Summer is typically a
busy time of year for me and this year is no different. The
unexpected arrival of hot weather and sunshine has further kept me
away from the keyboard, and I admit that the blog has had to take
second place recently to some fiction I’m working on (gasp!) and a
Secret Project: the latter two will hopefully come to fruition in the
autumn when I suppose I’ll make another of my misguided attempts to
make something of my dreary creative ambitions.
So, there’s not been
a lot of time or motivation to consider my quarterly reading report.
I’d hoped to have the three volumes of the History of the Science
Fiction Magazine wrapped up by now, but that hasn’t happened. The
fact is that the necessity to blog about each story holds up the
reading: as I get behind, I’m disinclined to read more. This means
I’m on track to have read even fewer books this year than last
year. But, as I approach volume three, it seems a good time to think
about what these volumes have shown us about what SF and where it
came from, and that’s mostly what this review is going to look at.
But first, let’s have
a look at what’s turning into my primary source of reading love:
super-hero comics.
It makes for a long
post, but there you are: these reading reports always get out of
hand.
It’s been a
particularly brilliant quarter for comics reading for me that’s
included some old friends and a wonderful new acquaintance that’s
had me all giddy with the thrill of it.
Quire and gang are typically well-turned-out Morrison villains. |
Craving more Morrison,
I went straight on to a re-read of The 7 Soldiers of Victory
and Final Crisis, which just get better and better every time
I read them. I’m a habitual re-reader, especially of comics, and
these are currently in the absolute sweet-spot for me: familiar
enough that I don’t have to concentrate on the plot (always a bit
of a challenge for me) but still with a lot of deep and delicious
nuance to find. 7 Soldiers is enormously clever and satisfying,
well-constructed and nicely paced in the collections I read. Each
series could easily have launched a fascinating ongoing title, and I
particularly liked his takes on The Guardian and the Newsboy Legion,
Klarion the Witchboy and the Bulleteer.
Super Young Team are clearly descendants of ... |
When I’ve tried to
read these stories in the past, I’ve always struggled a bit. I
found them a bit easier this time but at the same time I think I
discovered why I found them hard work: Kirby is a terrible writer.
... the Forever People. |
It’s a work of outsider art facilitated by Kirby’s dogged devotion to the form for decades. After years of telling corporate fiction under editorial direction, here was he given the chance to pursue a personal vision and he totally went for it!
But his terrible
scripting shows weaknesses we didn’t realise were there in his
other work. Without a scripter to fill the empty spaces there’s
something a bit off about his pacing: there are pages where the
characters just seem to stand around uttering banalities or
explaining the plot that a better scripter would fill with character
moments. His characterisation is very poor and relies on what were
crusty and creaky cliches even in the seventies. A lot of the
character’s pronouncements regarding the deep structure of the
setting are completely impenetrable. I still entirely understand that
relationship between the New Gods and Earth, although maybe that
would have become clearer as the series went on.
And he seems to have
picked up the worst of the Stan Lee-syle bombast without the wit or
hint of self-deprecation that made it endearing (or at least
bearable) in the old days. That obviously makes one wonder about the
Kirby/Lee partnership – maybe Kirby was the instinctive genius
naturally yearning towards profundity that he struggled to express
outside his art. Lee is more of a craftsman, perhaps, without that
spark of inspirational genius that sends him off down the rabbit
hole. Instead he’s armed with a developed understanding of rhythm
and structure that keeps the story moving and maintains a focus on
the human level of the characters.
It’s hard not to be
disappointed by the way DC has used these characters since Kirby’s
day – the recent New 52 JLA storyline with Darkseid is a good
example of the way that all the philosophical touches have been
entirely drained from the characters and replaced by entirely clichéd
super-hero bobbins. Morrison, however, gets it. Morrison has a
similar instinct towards profound statements as Kirby and really
seems to get what Kirby was onto.
Alongside these I’ve
been picking over the library collections or graphic novels where
(Alan Partridge-style segue coming up) I’ve had the opportunity to give
two series based on cities a go – Frank Miller’s Sin City and
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.
To quickly dispose of
the former: they’re nicely crafted tributes to the blackest type of
noir fiction, but there’s not much to them, really. They’ve got
an enjoyable sleazy tone and at times it’s strikingly drafted, but
plot and character are too thickly coated with genre to make the
grisly moral choices compelling.
Astro City on
the other hand, however is pure joy! It’s a masterfully bit of
genre play that gets so very close to actual comics continuity that
it makes you almost rethink the events . Many of the characters are
clearly analogues to some of our faves over the years – The First
Family are the Fantastic Four, the Samaritan is Superman, the Apollo
Eleven look like the X Men ot the Outsiders, Jack-in-the-Box could be
Spidey or Daredevil, the Honour Guard are clearly a mix of the JLA
and the Avengers. As well being well-rounded inconic super-hero
character types, the series benefits from amazing character design
and covers by Alex Ross and consistently excellent interior artwork
by Brent Anderson.
At it’s best this
Alan Moore-ish technique does two things. On the one hand it
rationalises all the crazy super-hero clichés. There’s a brilliant
story - “Shining Armour” that takes the old cliché about Lois
Lane trying to crack Superman’s secret identity and frames it in
such a way that you can see how two rational normal people could –
the right circumstances – not just have a secret identity but
become fixated on exposing it. But more than rationalisation, Busiek
also uses the superhero clichés to shine a light on human emotion
and motivation. “Shining Armour” is, in the end, a moving tragedy
in the classical sense showing how our own needs and ambitions can
destroy us even when we want to do something as simple as be in love.
The series is a mix of
anthologies of one and two-shot stories and a couple of longer
storylines. In a few doxen issues, Busiek establishes a continuity
and background that’s as complex and convoluted as anything Marvel
or DC could come up with. The series travels freely in time and
Busiek uses it to create foreshadowing and subtle interplays between
apparently diverse and unrelated incidents.
It all comes together
in the two-volume Dark Ages, the single longest storyline in the
series so far. It follows two brothers over forty years or so as they
seek vengeance on the villain that killed their parents during a
super heroes bust up in the 50s and against the heroes that were
unable to save their parents. Busiek uses the cliches of different
eras of comics to embody the quality of the brothers’ quest. It
starts with 70s blaxploitation, moves to dark 80s style vigilantism
then 90s techno-thrillers with gadgets, catsuits and clinical
efficiency.
As the fashions in
super-hero stories change, so does their relationship which unfolds
in a believable and naturalistic in the foreground of a world rocked
by alien invasions, vengeful apparitions, mystic cosmic predators and
cataclysms. Their pursuit leads them, inevitably, into the precisely
kind of contrived apocalyptic climax that super-hero fans expect and
coincides with the emotional climax of their plot.
So, a good quarter for
comics but less good for prose reading. This is entirely my fault.
The volumes of the History of the Science Fiction Magazine are jolly
interesting. The introductions are pure gold for information on the
development of the genre and the stories themselves are … well, not
always good but reliably interesting at least. However, because I’ve
committed myself to blogging about each story, and life keeps getting
in the way, I’ve had to put the volumes aside so I don’t get too
far ahead of myself. It’s been particularly bad since the weather
picked up and sitting in my dank office has been less attractive.
I finished volume two
at the end of June and there are a few really good stories. Hermit of Satun’s Rings was a real highlight, and Almost Human and The Power are slickly written and enjoyable genre pieces. I’ve also
got a bit of a soft spot for the pulpy free-association of The Dead Spot. On the other hand The Abyss and Up There seemed to be more about
genre codes than being real stories, while The Circle of Zero was just bad.
On the whole it was
probably a slightly better read than the first volume and there’s
been significant shift in themes. The stories in volume 1 seemed to
be obsessed with the scale of the universe revealed by science –
the depths of space and the oceans, the incredible sub-microscopic
world of the atom, the gulfs of geological and universal time. Volume
2 doesn’t have a clear trend in the same way. There are three
stories with a time travel theme – The Circle of Zero, Wanderer ofTime and Seeker of Tomorrow. The Dead Spot almost has a time travel
theme, as Tech Tsar accelerates time with the titular barren region
so he can carry out his evolutionary experiments.
There are a few fables
and morality plays dressed up as SF – The Circle of Zero, Almost
Human, Up There, The Wanderer of Time and almost none of the thick
science dump that was a feature of stories in the previous volume.
This shows a clear
change what was going on in the genre as writers came to grips with
what could be done with it. The hothouse environment of fandom –
that had been encouraged – perhaps even created – by the
publishers in the previous decade allowed the genre to grow quickly.
It wasn’t just individual authors ploughing a unique furrow –
like Verne and Wells – but a community, a dialogue between writers
and readers that encouraged rapid – and perhaps overly guided –
growth.
In his introduction to
volume 3, Mike Ashley calls the era between 1945 and 1955 as SF’s
‘coming of age’ and its clear that there was something going on
this decade. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Horishima in 1945
seemed to confirm everything that the sci fi writers had been saying
for decades. This wasn’t a wild fantasy any more: this was real,
this could happen.
And if that could
happen, what about the rest? The few short years since the world went
to war had seen the arrival of radar, the jet engine and the first
computers. Suddenly all the other options didn’t look quite so
crazy: super-computers, intelligent robots, interplanetary and
interstellar travel, alien life, even time travel and strange
parallel dimensions.
Science fiction was
there to provide all the symbolic devices required to explore the
newly aware public’s concerns about the world that confronted them.
For large numbers of people the changes in the world brought about by
rapid technological change presented the possibility of a break from
what had seemed like the eternal circle of being born, ploughing the
land, enduring the occasional war, reproducing and then dying. The
vernacular of science fiction that had evolved in the previous
decades provided a medium to imagine what that might be like.
At the same time,
science fiction began taking the place of fantasy – in particular
supernatural gothic – as a way of presenting fables. Ashley
observes that fantasy was declining, and Weird Tales finally
gave up the ghost, if you’ll pardon the expression, in 1954. In the
place of fantasy archetypes from the rural past that was becoming
increasingly remote, we gained a new cast of science fictionalised
archetypes. The alien could be a fairy, an angel or a monster; a
robot could be a naif, a doppelganger or a monster; a mad scientist
could be an evil wizard, a dotty saviour or a … well I think you
get the picture. Science itself could act like magic to create
contrived dilemmas and SF settings could be manipulated to cut
stories off from the kinds of real-world solutions that might exclude
their moral, political or philosophical purpose in the same way that
‘once upon a time’ had worked in the past. Ashley quotes Jacob
Bronowski who apparently called SF ‘the folklore of the atomic
age’.
This replacement of
archetypes extended beyond fiction, though. The first UFO sighting
came in 1948 and found a ready demographic among SF fans. SF also
appears to have been associated with, or somehow related to, the
writings of Charles Fort which wittily challenged ideas of common sense and the scientific consensus.
Several stories in the first two volumes either explicitly mention
Fort or pursue ideas that spring from his writings. It’s not
entirely surprising that SF fans should have an interest in pseudo
sciences like cryptozoology and ufology. As well as conforming to the
materialist view of the universe they appeal to the fantasy fan –
or less charitably, the ape that cowers from the lightning – that
lies just beneath our proudly rational veneer.
The new ideas
reawakened old feelings. For many people people it meant that
humanity was no longer alone for the first time since Nietzsche had
killed god – imagine their relief! The space brothers began to fill
the void that the death of god had left and became a repository for
our guilt and existential angst. That’s possibly why the Shaver
controversy in the pages of Amazing caused such a sensation. It was
just plausible enough that some fans could believe there really was
an ancient race of evil dwarves living underground that was
responsible for everything that was wrong in the world. It was a
notion that comfortingly relieved us of either blame for the shitty
state of our lives or the dreary task of taking realistic steps to
put things right.
Large numbers of fans
saw it for the nonsense that it was, of course, but Dianetics made a
much stronger impression. Before it became a religion, L Ron
Hubbard’s Dianetics offered enthusiasts a quantifiable, DIY cure to
all the little hang ups and anxieties that make life such a drag.
Rather than the glum uncertainties of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Hubbard offered his followers the potential of a perfected mind –
perfect recall, higher analytical functions, ESP – that seemed
entirely in keeping with the scientific understanding of the world.
The strange Shaver-like fantasies about Thetan’s and all the rest
came later, but in its first flush Dianetics was a kind of highly
rationalist post-humanism that, like it’s modern post-singularity
cousin, offered its adherents access to super-powers through a
scientific-sounding ladder of mystical initiation.
All of this activity
saw a clear and palpable increase in the market for SF and not
coincidentally a step up in general quality of stories from the
better magazines. (Worth pointing out here that I am suspicious of
ideas like ‘quality’, which are not objective or even subjective
constructs, but entirely cultural... one for another time!) In this
decade some of the more enduring names begin to crop up, for example:
Walter Miller, Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick, Robert Sheckley, Gordon
R Dickinson, Brian Aldiss, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Shaw, Anne McCaffery
and Marion Zimmer Bradley. In addtion, many of the established names
were reaching their zenith: Ray Bradbury published the stories that
became The Martian Chronicles; Isaac Asimov came along with the
stories that became his Foundation series, Arthur C Clarke and Robert
Heinlein were (in my estimation, at least) at the height of their
powers.
It’s true that the SF
crowd had a head start with the ideas, but the ‘mundanes’ (the
term originates from somewhere in this decade) were learning fast. TV
and movies in particular spread SF ideas through the popular
consciousness rapidly – The Twilight Zone was a hit show in this
era, and the roster of classic SF movies from the period between 1950
and 1960 defined SF in the popular culture – if I have to name them
for you, then I must question what you’re doing reading this blog!
But is this really
‘growing up’?
Much depends on what we
mean by ‘growing up’. By Ashley’s own admission a lot of SF was
still not very grown-up at all. He complains again about the amount
of material aimed at juvenile readers and has particular disdain for
the many opportunistic band-wagon jumpers that flooded the market
with inferior goods just as SF was at its most popular peak. He
describes the output of John Spencer & Co, for example, as
‘damaging the sf scene, giving totally the wrong impression and
creating a dustbin atmosphere.’
This attitude seems to
miss a large part of what was going on in this era. The fact that
there was such a demand for SF was clearly not entirely based on the
quality of writers or their stories. In the decade between 1945 and
1955 there was a growing appetite for sci fi of any sort, but
Ashley excludes quite a lot from his survey. He’s disparaging about
writers in the ‘slicks’ who used SF without really understanding
it (sound familiar?) and of the stories published in the slicks by
pulp stalwarts like Heinlein which he dismisses as having ‘nothing
exceptional to the SF reader’ and as ‘rather mundane’.
Ashely explains away
the watery content by saying that the mainstream editors weren’t
looking for new SF ideas but for Heinlein’s ‘skilled approach’,
but I think that’s pretty much the opposite of what was going on.
These editors absolutely wanted Heinlein for his SF stories. They
could see that SF was an important movement that was interesting for
their readers, and they wanted stories that addressed SF ideas.
That’s why they bought stories from Heinlein: what Ashley sees as a
‘skilled approach’, the editors of the slicks saw as a minimum
standard of expression that the majority of SF writers didn’t meet.
Even if the new ideas
were unexceptional to the jaded SF fan, the same was not true for the
typical reader of the slicks. This readership was also interested in
new ideas. They too wanted to understand the ways the world might
change. Compared to the huge circulation of the slicks, SF pulps were
small beer, and many of what we think of as classic stories were read
initially – in fact, perhaps still – by a relatively small
readership.
There seems to be an
assumption that the SF writers were in the lead of something. It’s
perhaps not entirely unjustified to say that the deeper thinking was
going on among writers who thought deeply about the issues, but the
themes and aesthetics of SF were just waiting to emerge into the
mainstream. They’d done so sporadically throughout the 19th
century – starting with Frankenstein, going through Wells and Verne
and elements of Poe – before coalescing in the USA. The
extraordinary rush of technology in the Second World War threw it
into sharp relief.
This era, then, is when
I think that the rest of the world caught up with what the early SF
writers had seen early on: the world was changing forever. New
technological gave us new metaphors to understand the world,
morality, ethics and epistemology. I wouldn’t say that SF grew up,
I’d say that the events of World War 2 showed that the changes in
the world couldn’t be ignored. It was the first time that the
popular consciousness – rather than only those who had been paying
attention – registered that technology was changing our lives
forever.
In 2013, that
transformation is pretty much complete. No serious writer today can ignore the effect of
technology on our lives. Many contemporary literary writers both
acknowledge the importance of SF’s heritage – even the darker
recesses like super-hero comics – on the culture and their own
writing.
What hasn’t happened
– what will never happen – is an uncritical acceptance of writers
who slavishly identify themselves what we might call, in the modern
way ‘brand’ science fiction. Brand science fiction is obsessed
with Comicon. Brand science fiction checks io9 everyday. Brand
science fiction argues about the Hugo awards. Brand science fiction
shops at Forbidden Planet. Brand science fiction thinks it’s a
scandal that a book by a grumpy homophobe is being made into a big
budget movie when there are some many other writers out there who
reflect much better on the brand values.
Before you get the
wrong idea about me, I’m clearly a moderately rabid consumer of
brand science fiction – I fucking love it! But I don’t mistake it
for the cutting edge of the arts. The days when brand SF had anything
new or interesting to show the world are long gone. The good bits
were quickly assimilated and many of them became the clichés that
the followers of brand SF rage about when used by non-brand writers –
nuclear apocalypse, robots, various flavour of dystopia.
But those are really
all that SF ever had to offer the world at large. The rest is a load
of nods and winks that we all enjoy, a certain strain of disbelief
that we can all agree to suspend a bit because we know the rules.
You and your cosplay, your
Hugos, your Worldcon, your certificate from the Clarion workshop and
your books blog are living in the past. Get with the future guys and leave
brand science fiction in the past where it belongs.
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