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.”

Jack Vance takes a sociologist’s approach to SF in the three novels collected in The Jack Vance Reader, the first I’ve read of him: Emphyrio, about a repressive guild-based welfare state, where an old legend inspires a young man to non-conformity. The Languages of Pao, about mass-scale social engineering, where a world’s ruler brings in outside linguists to make his people speak (and therefore think) like warriors, merchants, and engineers. And The Domains of Koryphon, from a world where human colonists compete with other races for land. In all these stories, the focus is on social forces and mass psychology, not at the expense of characters, but as the nuanced backdrop against which the characters act. I’ll single out (at random) The Domains of Koryphon (aka The Gray Prince) for praise: Vance brings his eye for social dynamics to the issues of colonization and slavery, taking a provoking approach where the colonial landlords are morally wrong but realistic, while their urban, intellectual critics are naive hypocrites. Some have called it a racist novel with a message of might makes right, which is stupid. This is a story for adults who don’t turn their brains off when they read. The Domains of Koryphon is not meant to comfort, but to provoke ideas. The moral high ground of the human landlords does makes it a problematic novel, though, and it’s more fair to criticize it than to neuter it with the label of escapism. Even so, I’ll return for more of Vance’s speculative sociology.

A story for book lovers.

Earlier I wrote about a book I wish I’d read when I was 16. Here’s one I wish I’d read when I was 10: The Adventures of Endill Swift, by Stuart McDonald. This is surreal children’s literature in the tradition of Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. Endill Swift is trapped at Epitaph School, a gruesome place with sadistic teachers, labyrinthine corridors you can lose yourself in for years, a dining room where rows of animal heads grin down at frightened students, and dormitories named after weeds and insects. The library is so huge it has its own abominable bookman, living somewhere far above the floor. Endill wants to escape before the school drives him mad, like it once did his father and grandfather, and clearly also has done to the teachers, who even when they retire don’t leave the school island, but go off to wander the uncharted corridors, sad and confused.

It’s all done in the clear, intelligent and witty style of the best children’s books. There’s also plenty of satire aimed at adult readers, and it’s really up to you if you want to read Endill Swift as a book for children, or a book for adults about childhood. It’s brilliant either way, (and if it all sounds too dark for children to read then you’ve forgotten what it was like.) It’s also out of print and virtually forgotten, something that happens to a frightening number of potential classics.

When Thomas M. Disch killed himself this summer, obituaries said he was the kind of brilliant critic’s favourite that readers ignore. After reading On Wings of Song, I see why he was admired, but also why he wasn’t read. How do you describe a novel where the only escape from religious conformism and economic depression is to sing so earnestly that your inner invisible fairy flies out of your body in a state of mystical bliss, and not make it sound silly? I sure don’t know how. I guess you have to take me on trust when I say that this bleak and quiet satire isn’t silly or funny, and definitely not blissful. Anything good in its world is shown only as an unreachable goal that adds to the bitterness of the life of Daniel Weinreb. The near-future America he lives in is falling apart, (quietly, in the background), and it’s taking him down with it, coloring him with its hypocrisy. Daniel is not an anti-hero, he seems always at the verge of success, earnestly wanting to live well, and that makes his failures more bitter. It’s the moderation I admire in this novel, the way Disch creates a feeling of a world ending, (as well as a feeling that it deserves to), without piling on with tragic horrors. Not a happy novel, this, not at all. I liked it, and I think I recommend it, but neither that nor his lit fic respectability will bring crowds of readers to Thomas M. Disch any time soon.

“As for Tolkien, I think those movies came along at a time when people would do almost anything to avoid thinking clearly about what is actually going on, and it was good homogenous escapism. I liked Liv Tyler’s mouth, and I think all three movies should have been just a close-up of that.”
- Steve Aylett

“Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It’s a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it’s inside you it’s too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it’s your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn’t trigger, it doesn’t need to.”
- Steve Aylett

“I would hope that [death is] just the end – I’d feel really cheated if I was woken up into another realm and had a load more shit to deal with. I really just want it finished.”
- Steve Aylett

“It’s a shame, sort of a waste, that most people are influenced by what the newspaper supplements tell them is the book they are meant to be seen reading this year. It seems like those people aren’t really interested in books. If you’re really into books, you havoc all over the place picking up disparate stuff which you devour hungrily, and the ‘selection’ process is more like a sixth sense hunger, a billion miles away from fashion.”
- Steve Aylett

I reviewed his Slaughtermatic earlier, and I’ll be back for more.