarcastic.

Robert Moore Williams seemingly hammered out a million of these things, and they don't always make for a particularly smooth read where hastily constructed prose does its best to shoehorn pseudo-philosophical revelations into something wherein a man goes around hitting his enemies with a copper hammer; and the orientalism is a bit odd in this one, but - quite frankly - it pisses all over anything written by the genius who came up with Tarzan, and may even be one of the more coherent and engaging representatives of Williams' thoroughly weird body of work.

Doctor Who and the Daemons

 

Barry Letts Doctor Who and the Daemons (1974)
Just to get the cloying stench of nostalgia out of the way, specifically the increasingly widespread notion of the quality of a work being equivalent to whether one is able to remember it from childhood, I was nuts for Who when I was a kid and The Daemons, first broadcast in 1971, constitutes my absolute earliest memory of the show. I would have been five. My memory is specifically of being terrified as I watched Jon Pertwee menaced by Bok, a living stone gargoyle, in a subterranean burial chamber. Somehow attendant to this memory is that of me informing my mother that it would be okay for me to watch Doctor Who from that point on because it no longer scared me as it had once done - which I vaguely recall as having been a cause for concern.

I became a regular and obsessive viewer from that point on. I bought the Radio Times special in 1973 and what little mind I had then developed was blown by the realisation of there having been both doctors and stories prior to Jon Pertwee. It never occurred to me that I might ever get to see, or at least experience, any of them because television was an ephemeral medium and I'd missed the boat. Naturally I went wild for the Target novelisations when they started to show up on the shelves of my local WHSmith. There were just five of them - three from the Hartnell era and two Pertwees. I wasn't much of a reader but I bought and read them all, assuming that would probably be the lot.

Then another five came out, and because I'd sent my stamped addressed envelope and coupon off to Target Books, I was forewarned and excited almost to the point of exploding. If they could just keep novelising the stories I'd missed due to either being too young or not actually having been born, I could die happy.

I expect persons of similar vintage will have recognised at least some of this, and a few of them give Doctor Who and the Daemons five stars on Goodreads. Five stars is the rating you give a book on Goodreads if your reaction is that it was amazing. I assume five stars also covers reactions as diverse as I can remember this from my childhood and I see it has a Doctor Who logo on the cover, thus illustrating the general worthlessness of the system.

The Daemons, which is also one of the first Who serials I ever saw on VHS, was inspired by Barry Letts reading Dennis Wheatley and Robert Sloman concluding that Erich von Däniken had proved that there were spacemen on Earth before we arrived, which he really hadn't. The thing we saw on the telly additionally betrays significant influences from John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos, Quatermass, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End at a bit of a stretch, and all that folk horror which was doing the rounds in the early seventies. It was a lot of fun and nearly caused me to shit myself when I was five.

The novelisation was great when I was a kid who hadn't actually read much of anything, but is underwhelming now that I'm in my fifties - which I state as a fully grown man who is nevertheless still able to take pleasure from seventies Defenders comics. It's not badly written. Letts makes some efforts to flesh things out a little, presenting more than we actually saw on the screen, but the bottom line is that it remains a two-hundred page blow by blow account of what we would have seen had we been sat in front of the telly back in June, 1971. There's a lot of running around while people get tied up and held captive in wooden trunks, which simply fails to hold the attention as prose, meaning the infodumps are more interesting than anything done with that info in the course of the story. It's readable, even now that I'm old and fat, but it really isn't amazing. Sorry.

Sympathy for the Devil

 

Daniel Bristow-Bailey Sympathy for the Devil (2020)
I'm still sort of waiting for Daniel Bristow-Bailey to return to the written word, given the promise of 2016's The Ruins, but I'm not inclined to complain about his subsequent focus on comic strips, of which this is the latest, because his ability with a crayon is, so it turns out, comparable to his ability with a keyboard. So comparable, in fact, that it seems almost unfair. There must be something he can't do, surely.

Sympathy for the Devil is approximately the book of Genesis retold as Mike Judge's Office Space. If it's not clear what I mean by that, we open with a celestial board meeting wherein Lucifer suggests dinosaurs be repurposed as something he's decided to call birds, while Michael - clearly one of God's golden boys - poo-poos the idea, pointing out that they'll only shit everywhere, which hardly seems like the sort of thing anyone is likely to want in the proposed earthly paradise. You may already know what happens next, but the telling is something new, beautifully paced, and with Bristow-Baileys' illustration looking better than ever - combining the weight and depth of Jean Giraud with the looser, more expressive quality of maybe Edward Ardizzone. Sympathy is genuinely one of the best looking independent comics I think I've seen, possibly ever.

Buy it here, my child.

Dr. Mukti

Will Self Dr. Mukti (2004)
By this point there seems to be only a few by Will Self which I'm still to read, and - at risk of being repetitive - I still don't get the general thrust of the hostility regarding his works. I appreciate that we don't like grammar school boys unless they pretend to have been born within sonic proximity of Bow bells, and I appreciate how we might not like too many long words; but a rock casually lobbed at internet commentary upon Self's writing will almost certainly strike something so thoroughly indignant as to border on character assassination. I don't know if there's any other writer - at least among those with demonstrable ability to string a sentence together - who consistently inspires such bile on the grounds of somehow being the darling of the critics despite that none of the critics seem to have a good word to say about him. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. A quick rummage around for second or third opinions on this one suggested that at least two of the short stories collected herein were actually random assemblages of long words pulled from an inverted top hat. While it might be said that Conversations with Ord twists and turns a little too much for its own good, if you're genuinely unable to tell it apart from Marinetti's parole in libertà then you probably need an MRI scan.

Anyway, Dr. Mukti is a novella with bonus features more than a short story collection in the sense of The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The title track, which takes up half of the full page count, revisits the familiar psychiatric territory of Self's grotesque pop psychologist, Dr. Zac Busner as he engages in territorial pissings with a colleague, each combatant referring a series of increasingly bizarre patients to the other - more or less brinkmanship with nutters. It's funny and deeply appalling and may even be among Self's best in certain respects, and while it's undoubtedly a freak show, anthropological detachment doesn't come into it - unless you're really looking for it in furtherance of a sneering point, I suppose. I believe the author has had some experience with mental health services, and even his most scatologically debased mutants are granted some dignity while his view - or at least that of Dr. Mukti - seems to be that mental illness can be as much a product of environment as anything.

People as products of their environment seems to be the dominant theme here, although it has preoccupied Self elsewhere. Of the other stories, 161 is probably the strongest, and may actually be the best thing here. It inhabits one of those doomed London tower blocks from the turn of the century, home to a handful of rotting pensioners soon to be rudely gouged from their dwellings in the name of urban renewal. As with Dr. Mukti, an environment and culture is captured in painfully vivid terms of its decay with the sort of clarity which Self's critics presumably consider a cheap holiday in someone else's misery, therefore nyer nyer nyer; but I don't know. I'm actually very familiar with the territory - or was as of a couple of decades ago - and Self gets it spot on so far as I can see, regardless of anyone feeling duty bound to experience offence on the behalf of a working class they don't actually know so well as they might like to think.

As collections go, it's not pretty but it's certainly compelling. Two of the stories were a little messy, I thought, but they don't take up much space and the good stuff is genuinely terrific.

Rhialto the Marvellous

Jack Vance Rhialto the Marvellous (1985)
This one is part of the Dying Earth series, as it's called, which I picked up purely because Matthew Hughes cited it as a significant influence on his Raffalon stories - which I can see now that I know what to look for. I tend to avoid anything involving wizards as a general rule, but as with Hughes' writing, this is clearly something else. More than anything it reminds me of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in being set in the improbably distant future amongst a community of peculiarly eccentric beings with strange powers. That being said, it's quite different to Dancers while being similarly distinguished as betraying no tangible influence from Tolkien or any of the usual pointy-hatted suspects.

What actually seems to distinguish Vance from everybody else - at least everybody else that I've read - is the language, ornate, luxuriant, decadent and never afraid to use an archaic term if it suits the sentence, or even to just make something up. With that which is described being at least as strange and ornate as the composition of its description, Rhialto is a delight to read, resembling surrealist fiction as much as fantasy, conjuring images as much resembling traditional Japanese art as Heironymous Bosch as Yellow Submarine; and it's nothing if not witty.

A big-bellied old man with grey wattles sidled a few steps forward. He spoke in a wheedling nasal voice: 'Must your disgust be so blatant? True: we are anthropophages. True: we put strangers to succulent use. Is this truly good cause for hostility? The world is as it is and each of us must hope in some fashion to be of service to his fellows, even if only in the form of a soup.'

The only downside here is arguably that the language is such as to require the reader's full and undivided attention, because it can be otherwise quite easy to lose one's footing and slip, mid-narrative, and a little of Vance's prose goes a long way. Then again, if that seems like it might be a problem, you should probably stick to Terry Brooks or one of those guys.

Highwood

Neal Barrett, Jr. Highwood (1972)
Internet research has revealed to me that Neal Barrett, Jr. had a reasonably respectable career as a writer following this early effort and - of more direct interest to me - was born in San Antonio; so I was well disposed towards this as I turned to the first page, or at least curious or hopeful or something. It came stuck to Barrington Bayley's arse as part of an Ace Double, and gets off to a tremendous start.

Highwood is a relative of Aldiss's Hothouse, or maybe something from Ursula LeGuin, or Ewok soft porn at the less complimentary end of the scale. It's set on a world where the trees are tens of miles high and home to entire communities of lesbian natives resembling lemurs. The males live in a separate segregated community, either in another tree or miles down on the forest floor - the author seems a bit vague about the details. Kearney Wynn comes to this world to study these natives and immediately finds herself at odds with Hamby Flagg, who seems to be some sort of colonial caretaker stationed on this peculiar world. Hamby is accompanied by Teddi, a robotic teddy bear who provides the counselling and emotional support necessitated by such a thankless and solitary posting. Of all the novels which have ever reminded me of Philip K. Dick, this one reminds me of Philip K. Dick a lot, at least up until the last couple of chapters - and in a good way, writing with the same sort of rhythm - expressive without getting too fancy - and characters who could easily be on vacation from Ubik or A Maze of Death or one of the others.

However, Highwood seems often wilfully vague in what it's trying to describe, and I made it right to the end without quite working out what had happened to the colony of male natives seen earlier, or - honestly - what the fuck was going on; and before it gets resolved, the author whips off the mask and reveals that we've actually been reading a very different book, one which seems to promise a lot but turns out to be ham-fisted bollocks. That lesbian Ewok colony was actually some sort of metaphor for women's emancipation, which Kearney realises is all a waste of time, and she only ever thought otherwise due to having had some funny ideas in her head - probably all that book learnin'.

She stepped back from him, thrust her fists stubbornly against her hips. 'No—you listen to me, Hamby Flagg. I didn't climb all over this damn planet and half a dozen others for my health—or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, moth-eaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got. Though God knows you're not what I had in mind—or thought I had in mind, anyway. But I do not intend to waste all that time and effort just to—to provide a very unappetising picnic for those things!'

Highwood opens like some lost Philip K. Dick novella and ends like the sort of conservative and occasionally Christian science-fiction which has always made Analog magazine a bit of a lottery.

Never mind.

Inferno

 

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar & Carlos Ezquerra Inferno (1993)
I was still buying 2000AD regularly when this saga was first published; I re-read some of it a couple of years ago after snapping up those Summer Offensive issues on eBay - mainly for the sake of Big Dave, and yet none of it rings any significant bells; and now I've bought it again as a collected edition—sorry, graphic novel—so as to give it a fair crack of the whip. I say saga but I actually mean a story lasting twenty issues of the galaxy's greatest which therefore probably wouldn't stand up in comparison to, off the top of my head, Beowulf.

Anyway, the main thing I've taken from this, and which I'd forgotten, is that Judge Dredd in its heyday was mostly a comedy, or at least satire, sharing more in common with those ludicrous hard man strips in the early issues of Viz than it did with any caped American fare. In a totalitarian future society where one might be executed by a monosyllabic uniformed nutcase for littering, chuckles were never far away. Dredd himself is therefore horrible, which is the point, his principal virtue being that he's absolutely consistent and ruthlessly honest by his own draconian terms. The weekly strip therefore usually seemed to work better in short, sharp bursts of ultraviolent slapstick, and earlier attempts at lengthy stories spanning multiple issues worked best when they kept this in mind - I still have fairly good memories of the Cursed Earth and Judge Caligula tales, although admittedly it's been a while.

However, fifteen or so years down the line, it was beginning to look a bit thin, at least to me, which was presumably why I stopped buying. Dredd works better as a Ramones album than as some sprawling conceptual Tolkien with firearms cycle exploring the limits of his grim, frowning universe, because that universe isn't really very interesting unless it's funny. Mark Millar's Purgatory develops the background of a prison break in a penal colony on one of Saturn's moons, and Grant Morrison's Inferno brings the escaped violent psychopaths to Mega City One - which they take over because what else would they do? So they act like escaped violent psychopaths - a handful of whom have somehow managed to oust the government of a city of eight-hundred million - Judge Dredd busts heads and saves the day, as usual.

I like Mark Miller but Purgatory is high on primary colours and low on redeeming features even by his standards, and Inferno reads like Grant Morrison was mostly just trying to pay off a phone bill. It would be saved by Carlos Ezquerra's mostly gorgeous artwork, but even that has begun to stray into caricature by this point, with Chief Judge McGruder having sprouted what looks like a loaf of bread where her nose used to be.

It's not bad but it feels somewhat like a strip going through the motions, and the inclusion of Millar's pleasantly ludicrous six-page I Hate Christmas serves mainly to remind us what Judge Dredd should look like.