The Zaucer of Zilk

Al Ewing & Brendan McCarthy The Zaucer of Zilk (2012)
This was one of those things I missed, having long given up on 2000AD comic. I'd heard of it, but the title sounded like something you would expect to find in 2000AD and thus failed to pique my curiosity; at least until I happened upon this reprint and realised it was by Brendan McCarthy - which changes everything, obviously.

I still don't really know what to call this sort of thing, or even that it matters. The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan McCarthy doing what he does best, and nothing else has really come close, certainly not Hewligan's fucking Haircut or - ugh - Really & Truly, or even Rogan Gosh for that matter. This, on the other hand, seems to exhibit kinship with Alice in Wonderland, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Windsor McCay, and thankfully none of the also-rans who would give their collective left one to be this strange but just don't fucking get it - looking at you, Tim, Neil, and all of your self-consciously kooky spawn - also anyone who ever mistook the Cure for a wild display of imagination.

The Zaucer of Zilk tells a surprisingly traditional story using characters and settings which wouldn't seem out of place on a Nurse With Wound album, and to similarly disorientating effect but for the presence of a beating heart where one might, under other circumstances, expect to find the usual emotive button pushing. McCarthy has always been in a class of his own, but rarely has it been so obvious as it is here.

Nerves

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

D.H. Lawrence and His World

Harry T. Moore & Warren Roberts D.H. Lawrence and His World (1966)
Always room for one more biography of D.H. Lawrence, I guess, and this one made the cut because it's full of photographs I'd never seen before, which really helps refine one's impression of the man and his world - as promised by the title. Additionally, being more visually orientated than usual, the text is snappy and to the point, distilling the usual four-hundred page account into just over a quarter of that, so what it may lack in detail is compensated by a more coherent summary of Lawrence's life as a whole. This is the third biography I've read of the man, and I've found plenty that I missed through other versions having their noses pressed up so much closer to the screen, figuratively speaking.

One minor reason for my enduring interest in this writer is how my own life seems to have echoed his, at least geographically speaking, and entirely by accident. We were both born in the Midlands, gravitated to south London, then Mexico City and Oaxaca, and then the American southwest give or take a few hundred miles. The patterns are only loosely parallel with plenty that doesn't match up, but are at least close enough for me to have raised an eyebrow at instances of having stayed in the same hotel and suchlike; and I feel it affords me a certain perspective on at least some of what he wrote, which this biography underscores.

How to Get to Apocalypse

Erica L. Satifka How to Get to Apocalypse (2021)
Keeping in mind that I make no claim as to having my finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction publishing, I'm nevertheless beginning to suspect that Satifka may actually be our greatest living science-fiction author. At least I don't recall having read anything vaguely of the moment which has been anything like so good, and even if we expand our definition of contemporary back by a decade or so to include a few of the allegedly heavy hitters - Reynolds, Stross or whoever - I stand by my statement.

Her writing has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick with some frequency, and some justification, although it also recalls the parables of Ursula LeGuin and, more than anything, the dynamic of all those cyberpunk writers warning against the corporate commodification of society; although personally I've only read William Gibson on that last count and I like Satifka more. Whilst I'm reluctant to analyse my own preferences, or possibly biases, there are certain things I look for in a piece of science-fiction writing.

• I like to be drawn in by something which doesn't make immediate sense, which needs figuring out, and which, once I've figured it out, will have something to say beyond simple statements of its own weirdness.
• I dislike the weird or brain-meltingly futuristic just for its own sake. I'm not keen on flashy or self-consciously edgy.
• I'm not actually adverse to adventures, except they're usually too predictable to allow for much wiggle room in terms of the first point. I'd prefer to avoid anything which reads like it would rather be on TV.

Satifka ticks all of these boxes while telling stories of survival, or of just about getting by, amongst people who work at fast food restaurants or have trouble making rent, the sort of people Dick wrote about - those of us who, if we ever make it into space, will still be cleaning the fucking toilets because they can't get a robot to do it. This means a lot to me, because I don't want to read another novel opening with anything like this ever again:

Space Security Agent Lucas Manning watched the red light winking across the screen of his operations monitor with a growing sense of alarm.

In case it's not obvious why I should regard the above as the worst sort of generic bollocks, State of Emergency, the first of the twenty-three short stories in this collection, kicks off like so:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

See! It only gets stranger from that point on, but stranger by terms which come to make perfect sense. All of the stories here inhabit variant versions of the end of the world, or of a world, none concluding with a bang but most with a sigh of such depressing resonance as to crack the foundations of whatever you're stood upon; and depressing because this is satire at its finest, a horrible mirror held up to our own increasingly desperate existence with home truths delivered before you've even noticed anyone was maybe trying to tell you something you needed to hear.

Satifka delivers accounts of places which feel like the world outside our windows, at least thematically, combining the painfully and playfully familiar with wildly flamboyant flourishes of imagination that - just like the real world - defy our ability to predict just what the fuck is happening; and she writes clearly and beautifully without treading narrative water, while making it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

Honestly, this one makes all of those New York Times Bestseller guys clogging up the book store carousels with their eight-hundred page contributions to the Asimov revival look like wankers.

DON'T PISS ME OFF!!!

Meg McCarville DON'T PISS ME OFF!!! (2022)
I've come across this sort of thing before, even done it myself to a certain extent - self-published collections of emails and the like which you really felt were worth preserving for the benefit of future generations. However, this is different because we're talking Meg McCarville, with what she describes as a collection of my most violent, viral, and vicious emails, text messages, and Yelp! reviews. This isn't one of those things where some web designer you've never heard of passive-aggressively corrects plebeian clients who have failed to comprehend the basic principles of design.

The next day it was 90 degrees outside and I slowly started to realize that my room had no air conditioning. Besides that, it had black mold in the bathroom, no remote control, a bizarre closet with no bar with a door that might only barely fit a human carcass inside, with a wooden desk pushed up against the door. The desk had a drawer that had FUCK OFF carved into it. This drawer also had creepily opened and closed of its own will, but I have two dealbreakers. Bed bugs and no AC.

The first message kicks off on the very first page, no foreplay, no preamble, just straight into are we LONELY on thanksgiving you dumb fucking crackhead CUNT? There's no title page, no fancy shit, a freewheeling approach to punctuation, a ton of the angriest CAPSLOCK you ever did see, and what amounts to Meg backing an eighteen wheeler dump truck up to the reader and unloading a megaton of weapons grade sarcasm and wrath, the kind which reduces the harshest, blackest metal band you've ever heard to Daniel O'Donnell; and she's very, very funny because these are mostly righteous sermons which really needed to be made; and they're massively satisfying because most of us have been on the same end of at least one of the shitty sticks described herein, or at least I have. That said, some of the fury tips over into the sort of disturbing territory which means you're probably not going to find copies of this on sale at the counter of your local bookstore next to Who Farted? She reaches such a peak of anger during the final ten page tirade against an unidentified party that she's hitting the wrong keys half the time, leaving us to unscramble the RESULTIDGN cASPLOK CHOAS, which actually sort of works, weirdly enough. If I had any complaint, I suppose it could have been longer, but being as the existing sixty-nine pages read like a continuous rocket blast in the face of everyone who ever said something stupid, it's probably the length it needs to be.

Buy as many copies as you need here, then also pick up American Victim which is incredible and for which I'll get around to posting a review at some point.

The Yage Letters

William S. Burroughs The Yage Letters (1963)
I know Ginsberg gets equal credit as co-author on the cover, but I'll come to that in a minute.

The Yage Letters is one of those obscure early pamphlets dating from before Lady Luck smiled upon Uncle Bill and got everybody to buy his books. It was always listed as one of his numerous works in the front of those I read, and some time passed before I realised it had been reprinted. Chronologically speaking, it's approximately the one after Junkie but before Queer, although its status as a novel is questionable, even by Burroughs' standards. All we know for certain is that our boy envisioned something along the lines of travel writing, beyond which it seems to have found its own way into print without much conscious direction on the part of the author. It's billed as letters, specifically Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about his daily experiences as he schleps around Colombia and Peru in search of a hallucinogenic vine, but this was most likely simply a means of framing his observations long after the fact; although I gather some of the material duplicates actual letters sent to Ginsberg at the time.

Burroughs had studied ethnography in Mexico City, but his travels were specifically conducted in search of a drug which he'd been told bestowed telepathic abilities on the user; so as with much of his writing, we need to take a shitload of poetic license into account. That being done, we're nevertheless left with something which is pretty readable and rarely boring. He hangs out in villages with Shamanic types, he chugs ayahuasca, he throws up quite a lot, and he struggles towards some sort of insight.

That described thus far comprises the main section of the book, aptly named In Search of Yage, which is supplemented by additional material which may or may not have turned up in later editions - the introduction from Oliver Harris who edited the thing could have used a little more focus and I've lost track of what first appeared when. The supplementary material comprises Ginsberg's analysis of the first part, and Burroughs response to the same; which would be fine but Ginsberg's analysis is mostly blandly mystic observations on the nature of reality, third eyes opening, all that sort of guff. I'm sure I recall the Bhagavad Gita getting a mention at some point. I personally find Ginsberg marginally more interesting as Billy's pal than as a writer, but even then, honestly not that interesting. I'm quite happy to believe that the manuscript would have ended up at the back of a drawer were it not for Ginsberg's efforts, but his writing simply doesn't interest me because I don't see that it adds anything.

In Search of Yage is mostly worth a look, even if it's hard to tell quite what it's supposed to be, beyond which Yage Letters mostly serves as a testament to less being more.

Analog July 1971

John W. Campbell (editor)
Analog July 1971 (1961 but felt more like 1931)
This looks interesting, you think, so the next time you see a copy in a second hand place, you pick it up, maybe acquiring a stack of back issues before you've actually read any of them. Then you read them and a hard lesson is learned.

Campbell's editorial comprises the usual ranting about how hippy beatnik liberals are living in cloud cuckoo land, DDT is good, and how he'd like to see every endangered species wiped off the fucking face of the Earth; and on page seven there's an advert for a hardback collection of previous editorials should you wish to charge your pipe with a goodly plug of tobacco and sit chuckling over accounts of damn liberals and long hairs revealed for the fools they are by the mighty power of scientific discourse; and so to the stories...

Joseph P. Martino's Zero Sum seems to be a loose analogy of what was going on in Vietnam, which eventually comes out as one of those Asimov-style logic puzzles. Here's one sparkling example of its dialogue.

'Anyway, the point is there's one best mix of tactics, and you can't improve your situation by deviating from it. In fact, if you do deviate, your average losses increase. The way we figure it, on each engagement between a Destroyer and a Monitor, on average we should lose three quarters of a man less than they do. Instead, their losses average one and three eights man per engagement more than ours. And the reason is they're using the wrong mix of tactics. If they'd use the right mix, they could cut their losses, and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it.'

There's a scene of our lads watching governmental speeches about the war on telly which lasts for nine pages. To be fair, it picks up a little in the second half but only in the sense that an Ed Sheeran album probably won't be anything like so terrible as you expect it to be.

F. Paul Wilson's The Man with the Anteater starts off with both the charm and the cast promised by the title, then turns into a pseudo libertarian opinion column while the reader is distracted by union bashing comments on just the third or second page, all of which leaves a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.

I managed about four pages of Gordon R. Dickson's The Outposter, presumably the second half of a novel here serialised in instalments. It's probably unfair to judge something so poorly on the strength of four pages somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't even plough my gaze through the synopsis of what had already happened in the previous episode. I think it's about a ragtag crew of rebellious space renegades, or pirates, or something. I guess I'll never know.

James H. Schmitz's Poltergeist is, if not amazing, certainly readable; and A Little Edge by S. Kye Boult seems massively out of place here in terms of quality and, weirdest of all, seems to foreshadow the general tone of certain things by China Miéville.

Also there's an article about a computer game excitingly named Spacewar, which is probably hilarious if you care about such things given that this was 1971 and the guy spends twelve pages gushing over what may as well be Pong, but I couldn't give a shit about computer games. I tried half a page and found myself granted particular insight into Midge Ure's feelings regarding the city of Vienna.

The book review section uses up quite a few words in sneering at mainstream literary authors who dabble with science-fiction, for their admittedly well-written efforts are as naught compared to the power of Gordon R. Dickson, or indeed everything else published in the mighty pages of Analog; then spunks away what little validity the argument may have accumulated with praise for something by - ugh - Colin Wilson; which leaves us with just the letters page, which is mostly praise for previous Campbell editorials, including an angry housewife fulminating against kids these days. The one note of dissent comes from an anthropologist defending his field as a legitimate area of study, warranting a significantly longer response from Campbell restating his position that it's not science if it doesn't involved a blackboard covered in complicated equations, and only a fool would claim that blah blah blah…

I've got another four of these fucking things on my reading pile.