My Reading Year 2013 Part Two: Science Fiction is Dead

Dead!

This year I read just 16 books of prose. It’s a pretty disappointing number; well down on my usual efforts. I think the most books I’ve read in a year is 32, so it’s half of that, but I generally manage about 25. I haven’t had much time for writing, either. I’ve written no fiction but I did write four reviews, which I suppose is more than in either of the last couple of years.

As mentioned in part 1, it’s mostly because of my new job and the house move: if didn’t do as much reading or writing as I’d have liked, it’s because I was busily occupied on the business of getting on with life and moving on. But because I was distracted, my reading felt a bit random and purposeless this year.

I finished off my series on Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft, and gradually lost interest in the early 20^th century popular gothic. Instead I got a dose of the real thing. when I found a copy of The Great Beast: The Life and Magic of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds in the basement of my new house. I read a bit of fantasy including the low fantasy novel Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel while watching the alt-historical drama A Game of Thrones on DVD, and then read World Fantasy Award winner Osama by Lavie Tidhar.

Late in the year, this now infamous review by Paul Kincaid made me ponder my own relationship to the genre because I don’t read a lot of prose SF and fantasy in comparison to my younger days and I’ve been wondering why that might be. While I’ve only just begun to investigate the question, starting with my series on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, the early diagnosis isn’t encouraging. As far as I can tell, science fiction is dead.

NOTE: This is really long, maybe my longest post yet. You have been warned. 

Reading log - Q2 2012

Well, what a few months! For those who don’t know, I moved house on 7 March and found myself at the centre of one of those yuppie nightmare movies like The Pit where a likeable upwardly mobile couple buy a ‘fixer upper’ in a nice neighbourhood and then slowly go mad as the money-eating problems build up. The final scene is a comic denouement where the house ends up a smoking ruin, but the couple have learned to value the important things in life rather than money.

I guess we must still be in act three because say the house is still standing and I still believe money is pretty damn important. In fact, I’d say I think it’s more or less half as much again as important as I did before I started. And I’m still assuming this is a comedy farce and that the final act won’t involve an Indian graveyard.

This has rather taken time and energy away from my usual pursuits. Nonetheless, the commute to work and the minutes between bed and sleep have allowed me some reading time and I’ve done a little writing too.


After the jump, I'll be talking briefly about The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and various artists and Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, and then in more depth about:

DC Showcase All Star Comics by Paul Levitz, Joe Staton and others
DC Showcase All Star Squadron by Roy Thomas
The Inifinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin, George Perez and Ron Lim
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Great Beast: The Life and Magic of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds
I, The Jury by Mike Hammer

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison et al

Sorry for generic pics lately - scanner broken!

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading The Invisibles. At the time it started I was getting a bit burned out with comics in general and in particular with the boundary busting work of the Vertigo crowd. The Invisibles sounded like the worst kind of self-indulgence to me at the time and this put me off.

However, a few years back I began getting interested in Grant Morrison again, and I started to think that maybe I should read The Invisibles. I was put off now by the wallet-busting seven volumes, even despite my healthy budget for pamphlets. What finally swung the deal was the new library in Deptford, the Deptford Lounge. It’s a smart modern library with a swish coffee bar and computers and wifi and most attractively a huge selection of brand new graphic novels including all seven volumes of The Invisibles.

Needless to say, after all these years avoiding it I loved it!

Supergods by Grant Morrison

I have reviewed Grant Morrison's book Supergods over at the Zone. I knew I was going to have a lot to say about this, so when Tony asked me if I wanted to review it, I said yes. Making it a review means I have to focus it a little more than I might if I did it here, so I thought that might be a benefit, as well.

The review was an interesting one to write because the book engages three of my favourite topics: comics, cranky beliefs, and authors writing about their own fiction and process.

Grant Morrison is part of what I consider my generation of artists and writers. He's one of those 80s guys I first encountered in 2000AD and Warrior, who stormed America and beat them at their own game. He's the same sort of age as me, and clearly has had a lot of the same cultural influences on his life. When I was a kid, there was a section of the book shop called “cult”, which covered everything from Aleister Crowley and the Marquis de Sade, to William Burroughs and Hugh Selby Junior, to underground comics and Robert Anton Wilson. I read deeply from that shelf, and so, apparently, did Grant Morrison.

The Immortalisation Commission

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a circle of serious minded Victorian intellectuals who wanted to explore the curious range of phenomena that had manifested across the West (in particular) since about the 1850s. It was an attempt (which still goes on!) to find some order in all those tantalising phenomena that seemed to suggest an invisible world of ghosts, seances, ESP, predictions, reincarnation and all manner of weirdness that hovers the border between science, superstition and mental illness.

Among the founders were the philosopher and fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick, the Classical scholar F W H Myers, who both asserted that when they passed over they'd try and get back in touch. The first part of The Imortalisation Commission tells the story of this pursuit of reliable evidence of an afterlife.

Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

We all want to be heroes. We all want to think we fight the good fight, that we stand by our moral principles, that we do what's right regardless of the odds. That's one of the main attractions of genre fiction in whatever medium – while life is full of compromise, defeat and cowardice, in our dreams we are always right and noble and our opponents are always wrong and insidious.

For a little while we can live vicariously as a hard boiled private eye or a brave soldier or a wise-cracking rogue with a heart of gold. That's one of it's chief attraction, and that's where the escape in escapism takes us.

In the pursuit of these fantasies, our own righteousness is guaranteed by the author, of course, who's always on our side, and we are freed to exercise our angry and violent impulses without concerning ourselves with their consequences. Heroic righteousness allows us to kill, main and brutalise our enemies without restraint. There's nothing we can't excuse ourselves if we know our cause is right.

Science fiction and fantasy give us a further out: in these genres our enemies can be literally non-human (rather than the literary inhumanity that more Earth-centred foes in other forms of adventure fiction, the Soviet spies, yellow peril and Middle Eastern extremists). Perhaps most famously, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings set out a kind of enemy one can kill guiltlessly, as they have no admirable qualities whatsoever, and this has certainly set a pattern in heroic fantasy that's been formalised in the D&D generation of writer with their weird numerical categorisation of racial characteristics and the literal moral compass of alignment.

Norman Spinrad spotted the worrying aspects of all this in the 70s and highlighted it with brilliantly cold clarity in his wonderful novel, The Iron Dream. Spinrad saw beneath the harmless fantasies at the murky longing for power and violence that lay beneath.

The Penguin Book of Ghosts

I saw a ghost once, or at least what I thought was a ghost. I was six years old or so, and we lived in a big Edwardian semi in Surrey. It was a winter evening and I was on the landing. I was alone, and I'd turned the lights out to get a better look at the flashing red lasery things on the front of my battery operated robot. Out of the corner of my eye, in the very periphary of my vision, I saw a flicker of light that I interpreted then as a woman in a crinoline drifting up the stairs and out of my view.

The sighting must have lasted just a second or two. If I shut my eyes, I can still see it now, both the image of the old fashioned lady passing across the landing, and the striated lights of a car passing by refracted through the windows and curtains, which is what I now think I actually saw. 

More than the image, though, what lingers for me is the sensation – the liquid cold of apprehension, the prickle of hair raising on my arm and neck like the unexpected – uninvited, unwelcome - stroke of a cold hand. It was a moment of vertigo during which the material world seemed to shake and shudder away from me.

I think this sensation of transportation – as unpleasant as it can be – lies behind our obsession with ghosts and spirits. It's a somewhat mystical thing, and I have to say that I have found the experience of reading The Penguin Book of Ghosts a somewhat religious one.

Night's Black Agents by Daniel Ogden

Witches and magicians have been with us since the beginning of literature. In this book, Daniel Ogden identifies the first western depiction of a witch as Circe, a kind of a siren who tempts Odysseus's men to her island and then transforms them into pigs. Pigs had only use in the ancient world, food, and so its pretty clear what she's got in mind. On top of this, though, she Hermes warns Odysseus to not to embrace her, or he'll be enslaved by her forever.

Despite all this, she seems a less threatening figure than our present idea of a witch. In fact, after Odysseus gives her a good talking to, she becomes rather accommodating, telling him how to find the entrance to the underworld so he can chat with Tiresias and provides other aid before saying goodbye.

Occult London by Merlin Coverley

Lot's of writers are attracted to the idea of London steeped in the occult. It's certainly got the pedigree: there's John Dee living at Mortlake, and the possibly occult Masonic shenanigans of Hawksmoor, but things really got going in the 19^th century. In those years, the city seemed to be at the centre of attempts to reach through the veil, starting with mystical poetry of Blake, and then Swedenborg established the spiritualist church here, Blavatsky settled the HQ of the Theosophical movement here, the Golden Dawn began here.

I wonder why London attracted this sudden flourishing in mystical thought?

Gobekli Tepe

An ancient temple complex in Turkey. I liked this in particular:

The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human.

To the Devil -A Daughter!

I picked up this Dennis Wheatley occult thriller from the secondhand book stalls under Waterloo Bridge one wintery night in January. I love these book stalls, especially for finding these great old vintage paperbacks in good condition. This one's a handsome Arrow paperback with a rather stiff montage on the front cover, heavy on the goat's head and the suggestion of nubile nudity. The back cover has a terrific publicity shot of Dennis with a pen in his hand in his book-lined library, obviously hard at work in a blue satin dinner jacket and bow tie, fag in one hand and a glass of red wine nearby. When I was young, this is what I dreamed being a writer was all about!


EDIT: DON'T KNOW WHY THIS ISN'T SHOWING UP NICELY. THIS BLOG THING IS SO COMPLICATED!


These occulty thrillers always had an air of erotic eeriness about them when I was a kid. I remember in the seventies the salacious reputation of the Hammer movies of The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil - A Daughter; his books were also advertised in the back of colour supplements with imagery just like the cover of this edition.

The movies are far less sordid than their reputation suggests - The Devil Rides Out is pretty good, in fact - and the books are also a lot less shocking than the back cover blurb and imagery. They have much more in common with detective stories of Dorothy L Sayers and Sapper than they do with sex'n'gore exploitation paperbacks they shared shelf space with when I was a kid.

I read the Devil Rides Out a couple of years ago and found it very enjoyable - old fashioned, of course, but the Duke du Richelieu is a great character and Mocata an excellent villain. This is similarly old fashioned and also quite a lot of fun once you get used to it. It's set very tightly in the fifties, and deals entirely with the upper middle classes - everyone above is probably a decadent toff, while everyone below is either mean and cunning or the salt of the Earth. Wartime experience hangs over all the characters' back stories - I quite enjoyed that, as a matter of fact, as it gave a lot of interesting texture to the stories.

The setting is largely an entertainingly fashionable South of France, where everyone dresses for dinner and goes to the casino. It's a bit like James Bond, with a similar line in name dropping fancy food and drink and flash fifties brand names. A large proportion of the final third is occupied by a sojourn of rural Essex, where, away from the bright Mediterranean sunshime, the horror gets ramped up to apocalyptic levels.

In fact, it's interesting how Wheatley holds back any overt paranormalism until the final movement of the plot. What comes is all all the more effective because of this initial restraint, and Wheatley does a great line in suspense all the way through.The sequence where John Fountain attempts to infiltrate Comte de Grasse's yacht where Christina is being held is a fantastic example of balancing protagonsist action with antagonistic reaction to keep the reader on the edge of their seat regarding the outcome.

I liked the eccentric characters that populate this novel. Anna Fountain is middle-aged lady crime novellist with a taste for weapons; her son john Fountain is a two-fisted interior designer who pays careful attention to the decor of every setting; most of the heavy lefting is done by MI5 agent Bill Verney, known throughout as "C.B." or "Conky Bill" on account of his huge nose.

I enjoyed this a good deal. It makes me wonder why I don't get on with more modern iterations of the thriller and crime novel. Maybe I enjoy the camp? Like fantasy, it seems to throw the absurdity of it all into sharp releif, like an exceptionally well worked parody.

The Secret History of the World

I have had to give up on this book by Jonathan Black.

Giving up on books (and movies, for that matter) is not something I do lightly. I'll generally soldier through no matter how heavy the going gets, partly because of pride and partly out of a misplaced belief that it must get better than this, mustn't it? With this one, though, I've lost interest to such a degree that even my over-weening pride can't carry me through. It's doubly difficult because this was a Christmas present from my wife. In these cases one is obliged to clear one's plate and end the meal with a smile, but on this occasion I wasn't able.

This one came from PostScript. PostScript is a rather nifty mail-order clearing house specialising in remaindered academic and specialist books. We've been customers for a long time and I've gotten some really fabulous books from them over the years. That slightly interesting academic books you saw reviewed in Fortean Times becomes a whole lot more attractive when the RRP of £24.99 is reduced to £4.99!

It was listed as a trawl through the history esoteric thought, which, as I noted in my review of the year, is a subject that I find intriguing. I used to devour this studff as a kid: Peter Haining "true mysteries" books, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, Chariots of the Gods and Unexplained magazines. In my twenties I discovered Colin Wilson's books on the topics, which were the same sort of thing for grown ups, and of course the wonderful Fortean Times.

I'm not a believer, although I suppose I maintain a healthy Fortean scepticism on scientism, and as an artsy fartsy type I'm inclined to believe that there's more to life than flesh and dirt. I think, though, that I enjoy this stufdf as a kind of REAL sci fi or REAL fantasy. UFOs generate the same kind of sensawunda that SF does, and poltergeist reports create the same frisson of the uncanny as MR James. It all comes form the same place, I think, but when you start believing it... well, next stop Scientology, I suppose.

Which brings us to this volume. It's a very handsomely produced hardback, with thickl creamy paper and packed with interesting illustrations, inlcuding two sets of slick, colour reproductions of various bits and pieces. It's from Quercus, a major non-fiction publisher, and so one would hope the content would match these high production values. It doesn't, though, not by a long shot!

It is, essentially, a detailed overview of the kind of devolutionary theory that's familiar from theosophy. Humanity starts as pure spirit, and slowly degrades through various stages of corporeality to rude matter; and the purpose if life is to pierce the veil of maia and return to the spiritual thingamabob. This is described through one of those great esoteric crawls through history where anything cross-shaped is a crucifix, every flood myth is a memory of Atlantis and every archway is a wink from the freemasons.

I have a high tolerance for bullshit (obviously, otherwise I'd have poisoned myself by now) but the problem with this book is the flaccid vacuity of it all. Mr Black makes a great deal of assertions that are not backed by references to original sources or really discussed in any detail at all. I usually come to a book like this looking for the author to winkle out shades of meaning or detail and cast new light - however incorrectly - onto various bits of myth or history, but this guy does none of that.

The "classic" volumes of this sort for me are the Colin Wilson books The Occult and Strange Powers. Colin's obviously a trifle deranged, but he examines his subjects in great depth and argues for his conclusions quite forcefully (if memory serves, a mix of Gurdjieffian and Crowleyian occultism-as-mind-focusing that produces psychis experiences). There's none of that here. It's more of a man-in-the-pub ramble where the history and evidence is made to fit the preconceived notions of the author.

Sigh, such a shame! I really love these types of book, but I am, perhaps, now too well read in this subject for this particular strain of book to hold much new information for me. Certainly when I see the same old well-debunked names popping up (Graham Hancock, Robert Temple, David Rohl) my eyes begin to glaze over. Better are the recent works of Gary Lachman based on original research and often new interviews Those In The Know, the work of Erik Davis (such as the superb Techgnosis) or, as recommended in my round up of 2009, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon by Peter Washington. These authors manage to illuminate the history of esoteric thinking in level-headed yet skepticism light way that eludes Black here.

There's a couple of other odd things about this book, both pointed out by Hilary Mantel in her funny review that appeared in the Guardian in 2007. First off, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that this is just a cash in on the Da Vinci Code. Black name checks Dan Brown in the first few pages and the facts-light tone of the thing and welath of illustrations hints at a rush-job by a publishing insider with a whiff of easy money in their nostrils.

The other puzzle about this book, is that Jonathan Black is pen name for Mark Booth, former head of the Century imprint at Random House who has recently (google reveals!) moved to Hodder & Stoughton. Mantel says: "Here's an age-old mystery before we start: why do authors do that? Surely you must either assume a false identity, or publish under your own name; how can you do both?"

How indeed!