Planet Comics volume one

Planet Comics volume one (2012)
A massive stack of these turned up in my local Half Price, numerous titles from the thirties and forties and entire runs of things I've never heard of reprinted over a number of volumes. I kept a distance, knowing my own tendency to collect complete sets, but curiosity overcame me. Just one won't hurt, I thought, and Planet Comics seemed closest to my interests. Apparently this thing ran to seventy-three issues, of which the first four are reproduced here, and aside from Will Eisner having drawn a couple of covers, I'd never heard of either it or anyone involved.

I guess from this that mainstream comic strips of the forties were in certain respects closer to silent film than the narratives with which we are familiar. The tales here comprise mostly a series of bold images, more summaries than stories, with text usually serving to emphasise or clarify what we're looking at and only occasionally to explain. The art is generally amateurish, but simple enough to survive crude printing on what probably may as well have been Izel toilet paper, and so strongly stylised as to rise above most of its technical failings. Of course, I'm looking at this stuff seventy-five years later, and that which I see as having novel or otherwise exotic qualities may simply be hack work and crap by ordinary criteria; and there's also the possibility that what I'm enjoying pertains to how closely it resembles strips which have parodied or emulated this sort of material - early issues of Viz, Reid Fleming, and particularly Flaming Carrot; but fuck it - it works for me.

The strips are mostly variations on the theme of the loosely Gernsbackian science hero in thrills and scrapes reminiscent of the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs or E.E. 'Doc' Smith - variations on Flash Gordon in other words, right down to the one-then-two syllable names - Flint Baker, Buzz Crandall, and Spurt Hammond, to name but three. The adventures tend to involve alien despots and female companions kidnapped or else terrorised by the same, and other planets of our solar system tend to bear a suspicious resemblance to Earth. Auro, Lord of Jupiter, for example, tells the story of Auro, a human child orphaned and abandoned on Jupiter and raised by a sabre tooth tiger to rule the planet - which seems to be mostly jungle - by virtue of his superior strength and intelligence. It has to be said that aside from the occasional space rocket, Auro is a lot like Tarzan.

As with Flash Gordon, most of our guys seem to inhabit a swashbuckling narrative of kings, queens, castles, and beautiful princesses, with a cursory mention of the tale being set on Neptune or Pluto to qualify it as science-fiction. A particularly bewildering episode of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force takes our man to the planet Zog whereupon the local and inevitably troubled ruler informs him that he must fight a two-headed giant which has been inducing terror amongst the natives, and he must fight the beast whilst disguised as a character called Torro. Unlike Cole, Torro has a moustache and a mullet, and given that the reasoning behind this transformation is never explained, I've a feeling it may have been effected so as allow the artist to recycle an existing strip for the second half of this one. Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

Yet despite all of this, there is genuine charm in much of this material, and the better strips are almost hypnotically weird. Plots twist beyond reason and virtually without explanation in the majority of the stories, conclusions occur abruptly or not at all in a couple of cases, and we're left with the feeling that someone was either drunk or making it up as they went along. In other words, if you enjoy A.E. van Vogt, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Planet Comics.

Above all, regardless of narrative peculiarities, whilst the art remains awkward and angular thoughout, these tales are packed with arresting, even nightmarishly surreal images and an often powerful sense of design consistent with the era. Just about every panel of the amusingly named Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer will pop your eyes from your head, and Henry Kiefer's artwork is genuinely beautiful even if he could have used a few more lessons in figure work. It's a shame Spurt didn't get a longer run in the title, lasting only up to issue thirteen according to Wikipedia, although I suppose at least it means I won't feel obliged to hunt down all eighteen or however many volumes, should I end up going down that road.

On a purely technical level Planet Comics is probably one of the shabbiest things I've ever read, and yet I find myself absolutely transfixed.

Islands in the Sky

Arthur C. Clarke Islands in the Sky (1952)
Here's another early Arthur featuring a cast of nerds, squares, Poindexters and Brainiacs who point at things and then furnish each other with detailed scientific explanations as to what those things are, and in the case of Islands in the Sky, they're mostly rockets and space stations. This one's a juvie, but is nonetheless enjoyable for all of its edumacational aspirations thanks to Clarke's clear, engrossing prose - and I would have added timeless to the description but for Islands being so firmly nailed to the early fifties that I'm sure some hipster will already have it filed under some ludicrous invented classification, ovaltinepunk or something of the sort. If you're sat there clapping your hands and squealing at the idea of ovaltinepunk as an exciting new retro-genre, please kill yourself now.

Anyway, a wholesome and duly studious young lad wins a competition on the telly, and the prize is a visit to a space station, and thus do we have a novel. Whilst Clarke is rightly praised for having forseen all sorts - not least being the communication satellite - most striking from a twenty-first century perspective is that this was written in a world without computers, and of complex calculations performed on a slide rule, and of apprenticeships undertaken once you've left school; so it's more interesting in terms of the history of futurism, which I didn't expect.

It's striking just how much Clarke failed to predict; which is thrown into sharp relief when the novel occasionally puffs itself up like Kenneth Clarke to point out that actually, this isn't one of your ghastly magazine stories, even though the lineage is earlier acknowledged in a passing reference to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space.

It wouldn't do in a Shakespeare play for all the characters to be floating around in mid-air. So the actors had to use magnetic shoes—a favourite dodge of the old science fiction writers, though this was the only time I ever found them used in reality.

Still, the whole thing is written with such enthusiasm and affection as to negate any pleasure taken in the irony of something so resolutely of the fifties seeming so pleased with its endearingly wonky predictions.

Earthlight

Arthur C. Clarke Earthlight (1955)
I hadn't really planned on reading any more Arthurs, but there I was in Half Price, and - for the first time in many years - without a to be read pile higher than the Empire State waiting for me back home, and thence did my eye come to rest upon a triumvirate of Arthurs, and the other two had great covers; and thusly didst I then recall the pleasure taken in previous Arthurs I had read many years ago, specifically taken in the economy of his prose, cool and clear as spring water lending an unexpected frisson of novelty to subjects which might be deemed a little dry under other circumstances.

I'm not sure why I've written that first paragraph in Marvel Shakespearean, but the point is that I've bought some more Arthur C. Clarke, of which this is the first. Naturally it's hard science-fiction - as the genre has come to be known - meaning speculation based upon scientific principles which are already fairly well understood, and nothing straying too deeply into the realms of aliens, time travel, hyperdrive, or anything too severely hypothetical. That said, our tale is set upon the moon, with colonies established on both Mars and Venus, Earthlight having been written before data from the Mariner or Venera space probes somewhat dispelled the possibility of the latter.

Earthlight is mostly speculation pinned on some story about a dispute between the Earth and moon which loosely alludes to the European colonisation of the Americas and the subsequent declaration of independence. The characters aren't very interesting because it's basically a novel about nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs living on the moon with war breaking out because someone returned someone else's compass late and had quite clearly been using it to play darts, or summink. In fact, the central third of the novel is almost entirely unreadable, being mostly nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs discussing vectors. Thankfully, Clarke really comes into his own when describing a weird and unfamiliar environment, such as are the lunar surface and outer space itself, so the first and final third of the novel are surprisingly gripping, even evocative for something so otherwise dry; seemingly suggesting the possibility of Earthlight being Clarke's attempt to transpose E.E. 'Doc' Smith style space opera into a working universe of known science; and certainly it foreshadows Stephen Baxter more than almost anything else I've read. Some twit on Goodreads described it as appallingly sexist due to the complete absence of female characters, but it seems a bit of a redundant observation, all things considered, and this would be a generally amazing book were it not for the big chunk of espionage landfill clogging up the central section.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

Fletcher Hanks
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (2007)
You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation (2009)
I first became aware of Fletcher Hanks as a result of discussion on facebook, leading to online articles and my immediately recognising his style from the Tiger Hart strip in Planet Comics, as distinguished by characters with tiny heads on top of huge muscular bodies. Having discovered that there was more of this stuff to be had, I immediately knew that I needed it, for Hanks' work seemed to be the absolute distillation of everything I'd enjoyed about Planet Comics.

Fletcher Hanks, as Paul Karasik's introduction suggests, was never really an outsider artist despite the mythology. He took to writing and drawing his own comic strips at the very birth of the form in its modern sense, before the conventions of strip fiction were fully established. Additionally, it's worth remembering that the printing process and paper quality of Fantastic, Fight and other titles obliged artists to keep it bold and simple, nothing which would end up looking too scrappy on the page. Hanks' art is unusually stylised, but his flights of fancy are expanded from a powerful sense of realism and a keen eye for the solid form, with only a very occasional lapse of scale to muddy the waters; although admittedly his draughtsmanship is often eclipsed by the sheer weirdness of his work.

Hanks' audience required heroes of specific and direct type, men - and one woman - who have scrapes and adventures and who vanquish the bad guys. For the most part we have variations on Hugo Gernsback's science-hero as developed by E.E. 'Doc' Smith and others, and Fletcher Hanks' cast of characters are variations on this theme. Arguably the greatest is Stardust the Super Wizard, most likely created in response to Action's Superman. Stardust lives out in space, and his initial adventures mostly began with the reportage of some nefarious activity befalling New York revealed on his crime detecting space television. Each story therefore begins with a commute, but I suppose Stardust's living in outer space serves as a measure of how amazing he is more than anything. Stardust generally achieves victory by use of a seemingly endless variety of absurdly specific yet poorly defined rays which shrink, enlarge, render invisible, or otherwise effect an almost immediate resolution to whatever the problem may be, meaning we can get on with the closing pages of just desserts. Stardust comic strips typically spend half of their page count punishing the criminal by cruel and unusual means.

Someone on facebook recently described some noise act as a boy sat alone at the back of the class frantically scribbling scenes of wartime atrocity in the back of his exercise book, Stukas fly low strafing the crowd with bullets, blood everywhere… which is probably as good a description as any of the mood and intensity of Hanks' work. Biology is malleable, disembodied heads fly through the air, faces always seem to be turned away from the reader, fight scenes resemble ballet, and the image of objects and people mysteriously suspended in the sky occurs with surprising frequency; so while there's a touch of Basil Wolverton, it's Basil Wolverton in a landscape described by Giorgio de Chirico.

While Hanks characters tend to inhabit the same basic story, the variation of themes is surprisingly imaginative, and enough so as to demonstrate that this guy knew exactly what he was doing and was exploring the limitations of the form. Where Stardust has his special rays and extended scenes of urban poetic justice, Space Smith's adventures occur beyond the Earth and are much closer in spirit to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space series. Big Red McLane follows the exploits of a stout-hearted lumberjack defending honest enterprise by punching racketeers and corporate criminals from rival companies without a special ray or mysterious transformation to be seen; and the skull-faced Fantomah mounts a supernatural assault on those evil forces who seek to control the jungle, whatever the hell that even means. Towards the close of Hanks' two year career in comics he had begun to expand here and there - Stardust defends Chicago rather than New York, then has adventures in space; Red McLane leaves the forest behind and travels to San Francisco in search of a childhood sweetheart; and then Fletcher Hanks simply stopped. He is described by his son as an angry, troubled man and a violent alcoholic, so I guess his own itinerant existence finally got the better of him.

This work seems fairly typical of its time on first glance, and a skim through an issue of Planet Comics leaves the definition of Fletcher Hanks as unique seeming less than clear cut; and yet the more of this stuff you read, the stranger and more beautiful it appears - or maybe arresting rather than beautiful. Hanks' work has the random swerves and dreamlike ambience of van Vogt and a few others, but in comic book form and quite clearly aimed at a younger audience. I'm tempted to consider him as something in the tradition of Shaver or Robert Moore Williams but that may be overthinking it a little, and I suspect Fletcher Hanks was driven more by impotent rage than schizophrenic philosophy. More than anything, it's hard not to wonder where Hanks would have gone had he kept at it; but I suppose had he been capable of such, he never would have possessed whatever quality it was that drove him to create works of such twisted majesty in the first place.

Marshal Law Takes Manhattan

Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill

Crime and Punishment: Marshal Law Takes Manhattan (1989)
At some point around five or six years ago I noticed that I owned one hell of a lot of books that I'd never read, and in fact there were a good few which had been sat on my shelves for no less than two decades without my ever having quite got around to cracking open the cover. This struck me as depressing and ridiculous given how much I enjoy buying books, and reading them when I remember to do so. So I spent some time catching up and made a promise that never again would I fall back to such pathetic habits, and so was born my to-read pile, which I strive to keep down to as few titles as possible at any given time. When the pile grows tall, I try to hold back from further incrementation with any new purchases until it has resumed manageable size, which isn't easy as I enjoy browsing in book stores and buying books.

This requires a certain amount of self-discipline. You might say it constitutes work in some sense, and it therefore feels like a kick in the teeth when my patience and restraint are rewarded with something like E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Masters of Space, anticipated as a literary bouquet of vintage fun and wonder, experienced as akin to a burping sex offender wiping his spent tool on my sandwiches. In need of some sort of brain enema by which I might flush out the lurid gunge of stacked scientist chicks who could pass for seventeen if you know what I'm saying, I opt for comfort food, retiring to bed with a big stack of comics and a carton of Little Debbie Swiss rolls.

And so once again to Marshal Law...

The one-off Marshal Law Takes Manhattan is as short and sharp a shock as you're likely to find in a comic that actually has a story as opposed to being just a sequence of pages of people being punched in the face, although there is quite a lot of that going on here as well. To suggest that Pat Mills' psychotic future lawman lacks subtlety would not be so much an understatement as just a deeply fucking stupid thing to say, roughly equivalent to whining that the Les Humphries Singers' 1976 Eurovision entry 'Sing Sang Song' is the worst industrial hardbeat track you've ever heard. Subtlety is neither the point nor the means of its delivery. Marshal Law is about direct upper case statements broadcast at maximum volume, or if not exactly statements, then insults, sarcastic remarks, and wilfully prurient observations - if Batman had started out in Viz comic drawn by members of Crass, or something. It's very noisy and very funny, on this occasion biting the entire arm that feeds - this originally having been published by Marvel's Epic line - by recasting the Avengers as the unfortunates of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. As a superhero comic written by a guy who really, really hates superhero comics, it's very, very funny; as a comment on the genre, it's merciless; and as a satire of American foreign policy, it hits its target dead, absolutely chilling and without a word wasted.

Jesus - I needed that.

Triplanetary

E.E. 'Doc' Smith Triplanetary (1934)
Prior to tackling E.E. 'Doc' Smith, I'd been primed with conflicting opinions of the chap's work. My friend Gareth rated the Lensman series quite highly, whilst I got the impression that Carl viewed E.E.'s oeuvre as being on par with Bernard Manning or perhaps The Mission in their respective fields of racist comedy and po-faced sixth form poetry set to music with far too much echo. Being as Gareth had a habit of dropping words like yonder and behold into casual conversation, and Carl was usually on the money about most things - much as I sometimes wished it were otherwise - I approached Smith's 1920 novel The Skylark of Space with great trepidation; and against expectation it turned out to be great - also fairly stupid what with the constant pipe-smoking, ships travelling seven-hundred times the speed of light, and giggly women rushing off to fetch their coloured pencils - but it read like the work of someone who had a lot of fun writing it, and so was difficult to dislike.

1934's Triplanetary is a little more earnest, and quite conspicuously a forerunner to the space opera of Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton and those guys. It's competent, with convincing descriptions of protons and the like, and much closer in both spirit and execution to the sort of fiction one associates with Asimov than the Flash Gordon dynamic that informed Skylark. That said, it's a little long-winded in places and not particularly engaging. There's a possibility that Edward Elmer may have addressed this when he came to revise Triplanetary in 1948, adding new material so as to make it a prequel to the Lensman books - all very exciting, or least it seems that way from the blurb on the jacket of my copy which describes all manner of things that don't happen in the story because they've screwed up and printed the earlier 1934 version inside this edition.

Never mind.

Compensation might have arrived in the form of the supplementary novel length Masters of Space, a 1961 collaboration with E. Everett Evans, another guy with initials suspiciously biased towards the fifth letter of the alphabet. The only problem is that Masters of Space is pure shite. I read thirty or so pages before bed, then another thirty as I woke next day - as is my habit - gradually realising during this second stint that I was unable to recall a single detail of what I'd already read. On close investigation this turned out to be because it doesn't really have a plot as such, just page after page of inconsequential conversation apparently written by someone who didn't quite get to grips with why Some Like It Hot was such a great film. Another emergent trope is that of the brilliant female scientist with massive tits who has had the additional foresight to be blonde - and we all know what blondes like, right guys? In fact there's a whole troop of nubile and knockery female theoretical physicists here; and even a planet full of realistic lady automatons with no inhibitions, if you know what I'm saying - and being automatons their function is to make men happy any way they can, and I mean any way.

Masters of Space is soft porn with space exploration standing in for the more traditional washing machine repair, and it's the soft porn of an era in which Dragnet was considered edgy - all veiled references to bosoms and coming across like a faintly sinister uncle smirking to himself at a teenage niece's sixteenth birthday party; which is why it took me a while to actually identify it as such. One kind of expects porn fiction to incorporate anatomical detail, a few rude words, or at least some sort of reference to things going in and out of other things, but here it's all knowing winks and mildly stomach-churning observations about how such and such a gal could pass for seventeen. It may sound side-splitting, but actually sitting down to read this shit is another thing entirely. I managed fifty pages, and that seemed like more than enough.

Looks like Carl was right after all.

The Beast

A.E. van Vogt The Beast (1963)
I keep trying to give up the van Vogt but it's difficult. His stories range from incomprehensible and headachey to warped and surreal brilliance of a flavour that was almost unique to Alfred Elton himself. Each time I happen upon some hitherto undiscovered van Vogt title secreted amongst the ordinary science-fiction paperbacks, I think of the tower that is my present to-be-read pile, and how I should at least tackle Project Pope, Triplanetary, or The War of the Worlds before shelling out on another novel that will probably read like some guy having a fight with his own typewriter; but then I remember The Winged Man or The Voyage of the Space Beagle, the sheer what the fuck? factor of his best works, and suddenly I'm off the wagon again.

Just to recap with the customary generalisation, A.E. van Vogt wrote to a certain formula, something he cooked up himself entailing dream images, random plot swerves roughly every eight-hundred words, and sentences bolted together for maximum evocation by a method that seems as much modernist sculpture as literary technique. To suggest that the results were sometimes a little weird is an understatement, but when it works, it's amazing.

A typical van Vogt narrative may go in almost any direction suddenly and without warning, and so it makes sense that his regular novels are not always easily distinguished from his fix-ups - the fix-up novel comprising three or more short stories welded together and relentlessly hammered into a single tale, roughly speaking, regardless of how thematically disparate the original components may have been. Some of these novel-length exquisite corpses work better than others - the bewildering and yet strangely fascinating Quest for the Future being a good example.

The Beast combines one of my favourite van Vogt shorts, The Great Engine, with some other stuff. The other stuff in question incorporates moon cowboys dominated by a despotic caveman - formerly a grunting Adolf Hitler substitute in the original war-era material according to the evidently knowledgeable Andrew May - and a drug which enhances women so as to render them equal to men, if you can imagine such a thing. It does its best and tries hard, and almost gets there, but - never mind the usual patchwork of bits and unmatching pieces all sewn together - The Beast reads unfortunately like the author composed the latter third with a food mixer. There is van Vogt goodness here, but sadly not in the right order.

Brontomek!

Michael Coney Brontomek! (1976)
During the late 1970s I was in an English class which had some sort of book club deal going on, and thus was I exposed to a Pan Books promotional poster reproducing twenty or thirty covers from their science-fiction range - Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound, Philip K. Dick's Galactic Pot Healer, Clifford D. Simak's The Werewolf Principle, Robert Heinlein's The Green Hills of Earth, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End being the five which really stuck with me. I was fascinated by this poster, and tried hard to imagine what it would be like to read books of such futuristic promise, yet never quite got there, which was probably thanks to television.

Still, I eventually caught up, seeking out and reading at least those named above, having been primed to do so back in 1978.

More recently, my friend Steve mentioned that he was reading something by Michael Coney. This being an unfamiliar name, I googled and found Brontomek! the cover of which flooded my  nostalgia gland with memory sherbert of a strength I hadn't experienced in a while - an obvious inspiration for the Terra-Meks from the 1979 Ro-Busters strip in 2000AD comic, something that  had also caught my imagination, inspiring many Saturday afternoons spent with biro and drawing pad devising my own highly derivative canon of city-crushing demolition robots.

Anyway, Coney's Brontomek! - much like The Godwhale by T.J. Bass - appears to be one of those novels which enjoyed brief 1970s fame before vanishing without leaving much of a trace. Like The Godwhale, for all that it has in its favour, there is some indeterminate quality pinning it firmly to that decade - beach scenes oddly reminiscent of Jaws, the inference that prolonged bachelorhood will ultimately lead one to steal women's underwear from washing lines, a lead character seemingly played by Harry Enfield's impersonation of Roger Moore, and all the whisky he drinks, and the fact that he names his boat Easy Lady; even in the unlikely event that nocturnal theft of women's knickers will one day number amongst the crimes that continue to plague interplanetary colonists, such details somehow date Brontomek! as profoundly as any of E.E. 'Doc' Smith's spacefaring pipe smokers.

The story, essentially the struggle of the little guy against the corporation, is serviceable but tends to occur as background detail to what might as well be Howard's Way in space - all boat drinks and bachelorhood and a slightly cranky obsession with nautical detail - so that by the time the story actually shows up, it seems too little too late and is in any case eclipsed by the unfolding and slightly bewildering focus on some attempt at breaking a yachting record.

There were some great ideas here, and Coney was clearly a decent writer, but somehow this should have been so much better.

The Land Leviathan

Steampunk = Wank
Presenting that venerable gentleman Mr. L. Burton's indubitably hasty treatise upon why the Steampunk genre must be regarded as wank.

Steampunk was arguably created by Michael Moorcock in the late 1960s in his thoroughly readable Sir Oswald Bastable novels wherein the eponymous hero had a series of Victorian style adventures in hot-air balloons and the like. This was of course entirely in keeping with the 1960s countercultural fascination with Victoriana, vaguely Edwardian shite, science-fiction and so on. If it hadn't been Moorcock, someone else would have done it, and it's probably telling that Moorcock himself has on occasion appeared ambivalent or even sceptical regarding the success of the baby he prefers to call steam opera. In a 2009 Guadrian review of Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection he wrote:

Steampunk reached its final burst of brilliant deliquescence with Pynchon's Against the Day and his Airship Boys. Once the wide world gets hold of an idea, however, it can only survive through knowing irony. Its tools, its icons, its angle of attack are absorbed into the cultural mainstream. The genre has started to write about itself, the way Cat Ballou or Blazing Saddles addressed the western. Steampunk no longer examines context and history but now looks ironically at its own roots, tropes and clichés.

Steampunk, generally speaking, updates Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, speeding them to thriller pace whilst retaining their settings, themes, and literary styles. Its recent incarnation seems to have been spawned by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's collaborative The Difference Engine, essentially a cyberpunk novel set in the Victorian era which transposes all that fetishistic technology for steam driven ancestral equivalents.

Fine... whatever...

Given the unwritten law defining the point at which a phenomenon has definitively hit rock bottom as proportional to the sum of cultural units distinguishing the Sex Pistols from Gary & the Gonads, the redundancy of anything declaring itself steampunk without either qualification, apology, or due embarrassment was recently heralded by the arrival of the steampunk What I Really meme reproduced below.

The What I Really meme, for those presently mouldering in blissful ignorance, is a frequently copied internet image comprising six illustrations exposing the side-splitting disparity between one's occupation, and the details of that of which others believe one's occupation to be comprised. To hilarious effect.

Personally I find the chucklesome gulf between perception and reality tends to be all the more amusing when the images demonstrate some conceptual variance as opposed to being, for example, a random assortment of cock-obvious images snipped off the back of a steampunk themed cornflakes packet, or have I fucking missed something? I can see perhaps what the artist's friends and mother may be getting at, but does society really view this person's occupation as frowning whilst wearing a fancy jacket and having a metal arm? I mean does it really? Or would that third panel be better served with a blank space given that society, by whatever definition, probably doesn't give a shit and has better things to do?

Okay so Michael Moorcock's efforts were decent, and both Stephen Baxter and Mark Hodder have bothered to write genre novels that go somewhat further than tittering over brass spacecraft with union flags painted across the heavily riveted prow; but now there are steampunk clothing outlets, lifestyle magazines, comics, action figures, bands, conventions, and doubtless comedians soon taking to the stage in flying goggles to crack jokes about most diverting occurrences befalling one on the way to the dirigible emporium. Aside from a few writers, steampunk is looking a lot like the biggest pile of cock to knob-cheese up our cultural bandwidth since Doctor Who nosedived in 2005. It's a one-trick literary subgenre, not a youth movement, unless the 153,954 who like the Steampunk facebook page really do wax up their moustaches every weekend and get hammered on absinthe and drawing room techno. The entire schtick is so hopelessly mannered that you could bang out your average steampunk novel on a child's origami fortune teller, never mind that generic coal-fired Babbage engine.

The comically Victorian + technology = steampunk and so we end up with The D'Israeli Undertaking, The Mafeking Modem, and The Splendiferous Escapades of Mr. Quentin Internet because this is a genre in which everything is worked out in advance and which succeeds (supposedly) through parody and collage and not a whole lot else. It probably shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that more than one former author of dispiriting TV tie-in fiction should have recently added the genre's proverbial string to his soulless, workmanlike bow, because once you've read the novels by the fuckers who actually can write, you're left with people who regard Terrance Dicks as some sort of literary gold standard.

It feels like Star Wars all over again, the tide of balls-achingly easy populism sweeping away anything that is thoughtful, at odds with the norm, anything that strives to do more than just romp along like an E.E. 'Doc' Smith hero with an issue of Dazed and Confused stuffed in his back pocket; and perhaps this is itself a clue as to the success of this phenomenon. It's a return to ripping yarns and morally unambiguous superheroes, the comforting familiarity of Victoriana spruced up with a touch of console game and a knowing wink just to confirm that this is where the cool kids hang out, the cool kids as opposed to all those nerds and sad sacks with their Isaac Asimov and hilariously intact virginity.

Of course, this is all an overreaction on my part - hyperbole being my job - and has no bearing on authors such as Michael Moorcock, Mark Hodder, or Paolo Bacigalupi - who has of late been cropping up in steampunk must-read lists for no good reason I can think of. It's bollocks and it will all blow over in due course I'm sure, but until then, a little less mindless recycling for its own sake and a little more use of critical faculties can hardly be a bad thing; and if this rant has dissuaded just one person from turning their hand to an already overpopulated subgenre, then good.

On which note:



Michael Moorcock The Land Leviathan (1974)
Including one slightly peculiar novelisation of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, this is my tenth Moorcock novel, and the number strikes me as strange seeing as he was never an author whose works I sought with particular fervour. The book stores of my childhood  bulged with a million Moorcock titles, all involving elves with swords so far as I was able to tell. This was off-putting because I've never truly warmed to elves. They seem like the self-absorbed teenagers of the faerie realm, all very pretty but otherwise lacking the honesty of gnomes. In any case, I was probably misled by wispy cover paintings and the name Elric sounding a bit like it could be headed in that general direction.

More recently I got the habit of picking up the odd second hand Moorcock title if it appeared to maintain a respectable distance from anything involving dragons or magic and was cheap. I'd read his Constant Fire in a second hand copy of the New Worlds anthology and been impressed at the sheer insanity of the tale, so had come to view him as a good risk. This caution now seems strange through the benefit of hindsight and my having noticed that I've reached double figures with the man's work, and actually, it's all been pretty great.

The Land Leviathan continues the tale of Sir Oswald Bastable from The War Lord of the Air, a man lost in alternate histories full of Victoriana that we would now recognise as steampunk but for the fact that Moorcock has purposes other than smirking at the reader whilst wearing aviator goggles. The Land Leviathan, like its predecessor, uses the trappings of empire to criticise the hypocrisies of the era and mindset it parodies, and impressively goes for the big one in terms of moral redress - a world in which a new African empire modelled to some extent upon that of Rome crushes the United States in response to centuries of slavery imposed upon the black race.

Read that summarising sentence again and take a moment to consider just how kak-handed and painful this could have been in the hands of a less able writer. Not only does Moorcock succeed in dealing with issues of great moral complexity, naming names without the suggestion of anything reduced to a slogan, but he makes it compelling, saying everything he needs to say in a novel that's barely much over the length of a novella. The Land Leviathan is unassuming and genuinely wonderful, and its author just went up a level in my own personal league table.