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Why Am I Still Doing This…? Part 1

Well, I’ve now had a couple of weeks to regain my sanity after I finished watching the 50 films in the Sci Fi Classics 50-movie pack… So it’s on to the second 50-movie pack, Nightmare Worlds.

Alien Contamination – this Italian film pretty much transplants the plot of Ridley Scott’s Alien to Earth. A tramp freighter from South America drifts into New York harbour, its crew all dead. In the hold are strange alien eggs… which cause people to explode messily. The detective in charge, with the help of a secret government organisation of scientists, tracks down the surviving astronaut from a Mars mission. Together, they travel to the ship’s origin… and discover the other Mars astronaut, who had faked his own death and is now growing and distributing alien eggs for his alien masters on Mars. This film was entirely ordinary.

Alien Species – a trio of prisoners are being transported by sheriffs, when a fleet of UFOs attack Earth and force them off the road. The prisoners escape, and hide out in a nearby cave. Which proves to be the headquarters of the invading aliens. Initially watchable, this film quickly descended into silliness. The cave sets look fake, the aliens looks fake, and ten minutes in, the story began shedding plausibility and intelligence by the second.

Atomic Rulers of the World – a Japanese Starman film, and as such resembles all the other Starman films. The alien council of the Emerald Planet look like the deranged imaginings of the insane brother of the inventor of Teletubbies. The plot: Starman saves the Earth from human invaders from the planet Mirapolia.

The Alpha Incident – A space probe returns to Earth and brings with it a dangerous micro-organism. While being transported by train, a sample of this micro-organism is inadvertently released by a criminally stupid train guard. Five people are exposed, and promptly confined at a remote train stop while scientists rush to find a cure. This was as dull as it sounds.

Attack from Space – another Starman film. This time the Spherions are out to conquer Earth. Of course, Starman defeats them. Happily, they don’t make films like this any more.

Beast of the Yellow Night – a man sells his soul to the Devil after being saved from certain death. As a result, he turns into the titular creature at night – not just on yellow nights, I should add; whatever a “yellow night” might be – and kills people. This film couldn’t quite make up its mind what it was supposed to be – horror, thriller or family drama. The poor transfer made it even harder to figure out.

Warriors of the Wasteland – an Italian post-apocalypse movie. And if there’s one thing we now know about the Apocalypse from all the films on the subject, it’s that the Goths will inherit the Earth. Well, they’re not quite Goths in this one – the eponymous warriors wear white, for one thing. (Which means we also know Persil will survive the Apocalypse.) And they’re a bit too camp to be Goths. But, essentially, this film is Mad Max meets the Camp White-Clad Goths of the Wasteland. And he kills them all.

Werewolf Woman – this one is about a woman who turns into a werewolf. Of course. Actually, she only thinks she turns into a werewolf. Except she does at the end. Along the way, she meets and seduces numerous men, and then kills them. This is one of those movies where you get exactly what the title leads you to expect. In fact, the film’s alternative title Naked Werewolf Woman probably tells you more than you need to know…

The Nightmare Never Ends – an old Nazi hunter is killed, and the detective investigating the murder begins to obsess about the man’s death. The Nazi hunter had been tracking a notorious war criminal, a louche young SS officer, who doesn’t appear to have aged in the 35 years since WWII. Unfortunately, the title better refers to the film itself than it does to its plot…

Counterblast – a Nazi scientist escapes to England at the end of WWII, and murders and takes the identity of a British scientist returning from Australia. He continues to work on the biological weapons he had been creating for his Nazi masters, with the intention of using them to usher in a Fourth Reich. But it all starts to go wrong… This B&W British film from 1948 was actually quite good.

All the Kind Strangers – Stacy Keach is driving through deepest darkest Tennessee when it sees a young boy walking by the side of the road with a heavy bag of shopping. He stops and offers the kid a lift… which subsequently involves a long drive down a dirt track and across a creek… to a house where seven kids (ranging in age from late teens to under ten) live alone. They do have a “mother” – but she’s actually a woman they’ve kidnapped and forced to play that role. And so they likewise force Keach to become their father. There was a halfway decent story buried in this film – which isn’t at all sf or horror – but it didn’t deserve 74 minutes.

The Day the Sky Exploded – Earth is bombarded by asteroids. Which is sort of like the sky “exploding”. Cue lots of running around, explosions, buildings falling over. I don’t actually remember there being much in the way of a story in this film. Deep Impact it’s not. Happily, neither is it Armageddon.


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2008 Reading Challenge – May

I’ve had Virginia Woolf’s Orlando on my book-shelves for a number of years, but had never got around to reading it. I forget why I even bought it. It was cheap, I know that much: there’s a Dh 10/- sticker on the back (ten Dirhams, the currency of the UAE; at the time I was living there, that would be about £1.65).

I also have the DVD of Sally Potter’s film, starring Tilda Swinton. And it’s a good film – looks fantastic, although the story meanders a bit.

So the book immediately went on the list when I decided to read a classic author each month of 2008. And now I’ve read it…

Orlando is a young noble in Elizabethan England. He is a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, writes volumes of execrable poetry, and has an affair with a Muscovite princess. The affair ends badly, and so Orlando wangles a position as Ambassador Extraordinary to the Sultan’s Court in Istanbul. Several years later, he is promoted to Duke and made a member of the Order of Bath. Shortly afterwards, he falls into a sleep from which none can wake him for a week. While he sleeps, the Janissaries revolt. When Orlando wakes, he is now a woman.

After spending some time with Anatolian gypsies, Orlando returns to England. She then lives through the centuries following until the publication of the book: “Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight” (the last words of the novel).

Orlando is written as a biography, with frequent authorial interjections – at one point, even declaring the date on which a passage was written – “…for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs…”; or commenting on the prose itself: “…who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence…” The words “biography” and “story” are used throughout, explaining that Orlando is as much a commentary on Orlando’s life as it is a telling of it.

Unfortunately, Orlando is a paragon – loved by all who meet him; his legs “the shapliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon”; his house the greatest in England, with 365 rooms and 15 acres of parkland… We are told this repeatedly. Woolf makes no effort to make her protagonist or her story plausible. Orlando’s central change of sex is left completely unexplained – and barely remarked upon by those who knew him before.

Orlando reads like a paean to its subject. It tells a story, yes, but it’s not really a novel. Woolf’s close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West was the inspiration for Orlando, and the book reads like an open and frank love letter to her. In places, the author’s heart is far too visible on her sleeve.

In one respect, reading Orlando proved an interesting exercise. It’s a fantasy, and it was published ninety years ago. Given the current form of fantasy, especially high fantasy (or sword & sorcery, as it’s sometimes known), comparisons between such novels and Woolf’s were almost inevitable. The current trend is for immersion, a narrative that drags the reader into the world of the story and keeps them there. And the world must be internally consistent in order for that to occur. Whereas Orlando does no such thing. The story is told to the reader, no effort is made to entice the reader into living the story in their imagination. Woolf is quite clearly writing Orlando in 1928, and often makes reference to items and knowledge that would have been unknown to her protagonist – “The thought struck him like a bullet”, for example. It’s an entirely different reading experience to that of, say, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (quality of writing aside).

Personally, I prefer rigour and internal consistency in my fiction. Especially in regard to an invented world, or a story which cannot rely on the real world to provide consistency. Woolf’s authorial interventions I found intrusive. This might have been acceptable if they were witty – like Jane Austen, for example – but in Orlando, they were just fawning. Orlando was too good, too improbable, a hero/heroine, and quickly became boring. Orlando is, well, fanciful tosh.

So, another classic fails to make the grade. While I admitted back in February that I might give Hemingway another go some time, I very much doubt I’ll be doing the same to Virginia Woolf. Orlando is, according to Wikipedia, “generally considered one of Woolf’s most accessible novels”. Not to mention its importance to English literature. But I just can’t see it.

I’ve all ready picked out Nostromo by Joseph Conrad for next month. Let’s hope I like that one better.

(Incidentally, for those who want to try Orlando for themselves, here’s an online copy.)


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Overlooked Classics – Part 2

Here is the second lot of sf novels which, I believe, shouldn’t be forgotten. I chose these books – and the preceding five – as much because they, and their authors, are obscure as I did because I like the novels. Most authors, even well-known ones, have some title buried in their back-catalogue which deserves better recognition. And some novels which are obscure today were much-lauded on publication. I’ve tried to avoid such books. The five titles below were, and still are, “overlooked”…

Blueprint For A Prophet (1997)
Carl Gibeily
I forget where I picked this book up. Given that I have the hardback edition, I suspect it was in some publishers’ clearance shop. Why I bought it… Well, the author was unknown to me, and the book wasn’t published as science fiction… It must have been the story. But I’m glad I did buy it and read it. Blueprint For A Prophet is set in Lebanon (Gibeily is Lebanese) and describes the rise of a fundamentalist prophet who knits together the Arab states into a powerful Muslim federation. But it’s not just about that, because one character is a theoretical physicist whose experiments could change history… Blueprint For A Prophet is one of those sf novels written by a non-sf writer which succeeds as science fiction.

The War for Eternity (1983)
Christopher Rowley
“Classic” is not a word usually associated with Christopher Rowley’s novels. His prose is usually little better than competent. But his debut novel is much better. The War for Eternity is set on the world of Fenrille, which contains a single continent ringing its equator, and is the source of a longevity drug. The drug is harvested from insectoid creatures native to Fenrille, but only certain people are permitted by them to do the harvesting. It’s a similar idea to that in CJ Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach, although that’s the only similarity between the two books. In The War for Eternity, forces from Earth attempt to seize control of Fenrille, but are fought off by the colonists. The story also takes a final bizarre twist at the end. Rowley went on to write a further three novels set in the same universe – The Black Ship, The Founder and To a Highland Nation.

Cortez on Jupiter (1990)
Ernest Hogan
According to the cover of this novel, Cortez on Jupiter is “the most spectacular first novel since The Demolished Man“. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described Hogan as “a figure of interest for the 1990s”. Unfortunately, he had one more novel published, High Aztec (1992), and then dropped out of sight. Which is a shame. Cortez on Jupiter is an early post-cyberpunk novel about a graffiti artists who ends up making humanity’s first contact with the sentient inhabitants of Jupiter. The flamboyant prose throws off ideas on every page, and the story is a rush from start to finish.

The Krugg Syndrome (1988)
Angus McAllister
This has to be one of the most mis-marketed books ever. From the cover, you’d expect something from the heartland of the genre, featuring strange expeditions to alien worlds. Instead, what you get is a comedy set in Glasgow in which a law clerk thinks he is an alien. Arthur Montrose is convinced he is a Krugg, one of a race of telepathic alien trees who are bent on conquering Earth. Unfortunately, he’s lost his telepathic powers and can no longer contact his home world… The Krugg Syndrome is a diary of Arthur’s experiences on Earth, the people he meets, his encounters with alcohol and sex, and his increasing inability to fulfill his Krugg mission…


The Morphodite trilogy (1981 – 1985)
MA Foster
The Morphodite is an artificially created humanoid with the ability to change its appearance, with each transformation changing sex and appearing younger. However, the Morphodite’s real talent lies in spotting a society’s fracture points – i.e., places where the ramifications of one small action can spiral out until they bring down the society. In the first book in the series, The Morphodite, the eponymous character is created in The Mask Factory on the world of Oerlikon, escapes, and promptly wreaks its revenge. In Transformer, the authorities have tracked down the Morphodite and send assassins to kill it. The Morphodite learns that it was originally a woman from offworld. Now knowing its original identity, it leaves Oerlikon for the world of Teragon. Preserver is set on that world many years later. A young man, who works as a thug/assassin for hire, learns when his lover is kidnapped that he is the Morphodite. He then uses his powers to destroy Teragon’s society. There’s something very Vancian about Foster’s prose in these novels, although the central premise and its treatment is not in the slightest bit like Jack Vance. The three books were re-issued in an omnibus edition as The Transformer Trilogy.

Part one of “Overlooked Classics” is here.


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Overlooked Classics?

Inspired by this post, I decided to have a go at producing my own list of ten sf novels which don’t really deserve to be forgotten. They’re hardly lost classics – in fact, most of the following I bought remaindered. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad. Good books get remaindered too. Nor does it mean, as a friend once insisted, that they’re faulty because they’re full of spelling mistakes. Books get remaindered because they didn’t sell.

The science fiction novels below were never going to win awards or redefine the genre. But they are entertaining reads, by no means ordinary, and certainly worth picking up if you see them in some second-hand or charity shop.

The Broken Worlds (1986)
Raymond Harris
Harris had three books published, and then vanished. This is his first. It’s a space opera, set after the fall of a galactic empire. The Martians, immortal warriors, are trying to recreate the empire. Caught up in this are cabaret artist Attanio Hwin and the mysterious woman Sringlë. As space operas go, The Broken Worlds is more colourful than most. While Harris doesn’t try to give his universe depth by slapping on some pseudo-historical patina, he still manages to present a series of worlds which are unique and interesting. EC Tubb did something similar with his Dumarest series, but that was unremittingly grim. The Broken Worlds is fun – The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction even calls it “an attractive picaresque adventure”. Harris’ other two novels are Shadows of the White Sun, which is better than The Broken Worlds but not as much fun, and The Schizogenic Man, which is perhaps the least interesting of the three.

The Children of Anthi (1985)
Jay D Blakeney
Blakeney is a pseudonym of romance writer Deborah A Chester, who is also known under the name Sean Dalton for her YA sf series Operation StarHawks. The Children of Anthi is a richly-detailed space opera, in which scout Omari crashes on the world of Ruantl and is taken hostage by the world’s inhabitants. The story takes place on a single planet, but Blakeney has clearly spent a lot of time mapping out its society and customs. In places, it’s almost Herbert-esque, and fans of Dune will probably find something to enjoy in this novel. There is a sequel, Requiem for Anthi (1990), which is also worth tracking down.

Dancer of the Sixth (1993)
Michelle Shirey Crean
As far as I’m aware, Crean has never had another novel published. Which is a shame, because Dancer of the Sixth is a pretty good read. It’s military sf, but it’s from that strange sub-set which feature female heroines, usually pilots. In this instance, the pilot is called Dancer, and she’s not a pilot anymore. Now she’s a member of the Sixth Service, military intelligence, and her past has been wiped and she conditioned to forget it. Until one day a fighter crash-lands on the planet where Dancer is stationed, and the pilot proves to be… someone masquerading as Dancer. So the real Dancer takes her place to find out what’s going on.

Cageworld (1982 – 1984)
Colin Kapp
This is a cheat as it’s a series of four books: Search for the Sun!, The Lost Worlds of Cronus, The Tyrant of Hades and Star-Search. The series features one of the most impressive Big Dumb Objects in sf – the entire Solar system has been encased in a concentric series of Dyson Spheres. Embedded in each Sphere are holes, and in these holes are Earth-like planets. People live both on these planets and the outer surface of the spheres. It’s all completely implausible of course, but that doesn’t matter. The series opens on the Mars-shell. The fabulously wealthy and mysterious Land-a has recruited Master of Assassins Maq Ancor, Space Illusionist Cherry, and Sine Anura, Mistress of the Erotic, to travel in towards the Sun in a specially built space-ship, Shellback. Contact with the shells’ controlling AI, Zeus, has been lost and they must discover why. In the subsequent novels, the same three travel outwards from Mars-shell, seeking to determine why emigration outwards has halted. Baroque and a great deal of fun.

Frostworld and Dreamfire (1977)
John Morressy
Morressy wrote a series of sf novels set in a future interstellar federation called the Sternverein. This is the best of them. (The worst, The Mansions of Space, should be avoided.) Unusually for such space operas – and it’s the only one of Morressy’s series that is like this – Frostworld and Dreamfire is told from the viewpoint of an alien. Hult is the last of the Onhla, a race of primitive humanoid hunters who live on the frozen face of the planet Hragellon. He sets out on a quest to discover the world where legend claims other Onhla settled ages past. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes the novel as “a strongly constructed and occasionally rousing epic of a metamorphic humanoid’s search”. Also worth seeking out is Morressy’s Del Whitby trilogy, also set in the Sternverein – Starbrat, Nail Down the Stars and Under A Calculating Star.

Part two of this post – another five “overlooked classics” – to follow soon.


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I Did This So You Don’t Have To – Part 4

Here’s the final lot of films from the SciFi Classics 50-Movie Pack.

The Incredible Petrified World – a diving bell is sucked into a labyrinth of underground caverns, and the four crew-members are trapped there. A mad victim of a shipwreck from years before tells them there is no escape, but our plucky heroes – and heroines, of course – manage to find a route to the surface via a volcanic vent. This film is possibly only of interest to potholers.

Queen of the Amazons – a woman’s husband disappears during a trip into the African jungle. She organises an expedition to find him… only to discover he’s shacked up with the local Amazon queen. But she falls for her guide – who rescues her from all manner of jungle-related danger, of course; including man-eating lions and, er, locusts. There’s not much that’s sf about this movie. In fact, suspiciously many of the films in this 50-movie pack have been set in the African jungle. Maybe they’re hangovers from H Rider Haggard‘s She and King Solomon’s Mines…

The Amazing Transparent Man – many years ago, comic 2000AD ran a story about a “Visible Man” – a chemical accident had turned his skin transparent so all his internal organs were, well, visible. This film, on the other hand, is just another tired retread of HG Wells‘ The Invisible Man. This time, however, he’s aiming for world domination. If he succeeds, how are they going to put his head on the coins and stamps, eh?

Horrors of Spider Island – an agent puts together a troupe of dancing girls for a show in Singapore. En route, their plane crashes and the bevy of beautiful girls find themselves stranded on a deserted island. It’s all sunbathing and skinny-dipping for a while… until their manager is attacked by a giant spider and turns into a half-man half-spider creature. Just like Club 18-30, then. While watching this, I couldn’t work out why the soundtrack was slightly off – the dialogue didn’t seem to match the lip movements. It was only afterwards I learnt that the film is German. I’d just assumed it was an early Roger Corman or something…

Devil of the Desert vs The Son of Hercules – another Italian swords & sandals starring some random bodybuilder as Hercules. These have all started to blur into one homogenous blob of badly-dubbed English, poorly-choreographed fight scenes, evil despots who live in caves and/or castles, and some bodybuilder hero in a leather skirt.

Zontar, The Thing from Venus – an object approaches Earth and proves to be an invader from Venus. It persuades an astronomer to act as its agent on Earth, but is eventually defeated. There was lots of people explaining the plot to each other – usually accompanied by manic laughter – and when Zontar finally does put in an appearance he looks like, well, like a bloke in a rubber monster suit.

Kong Island – some scientists visit the titular island with a plan to turn its gorilla population into an unstoppable army through the use of brain transplants. But a giant gorilla foils their fiendish plot. I know I’ve watched this one, but I have no memory of it. That’s probably a good thing

Bride of the Gorilla – Raymond Burr (better known as Perry Mason) is a plantation manager in a South American jungle. He falls for his boss’s beautiful wife, so he kills the old man and takes over the plantation and the wife. But his crime is witnessed by a native sorceress. She curses him. Every night, he turns into a… wild gorilla. After ripping various people to bits, he’s hunted down and shot. It’s all very silly but quite watchable.

Mesa of Lost Women – a mad scientist invents a serum which makes women beautiful. Men, however, turn into evil dwarves. (Sounds like beer to me.) The serum is actually made from, er, “spider hormones”. A group of people are taken to the secret lair of the mad scientist and manage to foil his fiendish plot.

Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon – another US star gets roped into one of these Italian Hercules epics. This time it’s Peter Lupus of the Mission Impossible television series. He has to rescue the beautiful Queen of the Hellenes from the eponymous rulers of Babylon – who were actually the most interesting characters in the film. In all other respects, this was just like all the other Hercules films.

Hercules Unchained – happily, this was the last of swords & sandals. Hercules drinks from an enchanted spring, loses his memory, and shacks up with the beautiful but evil Queen Omphale. Fortunately, brave Ulysses helps him regain his memory, so Hercules wins the day yet again. I always thought Hercules only performed twelve labours, but it feels like I’ve watched hundreds of these films. I think I’d sooner muck out the Augean stables than watch another one…

White Pongo – the title creature a legendary white gorilla. A scientific expedition heads into the jungle to find it. One thing about this film puzzles me: the boxed set is titled SciFi Classics, but I fail to see what’s science-fictional about a jungle expedition to find a white gorilla. It’s not even horror, which at least some of the other non-sf films in the set are. But perhaps it’s a bit late to be asking this.

The Snow Creature – now this one is peripherally sf, inasmuch as the objective of the expedition is to find the fabulous Yeti. But in most other respects, it’s very like White Pongo. Parts of this movie appeared to have been filmed on location – although I suspect it’s the Rockies rather than the Himalayas…

That’s it. All fifty movies watched. And I survived. Now onto the second 50-movie pack, Nightmare Worlds…

Also see parts one, two and three.


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Alt.Fiction 2008

That’s the third alt.fiction finished. And each year it has grown bigger, and more areas of the labyrinthine Assembly Rooms have been opened to the event. I only made it to only two items during the day – a reading from his new novel, Kéthani, by Eric Brown (with the able assistance/prompting of Tony Ballantyne), and a talk by my agent, John Jarrold. I did want to attend the talk on ‘Science Fiction’ given by Eric Brown, Tony Ballantyne and Charles Stross. But it was the last item on the agenda at 8:15 p.m, and I didn’t want to get home late. Sorry I missed it, guys.

All attendees were given an ARC of Charles Stross’ Halting State in their convention pack. I had a chat with Charlie – mostly about the appalling cover art to the US edition of his Saturn’s Children and his upcoming signing tour of the US – and then got him to sign the ARC. On which subject… There were no dealers present – other than the redoubtable and near-ubiquitous Elastic Press, NewCon Press and TTA. This was both good and bad. Bad because I might have been able to pick up a few hard-to-find titles from the wants list. Good because it saved me money. The event organisers were selling books by the attending authors, and there was a signing session arranged about halfway through the day. But there was a poor choice of titles available, and they were pretty much all massmarket paperbacks. But then alt.fiction isn’t a convention per se, and that’s reflected in the attendees. This was particularly obvious during John Jarrold’s talk. Alt.fiction is aimed at unpublished writers, and in that respect the many talks provide some very useful and helpful information. And, of course, an opportunity to network.

Annoyingly, I forgot to take my camera along – although one or two people were happy I’d left it behind. I can’t think why… But, despite that, despite the lack of dealers, I had a good time, and I’ll certainly be attending next year’s alt.fiction.


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Breeding Always Shows

For April’s entry in my 2008 Reading Challenge to try each month a classic author I’ve never read before, I picked A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell. It’s actually the first book in the 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time, and was first published in 1951.

In his 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, Anthony Burgess describes A Question of Upbringing as “a work we may not always like, but we cannot ignore it”. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement, but the fact that he’s named it as one of the ninety-nine says much. Even the most cursory of googles will throw up plenty of approving reviews. Time magazine even included it in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. A Dance to the Music of Time is clearly a highly-regarded series of novels.

A Question of Upbringing opens with its narrator, Nick Jenkins, in his final year at Eton. It is 1921. Jenkins describes several incidents which took place that year, and serve to introduce the characters who will reappear throughout the series: Charles Stringham, Peter Templer and Kenneth Widmerpool. After finishing at Eton, Jenkins visits with Stringham, and then spends a few days with Templer. He next goes to stay in France, ostensibly to improve his French, before taking a place at Oxford. There he meets up with Stringham once again, and joins Professor Sillery’s coterie of possible future movers and shakers. The novels ends with a car crash: Templer on a visit drives his car into a ditch while carrying Jenkins, Stringham and some others as passengers.

As plots go, not much happens in A Question of Upbringing. Admittedly, it’s a relatively thin novel – 223 pages in my Fontana paperback edition – and it is only the first of twelve books. It’s an introduction, chiefly to the characters. Powell’s prose, in fact, focuses on the people, often at the expense of everything else. There are no sweeping passages of landscape painting as you’d find in Lawrence Durrell, or even John Jarmain. Jenkins analyses everyone he meets, and every action or utterance they make. It’s as if you’re standing before a large painting, armed with a magnifying glass and peering through it with your face no more than inches from the canvas. There is no clue to the “big picture” in A Question of Upbringing (which seems slightly weird, when compared to modern-day blockbuster high fantasy series).

The period in which the novel is set also invites unfair comparisons with PG Wodehouse or EF Benson. But A Question of Upbringing is no comedy of manners. The cast might all be upper-class twits – as Burgess points out, “Powell cannot take the lower classes seriously” – but Powell does draw his characters with a sharp eye, and he takes them very seriously.

The writing throughout is mannered, but very good. There is some strangely old-fashioned grammar – a tendency to run on sentences using colons, for example; but it doesn’t impede reading. Burgess’ pyrotechnics might be memorable, as are Durrell’s lyrical purple passages; but Powell is not so flamboyant. There are some striking images – A Question of Upbringing opens with a description of snow falling on a workmen’s brazier, which effectively sets the motif for the entire twelve-volume sequence.

I enjoyed and appreciated A Question of Upbringing. Which makes it the first success of this year’s reading challenge. While I’ve no plans to dash out and buy the other eleven books, should I see them in some second-hand book shop or charity shop: then yes, I will buy them and read them.

Besides, I’ve a feeling A Dance to the Music of Time improves a great deal as more of the big picture is revealed…


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The future is for the old, not the young

There’s an interesting article on the New Scientist blog pointing out that NASA’s workforce is greying. The average age of the organisation’s employees is now 47. During Project Apollo, most of the engineers and technicians were in their twenties. On 31 January 1971, when Alan Shepard walked on the Moon, he was, at 47, the oldest Apollo astronaut.

The greying of sf fandom is another established fact: the average age of people who attend sf conventions has risen each year.

I have to wonder if the two phenomena aren’t related. Of course, not all sf readers are rocket scientists and not all rocket scientists are sf readers. But both groups surely share a fascination with space exploration and space travel, with the universe out there. Away from planet Earth. The future, to both groups, lies in space, where humanity is no longer dependent upon a single fragile world.

Admittedly, space exploration is expensive and dangerous. But so is the War in Iraq. And many developed nations are happy to throw money into that. Of course, once – if – it’s all over, there’ll be vast profits to be made, rebuilding all the infrastructure destroyed by the invaders. But there are also huge profits to be made in space. The ROI on sending a M-type asteroid to Earth orbit from the Asteroid Belt would be phenomenal. And there’s all that real estate – not exactly habitable, it has to be said – waiting out there to be sold and tamed…

Is it that outward vision which society is slowly losing? There are no blank spaces left on maps of the Earth anymore – now we’re just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. And thanks to Google Maps, you can see anywhere on the globe from the comfort of your own home. You would think that now the Earth now holds so few mysteries, we’d go hunting for more away from the planet.

But instead we appear to be looking in and at each other. Even the War on Terror is just more inward-turned gazing: our enemy is hiding in our midst; watch each other; be vigilant; trust no one. Perhaps that’s the problem – all this overt and covert surveillance is taking the mystery out of our daily lives. And without small mysteries to sustain us, we can’t engage with the bigger ones. Pioneer spirit is like a muscle, it needs regular exercise…

Is sf engaging with those big mysteries? Looking at this year’s BSFA Award shortlist (see here), it would seem not. Three novels set in the near-future (Black Man, Brasyl, The Execution Channel), one set in an alternate present (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), and only one featuring an interstellar humanity (The Prefect). Oh, and a meta-fictional graphic novel (Alice in Sunderland). In fact, it appears these days that the most popular forms of sf with interstellar settings are military sf and space opera. And both chiefly involve war, both chiefly involve entrenched political systems falling apart or struggling to adapt to violent change.

It’s a cliché, albeit a true one, that sf inspired a great many young men and women to become rocket scientists. And it was those people who helped put men on the Moon. I don’t believe for a moment that sf’s role is inspirational or didactic – even if that’s what Hugo Gernsback intended when he first published Amazing Stories in 1926. Science fiction is a branch of literature, and it has no responsibilities other than those which attach to it as such. I’ll confess I liked the idea of Mundane SF as an antidote to increasingly right-wing military sf and shoddy space operas. But on reflection it’s only another call to look inwards, to ignore what’s out there. Writing about the possible is hardly engaging with the big mysteries. It’s giving small-minded solutions to small problems.

Sf needs to re-engage with the big mysteries. Maybe then we can start looking up and out again. Maybe then we’ll be allowed to look up and out again.


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I Did This So You Don’t Have To – Part 3

Yet more cinematic delights from the SciFi Classics 50-Movie Pack. And I use the word “delights” advisedly.

Warning From Space – yet another Japanese monster movie. In this one, flying saucers approach Tokyo – but not to destroy it. There’s a meteor on a collision course with Earth, and the aliens have come to warn humanity. I think this is the one that has the aliens that look like giant upright starfish with a big eye in their middle. They were… silly.

Phantom from Space – a flying saucer lands in California and a space-suited alien disembarks from it. He attacks and kills two passers-by. The authorities chase after him. So he takes off his spacesuit and underneath he’s… invisible!

Hercules & the Captive Women – sigh. More sandalled bodybuilders running up and down sandy valleys and in and out of caves. The eponymous women – it’s one at a time, rather than many at once – have been left out as sacrifices to Proteus by the queen of Atlantis. Hercules is only there because his friend, King Androcles of Thebes, drugs him and takes him on a mission to uncover who it is that’s trying to conquer Greece. But Hercules defeats the Atlanteans – the queen and an army of strange blond identical men with what look like false foreheads – and everyone lives happily ever after.

Lost Jungle – this one is a vehicle for 1930s animal trainer Clyde Beatty, and an excuse to have a lion and a tiger fight it out on-screen. Beatty’s (he plays himself) girlfriend disappears on an expedition to discover the lost island of Kamor, which boasts both African and Asian fauna. Lions and tigers, in other words. Beatty, freely admitting that Kamor will save him the expense of a trip to Africa and India, joins a rescue mission. And, er, rescues her. Oh, and there’s a fight between a lion and a tiger. Even though Beatty plays himself, the film makes an effort to give him a character-arc. I suspect that’s unusual in a 1934 film.

Teenagers from Outer Space – a bunch of Martians arrive in California in a flying saucer and decide it is an excellent place to raise their giant lobster-like cattle. Unfortunately, these creatures will destroy all earthly life, so one heroic Martian escapes to warn the population of a nearby town. There’s a sort of earnest amateurishness to this film.The special effects are poor, the acting is terrible, and the plot involves a lot of running about. Despite that it’s actually not bad.

Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Menace from Outer Space – yet more interplanetary derring-do by Rocky, sidekick Winky, and token female Vena Ray. There’s a comet approaching the Earth, and it’s controlled by some villains. Rocky heads off in his spaceship and saves the day. Can anyone spell “formula”?

Colossus and the Amazon Queen – I bet Rod Taylor (of George Pal’s The Time Machine, among other films) doesn’t mention this one on his c.v. He plays the sidekick of strongman Glauco (played by yet another bodybuilder). The pair of them go exploring, and find themselves in the hands of the Amazons. Glauco escapes, and then rescues the others. All these Italian swords & sandals epics are starting to blur into one… Astonishing to think that these films were made in the same country that gave us the great Michelangelo Antonioni…

Moon of the Wolf – there’s a werewolf loose down in the bayou. Even when this film was made in 1972, its plot was a cliché. David Janssen plays the manly sheriff, Bradford Dillman the louche aristocrat who’s really a werewolf, and Barbara Rush the sister who had a fling with the sheriff but had to go away because she consorted with the one of the lower orders… Southern Gothic meets An American Werewolf in Paris. In recent years, this has become an extremely popular sub-genre in written fiction – for reasons I completely fail to understand.

The Wasp Woman – an early Roger Corman, this one wasn’t too bad… except for the title character. The owner of a cosmetics company injects herself with wasp royal jelly in the hope of looking younger. Which it does. It also turns her into a wasp-human hybrid at intervals. Who attacks and kills people. Pretty silly. Um, on reflection, perhaps it wasn’t that good after all.

The Galaxy Invader – an alien crash-lands in the wrong part of the US, and a group of drunken rednecks go hunting for him. It’s sort of like Deliverance. But without a decent script. Or anyone who can act. Or a decent director. Or coherent dialogue. Actually, it was more like a home video.

Also see Part 1 and Part 2.