John Scalzi - The Ghost Brigades (2006)

This came as something of a relief after Starter Villain because it's decent, meaning that I didn't simply imagine Starter Villain being nothing like so good as it should have been. I had no coherent plan to read anything beyond Scalzi's generally excellent Old Man's War but this was in Goodwill for two dollars and I liked the sound of it. As with Old Man's War, from which it represents a continuation, it's military science-fiction, a genre which is usually about as good as the name promises, but rather than the usual dreary ticking of boxes for the benefit of persons who enjoy saluting whilst screaming SIR, YES, SIR, Scalzi writes with humanitarian wit and not much conceded to those who back the blue.

The Ghost Brigades is the story of Jared Dirac, created as a clone of a scientist who has gone over to the other side - a coalition of three hostile alien races. Dirac's consciousness is also a copy of the defector's personality, implanted in the hope of revealing just what the fuck the guy was thinking before he jumped ship. So there are plenty of pleasurably disconcerting ideas to keep you busy, but what makes the book - at least once we get there - is the realisation of there being a fairly strong argument for Dirac and his cohorts being the wrong 'uns in this equation; so expectations are turned on their head, and with surprisingly little fuss, before settling into a narrative very much informed by the complexities of conflict in the real world rather than the typically eternal struggle between goodies and baddies. My only criticism is that it's probably a bit long, but it's not much of one given that the final hundred or so pages probably require the preamble. It's probably not quite so good as Old Man's War, but as most military science-fiction seems to be garbage, I'm not complaining.

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (2004)

By Persepolis, I'm here referring to the whole thing. I read the first volume, itself comprising the first two parts, then insisted Mrs. Pamphlets give it a read because it was so good. She did so, then immediately bought the second volume, comprising parts three and four. I wasn't going to bother writing anything because I'm trying to break the habit of reviewing absolutely fucking everything I read before I find myself passing comment on the ingredients printed on the label of a jar of peanut butter. Although also, occasionally there will be something so amazing that you're not quite sure what to say.

I'm sure we're all familiar with pow! the comic book having grown up. It was never a development which inspired me to unconditional enthusiasm, because - apart from anything - I'd say the evolutionary through-line with Web of Spider-Man at one end, American Splendor at the other, and Watchmen somewhere in the middle is a complete waste of everyone's time. Marjane Satrapi writes with pictures as well as words, and Persepolis is so powerful as to render comparisons pretty much redundant; and by powerful, I don't mean in the sense of frowning whilst thinking really hard about Bakunin - as she does at one point - but simply that it does what it does to the point of representing a sort of perfection. There's nothing here which could have been done better or improved in any way.

As you probably know, Persepolis tells the tale of Satrapi growing up in Iran during the revolution. It's alternately harrowing, funny, touching, and strongly underscores the humanity of those living in countries unlike our own. This last point is, I feel, something we really need to keep in sight given the tendencies of theocracies - our western version very much guilty as hell in this respect - to reduce those people over there to dangerous monsters who dress funny and probably don't speak English. Persepolis works so well because it's hard not to see ourselves in this story, and if you can't see yourself in this story then get the fuck away from me.

Everyone needs to read this.

T.G. Engle - Silent Dawn (2017)

 

It began life back in 1993 as a play and was rewritten as a novel in 2017, which explains my initial impression being that of a recently revised early novel. Before it occurs to anyone that I may mean early novel in dismissive terms - given that Silent Dawn is also self-published - I should clarify that it does certain things which first efforts tend to do in so much as that the narrative has a loose, somewhat improvised feel and we seem to get a lot of new characters complete with physical descriptions introduced before anything has really started moving. With hindsight I can see some of this may be the trail left by the journey from stage to page - a journey which, I hasten to add, makes a lot of sense given the sheer geographical range of this thing

Beyond these details, Silent Dawn reads like a self-published early novel by someone who really knows how to write. There's a minor issue with formatting, the indention of paragraphs and where it occurs, which I gather is pretty much standard for anyone self-publishing from Microsoft documents; and it's distracting, but not so much as to detract from a novel which otherwise writhes with confidence. As for the usual crimes of the self-published - inactive non-sentences, inept grammar or spelling, absence of proofing, crowd pleasing pop culture references, narrative developments which would transparently prefer to have been on telly, and so on and so forth - we suffer nothing of the sort in this book. Particularly impressive is that in Pastor Stanshall we have an irredeemable monster who, without ever becoming even remotely sympathetic, is easily understood; so his evil - which is the optimum strength fully leaded version - is  believable where, in less capable hands, it could easily have slipped over into pantomime. There are many finely struck balancing acts going on here, which I suspect I only even noticed through having read at least a couple of novels by authors who weren't up to the job.

Silent Dawn is a hard-boiled satire set amongst warring factions of the US population about a thousand years from now. It's not exactly post-apocalypse, but civilisation is a thing of the past and daily life is otherwise about as bad as it can possibly be - rape, pillage, no law, few utilities despite the government still being hidden away somewhere, and a shitload of praising Jesus while passing ammunition. It's like William Burroughs' take on Mick Norman's Hell's Angel books, directed by John Waters, soundtrack by Motorhead - but better. There isn't a whole lot of rib-tickling, and yet it's darkly funny throughout; and certain caricatures which rarely amount to anything more than a groanfest of recycled clichés - not least evangelical preachers and good ol' boys - are delivered as readable and even wildly entertaining, which is a rare thing in my experience. Whatever I read, as soon as the Texan shows up, I'm usually about thirty pages from throwing it across the room and switching to something else, which didn't happen this time.

Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore - The Roswell Incident (1980)

 

Back in the eighties I read this along with a stack of related Berlitz paperbacks investigating mysterious strangeness, flying saucers, the Bermuda triangle, unexplained mysteriousness, and reports which they don't want you to know about. I had a ton of this shit, all picked up on the cheap from Oxfam and the like because I didn't like to read anything that was hard to understand. I eventually saw the error of my barely literate ways and replaced my vast library of cranky tomes with proper books for grown-ups, but I sort of wish I hadn't because this kind of thing is often very entertaining - even genuinely interesting regardless of whether or not you believe any of it.

Anyway…

In short form, the legend has it that the remains of a flying saucer were recovered by the air force from a ranch seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell; and then the story was retracted because it turned out to be a weather balloon; and then this was viewed as a cover up intended to conceal the weather balloon having been a flying saucer after all; except that the weather balloon story was a cover up to conceal the wreckage having originated in some more secretive government effort to monitor Soviet bomb tests at long range; and then somewhere in there we have the bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site, and so on and so forth. All that can really be said is that something crashed, and something was found, and some people were more than a little freaked out by the whole thing*. 

I've been to Roswell since I first read this book. To an outsider, such as I am, it seems a very strange place, not quite real and just the sort of landscape wherein one might anticipate the incursion of strange forces. This sense of mystery is unfortunately diminished by the weight of garishly grinning aliens hoping to sell you everything from cigarettes to chiropody all over the town, and while the portentously named International UFO Museum & Research Center is reasonably interesting, it stretches what debate is to be had to the point of undermining its own argument.

As a book which makes the best of what little it has to go on, The Roswell Incident is more focussed than the museum. Although it doesn't quite manage to argue any case beyond that something happened and everyone shat the bed, the legend seems less easily dismissed in the wake of the US government officially acknowledging that an unidentified flying disc somehow deactivated ten nuclear warheads at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana in 1967. In other words, some of this stuff is now accepted as real by the same agencies who spent the last hundred years or so insisting otherwise; which still doesn't mean that everything described in The Roswell Incident happened, but we're at least a little closer to the idea that it could have done.

*: Quoting myself from here.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Black Orchid (1989)

 

Back in April, 2018 my long-standing regret at having got rid of so much of my comic book collection back in the nineties achieved critical mass, driving me to buy them all back again. I spent twenty dollars a week at the Lone Star Comics online store, knowing it would take a long time but not dwelling on that particular detail. I bought back every issue of anything I regretted having sold in the first place, filled in all of the gaps, and hunted down everything I would have bought had I known about it at the time; and now, just this week, the mission is completed with the purchase of these three prestige format issues of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid. I may still buy the occasional comic book, but probably not regularly given that there doesn't seem to be anything much that I like these days. Weirdly, it does actually feel like an achievement.

Given how I've since come to regard the work of both Gaiman and McKean, and given the possibility of juvenile nostalgia tinting my judgement, Black Orchid seemed like a bit of a gamble. It isn't that either Nelly or the Davester lack talent, but I strongly feel that both have been massively overrated, having achieved popularity during an era when the comic biz was engaging in one of its most rabid periods of searching for the next superstar creator to fill Alan Moore's winkle pickers. Gaiman's writing sometimes felt a little like Alan-Moore-by-Numbers and eventually went full Tim Burton with the twinkly stuff; and while Dave McKean has always had a wonderful sense of design, he looked a little like a Bill Sienkiewicz tribute act for a long time, and I found it difficult to get past that.

However, going back to what was the start, at least for me, before I'd begun to notice any of the traits which eventually became irritating, I'm really glad to have this one back because it's magnificent. You can really see why these two had to spend the next couple of years beating them off with a shitty stick*.

If Neil Gaiman was truly channelling Alan Moore in Black Orchid, it's no longer so obvious as it may have seemed at the time. He imposes structure and rhythm in the style of Moore - switching between variations of six and eight panel pages, and to great visceral effect with the jukebox sequence in book one - but the narrative has a more natural, understated pace giving greater contrast to its dramatic hits than does the jigsaw plotting of Watchmen and the like. Dave McKean likewise keeps it simple, with powerful use of limited colour palettes and generally holding back, allowing the intimacy of his lines and composition to do the heavy lifting - which also reveals his style to be quite unlike that of Bill Sienkiewicz, regardless of whatever else he may have glued to the page in the years that followed.

Of course, Black Orchid is nevertheless caped stuff which also features Batman and Lex Luthor, and was spun out into a Vertigo series which I don't remember being up to much and therefore haven't bothered with this time around; but the telling borders on European art cinema - and the good kind - moody, inspiring, occasionally nightmarish, surreal and yet paradoxically realist at the same time. This may even have been their finest hour for my money.

*: I realise this is an unfortunate turn of phrase given details of Neil's various hobbies which have emerged since I wrote this review.

John Scalzi - Starter Villain (2023)

 

The story here features a substitute teacher inheriting a secret base on a remote volcanic island from his uncle, who happened to be a supervillain in the vein of all those guys who gave James Bond such a hard time. He also inherits his uncle's role and is thus inducted into a world of sentient cats who communicate by typing on a keyboard, with a team of trained dolphins as minions. It's a nice idea which works well for the first third of the novel, even suggesting Scalzi might have a career as the Terry Pratchett of science-fiction, with none of the smirking which rendered Douglas Adams so unreadably pleased with itself. This initial promise seems bolstered when we realise that these aren't exactly Bond villains in the traditional sense but real villains more in line with Martin Shkreli or Bernie Madoff, but without being caught. Then by the time we get to the Bellagio Gathering, a clandestine conference of billionaires and industrialists, it falls apart during chapter after chapter of global economics and the loopholes therein discussed in the form of long, long conversations.

This was the point at which I could no longer ignore just how much of Starter Villain reads somewhat like a script with one eye firmly on the screen adaptation. This was a significant disappointment because I like Jon Scalzi, or at least I liked Old Man's War, and I once asked him whether he would contribute to a short story anthology. The anthology never happened but I was impressed that he took the trouble to respond with a short but chatty email by way of polite refusal. The problem is that Starter Villain reads like a lot of contemporary science-fiction or fantasy in that it reads as though written for people who don't read but identify as nerds because they think it's cute and makes them more like Velma in Scooby-Doo. Tee hee. It's mostly page after page of dialogue and the references are all Millennial friendly and therefore awesome. Here we have Tolkien, The Princess Bride, and:

Dobrev smiled. 'You ever see the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark?'

'Yes.'

'It's like that.'

I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Indiana Jones movies and have no particular interest in doing so, so this reads like Comicon-pleasing gibberish to me. It's not quite so painful as Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free - also published by Tor, curiously enough - which drops a Star Wars zinger on nearly every other page in lieu of the author developing actual writing skills, but then nothing is quite so painful as Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, and this is massively disappointing. Also, it refers to a cis woman on page 138, which I find tiresome.

John Lydon - Anger is an Energy (2014)

 

I was initially puzzled as to why he seemed to have written it all over again, and having already read Rotten, I didn't bother with this one. Then, recently re-reading the aforementioned Rotten I noticed that it came out thirty years ago and therefore assumed this must be a continuation; but it makes a second sweep of both Lydon's troubled childhood and his time in the Pistols, so it isn't that either. Now, however, I understand - Rotten was a counter to all those history of punk books that were popping up at the time and not quite getting it right, whereas this is the autobiography proper, now that he's had a lot more to write about.

...or at least to talk about. Once again, we're back with that conversational style of as told to, complete with digressions and the kind of asides which make more sense in speech than on the page. It can be both exhausting and maddening at times, but I get the impression it was either that or the book wouldn't have happened at all; so you just have to get used to it, which you do because Lydon is a very entertaining man who says a lot which needs to be said.

It may not surprise you to learn that our man tends to blow his own trumpet loudly and often. At one point, for example, he takes credit for shops opening on Sunday because Public Image Ltd played at the Rainbow Theatre on Boxing Day back in 1978. However, this isn't to say that he lacks self-awareness regarding the complaints of his most vocal critics:

'What is it they're really trying to say? Have they a point? Should I analyze myself?' And of course, being me, I do. Well, I'm glad to report that I came out of my own self-analysis rather favourably.

Inevitably we also have certain contradictions, and my favourite of these refers to producer, Dave Jerden, slapping a sample of the Pistols' God Save the Queen over the coda of Acid Drops from That What is Not. I'm absolutely certain I've seen an interview - and just months ago - wherein John describes this having been done without his knowledge and so he's furious when he hears it, then eventually grows to like the idea; on the subject of which, herein we find:

At the end of the song I wanted the end refrain from God Save the Queen - 'nooooo fuuuuuture!' That to me seemed absolutely appropriate. I hope he remembers 'me like acid drops.'

Think Tank was about the rewriting of history that was going on with all them idiot punk books…

Yes, the rewriting of history…

Well, it doesn't matter, and our boy seems to pride himself on his contradictions with fairly good reason, rightly viewing them as symptomatic of the ability to think and progress, as distinct from merely hooting and clapping one's flippers in service of this week's most fashionable doctrine, regarding some of which - in case you were wondering - he also asks that we don't go mistaking his views as similar to those of that twat, Nigel Farage, in those actual words.

...sometimes I will say one thing to get a result, when I actually mean the opposite.

See? It isn't actually difficult to grasp, and any other silly questions you may have are capably answered in this book, which is far from perfect, but probably wouldn't do its job quite so well if it were.

You remember that deal with court jesters using comedic forms to say that which cannot otherwise be said? Well, while this one falls on its arse page after page, it nevertheless comes up smelling of roses nearly every time and is generally wise as fuck.