Interzone 275 (2018)

As may be apparent from the review of a couple of previous issues I wrote back in July, I haven't exactly been climbing over my massive pile of X-Men comic books to read this; and I only picked it up because Erica L. Satifka is featured, and she's great and therefore deserving of support. I suppose at least this time it's only taken me six years to generate sufficient enthusiasm to read the thing beyond Satifka's characteristically excellent The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest, which probably means something. It took me sixteen years, marriage, and a change of continental landmass to get around to reading issue 218.

It's not the worst science-fiction digest I've read, but I'm still getting a whiff of those boys and girls who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze. The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest is, as I say, wonderful even given its being a mere two pages in length - a lesson in getting to the point if ever there was. Leo Vladimirsky's The Christ Loop is similarly readable, presenting the death of Himself as a sequence of increasingly ludicrous execution beta tests, each followed by a focus group meeting before they finally settle for the version with the wooden cross. Malcolm Devlin's The Purpose of the Dodo Is to Be Extinct has an enjoyable touch of the Borges about it but probably could have been shorter. I didn't really understand either The Mark by Abi Hynes or Steven J. Dines' Looking for Landau. The former seemed nevertheless decent, but the latter was eighteen pages of growling bikers going into Arizona dive bars and starting fights like you see on the telly, but with infrequent puzzling interjections about the Holocaust.

Elsewhere we have mostly inoffensive editorials, reviews and one instance of the word cisheteronormative, which can fuck right off. A couple of short stories in some anthology or other are slated for satirising the political correctness of wokesters because, as you know, it's only satire when coming from the left, so when the right does the same thing it's hate speech, actually. Regardless of anyone who may or may not be channelling their inner Jeremy Clarkson, I believe I've reached the point of equilibrium where I find those whining about political correctness not significantly less irritating than those whining about those whining about political correctness. The review section spunks away a phenomenal generous word count on nothing that really warrants it, so far as I can see, notably the Ready Player One movie - which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing - about which we learn:

As Infinity War understands but this film never quite does, true geek knowing is a superpower in itself: a creative, expansive mode of cognition which parses tropes against a vast internalised corpus of actual and potential narrative utterances, and comprehends megatextual vastness beyond the puny grasp of high-cultural minds.

To be fair, I've a feeling this may be deliberate affectation as set-up to the somewhat more direct punchline, but honestly it's hard to fucking tell - or to care for that matter. Nick Lowe writes the movie reviews and is clearly perceptive, and I've very much enjoyed his writing, but I don't understand why movies are given so much space in this magazine, or why Lowe is wasting his time on such garbage. I guess that's more or less it for me and Interzone.

Peter Hope - Boost / 2nd by 2nd (both 2023)

I sometimes find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for contemporary writing, and I'm growing increasingly suspicious of that which offers its contemporary status as but one of its many virtues. Leaving aside the usual creatives, content providers, and loyal servants of the franchise, even the supposed alternatives are looking ropey these days. Among the transgressives I found one internet twat helpfully making blog posts about how avant-garde fiction is easy, fun, and here's how you do it; and if the Neo-Decadents seemed initially promising, I've been somewhat put off by the unmistakable aroma of boys who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze; and of course this sorry state of affairs echoes the culture I inhabit as a whole. Daily existence has become, just as it was for the Aztecs, a balancing act - a matter of keeping those forces which influence our lives at a distance. In political terms, there no longer seems to be anyone who isn't part of the machine. The right seeks allies while the left seeks traitors. There's no-one on our side, the machine is out of control, and the wheels have come off.

Thankfully, Peter Hope understands this all too well, and articulates it in terms which resist reframing as the usual rebel product.

Let's go walking through the bluebells with our statins and beta blockers, the buttons are popping and the blinkers are in place, surely we'll all be in a continuous state of dependent bliss before nightfall.

I hestitate, wondering if it's my role to highlight any of this or whether everyone should be allowed the freedom of their bad decisions.

A new disquiet is all around and the legal documents are being drafted to obscure contradictory history. It gets harder and harder to focus on the grey area between black and white, it jumps out of its shoes and picks up a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, upending the furniture and threatening to carve us all new eye sockets.

I hear the beep from a thousand phones letting the populace know it's no longer ok to breathe openly.

Boost and 2nd by 2nd are chapbooks - about fifty pages each, which seems exactly the right length - expanding on this theme - the world right now as experienced by one man, because the political as a universal and absolute response to ethical dilemmas is taking us to some incredibly shitty places. There's nothing here so tidy that it will fit on a placard or lend itself to elitist jargon of the kind which left at least me scratching my head over just what the fuck a red-brown tankie is supposed to be; and the reason there's nothing of that type is because grow the fuck up!

It isn't quite poetry, and it certainly isn't fiction, and although both books carry the same argument, where Boost is hard-headed and direct, 2nd by 2nd takes a more hallucinatory approach, I suppose you might say. The argument, which essentially summarises how well life inside Guy Debord's predicted Spectacle has been working out for us, frames the problem in terms which may hopefully inspire resistance, or at least some genuine commitment to leaving the world in a less shitty state than you found it.

Please someone take some fucking notice.

These are, by the by, almost certainly no longer available but keep an eye on the Wrong Revolution Bandcamp page if you're curious.

DISCLAIMER: If I know you either in person or through social media, or if I've written about something you wrote on this blog, criticisms made in the first paragraph almost certainly aren't referring to you. You hopefully know who you are.

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.