The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster The Time Tunnel (1967)
This, as you may recall, was an Irwin Allen television series thus described somewhat harshly by John Clute:

In one of the worst 1960s series, time travellers - trapped in a vortex created by experimenting scientists - carom through cardboard sets, overturn whole societies, and escape again and again.

I remember watching a few episodes as a kid but not much else. The basic premise and title, albeit lacking the definite article, came from Leinster's Time Tunnel of 1964, published a couple of years prior to the series. My guess for how any of this relates would be that Leinster conceded the rights and title to Allen in return for a couple of novelisations more directly tied in to the television series.

I began reading under the assumption of the book most likely expanding on the first couple of episodes, given that it kicks off with more or less the same cast of characters and vaguely scientific furniture - significantly featuring our main guys, Doug and Tony, sent into the time stream so as to demonstrate the validity of the government funded project to a disgruntled Senator Clark who wants to know where all the money has gone. Having myself novelised an episodic television show, I've been surprised at the slender page count which tends to be generated by even a full hour of television drama - as anyone who ever read a Terrance Dicks Who novelisation will probably appreciate - and so a certain quota of padding or treading of extemporary water is usually necessary to avoid the finished thing resembling a pamphlet. There's a lot of that in evidence here, but it turns out that the first episode of the television show sends Doug and Tony to the RMS Titanic just as it's about to make the acquaintance of that iceberg. Leinster instead first sends the boys to Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 - site of a catastrophic flood - then to a critical battle at Adobe Walls, Texas in 1874, neither of which correspond to anything we saw on the screen. Given that Leinster was nothing if not quick off the mark, I suspect that either Allen's people gave him license to go his own way, or possibly this book may represent a novelisation of something he proposed for the television show which was deemed to have less potential impact than the Titanic story filmed as Rendezvous with Yesterday, which is probably fair.

With this in mind, what I've read as padding is therefore most likely Leinster doing what seemed right for the story, and so we get a ton of historical detail delivered in large chunks, which is interesting but makes for somewhat chewy reading. We additionally get certain imaginative flourishes and elements which attempt to make sense of what was seen on the screen to some degree - our time travellers each wearing a kind of technological harness which connects them to those operating the Tunnel; and then an additional harness is sent to join them equipped with a poorly defined means of locomotion and a camera - amounting to a remote drone - by which I suppose the reader might rationalise the screening of historical events unfolding on the other side of the next hill, beyond the ken of our travellers; and this remote drone is then developed into a sort of time car by the end of the book, allowing our temporal castaways to whizz around the futuristic city which provides the slightly puzzling setting for the final chapters.

It's a novel which does a lot of telling and not quite enough showing to strike the right balance, which is also true of the 1964 Time Tunnel which, for all its wacky ideas, is really a bit of a mess. This is a shame because Leinster's best is usually wonderful, notably The Greks Bring Gifts and The Wailing Asteroid both of which are just screwy enough to overcome any objections one might harbour regarding the pulpier end of the genre. His greatest strength seems to have been the short story form - or at least sequential short stories welded together into novels - and his short stories mostly appeared in the digest magazines and would thus have been subject to the attention of some fairly astringent editors. His three Time Tunnel novels were, on the other hand, published by Pyramid Books whom I gather were in the business of wacking them out fast and cheap and may therefore have left established writers to their own devices - and the sheer weirdness of those novels they published by Robert Moore Williams seems to support this as a possibility.

All the same, The Time Tunnel is a book which could have been better rather than a bad one. It somehow maintains a heady pace in spite of the infodumping, its ideas are engaging, and my initial concerns about Doug and Tony helping out in the extermination of hostile Indians at Adobe Walls proved mercifully unfounded for the most part, for Leinster achieves a surprising objectivity in his sensitive portrayal of what might not unfairly be described as genocide.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs

Allen Hibbard (editor)
Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999)
Given that Burroughs oeuvre can often prove somewhat repetitive, it's probably testament to the man's ability that new details remain to be discovered even when you've read pretty much everything. I haven't read everything but I've read the major novels and a significant quota of those lesser known, with this being my spooky twenty-third Burroughs title. As may be obvious, it's a collection of interviews spanning his career of which only the one first seen in Re/Search is familiar to me; and taking in subjects adjacent to the writing, whatever Bill felt like talking about at the time, it feels like a more thorough overview of his work than, for example, John Calder's William Burroughs Reader, not least in its reiteration of themes which we may or may not have noticed in individual novels - notably that Burroughs' life work can be distilled to a desire to communicate that which we already know, but don't realise we already know.

Also, this collection roughly maps out the shape of Burroughs' intellectual progress over the years, particularly as he dismisses and moves beyond earlier fixations. This is in particular a relief as the first third of the page count is dull as fuck, adding nothing new whilst endlessly retreading everything we've already read in Naked Lunch and others in response to the enquiries of overly earnest young men with long hair and beards, the nadir of which has Burroughs concluding that the revolution will not only be won, but will probably be won by the Rolling Stones.

It gets a lot more interesting once we're past the sixties and Bill's habit of predicting massive cultural shifts which never came to pass, which also means we have to talk about telepathy, mind control and the like, but at least he has his gun pointed in the right direction. By the time we come to the last page, the journey has proven mostly fascinating as our boy pontificates on his life, influences, favourite painters and writers, and other subjects which fed into the novels without any more overt manifestation therein. I'm still not sure he was the most important writer of the twentieth century - let alone that such an accolade means anything - but he was certainly one of the most interesting.

The Witling

Vernor Vinge The Witling (1976)
I'm not quite sure how this one came to leap from the shelf and into my shopping trolley. I vaguely recall finding Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Peace War underwhelming beyond their admittedly sparky ideas, and nothing on the cover of this one promises anything likely to change my mind; and yet I picked it up, for some reason, and it's fucking great, and so much so as to leave me wondering why the other two failed to get me going.

Anyway, this being my third Vinge, I think I've spotted the theme, specifically that he very much enjoys fucking around with the laws of physics as they apply to space and how one moves around therein. Here it's a pseudo-mediaeval alien civilisation which has evolved an ability to instantaneously teleport from place to place. The rhythm of the story and the cadence of its characters borders on Tolkien, albeit less cloying, or at least something by Ursula LeGuin, and this contrasts very well with how their society is seen through the eyes of technologically advanced human visitors - with the story riding along on the fact of said visitors having found themselves stranded on this strange world.

The Witling isn't anything mind-expanding, but it does that which it does exceptionally well and makes for a thoroughly breezy read which does much to remind the reader what first drew him* to the science-fiction novel.

*: I've made this hypothetical person masculine because I'm referring directly to myself, and also because girls are more likely to read romance novels or the latest issue of Woman's Hat Monthly than anything by Vernor Vinge.

Analog April 1980

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog April 1980 (1980)
Just when you think you know someone… as Lord Rothermere observed on the first of September, 1939. I've developed certain expectations as I work my way through a handful of unread back issues of Analog picked up here and there over the years, and true to form, the April 1980 issue features a science article which I couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first couple of pages, Jerry Pournelle droning on about something or other, advertisements which appear faintly ludicrous with hindsight, and the second instalment of Bob Buckley's World in the Clouds - which would be fine if it were just about terraforming Venus as the science is quite interesting and well communicated, but said terraforming is undertaken as some kind of futuristic community service deal by a street tough. I assume tough as a noun made sense for my father's generation and I remember finding it weird in Topper and Beano when I was a kid. The problem is that, science aside, the rest of the tale is written in a style consistent with the kind of writing you would expect in a story about a street tough.

Also, there's David A. Roach's Memo from the Big Chief which takes the form of correspondence between various cavepersons - one of whom is imaginatively named Ugg - detailing, I presume, health and safety concerns raised by the invention of fire. I didn't read it because I make a point of not reading short stories which take the form of correspondence, and the premise just isn't that funny.

However, this was otherwise a surprisingly enjoyable issue of this thing. The characteristically right leaning editorial is fairly liberal and concerns itself with the environment in terms which serve to remind us that Republicans weren't always the largely amoral corporate shitbags we see before us today and were once worth listening to, sometimes. The letters page features satisfyingly testy missives from Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt defending his 1979 novel Renaissance from a reviewer who may or may not have bothered to read it.

The star attraction for me, the reason why this leapt off the shelf and into my hands, would be Simak's Grotto of the Dancing Deer which notably won Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards for best short story. Oddly, it's nothing spectacular in context of Simak's body of work, but is nevertheless decent - as you would most likely expect - so I suspect someone or other simply felt it was high time Cliff won another award, which is fair.

Finally we have the novella length Nightflyers, an example of George R.R. Martin's early science-fiction work. I sort of enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, but not enough to read the books so this is my first encounter with his writing, and it's not difficult to see why he would eventually be shifting this stuff by the truckload. Nightflyers almost mashes a ghost story up with a murder mystery and flings the results out into deep space, and is of sufficient complexity and sophistication to oblige me to re-read the first half when I came back to it because I was already lost; and yet going back to start again turned out to be a genuine pleasure, such is the quality of the tale, which may even be the best thing I've read in any of these digest magazines. At least I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything I've enjoyed more.

I appreciate that even a stopped clock is correct twice a day - unless it's digital - but this one has made for a very pleasant change to the usual.

Conform to Deform

Wesley Doyle Conform to Deform (2023)
It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare given the endless eulogisation of lesser musical entities and occurrences - jangly C86 bollocks, Britpop and here—have another fifty fucking essays about sodding Joy Division while we're on the subject. The Some Bizzare label tapped into something of which I was once very much a part, albeit at the molecular level, and was therefore of great importance to me when I was at the age of finding such things important.

Doyle avoids all the major problems of editorial bias by allowing those involved to speak for themselves, and so the story is told entirely as a series of quotations transcribed without additional comment. It could be argued that the book has been compiled rather than written, for what that may be worth, and given the flaring of tempers and associated drama which came to surround the label, it's easy to see why this was perhaps necessary. There may well be two sides to every story, and Stevo sure made a lot of people angry. On the other hand, I recognise many of the tantrums from hanging around at the World Serpent offices in the nineties, so I'm entirely familiar with noise weirdos getting the hump over unpaid royalties on a record that no fucker actually bought.

Anyway, this is a fascinating story of which I knew very little, despite owning more or less everything the label put out during its first decade; and it's also strangely depressing. I couldn't get enough of the book, and yet it was a massive relief when I came to the final page. I'm not sure I enjoy finding myself quite so immersed in the past, and in something to which I had such an intense connection; and it's uncomfortable reading nearly four-hundred pages of quotes, not least because the book doesn't appear to have been proofread at all and features more typos than your average print on demand magnum opus. In a sense, this seems ironically fitting given Some Bizzare's haphazard progress - one entertaining fuck up after another, albeit with the best of intentions.

It was high time something got written about Some Bizzare, but it's kind of a shame it had to be this.

Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley Antic Hay (1923)
In The Plumed Serpent of 1926, Huxley's pal, D.H. Lawrence wrote:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

If it's about anything, Antic Hay specifically concerns itself with the jazzing of this younger generation, although Huxley spends less time sighing and rolling his eyes than Lawrence. Although billed as the exploits of the supposedly Rabelaisian Theodore Gumbril, Antic Hay flits amongst various members of his circle as they strive for purpose in the wake of the first world war, the death of God, and the advent of modernism. In many senses it's almost a rewrite of Huxley's first novel, although Crome Yellow is arguably funnier and more scathing for its somewhat tighter focus. Antic Hay may possibly represent attempts at a new form of narrative, something presenting themes as part of an overall texture rather than anything you could call a story - Oscar Wilde doing a Burroughs but without the actual cut-up technique, I suppose you might say. For the sake of argument, we may as well assume Huxley had been thinking about Dadaism, this being the cumulative effect of all the interpersonal relationships arbitrarily mixed in with the likes of Gumbril's inflatable trousers and the peculiar twenty-second chapter.

As with Crome Yellow, certain elements foreshadow Brave New World - notably the eugenically directed vivisection, which is thankfully lacking in detail - but it only really scrapes by as a novel in its own right, at least compared to Huxley's hits. Gumbril and pals are building a new world, having done away with the old one, but find themselves floundering without the foundation of tradition upon which to build; which is mostly entertaining, but as I say, covers familiar ground to lesser effect.

The Door into Summer

Robert Heinlein The Door into Summer (1957)
It's taken me a while to forgive Heinlein and grudgingly accept that he may have written some greats. The Door into Summer gets off to a tremendous start, then races along in consistently tremendous style for more or less the duration. There's no way of saying it without annoying someone or committing what will almost certainly resemble sneering, but Heinlein writes like a guy who knows regular people and has had sexual intercourse. He writes like a proper author, an author of books written for persons who like to read more than they care about signing up for a genre which doubles up as their identity.

This is a novel about time travel, and an ingenious one which avoids the usual time travel twists that have since been done to death. It's a novel about an inventor and his cat, and the cat features prominently as much more than just some arbitrary pendant to the main character. Heinlein really got cats, it seems, and writes at satisfying length about them, and also about people who don't get cats and what's wrong with them; so that scores points with me.

Unfortunately he almost blows it at the end by having his main character turn up in a nudist colony, then travel forward in time to marry a little girl once sufficient years have passed for her to have become a woman. They're not related, despite her being referred to as his niece, but it seems a needlessly creepy development reminding us that this is the author of Stranger in a Strange Land, and also that persons referring to themselves as inventors usually have something wrong with them.

So it's a great book, and you can see why Heinlein has been so revered over the years, but you may prefer to pretend you didn't hear a couple of comments made near the end.