The Fireclown

Michael Moorcock The Fireclown (1965)
An early work from himself, and an impulse purchase made on the grounds of it having the greatest cover of all time and featuring the Fireclown, a character whose subsequent japes in The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming made for such fine and impressively weird reading.

I gather Moorcock was still finding his feet when he wrote this. It certainly has its moments, but somehow lacks character and doesn't compare well even to The Shores of Death written only a year later. The Fireclown is conspicuously a parable, a parody of political systems, specifically English political systems of the 1960s wherein Harold Macmillan shaped politicians conspire against free-wheeling counter-cultural types. There's space travel, strange powers exerted over time, and futuristic fashions; but telephone switchboards are still worked by gossip prone operators, and somehow it feels very much a product of its time. Worse still, the first half is one of the least memorable things I've read in ages, very much a fumbled ball considering that it revolves around a revolutionary super-powered clown inspiring dissent in an underground city.

The Fireclown picks up towards the end, and it's nevertheless worth reading, but the promise of the cover isn't really delivered. Still, Moorcock's written about a million books, and off the top of my head I can think of at least six or seven that were brilliant in more or less every way, so the guy's entitled the odd dud.

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea (1938)
Driving back from CD Exchange I slipped on my newly purchased Lazer Guided Melodies by Spiritualized, skipping straight to the sublime 'Shine a Light' which I hadn't heard in many years. Completely unexpected, as the track played I was in tears, and I realised I hadn't listened to this album since my friend Andrew died in February 2009. Andrew had taped it for me, along with the music of many other artists who became firm favourites and whom I never would have listened to but for his recommendation. He was a good friend, a huge and positive influence during a slightly crappy period living in south-east London, and I would do absolutely anything were it possible to bring him back and give him the life he should have had rather than the one he ended up with.

I first read Nausea because Andrew insisted I read it, explaining that it was quite unlike any other novel. I've now read it five or six times and I'm still not sure what to make of it, or at least whether there's anything to make of it beyond that which has already presented itself. My first impression was that Nausea might to some degree describe what it was like being Andrew at least part of the time, and I found the novel dense and difficult. Then, during one of those days so bad that you can no longer even be bothered to feel pissed off, it suddenly made absolute sense, and telling this to Andrew, he agreed that a very specific frame of mind is necessary for full appreciation of Sartre's debut novel. I've re-read a few times since, and it's always been the same, always dependent on one being just the right hue of something or other that isn't exactly melancholic.

Sartre's Antoine Roquentin lives a solitary existence, sat alone in a cafe or bar, occasional conversations with a self-taught acquaintance whom he doesn't really like that much, and an increasing sense of repulsion, a sense that no object or event is a thing in itself, and that all is tainted by his own understanding - yer basic existential nausea, not to be confused with anything so obvious as self-hatred. I could have a go at getting into the details but it would probably be easier if you just read the book, keeping in mind that it works best when approached from a quite specific perspective, and will probably never be adapted for the big screen with Bruce Willis playing the pensive historian Roquentin.

This time, for some reason, Nausea works despite my being generally happy. Possibly it feels like I'm reading Andrew's biography. The themes are soft but profound, and far too subtle for anything that could be distilled into a neat sentence upon a Wikipedia page, which is I suppose why Nausea is a novel rather than a manifesto.

New UFO Breakthrough

Brad Steiger & Joan Whritenour New UFO Breakthrough (1968)
I know, but whilst New UFO Breakthrough may not be fiction in the sense of Great Expectations, these increasingly autobiographical essays are as much response as review, so...

Possibly due to the influence of Paul, the kid who lived on the next farm along in the rural Warwickshire of my youth - if you'll pardon the phrase of my youth - crappy books about flying saucers were my Biggles, my Just William, my Harry Potter. Paul's dad was a bit nuts, or at least seemed that way, maintaining a back garden UFO detector of the kind once advertised in certain magazines, so there must have been some sort of trickle down effect. Up until the age of about ten, and then again during a revival lasting from roughly 1988 to 1993, I read a ton of this shit in lieu of anything of literary value - unless you count X-Men comics. I'm still not sure quite how much of it I believed in the sense of believing in the existence of, for example, Morrissey, but I was certainly keen on the idea of our skies being full of mysterious visitors 'n' shit. With hindsight I suspect I bought these books for the same reasons I now scour the shelves in search of cheap science-fiction. Admittedly there may not be much of a story, but if you squint a bit there's always a vague possibility that it could be real, sort of...

The problem with much UFO literature is that sadly, and particularly sadly for something purporting to describe visitations from outer space, a great deal of it is actually quite dull with its doomed efforts to maintain scientific sobriety: three-hundred pages of blokes who thought they saw a light, but might have been mistaken, and then felt a bit funny afterwards.

Brad Steiger was notable for bucking this trend and reporting nuttier and hence greatly more entertaining accounts from the periphery of the strange unexplainable mysterious twilight world of mystery that cannot be explained; and so the New UFO Breakthrough in question is that the Earth is probably hollow and that's where all the flying saucers come from. Laugh if you must, but it's oddly readable, not least because many cases stated herein are at least as weird as anything from the science-fiction novels of the time; and it probably helps that Steiger remains reasonably objective instead of raising an eyebrow to suggest that scepticism is fine but knoweth ye well that this be just what the men in black want you to think.

Actually, at least one major folk myth detailed here is derived from a science-fiction novel of the time, namely Richard Shaver's abduction by the subterranean Dero, later written up as fiction and submitted to Amazing Stories because the author knew his apparently autobiographical stories of the inner world were probably just a bit too amazing to be accepted as fact.

Too much of this stuff is probably bad for you, but it's fascinating just to dip a toe in the waters every once in a while. Even assuming it's all bollocks, as I tend to, it nevertheless raises some peculiar questions: why so many accounts should be so consistent with each other and where the ones that make no fucking sense come from; why everyone started seeing saucers in the 1940s rather than, as you might expect, things inspired by Flash Gordon style rocketry.

As science it's a bit suspect, but as modern mythology, this stuff can be an engrossing if guilty pleasure; and it has to be said, Brad Steiger really had the good stuff.

Andromeda Breakthrough

Fred Hoyle & John Elliot Andromeda Breakthrough (1964)
A boldly exciting work of imagination... filled with physical excitement and intellectual stimulation... much of it reads like a James Bond adventure, it proclaims upon the back cover, presumably referencing Completed in Triplicate, that obscure Ian Fleming novel wherein Bond spends the entire story in a laboratory frowning at things seen under a microscope. The rest of the back cover is taken up with glowing praise for all the mighty deeds of Hoyle and Elliot which aren't this novel.

A for Andromeda was a 1961 BBC television serial written by Fred Hoyle - renowned astronomer and cosmologist famous for kicking Stephen Hawking's head in on numerous occasions - and John Elliot, widely respected and eminently talented author of television plays. The story begins with a radio signal picked up from the vicinity of the Andromeda galaxy, a signal delivering instructions for the building of an advanced computer which, once running, itself delivers instructions for the creation of artificial life, specifically a seemingly human woman who grows to adulthood in a matter of days. This being the BBC in the early 1960s, I gather most of the drama took the form of men with moustaches holding forth in either laboratories or governmental offices which, in the absence of competition, proved so exciting as to justify a sequel, 1962's The Andromeda Breakthrough.

This is of course the novelisation. Unlike A for Andromeda, the television serial still exists in its entirety and is available on DVD, but as I keep trying to explain to people regardless of their utter incredulity, I like reading books and for the most part I couldn't really give a shit about TV, so here we are.

Fred's later novel, Seven Steps to the Sun co-written with  Geoffrey Hoyle, is a weird and extraordinarily clunky effort, a long, long way from being one of the best things I've ever read, and distinguished by this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Andromeda Breakthrough benefits from the involvement of a writing partner qualified by his ability to string sentences together rather than by his being fruit of the author's loins, so it's reasonably well-written, avoids the clichés one might expect of this sort of novel, with no obvious pantomime villains and the rulers of the somewhat implausible middle eastern country of Azaran turning out to be entirely reasonable people despite the kidnappings; and the story is decent enough, a suitably Quatermassy apocalypse, although it may be stretching the point a bit when we learn that the beings of Andromeda merely pretended to desire the destruction of life on Earth so as to shock humanity into getting its ecological act together.

The problem is that for all its virtues Andromeda Breakthrough is very, very dull, a presumably faithful adaptation of a conspicuously studio-based television serial, all men in white coats frowning at clipboards and suggesting calls to the ministry. It may have worked well enough on the screen in 1962, but fifty years later and in an entirely different medium, some of the magic has gone.

Clans of the Alphane Moon

Philip K. Dick Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
I've probably said it before, but regardless of the general quality of my bedtime reading material, each time I return to Philip K. Dick, I'm struck anew by the strength of his prose, the seemingly effortless wit and economy of language - nothing elaborate or showy unless absolutely justified by the narrative: knowing what to exclude being that which elevates the greatest artist above those who merely do well. More and more, now that I'm on what I suppose you'd call the second lap of his oeuvre, I'm beginning to appreciate the literary prowess that allowed for such a prolific output; also how limited is the popular appreciation of his writing, an enthusiasm which seems to have focused on just one aspect, somehow identifying Blade Runner as the quintessential expression of Philip K. Dick's fiction, which it absolutely was not.

Here, for example, we have Chuck Rittersdorf's aborted suicide attempt from Clans of the Alphane Moon, a scene which I doubt could be mistaken for the work of anyone other than Dick:

He found a smaller side window that opened; raising it, he listened to the buzz of a jet-hopper as it landed on a rooftop on the far side of the street. Its sound died. He waited, and then he climbed part way over the edge of the window, dangling above the traffic which moved below....

From inside him a voice, but not his own, said, 'Please tell me your name. Regardless of whether you intend or do not intend to jump.'

Turning, Chuck saw a yellow Ganymedean slime mould that had silently flowed under the door of the conapt and was gathering itself into the heap of small globes which comprised its physical being.

'I rent the conapt across the hall,' the slime mould declared.

Chuck said, 'Among Terrans it's customary to knock.'

'I possess nothing to knock with. In any case I wished to enter before you - departed.'

'It's my personal business whether I jump or not.'

' "No Terran is an island," ' the slime mould more or less quoted. 'Welcome to the building which we who rent apts here have humorously dubbed "Discarded Arms Conapts." There are others here whom you should meet. Several Terrans - like yourself - plus a number of non-Ts of assorted physiognomy, some of which will repel you, some which will no doubt attract. I had planned to borrow a cup of yoghurt culture from you, but in view of your preoccupation it seems an insulting request.'

Quite aside from Blade Runner inverting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - entirely revising its replicants from humanity without morality to childlike innocents - is there a single moment in the film as sad, absurd, funny or human as the above, or are viewers simply seduced by the wow factor of that which is not as it seems rendered with better special effects than Logan's Run?

Yes, I would say. Yes they are, the thick fuckers.

That argument settled, I return briefly to Clans of the Alphane Moon, not even one of his best efforts but still pretty great. The novel follows Chuck Rittersdorf and his inordinately complicated divorce to a distant moon colonised by psychiatric patients through the agency of a popular television entertainer. It's a bit of a mess in places, possibly therefore accurately descriptive of Dick's own personal life at the time, and comes slightly adrift towards the end, but it still poops big ones over even the finest efforts of other authors.

That is all you need to know.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (1972)
Collecting the first three of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels, two of which I vaguely recall from their comic strip adaptations in 2000AD. Whilst not really one of the mighty Tharg's more memorable offerings, the art of Carlos Ezquerra was impressive as ever, and it clearly did enough to instil curiosity sufficient to inspire my plucking this anthology from the shelf of Half-Price Books thirty or so years later.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1961), The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970), and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972) are, as I expected, ripping futuristic spy-thrillers, unlikely to have one scrabbling for a well-worn copy of Plato's Republic in search of some obscure reference or other, but then that was never really their job.  I'd say Slippery Jim diGriz - the rat of the title - is essentially James Bond in space with a slight counter-cultural twist and a more well developed sense of humour, although being as I haven't actually read anything by Ian Fleming since I was about twelve this may well be bollocks; but hopefully you get the idea.

We have bank robberies, Robin Hood moments, time travel, typically futuristic gadgetry and overpowered security guards revealed to be wearing women's knickers beneath their uniforms - all somehow amounting to a suggestion of diGriz as a young Malcolm McDowell doing comedy turns to camera whilst his long-suffering boss, played by Leo McKern, fumes in silence. It's nothing deep and it's probably dated, but it's also nicely written and a lot of fun. These are the sort of novels you whiz through over the course of a long afternoon, and I suppose my only criticism is that welding three of them together like this somehow misses a point, although it's surely worth noting that I found myself reading all three in quick succession without a trace of boredom.

Laikonik Express

Nick Sweeney Laikonik Express (2011)
Not entirely sure what to make of this debut, and my views faltered during reading, ranging from bored to amused to entirely engaged. The narrative follows writer Nolan Kennedy to Poland where he tries to coax Don Darius, his friend and also a writer, into completing an unpublished and apparently amazing novel he's been sitting on for far too long. I'd say Laikonik Express is Kerouac's On the Road except for the fact that it's set on a Polish train, and never having read On the Road there's a danger I might actually be talking out of my arse.

Much of what transpires is low on incident, largely conversational and anecdotal, inspiring the thought that this may  represent characters as much in search of a story as their author; and whilst much of the Polish detail is fascinating, I was never quite convinced that Kennedy or Darius were ever entirely engaged with their surroundings, but for all I know this may well have been the point. Clearly it is a novel which to some extent concerns itself with the process of writing a novel, possibly an examination of the relationship between the terrain and that which ends up on the printed page. When, towards the end of the book, the lads meet Krystyna and learn that she is dying of cancer it seems the harsh reality of the situation obliges them to at last engage on a level beyond that of scenes viewed from the window of a railway carriage.

Possibly.

I suspect there may be a great deal that I missed in Laikonik Express, and certainly it seems pregnant with the possibilities of what it might be saying, if it really is saying any one specific thing. If the point is the journey rather than the destination, I may have appreciated more focus on the journey itself, with a little less on the anecdotes of our travellers which tended to unbalance the narrative a little in my view. Yet in the final quarter it all seemingly adds up by means suggestive of a purpose to the rambling of previous chapters.

At this point I should perhaps stress that I did enjoy Laikonik Express even if I wasn't always sure of where it was going or why. Those online reviews I've checked out mostly heap glowing praise on the quality of Nick Sweeney's narrative, and rightly so. The man is clearly incapable of a dull sentence, with even the most prosaic of observations sparkling with an effortless wit that puts most of Nick Sweeney's contemporaries to shame.

Possibly an unusual debut - says the man who rarely picks up anything that doesn't have a picture of a robot on the cover - but one that may prove more rewarding with time, and one that hints very strongly at better to come.