The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Dave Ball - Electronic Boy (2020)

Soft Cell were fairly important to me and continue to be so by some definition, so this seemed like essential reading; and sure enough, much of it is fascinating, particularly Ball's account of the early years. Additional points might be dispensed for Electronic Boy being a rock star autobiography free of the telltale as told to Lippy Scrungebucket or whoever in tiny letters beneath the name of the author, except I feel this one may have benefited from a more hands-on editor, or at least somebody with a strongly expressed second opinion. This isn't so much a complaint about anything bad as a feeling that it could have been better with just a little more fine tuning here and there.

Dave Ball has an amiable, conversational tone, and most of his book is engaging, although one's mileage may vary with the lists of various synths and effects boxes. A certain quota of clichés are committed, which is probably inevitable - observations in the immortal words of such and such, or the occasional sentence describing how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend Ray Reardon, the snooker champion*. However, Dave Ball is primarily a musician, and an exceptional one for what it may be worth, so it would be churlish to criticise him for failing to replace Shakespeare as our number one English language word doer, particularly where the whole is so entertaining. The problem seems to be one of focus - plenty of it for the years up to Soft Cell falling apart in the wake of their third album, after which it gets very uneven, zipping through the last couple of decades as though skipping through a DVD in search of a particular scene. I could have stood a little more detail with English Boy on the Love Ranch, the Grid, and other post-Cell endeavors; and when we come to 2002's Cruelty Without Beauty, we're half way through the account before it's even clear that they're not only back on speaking terms but have actually reformed. On this score, there's an entire chapter reproducing Dave's diary entries from crossing the Atlantic in a boat, and we don't actually discover why he was crossing the Atlantic in a boat until the following chapter. So it's a bit like having a conversation with someone who keeps playing with their phone - gems scattered here and there, but somehow it should have held together better.

It's still a great book though.

*: To be fair, this example is actually from the Cosey Fanni Tutti book.

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 

I read this mainly because it had begun to feel a bit weird that I hadn't, given the shadow it casts across various stretches of popular culture. Having been found in the pocket of the bloke who murdered John Lennon, and then again in the fictional narrative of Margaret Thatcher's aspiring assassin in Grant Morrison's St. Swithin's Day, I'd always assumed Catcher to be about a neurotic outsider who flips and consequently pops an innocent with a firearm - the blueprint for all those school shootings. Thankfully it isn't anything quite so obvious and the general concept of both teenagers and their inherent disgruntlement was still very much in development back in 1951.

So Holden Caulfield isn't the tidily modular rebel who rejects whatever you've got on principle, but rather is someone who has failed to connect with aspects of his own existence - like a more freewheeling version of Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, the first English translation of which had appeared just two years earlier, it might be noted. My own stepson had a couple of years at one of those supposedly prestigious military academies to which Americans with too much money send their offspring, and so I recognise Caulfield's environment, finding it both reassuring and depressing that someone else identified the exact same problems with such places over seventy years ago. Caulfield isn't a bad student, or a kid with any  psychological issues which would today be medicated to drooling oblivion. It's simply that he's just smart enough to recognise bullshit when he sees it and struggles to reconcile himself to what is expected of him, most of which is predicated on the existence of a noble world full of grand achievements, aspirations, and fine men delivering speeches in front of marble columns, as distinct from a world made entirely of bullshit. He's been taught to hold truth as among the highest of virtues and so cannot help but revolt against that which it reveals. In practical terms, this amounts to his dropping out of school and vanishing off into the wild, blue yonder over the course of a weekend, as told in rambling first person with endless digressions and passing distractions in Caulfield's own distinctive if occasionally limited turn of phrase. You might argue the case for it being a more populist Nausea with Caulfield, lacking Roquentin's philosophical rhetoric, obliged to define his disconnection in more familiar terms, or terms with which I was more familiar at least.

It isn't a literary precursor to Ill Bill's Anatomy of a School Shooting, despite the reputation, being concerned with cause more than dramatic effect, and I doubt it would have endured so well were that the case.

D.H. Lawrence - The Woman Who Rode Away (1928)

 

...and other stories, mostly written after The Plumed Serpent but prior to Lady Chatterley, and he'd apparently got most of the thrusting and scowling out of his system, which is nice. I tend to regard Lawrence's greatest strength as his ability to capture the soul of the moment, achieving in text an equivalent psychological effect to the work of the more tumultuous symbolist painters of the time, give or take a decade. However, there's an unfortunately fine balance to be struck and he was never the best judge of his own work, meaning he occasionally borders on unreadable, invariably because a cloying syrup of mood, interpretation, and even premonition brings everything grinding to a standstill so that it can feel as though you're trying to read a ten minute widdly-widdly guitar solo from the early seventies.

There are a couple of blanks in this collection for sure - tales which may or may not actually do something which proved difficult to identify or even to apply one's concentration - but the good stuff is arguably among the best he ever wrote. By this point Dave was well aware of his time having become limited, so maybe reconciliation to his own mortality had blown away a few of the cobwebs. Glad Ghosts and The Woman Who Rode Away in particular benefit from a clarity and a paring down of sentiment to just the implication which seems more or less unprecedented in Lawrence's fiction. He was, I assume, expanding his palette, and so four of these are generally credited with supernatural themes, most of which seemed symbolically layered rather than actually supernatural to me; although None of That might almost qualify as weird fiction by virtue of its arbitrary narrative swerves and surreal mood.

The Woman Who Rode Away is an odd one. It features a woman somewhat resembling Mabel Luhan who, fixating on the exotically indigenous, rides into the mountains of wild Mexico in search of an idealised native culture. Unfortunately she encounters the same and is ultimately sacrificed by its representatives. It's difficult to avoid the probability of the tale being Lawrence's revenge on Luhan, his former landlady at Taos, here brutalised by the reality of her own affectations in a distinctly unsavoury and arguably misogynist narrative, as I'm sure Lawrence was aware; and yet there's much more to the story than just this, which is what saves it from itself.

Regardless of a few duds, of the collections I've read, this may well be his greatest on the strength of where it succeeds.

Nigel Kitching & others - The Light Brigade (1990)

 

This may seem a bit of a stretch as reviews go - not even a stack of comic books, but a strip featured in an anthology title which was dead in the water by the eighth issue; so The Light Brigade was never finished, which is a shame.

The Light Brigade first appeared in the late and much missed Martin Skidmore's Trident - a bi-monthly which lasted a little over a year - and was arguably the lead strip given its featuring on three of the eight covers, notably those drawn by both John Ridgeway and Alan Davis. Eddie Campbell's superb Bacchus has obviously done much better in the long run, but The Light Brigade, co-created with Neil Gaiman - although his involvement was limited to the first instalment - felt like the potential hit single.

It's a cyberpunk comic strip hitting all of the points you would expect to find in a cyberpunk comic strip, but dating from 1989 - way before the rise of the internet. It wasn't the first, didn't do anything which hadn't already been done in a William Gibson novel, and in the wake of the movie Tron, I've no doubt everyone from the X-Men to Biffo the Bear had toppled some virtual corporate edifice in cyberspace by this point; but The Light Brigade nevertheless feels early, like the first expression of something new, as was, without quite having dated in the usual way. The story, such as it is, tells of four individuals, underwhelming urban nobodies in real life, waging a VR war as magically punky pirates; and it would probably be bollocks were it not for Nigel Kitching.

I gather Kitching went on to international renown as artist on the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book - which seems, by the way, a peculiarly logical development; but back in 1989 he was drawing this, Mark Millar's Saviour, and not much else that I'm aware of. His art tended to the starkly angular and expressionist while conveying a lightness of touch equal, I would argue, to that of Eddie Campbell elsewhere in the mag. We get a few fill-in episodes from adjacent artists, Nigel Dobbyn, D'Israeli and so on, each of which squares so beautifully with the whole as to come and go without the usual sense of disruption or looming deadlines. So I guess it's all down to Kitching's writing, which is well paced, erudite without waffling, and prone to sparking off new and delightfully wacky ideas above and beyond anything you would expect of punky pirates fighting Richard Branson in cyberspace. It was at least as good as anything in 2000AD that year.

Unfortunately, excepting Bacchus, it was significantly better than the rest of Trident for the most part -  a black and white newsprint anthology which never quite found its identity and was neither 2000AD, Deadline, nor the small press. It had its moments - notably a couple of strips by Denny Derbyshire - but was firing off in too many directions with too many weak links - not least being the terrible art of Lowlife. Thus did Trident fall from the edge after just one year, going the way of most attempts to sell not-quite-mainstream comic books to the English. I don't suppose The Light Brigade will ever be finished, but it should be remembered at least.

Nick Sweeney - Daedalus: All Dublin Talking (2023)

 

Never having read Ulysses, I may be at something of a disadvantage here given that Daedalus extends the existence of its principal character; and yet it didn't feel as though I was at a disadvantage. Similarly, this is a work in progress - a breather taken for the sake of comparing notes and due consideration given to what other materials will be needed before the building can be completed - and yet to me, in my potential ignorance, it feels finished. Daedalus presents thirteen snapshots in the life of himself beyond the final page of Joyce's novel and dating from 1904 to 1925. Sweeney hasn't yet settled on what will occur to link these interludes, hence the temporary pause to take stock.

I didn't have much of an idea of what occurred to Stephen before the final page of Joyce's novel, but Sweeney isn't afraid of making what I suspect may be dramatic changes - dramatic changes being more consistent with real life than with fannish extensions. So our man turns his back on the poetry and we find him later crossing the Atlantic to churn out popular songs for Tin Pan Alley - or at least one of its cousins - then hanging out on Hollywood lots with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. It probably could have turned a little pear-shaped given some of the supporting cast, but doesn't, retaining its focus on what it was doing anyway and otherwise ignoring the legends of celebrities who happen to be passing through; although this paragraph gave me a warm chuckle:

He gave in to sleep, dreamed of a bananaeating lion roaming the Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split, and he and Stan and a fat man comically trying to shoo it out the door before the illtempered boss noticed and put his one fearsome beady eye on them all.

Somehow, although written in a style which pays homage to Ulysses, or so I gather, Daedalus is recognisably the work of Nick Sweeney in that it's the voice established in Laikonik Express and The Émigré Engineer, which seems like no mean feat, elaborating on migratory themes - where we end up and how we're changed by the journey, which appeals to me for obvious reasons. So Daedalus isn't either - ugh - fan fiction, or even Wide Sargasso Sea which, fine book though it is, sings from an entirely different hymn sheet to Brontë's Jane Eyre. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is that it doesn't read like a work in progress and does everything it apparently needs to do in just 150 pages. It feels complete and satisfying as it stands, and doesn't suffer from its episodic composition; and it's of a quality suggesting that any expansion, extension, or filling in of gaps the author chooses to make can only add. I'll be interested to see where it goes from here.

I really need to read Ulysses, don't I?

A.E. van Vogt - Cosmic Encounter (1980)

I still find it amazing that my first encounter with the writing of A.E. van Vogt led me to conclude that he couldn't write, and that I might therefore scratch his name from my list; and yet here I sit, approximately fifteen years later, having now read thirty-four of his thirty-six novels - many of which bordered on incomprehensible - and countless short stories. I have only Siege of the Unseen and To Conquer Kiber left to read, and the latter exists only in its French translation so that one probably ain't happening. The French regard van Vogt as an important surrealist writer, which is fair.

My initially unfavourable reaction stemmed from his fiction suggesting an author drunk at the typewriter, and even now that's often how his books read. The difference is that I've learned to appreciate that the disorientation is orchestrated, and that there's a lot going on with this guy's work if you know what to look for.

Cosmic Encounter was one of his last novels and seems better realised than many others written around the same decade - although by better realised I mean that you can see he's doing something even if it's not obvious what it could be. We open on a pirate ship in the year 1704 as it encounters the robots of a Lantellan spacecraft and all spacetime collapses to that one year, with the entire past and future of the universe simply ceasing to exist, after which the novel gets weirder by the chapter. The explanation, when it finally comes, is difficult to understand, being wrapped up as it is in a mesh of van Vogt's ideas regarding the gulf between that which we observe and how we describe it; but if you hold on tight, concentrate hard, and re-read the more obtuse passages until some sort of understanding is reached, you just about get an impression of what he's been trying to do; and I'm beginning to suspect that he may have been using language and narrative to rewire the reader's brain so as to facilitate cognition in terms described by Korzybski's general semantics, of which A.E. was very much a fan. Of all his works, Cosmic Encounter is very odd, even more dreamlike than usual, and certainly seems to do something peculiar to your head.

Without being particularly familiar with Korzybski, I gather van Vogt's interest lay in establishing a form of logic which eschews the binary of either-or with nothing in between, a logic wherein two plus two can equal five, and we shouldn't get too hung up on his using pirates and space robots to communicate this. Cause and effect being something traditionally subject to an either-or duality, van Vogt plays it down, often uncoupling one from the other, writing everything exclusively in the moment - which is why you really have to hold on tight with this stuff, to pay attention, and not get too upset where common or garden linear sense goes flying out of the window.

So I enjoyed Cosmic Encounter a lot, even if I struggle to describe what it's about, that being something you have to experience for yourself. It's worth the effort.