I should have read this total banger years ago. This is from 1956 and it’s cold as ice. I was expecting a cosy John Wyndham English catastrophe; an olI should have read this total banger years ago. This is from 1956 and it’s cold as ice. I was expecting a cosy John Wyndham English catastrophe; an old buffer with a pipe and a determined young botanist from Oxford would figure the whole thing out, as usual. Not at all. This novel is so vicious, bleak and nasty.
I think all apocalypse/post-apocalypse stories are the same story. The Death of Grass is really the same as The Walking Dead, but without zombies. (And without grass too, it goes without saying.)
In these stories there is a catastrophe which collapses state authority, there is anarchy, and decent men and women have to fight indecent men for quickly vanishing resources. First phase is day to day survival, second phase is building a small new community. The indecent men will continually try to take from you anything you got so there is always the problem of how indecent you yourself have to become to protect yourself/your family/your tiny village. How many of those liberal values you assumed so easily growing up in your leafy suburb are ridiculous luxuries? Can some of them be saved or will everything fall away like the memories of that lost world of jobs, houses, electricity and fifty flavours of ice cream? Democracy will be ditched without a thought, but the rule of law – maybe we should keep that one. But is there any rule of law without democracy? So many questions. Is it those values that make us human? What’s so good about being human anyway if it got us into this mess? Will the best survive or maybe more likely, the worst?
Oh boy, I am in such a jam. I was visiting the revered geologist minerologist Professor Otto Lidenbrock, or as I call him, uncle, and I was idly flippOh boy, I am in such a jam. I was visiting the revered geologist minerologist Professor Otto Lidenbrock, or as I call him, uncle, and I was idly flipping through a priceless unique 16th century Icelandic manuscript he had acquired, when I found a mysterious page inserted within the parchment. It was in an unknown code. How exciting. Naturally we spent many amusing hours trying to figure it out, hoping that it wasn’t just a recipe for asparagus soup but something of critical worldshaking scientific importance. But we couldn’t crack it. He ran out of the house to find some other eccentric professor to interrogate. Meanwhile quite by chance I realised that if you just cross-diagonal the words on this paper then translate them into Latin and hold them up to a mirror, the message is plain. It’s an instruction telling how to find the tunnel that leads to the centre of the earth!
I know that when uncle comes back I should tell him, but I have a feeling he will immediately drag us both off to Iceland, hire a broadshouldered taciturn hunter with unlimited brawny skills, and force the three of us down some endless gloomy corridors where there will no doubt be prehistoric beasts, underground oceans, vortexes and whirlwinds and the Lord knows what else and we will be very lucky not to be killed in twenty different ways before next Tuesday. But, I am wondering, if I could just let this troublesome document accidentally fall into the professor’s cosy fire, and burn up entirely, I could stay in Hamburg and get married to my little tootsiewootsie, and not have to bother with the centre of the earth at all. What to do....more
Young female biochemist goes to work for top research company and before too long she has made an earth shattering discovery – this Chinese lichen wilYoung female biochemist goes to work for top research company and before too long she has made an earth shattering discovery – this Chinese lichen will slow down your metabolism and enable you to live for 200 plus years! Well… now what? She doesn't know that the boss knows, but the boss doesn’t know she knows what he knows. She leaves the company and starts up a beauty salon in London catering for the wives of the rich and influential. Because she has a Plan.
As some years tick by they begin to flock to her establishment because word gets round that damn, this stuff seems to actually work..! So this is her plan : she thinks that if the anti-ageing treatment is announced to the world at large there will be rioting, chaos and general mayhem because not everyone can get it (not enough lichen) and because some powerful elements in society will be dead against it. So what she will do is secretly give the lichen treatment to all these wives of the great and the good so that when she makes the big announcement that semi-immortality has been discovered and the uproar/backlash begins, the secret cabal of wives will find ways of ensuring their husbands support the idea of lichen for all and she will be able to lead first England then the whole human race into its next phase.
Sounds great.
John Wyndham wrote 7 novels, I have read 6 so far. This is the only one not rated 3 stars. This novel gets all tangled up like someone falling on the floor whilst wildly trying to put their pyjama trousers on. He has a very solid sf idea and he wants to use it to spotlight how women’s lives in particular are crippled and bent out of shape under society’s current rules, and this is all good, but the whole thing seems to be played for laughs….I should say for smirks…and his ghastly elbow-in-ribcage old-fashioned unfunny comic writing will just grind the teeth of modern readers.
Still, 5 three star novels out of 6 – I’m not complaining!...more
Space age cop Tony Crowe is pursuing three hardened criminals inamongst the Asteroids. The crims crashland on an asteroid. The cop follows them and daSpace age cop Tony Crowe is pursuing three hardened criminals inamongst the Asteroids. The crims crashland on an asteroid. The cop follows them and damn, he crashlands too. After a gunbattle (sure you can have a gunbattle on an asteroid) one of the crims is dead and two are in handcuffs. Lieutenant Crowe is a tough cookie. But now they are stranded on an asteroid and will certainly die. Wait! A third spaceship arrives! This is like a very popular asteroid. It is a scientific expedition. There is a wise professor, his lovely young daughter, and the surly guy she’s engaged to. They are trying to fit all the asteroids together to prove they all came from a planet that exploded. Anyway, the crims and the cop are saved! (This is all in the first four pages.)
An hour later, Tony agreeably relaxed in a small lounge, was smoking his third cigarette, pressure suit off…The girl leaned against the door jamb, clad in jodhpurs and white silk blouse. She was blond and had clear blue eyes. Her lips were pursed a little
So, Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story I’m thinking.
Now, during the gunfight the cop had stumbled into a cave where he saw a human skeleton wearing a ring. He instantly knows that this skeleton was there before there was ever a human race. How? He can’t explain. Then he sees one of the crims is wearing the very same ring! Wait – the ring is in two places at the same time? When he explains this head-scratcher to the others they all figure that whoever wears the ring will end up dead in the cave. They all smoke a lot.
The Professor offers to take them all to Mars using his extra fast Hoderay-Hammond drive. The cop says
All I know about the Hoderay-Hammond drive is that it reverses the Fitz-Gerald Contraction Principle
(This is now being incorporated into the latest Teslas.)
The professor wants to go back and take a look at the ring that is in two places at the same time. He reverses the H-H drive engine and back they go to the asteroid and well, they crashland too. That’s three crashlandings on the same little asteroid. They should have put up a sign : Accident Blackspot : Take Extra Care.
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But here’s the big twist : they have gone back in time a zillion years and have crashlanded not on the asteroid but on the planet that was there before the asteroids! Yes!
So they have discovered time travel (maybe no one reversed the H-H drive before... watch out Elon Musk) and solved a major astronomical question but they can’t think about that now, because on looking up in the sky they can see a huge celestial body hurtling towards them. Yes, unluckily they have gone back in time to 19 days before the planet exploded into asteroids on being hit by a giant meteor. How unlucky is that. I would say, very unlucky.
There is nothing like piling one thing on top of another thing and this short but exhausting novella does that. There is a lot of repairing and fighting and handcuffing and fretting about where the ring is. But, you know, so long as the skeleton was not Frodo Baggins.
Reading 1940s science fiction is exhausting. There is the terrible Boy’s Own Adventure style, there is the helter-skelter plotting, there is the ancient science where you are not sure if the author was right at the time it was written or just always bonkers. And anyway a fat lot about H-H drives I know about, so you kind of have to just go with the flow. After this one I think I need a long lie-down in a cave on a nice comfortable asteroid....more
Back in the 1950s it was comforting to know that all difficult challenges to the future of the human race, such asNote : review is somewhat spoilerish
Back in the 1950s it was comforting to know that all difficult challenges to the future of the human race, such as from the obliteration of the sun by a drifting cloud from outer space causing a month long instant ice age preceded by Biblical floods, cataracts, typhoons, hurricanes and violent convulsions of nature, and the death of at least 750 million people, mostly in the tropical zones, could be mulled over, pondered upon and solved by English men sitting around an open fire in their “rooms” smoking pipes and decanting a decent whiskey fetched from the cellar by some offstage non-speaking role lackey.
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Famous astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote the cosiest possible book in which a quarter of the human race dies horribly. This was his first novel and it seems that he wrote it before he read anyone else’s science fiction. It’s as if someone told him what science fiction was and then he thought he’d have a go at it in an idle moment, but he couldn’t quite remember what the guy had said. But well, he knew what fiction was, sort of, and he knew what science was all right, so he jammed them both together and Bob’s your uncle – lots of pages with daunting actual mathematical formulae festooned upon them, other pages with actual diagrams, and lots of smoke-wreathed conversations where blokes say to each other
It looks to me as though the volume of the cloud is roughly ten to the power of 40 cc. Its mass is about 1.3 times ten to the power of 30 gm which gives a density of 1.3 times ten to the power of minus 18 per cm cubed.
In one chapter they drone on about the ionisation of particular wavelengths for what seems like hours. They just don’t know how to have normal conversations. When one astronomer gets a little frosty with a politician he tells him off like this:
It seems a pity that you cannot display an equal penetration into matters with which you might more properly claim a less amateur acquaintance.
However, the whole thing cheers up immensely when the Black Cloud arrives and after many diagrams and formulae our bold hero astronomer (the only one who gets a girl) figures out that the cloud is sentient and intelligent and doesn’t mean to terminate life on earth, and – yes – therefore – it can talk!
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So the astronomer and the cloud establish communications (don’t ask how, I skipped that bit) and they start having friendly conversations :
Astronomers: How old are you?
Cloud : Rather more than five hundred million years.
Astronomer : So….er… what do you clouds do for entertainment on Saturday night?
As I read this I realised that the more people died the better I liked it. What does that say about me? Nothing you hadn’t already guessed. But the acAs I read this I realised that the more people died the better I liked it. What does that say about me? Nothing you hadn’t already guessed. But the action in this story of an alien invasion only really kicks off on page 140 and that’s a long time to spend in the company of an irritating smug English bastard from 1955 with a perky clever wife called Phyllis without anybody dying.
It’s immediately obvious that this husband-and-wife team is a would-be English version of Nick & Nora from the Thin Man movies but their unsnappy witfree and icky dialogue is like to set your teeth on edge.
Still, I ended up liking this novel because I enjoyed the very thing that other reviewers hated – there ain’t no Kraken in the whole book! I remember somebody coming back from seeing Rosemary’s Baby once. We asked him “what was it like?” and he said “You don’t see it.” He seemed as if he wanted his money back. But I loved the idea of never seeing the aliens who are invading you, and never even finding out if they even have faces! They live in the ocean deeps, yes, and they are attacking us, but do they even have a face?? Maybe they’re just intelligent slime!
The aliens take their own damned time to invade the land and the story drags until they start sending sea tanks with extruding blobs which lasso any citizens they can find with a lot of fronds then drag the dead or dying back into the ocean. What for? Don’t ask me, pal. Maybe burgers?
There were some unexpected contemporary resonances in this old fashioned book. When the aliens in the deeps start destroying ships people dismiss the whole idea as a conspiracy – what? Aliens? Don’t be silly. It’s those Communists. But the government can’t admit it, you see. Later when the aliens send in the sea tanks with blobs they start in some far-flung places and all reports that reach the west are thought of as fake news. Oh and also, the aliens finally figure out what diabolical weapon to use to exterminate people : ice cap melting. Something that we might be doing to ourselves quite soon.
In case you were wondering, it takes five years for the aliens to completely wreck the planet.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
I was somewhat shaken by this on p168:
The name of Her Majesty the Queen headed the list of subscribers for the relief of etc etc – this is the SAME Her Majesty that we have now! This novel was published in 1953! And we have the same queen now in 2021! Wow!
And finally : an extra point to John Wyndham for the use of the word tsunami on p67, that must have been the first tsunami in an English novel.
Rudyard Kipling wrote many great poems about the past but here he sits at his desk in 1905 and figures what life is going to be like in the year 2000.Rudyard Kipling wrote many great poems about the past but here he sits at his desk in 1905 and figures what life is going to be like in the year 2000. And the future is
Dirigibles! Air ships!
Obviously not aeroplanes – the Wright brothers’ eccentric experiment had only taken place two years before, and anyone could see that was not going to lead to anything.
Mr Kipling’s novelette is really a magazine article about "My Exciting Trip with the Night Mail", including a big storm and the rescuing of another air ship in distress. So it’s not a story, as such. No, it’s a pure exercise in
TECHNOPORN
Steely-eyed captains stare certain death in the face but the night mail must get through.
Give her full helm and she returns on her track like a whip-lash.
they will explain. Something in another dirigible offends Captain Hodgson and he raps out
Serves ‘em right for putting German compos in their thrust-blocks.
Meanwhile our goggle-eyed narrator almost drools as he tells us that
The inner skin shuts off fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. … One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upwards.
Kipling is not entirely straight-faced about all this machinery worship, he adds some spoofy adverts and letters to the editor at the end. But still, it’s clear he thought the future was 1000 foot long gleaming silver eggs in the sky. Lots and lots of them.
After reading this, I will not be putting German compos in my thrust-blocks any time soon. You would have to be a complete fool.
This English 1957 SF novel begins with total incomprehension, moves forward into dawning awareness filled with creeping dread, then sullen acceptance This English 1957 SF novel begins with total incomprehension, moves forward into dawning awareness filled with creeping dread, then sullen acceptance changing to psychological horror and ends up with full-on fear and loathing leading to inevitable catastrophe. What’s not to like?
You probably know the set up but anyway – this teensy English village is struck one evening with a sleeping sickness. Everybody conks out for 24 hours. It’s sudden so there are a few accidents. When they all wake up nothing seems to be amiss but as weeks go by it turns out that every fertile woman in the village is now pregnant. What a pickle.
John Wyndham has got himself a really squeamish idea here, the very thing to make people in the 1950s squirm and flinch from – mass pregnancies and no fathers? Because it is apparent that even virgins are now pregnant! Ewww! He lets his uncomfortable idea take the story where it might go, pretty much, but because this is 1957 there is NO MENTION of abortion whatsoever in the whole book. If he had written it only ten years later he wouldn’t have been able to avoid that prickly subject – some of the 60 or so women, knowing they had been made pregnant by something other than a human man, would have surely wished to terminate whatever lifeform was growing in their body. But not in 1957, it wasn’t an option. Should I say it wasn’t an option mentionable in a polite novel.
The other thing John Wyndham avoided LIKE THE PLAGUE was any talk of young teenagers becoming pregnant. There were, it seems no girls under the age of 18 in this village.
The grotesque situation is managed and commented on by the three or four wise birds of Midwich, all of whom are male, all of whom talk in a strangulated hoity toity manner where nothing should be mentioned directly if there is a longwinded circumlocution available – here’s our narrator :
Hitherto the spirit of Midwich had been not ill-attuned with that of the burgeoning season all around. It would be too much to say that it now went out of tune, but there was a certain muting of its strings.
Oh yes and the lower classes speak (when they are allowed a line or two) in a hilarious Cockerny:
Cor! That there Miss Ogle ain’t ‘alf goin’ to cop ‘erself a basinful of ‘Er Majesty’s displeasure over this little lot!
Because having babies happens to women and not men, the learned men get to comment on women and they say profound stuff like
If we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull, and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls there can grow into a riotous tangle, we shall not be surprised by an outlook on life which has the disproportion and the illogical inconsequence of a nightmare, where values are symbolic rather than literal.
In spite of all this slagging off, I really enjoyed this novel. I liked the idea (alien invasion by stealth) and the strange tension created by all these difficult ideas – surrogacy, parents not loving their children, reality being too bizarre for people to grasp – in the end it was cosy and nasty at the same time, a great combination....more
A plague is sweeping over the USA causing people’s skin to turn GREY (or GRAY) – that’s pretty much all it does, it doesn’t kill anybody or turn them A plague is sweeping over the USA causing people’s skin to turn GREY (or GRAY) – that’s pretty much all it does, it doesn’t kill anybody or turn them into flesh eating zombies. But all right-thinking citizens are fleeing the grey skin plague. It seems as the story progresses that there are only white people in this version of the USA. Then it dawned on me that this is a little parable about racism. The only other effect of the “plague” is to enhance people’s sensory perceptions slightly. So all the hysterical white flight and horror of the plague is code for the horrors of mixing the races – you know, like, if you mix black and white you get grey, right? In the end, the hero realises people are running away for nothing and grey is the new white or whatever so he willingly snogs a grey-skinned young lady and catches the plague. Soon he’ll be glad to be grey.
Kinda goofy little story.
This was the final book in a very desultory series I have been reading called TEN SHORT SF NOVELS. I started back in 2018. The full randomly-selected list is as follows:
1. The Miracle Workers : Jack Vance 2. The Merchants Of Venus : Frederik Pohl 3. A Story Of The Days To Come : H G Wells 4. The Star Pit : Samuel R. Delany 5. The Midas Plague : Frederik Pohl 6. Chocky : John Wyndham 7. The Chrysalids : John Wyndham 8. Flight To Forever : Poul Anderson 9. And Then There Were None : Eric Frank Russell 10. Dark Benediction : Walter M. Miller Jr
I checked my vast archive of unread science fiction and found I have enough short ones for a second series. Great! I will call it ANOTHER TEN SHORT SF NOVELS. Pretty catchy!...more
The galactic patrol battleship bulging with 500 military men finally reaches a planet colonised 300 years ago by people who had some odd ideas about hThe galactic patrol battleship bulging with 500 military men finally reaches a planet colonised 300 years ago by people who had some odd ideas about how society should work. They don’t use money, they barter. They think money is a terrible idea that enslaves everyone. So, for instance, if I go to your restaurant and eat a nice meal then I have an obligation to you to do something in return, like fix your roof. Everyone is busy putting obs (obligations) on other people and getting rid of the obs put on them. They call themselves Gands, from an ancient Terran philosopher named Gandhi. They also demonstrate their inalienable individuality (aside from the eccentric dress, men wearing four foot long pigtails and nose rings) by saying “Myob” very frequently to the pompous military types trying to get to meet with the president of this ridiculous planet. Finally the penny drops that “Myob” mean mind your own business.
So this is a pleasant social satire full of 1950s blokeish humour (“you dumb galoots!”…”Zipping meteors!” he exclaimed) about an anarchic society which just can’t be organised and controlled, the soldiers find it’s like trying to herd cats. They are always trying to locate the capital city but their isn’t one, the whole planet is just small towns and villages where everyone knows everyone else. There’s no government.
Oh and the soldiers ask – what if a person collected lots of obs, got free meals, free clothes, etc, but then refused to pay back. Answer is that all of society would ghost that reprobate, they would be frozen out of everywhere and eventually they would starve. So nobody does that. Hmmm…
I couldn’t help thinking though – this barter society might possibly work if everyone has a great memory of who owes who which type of ob; and is a meal the equivalent of wallpapering a room or delivering a baby? How do they work out who owes how much labour? Also, there seemed to be a secondary market in obs, so that you could deliver a lot of obs to somebody (such as when the local firefighters put out a fire in a clothes shop) and then the shopkeeper can work off all these new obs by supplying clothes to other people the firefighters owe obs to, so he doesn’t have to keep giving the firefighters clothes they don’t need.
So it seemed to me that in order to make this whole barter system manageable, they should write down these obs, then they could use the official obs record to swap obs with anyone they wanted to, and life would be so much simpler, you wouldn’t have to have a perfect memory. But of course the paper obs records would be…. Money.
A few hundred years after the nuclear holocaust and things are sticky. There’s the Fringe where people have six toes or an extra arm and there are strA few hundred years after the nuclear holocaust and things are sticky. There’s the Fringe where people have six toes or an extra arm and there are strange creatures like a cross between a hyena and a mushroom pizza and so forth, there’s the Badlands which are so bad no one will go to even find out just how bad they are, and there are places even worse that are just mile upon mile of black glass, a challenge for skateboarders. But there are also areas of relative peace and security where it’s almost as good as it was in the 13th century. They try to keep people normal in this part of the world, so woe betide you if you turn out to be born with an extra toe, you are gonna get capped even if you are a likkle weeny itty baby.
Honesty compels me to state that The Chrysalids suffers from being very familiar even if you never read it because there are (apparently) only so many thing that are ever going to happen after the nuclear holocaust. There will be granite jawed high and mighty God-intoxicated flawed leaders (Charlton Heston), there will be hotheaded youths (Leonardo DiCaprio circa 1998), there will be lissom ardent girls in inappropriate garments (Jenny Agutter from Logan’s Run), there is a strong chance of there being bands of roaming mutants led by Brad Dourif, aw, you know the drill.
Anyway, I have a soft spot for the British science fiction of HG Wells followed by John Wyndham followed by Brian Aldiss followed by JG Ballard. Someone should write a mashup of all those guys’ first five novels. It would be hilarious....more
This is very awkward. Two things happened. A random person added a comment to my review of Buckets of Blood (subsequently deleted but I still got the This is very awkward. Two things happened. A random person added a comment to my review of Buckets of Blood (subsequently deleted but I still got the email of it, this is a stroke of passive aggressiveness you can do very well on goodreads) asking if I actually liked reading at all since I gave out so many 1 & 2 star ratings and this disturbed me more than somewhat because I thought – this guy might be on to something here. This could be what they call a breakthrough. Perhaps I’ve lost the power to like fiction! What a thought. Some people lose their sense of smell when they get a whack on the head, so why not. The next thing was that a certain other person and I did a swap read, this person gave me Illuminae and I gave this person one of my favourite sf novels (it was Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot). The problem is that this person really likes Blueprints of the Afterlife but as usual for the novel-hating person I now believe I have become I am not quite convinced by Illuminae, even though this is a beloved modern YA sf book that hardly anyone admits to disliking. Now add into the mix of awkwardness that this person, the one who gave me Illuminae, is also on goodreads and whereas they usually totally ignore all my reviews (that’s okay with me) they might want to look at this one so really I don’t want to say too much about it except to say that it’s a beautifully designed good looking thing presented in the form of 600 pages of “found documents” as it were with many fun pages all in black and upside down or swirly-whirly or bloodstained or whatever like a dialled down version of House of Leaves, and I am keenly in favour of people making pretty things and messing with the typography and all of that, and I did enjoy the running joke about the redacted swearing (every single bad word is carefully hidden behind a little black oblong, so you get many sentences like “Your timing is [black oblong]ty… Jesus, this is so [black oblong]ed up… That sonofa[black oblong]… I’m gonna [black oblong] his [black oblong] up… you mother[black oblong]”. That was pretty funny. I couldn’t care so much for the Dreaded Teenage Romance that persists in the middle of nuclear detonations, maniac virus outbreaks, a homicidal AI (great great grandoffspring of HAL from 2001), dogfights in space and all manner of [black oblong]ed up [black oblong] but I did like the energy, I may say the brio, the dash, nay, the verve with which this rum spatchcocked confabulation is served up. It occurs to me that this could be described as damning with faint praise.
Saunders (a scientist) : Let’s go 100 years into the future in our dodgy time machine to do some science!
Hull (another scientist): Okay boss.
Eve : DonSaunders (a scientist) : Let’s go 100 years into the future in our dodgy time machine to do some science!
Hull (another scientist): Okay boss.
Eve : Don’t be long! Missing you already!
They arrive in the year 2073!
There is fighting. One of them is killed.
Saunders : Oh no, it turns out the time machine can only go 30 years backwards! I must go forwards again until I find a time when they have the technology to fix this, otherwise I will never see my Eve again. Eve! Eve! Eve!
The Year 2500.
Saunders : Can you fix my machine?
Man : Glurble flert myoop barflurt.
Saunders : Not much use. Off I go again.
The year 3799.
Saunders : Hello! Where am I?
Alien : This is the planet Sol, a minor member of the Galactic Federation, a peaceful organisation run by infinitely wise beings.
Saunders : Who is Galactic President?
Alien : We located the DNA of the greatest of your presidents and cloned him up the wazoo and here he is again, President Donald Trump.
Saunders: I’m outta here.
The year 4500. Bang! Crackle!
Saunders : No good. That Galactic Empire didn’t last all that long.
The year 67,121. Tinkle tankle, tinkle tankle.
Saunders : This looks better. Hello?
Girl in immodest dress: Hey toots.
Saunders: Have youse guys invented backwards time travel yet?
Girl : No, mate, what you have to do is you have to go right round and then it all comes back again, like it says in the Upanishads, or was it Kahil Ghibran, I can never remember.
Saunders: Er, what do you mean, go right round?
Girl : Oh, you know, really a long way forward, to the end of the universe, then keep going, don’t turn left or right, just straight on, and you’ll come to another big bang.
Saunders: Another big bang? Are you sure?
Girl: Yes, really, then you keep going and you’ll find that it all sort of repeats the first big bang and so on and so forth.
Saunders: Well, okay, I’ll try.
Three trillion plus 1973 years later.
Bringgg! The time machine reappears in the laboratory ten minutes after it left.
This is about an 11 year old English boy in the mid-1960s who gets an alien stuck in his head. The story is narrated by his father, one of those self-This is about an 11 year old English boy in the mid-1960s who gets an alien stuck in his head. The story is narrated by his father, one of those self-satisfied middle class lawyer types who routinely patronises his wifey little wife who says shit like “If you think so dear”. He’s one of those guys who wouldn’t have noticed the sixties were swinging unless you tied him to a table and force fed him LSD. It’s a shame all of those guys didn’t get an alien stuck in their heads. Nowadays we all have an alien stuck in our heads – the name of it is Donald Trump. Ha, top political satire! I was wondering if I could turn a review of a pleasant but rather fusty old sf novel into a pungent, searing comment on our current woes.
Anyways John Wyndham perfectly captures the deadly tone of voice these types had, when they ruled their smug worlds with velvet fists. You know what? This was a good read! ...more
I’m determined to actually read the books that have been squatting on my shelves for YEARS, and because of some Poor Life Choices™ 2024 : YEAR OF DNFS
I’m determined to actually read the books that have been squatting on my shelves for YEARS, and because of some Poor Life Choices™ I suspect some of them are gonna be dnfed with extreme prejudice. First victim : Connie Willis, an sf author who wrote two of my favourite sf short stories, “Fire Watch” and “All my Darling Daughters”.
INFODUMPS
Science fiction is notorious for infodumping and Connie is very bad at this from the get go :
”Are you familiar with the new RIPT scan?” Joanna shook her head. “Is it similar to a PET scan?” He nodded. “They both measure your brain activity, but the RIPT scan is exponentially faster and more detailed. Plus, it uses chemical tracers, not radioactive ones, so the number of scans per subject doesn’t have to be limited. It simultaneously photographs the electrochemical activity in different subsections of the brain for a 3-D picture of neural activity in the working grain. Or the dying brain.”
There is even a little kid who does infodumping :
”Look,” Maisie said. “This is the Great Molasses Flood. It happened in 1919.” She pointed to a grainy black and white photo of what looked like an oil slick. “These huge tanks broke and all the molasses poured out and drowned everybody. Twenty-one people…”
LANGUAGE WAY TOO ROMCOMMY
”Can you give me the extension for CICU?” he said “I –“ “It’s 4502,” a cute blond nurse said, coming up to the nurse’s station. “Are you looking for Joanna Lander?” “Yes,” he said gratefully. “Do you know where she is?” “No,” she said, looking at him through her lashes. “but I know where she might me. In Pediatrics…” “Thanks," he said, hanging up the phone. “Can you tell me how to get to Peds? I’m new here.” “I know,” she said, smiling coyly. “You’re Dr Wright, right? I’m Tish.”
RIP Christopher Priest 14 July 1943 - 2 February 2024
A very intriguing writer who wrote one of the weirdest books I ever read - this one.
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She was now RIP Christopher Priest 14 July 1943 - 2 February 2024
A very intriguing writer who wrote one of the weirdest books I ever read - this one.
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She was now a little more than twelve inches high, and her body – as the other girls’ – was nearly five feet broad. It was impossible to recognize them as once having been human, even though he knew this to be so.
Well here is one of the strangest of all worlds. I shouldn’t really say too much about it, as that would spoil all the fun, but that’s okay because I couldn’t explain it if I tried. The first 100 pages are rather dull, it has to be admitted, but after that not even the sky is the limit. I’ll give you a couple of hints –
Later, I said : “Why does the ground move?” “I’m not sure,” said Blayne. “Is anyone?” “No.”
And
“We live in a large but finite universe occupied by a number of bodies of infinite size.”
Uh huh. I see. And, er, would any of these bodies belong to 12 inch high girls by any chance?...more
TEN SHORT SF NOVELS NO. 5 : THE MIDAS PLAGUE by Fred Pohl
This is 1950s satire. This means that it’s just…silly. In the future everyone has to consume TEN SHORT SF NOVELS NO. 5 : THE MIDAS PLAGUE by Fred Pohl
This is 1950s satire. This means that it’s just…silly. In the future everyone has to consume products like crazy to keep their wildly overproductive society going. (They have invented cheap energy and they have lots of robots.) To enforce this, everyone is on rations. The fun is that you’re given targets to consume per month – umpteen five course meals, many suits of clothes, more tvs, etc. The poorer you are the more you have to consume, because all this using stuff up is backbreaking and mind-destroying work. So it’s the poor who live in 40 room mansions and only work one day a week and the well-off who have modest five bedroom houses in this society and get to work 5 or 6 days a week. Ha ha! I get it! It's the opposite of our own society.... very satirical. And you can’t just get stuff and throw it away, no, there’s a rations board which checks if you’ve actually used the stuff you claim to. This story really doesn’t have much logic to it. Our hero hits on the idea of getting his house robots to wear all the extra clothes and play with the piles of sports equipment – and, this solves everyone’s problem. Like no one would have thought of that already....more
- Would you like to clarify your former statement concerning Big Dumb Objects?
- Oh, I see that this review is going to be in the style of Sleeping Gia- Would you like to clarify your former statement concerning Big Dumb Objects?
- Oh, I see that this review is going to be in the style of Sleeping Giants itself, which is, a series of interviews between an unnamed insufferable smug know-it-all who seems to have more clout than the President of the United and a series of cardboard cutouts.
- Cutouts? Rather supercilious of you, I would have said, never mind me.
- Well, how about : the Ripley ripoff – she’s from Alien The Movie you know – and the superintelligent geek, and the Mad Scientist – this is not profound characterization, you know.
- Mmm, well, okay, but back to the Object.
- Okay, well, the Big Dumb Object - it’s an affectionate term for something you find very often in science fiction and I should say that Sleeping Giants is science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction. Think of the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey or Rama in Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama or Ringworld – anyway, there are dozens of sf stories in which humans discover an Extra Terrestrial Thing and it’s always HUGE, it’s never 3 inches by 4 inches by 6 inches.
- So you’re saying that the 20 stories high robot discovered bit by bit in this novel is one of those.
- If you want to create a sense of wonder, have your robot be 20 stories high. That will work every time.
- So, within the confines of its alleged oldfashioned sensibility, then, does this entry-level science fiction novel work or not?
- Actual sf writers, if they come across this one, will be gnawing their own lower left arm off in frustration. Their intricate masterpieces sail by unnoticed by the multitude, but everyone falls instantly in love with this johnny-one-note tale.
- It was ever thus, you know. Ben Jonson thought Shakespeare was a bit crap compared to his own stuff.
- And the incessant sneeriness of the egomaniac who drives all these interviews gets more than a bit irritating.
- Are you implying anything here?
- Oh no, present company excepted.
- Most kind.
- But, you know, it was a real fast prawn crackery read.
- ?
- You know – OMG did I just eat a whole bag? And why, since they're completely tasteless?
- So?
- Well, I can see why some readers ladle out the stars, but for this old sf fan from way back, awarding a second star is my good deed for the day, akin to helping a three legged dog across the road.
Old science fiction, what is it, let’s see – 1976. Hmm, kind of quaint, no?
Oh but I like old stuff, new science fiction gives me a headache, all that Old science fiction, what is it, let’s see – 1976. Hmm, kind of quaint, no?
Oh but I like old stuff, new science fiction gives me a headache, all that sensory overload and made up words.
So you admit you can’t take the pace any more. Just settling down with a 43 year old Hugo ‘n’ Nebula winner, kids all grown up, maturing your annuities, undoing one more notch on your belt, I get the picture.
Well, that’s not exactly the way I’d have put it –
So what’s it about, this old classic?
Well, er… it’s kind of sad. Leaving aside the Heechees –
Heechees?
Yes, they are the long since vanished aliens who left stuff around on an asteroid including lots of their old spaceships….
Did they work still?
Oh yes, but no one could figure out how to work them except to be able to switch them on and off, and they only went to one pre-programmed destination (and back) and you never knew where you were going to end up, so you might come back dead, or you might come back rich, an intriguing idea.
Okay, but you were going to say something else.
I think what Gateway is really about is money, therapy and indecision.
Odd subjects for science fiction?
Yes, quite odd. And also quite dull. This narrator guy spends most of the book hanging about on Gateway (the asteroid) trying to get up the nerve to volunteer to go on one of these possibly-suicide missions. Otherwise we flash forward and he’s spending hours in therapy with an AI psychotherapist. The hanging around on a smelly asteroid part is dull and the analysis is extremely tiresome.
How come you didn’t bin this one then?
Well, I think the main idea is a good minor-chord variation on the usual SF-in-the-70s stuff. He had something going here. But he couldn’t quite get to it.
Could have used some of that therapy himself, then, old Fred Pohl, to unblock his writerly drains, so to speak?
Ah – yes – of course – that’s what Gateway is all about. The dilemma of a science fiction writer. You can’t decide if you really want to carry on writing sf because there’s no money in it, so you go to a shrink. Which costs money.
Case closed! Now you can get back to your rocking chair and your Brexit debates.
Thanks. I'm so glad you popped around for a chat. ...more
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