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doloras wrote:

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War Arrow wrote:

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Dick is generally good for what ails ye...

Sorry. I know no-one is going to believe me, but that was an entirely innocent remark.

Clifford D. Simak Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967)

Sometimes fans can be very off-putting. There are parts, for example, of Outpost Homeworld (those featuring 40 pages of The Rory's Shoes Appreciation Thread and the like) which I'm pretty sure would scare me off watching that show ever again. Anyway, lacking background knowledge of the intriguing Mr. Simak, I signed up to Simak Fan (I think it was called) - not a forum, just a sort of network where everyone gets emails from everyone else, so sort of like a forum without a site. Anyway, I introduced myself, made a few observations on Simak, mentioned some other authors I like, and left it at that.  The first response said something along the lines of "I've tried other authors, and I used to enjoy Philip K. Dick, but when I read him now he just makes my teeth hurt  - Simak is the one for me." Then came "That's right Geoff, I think we all agree there's no-one quite like Simak." And then "I certainly concur with what has been said and like nothing better of an evening than to relax with a hot drink and a good Simak." And so on and so forth. Eventually discussion erupted into the meaning of Simak's work, the message he was attempting to convey, and by discussion I mean minor essays.

Let's be quite clear, Simak has his moments, and true enough his books have a flavour entirely of their own, but we're not talking fucking Shakespeare here - his message ("let's be nice to one another and if possible try not to screw up the environment") is invariably spelled out in a font so monolithic as to make the Ben Hur poster seem restrained, and getting into the subtext is about as useful as dissecting the works of The Ramones; and to be brutally honest, Simak's prose can be occasionally appalling. This isn't to slate the man. I love The Waltons too, but treating either as equivalent to War & Peace just means you're a berk.

So I unsubscribed and tried hard to unremember the innermost Simakian musings of morons and read this novel without aversion therapy colouring my view, which was initially something of a challenge. The already heavy-handed ecological subtext screamed away with the subtlety of a leather studded 1982 punk single called Thatcher! Clunky sentences I might have otherwise overlooked leapt right up off the page - this sort of thing:

"And when he finally came, he carried, as well as the basket full of garbage, a bundle, wrapped in newspaper, which he placed on the ground beside the cans. Then he took the lids off the cans and lifted the bundles of garbage from the heavy basket in which he carried them and put them in the cans. Having done this, he picked up the bundle he had placed beside the cans and balanced it on the lid of one of the cans."

So the guy chucked some of his shit in the cans but not all of it is in essence what is being said here: there are 83 words in that passage, utilising a vocabulary of 42, of which a mere 25 appear only the once... which is, I suspect, why it's so bleeding repetitive. And what's with, all those, fucking, apostrophes in that first, sentence? And, it gets worse, if not in terms of composition, then certainly with regard to sheer wince-factor:

"Mathematics - what had a woman to do with mathematics other than the basic arithmetic of fitting the family's budget to the family's need? And what had a woman to do with life other than the giving and the rearing of new life?"

Hate to say it, but I don't think he was joking. Much of this novel would work better read aloud by Dad Walton, half moon spectacles perched upon his nose, 400 Walton kids gathered around the rocking chair, and Ike Godsey doing hapless and heart-warming deeds in the background. In fact it would be pretty compelling as home-spun morality in that context, but as printed word, Clifford has let himself down somewhat. And yet when writing within his comfort zone - nature, or nature from the perspective of a single character alone in the wilderness - his prose comes alive with startling and genuinely stirring images which circumnavigate any potential schmaltz.

This is a dystopian novel, an oppressive future society enslaved by the promise of post-mortem revival. The evil company (more powerful than any government) freezes you on the promise of eternal life just as soon as they can figure out how to do it, so there's very little to truly qualify this as science-fiction as opposed to speculative fiction, what with the promised reanimation being no nearer to actually happening than it was when Walt Disney went into the freezer (assuming that story is true). After a hundred or so pages of barely coherent and thoroughly unconvincing dystopian politics, the story flees into the wilderness and suddenly Simak is back on form once again, reminding cynical types like myself just why Way Station and City were so great. The final third of the novel sees the author back on top form, delivering a crushing (and unusually pessimistic) final line worthy of Orwell (or one of those guys). Shame it took so long to get there.

Nick Walters Reckless Engineering (BBC Books, 2003)

Another detour prompted by an invite to the Eighth Doctor facebook page; also (unrelated) coming across George Mann (former editor of Solaris Books, several of which were reviewed here) on facebook and finding that this chappie - responsible for putting out some of the most memorable and original things I've read in the last few years - has taken it upon himself to read all the BBC EDAs. Not having read any before, he's starting with The Eight Doctors and working his way through to the end. And he enjoyed said Terrance Dicks debut for reasons roughly amounting to the view that whilst it may not be a masterpiece, it's harmless fun and does pretty much everything it sets out to do. I tend to agree, and it makes a pleasant change to encounter someone (particularly considering George Mann's literary credentials) with such eclectic tastes and refreshing attitude. 'What a nice guy,' I thought.

Anyway, I hadn't read any of the EDAs in a long time, and this gave me a hankering to go back and see if all was as I remembered. I've seen some scathing reviews of Reckless Engineering, and whilst I recall enjoying Nick Walters' previous books, I don't recall them as particularly having stood out from others of the range. I returned to this one simply because it came to mind as having made a good impression. And yet there are still those unfavourable reviews, so...

Whilst I'm not sure I noticed this at the time, Walters' prose suggests compliance with some editorial policy favouring a narrative that would appeal to the teenage reader as much as to crusty old Doctor Who obsessives: events spelt out fairly clearly with a minimum of fuss, nothing too experimental, evidence of a modular approach (introduction of character, description of character's appearance, then on with the dialogue) and so on. There are a few passages I found a little jarring near the beginning, notably where Fitz is described as saying something "warningly". Then there's an impressive middle section, and it becomes unfortunately muddy towards the end as the TARDIS fills up with characters who stand around waiting to deliver their lines. Actually, the conclusion of the book was a little unsatisfactory. It seems rushed, sketchy even, and is marred by some truly peculiar lines:

"Brunel blew through his lips, shook his head, and stepped past the Doctor into the TARDIS.
The Doctor paused for a moment, just in time to hear Brunel's cry of astonishment, and then stepped in after him."

I get that Brunel is exasperated here, but this 'blowing through his lips' sits so awkward on the page, not to mention being anatomically suspect; and then we have the Doctor pausing for a moment (a statement of non-activity) "just in time" (suggesting something experienced on completion of activity) which seems equally clunky. Then later, when Malahyde encounters the Doctor:

"His voice went up and down. He was clearly afraid."

Okay, so the pitch of his voice went up and down. It faltered, or quailed, or some other single word that would have served better than the three. And then on page 254 we get an early and typically mystifying appearance from Trix, the companion no-one ever quite got (or at least no-one I've spoken to) and who seems symptomatic of all that went wrong with the later EDAs.

That said, the main part of this novel is impressive, with plenty of those vertiginous concepts that really made Doctor Who what it is. Alternate reality tales can be problematic because they so often fail to rise above the notion that, being an alternate reality, there isn't much at stake in terms of the big picture. The strength of Reckless Engineering is that its characters don't get the luxury of considering any big picture as they struggle for survival in a pseudo-mediaeval version of the present. As post-apocalyptic scenarios go, this is one of the grimmest and most compelling I've read - an Earth where serious fuck-ups with a Victorian time machine have utterly wiped out all animal life, most plant life, and 95% of humanity - leaving the remainder to either a miserable and feudal vegetarian existence, or to hunt in feral packs of mindless cannibals.

The narrative ingenuity of this setting is impressive, and raises questions about why it didn't hold together so well towards the end, so striking is the contrast between the more vivid chapters and those which read suspiciously like a first draft. Additionally, the awkward conclusion also seems strange considering that Nick Walters had already turned out a couple of fairly respectable novels with none of the problems that eventually bog this one down. Given the final underwhelming years of the EDAs, I'm inclined to wonder whether this may be due to a lack of editorial direction.

A.E. van Vogt & E. Mayne Hull The Winged Man (1944)

Edna Mayne Hull was the woman who typed up a lot of van Vogt's stories, and the two eventually married and wrote together. There's since been some dispute about this - suggesting that she had little or no involvement in the writing process, but I'm not so sure.

Approaching van Vogt I've found some preparation is needed, sort of like drinking a pint of milk and eating a kebab prior to a heavy night on the sauce. He was very particular about wanting to create a certain evocative effect with his prose, so the sentence structure can at times be almost like the literary equivalent of cubism - it makes absolute sense, but it hits you at a funny angle, and makes for intense prolonged reading. Whilst The Winged Man has some of that, it's nothing like so severe as in the others I've read, which suggests either a calming influence on the part of Mayne Hull, or that my brain has finally developed glands which help me to cope with van Vogt reality.

Whatever the case, this is typical of his writing, just not quite so hard on the brain as some of them. It's dreamlike as usual, with van Vogt's signature random change of direction roughly every eight hundred words, and of course the story itself - distant future earth where all land mass is reduced to mud, and humanity is divided into aquatic and avian branches, neither of whom fully understand the technology they have inherited (the floating pyramid city of the bird people for example); into this world come various sea craft from human history - a 20th century submarine amongst them - all recruits in the war between the people of the sea and the air. One of the future sea craft is notably populated by an all-female crew (Amazonian with pretty dresses, hand bags, and a certain degree of awe at the manliness of chaps from other eras) which ordinarily might come across as preposterous shite, but here just supports the general surreality.

The more I read of this guy (and possibly his wife), the more impressed I am - there are gratuitous plot twists here that would make Russell T. Davies blush and demand for some semblance of plausibility, but the narrative is so focussed, so meticulous in its detail (including even the detail that would otherwise make no sense) that you barely even notice. Where some novels feel as though the substructure is map-like, a chart of interactions with the novel as just a glimpse of the story, here it feels like everything that occurs is knotted tight within a single continuous strand, the focus spread equally to each element... as I say, dream-like.

Weird. And very enjoyable.

Miss Wildthyme & Friends Investigate (Obverse Books, 2010)

Advanced apologies for my unexpected (to me at least) switch into essay mode, but before I get onto how much I liked this collection (considerably)...

I sometimes feel slightly ambivalent regarding kitsch, or that which is campy, or whatever you want to call it. It's not so much the object of kitsch, or that which has been retroactively defined as such, as the motive of said redefining. At worst, it ends up with a three hour clip show on TV in which the usual talking heads point at The Bay City Rollers and laugh at the tartan trim, the hysterical fans, the sub-glam music, and the faintly worrying manager on the grounds that we all know so much better these days because we listen to proper music like Coldplay and Radiohead - in other words HA HA LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF ME WHEN I WAS YOUNG HO HO MY HAIR WAS SLIGHTLY LONGER TITTER CHORTLE, or the time I sat down with an ex-girlfriend and her sister to watch Terror of the Autons and realised their main areas of focus were the "hilarious" effects and the fact that it wasn't Star Trek: The Next Generation. Missing the point I thought, but anyway... as a devotee of every Godzilla film ever made (except the American one and Terror of Mechagodzilla because it went just a bit too cute for its own good) I just find that sort of thing kind of weird: almost like a fear of appreciating something on the strength of its own merits (whatever they may be) in case somebody points at you and laughs because you're watching All Monsters Attack when really you should be reading Shakespeare. There's something a bit too easy in chuckling at the old days for the heinous crime of not being the present, particularly when the present may not necessarily be any more amazing in anything other than subjective terms. So I really would rather listen to the Bay City Rollers and watch Godzilla films than spend time with Coldplay or the bard because that's how I roll. It's not an exercise in irony. I read proper books too, and I even watch films with subtitles (you know... French ones and that) so don't feel I have anything to prove.

Getting to the point... Paul Magrs Doctor Who novels introducing (to me anyway) Iris Wildthyme are still great books, but I never quite saw why the character was so popular, and I was a lot less keen on that Big Finish Who adventure featuring Iris (The Wormery)... possibly that's partially my irrational bias against northern English accents (excepting north-east, there seems to be this unspoken tenet within the UK media that anything said in a northern accent is immediately either hilarious or deeply poignant) so, rightly or wrongly, all I heard was a load of 'eeh bah gum, chuck' and hangover funnies. It just sounded somehow too obvious.

Anyway, at last I'm a convert. This is largely thanks to Cody Schell and his love of Mexican wrestlers. Obviously the Mexico element is a big draw for me, but only a few months ago I saw the Aztec Mummy films (I won't go into detail but they're Mexican and far superior to all that long-winded Tarkovsky guff) and was hugely impressed by the sudden and bewildering appearance of a crime-fighting guy in a cape and a mask. I was hooked, and thanks to Cody this led naturally to the four million Santo films which really hit my Godzilla gland where it counts. Sure they're funny, and possibly ludicrous, but there's a real charm to them and a wonderful sincerity which you'll probably only get if you laugh with rather than at them. Not sure if it's of direct relevance here but it might be worth remembering that Mexico is the country where men have actually donned masks and capes and fought crime. In real life.


Anyway, Cody Schell is the creator of Mr. 105, a Mexican Wrestler pal of Iris, and I was sold on the idea before I'd even read a word. So here I am at last getting stuck into Iris, if you'll pardon the expression.

This, as the two of you reading this will no doubt know, comprises four separate stories loosely tied together by a mysterious perfume bottle. The standard of writing is extraordinarily high, technically speaking. I must admit, for me Jim Smith's The Found World was a little hard to follow, with new characters still being introduced, it seemed, at least two thirds of the way through, plus a slight overload of famous names (albeit as conceptual entities) - Dracula, Sherlock Holmes' Watson and brother Mycroft, Professor Challenger from The Lost World, and so on - just stretched the credibility a little too much and buried the story, but expanded to 200 pages (without too many more famous names tossed in) I suspect it would work well. Nick Wallace's The Irredeemable Love is a little more leisurely, a pleasant slow-burning murder mystery which hangs together nicely and creates a powerful atmosphere. Cody Schell's Mr. 105 tale (although I'm biased) takes a more primary colours approach than the undoubtedly poetic preceding episodes, but this is well matched to the story and does better to carry the excesses which (for me) cluttered the first of the collection - and by excesses I mean stuff that Doom Patrol era Grant Morrison would probably shy away from in the name of moderation. Bonkers characters and situations fly off the page with genuine affection, a healthy quota of belly laughs ("I pity the fool," said Mr. Tea) and not a trace of the dreaded irony - I'm a convert, and the world needs a lot more Mr. 105. The final story is a Stuart Douglas Iris tale (and dammit I get it now) which strikes a wonderful balance between all the stuff that makes Iris fun, and keeping it sharp without resorting to easy chuckles.

A great collection which manages throughout to crack jokes without ever quite descending to obvious 'comic writing' (by which I mean stuff that repeatedly digs you in the ribs to remind you of how amusing it is, sorry but Douglas Adams springs to mind here*). Weirdly enough, some of the humour actually reminds me of the old Ealing comedies - raucous disguised as subtle. Oh and it mentions the Faction on page 189.

Brilliant. I'm sold. Looks like I'm going to have to get the first two collections now.

Available from here, although you probably knew that.

*: Probably contentious I know, and Terry Pratchett does it too (although I'd argue that he writes better and tells a more satisfying story) but it's that thing about how once you notice a formula, it becomes difficult to ignore. With Douglas Adams (amongst others) it was the quintessentially English eloquent non-sequiteur: "Pardon me, but I can't help noticing that you appear to have a marshmallow / toad / alien / time-space vortex protruding from your forehead." etc etc. I just found it a bit wearying after a while and it made me long for a good old man-slips-on-banana-skin joke.

Tim90 wrote:

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Hi War Arrow.

I really enjoy reading your reviews and was just wondering if you could recommend some books for me. Im looking for books set entirely aboard space ships, so sort of Space Opera type books.

Thanks.

Sure... only one I can think of set entirely aboard a spacecraft (as in that I've read) is Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop - his first novel and one of the best things he's done I thought, though it feels oddly like a Virgin NA in places. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, maybe not exactly space-opera, but it comes close and entails space-war and plenty mind-bending time-travel stuff. Stephen Baxter's Timelike Infinity is good in a similar way too, though I'm not sure it's in print right now. As space-operay as you can get are some of Peter F. Hamilton's books - they're all massive but surprisingly quick reading - Night's Dawn trilogy I'd recommend for biological starships, interplanetary politics, humanity split into two separate species (or equivalent) and sheer scale, although that's a lot of reading and I haven't even got to the last volume yet, so his shortish story collection A Second Chance at Eden (set in the same universe) might be a safer bet, or Fallen Dragon which stands on its own.

I'm sure there's others but those are the ones that came to mind. I'm told Charles Stross and Neal Asher are also pretty damn good in this respect but haven't read either of them yet. Think if I had to recommend just one of the above it would be The Forever War.

Not all entirely aboard spacecraft I'm afraid, but mostly. Sort of.

Tim90 wrote:

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Thanks for the recommendations.

Think I might give The Forever War a go.

A pleasure. I've never met anyone who read it who didn't rate it highly, so hope you'll enjoy it.

Sigh... I just can't give him up...



Lawrence Miles Interference (1999)

I seem to find myself distracted, dipping back into His mighty texts more often than intended, and here I am reading this one (or strictly speaking two) again. It just sort of fell into my hand as I was reaching for the Asimov (or whatever), and possibly there's some subconscious motive spawned by seeing too many Outhouse Mongbase threads dedicated to the extermination of Lawrence Miles and canonisation of Interference as the worst novel in the world.

Why do I go in those threads? I always know what I'll find. Perhaps it's like a bloodsport - all those lengthy posts calling for Lawrence Miles to be loaded into a giant cannon and fired at the sun, and the tortured logic by which they are presented, all that energy that goes into the writing and all towards what reads like Gary Bushell with a copy of The Doctor Who Episode Guide stuffed up his arse. It's like watching a horse trying to climb a ladder (just to wheel out my favourite Charlie Brooker line once more).

I still can't see the objections, at least I can't whilst labouring under the assumption that some people aren't just a bit thick. So far, specifically regarding Interference, we've had:

It's too long.

It would be better if it were two separate books, no no - I mean I know it is, but if it was one with the McGann Doctor and another for the Pertwee story.

It's badly written.

It's preachy.

It's fanwank - it explains something that required no explanation (meaning the I.M.Foreman material).

It fucks up the continuity.

To address these criticisms one by one in the absence of those who offered them thus sparing me their droning retorts, as I see it:

It's too long.
To be fair, some of the later chapters seemed like they might have benefited from a little more copy editing. There's a few uncharacteristically clumsy sentences (much to my surprise) and the narrative became a bit muddy for me, which is unusual from this author. I suspect the essence of this problem, at least for some, was simply a lack of linking scenes wherein people run down corridors.

It would be better if it were two separate books, no no - I mean I know it is, but if it was one with the McGann Doctor and another for the Pertwee story.
Maybe, but this looks suspiciously like the logic of someone who bought eight copies of The Eight Doctors just for the sake of keeping the library absolutely comprehensive - none of the misery of having to look on another shelf for the Troughton interlude when the marathon reaches that crucial gap between Menace of the Kite Men and Obfuscation of Frankenstein. Anyway... the Pertwee section is little more than a novella and would seem ridiculous without the supporting McGann material. Imbeciles.

It's badly written.
No. It. Isn't.

It's preachy.
This apparently because it mentions the arms trade at some length. I actually saw nothing I would describe as preachy, and given that a central theme of the book is people picking and choosing what causes they consider worthy or otherwise (no-one horrified by any real life arms trade revelations described herein, many apoplectic that Loz kills the Doctor before spider radiation can do the job like on the telly), this seems a particularly ironic criticism. Also a very stupid one.

It's fanwank - it explains something that required no explanation (meaning the I.M.Foreman material).
True to an extent I guess, but the fanwank isn't really the point of the book. I'd say fanwank is more offensive when the point of the book is something "deep and meaningful" like WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT BETWEEN CYBERMEN & PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. I gather Lawrence just dislikes untidiness in his continuity, and for what it's worth, he did a pretty impressive job of rationalising a good few howlers here. Not that that's the issue of course.

It fucks up the continuity.
No. It actually makes more sense of it if anything, particularly all that human-on-my-mother's side cobblers. Sure, sure - nothing in the show to directly contradict it (although nothing to support it either), and of course there's no way it could have been slapped in there by a careless producer who really wasn't that bothered so long as it was a hit with the sort of audience who were never going to like it anyway. And actually, given that central to the Doctor Who mythos is time travel and that whole changing history dealio, this criticism really does seem to be the work of mentalists.

I'm assuming of course that everyone reading this will already know enough about the whole Doctor Who novels thing, but if not - sorry. Just treat the above as free-form poetry.


It's not his greatest by some way, but it is at least ambitious, and for the most part it succeeds. It makes some damn good points about culture and relative values (although This Town... went a little further in some respects) as mentioned, balancing actual real world nastiness against the "death" of BBC TV's beloved Doctor Who - probably a bit of a cruel trick to play on the more hard-of-thinking readers, although I doubt that was Lawrence's intention. Not the author's best, but still shits big ones over many others in the range. And I'm kind of proud to admit liking this one when it clearly annoys so many dumbells.

Oh... one more thing. I'd forgotten about the childhood / gas mask / terror equation halfway through Book Two - another Milesism that just happens to have cropped up on the goggle box in recent years.

Just sayin'.