Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.

Electronic Resistance

Nigel Ayers Electronic Resistance (2022)
This is a lavishly printed retrospective of artwork, collages, record covers, fliers, and related material by Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions. I wasn't going to bother, mainly because I still have all  the records and most of the other stuff, plus eighty dollars seemed like a lot of conkers - although to be fair this may be because the numismatic lobe of my brain still thinks an album costs around four quid like they did in 1982, so eighty dollars is probably what I think of as a tenner, maybe fifteen quid at a push. Anyway I saw a copy and noticed that I'd been personally thanked in the foreword alongside a load of other people you probably have heard of; so it seemed like I should probably get one for the coffee table just in case I ever get another visitor.

Actually, it is a good looking book, beautifully put together, and it's nice to have those collages I've known only as muddy black and white photocopies in full colour, along with all the stuff I've not seen before. Nigel Ayers' art has been difficult to quantify, not least because it eludes traditional classification as such and is easy to miss as something wrapped around an album - like punky Max Ernst, more at ease falling from a battered envelope than hung on a wall to be admired by wine enthusiasts. However, this collection goes a long way towards making sense of it all, bringing everything together as a surprisingly coherent picture, and one which emphasises the common threads which unite seemingly disparate areas of focus - from the consumer revolt of the early eighties to the shamanic pastoralism of more recent times. The collection also firmly stamps this visual component as part of the same deal as the music, from which it is arguably inseparable.

Nocturnal Emissions came to the fore, or to a fore of some description, along with an entire wave of similarly noisy avant-garde music groups approximately in the wake of Throbbing Gristle - at least for the sake of argument; but despite sharing certain recording techniques and a penchant for bothersome imagery, they always seemed very much their own thing, aesthetically closer to SPK - at least initially - and informed by a revolutionary and political conscience in comparison to which Gristle may as well have been Pink Floyd delighting their black clad followers with slides of murderers to accompany those trippy flanging effects.

For a little while, there was a gypsy camp out the back, that was good—we filled up their water containers and they scared the burglars off.

This comes from Ayers' account of the early days squatting in abject poverty in south London, and provides telling contrast with Gristle eulogising their own neighbourhood gypsy encampment on Subhuman. Nocturnal Emissions recycled the advertising copy and consumer propaganda, revealing the true intent of the great beast, but it was because they cared and because they hoped to make things better. It was never just some art school game with each reaction gauged as interesting before moving on to the next routine transgression. Electronic Resistance brings a new focus to Ayers' work, revealing it as spiritual kin to the Situationists, Jamie Reid, Crass, and other dwellers on the aesthetic and societal periphery, those who, for the most part, continue to resist assimilation by the machine. More than just a treasury of hits, these artworks retain their power in opposition to a system which is arguably worse now than it was even then, because they're witty, upsetting, funny, and oddly illuminating, like glimpses of the real world seen through the fog of consensus reality.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge (1885)
Here's what happens: Michael Henchard has one too many and accidentally sells his wife to a sailor, along with his infant daughter. Next day, full of regret, he makes a vow to stop being a fucking knob and to accordingly sort his life out. Twenty years later he's the most successful corn magnate in the county and has been made mayor in recognition of his corn trading excellence. Donald Farfrae, a Scottish gentleman turns up with a new technique of doing something or other to corn of such mind-blowing innovation that Henchard hires him. Henchard's wife and daughter come into town because the sailor who purchased them has been lost at sea. Henchard is happy because he has his family again. Then his wife dies but he still has his daughter. Donald Farfrae fancies his daughter, which is annoying because Donald Farfrae seems generally more popular than grumpy old Henchard, which is itself a source of resentment to the mayor. Henchard finds a letter written by his late wife explaining that the daughter he sold to the sailor twenty years ago died shortly after, and Elizabeth Jane is actually the sailor's daughter. This is annoying because Henchard had told her she was his own kid whom he accidentally sold before she was old enough to form memories, and also because he's begun to find her irritating. His girlfriend Lucetta turns up next. Henchard hooked up with Lucetta after selling his wife to a sailor. Henchard, Lucetta, and Elizabeth Jane are going to live as a family, sort of, although Donald now fancies Lucetta, which is awkward. Henchard tells Elizabeth Jane that she's actually the sailor's daughter. The sailor turns up in search of his missing family,  but is sent away by Henchard who now wishes he hadn't told Elizabeth Jane about her real father. There's a load of other stuff, mostly Henchard telling fibs then being found out, over and over. Everybody now thinks he's a tit, not like that nice Mr. Farfrae who is, by the way, going to marry Lucetta. The townspeople make an effigy to mock Lucetta and she dies of embarrassment, or possibly a miscarriage. In a move somewhat foreshadowing certain life choices made by Woody Allen, Farfrae marries Elizabeth Jane. Henchard goes off somewhere and dies alone. You can't really blame him.

I read The Mayor of Casterbridge when I was at school and I thought it was great. Now, forty years later, I'm bewildered at it being regarded as Hardy's first masterpiece - according to Martin Seymour-Smith - and superior to the earlier Return of the Native, which I read mainly because I remembered liking this one so much. The Mayor of Casterbridge, a technically brilliant but ultimately simplistic novel reads, at least to me, like an early work in comparison to the greater ambition and scope of the previous book, and is perhaps the written equivalent to one of those beautifully rendered Victorian paintings intended to impart a heavy handed moral lesson in having the knockery young woman lasciviously checking out the common labourer's lunchbox while doves in the cage immediately behind her peck each other to death, amounting to, See!!! See!!! That's what happens, you thoughtless hussy!

Henchard makes a bad decision, accordingly fucks up, pisses everyone off, then regrets the decision whilst nevertheless resenting the injured parties - then does it again, over and over to the point at which only a fucking idiot could fail to see how it will end. Worse is that it's pretty easy to spot the emerging pattern more or less as soon as the much nicer and conspicuously more popular Mr. Farfrae shows up. For all the complexity with which Hardy renders Henchard's character, it's nevertheless a completely predictable character; also one which provides few clues as to how - seeing as Henchard is such a turd - he nevertheless somehow enjoyed two complete decades of not covering anything up, nor shooting himself in the foot, nor pissing everyone off.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is saved by Hardy's consistently compelling prose and the focus given to the emotional minutae of Henchard's fumbled social interactions, but unlike The Return of the Native, it presents everything up front with each conflict neatly tied off by the final page. It wouldn't be entirely fair to say it reads like an exercise in plotting, but it lacks the expressionist power of which Hardy was capable and borders on cloying Victorian sentiment.

As a point of interest, I notice that Hardy's pseudo-fictitious Wessex identifies Salisbury as Melchester, suggesting the possibility of both The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge having occurred in the same universe as Roy of the Rovers; which is itself unfortunately more interesting than this novel.

1963

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch & others 1963 (1993)

From where I was stood at the time, 1963 looked like Image Comics experimenting with the possibility of printing something that wasn't shit - which was fairly surprising. It took the form of six comic books, all written by Alan Moore, all different titles purportedly belonging to a shared continuity which was obviously a satire on the Marvel universe as it had been in the sixties. It was deliberately hokey, emphasising the more amusing aspects of the caped sixties - the occasionally rabid patriotism, the pathological fear of commies, the casual misogyny and so on. It was hardly an original idea, having been done in Mad magazine about every three or four months*, usually with a version of Wolverine sprouting knives, forks and spoons from his knuckles - amongst other side-splitters doubtless thrashed out during a few hours on the golf course; and of course Grant Morrison reckons it was all inspired by that issue of his Doom Patrol, which seems unusually narcissistic even by his standards.

The point of this was not quite satire, or not exclusively so, but that the six titles would interconnect, culminating in an eighty-page special wherein Mystery Inc., Tomorrow Syndicate and the rest battle it out with the horrible then contemporary Image characters with ninja swords and too many angry lines on their faces - Deathstabber, Kill Squad and those guys; and thus would we learn that the gritty realism of 1993 was but the kid fuel of 1963 seen from a different angle, or summink. No-one seems to agree on what the point was, or would have been had the special ever seen print, and it's difficult to tell from these six existing comic books. As to why the series was never wrapped up as intended, no-one seems able to agree on that either. This was the point at which Alan Moore decided he'd had enough of superheroes, and you can kind of tell, but it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault that the engine ran out of steam.

Whatever the case may be, and ignoring rumours of various persons other than Alan Moore having readied the missing final piece for imminent publication, 1963 reads - as stated - as a satire on sixties Marvel, without quite slipping over into parody. The individual issues are mostly enjoyable enough in their own right without it all feeling entirely cynical, excepting Horus, Lord of Light which is simply dull, dull, dull by terms which could never be levelled at the Mighty Thor upon which it provides a tangential commentary. It helps that the style is familiar more than the characters, so we have N-Man who, for example, is spun from nuclear accidents which inexplicably bestow strange powers, but he can't really be mistaken for the incredible Bulk or any of those other creaking parodies; but the more one reads into this, additionally delving into the faux text articles, adverts, and letters pages, it begins to feel pretty much like a rant against Stan Lee and the comic book industry in general; and while the rant may well be justified, it gets fucking boring because the overpowering alliteration and digression just ain't that funny and it begins to feel like an embittered fist shaken at clouds, or even Moore's little gang sniggering amongst themselves. So 1963 was sort of self-defeating in that for all that it does, it wasn't actually anywhere near so much fun as, off the top off my head, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron from approximately the same era, likewise harking back to a golden age, and so rigorously square as to make 1963 seem like the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Shame.

Mind you, we got a couple of pin-ups from Melinda Gebbie, so that was a scoop, obviously.

*: It probably wasn't but it felt that way, and I'm possibly thinking of Frantic.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Becky Cloonan
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (2013)
Okay, so this is the book I assumed National Anthem would be. National Anthem was a more recent rendering of the original story which became both this and an associated album by My Chemical Romance or, if you prefer, one of them is The Dark Knight Returns where the other is Adam West braining the Joker with a giant inflatable clown shoe. That being said, you can sort of read California as referring to National Anthem a decade or so down the line, with the populace of the latter having become something amounting to urban legends. At least that's how it seemed to me.

Here we have one of those futuristic dystopias of vaguely Orwellian thrust, albeit filtered through Andy Warhol with elements of Mad Max and Walter Hill's Warriors. Society has become a parody of the consumerist present - although as to how much of it is truly a parody is open to debate. The corporation runs everything and the sex robots of Battery City have their own religion predicting the apocalyptic return of the mighty mechanical Destroya. You get the picture.

Naturally we have rebellious outsiders opposed to the status quo, which is where the Killjoys come in, except this one flips the usual script by revealing that life with the idealistic freedom fighters really ain't that great either; unwittingly echoing the current state of internet discourse wherein shitbags occupy the full extent of the political spectrum leaving the rest of us more or less ideologically homeless.

It's massively pessimistic whilst also being a breath of fresh air, and is beautifully told with the narrative sophistication of Philip K. Dick but in a visual medium. Cloonan's art reminds me a little of those horrible Deadline folks of days gone by, except it's much, much better and actually cute where appropriate rather than just turning in twee Hernandez impersonations. I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge it being related to an album by My Chemical Romance, possibly because in terms of mood it seems closer to Bowie's Diamond Dogs to my eyes, or possibly ears. Yet, despite being tied in with the music of a band I honestly can't listen to, this version of the Killjoys is pretty much perfect in every way.

Amazing Stories February 1980

Omar Gohagen (editor)
Amazing Stories February 1980 (1980)
I picked this up from eBay a while back for the Simak interview but never quite got around to reading the rest, for some reason. For what it may be worth, the Simak interview is great and leaves one wishing that it were possible to go back in time and hang out with the guy; and on the subject of the direct testimony of science-fiction authors, we also get observations from Asimov, Silverberg, and Alan Dean Foster of which the latter - often unfairly criticised as a hack for churning out all those movie tie-ins - is particularly enlightening.

Amazing Stories went through a number of significant changes during its lengthy publishing history - cancellation, relocation then revival without much duplication of the success of the Gernsback years, depending upon how one defines success. The sixties version seems to have been remembered as the era of crowd-pleasing big name reprints from which original authors received nary a red cent. I'm guessing the eighties incarnation continued the tradition of great editorial savings with, in this issue, big name interviews - which presumably qualified as promotional for those interviewed - and original stories by people you've never heard of, and possibly won't hear of ever again and who were most likely glad just to be in print.

Hal Hill's Chimera is accordingly underwhelming, despite being the main feature of this issue at thirty or so pages, nearly half of which constitute the biggest extended info-dump I've read in a long time. The story itself isn't actually bad, and I'd hesitantly hail it as a prescient foreshadowing of all that cyberpunk stuff which followed soon after were it not for the fact of it reading like the tie-in to a Quinn Martin telly adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Wayne Wightman's Do Unto Others, if harmless and mercifully short, reads somewhat like the response to a high school English assignment on the theme of just deserts. Michael P. Kube-McDowell - who apparently later co-wrote something with Arthur C. Clarke - continues the scholastic theme with Antithesis, wherein the black sheep of the college physics class writes a paper proving Einstein wrong; which would be okay in itself but for the slightly depressing two page supporting essay describing what we've just read as though we hadn't understood it, delivered in the tone of Leonard Nimoy emerging from the side of the screen to explain how not everything is as it seems; or like an episode of Catfish wherein Trayvon's dilemma with the elusive Tamiqua is reiterated over and over as though we hadn't understood it the first four fucking thousand times; or like me rephrasing the same complaint in three different ways right here.

Talking of repetition, this issue embellishes each tale with a few paragraphs under the heading Why We Chose This Story attempting to reinforce the proposed excellence of each tale but mostly just delivering a redundant summary.

When you are allowed to realise what really is happening, the surprise is as incredible as it must have been for Troy Haver, who then figures how to make the mental leap to liberation after all.

We know. We've just read it.

Linda Grossman's Black Hole, may or may not be science-fiction depending upon how you interpret the story. The editor reckons it is, which feels somewhat like a clandestine attempt to smuggle literature into the magazine of robots and bug-eyed monsters. I personally don't think it is, but it doesn't matter because it's about the only thing here that's worth reading apart from the interviews.

Normal service is resumed in Flight Over XP-637 by Craig Sayre in which the twist ending is that the shape changing alien visitors are disguising themselves as ducks, which is funny because we are led to believe that they are attempting to pass themselves off as human, but they aren't! They're changing themselves into ducks, like I said! Brilliant! Hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone.

Kurt von Stuckrad's Mushroom Farmers, is one of those cold war things featuring silos full of missiles which is, as such, okay in context of its type, I suppose, providing you don't mind that one of the nuclear button pushers had also been the class stud and no woman known had ever turned him down. It didn't bother me personally, although I'm confused by the idea of there being such a thing as a class stud. I don't even know if we had those in schools back in England, although if we did I'm fairly sure it wasn't me.

Finally, and mercifully, and mercifully short too, we end with Steve Miller's, Time Cycle, which is about a bloke who travels through time on a time cycle - which is like a motorbike - hence the title. I doubt it's the same bloke, but if it is, I definitely preferred Abracadabra and the song about people calling him the space cowboy, and I didn't like those at all.

I also have to wonder if people really called him the space cowboy, because it's interesting that he doesn't seem to remember the names of any of these people in the song. Perhaps he just wanted us to believe that people called him the space cowboy.

That Texas Blood

Chris Condon & Jacob Philips That Texas Blood (2021)
Well, this makes a pleasant change to the usual depiction of Texas in this sort of thing, this sort of thing being those special comics for mum and dad - no kids allowed! I suppose when I say the usual depiction I'm actually thinking of Garth Ennis donning his atomic powered thinking cap and cleverly depicting Texas as a place where siblings marry - chortle chortle - and have one-eyed kids - titter - who tie you up and bum you should you stop by and ask to use the telephone - guffaw belly-laugh belly-laugh - and if there have been others, they were hopefully a little more nuanced than an old Billy Connolly routine from the fucking seventies.

Anyway, That Texas Blood is described as a mature neo-western crime series on the Image Comics website, which is as good a description as any; and it inhabits a place which really does feel like Texas right down to the finer details of speech. Not only have I driven through Condon's fictitious Ambrose County but I feel like I know half of the people in this book, which serves as a testament to the power of doing one's homework and getting it right. That Texas Blood is a murder mystery, but primarily seems to be about sense of place and the possibility of escape from the same, and as with any quality narrative delivered by actual literate functioning adults, much of what it does is described in the spaces between what isn't said or clearly depicted. More than any other comic book I've read in the last few years - keeping in mind that most of them predate the nineties - That Texas Blood is absolutely cinematic in terms of pace, and to the point that it only really resembles what I tend to think of as a comic book in how it's reproduced as panels on pages with dialogue. Jacob Philips near photo-realist art is gorgeous, somewhat resembling that of his father, Sean, but more expressive, in my opinion.

I'm sure someone will try to make this into a Netflix series at some point, particularly given that they can at least save money on having to come up with a story board, but there's really no need. This thing is pretty much perfect as it is.