User Profile

Two of the most famous works by Capek are collected in this SF Masterworks edition. I greatly enjoyed both of them. R.U.R. is, unusually, a play. It tells of the creation of synthetic humans and the disastrous consequences. It is famous for coining the term "robot", and it is as relevant as ever in this technological age, more than a century after it was written.

"War With the Newts" is more overtly satirical, darkly comic in places. It is a novel about the discovery of an intelligent amphibious species, which proves itself adept at using many aspects of human technology, while being incapable of adopting other elements of our culture. The book is loaded with references to the political and military calamity into which the world was careering at the time it was written, 1936.

I feel further enriched to learn about Capek. He was Czech, and his homeland features prominently. He was a critic of both communism and nazism. He died in 1938, months before the nazi invasion. His brother Josef was also an artist. He was captured by the nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

At a time when neo-nazis and other fascist killer clowns are on the rise (some of them are also adherents of weird AI beliefs), the Capeks, and "War With the Newts" deserve to be celebrated.

The existence of the "bubblegum fiction" genre and the claim that this book is a high point in it are both assertions by me, unsupported by anyone else to my knowledge. My enjoyment of "The Case of the Missing Message" is strongly influenced by nostalgia. Your mileage may vary.

I borrowed the "bubblegum" concept from the pop music phenomenon which flowered in the 1960s, where producers and faceless session musicians would make records. THey would then sign up a band of ambitious puppets to be the face of the synthetic creation, lip-synching in TV appearances and posing for cover photos, promoting someone else's music, but putting up with it while enjoying the fringe benefits of fame.

The literary equivalent of this commercial exploitation model was pioneered by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. I am impressed to read that it began pumping out product in the 19th century, but its more famous output came later: The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were among its hot properties. Each series was attributed to a pseudonymous author, but the books were all ghostwritten by staff hacks or freelancers, following a format dictated by the publisher. Also in this vein, Robert Arthur's "Three Investigators" series was a favourite of mine in the 1970s. The commercial innovation here was to leave out the author's name and replace it with the film director Alfred Hitchcock, who "presents" the books rather than writes them. It is notable that Arthur's creation has some strong similarities to the Brains Benton mysteries which preceded it by several years.

The marketing model was paralleled by actual authors in the conventional publishing system. Enid Blyton springs to mind as a prominent exponent of formulaic fiction. Charles Spain Verral seems to sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, in terms of facelessness versus fame.

"The Case of the Missing Message" was written in 1959. I have a particular fondness for this book because it was one of my very earliest reading pleasures. My childhood copy was the "Golden Press" edition, with illustrations by the French artist Jacques Pecnard. I was too young to read it in the 60s, but at some stage in the early 1970s I devoured it. I didn't know the author's name. Only later research would reveal it: Charles Spain Verral. On this modern re-reading, I have the Whitman edition which does credit the author, but not on the cover.

The book is a lively and engaging story of two boy detectives who stumble upon a plot by a villainous cove to kidnap the heir to a successful traveling circus, and steal his birthright. The two main characters are an interesting period study... Jimmy Carson is the narrator, an average fifties boy who likes sport and has a paper round. He is a wide-eyed innocent, the type who would say "gee whiz", although his catchphrase when expressing surprise is "creeps!" Jimmy's best friend is Brains Benton, a teenage uber nerd, cross-bred in a literary test tube with Sherlock Holmes.

Brains really is the star of the show, although he's not allowed to have much personality, especially compared to Jimmy, whose narrator's voice rings out clearly. Modern readers might detect a hint of the autism spectrum about Brains, but it seems highly unlikely the author would have had such intent. Happily, Brains is also courageous, moral, and most definitely the leader to whom all other characters defer. I find myself ruefully comparing this to the 21st century, when expertise is derided, science is denied, and a worldwide plague of ignorance, cruelty and greed has broken out in seats of government and state houses around the world.

By contrast, in 1959, in the middle of the nuclear age, and at the dawn of the space age, there was a better class of geek, and they were afforded an appropriate level of deference. In Verral's depiction of the repressed 1950s, there isn't much affection... relationsips are based on loyalty and established modes of behaviour, including rather strict adherence to gender roles and the exclusion of girls and women from the action. Soon, though, the young denizens of this idyllic period would come of age and learn that all you need is love. Or so I like to believe.

The book is dedicated "To Charlie and Randy, for inspiration". Charlie is the author's son, and Randy was his school friend. I take this to be a sign that Verral was perhaps more attached to the story than the "bubblegum" model would suggest. An online anecdote I read tells that the sequels to this book were written by other authors, but Verral thought they weren't good enough, and rewrote them to his own satisfaction. They were then published under the name "George Wyatt", presumably to avoid crediting any one author with the collaborative outcome.

A deserted alien transport hub is discovered on an asteroid, and humans get to use the ships to explore the galaxy, despite not really understanding how they achieve faster-than-light travel. It's incredibly dangerous. The company which runs it creates a nightmare of late-stage capitalism. It's a bit like "Squid Game", where the economy is so bad, you risk everything by getting on one of the Gateway ships. The setting also reminded me of "The Expanse". That's the good bit.

The parallel plot is about the protagonist dealing with the trauma of his experiences on Gateway, as he takes part in therapy with a computer psychoanalyst called Sigfrid. This section let it down for me. Like Pohl's "Man Plus", the tortured masculinity he portrays is annoying, at best. Towards the end of the book, the protagonist Rob launches a vicious assault on his girlfriend, who somehow still decides to come back to him. Pohl makes a feeble attempt to redeem the character with a bit of guilt and remorse, but it's not enough. He doesn't deserve a happy ending. The exploration of Rob's bisexuality is also cringeworthy. Pohl seems to be well-meaning, but he just regurgitates Freudian nonsense in fictional form.

Disappointing.

Post-apocalypse science fiction is flourishing at the moment, but "Earth Abides" is the one that really established its modern form. I've read it many times, but in 2024 it had a different impact on me, and I think it has grown in stature over the years.

The plot takes a now familiar path: a plague wipes out most of humanity; the survivors must come together and work out how to repopulate the empty world, to overcome the psychological and physical impediments they now face. As the story unfolds, it reveals truths about all humanity: our morals and failings and strengths are exposed by the thought experiment of stripping the species back to its barest remnants.

There are no triffids here, no zombies, not even any crazed marauding gangs to provide conflict. Much of the plot tension comes through the protagonist, Isherwood Williams, a young intellectual who judges himself the only survivor capable of rekindling all the earth's knowledge, passing it on to future generations who will rebuild civilisation.

Ish is a solitary, geeky sort of man. He's a nature lover who survives the plague because he's on one of his frequent wilderness camping trips. He considers his solitary tendency a strength at first, judging that he can survive the shock, as so much human companionship vanishes from the face of the earth. It turns out to be a hindrance too, and he has to turn to his newly found companions, especially Em, a black woman whom he loves and comes to depend on for wisdom and courage even as he sees his education and intellectual acumen are a burden as well as a gift.

There's a kind of tragedy as Ish is forced to accept that his dream of reviving technology and rebuilding civilisation is an impossible one. He must also come to recognise the value of the community and the way it finds its strengths existing in harmony with the environment; humanity is no longer the technological master it was before the great disaster.

The hammer which is Ish's talisman is with him always, but the former symbol of industry turns into a religious icon, and Ish as its wielder is like the last of a race of Titans or demigods to his wild young descendants.

On previous readings, I remember feeling the loss, the failure, as Ish downgrades his expectations. Now, as we contemplate the impending impacts of climate change, my reaction is different. I can see from the very beginning that Stewart paints Ish as a flawed, almost a deluded character, whose belief in civilisation and quest to revive it are misguided from the start.

In our 21st century reality, our trust in technology and industry to provide solutions to the climate crisis seems just as flawed. To lose civilisation would be a tragedy, but we would also be losing a lot of the malign structures which destroyed so much of what is precious on our small planet.

"Earth Abides" is further elevated by its multiple themes: the role of the state, of religion, morality, gender, race and law. It is full of references to the cultural and scientific heritage to which Ish clings. It is generously spiced with powerful symbolism and biblical references... at times it reads like an old testament book in itself.

It's got a great plot, great characters and great world-building. The feminism, queerness and anti-racism bring waves of refreshment.

The main thing that let it down for me was the language. The voice I heard was not that of a 1912 steampunk denizen of Cairo. It sounded more like a 21st century internet-soaked American. This included bad grammar: subject pronouns that should have been objects, adjectives that should have been adverbs. Decolonisation is one of the themes, but American English is re-colonising much of the world. It might not bother you, but it definitely bothers me.

Clark also draws on the tradition of the detective genre, which I don't enjoy. Again, it's such an American form, so it added to the annoyance of the language.

I'm a bit sensitive to this because of my recent reading of Lord Dunsany and Ursula le Guin's comments on the importance of style in fantasy. It probably won't bother most readers. This is perhaps a reflection of the sinking standards of readers and writers in the internet age.

It's another must-read masterwork from Reynolds, who gives us a vast survey of popular music, charting the quantity and quality of its cannibalism over the decades, and assessing the extreme levels of self-devouring reached by 2011. In the decade plus since the book's publication, not much has changed.

I have my own take on the subject of this book. I imagine a post-war "tabula rasa". If you were born in, say, 1930, you would have been 15 at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 it was like the end of the old world, which had basically destroyed itself.

Normally when you are around the age of 15 you are ready to start soaking up the rich sweet syrup of culture, but in 1945 it was all gone, wiped out or rendered meaningless by years of fascist dictatorship and the all-consuming allied campaign to destroy it.

For about a decade after 1945 we had a kind of writer's block, where the blank slate was a psychological barrier to creation. In the 1950s, enough people began to see the blank page as a clean, perfect invitation to start creating. It was a release, an outpouring, after a build-up of pressure. This was why we fought that war: to be free.

Post-war modernity began with rock and roll in the 1950s. The engine sputtered briefly before kicking into life and reaching maximum speed in the 1960s. For the next 30 years or so it was a febrile time of creation, filling up the blank page, constantly looking for a space on that page to colour in, as soon as we could conceive something new to express and cover that intolerable blankness.

That was how I viewed pop and rock music as I grew up. The Beatles were my centre of gravity. Through their cover versions (Little Richard, Chuck Berry) I gained a foothold into the music of the 50s, discovering the big bang of rock and roll even though I was born in 1962. In the 60s, 70s and 80s the flame of originality burned brightly, but in the 90s, its intensity began to fade. That was when the remix, the rehash, the revival assumed a greater status than the revolution. The new and the unprecedented were eclipsed by the repeat. The blank page was all filled in.

The internet promised something new, but instead it became a sort of zombie apocalypse. Technology's boundless online capacity was able to revive all the old stuff. The medium was no longer the message: the past had taken control of the medium, and imposed a new temporal order where the expressions of the present and even the future were suppressed.

Reynolds explores the history of revivals. His research and his insights are impeccable. I loved reading about the earliest retromaniacs, the jazz freaks who thought music went downhill after 1933. I am a fan of Robert Crumb, and he has graphically expressed his commitment to this concept. There was another rebellion against modern jazz. Instead of the expressive, experimental Coltrane stuff, the 50s jazz retromaniacs insisted on the New Orleans tradition, a revival cult abbreviated to "trad jazz". It had a surge of popularity in the 1950s, prompting some of its proponents to "sell out". It was like a Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation, a battle between dinosaurs. Soon a meteor called The Beatles would wipe them all out. There are plenty more revivals from subsequent decades lovingly analysed in this great book.

Fast forward to the present, and Reynolds still believes in the future, still believes something huge will come along to repeat the thrills of the summer of love, punk and rave. My fear is that it will only happen with a cataclysm like world war 2... except this time it would be world war 3. There'll be no blank page, because there will be no page at all. I'd rather have the stagnation of retromania, thank you very much.

An omnibus edition of Fisk's 1973 novel "Grinny", and its 1984 sequel "You Remember Me".

The first book tells of a sinister old woman, nicknamed "Grinny", who poses as a relative and embeds herself with an English family. She turns out to be an alien cyborg laying the groundwork for a hostile takeover of the human race. She is able to control the minds of adults, but it is up to the children of the household to thwart her.

The book is short, even by the standards of children's fiction, and I think Fisk skimps on the logistical requirements of science fiction. There's almost no attempt at a scientific explanation for the children's ability to fight off this advanced alien invader. Young readers deserve better than this, no less than us adults. I don't think I'm being old and cynical. I am a lifelong consumer of children's fiction - I simply never grew out of it - and I think my standards of judgement are fair.

The strengths of this little novel lie elsewhere. The creation of an evil entity in the form of a senior citizen reminds me of the generational changes of the times, following the 1968 student uprisings as young people sought to break the stranglehold of previous generations who had made such an appalling mess of the 20th century up to that point. The nice kindly old lady is no longer credible - the older generation is a MENACE!

The portrayal of family life is vivid, as the more relaxed mores of the late 60s and early 70s are disturbed by the leering old Grinny. Fisk also experiments with narrative technique, with most of the book in diary format, and he even introduces himself as a character.

The sequel is a surprising evolution. An upgraded mind-controlling alien returns, this time in the form of a right-wing populist demagogue. Even older teens are susceptible to her hypnosis, as the entire nation joins a mass movement which might well have the slogan "Make America Great Again" if the story were set in the USA. The echoes of our real-life political malaise of the past decades are all too strong, with zealous zombie-like hordes waving union jack flags and slavering over concepts like "discipline" and "rule of law". Margaret Thatcher is referenced, not by name, but with her memorable quote "the lady's not for turning".

Once again Fisk writes himself into the story and, marvelously, portrays himself as a fully vanquished devotee of the neo-fascist alien overlord - until the resourceful child heroine wins the day and frees his mind.

As in the previous novel, the weapons wielded by our planet-saving pre-teen protagonists strain the suspension of disbelief. I am reminded of "The Andromeda Strain" and the dreadful movie of "The Day of the Triffids", both of which included the discovery that seawater was the secret weapon to fight off the otherwise all-powerful monsters. Puh-lease. But it matters less here, because "You Remember Me" is a early warning of the lingering threat of tyranny in human affairs, and another smash hit from the esteemed author Mr Fisk.

It would take a greater scholar than me to accurately assess the influence this novel has had on later works of fantasy. The tale is set partly in our own world and partly in a magical realm, with denizens of each territory crossing the border as they follow their passions, obsessions, quests and whims . It immediately reminds me of several other stories in that mode: "Narnia", "His Dark Materials", "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" all spring to my mind.

Dunsany's 1924 novel is somewhat harder to digest than any of those subsequent works. His mythic language won me over at times, but mostly I found his long flowery sentences contained a lot of superfluous words. It takes a long time for anything to happen. Occasionally I felt the echoes of biblical language, something you might expect from the more explicitly Christian Tolkien or CS Lewis, But those more famous chaps come down to earth as it were, or perhaps I should say they linguistically leave Elfland behind and speak in the ways more familiar in the fields we know. They're more preachy, but more fun than Dunsany.

My recent fantasy reading has had me pondering the Arthurian tradition, where the God-given divine right of kings and the fundamental Christian purity of the ruling class co-exist with what appear to be pagan tropes like Merlin and the Lady of the Lake. Dunsany refers to the non-magical world as "Christom" at times, but his human characters don't seem to be churchgoers. Their local holy man is a sort of earthly wizard himself, who utters spells and curses rather than prayers. The story describes a conflict between the magical realm and the fields we know, but I didn't get the sense that this was a battle between good and evil. I found myself cheering for Elfland, but I suspect that's my own prejudice rather than the author's intended meaning.

In the end this book didn't trigger my atheist sensibilities as much as it did my adherence to other tenets: republican, socialist, egalitarian. When one of the main characters becomes obsessed with hunting, he starts with deer and then turns to unicorns, sending his hounds to rip out the throats of his prey, cutting their heads off and mounting them on his castle wall. The vileness of this incident goes unremarked, and indeed "Lord" (FFS) Dunsany was himself partial to a bit of hunting, he was a lordly torturer of animals and a privileged piece of shit by the sound of things. His real name (Ed Plunkett) seems more apt.

A truly alien lifeform arrives on earth, in the form of tiny, beautiful crystals which have the ability to form together into elaborate structures. The "Trillions" as they come to be known, also have a sort of hive mind. They are intelligent. Children love them, but adults are fearful of them and set about destroying them with nuclear weapons. The general who leads this operation is an almost pantomime villain, a one-dimensional caricature of a military man of action.

That was the plot I latched onto reading this book when I was nine. (More than 50 years ago, how did that happen?!). There were also the child characters: a couple of boy geniuses, Scott and Bem, each one an uber geek in a different way. The nerdy nine-year old me I liked them both. There are other younger children making up a kind of Famous Five gang whose destiny is to save the world.

Reading it again now I'm surprised at how much else is in there. Firstly, there is the ex-astronaut with a massive dose of PTSD and facial scarring from burns sustained in a mission gone wrong. He ends up being a sort of honorary member of the juvenile gang of interplanetary interlocutors. Icarus, as he is known, also delves into an incongruous series of debates and discussions with Scott. They explore subjects like the deficiencies of a dualistic model of good and evil, and contemplate a sort of Gaia hypothesis. Yikes! What happened to the pantomime general, so simple and obvious? Suddenly this book has become deep and cosmic in an almost psychedelic way. And the flyleaf says "for readers ten and over"!

A lot of it went over my head as I defiantly ignored the age guide and read it a year early, but I also recall being kind of high on the experience of reading this book, the first one to have that sort of transcendent effect on my brain that only a good book can provide.

I wish I could say that the philosophical musings are more coherent to me as an adult reader. Scott and Icrarus have their eureka moment and work out what it all means, and it is great for the story, but even now I'm scratching my head at their conclusion. It somehow fails to translate into a broadly applicable meaning in the way that a novel by, say, Ursula le Guin would (e.g. Ged's defeat of the shadow in "A Wizard of Earthsea").

It's not too bad, the actions they take in "Trillions" make sense even if their supposed insights and motivations do not.

I think the cover illustration of the Puffin edition is superb. I still have my copy from the early 70s, with its recommended retail price of 65 Australian cents. What a treasure!

Re-reading this great little book for the first time since the 1970s, I was struck by the dark cold war themes and the sheer terror of living in the shadow of the bomb. The Puffin edition declares the book is for boys aged 10 and over, which seems simultaneously progressive and also a retrograde assignment of age and gender roles.

The story begins in a backwater English town, in descriptive passages which reminded me of the dreary austere scenes of London in the 1960s, still scarred by the blitz just over two decades before. News programs are filled with reports of nuclear brinkmanship, an incomprehensible war in Asia and last-ditch talks to stave off what looks like imminent global destruction.

The setting absolutely reeks of the time it was written - 1967 - but the novel is actually set in the future. There is an advanced moon base, and we soon discover that the elite of the British government and military have built an escape pod they can use in the event of a nuclear holocaust. It's a huge luxury flying saucer, which is stolen by a lone anti-war activist who lands in the village and kidnaps a group of children in a desperate attempt to protest against the looming apocalypse.

The children must work out how to survive this outer space ordeal. At the same time, there is a personal conflict between the two oldest boys in the group. One is black, an uber geek best equipped to get the spaceship home. The other one is a psychotic bully who craves power and attention, and is a vile racist along with it.

There's plenty here which is dated. There's also a scientific clanger, referring to the moon's atmosphere slowing down an approaching spacecraft. I took half a star off just for that, the other half because the bully gets off too lightly for my outraged nerd sensibilities. But "Space Hostages" is still a thoroughly modern novel and overall has aged very well. In the year of its publication, the SF youth rebellion classic "The Tripods" by John Christopher would materialise, and a year after that Ursula le Guin's tour de force "A Wizard of Earthsea". Before that, Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 breakthrough "A Wrinkle in Time" served as a bridge from the cultural desert that was the 1950s. Narnia was the standout children's series way back then, but in 1967 kids no longer looked wonderingly at their old wardrobes. You'd be vapourised before you even had a chance to scurry between the coats and escape to Narnia. Even inter-stellar theological witches weren't cutting it any more. It was time to confront the real world.