Reviews and Comments

A strange future history of life on earth and beyond, explicitly presented as a collection of myths. One of them is titled "Aesop", tempting you to think of it as a fable. But that's a deception. There is no simple moral to these stories. Although it's a short book, there's a lot to digest, and I will probably need a bit of time to order my thoughts about it.

A consistent line running through the tales is the way technological progress ends up being a dead end. First it's the demise of the city. Then there's the emergence of a promising new philosophy, Juwainism. It promotes empathy, but the goal of humanity is to harness it to accelerate development and progress. That goal fails, and when Juwainism finally takes hold, it has the opposite effect.

After humans have deserted the earth, or forsaken their own cursed humanity, a super-evolved society of ants takes over the role of development and industry, persisting to the very end with a city of their own, an ambition which proves itself to be another inevitable journey to decay and extinction.

In between, there's compassion, loyalty, love, and even vegetarianism. A clear inspiration is the relationship between dogs and people. What would happen if that partnership evolved as canine intelligence arose to stand alongside its human partners? (Simak seems to prefer dogs to people, I feel certain that would be part of his biography in real life).

When the great works of all the species to have conquered the earth have come toppling down, there is memory, in the form of the ancient robot Jenkins, who has lived through it all and seen everything.

After reading SImak's "Way Station", I'm aware of the way nuclear holocaust shadowed his thinking. He avoids making war and conflict the driving force of his stories. The malign impetus of a doomed humanity is there in other ways, but he also finds hope and beauty at the core of existence.

I only take a star off because the book fails dismally in female representation. I am inclined to re-read the work of Cordwainer Smith, who also explored the way some of our best traits are expressed in the way we interact with our animal cousins.

The premise is that a single human has been chosen as the manager of a galactic teleportation station. He is the only person on earth who is in contact with the broader community of interstellar life. On the outside, he lives a peaceful existence walking through the countryside and chatting with his best friend the postman, but secretly he is in daily contact with strange creatures from all over the galaxy.

The book was written at the height of the cold war, and Simak portrays an earth society on a seemingly inevitable course to nuclear annihilation. The protagonist, Enoch Wallace, discovers that the galactic community of which he is the sole human participant is also on the brink of a destructive crisis.

Simak portrays a universe where god exists as a sort of higher lifeform, and is somehow made accessible by technology. The nature of that technology, in keeping with the old SF adage, is indistinguishable from magic. My strident atheism is mollified by the broader knowledge that this idea was codified by Arthur C Clarke, a non-believer of the highest order. In "Way Station", the access to the deity could also be seen as metaphorical. Either way, I don't think this book is describing a universe where we would find god if we ventured out to the stars, but if you are that way inclined you might interpret it that way.

I greatly enjoyed this book which was published the year after I was born. I get such a warm feeling of nostalgia from discovering the ideas of mid-century science fiction. It was a fertile time and I think its more concise forms of storytelling are preferable in a lot of ways to the longer form styles in vogue today. Simak also portrays simple but lasting virtues: friendship and tenderness are precious; peace is something to strive for; violence and death are bad things, even if you are forced to resort to them for the greater good.

Also, get rid of your guns, you insane Americans.

I look forward to reading Simak's other famous work "City".

There are are some fantastic concepts in the third Titus book - the modern setting is the first surprise, but it's nothing like our real world. Peake had illustrated an edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", and here we have a sort of urban dreamscape which Titus has entered mysteriously and can't quite wake from. It never feels like science fiction, although from habit I imagined it to be a sort of alternative future of the sort you might get from a SF writer.

Unfortunately, Peake's florid descriptive power from the previous two books is not quite working here. Having fled Gormenghast, the adult Titus is a bit of a self-obsessed arsehole, and not at all like Alice. Her commentary about the way things become curioser and curioser is not the sort of thing Titus offers us as we follow him on his sojourn of discontent. In fact he's generally an entitled royal turd and a sex pest who ought to be charged with assault for some of his nasty groping and harassment. The supporting cast of Juno and Muzzlehatch never quite come to life like the human menagerie in the preceding two books.

The story and its meaning are also somewhat untethered. New, surreal landscapes and a whole population of characters appear suddenly like a dramatic edit in a Stanley Kubrick movie, and their thematic relevance to Titus and his sojourn is subtle, or perhaps left to the reader to decide. The loneliness of Titus is self-imposed, although he might be forgiven for his almost solipsistic approach to life because of his traumatic childhood in Gormenghast. His surly rejection of human companionship is countered by the devotion of his guardian Muzzlehatch, his ex-lover Juno, and a comic trio of eccentric beggars who appoint themselves as his bodyguards.

I found the climactic confrontation at the end of the book to be quite satisfying. Even though it threatens only psychological peril, it is still an engaging conflict.

"Titus Alone" was worth the effort, but didn't dazzle nearly as much as the two novels which preceded it. It's got factories, futuristic cars, and drones like you might encounter in an Iain M Banks novel, so don't think for a second you will be getting elves and wizards just because this series is usually categorised as "fantasy". All three books really are in a genre of their own.

You approach the second novel in the Gormenghast series as a journeyman or a veteran, thanks to your tour of duty during which you read the first. As a result you are ready to digest the richness of Peake's language, and to savour the growing power and clarity of his themes, characters and story. NOW we know what Gormenghast is all about!

Consistent with Peaks's unique and complex style, the book titled "Gormenghast" is much more about the character Titus Groan than the preceding novel which carries his name. In that first book Titus was a baby with no agency, but the second in the series begins with Titus as a seven year old schoolboy. A key part of the story is his growing independence and rebellion against the strictures placed on him by virtue, or more appropriately by the CURSE of his noble birth.

Gormenghast is a society where conformity to ritual and tradition is paramount. It is a crumbling, ancient, decaying world, so you might not immediately think of the wealth and glamour of the British monarchy. But Peake's fantasy world seems to be inspired by the meaningless imprisonment of the class system headed by the house of Windsor. Occasionally in their real-world castles you see the captives in their gilded cages show the signs of distress seen in animals tortured in the cruelest of zoos. Our caged royals never seem to make their escape, and for Titus the chains binding him are also powerful.

One again the psychotic Steerpike is on hand to inject himself into this ancient system of tradition, and to use it to bring glory unto himself. We also get to meet the mouldy edifices of education, romance and marriage in Gormenghast, where the participants are locked in their own moribund traditions and roles which the stone walls around them seemingly enforce.

For a few moments we see some of the characters come up for air and gulp in a few sweet breaths of freedom, which the stagnant of waters of their castle home deny them. Titus' sister Fuchsia in particular, takes her brother's hand and guides him, for a while at least, to the light and air of the surface.

It has been a pleasure to discover the source material which has inspired some of my other favourite books. Michael Moorcock in particular, who knew Mervyn Peake, pays tribute to the older writer in wonderful ways. More recently Susanna Clarke seems to have been a Peake fan. And the great China Mieville writes a splendid introduction to the edition I have.

In my review of the first book I talked about the comparison to Tolkien. In "Gormenghast" it has far less meaning. The intensely personal, detailed interior life of Peake's characters is a world away from Tolkien's huge world-scale battles. The other difference I am enjoying is Peake's fundamental anti-establishment position, a stark contrast to the stuffy lexicographer Tolkien who was buddies with theological bore CS Lewis.

Also noteworthy is the tragedy of Peake's degenerative neurological condition which meant he was barely able to finish the third novel in the Gormenghast series, and never wrote others that he had planned. But he did finish book 3, and I now look forward to enjoying this final installment.

Before I started reading 'Titus Groan', I'd been aware of the status of the 'Gormenghast' books of which it is the first. There was a sense that it's the hipster 'Lord of the Rings'. Tolkien is MAINSTREAM, man. If you have your finger on the pulse then you know that Mervyn Peake is hot shit, not John too-many-middle-names Tolkien.

This is not the best way to approach "Gormenghast". It is still OK to count yourself as a chosen one of alternative culture after you get into Mervyn Peake, but Tolkien/Peake not a good comparison because they are travelling on different roads.

Middle Earth is in the broad magisterium of myths and legends. In saying that, remember that that kind of story, past and present, can be part of a religious tradition. That's Tolkien's thing. It's all about the big picture of good and evil, gods and devils, and how their cosmic intentions are reflected in humankind.

While reading 'Titus Groan' I very quickly started getting the vibe that it is from a different universe, that of the Fairy Tale. While holy books are maintained and propagated by the authorities - the priests and the divinely appointed kings they serve - fairy tales come from the common folk. You don't have to be rich or powerful and you don't have to have a penis to pass on and embellish a fairy tale. In fact without the poor people with no better form of entertainment, without the mothers and aunts and grandmothers and big sisters, the fairy tales for which the real life lords and princesses hunger so ravenously would not exist.

Both Tolkien and Peake take mythology/fairytales to new realms. Both were working in the tempestuous mid twentieth century. But they go in different directions from their adjacent starting points.

And so to 'Titus Groan'. There's a castle and a king (actually Sepulchrave, the Earl of Groan), a wicked interloper, a Queen, a Princess and a young prince, even a couple of ugly sisters-in-law.

At first you slot into the lifelong habit developed from having the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen read to you at bedtime. You see the characters as archetypes, representing pride, jealousy, ignorance, compassion. But that's just the starting point. There are new types, in particular the scheming, ambitious Steerpike. It's not enough to call him a villain, he is a genuine fairytale PSYCHOPATH. With him and his allies and adversaries, instead of monumental, simplified emotions and motivations in human form, Peake proceeds to zoom into their personalities and their actions like a fractal animation. You get to know the thoughts and plans and feelings of these characters in a detailed, intensely sensual way. You get to know their innermost sensations. Peake can spend paragraphs describing how a character bites into a peach, (the villain's first food after an arduous trek across a desert of architectural stone). Or he will describe the passage of a single raindrop as part of a broader human drama which takes place during a storm.

A fair warning is given to the minimalistically inclined: Peake's language is florid, his sentences leisurely, his vocabulary luxuriant. The names of the characters are magnificent: Prunesquallor. Flay. Swelter. Nannie Slagg. Often their extreme behaviour and bizarre modes of speech are utterly hilarious. Peake also lets well-lubricated sexual motivations drive his characters, something Tolkien was always too hung up to allow into the chaste world of Middle Earth's sparse and doomed romances.

The archetypal characters of Gormenghast castle are somehow simultaneously familiar, yet full of surprises. The most hateful can end up winning your sympathy. The noblest are sometimes also grotesque. They inhabit a world utterly dominated by tradition and ritual. The British Royal family and the sickeningly grandiose coronation of King Charles III look plain next to the daily breakfast of the Earl of Groan. And yet into this decaying world is about to come a total revolution. The rotting traditions of Gormenghast are under attack, and by the end of the novel, you can't wait to see how they are destroyed, whether any shred of them can survive.

It was in the shadow of two world wars, the rise of tyrannies and industrial scale genocide which both Tolkien and Peake wrote their great works. But now in 2024 we are witnessing a new fear of tyranny and environmental destruction, of pride and folly and greed. I feel like we are still living under the fearful shadow of Gormenghast Mountain, with everything about to be overturned.

There are a few things which provide the context for me not liking this book. Firstly, I was 19 years old when "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" came out, consuming a lot of the subject matter of this book. I was an opinionated and dedicated music fan forming my own views. Secondly, I have recently finished reading a far superior book about this period "Rip it Up and Start Again" by Simon Reynolds. Thirdly, "Like Punk Never Happened" has a reputation as an insightful account of the pop music of the early 80s. The title reinforces that expectation, but the text doesn't deliver. Too much of it is padded with mindless fan service, waffle of the type that filled the pages of the glossy magazines like Smash Hits, which the author was intimately involved with at the time.

My assessment of the music of this period is more in keeping with Reynolds' account. Punk ploughed the field, the tired old crop of 70s rock was uprooted and buried, and then 1000 flowers bloomed. It was Paul Weller who coined the phrase that gives this book its title. In certain respects it's accurate... the "new pop" of Culture Club, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet was crass, commercial, shallow, like the exploitative pre-punk bubblegum music of the late 60s and early 70s. But by the late 70s and early 80s, it felt like this fun, colourful new music was one of the 1000 flowers which grew as a result of punk. Reynolds tells a much more satisfying story of this fabulously diverse and wildly inventive period, and has greater insights into its contradictions.

Dave Rimmer tells a little bit of that story too, including the direct connections Culture Club had to Malcolm McLaren and groups like The Clash, and there are a few pages of excellent analysis of the cultural and political context this music sprang up in. But soon after that you get pages of tedious personal anecdotes of what the author saw in the hotel rooms, bars and clubs where he was, ahem, 'privileged' to hang out with Boy George and his gang. There's plenty about the business side of things, the cynical industrial mechanics of making pop records and getting them into the charts, but there's not much insight into the music. They actually made some great records: "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" is a lovely slice of melodic pop reggae, "That's the Way" was a soulful duet with Helen Terry which made the cynics take note, "Church of the Poison Mind" was a perfectly pitched tribute to Motown.

I suppose it's fair enough, in the case of Culture Club things of artistic weight were actually overwhelmed by the tabloid circus and the Thatcherite mode of 80s pop. But the way I remember it, we absolutely prioritised artisitic innovation and the political aspect of pop, espoused by the likes of Weller and Billy Bragg. At the same time we had the punk contempt for our hippy uncles who would sneer at pop, and so hell yes, we loved all those glossy outrageous sweet sonic treats being created by Culture Club, Wham, and the rest. We'd read NME AND Smash Hits, and here in Australia the local music tabloid RAM, but we did it because we wanted to, not because we were being herded into a particular uniformed subculture by the corporate Svengalis of the entertainment industry. We didn't have to have dinner only, or dessert only. We liked ALL kinds of music, and it was possible to do so precisely because punk happened.

A gripping young adult novel about a future England which has devolved into a sort of city-country apartheid dictatorship. The class system and the monarchy in present-day little Britain make the suspension of disbelief all too easy. A rebellion against this oppressive system is inevitable for a decent character, and becoming that person is a big part of the journey for the protagonist in this excellent little book.

The first section of the book, which describes the bleak urban drudgery of the city's workers, reminded me of the dismal London of the 1970s, which spawned the punk rock movement. I wouldn't claim that "The Guardians" is in the same class as "The Handmaid's Tale" (especially because John Christopher has a poor record of female representation in my reading so far) , but I was also reminded of Margaret Attwood's classic as I was reading "The Guardians".

If you are the type of reader who enjoys books written for old and young people, you win. In fact books for young readers like "The Guardians" are better thought of as books for everyone in my opinion.

John Christopher (the best-known pseudonym of Sam Youd) made some great achievements in the so-called young adult category. Here he plants his flag in the adult section of the library.

"A Wrinkle in the Skin" follows the format of the post-apocalypse sub-genre, but it goes deeper than most. The title alludes to the small changes on the surface, but the black heart of humanity is the real subject here.

The disaster which wipes out most of the population is an unexpected, planet-wide earthquake. Its cause is unknown, its effects so devastating that every building on earth is destroyed, whole landscapes transformed, oceans drained. The protagonist, Matthew Cotter, sets out from the Island of Guernsey, clawing his way through the devastation, to find his daughter. On the way he discovers that, far from coming together to keep the spark of humanity alive, the traumatised survivors have turned to barbarism, rape and murder.

Unlike the empty cities and plentiful bounty of other fictional apocalypses, this one leaves a harsh and hostile land, where crops and animals have been churned into mud by the cataclysm. Even the tinned food has been buried, forcing the survivors to dig with their bare hands in the hope of finding a meal of baked beans and condensed milk.

Matthew encounters more than one shattered survivor who has succumbed to religious fervour, believing the geological reality of "the Bust" to be a divine punishment, the arrival of the end times. He is much better at diagnosing their madness than he is at recognising his own delusions.

After a few dozen pages of the relentless descriptions of the horror visited on the earth, I felt like I too was transported into a sort of revelation, a journey into the heart of darkness, perhaps. There are also strong echoes of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", which post-dates "A Wrinkle in the Skin" by three decades. The biblical allusions are perhaps less elegant than those in "Earth Abides" by George Stewart, but overall I feel like John Christopher has made it into the upper echelons with this book.

Inevitably I must also compare "A Wrinkle in the Skin" to John Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids". That more famous work always invites the reader to cheer on the survivors who choose altruism, who trust in the best of humanity, and vanquish the tyrants and looters. You always feel you are along for the ride, that if it came to the crunch, you'd be one of the good guys, siding with Mason and Coker against the killer walking plants and the clueless humans who are doomed to become their fertiliser.

By contrast, John Christopher isn't saying the psychopaths will inherit the earth, but a hopeful future isn't guaranteed. You have to fight for it, and at every stage there's a real chance the dark side will overwhelm you.

Re-reading these books after about 20 years, the thing I like most about them is still the concept of the caps. In the future earth under alien occupation, at the age of 14 all humans have one of these metal mind-control devices fitted to their heads, making them unquestioning, devoted slaves of their alien overlords. The trilogy was written in 1967 and '68, a time when young people were breaking free of the stifling expectations of conformity laid down by their parents' generation, and I've always associated "The Tripods" with the cultural explosion in the decade of my birth.

The story follows a group of boys who question the tradition of capping, and run away to escape the terrifying coming-of-age ritual . Over the course of three books, they join a resistance movement and eventually triumph over the Tripods. Some might find the 'Boys Own Adventure' style of the plot to be rather old-fashioned and obvious, but I greatly enjoyed its pulpy simplicity. The set-up is acknowledged to be a remix of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, so it fits.

On this re-reading I was also struck by the clear influence on the Second World War on the story. The main characters of the book are English, French and German. The domination of the Tripods and their plan for the extinction of humanity is an echo of the Holocaust. In the preface to the 35th anniversary edition, the author says he wanted to create a scenario where yielding to tyranny and slipping into mindless oblivion was the easy option, while those who chose freedom and the righteous fight against tyranny faced hardship and danger.

The warlike nature of humanity is another theme. Once the alien enemies are defeated, the triumphant men (for they are all men) resume the rivalries which preceded the occupation. The boys (ALL boys) who defeated tyranny take on a new cause of peace. They've also developed an appreciation for low-tech pursuits like farming and sailing. In the age of surveillance capitalism, the controlling addiction of apps and manipulative social media is a modern parallel to the caps which John Christopher probably never imagined in 1967.

For the second time in a review of John Christopher's work, I have to highlight the dismal representation of gender roles in these books. Girls and women are barely even present in the events portrayed. I took a star off for this reason. It's a terrible shame when the other themes in the book are so strong. The author refers in his preface to the "girls and boys" who read his books, but I can understand why he would fail to capture the imagination of many female readers. If any boys read these books today, I think they would benefit from some guidance to draw their attention to this deficiency.

The dawning awareness of your own mortality is a common theme in young adult fiction, often paired with a sexual awakening. You get both here, but mostly, it's the death.

There's been a plague of books and shows about plagues lately. This one from 1977 distinguishes itself by depicting a plague of premature ageing. Suddenly the inevitable end comes hurtling towards the whole human race at super speed, and even toddlers suddenly become gnarled, wrinkled and senile, then die quietly in their sleep.

YA fiction became bolder and more explicit about sex and death around the time this book was written, and there's plenty of shocking confrontation here to have it banned by squeamish or rabidly zealous US school boards. The very bits they would no doubt object to are the best parts of this book.

John Christopher was a friend of John Wyndham. The work of the triffids creator was famously (and unfairly in my opinion) smeared as "cosy catastrophes" by Brian Aldiss. 'Empty World', might qualify for Aldiss' epithet, if it weren't for the corpse-laden first half of this little novel. The second half changes gears and becomes a sort of bisexual love triangle and morality play. The ending is satisfying, but the first half of the book is the best. The grieving protagonist is numbed by his tragedy, giving the author an opportunity to serve us up some meaty existential detachment and alienation.

After a day's reflection I have removed a star because of dated sex and gender portrayals. Mainly, it is unacceptable for a male character to forcibly kiss a girl to resolve an argument, it is sexual assault. In the story it turns out it was what she wanted but didn't express it. Also the male character didn't know this, he just kissed her without consent. Female readers will recognise this garbage. In real life, a boy having an argument with a girl does not mean he should kiss her without her agreement, this only happens in the warped imagination of boys trained to believe these rapey fictions.

I've read a few of John Christopher's books and he is not too good with inclusiveness. I'll go easy on him here because he has at least included two interesting female characters, and it is an isolated incident. The author should have paid closer attention to his buddy John Wyndham, who created powerful female characters, inspired by his real-life partner.

In my recent re-reading of "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier, I found the story completely ruined by the ridiculous objectification of the female characters who are remote or peripheral. It's a shame because it was a groundbreaking book in so many other ways. Now I can't recommend it to young readers. I wouldn't go so far with John Christopher's books, but I think any boys reading them would benefit from some guidance about the dated attitudes presented in books like this.

This book does a superb job at corralling the unruly herd of musical creators who stampeded through the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was MY time. I was 16 in 1979, excited by punk, enamoured with the new music which was emerging.

Each individual artist from this time is unique, they include Public Image Ltd on one end of the scale, and the Thompson Twins at the other. The artists could be abrasive and uncompromising, or commercial and artistically slight, but Reynolds deftly identifies a common thread that links them all. What is that thread? It's hard to pin down, but I think the title gives the best indication. In 1976 the original punks smashed down the walls that commercialised popular culture had built up over the preceding two decades. Postpunk was about the possibilities created once we could venture forth beyond those walls.

Towards the end of the book Reynolds makes some comparisons with the preceding cultural breakout of the 1960s. There's a sense that the first version was messed up, and the punks were trying to get it right this time. I'm reminded of the key line in a 60s touchstone, the film 'Easy Rider': "we blew it".

Perhaps the ambitions of the punks and those who followed were not as lofty as their older brothers and sisters. Perhaps Peter Fonda's chopper-riding character was being a bit harsh on his 60s travellers. But after reading this great book, I think we can feel pretty good about our second attempt. We didn't blow it, whatever "it" was.

Philosophy is bunk. I've gleaned that philosophers in the course of history have felt the need to concoct a cosmology. Over the centuries the great discoveries of science have rendered those earlier confections meaningless, yet they linger. If all the great thinkers of classical antiquity had access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and EInstein, they would have saved a lot of time and not bothered with their speculations about the will of the gods in creating life and matter and all the rest.

Here we have Olaf Stapledon who does indeed have access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, come up with a load of tedious waffle trying to describe god. Stapledon thinly disguises his theological nonsense as a journey through space and time. It gets worse and worse as the book goes on as he loses interest in the disguise . Stapledon shouldn't have bothered to write it, and I don't think you should bother to read it.