Crappy 70s paperbacks with airbrushed spaceships on cover - reviews in the remote Forum

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Crappy 70s paperbacks with airbrushed spaceships on cover - reviews

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War Arrow		#281	[url]	[-]
mother/father Posts: 1004 11 June, 2011 9:32 AM	Remove this ad doloras wrote: No, there is no scene in which... I think I already saw a thread on The Anorak Zone forum, called Which Companions would you include in a Human Centipede? or something similar. Adric seemed to be a fairly popular choice. My own would probably be Billie "because we want to, because we want to" Piper, River Song (who I never forgave for killing Dirty Den in Eastenders), and Bog Brush... er... Moffat (sorry, force of habit) who may not be a companion in a literal sense but I feel almost certainly deserves to feature somewhere therein. On a related subject, it gave me a little thrill to learn that Human Centipede II has been banned for being vile and pointless which, in turn, has caused me to examine my own supposedly liberal values blah blah blah... Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr (editors) World's Best Science-Fiction: 1969 (1969) In a 1980 Amazing Stories interview, Clifford D. Simak mentions Terry Carr's The Dance of the Changer and the Three as a particularly good example of the truly alien in imaginative fiction, so, eager to feed my increasing Simak habit, I traced it to this collection. As it turns out, Carr's short story does live up to some of that hype, doing things that would later be done to great and similar effect in Stephen Baxter's Flux, although it's probably not quite in Simak's league. Happily though, there's plenty here that is, and the World's Best title doesn't seem too bold a claim. Inevitably, with the best will in the world, this sort of thing will tend to be a mixed bunch, and Samuel R. Delaney's dog's dinner of a contribution, whilst imaginative, does little to justify the glowing terms by which his name is usually mentioned; and Brian Aldiss does it again as editors confuse literary flair for his usual sub-Tolkein setting and overuse of words like maiden and yonder. I'm still mystified how someone could have written such great novels whilst churning out such a wealth of bewilderingly dreadful short stories; and I'm beginning to suspect he just doesn't work below a certain word count because elsewhere in this collection, his novella length Total Environment - a terrifying look at population growth which could almost constitute psychological horror - is at the opposite end of the spectrum, right up there with Earthworks and its like. Aside from those mentioned above, the rest is at least pretty damn good, and mostly of such an unusually high quality that each would alone justify grabbing the collection even if the rest turned out to be the sort of shite that would make Terrance Dicks wince, which it isn't. R.A. Lafferty's This Grand Carcass gets extra points for reminding me of Simak; Damon Knight's Masks, Robert Silverberg's Going Down Smooth, and stories from Fritz Leiber and Fred Saberhagen are of similar standard; Colin Kapp's The Cloudbuilders provides wonderful, balloon orientated steampunk from before people realised that sort of thing didn't have to be set in a post-technological agrarian future; Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House is just fucking breathtaking, to be frank; and all nicely rounded off with Katherine MacLean's Fear Hound - a short piece about group psychology and probability, and a reminder that I really need to start tracking down those few novels she had published. Aside from a couple of clunkers, this is one of the best collections I've read: pretty much all number ones and little in the way of ballast.
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doloras		#282	[url]	[-]
mother/father Posts: 643 12 June, 2011 3:32 AM	Hey, for those interested, Total Environment is available online - google it. The Stacks - the site for Faction Paradox fanfic and other fanworks "Larry was with us in spirit" - Kate Orman (for more of my messed up thoughts on culture, magick and revolutionary politics)
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War Arrow		#283	[url]	[-]
mother/father Posts: 1004 12 June, 2011 8:16 AM	doloras wrote: Hey, for those interested, Total Environment is available online - google it. Nice find. PDF here but there seem to be a few formats available from what I can see. Really is well worth a look, and a definite clue as to why Aldiss has such a reputation (just wish I hadn't read all those fecking terrible short stories about special types of atoms - starting to suspect Aldiss may actually be two separate people).
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War Arrow		#284	[url]	[-]
mother/father Posts: 1004 13 June, 2011 8:06 AM	Stuart Douglas & Lawrence Miles (editors) Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts (2011) I may not be the most impartial of critics on account of that being my painting on the cover, but tough shit. I'm milking this baby for every last drop. That my own brushstrokes should be the public face of something this good makes me feel like ten Christopher Walkens, and Christopher Walken in Things to do in Denver when your Dead rather than King of New York or that film about Whitley Strieber having a little bit of a dance with space aliens once they're done putting things into his bottom. Twelve stories from the Faction Paradox universe, vaguely linked by characteristically understated means, and which satisfy like a good meal. Inevitably, it's a mixed bag and surprisingly so, but that's no bad thing, and it avoids the most common misconception of Faction Paradox mythos: commodified dissent, and that the Faction could be about wearing black clothes, sucking your cheeks in, and listening to bands with names like The Tangled Disciples of Gibbet; or, worse still, that it could be reduced to God-awful Scooby Doo villains who dress up in hooded robes and hang around laughing in deep boomy voices, as Lawrence Miles put it in his surprisingly restrained response to The Ancestor Cell. In fact, Ian Potter's (somewhat outstanding) contribution addresses these very points to enormously entertaining effect. So, a mixed bag of what feels like every genre you might care to mention put through the Faction Paradox mincer: Daniel O'Mahoney's Print the Legend appears to channel Charles Dickens through James Fenimore Cooper as read out loud by William Burroughs in his wild west phase, but without the stuff about bums and that; I felt hot and dusty just reading it. What with Jon Dennis' short piece about stray cats and retirement homes, Scott Harrison's psychological space opera, and Stuart Douglas dragging Iris Wildthyme kicking, belching and calling out for ciggies into Faction discontinuity, there are many unexpected twists and turns making for a very robust whole. I probably shouldn't single any authors out for special attention, but I already have done, so fuck it... The thing which shall not be named from which Faction Paradox mythology is extrapolated used to get on my tits from time to time, at least in cases where it felt like I was reading characters researched either by watching a film or having oodles of boffo chuckles with one's keraaaaaaaazy university chums; therefore Jay Eales' tale of a lovable convict was a real breath of fresh air: an ordinary geezer - if there really is such a thing - unwittingly drawn into Faction jiggery-pokery without any of the bloody awful clichés of a film by that bloke who was briefly married to Madonna: not a single cry of leave it aht, yew muppet to be heard; and the stranger elements work all the better for the contrast provided by the setting. Blair Bidmead's Now or Thereabouts takes the boardroom aesthetic last seen in This Town Will Never Let Us Go a stage further with a gut-bustingly good joke that has no right to be as funny as it is; and Ian Potter's wonderful The Story of the Peace - which by the way captures Godfather Morlock perfectly - had me wondering why I had not before heard of this author. It turned out I had as he was in a Short Trips collection, but for some reason this one left a much greater impression. And it's all wrapped up (sort of) by Philip Purser-Hallard's sequel to Of the City of the Saved.... which effortlessly succeeds despite the peculiarly disjointed rigour of short bursts of words fired off in staccato sequence; and extra points for the return of Philip K. Dick as a character, and for getting him exactly right. A Romance in Twelve Parts is a collection of short stories which ultimately adds up to something greater than the sum, and has the overall feel of a good, meaty (or vegetabley if you prefer) novel, chicken soup in printed form if you will. The only questions left hanging are when the next one is due, and why at least a few of these authors aren't a lot more famous. Seriously, by all rights, Iain Banks should be shitting himself.
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War Arrow		#285	[url]	[-]
mother/father Posts: 1004 16 June, 2011 11:42 AM	Philip K. Dick & Ray Nelson The Ganymede Takeover (1967) Asked to identify the most culturally significant technological development since the advent of steam, whilst a few beatniks will most likely mumble the usual crap about computer chips or rocketry, right thinking people will, without hesitation, refer you immediately to our friend the propeller beanie. The propeller beanie, as any student of either science or millinery will tell you, is a development of the more common beanie, which Wikipedia describes like so: Beanies are made by triangular sections of cloth joined by a button at the crown and seamed together around the sides. The term is said to derive from a type of headgear worn in some medieval universities; the yellow hats ("bejaunus," that is, "yellowbill" later "beanus," a term used for both the hats and the new students) evolved into the college beanies of later years. In Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, the term "beanie" may also be applied to a knit cap known as a tuque. A larger variant of the skullcap, the beanie was a working hat associated with blue collar labourers, welders, mechanics, and other tradesmen who needed to keep their hair back but for whom a brim would be an unnecessary obstruction. Beanies do sometimes have a very small brim, less than an inch deep, around the brow front. The baseball cap evolved from this kind of beanie, with the addition of a brim to block the sun. And the propeller beanie is the same but with a small (and admittedly ineffective for aviation purposes) propeller on top. Oddly enough, it turns out to have been invented by Ray Nelson, childhood friend of Philip K. Dick - that's what I love about science-fiction: always thinking outside the box. Nelson, it transpires, has led an interesting life, one that quite aside from the Dick association, entails having knocked around with William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Jean Paul Sartre, Michael Moorcock, Simone de Beauvoir (just imagine their gang hut!) and, as we have established, inventing the world's most important hat. Nelson's website helpfully provides a list of other authors named Ray Nelson (titles include Memoirs of an Oregon Moonshiner, The Seven Seas of Billy's Bathtub and Rainy Day Funds and Value at Risk) and it's therefore difficult to not warm to the guy in the same way that it's hard to listen to The Ramones without concluding that all other non-Ramones music is shit. The Ganymede Takeover came about either from brainstorming sessions between the authors and Poul Anderson, or was a novel by Nelson which Dick knocked into shape, or a bit of all three; no-one seems to know quite which. It has clear touches of genius, as one would expect - Earth invaded by the worm-like Ganys who, lacking arms or legs, conquer despite requiring servants to carry them around; the Ganymedian Mekkis and his vast collection of model aircraft, fighting planes of the first world war and beyond - but, all things considered, the book is strangely unengaging. The characters tend towards certain types seen in other Dick novels, and yet, as Andrew M. Butler has observed, lack focus. It's also a little off-putting that initial exchanges by members of the book's black power activists are characterised by their every sentence ending in baby, like characters in an afro, platforms, and pimps film of the early 1970s. Whilst it's always nice to find a bit of black power, and this is entertaining enough, it has the tang of ethnicity as something understood through magazines and good intentions rather than actually hanging out with black folks. Still, The Ganymede Takeover is hardly a demanding read, and it has plenty in its favour. I just think one more rewrite could have nailed it and rendered it as the classic it should have been.
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