Analog July 1971

John W. Campbell (editor)
Analog July 1971 (1961 but felt more like 1931)
This looks interesting, you think, so the next time you see a copy in a second hand place, you pick it up, maybe acquiring a stack of back issues before you've actually read any of them. Then you read them and a hard lesson is learned.

Campbell's editorial comprises the usual ranting about how hippy beatnik liberals are living in cloud cuckoo land, DDT is good, and how he'd like to see every endangered species wiped off the fucking face of the Earth; and on page seven there's an advert for a hardback collection of previous editorials should you wish to charge your pipe with a goodly plug of tobacco and sit chuckling over accounts of damn liberals and long hairs revealed for the fools they are by the mighty power of scientific discourse; and so to the stories...

Joseph P. Martino's Zero Sum seems to be a loose analogy of what was going on in Vietnam, which eventually comes out as one of those Asimov-style logic puzzles. Here's one sparkling example of its dialogue.

'Anyway, the point is there's one best mix of tactics, and you can't improve your situation by deviating from it. In fact, if you do deviate, your average losses increase. The way we figure it, on each engagement between a Destroyer and a Monitor, on average we should lose three quarters of a man less than they do. Instead, their losses average one and three eights man per engagement more than ours. And the reason is they're using the wrong mix of tactics. If they'd use the right mix, they could cut their losses, and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it.'

There's a scene of our lads watching governmental speeches about the war on telly which lasts for nine pages. To be fair, it picks up a little in the second half but only in the sense that an Ed Sheeran album probably won't be anything like so terrible as you expect it to be.

F. Paul Wilson's The Man with the Anteater starts off with both the charm and the cast promised by the title, then turns into a pseudo libertarian opinion column while the reader is distracted by union bashing comments on just the third or second page, all of which leaves a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.

I managed about four pages of Gordon R. Dickson's The Outposter, presumably the second half of a novel here serialised in instalments. It's probably unfair to judge something so poorly on the strength of four pages somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't even plough my gaze through the synopsis of what had already happened in the previous episode. I think it's about a ragtag crew of rebellious space renegades, or pirates, or something. I guess I'll never know.

James H. Schmitz's Poltergeist is, if not amazing, certainly readable; and A Little Edge by S. Kye Boult seems massively out of place here in terms of quality and, weirdest of all, seems to foreshadow the general tone of certain things by China Miéville.

Also there's an article about a computer game excitingly named Spacewar, which is probably hilarious if you care about such things given that this was 1971 and the guy spends twelve pages gushing over what may as well be Pong, but I couldn't give a shit about computer games. I tried half a page and found myself granted particular insight into Midge Ure's feelings regarding the city of Vienna.

The book review section uses up quite a few words in sneering at mainstream literary authors who dabble with science-fiction, for their admittedly well-written efforts are as naught compared to the power of Gordon R. Dickson, or indeed everything else published in the mighty pages of Analog; then spunks away what little validity the argument may have accumulated with praise for something by - ugh - Colin Wilson; which leaves us with just the letters page, which is mostly praise for previous Campbell editorials, including an angry housewife fulminating against kids these days. The one note of dissent comes from an anthropologist defending his field as a legitimate area of study, warranting a significantly longer response from Campbell restating his position that it's not science if it doesn't involved a blackboard covered in complicated equations, and only a fool would claim that blah blah blah…

I've got another four of these fucking things on my reading pile.

Tomb of Valdemar

Simon Messingham Tomb of Valdemar (2000)
Why do I do this to myself? It was the usual thing - shitty times justifying the written equivalent of comfort food because I'm too psychologically punch drunk to tackle Voltaire or any of the other stuff on the shelf of books purchased but as yet unread. I used to buy a couple of these Who things a month and read them religiously, and because that was more or less all I fucking read at the time, I lacked anything decent by which to make comparison, and so my filter was set pretty low. Some were great - as I've been able to confirm during more recent re-readings - and others were less great, meaning that attempted re-readings undertaken on this side of the millennium can be sometimes akin to tackling a Rupert annual, which is particularly disappointing when you have an apparently false memory of it having been at least up to the standard of Asimov or whoever.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Rupert annuals, by the way, but then I don't remember having read a Rupert annual which thought it was China Miéville.

Tomb of Valdemar has the reputation - at least in my head - of being the one where Simon Messingham got it right. It therefore seemed a safe bet, despite The Indestructible Man - which I read back in 2016 - being pure shite. Assorted Goodreads drones hail Tomb as being proper science-fiction like the stuff by all those guys who wrote those books they haven't actually read, or else miss the point completely by praising Tom Baker who is a television actor and as such had what I would suggest should be considered an entirely peripheral influence on this masterpiece.

Anyway, to get to the point, here we have Baker's Doctor imaginatively transposed to what is more or less Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, but written so as to really, really, really make it feel like something which was on telly whilst also invoking Lovecraft at his most purple. The story is actually decent and not without a sense of invention, but the author insists on addressing both us and his characters in the rhetorical tone of a ponderous seventies Marvel comic, asking Tom Baker if he really thought that was a good idea, asking what he didst imagineth wouldst happen, and all that sort of shit liberally seasoned with ohs and ahs and self-conscious asides referring to whether or not we readers are getting anything out of Messingham's testimony; which I sort of wasn't. Tomb initially reads with the cadence of someone who would rather be telling you the story out loud while pulling spooky faces in a room lit only with black candles, so naturally there's a shitload of those inactive sentences wherein the full stop is used to invoke a portentous Orson Welles voice over; which I guess the author believes is dramatic, but which suggests a basic lack of ability. At least to me. Because it's obvious. And tedious. Just crap.

Also, one of the characters is described wearing a Red Dwarf T-shirt, so tee hee. Hooray for super bingeworthy cult telly shows. Plus there's Huvan, the pimple-spattered comedy adolescent who writes terrible poetry and takes himself far too seriously, which would be funnier if it didn't feel as though we were reading one of his efforts.

To be fair, this still pisses all over The Unreadable Man, which admittedly isn't saying much, and there's enough going on to infer there having been a decent novel in here somewhere, albeit one which has been obscured by its own telling. I really hope the other five million I'm still to revisit aren't quite so shabby as this.

Stardreamer

Cordwainer Smith Stardreamer (1971)
I'm a bit mystified as to why it should have taken me so long to stumble across this guy's work. I've known his name for some time, although I'm not sure why given his absence from the many science-fiction anthologies I've read over the years, right up until last month when his Alpha Ralpha Boulevard stamped itself firmly on my consciousness. He clearly had a reputation, fans, and an established body of highly distinctive work, so who knows? Maybe he was just a bit too weird to have ended up sandwiched between Isaac Asimov and Murray Leinster in the sort of collections I routinely read.

Cordwainer Smith turns out to have been the pen name of one Paul Anthony Myron Linebarger, a prolific author who employed various pseudonyms whilst working in adjacent genres. Significantly he was additionally a keen scholar of Chinese culture and tradition through it having played a role in his upbringing, which doubtless accounts for the form taken by his science-fiction, which has the feeling of traditional Buddhist parables in certain respects.

Stardreamer posthumously collects eight short stories, most taking place within the same peculiar mythology, a future universe governed by something called the Instrumentality of Mankind, which is described and developed with a rare literary flourish suggestive of Ursula LeGuin or more recent authors such as Iain M. Banks or China Miéville. The narrative has a beautiful, poetic flow suggestive of something which feels substantially philosophical on some level, yet without being a bore about it.

This was a delight to read from start to finish. I wish someone had told me about this guy sooner.

Head of State

Andrew Hickey Head of State (2015)
Full disclaimer: I painted the cover. I sort of know the author, and in fact he asked me if I wanted to read an earlier draft of this novel prior to publication - which I declined as I dislike reading off a screen and wanted to wait for the finished thing; and I get massive shout outs and nuff respeck on the closing page. My impartiality may therefore be somewhat open to question blah blah blah...

Fuck it. This is a great book, and I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with any of the above any more than it derives from the stark contrast of my having recently emerged from an agonising trawl through all four-billion chapters of Perdido Street Description - I mean Perdido Street Station.

Actually, to be honest, I passed on the offer of getting to read the earlier draft because I was a little worried that I wouldn't enjoy it and would thus find myself in the awkward position of disliking the work of someone I generally admire, and the entire internet would become an expanded version of Father Ted's increasingly uncomfortable encounters with novelist Polly Clarke, author of Bejewelled with Kisses. Andrew had sent me a few excerpts in the vague hope of providing some inspiration for the cover image, or maybe just for the sake of feedback, and I noticed the entire thing appeared to be written as a series of first person accounts, and that one of those accounts took the form of the self-conscious blog entries of a young journalist, somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries to my mind. It all seemed so heavy-handed that I really wasn't sure there was any advice I could give, for the same reason that I'm not sure I could really give any useful advice to China Miéville aside from write a better book. On the other hand, despite these misgivings, I've read Andrew's fiction before, and also his non-fiction which itself demonstrates a profound understanding of how fiction works, and his track record has been pretty fucking great, so I assumed and hoped it would all work out in the end with further rewrites, which it did and with knobs on.

I had a feeling that, regardless of the above, Head of State would have plenty going for it once polished up a bit, but I had no idea it would pupate into something quite so solid, quite so impressive as it has. Andrew wrestles prose with the skill of a master of many years standing, setting narratives against one another, lightly scenting passages with secondary and even tertiary levels of meaning, nesting stories within stories, even speaking directly to the reader without so much as a hint of either points or literary ability stretched beyond natural reach. It may help that behind all of the curtains, Head of State is a fairly simple story at least some of which is about the means by which that story is told, and the way in which the story is told actually constitutes a fairly essential plot detail. It's the kind of thing Grant Morrison has tried to do in comics on occasion, but here it works better, related with a somehow friendlier tone by an author who seems quite keen that the reader should understand what he is trying to say; and to further extend the analogy, of all the Faction Paradox novels published since This Town Will Never Let Us Go, in certain respects Head of State seems the thematically closest to the writing of Lawrence Miles, albeit a slightly happier Lawrence Miles who listens to the Beach Boys. I should probably stress at this point that Head of State doesn't read so much inspired by as in sympathy with. It's very much Hickey's own thing, and does much which eludes other writers, not least being that Rachel Edwards' somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries are actually supposed to be irritating and self-conscious and as such work perfectly within the context of the whole. Similarly impressive is our token conspiracy driven right-wing gun nut written as a rounded, believable, even sympathetic character rather than a check-list of hate-filled clichés driving around in an El Camino with Kiss on the tape deck. Andrew's powers of characterisation are such that even the most unpleasant characters speak to us on some level without need of the whining qualification of oh he's only racist because when he was just a kid... which is entirely consistent with what I understand to be Andrew's generally humanist view that the great majority of people are essentially decent in some respect, regardless of evidence to the contrary; and whilst we're here, his clear and erudite understanding of the American political landscape makes a refreshing change from the usual sub-Frank Miller bollocks.

Looking at the individual pieces, this is an incredibly ambitious novel, not least in terms of how it is written, and there's an awful lot which could have gone horribly wrong, but it's the tidiest piece of work I've read in some time.

Perdido Street Station

China Miéville Perdido Street Station (2000)
I'd heard good things about China Miéville, and it seemed like time to give him a shot, encouraged somewhat by those less favourable online reviews promising an author who liked to show off with all those big, fancy words what you can't understand and you have to like look them up in a dictionary because he thinks he's all lush and that with his long words but he don't know nuffink; and so on and so forth - such thickie-alienating criticism usually being indicative of somebody getting something right.

Perdido Street Station begins well with vivid and engrossing descriptions of the world it inhabits, a world Warren James describes - in the selection of quotations from reviews serving for preface - as a cross between Blade Runner and the London of Charles Dickens, which I only mention because I'm astonished that someone may actually have been paid to write such a sentence. Along similar lines I've also noticed Perdido Street Station cropping up in steampunk lists, because apparently anything not actually featuring the Starship Enterprise or lasers is now steampunk, thus increasing the aggregate quota of cultural reference points for anyone wishing to saddle up their velocipede and join in the blinking steampunk fun, what?

Huzzah!

Thankfully Perdido Street Station is none of the above. Rather it inhabits its own world, as much fantasy as science-fiction and populated by all manner of vaguely-but-not-quite-familiar biological oddities, the most extreme of which would be the scarab headed khepri, the females of which have a human body with a scarab head - not a beetle's head you understand, but an entire beetle complete with legs and wings as a head. Elsewhere, the laws of physics aren't quite the same as anything with which we are familiar, with mysterious forces adhering to a logic which seems to be of dreamlike or even overtly Surrealist intent; and it's all kind of disgusting with orifices dripping vaguely sexual effluvia onto mildewed Victorian brickwork left, right, centre, up, down, inside, and out. My Warren James description would be a Human Centipede version of Terry Pratchett but without the jokes.

As I say, Perdido Street Station begins well, but I was bored shitless by about page two-hundred - a third of the way in. The imagery is astonishing, but begins to get in the way of the book fairly quickly, and eventually the whole sags beneath the weight of description. Someone steps outside to scrape some poo off their boot and we're off again - another five fucking pages accounting for the life cycle of whatever produced the poo seemingly just for the sake of waving yet another fistful of suppurating tentacles in the readers' face. It may not be showing off, as claimed by some who probably shouldn't bother with books in the first place, and as for Miéville allegedly having a thesaurus stuck up his bottom, I didn't personally notice any unfamiliar words; but it does become a little boring after a while, as the narrative continually fails to get around to its own point, whatever that may be. I suspect there probably is a point, maybe something along the lines of Crime and Punishment with a higher quotient of dockyard oysters, but I stopped caring after a while. Chapter Thirty-Nine, for example, reveals certain characters to be under the influence of handlingers, which seem to be parasitic worms, each with a human hand for a head, specifically a human hand clasped around the neck of its host. Their introduction doesn't really serve to explain anything requiring explanation, and doesn't seem to do anything beyond adding further gratuitously sticky texture. Then four-million pages later we discover that the guy who had his wings cut off, the one who provides much of the forward motion for the rest of the cast, is a rapist and therefore a bad lad so we don't want to help the fucker after all, and that's the end of that. Maybe it's a subversion of the typical quest narrative and by association reader expectations, but by that point I'd ceased to care about any of it.

In terms of invention, style, and poetry, this is a great book, but it has no sense of humour, and doesn't actually appear to do anything besides stand in the corner trying hard to look interesting whilst outstaying its welcome by several weeks. Apparently he's written better, but after this, my curiosity is not what it could be.

Animal Man: Animal vs. Man / Rotworld - the Red Kingdom

Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder, Steve Pugh, Travel Foreman etc.
Animal Man: Animal vs. Man (2012)
Animal Man: Rotworld - the Red Kingdom (2013)
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station opens wonderfully and is beautifully written, but by page two-hundred I was bored shitless and sorely in need of something a little more immediate and enjoyable by way of a palate cleanser before committing to the remaining forty-fucking-million chapters. Further instalments of the revived Animal Man comic seemed to fit the bill, not least because of my having two whole unread volumes in which to immerse myself. Interestingly enough, the thematic shift is probably not that pronounced, given the emphasis on biological horror in Perdido Street Station.

Anyway, the continuation of the story which began with The Hunt holds up generally well, and is at least as good as anything from the Vertigo incarnation of the title, regarding which, it was nice to note the narrative assimilation of the Grant Morrison iteration, and even those yellow extraterrestrials from which our hero derived his amazing animal powers back in a 1965 issue of Strange Adventures. Slightly stranger was finding Buddy Baker back in a version of the regular DC universe as populated by Superman, Batman, Beast Boy, and a bunch of other faintly ludicrous characters with whom I am only distantly familiar. I say a version of the DC universe, because this is the one in which most of the costumed types are dead and have been revived as zombie-like soldiers of the Rot, so it's obvious there's going to be one massive fuck-off sized reset button popping up at some point, which sort of diminishes the integrity of the whole for me, as does the sheer spectacle of all those zombie superheroes flying into battle - ludicrous and as such all well and good in Marshal Law, but it seems an uncomfortable fit here.

Well, Animal Man is still fairly enjoyable regardless, if occasionally reading like it can't really decide on whether it's a post-Vertigo comic book or a 1980s issue of Firestorm the Nuclear Man. The art is mostly spectacular, although Andrew Belanger seems a bit out of place with his cute manga faces and everything looking as though he hasn't quite got all of the Teen Titans Go! out of his system.

Oh well, back to boring China Miéville, I guess.