Mysteries of Time & Space

Brad Steiger Mysteries of Time & Space (1974)
Being massively into the flying saucer shit as a kid, this one seemed life changing at the time, and so I recalled it as having been a cut above the usual fare without actually recalling what distinguished it from the usual mumbling accounts of a light which definitely wasn't a helicopter seen briefly in a field. Having since developed critical faculties, or at least some critical faculties, one might predict this particular trip down memory lane leading to inevitable disappointment, perhaps even embarrassment, but no.

As usual, Steiger cheerfully throws everything into the mix with casual abandon, even the stuff you would think might drastically reduce the possibility his being taken seriously by anyone at all; and so, aside from the usual saucers, swamp monsters, ghosts, and men in black we have human footprints in Cambrian shale, ancient spark plugs, and the United States of Iynkicidu. The key to Steiger's success is that he gives everything equal whack, and avoids the usual bollocks asking whether we readers have an open mind or whether we've been brainwashed by the so-called scientistic rationale of those so-called authorities scared to face the truth of the so-called facts. If anything, he takes apparent delight in how preposterous some of this seems to be; and because everything here is offered as a claim which therefore remains entirely subject to debate, it doesn't actually insult anyone's intelligence, excepting possibly the sort of evangelical hyper-rationalists who probably deserve it.

Steiger not only writes in the spirit of Charles Fort, but with this one he does a significantly better job in so much as that it more or less duplicates the structure of Lo! in seeking a means by which all manner of seemingly unrelated screwy claims may be seen as part of the same phenomenon, but comes to a somewhat more satisfying conclusion. Well, maybe not more satisfying - depending on how much of this stuff you actually believe - so much as simply one requiring much less suspension of disbelief because, rather than anything in the realm of Fort's upside down space volcanoes, one significant aspect of Steiger's conclusion is that there may be a strongly subjective element to the saucers and swamp monsters, even something vaguely compatible with Jung's take on the same.

As ever with books of this type, some suspension of disbelief is required and one should avoid placing too much stock in the reportage of anything which is obviously bollocks, but if you read with the notion that some percentage of what is claimed here is either true, or seemed absolutely true to those involved, then there's a lot of cerebral pleasure to be had from Steiger's efforts towards figuring it out, even when skating dangerously close to self-help literature, as he does in the conclusion.

Miracleman: The Golden Age

Neil Gaiman & Mark Buckingham Miracleman: The Golden Age (1999)
Is anyone else getting bored of the increasingly labyrinthine publishing history of Marvelman, or whatever he's called this year? I know I am. This reprints a reprint of an Eclipse comic which apparently no longer ever happened, may not actually have needed to happen in the first place, and may even have been redrawn according to some online article I can no longer find which was admittedly probably referring to Miracleman: The Silver Age, but never mind.

To briefly digress, some decades ago I went through a phase of wishing I could write superhero comics. I longed to be taken seriously as an author of frowning material involving capes, powers and important messages. The main obstacle to this career swivel was that I could barely string a sentence together. I wasn't particularly literate and what strips I had scrawled up to that point were improvised and heavily reliant on knob gags, so I sat down with a stack of my fave comics - mostly X-Men titles and things written by Alan Moore - and I tried really hard to work out what was going on so as to arrive at a method by which I too might tell a story. Eventually I accumulated a loose group of guidelines and techniques strip-mined mostly from the aforementioned Moore, methods I might employ so as to conceal my not actually having any story worth telling; roughly speaking, this sort of thing:

• Mess up the lives of your characters and the story will form around what happens as you try to get them back into shape.
• Don't be afraid of novelty. It looks like imagination and most people can't tell the difference.
• Quote freely, make frequent references to music, films, or literature generally regarded as cool. References to persons generally regarded as interesting are also to be encouraged - Crowley, Jung, Shakespeare and so on.
• Quote yourself freely, treating your story thus far as something of inherent weight and mystery. Maybe that person in the background back on page four could turn out to be some kind of mutant mastermind orchestrating everything from behind the scenes.
• Repeat yourself. People will mistake it for a motif and assume you know what you're doing.

Unfortunately, I learned just enough to immediately recognise my own efforts as complete bullshit once I got to work; and perhaps equally unfortunately, every time I pick up something written by Neil Gaiman - although admittedly it's been a while - it really looks to me as though he's using the very same checklist.

I discovered Neil Gaiman with an early issue of Sandman, went briefly nuts for the guy and bought up everything I could get my hands on; although within about a year I'd begun to detect the faint essence of something which I found difficult to like. I kept on buying Sandman, but Lordy those faux-Shakespearean issues bored me shitless; and I wasn't that wild about Harry fucking Potter even when he was Timothy Hunter; and eventually it all became too annoying so I flogged the lot on eBay. I recall the first twenty or so issues of Sandman as essentially decent, and I'd buy the collected editions but for the bloody awful art which somehow bothered me less at the time; and then there was Miracleman.

We didn't really need any more issues of Miracleman after Alan Moore was done with it, and I'm not convinced Neil Gaiman's run really adds anything. To be fair, The Golden Age seems to be the first of a longer three-part story, and is obviously mostly just scene setting, albeit for a story with a scene already set during Moore's run; and you can tell it's scene setting because it doesn't actually have a story. In fact it barely even has forward motion. I appreciate the device of describing something indescribable through the lives of those observing it from afar, but it reads like a series of novel images of the kind I would have tried to pass of as narrative back in my youth.

Lonely bloke looks after windmills, shags Miraclewoman.

Precocious Miraclebaby has superpowers, insults doting mother.

Geezer climbs mountain but doesn't find answer.

See, they're not really stories, just single images described at length by use of selected phrases deployed so as to suggest a particular mood, and at the end we're supposed to go wow whilst remaining nevertheless touched by the subtle poetry of human interaction; but nothing actually happens, and it really feels as though the author hopes we won't notice. It's the exact same thing which Steven Moffat does on Doctor Who, or did last time I could be arsed to sit through yet another time-wasting episode. A skeleton in a space suit does not in and of itself constitute narrative.

Where was I?

To be fair, the issue spent in the company of Andy Warhol, one of the many resurrected in Miracleman's brave new world of wonders, is terrific, and possibly the best thing I've read by Neil Gaiman; so I guess I can see what he's trying to do for most of this stuff, but none of the rest really comes close, at least not for me, because I can't read past what feels like writing by formula. We have the Kid Miracleman teen cultists drawn in apparent homage to the Hernandez brothers, because Love & Rockets is like rilly amaaazing, yeah? Then there's an incomprehensible Prisoner homage with edgily xeroxed images, and God help us yet another fucking story told as a twee children's book - novelty after novelty after novelty, and of course the poetry of the writing should be sufficient to save the thing from its own neatly modular eccentricity, except it can't because as usual it's so bleeding middle-class that it may as well be set in the same universe as Love Actually; and oh lookee - everyone meets up at the Notting Hill carnival in the final episode. Fancy that.

I realise I'm in the minority, but surely I can't be the only person to have had this reaction to Neil Gaiman's writing? Maybe American Gods is amazing. I don't know. I can only base my opinion on what I've managed to read by him, and it's all been twee; and instances of spontaneity and imagination feel calculated to invoke specific reactions; and it lacks danger or the flavour of any experience beyond the somewhat limited world of a conspicuously middle-class author who wishes only to entertain; and it feels like something for which there could never be greater praise than a glowing write up in Time Out; and when I read anything by Neil Gaiman it feels as though he's sat at my side, digging me in the ribs to see whether I'm suitably full of wonder, and it feels as though he's ever so pleased with himself.

That said, I'm sure he's a lovely bloke in person.

I expect Tim Burton's fucking smashing too.

Flying Saucers and the Three Men

Albert K. Bender Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962)
This account looms large in terms of UFOlogical history, and John Keel described Bender's work as the single biggest influence on saucer lore, ever. Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau in 1952, an independent organisation dedicated to the investigation of the phenomenon run entirely by amateurs and enthusiasts, and the very first such organisation of its kind. Momentarily setting aside any urge towards smirking we may feel, Bender's work - collating reports of the unexplained from across the globe in the form of a quarterly magazine called Space Review - brought him, with a certain peculiar inevitability, into direct contact with entities claiming to be from outer space.

Whether this really happened or not is another thing entirely, but from his testimony I'm very strongly inclined to believe that it seemed absolutely real to Albert K. Bender, because if he were consciously making it up, he probably would have come up with something more plausible, more consistent, and less obviously surreal. There are a few significant clues as to the objective reality of what Bender claims to have experienced, notably:

When I regained my senses I was standing alone in the center of my den. The headache remained, and my eyes burned and felt swollen. I sat down on the bed, rubbed my eyes and head. Again I wondered if I were going out of my mind. Had I suffered some kind of fit? Had I dreamed this and the other realistic experiences? I began to think it might be logical and wise to see a doctor.

The mysterious headaches sound a lot like pollen allergies to me, but as with claims made in much UFO literature, it can often be difficult to pass judgement with absolute certainty. It could all be made up, but if so wouldn't you make a better job of it? It could all be an illusory interference pattern resulting from schizophrenic disassociation of different areas of the brain, but why do people we have never met seem to be having identical experiences? It could all be real by some definition, but if it were, wouldn't we know for sure by now?

For what it may be worth, Bender's experience involved contact with apparently alien beings who took him to some sort of flying saucer base and then explained in detail what they were doing on Earth, followed by the warning that he should tell no-one anything of what he has learned; and implausible though the account certainly is, it can't be avoided that a great many aspects of what Bender was supposedly told seem to square unusually well with other parts of the broader mythology. The same is true of his subsequent, often clearly terrifying encounters - notably involving the coming and going of mysterious and less than amicable visitors heralded by the overpowering smell of sulphur - just like those mediaeval demons - and the manifestation of something which had been named the Flatwoods Monster based on earlier sightings around the West Virginia town of that name.

Curiously enough, just as I was conducting a google search for the Flatwoods Monster - never having heard of the thing - and just as a series of bizarre artist's impressions came up, I heard the heavy footsteps of something much larger than a man walking across the roof of my house. Knowing the deep and repetitive thumps were almost certainly originated with somebody firing a ceremonial cannon at the nearby military base wasn't quite enough to quell the shiver of genuine terror I felt for just a moment - recalling how those who look for saucers have, like Bender, tended to find them. Assuming for the sake of argument that the kind of encounters Bender describes are a Jungian phenomenon, their perceived reality in the eye of the beholder renders them no less worthy of serious investigation.

In his introduction, Gray Barker describes his editing of Bender's original manuscript, apologising that the author made no claim to be a professional writer; so I was expecting outsider art. However, I doubt the manuscript can have been edited to any significant extent given that the prose shares the same easy rhythm as Bender's writing in issues of Space Review; and the apology is unnecessary. The account occasionally suggests one of Hank Hill's extended essays on the joys of propane and as such lacks the pacing of a thriller, but it really doesn't need it. Bender writes honestly, retaining a healthy scepticism regarding even his own testimony which, regardless of how much it may help his case or otherwise, makes for a fascinating piece of autobiography with none of the embittered or overly-defensive qualities which spoil most UFO literature. True or not, this is one hell of a weird story.

The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson The Mind Parasites (1967)
Once was that I held Colin Wilson in relatively high regard, at least as the one author of cranky pseudoscience literature who stood a chance at being right about some of it. Somebody had given me a copy of Mysteries, of which I read about half. I tried it a couple of times, on each occasion losing interest around the halfway mark, at which point Colin started bringing in theories too wacky even for me. Later I realised that most of the good stuff had actually come from T.C. Lethbridge who wrote some broadly fascinating books about dowsing and the like. Mysteries tied Lethbridge in with some of Wilson's own ideas, most notably the one about a ladder of selves, which seems to work quite well as psychological analysis without requiring that one should take it as a literal description of the mechanism of the human mind.

Later I picked up The Outsider from a charity shop, but ended up giving it away because I couldn't be arsed to read it. The Outsider was amazing according to apparently everyone, an important book in the truest sense; and then my friend Paul Woods, who I seem to recall having had some dealings with Wilson in his capacity as a criminologist, always spoke very highly of the man, albeit not quite so highly as Wilson spoke of The Mind Parasites, his own novel:

Is it not time that we create a new type of novel? I think of a hatchet biting into a tree and making the chips fly, not an evasion of reality or a description of it, but an attack on it... What is needed is an existential realism. Like the social realism of the Soviets, yet biting much deeper; its attitude is not passive or pessimistic. In a qualified sense, it might be called practical; it wishes to change things. What it wishes to change I prefer to leave unsaid, it can be inferred from this book.

Really? This was a new type of novel? I was expecting some sort of - dunno - a mash-up of William Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Guy Debord, massive ideas flying about left, right and centre, a book reading like nothing I have ever read before.

The Mind Parasites gets off to a tremendous start as a more contemporary take on Lovecraft's squelchy mythology with mysterious blocky cities discovered several miles underground, events unfolding with the chilling realism of a Quatermass serial; after which it all goes very much tits up. The underground city is revealed to have been a red herring for reasons which either remain unclear or are so poorly described that I've forgotten them. The true culprits are the mind parasites, malign incorporeal entities dwelling in the depths of the collective unconscious, or some other place which probably makes more sense if you've read either Jung or Huxley. These entities are the cause of war, racism, cruelty, inequality, suicide, boredom, accidents at work, and Doctor Who having been shite since it came back on the telly. Were it not for them we would all be telepathic supermen, at our full potential and qualified to lead the common herd of humanity to its destiny and all that good stuff. The thing that bothers me is that I suspect Wilson may actually have believed at least some of this crap.

A few years ago I made fumbling attempts to identify a literary genre which I provisionally named dinnerpunk based on it comprising poorly written yarns which come to their authors as they mow the lawns of their Surbiton homes as Marjorie is preparing dinner. They've read Biggles, several Ian Flemings, and it can't be that hard considering some of the fairies who make a living of it, so they're jolly well going to have a go. Dinnerpunk fiction tends to be written from an entirely male perspective, suggests a conservative view of the world, usually one fixating on some peculiar detail such as aviation history - because nutters are always into planes for some reason - and amongst the cast of chaps and renowned scientists, there's nearly always somebody identified simply as the Colonel. Dinnerpunk is the written equivalent to Bob Mortimer's Graham Lister character. It knows doctors and dentists, professional people...

Regrettably, after the tremendous start described above, The Mind Parasites reveals itself to be not merely a disappointment, but to be fully-leaded weapons grade dinnerpunk.

Neither is there any evidence to indicate that the crew of the Pallas intended to build a new civilisation on another planet. There were only three women on board. The number would surely have been higher if any such plan had been contemplated?

I should jolly well, say so. Our heroes are a team of top scientists who travel around in a gang of about fifteen for most of the book, routinely pooling their psychic powers to make the world a better place. Human history is a litany of woe thanks to the mind parasites, because it was them what made us do all that bad stuff like Hitler and that, which ironically is itself a typically right-wing narrative, the enemy and source of all woe being those people or things over there; it's because of them that we can't have nice stuff. Freed of the mind parasites, we are able to travel around in gangs of fifteen making stuff more good, even psychokinetically sending the moon crashing into the sun because that was where the mind parasites was all coming from innit. Except the mind parasites are actually ourselves, or at least ourselves what have failed to evolve into thinking, reasoning supermen, people who know doctors and dentists. Meanwhile the black nations of Africa unite and rise up against the white man because the mind parasites make them do it innit, just in case you mistakenly thought they might have had any other better reason to be pissed off.

Frankly, it's a complete fucking dog's dinner besides which even Lindsay Gutteridge's dinnerpunk tour de force Cold War in a Country Garden may as well be The Mayor of Casterbridge. The psychological discussion amounts to pseudoscientific bollocks of the kind which invariably namechecks Velikovsky, Gurdjieff, Madam Blavatsky and the usual wankers; there's barely a story to speak of; and there's a faintly unsavoury aftertaste of Hubbardry - telepathy, Nietzsche, supermen blah blah blah - except Hubbard could at least string a decent story together. This is like bad van Vogt stripped of all charm and art.

He had a shuddering distaste for most human beings; he once complained to me that most of them seemed so unfinished and shabby. Myers made me feel that the true historian is a poet rather than a scientist. He once said that the contemplation of individual men made him dream of suicide, and that he could reconcile himself to being human only by considering the rise and fall of civilisations.

I suspect Colin Wilson, whilst he may have been prone to a degree of ukippery, probably wasn't entirely a man without merits, but none of them are to be found in The Mind Parasites which was most certainly never a new kind of novel by any description. It's not often that I'm driven to such harsh words with regard to a book, but this really was a complete load of shit.