So what would really happen after the world ends? Peter Bagge’s answer in Apocalypse Nerd isn’t very different from anyone else’s: The survivors of North Korea’s nuclear attack on Seattle would remain civilized until their first missed meal, and then turn on each other like starved animals. So maybe in real life they wouldn’t turn so quickly into desperate killers as Perry and Gordo does here, but then again I’ve never gone to bed hungry, so what do I know? The style is very Bagge: Down-to-earth slapstick with bitter humor – much more bitter than in his Hate comics. The survivors are not actually forced by circumstance to become barbarians, it’s more like they’ve been given an excuse to think they have no choice, and eagerly take it, (bemoaning what they’ve become while they rob the houses of their victims). It’s almost funny. Almost.

Btw, go read Peter Bagge’s political strips at Reason.

“Here’s the whole story of how Fain the Gardener became Fain the Sorcerer. But I’ll tell it quickly by leaving out the lies.” In my project to read everything by the satirist Steve Aylett, (well somebody should), I’ve come to his one contribution to fantasy. Fain the Sorcerer is a 90 page riff on fairy tale conventions and time travel. Fain, on escaping from the royal castle where he’s failed to revive the enchanted princess, (a local tradition because it gives people “something to think about other than what is important”), comes across a lunatic who grants three wishes. Fain wishes the ability to travel backwards in time, does so, and immediately returns for three new wishes. And so on. Through elaborate attempts to avoid the loopholes of wish-granters, (“I wish to be able to see in the dark, and by this I do not mean to be able merely to see the darkness, but to see in the darkness as though it were illuminated, though without conflagration”), Fain gains many useful powers (and some useless ones), visits remote kingdoms, fights the evil wizard, woos the princess, and goes on a reckless rampage throughout the timeline. And there’s the usual Aylettian linguistic bombshells and satirical stabs, though less than in Slaughtermatic. Read it, and read Aylett.

I know there’s something happening in David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, but I don’t know what it is. Maskull travels (by improbably means) to a remote planet, a young and wild world where the local Creator and Devil still walks about, and the landscape changes by the minute. People’s bodies correspond to their different personalities, and Maskull’s body and worldview changes to match the people he meet. Compassionate people have extra organs to sense the emotions of others, while cruel people have an extra eye that projects pure will-power. He meets a sort of buddhist, a musician who plays ugly-beautiful music that kills people, and a person of a third sex. David Lindsay’s purpose is philosophy, not satire as in many such stories of fantastic journeys, but I have no idea what he’s trying to say. It’s like an ambitious art film: Someone clearly put a lot of thought into it, but don’t ask me what the scene where the clown shoots Jesus means. A Voyage to Arcturus is an unfathomable allegory of something-or-other, and that’s not for me. I like it less because I have Jurgen by James Branch Cabell to compare it to. Jurgen was published at about the same time, and walks in more or less the same territory, but is one of my favourite novels. Jurgen is a hard-hitting classic of philosophical fantasy, (and read also Cabell’s The Silver Stallion.) A Voyage of Arcturus is only imaginative.

William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel The House on the Borderland isn’t good, but it’s flawed in a memorable and pioneering way. Hodgson writes like a less angsty H. P. Lovecraft, with “inhumanly human” swine-monsters emerging from a bottomless Pit to threaten an isolated house in Ireland. My favourite part foreshadows the “defend your home against the undead army” scene in a zombie movie. The second half is a vision of the end of the world, where the main character fast-forwards through the future at ever-increasing speeds, until both the Earth and the Sun is dead. It’s time-lapse photography in writing, secular in content but Biblical in style. And there’s an alternate dimension, containing a huge replica of the main character’s house and the ghost-like love of his life. All this in less than 100 pages. The House on the Borderland makes no sense whatsoever. It jumps incoherently from one strange event to another, never really trying to tie them together. It’s not even confusing. What it has going for it is its proto-Lovecraftian style, and I’m not surprised to learn that Lovecraft was a fan. He was also a better writer. But still – memorable, oh yes! (And I might just check out the comic book version.)

Pundits who, in these exciting times, are eager to loosen the reins on their inner prophet, will find inspiration in the words of Rabelais from Pantagrueline Prognostication for 1533:

“This year, the blind will see very little; the deaf will be very hard of hearing; the dumb will hardly speak; the rich will keep themselves somewhat better than the poor, and the healthy than the sick. Many sheep, oxen, pigs, geese, pullets and ducks will die, whilst among monkeys and dromedaries the mortality will be less cruel. Old age will prove incurable this year because of the years gone by. Sufferers from pleurisy will have great pains in their sides; those who suffer from a runny belly will frequently go to the jakes; this year catarrhs will flow down from the brain to the lower limbs; and there will all but universally reign an illness most horrible, redoubtable, malignant, perverse, frightening and nasty which will so confuse everybody that they will never know what wood to use for their arrows, and will often madly write treatises in which they argue about the philosopher’s stone; Averroës (in Book Seven of the Colliget) calls it Shortage of cash.”