Super Sad True Love Story

My review of Super Sad Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is now up on The Zone. It's a terrific book that I enjoyed reading and writing about a lot. It's a very clear commentary on 1984, one of my favourite novels, and so I had a lot of fun with it. Plus it's genuinely funny and clever – the dystopian elements are pitch perfect satire of current media and trends and the characters do more than fill their roles as comic types and really come alive.

As is often the case, this review is just a thinly disguided excuse to write about something else entirely, though. In this case, I wanted to explore the divide between literary and genre fiction. I frequent a big geeky message board and it's a topic that comes up there quite a lot, usually in reaction to some statement by a mainstream type eschewing fantasy or SF (J K Rowling and Margaret Atwood are the examples that keep coming up). The last twelve or 18 months seem to have had a few mainstream SF releases and so the issue's been coming up again, most interestingly a discussion between China Mielville and literary critic John Mullan on the question of why SF novels never win the Booker prize. 

The Butt by Will Self

Well Self is a sci fi writer. He tries to hide it, but a brief glance at his oeuvre should be enough to convince. It's there in the title story of his first collection of short stories “The Quantity Theory of Insanity”, which recounts the results of an experiment at a mental hospital in London. There are clear SF influences in this story – H P Lovecraft, J G Ballard, David Cronenberg, to name just the most obvious. More mainstream readers try to hide it under murmurings about Burroughs, or Kafka or Alasdair Grey or Jonathan Swift, but those of us that are in the know are not fooled!

So, what was I saying?

My apologies. I've been busy on other things and haven't been updating here. Well, never fear I'm still out and will be back soon with a review of Super Sad Love Story by Gary Shteyngart and some less formal comments on Will Self's The Butt. There's also part four of the 2000AD review to come: rather than just Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante I'm going to cover all the rest in one last post.

So, hang in there all this is coming soon! In the meantime, here's Jackson performed by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood.

2000AD Part Three: Savage and Defoe

I keep saying this about different people, but if there's one guy who really embodies the values of 2000AD, it's Pat Mills. He was, of course, one of the motive forces behind establishing the title back in the seventies, and over the years he's never been far away. You could say the same about John Wagner and Alan grant, of course, who were similarly involved in 2000AD's earliest days, but it seems to me that no one quite expresses the conflicting impulses of 2000AD quite like Mr Mills.

While I've been reading the reprint volumes (you can find the reviews by clicking the 2000AD tag, an Harlem Heroes is awaiting review, NB) I think it's his stories that I have – so far – enjoyed the most. I don't think I'll be going back for more Robo-Hunter or Rogue Trooper, but I am hungry to get to ABC Warriors and to read more Nemesis. His stories have a restlessness about them, an impatience that expresses itself in a wilful, almost destructive desire to make us face up to the darkness that the stories are built on. It's right there at the start of Dredd (and Mills wrote a lot of the early classic strips, including the entirety of the Cursed Earth series, which contains a lot of intriguing morality plays), and in Ro-Busters, which starts as an amusing and enjoyable Thunderbirds-style adventure story and develops to combine elements of animal cruelty (via some very explicit references to Black Beauty) and – more obviously – slavery. It's almost as if Mills can't bring himself to write this stuff any more, as if he feels this massive moral obligation to a bunch of comedy boys' comic robots, to take them seriously and address their concerns.

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?

Sorry for recent lack of updates!

Man, my work is so behind!

2000AD Part 2: Strontium Dog and Judge Dredd

Having discussed my personal history with 2000AD in part 1, let's take a look the most recent progs in my possession, progs 1689 to 1702.

That's 13 progs, three-month's worth. It's amazing how quickly they pile up! I only make it to the comics shop once a month or so (Gosh in London, by the way, and consider this a plug for the friendliest friendly comics shop in London) and so I've been reading them in a slightly different way to how I read it in the past. Instead of three or four page bites, I've been reading the stories in longer stretches. Some of them, I've been hoarding up and reading all in one go, and some of them I've gone through and re-read again for the purposes of this review.
 
This is more like how I've been reading the reprint volumes I've been reviewing than how I used to read progs in the old days, and it's thrown up a few contrasts between then and now, but I'm probably going to hold on to these until the end of the series. Howzabout that then, suspense fans? In the meantime, though I'm going to look at each story in some detail (some more than others), starting with two of 2000AD's most enduring characters, Judge Dredd and Johnny Alpha.