Van Vogt's Supermind, or, It's Funny How Things Go

I don’t remember when I did it, but at some point in my childhood I gave Dad a book by A.E. van Vogt with a fuzzy green shape on the cover. For years I thought it was called The Green Brain and I carried an inexplicable pride in having given it to him. Mum had probably chosen it and she definitely paid for it, but it was my gift to Dad. He had five van Vogt novels, including that one, and somehow that name became a magnet to me so that when I had disposable income and easy access to second-hand bookstores I began building up my collection of his works. I’ve probably read more books by him than any other SF author, possibly any author, even P.K. Dick who I consider my favourite. Until last week, however, I hadn’t read The Green Brain.

Actually, I still haven’t since there is no A.E. van Vogt novel of that name. The real title is Supermind and it explores a galaxy where humans are a low-level species under the protection of the vastly superior Great Galactics, and under threat from the Dreeghs, a race of “space vampires” who can only survive a mysterious illness by draining the blood and life energy of others.

In typical van Vogt fashion the novel is a “fix-up” where he patched three shorter works together into one. The seams are distinct but he “fixed” it so they seem like logical progressions of one narrative. It would be interesting to read the originals to see how much he had to fix/change. There are some clashes, the first and third parts feature the Great Galactics while the second part declares that they don’t exist per se but are a freaks of the moment, but there are ways to forgive that and move on with the story.

I’d be overstating it if I called van Vogt a great writer, but he never fails to draw me in. The stories are simple, the characters forever trapped in the 1950s despite their futuristic settings, and the ideas can be a tad whacky, but he pulls them all together into a readable and fun package.

I doubt my dad, who loves the hard SF of Asimov and Clarke, was that into it – he did just give me all five of his van Vogt books – but somehow, this book, or its cover, combined with the childish joy of having given it to him myself, led me to read many books by someone I may not otherwise have read at all. Then I would never have travelled on the Space Beagle, visited the Weapon Shops, or marvelled at the many possibilities of the Reflected Men. And if I hadn’t read those books, what other authors might I have not read? Somewhere out there is a reflected version of me who never read any SF, and that is not the best possible me, of that I am sure.

Keep dreaming!

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader - A Micro-Review

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What to say about The Reader? Unsettling, thought-provoking, uncomfortable. They all come to mind as ways to describe it. It's also well written, compelling and convincing; while I know the line between truth and fiction is always blurred and especially so in historical fiction, there was a need to remind myself this is not autobiography. Not directly anyway.

But even now as I sit here, having finished it 12 hours ago, I don't know how to feel. But, that's the point isn't it? Schlink has thrown out the rule book on how to feel about such a sacrosanct subject. I do not know Hanna, cannot know her, the narrator in the end does not know her and he knew her better than anyone else. We don't know what she did, why she did what she did or anything else. Only that what she did was, by usual standards unconscionable. Should I even want to understand what can only be condemned?

There are no answers here. Only the questions, and are they not the same questions we must ask ourselves? Are not the same atrocities being enacted around the world on differing scales right now? Do we not ignore, allow, condone such acts? Should we seek to condemn wholesale, or do we try to understand?

The novel suggests that history seeks to build a bridge between the past and the present and the historian must therefore be an active participant in both. In telling of the past here, Schlink builds that bridge, and in crossing it to see the past the reader must confront questions of the present.



View all my reviews

Tickling Wolves - Some Thoughts Inspired by Fritz Leiber

I just finished reading a story about an invention called the Tickler. It starts out as a joke about a mechanical reminder so you wouldn't need a secretary (it was written in the early '60s) and ends up being a telepathic hive minded robot that controls the thoughts of the entire population.

Once I finished it, I opened up my laptop and this thing flashed at me at the bottom of the screen - "I'm Cortana. I can help you. Ask me anything." There's that circle next to it, white and ominous like some unblinking eye. It was eerie.

It's like the time I'd recently finished reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where the main character's wife detaches herself from reality within a TV show that has become her family. The screens are three walls of the living room, she really wants the fourth wall put in, closing the reality, putting her on the stage with the actors and letting her exit the real world. Then I turned on the TV and saw an ad for Big Brother. That was eerie too.

I won't tell you how I reacted when I read about the original Big Brother. Let's just say I nodded a lot as I did.

It all sounds conspiratorial. Too far-fetched. We'd never let those terrible things happen, would we? Authors write what they know. We may stretch and play with ideas, but the ideas come from somewhere. Our world is changing, faster every day, it's difficult to keep up, sometimes we don't want to know everything that's going on, we find ways to tune out. We plug in to switch off - it's a strange dichotomy.

I'm not saying we're living in a dystopia. I'm not saying we're not either. It's hard to know. Are we heading for one? If so, how do we stop it? If we go one way can we be sure that isn't the way to dystopia? In the end what is dystopia? The underlying factor, in the stories of ticklers, book-burning firemen, omnipresent big brothers and others, is thinking. The masses, usually everyone, stops thinking. They may know a lot, they may be very switched on with the news, but they don't think. Nor do they dream. So let's never forget how to think - rationally - and to dream - irrationally and with abandon.

For the record, the story was the first of four in Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Wolf, a sort of anthology/paste-up novel. In the book it's called 'The Lone Wolf' but it was originally published as 'The Creature from Cleveland Depths' in Galaxy 1962.

Keep dreaming!

The Silkie by A.E Van Vogt

Years ago there was a shop called Lazy Daze in Penrith. It sold second-hand CDs and books and I loved it. The owner had a terrible head for business though, whenever I bought things he'd do a rough adding up then round it down, sometimes quite a lot. I guess he hated giving change. And the stock was under-priced to start with. But he had some good stock, I got a lot of stuff from Lazy Daze.

One such find was The Silkie, one of A.E Van Vogt's short novels, it cost me $2. At the time I'd buy pretty much any Van Vogt novel Lazy Daze had. I read most of them years ago, The Weapon Makers, The Moon Beast, The Voyage of the Space Beagle ... but when I tried The Silkie, for some reason I just didn't get into it. I stopped reading it not long after the prologue I think. So, I finally got around to reading the whole thing (all 156 pages).

I'm not surprised the prologue put me off, for one thing there doesn't seem much point to it. We have this character who has a quest, it seems like that quest is about to start when she meets a new character. End the prologue, flash forward a couple of centuries ... never go back besides some historical references the actual main character makes. I suspect it shows a change in idea or something like that as this reads like one of Van Vogt's stitch-ups. He was very good at taking a number of short works on a theme or centred on a character and putting them into novel form. And The Silkie reads like three short stories put together, so I presume it really is.

In this case the stories follow the life of Nat-Cemp, a Silkie, which is a species which can shapeshift to human-like being, underwater breather or the space dwelling Silkie shape which can live in the vacuum of space and has hugely advanced mental powers and perceptions. The three episodes set Cemp up against three beings of even higher abilities, thus escalating the risks but also the ideas Van Vogt is throwing around.

In that respect it reminded me of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which is a series of encounters made by the scientific exploratory ship whereby the hero can demonstrate the wonders of his super-science which bridges every field of science into one. That may not sound terribly exciting the way I've put it but it actually is an enjoyable read with some intriguing situations thrown up. The Silkie however didn't, in my estimation, come close to succeeding on the same level.

While the episodes see some escalation they still seem somewhat same-same, although the history of the silkie species makes for a diversion in one of them. Moreover, the ideas being explored are very hard to connect with. It's all a question of higher perceptions beyond the human and the mental 'weapon' of 'logic of levels', where a mentally planted suggestion causes the body to follow through the logical succession of events to that suggestion/perception. It's airy-fairy and treated in a somewhat rambling way. And Cemp is so unemotional himself it's impossible to really care about him - which is the main issue with Space Beagle, but here it's worse.

Not A.E Van Vogt's best by a long shot.

Keep dreaming!

After a Long Hiatus ...

It's been far, far too long since I wrote here and I've read a lot in that time and written a fair bit too. I'll try to do some catch-up entries about some of the things I read, particularly Algernon Blackwood's short stories and a couple of trilogies I got through.

The last book I finished was Across the Wall, which is a short story anthology by Garth Nix, an Australian fantasy author. I hadn't read any of his work before but I heard him in a seminar at Supanova one year and bought this volume afterward and got it signed, of course. I'm happy to say it the whole collection was delightful. The stories were a good mix but he has a distinctive style which I enjoy. They tend to action with a dark side with flashes of humour. It's also very readable and entertaining so I'll look into the Abhorsen cycle when I get a chance.

Keeping on a signed at Supanova theme, I also read Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens. This was a combination fantasy and historical fiction, and was simply sumptuous. Reading a story about an author hearing a story she will write down and make famous is a bit meta-fiction but the way Kate Forsyth wrote it isn't very meta, for which I'm glad (not that there's anything wrong with meta-fiction per se). The court of Louis IV comes to life through a side character who's probably more interesting than Louis ever was himself, and we hear a retelling of Rapunzel in the bargain. Kate's writing is rich without being overladen, and really brings the scenes to vivid life. And, for the record, whoever wrote the review quoted on the front cover about the high number of sex scenes in the book was overstating things. Yes, there are a few sex scenes and a lot of 'adult themes' but not as many as the quote suggests.

That's your lot for now. I'll do my best to keep posting more often. In the meantime,

Keep dreaming!

You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) but you can procrastinate there - a lot

I was just sitting here playing a game on Facebook in a time I'd specifically arranged to do some writing, and while the guilt gnawed me further into inaction so I continued to play and feel more guilty, so worse, so less likely to do something constructive I remembered one of the things I wanted to write about. That is Felicia Day's book You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost).

Felicia Day is an actress known for her roles in Buffy, Supernatural and others. I saw her in Buffy, but it was when I was belatedly introduced to Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog that I first really noticed her and learnt her name. Not long after that I was, also belatedly, introduced to The Guild, which is a web series (made before such things were things) that Felicia wrote and starred in. It's hilarious and well worth watching if you haven't.

From there I naturally discovered Felicia's online media company Geek and Sundry - this time just as it was launching, huzzah I was sort of current - and became a complete Felicia fan. Given I have spent several hours of my life watching her and her brother play retro video games I think that's fair to say - but it's very entertaining dammit! Don't knock it till you've watched at least one episode of Co-Optitude.

So, when she started promoting her book I was intrigued and pre-ordered it. Even so, it was likely to have sat on my to-read shelf for a long time since that's what I do, but for having just read Amanda Palmer's book and for a nudge from my wife, who'd also nudged me to read Amanda's book. Hmm, my wife has red hair, Amanda has red hair and Felicia has red hair and they have all recently (and ongoingly) inspired me. I'm noticing a trend.

Moving on. To be honest, initially I was slightly underwhelmed with the book. I was enjoying it, Felicia has a fun writing style with wit and a devilish self-deprecation I can truly relate to. But it wasn't until partway into it that I started to sense this was another important book for me to read at the moment.

It was the story of how she got The Guild from the worm of an idea in her head to an internet phenomenon that really inspired me. Mostly because it was a story of someone with a lot of doubt and confusion and similar mental habits/issues that I have. No mistake, we're very different with totally different backgrounds, but anxiety and depression are constants and the way Felicia describes her dealings with them rings very close to home for me.

And, just as I was a short while ago, Felicia played a lot of games - more than me, but at least not Facebook games, see I procrastinate around playing a decent game to procrastinate, it's another circle of not doing. She tells of how she kept putting off writing The Guild, and just generally not doing it for months and months. Then, with some encouragement and a large portion of guilt/why the hell am I doing not doing this-ness, she put a ridiculous constraint on how long she had to achieve her goal and she worked her butt off to achieve it. And so, The Guild was born.

Then no-one would produce it. So she did it herself, with friends of course not discounting them. But, the point is, she worked hard and she kept going and going until her dreams came to fruition and her story was told. She did what she loved because she got in there and did it.

She also learnt valuable lessons about not working too hard or being too much of a perfectionist, and I'll keep those in mind. For now, it's a matter of getting down and doing the things I love. This blog is a step in the right direction. Finishing some more of my writing goals will be more. I just have to keep working.

And of course - Keep dreaming too.

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

As Amanda's book led me to think of giant squids as a sort of personal emblem, it made sense that the next book I read be John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes. Of course, at the time I thought there was an actual kraken in the story, there isn't.

This was my third Wyndham novel. The first was, unsurprisingly, The Day of the Triffids, which I read for English in Year 9. I loved it and I'd say it was an important novel in shaping my fictional tastes. Years later I read The Midwich Cuckoos, which I enjoyed but is a much slower story that relies heavily on a sense of wrongness and foreboding.

The Kraken Wakes falls somewhere between the two. It follows a couple and their adventures in a bizarre and world-changing alien invasion. This is probably the only alien invasion story I've read where no-one on Earth knows it's been invaded till over halfway through the book. The narration is made by the husband and starts with an introduction that establishes that the invasion is over but not all is right.

From there he goes back to what he believes is the beginning, a mysterious series of meteorites, then progresses through a number of other mysterious phenomena that baffle experts and the media - of which the narrator and his wife are a part. The state of the shipping market is discussed several times and the resultant increase in air transport around the world is also detailed. The pace picks up when the aliens make their first appearance.

It's an interesting take on the invasion theme, and uses the idea that because the aliens - who live in the deepest parts of our oceans - live in very different ways to us we weren't aware of them straightaway and couldn't understand their motives or actions. Nor, presumably, could they understand human reactions to them. The one thing that was clear was the Earth wasn't big enough for the two of us.

There's some debate in the Goodreads reviews about Brian Aldiss's description of Wyndham's novels as 'comfortable disasters'. As I read this one I definitely understood the term. There's undeniably a disaster unfolding, on a global scale, and there are scenes of very uncomfortable action and emotion. Huge numbers of people are killed. However, it unfolds gently, from the perspective of a remarkably cool-headed and rational Englishman and his wife (whom I'm glad to report more than holds her own, it's a real partnership). There are discussions on markets and how events affect such things.

So, while it is a disaster novel worthy of the name and equal to any more dramatically presented member of the genre, there is a certain calmness to the whole proceedings. Then there's the framing device of knowing the disaster is over and that the narrator is presenting his version of events for future generations to consider. We know who wins.

All in all, it's an enjoyable read with some interesting SF ideas and some classic Wyndham action scenes amidst his more thoughtful scientific mystery business. It probably has less appeal than Triffids, it's certainly not its equal in terms of writing or story, but worth a look for fans of the genre.

Keep dreaming!

A Song of Ice and Fire - Finally I'm Up to Date

Last night I stayed up later than was wise because I was so close to my destination and I had to reach it. And reach it I did, I finished A Dance of Dragons and am finally up to date with George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Now I join the throngs waiting for the next book.

It's called an epic fantasy and it really is in every sense, and reading it is certainly a journey. There are many fantastic vistas, especially when you get into the later books (which I guess will end up being the middle books by the time this thing is done), and I've loved visiting them and learning of the cultures and histories which are all vividly painted.

The characters are equally strong and Martin alters the writing to fit each perspective well, which can make the text read in troubling ways at times, but these are troubling characters and disturbing times.

The saga is certainly dark, with sometimes shocking violence and of course plenty of sex which is often quite twisted itself. However, I don't feel Martin has truly earned the reputation he has for killing off everyone's favourite characters. There are many, many deaths but very few characters that I actually care about have died so far. Some have appeared to die in one book only to turn up in the next - something I'm not ruling out come book six.

Finally, I'll just say, I'm happy in my decision to stick to reading the books and not watching the series. I did watch the first season and it was good television, but it felt like a Reader's Digest version of the story. There's no way to give the same depth to the characters and cultures in the show as in the books and for me that's what makes A Song of Ice and Fire so good. I also want to stick to one version of the story. There were two many unnecessary and quite odd changes in the first season, from what I've heard they only increase as it goes on.

Anyway, that's my very brief opinion on what is a vast story of considerable complexity. The journey is not always pleasant but it is worth taking if you can find the time.

Keep dreaming!

Shiny Aliens, Atlanteans and Serendipitous Exiles from Space

Most of my reading lately has been taken up with George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as I try to catch up with the TV series and avoid spoilers (I'm into A Dance of Dragons), but a couple of events recently saw me in need of my e-reader as opposed to thick epic paperbacks. As a result I read two short stories from old pulps.

One was pretty dreadful if vaguely amusing. It was Hal K Wells' Cavern of the Shining Ones which appeared in Astounding back in 1932. The Shining Ones turn out to be a highly advanced alien race which came to Earth 10,000 years ago and went to war with the Atlanteans. They destroyed Atlantis but not before the Atlanteans had made the planet uninhabitable for them for 10,000 years. They went into suspended animation except for a small number who fled home so someone could come back one day and wake up the rest.

It has some moments of suspense early on, not highly effective but they're there. It also has a quite blood-thirsty battle, but it doesn't really fire and the plot is pretty weak.

The other story was more interesting; Judith Merril's Exile from Space. It was published in 1956 in Universe as a 'short novel' but I'm not sure it would even qualify as a novella these days. Regardless it was a well told story of the 'other' with some nice satire and social commentary. The exile of the title is the main character, a woman who comes to Earth for unknown reasons, sent by unknown others she just refers to as 'them'.

Much of the plot is taken up with rather mundane human experiences, most prominently a romance, but the exile's approach and insights are handled really well and make the piece a fun read. Merril also keeps a good level of intrigue as to who the woman is and neatly plants the suggestion that the whole story is true with some direct from the author narration.

I admit I also found reading this one slightly serendipitous as the observational style in some of the early passages reminded me of my City Sketches (shameless plug and link to the published copy of Sketch No 1 here). I find serendipity encouraging, so the City Sketches idea is certainly continuing. Eventually I'm hoping to put out a collection of them, interspersed with some photos and maybe some longer stories. The beauty of them is they're so short they don't take away from my bigger projects, particularly Hierophants' Fall which reached another milestone recently so progress continues.

Meanwhile, don't trust rude enigmatic scientists who wear goggles - they're probably shiny alien slugs hellbent on conquest - and keep your eyes open as you go about life, you never know what or who you're really looking at.

Keep dreaming!

Catching Up

So it's been half a year since I wrote anything in here. That's deplorable. Anyway, it also leaves a lot of things uncovered. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully catch up in any detail so I'll try to put some things in here.

In terms of my writing the past six months have been pretty good. I've had two very short works published by Grouch - an online literary journal that aims to promote new writing/writers. The first actually came out in December last year, and I'd written it a few years before that. The second came out last week. The newer piece is very different for me, it's real life for one thing. It can be found here.

I've also been working slowly but surely on Hierophants' Fall, but in the meantime I entered Chapter One Blitz through Freshly Squeezed. This was a sort of competition where the first chapter of a YA novel was submitted and read by teens, peers and professionals. All of whom then gave feedback - so winning was a bonus, not one I got but I won through the feedback.

I submitted part of the first chapter of The Scarlet Ring, although I left the prologue out which I had to take into account when I got some of the feedback about how books open. Overall the feedback was positive and the criticism all agreed so it gave me a clear direction to go in. So that was a great experience and one that deserved a blog entry or two on its own.

There's been a lot of reading I haven't mentioned as well. Too much for this blog but I will mention two books: Last House Burning by Katy Scott and Unwanted by Amanda Holohan. Disclaimer - Katy and Amanda are friends and former co-workers. Amanda was a fellow subeditor and Katy was one of the writers who happily didn't need much work done subediting wise.

Amanda was already a published author when I met her; her first book was The King's Fool, which she nicely gave me a copy of when she left work. It's a great fantasy novel with some amazing characters and a vivid world. The sad part is, it's book one of a trilogy and books two and three are not published, so I remain hanging on that one.

Unwanted similarly left me hanging but thankfully in this case the publisher is running with the series. It's a dystopia with a teenage heroine, which may sound familiar to fans of the Hunger Games and Divergent series, but it's very much its own world and story so don't get any silly notions of bandwagons or anything like that. For one thing, there's a rich vein of alien invasion in it as well. The world is very detailed and has a strong mythology and history, which runs counter to truth so the world of our heroine is turned on its head.

Katy is self-published, for which she has my strong admiration. Last House Burning is also YA but in the urban fantasy genre. It's actually a mix of comedy and drama with some delicious satire. It has an Australian setting which I loved, and most of the action takes place in a fictional suburb of the Blue Mountains - where I grew up, so it had a nice homey feel for me. Not that I've met one of the Sentenced, St Peter or any employees of the devil. It's a fun ride with characters you can genuinely feel for and invest in. You can buy it here.

Hope to hear more on these pages more often!

Keep dreaming!

Rays of Life - some stories in Astounding from 1930

I'm about halfway through the second issue of Astounding (February 1930) and there's been an interesting common thread in a three of the stories so far. While vastly different in approach and atmosphere, they all feature the discovery of a 'Life' ray at their heart. There are some spoilers ahead so if you want to read the stories first they can be found here.

The first was Harl Vincent's Old Crompton's Secret. This story didn't go anything like I expected. The blurb describes a rejuvenated old man with the memory of a crime, the illustration is of a fight scene between Old Crompton and a younger man. Then the story opens with a description of the enigmatic town hermit - Crompton - who has been there so long even the old folk can't remember when he arrived or why he's such a grouch. So at this point I was assuming his dark secret/remembered crime was why he was a hermit. But no, the crime happens three-quarters of the way through the story and turns out to not actually have happened ... as in the murder victim isn't dead.

So from that angle I wasn't a particular fan of the story but in other ways it was an intriguing setup. The old hermit gained a new neighbour, a young scientist who turns as hermetic as he is, and the nature of his experiments result in a three-foot-tall rooster. It is finally revealed that the young scientist has discovered the secret to life itself - which he funnels through electric rays in a particular configuration. Most interesting is his motivation. Having discovered this world-changing technology he immediately thinks of all the money and influence he will make offering the use of his rejuvenating machine to old rich people. It's possibly the most mundane motivation for such a scientist I've encountered. Mad ideals, world domination, saving lost loved ones ... nope, just getting rich and influencing people.

The next story's scientist was less materialistic and was probing the mysteries of life and death for the sake of doing so more than anything else. Interestingly he was also a side character in what was, in the end, a form of locked-room horror story. The story was The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B Cave and is a first-person account of a mysterious night a doctor has when he and a famous scientist are called to visit a professor who proceeds to explain that he was on the verge of discovering the secret of life itself and restoring it to a dead man. He claimed mild success on a corpse but when the narrator called on him to prove it he said it hadn't proved as successful as he'd hoped so he'd dumped the body.

On their way home the doctor and scientist argue over the possibility of the professor being right, then they discover a dead man in a warehouse gate. It's the watchman and he appears to have died of fright. From here the story becomes the haunted house type, the doctor goes inside on a dare and ends up encountering the corpse the professor had disposed of. It turns out the professor should have been more patient.

The third 'life ray' story in the issue is an altogether different affair again. It's Creatures of the Light by Sophie Wenzel Ellis. It follows the adventure of another young scientist with incredible intellect and stunning looks. He is led to discover another scientist's great work. This scientist is an expert in electricity and has discovered the ray of life. He used that ray to create a tropical paradise in a hidden valley in the Antarctic where he has through use of his ray and a eugenic breeding program, advanced human evolution to the point of 'perfection'.

The story has our hero declaim the ideals of the scientific tinkerer of humanity revolting, primarily because of the manipulation of breeding people and using the ray to fast-track growth and development - at 20 years of age 'Eve' had spawned five generations. Indeed, the central villain is one of the 'perfect' humans who despises the lesser humans, except one woman, and his equals who are perfect and thus boring, so he aims to destroy them all. Of course, that doesn't quite pan out, but the paradise is most certainly lost in the end and shown as a foolish quest.

So three very different stories, all within the Frankenstein galaxy if not solar system. Fascinating concepts. In the middle of these three stories was a very different tale of alien invasion by Charles Willard Diffin, Spawn of the Stars. It had monstrous protozoa in near-perfect flying saucers with hydrogen-based attacks that precede the Manhattan Project by a decade which is interesting in itself. In the end the world is saved by sunlight - and good-old American military bravery and self-sacrifice of course.

Keep reading, keep exploring and thinking. And most of all - Keep dreaming!

Update for a New Year

So this is just a quick blog to open the year. 2015 is going to be a big year for me and my writing, at least that's the plan. I'm pushing my copywriting/editing service for small businesses too, there are a lot of small businesses out there who could really use some better website content and I can do that easily and at prices they can afford. Promo over :)

My submission to the Blackguards anthology via Ragnarok Publishing was unsuccessful so I'm going to make it the first of a series of prequel stories to The Scarlet Ring. It was about one of the side characters in the novel and what he was doing immediately prior to the beginning of the book. In fact, some of it probably overlaps if I think about it. I'm looking forward to getting Blackguards anyway, it has some great authors in it I haven't seen much of.

I've also just finished a submission for the Black Library's call for Deathwatch short stories. I haven't finished the story but they only want a sample. Fingers crossed on that one.

Meanwhile I need to get back to Hierophants' Fall (the sequel to The Scarlet Ring). I'm working on a timeline at the moment while testing Aeon Timeline, which I got a trial version of courtesy of NaNoWriMo.

Reading wise I just finished (finally) the Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed. As with all anthologies it had some misses but a lot of hits too. I was surprised by how many bleak stories there were, some were very morbid, but there were some good upbeat ones too. The flash fiction section was fun too.

I think the stand-outs for me Walking Awake by N K Jemisin, which told about parasites that took over human bodies and grew us for hosts, A World Shaped Like Bones by Kris Millering, which was about an artist alone in space with a man she killed accidentally for a very long time and making art from his corpse (reminded me of one I read in Nightmare #1 a bit) and The Cost to be Wise by Maureen F McHugh, which was a story of a mission where well-meaning people try to teach the locals, it ends in a massacre funnily enough.

More soon. I want this blog to be much more frequent this year.

Keep dreaming!

The Creature from Beyond Infinity by Henry Kuttner

In my last blog I mentioned that I read Kuttner’s first novel, so now I thought I’d quickly write about it. First of all I’d like to say the title isn’t really appropriate – neither is the original title One Million Years to Conquer – and doesn’t give a good idea of what your about to read. I expected some sort of monster story but it’s far from that. The original title is a bit closer to the truth but still off the mark. That said, I have no suggestions for a replacement.

It’s a complex story in some ways and overly simplistic in others. The first half or more is split into two narratives, one telling of an alien seeking super geniuses in humanity by cryogenically sleeping through millennia, the other of a super genius who discovers an extraterrestrial plague he struggles to find a cure too.

Without going into details of the plot, the stories collide when the alien’s timeline reaches our super genius/hero’s, at which point all bets are off and chaos ensues for few pages before falling into what we can see as an oncoming inevitable finale.

Allowing for the concept of the story – which not everyone would do – the real problem with the novel is, it isn’t a novel. It’s far too short and tries to deliver too much. There are too many characters whose emotional developments are naturally forced to fit the length. Of course, at the time Kuttner could hardly have produced an epic. Thankfully his pacing is quick so while you have to make some allowances for depth the story trots along and keeps you entertained.

What I also find interesting is the combination of science fiction and fantasy elements. Earlier I read Kuttner’s The Dark World (possibly co-written with CL Moore but we’ll never know for sure), which was on the face of it a fantasy story, but which used pseudo-scientific explanations to justify its fantastical characters and effects. We saw magic and monsters but the hero/anti-hero explained them as natural forces and mutations.

The Creature from Beyond Infinity, on the other hand, is ostensibly science fiction. Alien technology, evolution and bands of gas in space are the nature of its reality. Yet, it features a barbarian, a queen of Atlantis, an ancient Chinese philosopher and a Roman soldier/general.

So it seems Kuttner was perfectly happy travelling between the genres and throwing in elements of both into his work. And that’s something intriguing enough for me to want to explore further.

Keep dreaming.

First Response to Robert E Howard’s Pigeons from Hell

I just finished reading this delightful little horror story from Robert E Howard and I’m fairly impressed. It was originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, a posthumous publication. You can read it here.

It’s a classic horror in many ways, travellers stop the night in an abandoned house, only one leaves alive and that just barely. There’s an old legend of a violent and cruel family, there’s darkness that seems almost palpable, there’s dead men walking and terror-induced bouts of insanity.

At the heart of the mystery is voodoo, which I didn’t expect at first. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but does of course paint the practice as evil. The murderous creature in the house is a zuvembie, that is, a creature who used to be a woman but who is now a twisted creature with hypnotic powers that delights in killing people. I have no idea if there’s more lore about zuvembies but I may investigate later.

What was interesting was the portrayal of African Americans in this story. Usually Howard’s stories have non-whites as borderline savages or openly savages. Even the other story of his I’ve read set in America in relatively recent times, Black Canaan, has ‘blacks’ as the villains – the chief villain being a voodoo priest intent on killing ‘whites’. It’s degrading stuff and I have to pull a lot of mental trickery on myself to read it.

But this story, while it still has a voodoo man who’s made a pact with a demonic snake spirit and a vengeful ‘mulatto’, displays none of the usual hatred or condescension. And the villain is from a white family known and reviled for its cruel treatment of African Americans even post slavery. I’m not saying it’s an accepting story, there are still clear racial divides, as there were in society at the time, but it’s certainly a step up from Black Canaan.

Anyway, that aside, it is a good horror story with a nice atmosphere of impending doom. Some extended dialogue with theorising about, and attempted rationalising of, events does break the mood however which is unfortunate.

And what about the pigeons? Sadly, they’re just window dressing.

Keep dreaming!

September Reading Round-up

This month was mainly marked by two books, Kevin J Anderson’s Hopscotch and Frank Herbert’s High-Opp. I did also read issue 62 of Aurealis.

Let’s start with Hopscotch. The concept behind this is really intriguing; basically at some point in human evolution we gain the ability to swap bodies with each other, which makes the old adage of ‘live a day in another person’s shoes’ seem rather quaint – shoes? Bah, I was in their feet. The possibilities with this are huge and unfortunately the book tries to cover a lot of them.

It follows four orphans as they leave the orphanage and enter this brave new world. They each have their own paths and the stories wind their own ways, overlapping only in characters for the most part. At first it was like reading a series of interrelated short stories and I was enjoying that, but as the stories began to spin out I kept waiting for more to happen. So while I did enjoy it, Hopscotch could have been much better I feel. It explored too many ideas, the main characters were always too angelic and not enough actually happened. Which I didn’t expect from Anderson, although I admit the only other things of his I’ve read so far are his Star Wars works and the Crystal Door trilogy he co-wrote with Rebecca Moesta.

Herbert’s High-Opp was an early work, previously unpublished. It seems he wrote a number of works before Dune which no-one picked up and now the Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert team are making them available. Whether this is a good thing or not I’m not prepared to say; High-Opp had an intriguing idea but felt rather under-cooked – especially the ending.

It’s essentially a dystopia where the world is now governed by ‘opinion polls’ – fancy that. The extreme version of what we’re dangerously close to in reality does make for a good dystopia in the classical sense, but here it becomes more a question of cloak and dagger revolution. It does feature an advanced form of social psychology similar to what Asimov uses in the Foundation series, where behaviour and historical events are predicted; again it’s not explored much and is more a way for Herbert to push a political line – as is the end of the book. It wasn’t a bad novel, but it certainly wasn’t great either.

The stories in Aurealis #62 were Remnants by Dan Rabarts and The Leaves of the Manuka Tree by Phillip W Simpson. The first was a fantasy story that reminded me a lot of C A Smith in many respects; there was a king who’d lost his kingdom seeking an ancient artefact in a desert and even a necromancer. But I don’t think Smith would have had the family connection this one had. So I really enjoyed that one, the second one I did enjoy but not as much. It was more science fiction as it was far in the future and had a super soldier but it was wrapped up in Maori tradition, which was interesting in itself. However, it was very cut and dried and I just didn’t really connect with it.

I also started some books including book three in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, it may be some time before I finish that though especially with NaNoWriMo looming large and the birth of my son not long after that. My ebook at the moment is Cory Doctorow’s Pirate Cinema which I’m having very mixed feelings about, more on that next month.

Keep dreaming!

August Reading Roundup At Last

Since my promise of regular posts I’ve been quiet, sorry about that. I have been busy though – preparing the house for a baby, which is ongoing, writing some freelance articles, studying some free courses via Coursera and watching my wife get a kiss from Amanda Palmer. I’ll write more about that last one soon, but first, before I completely forget, an August Reading Round-up.

I finished Clarke Ashton Smith’s Emperor of Dreams. I really recommend it to anyone who enjoys visiting distant vistas of the imagination; the places I went to while reading it are amazing. I wouldn’t want to go to them for real but I’m very happy I could tour them in my mind. Some of the stories were a bit lack-lustre I admit and most of the plots weren’t great, but that wasn’t the reason for reading them. The atmosphere and the landscapes of these stories are their real strength.

I also finished the Legends II anthology put together by Robert Silverberg. I had read most of this book years ago but still had three stories left – and, as we’re boxing some books to make way for the baby, I figured I’d knock this one over and put it away. The first story I read was Feist’s The Messenger, which follows a messenger travelling between camps on the front line and getting more than he bargained for. It was an interesting perspective to take and made for a fun read.

Then there was Elizabeth Haydon’s Threshold, which is set in the world of her Symphony of Ages series. I knew nothing of this series coming into this beyond the short introduction before it, but it was an engrossing story of people essentially waiting to die in a catastrophe, being lured by a gleam of hope, then utterly betrayed. Sorry, mild spoiler there.

Finally there was Terry Brooks’ Indomitable, set in Shannara. I actually found this a bit dull, there was too much introspection and recollection; I haven’t read any other Shannara works so I don’t know if that’s the norm or if the story being told just didn’t work without back story so Terry Brooks overcompensated, but it didn’t work for me.

Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek was a surprise for me. I don’t read many autobiographical works but as Tabletop has inspired me to play more games and Wil has become something of a role model for me in his attitudes, and it was part of the last Humble Bundle ebook collection, I thought I’d read it. It was very honest, reading it feels like Wil telling you what happened then reading excerpts of his blog to you to fully paint the picture. It’s witty too and really grabbed me. I read it much more quickly than I would normally, even choosing to read it at times I reserve for physical paper books. Wil tells his own journey to a self-realisation and it’s inspiring and helps put things in perspective if you’re also wandering somewhat.

I think that’s all I read last month. At least to completion; I started Kevin J Anderson’s Hopscotch but I’ll discuss that next month along with Frank Herbert’s High-Opp and some other things.

Keep dreaming!

Reading Round-up

Having said I’d blog more I’ve not done much at all, sorry about that. So I figure a little reading round-up wouldn’t go astray.

I finally got through Clash of Kings – that’s Game of Thrones Season 2 for TV folks – and I’m looking forward to A Storm of Daggers. I also decided not to watch season 2 of the show; I watched season one and enjoyed it but it lacks some of the depth, the story is shifting away from the book and … I don’t need to see that stuff.

Finishing it opened the way for me to read Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It really dragged me in and was a charming tale; I don’t think it’s a match for his other novels but it’s still an addictive read with some great characters and ideas.

And finishing that, which didn’t take long, meant I could finally read Shine Light, the third book in Marianne de Pierre’s Night Creatures trilogy. It took me a couple of chapters to get back into the world but once there the story moved along at a good pace. I thought I knew what was happening, then bang, something shifted dramatically and kept me interested. The ending seemed somewhat sudden in a way but with time I see it’s the right way.

Actually, before those two I finished reading another YA fantasy, Crewel by Gennifer Ablin. I was lured to this book by a moment of serendipity. I was doing NaNoWriMo and I read one of the pep talks, which was by Ablin; and I found it pepped me quite successfully. I switched tabs to Twitter after reading it and someone tweeted their review of Crewel. It seemed to me to be a sign, so I tracked it down on Angus & Robertson and bought the ebook.

Unfortunately, when I went to read it on my reader I found passages went missing between pages. It turns out that why A&R uses the epub file format, it formats the books specifically for the Kobo, which handles the whole reading experience differently to my Sony. So the only way I could read it was on my computer, using the A&R program. Which was okay but not something I’m keen to do often.

Anyway, while very YA at times and occasionally a little rough around the edges, Crewel is a truly fascinating story. It’s a dystopia with a difference as the world of the story, Arras , is wound by Spinsters – women with an ability to see the threads of reality and to manipulate them on special looms. It’s a great concept and the intrigues we’re drawn into make it well worth reading.

Speaking of ebooks, I’ve recently read the classic fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany, a poetic tale of mundane meets faery, and Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, an interesting mix of magic and time-travel set, mostly, in 19th century London , with a detour to Egypt . Now I’m working my way through Emperor of Dreams, a huge collection of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith; brilliant. I’ll likely have more to say on them later.

For now, I think that’s your lot.

Keep dreaming.

Tasmanian Reading, Genre Issues & the Nature of Horror

Okay so I went away for a couple of weeks to explore Tasmania with my wife. I had hoped to do little entries here via the app, but very early on I realised mobile coverage down there is terrible in most places so it never happened. I did keep a journal however and I will sporadically type the entries up and post them here for those who are interested.

For now I just want to mention the reading I did while I was down there. The bulk of it was catching up on Nightmare Reader No 1 and the issue of Lightspeed Magazine I got as a bonus for backing Nightmare on Kickstarter (it was the October 2010 issue). I started with Nightmare and it was more than worth my paltry $3 pledge, which is a bad way of saying it was a solid literary journal with great stories. The one that’s stayed with me the most is Afterlife by Sarah Langan, which uses ghost children and ‘crossing over’ to present a tragic picture of very real woman whose non-supernatural plight was the genuine cause of distress if not horror.

Which leads to the interesting article at the back of the journal, The Other Scarlet Letter by RJ Sevin, discussing just what Horror is as a genre and why so many people shy away from the word. It essentially argued that the word has become tied to the schlock-horror side of the genre so people tend to assume anything else that might be described that way shouldn’t be. It made me think about how I view or have viewed Horror as a genre and I certainly used to connect it with schlock and gore; I only read my first Stephen King novel last year because to me he was the guy behind those B-grade movies I had no interest in seeing. How wrong was I?

I then moved to the idea that Horror was a strange subset of SF and Fantasy as any story within it would belong to one of them. This is further blurred by figuring out where the line between SF and Fantasy actually lies, sometimes it’s clear but others are almost indistinguishable. Hence Neil Gaiman can win major awards for all three genres for the same book. Genre is weird, and infallibly malleable. So now I tend to be a bit more open-minded on the subject.

After all, the stories in Lightspeed are technically SF but the ones in that issue had a bigger impact on me in terms of horror and mental disturbance than the actual horror stories in Nightmare. Particularly the reprint of Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R Lansdale, which was a post-nuclear war story of a man wracked with incredible guilt featuring creatures that cross zombies with Triffids in that the plant kills you then takes over your body … yeah. It gripped me, with both hands and freaked me out. Then there was the man trapped in space forced to rationalise cannibalising his cryogenically frozen crew mates and so slowly went mad (in The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz). That was peculiar and chilling but his failure to even consider other options (there was at least one I can think of) weakened the whole impact for me.

On a completely different note the other thing I read during the holiday was JM Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella, which I found at the Salamanca Markets for $2 (a 1937 hardback edition, $2, who was I to pass that up?) I wasn’t really sure what I was in for when I started it but I don’t think I was counting on it being as good as it was nor raising interesting questions in my head. I can’t even decide how to classify it, more problems with the whole question of genre.

It’s about a young woman in London during the Great War who is secretly looking after a group of orphans by scraping away and working at what she can. She’s one of those heart-of-gold waifs with an infectious charm that you expect from the man who gave us Peter Pan’s Wendy. She meets a policeman who is under the suspicion she’s helping Germans (only one, a four-year-old orphan so he doesn’t mind) and of course the two fall in love in that awkward Edwardian British way.

There’s a bit more to it than that including a delightful dream sequence where she fulfils her Cinderella persona, but I don’t want to get into the plot. The interesting thing for me was how Barrie had presented the script. It didn’t simply have dialogue and stage directions, it had narrative within stage directions so anyone reading the script is privy to information not presented to anyone merely watching a performance of it. We’re told of how the policeman met JM Barrie and discussed with him the question of true love for instance. We also understand why the dream sequence goes the way it does which would not be evident without his comments.

Of particular importance is the end however. It could be taken to be the expected happy ending but for one of these comments in the stage directions which is almost entirely ambiguous but seems to imply a very bitter twist to the whole thing. Which would give anyone mounting the play a big decision to make. It’s not a method I think I’ll ever employ but it’s certainly an interesting one and kept me thinking about something I might otherwise have glossed over as a light entertainment.

Keep dreaming!

Brief recount of last nigh

I have some posts planned for here so expect a bit more activity in coming weeks. But for now I just want to quickly mention last night. I went with my lovely wife to see Neil Gaiman at the City Recital Hall. It was a fun and inspirational event as he read from two forthcoming books and generally said entertaining things. Fourplay was also in attendance and played a couple of tunes - including the Doctor Who theme - and also accompanied Neil as he read one of the books. They also accompanied him as he sang the FireballX5 theme song which was fun.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the main novel he read from and we luckily got a sample to keep. It's an adult novel but the narrator is remembering events from his childhood so there's a mix and young feel. There's no mistaking the sense of dread floating over the black humour and jokes about burnt toast. The first three chapters have definitely got me hooked, bring on June and the full release. In the meantime ...

Keep dreaming.

September Reading

Thought I might do a quick review of what I've been reading this month - if for no other reason than keeping it clear in my own head. I already mentioned the Elric novels so that was a big portion of it.

The other big one was Robert Chamber's The King in Yellow. I got this from the University of Adelaide ebook site as it was mentioned in terms of Weird fiction and having influenced HP Lovecraft. It was weird all right but not always in the sense of the supernatural genre.

It's a collection of short stories, the first four of which make reference to a fictional play, the eponymous King in Yellow. This play is so artistically wrought that anyone who reads it, or at least the second act, is mentally disturbed by it or downright insane. This concept Lovecraft liked and he referenced the play or the places mentioned in it a few times. He also liked some of Chamber's style at times.

The rest of the stories in the book, which make up the other two-thirds or so, have nothing to do with The King in Yellow or Weird fiction whatsoever. They are predominantly romances about naive American art students in Paris. One of them, The Street of the Four Winds, was absolutely brilliant though. It wasn't about a student but was set in Paris. It's a simple tale of a man who is kind to a stray cat and tells him something of his history. The coincidence at the story's heart will break the reader's own, at least it did mine.

I confess the concept of a play so powerful it affects people's psyches to the point of madness did rather rub the bells of synchronicity. I've been thinking about Artaud's Alchemical Theatre and the role of theatre to create a reality beyond our own mundane existence. The 'liminal' space and the greater truths of myth and story than everyday banality. Anyway, somewhere in that idea is my Masters thesis, one day.

The other things I've read, in full, are W W Jacob's The Monkey's Paw and some Lovecraft shorts. The former is a classic of the Weird too, and I believe Lovecraft thought it such as well. It works on the premise of less is more, terror over horror, suggestion over detail. And it works well. Reminiscent of a Buffy episode too, I suspect it was involved somewhere.

The Lovecraft were Pickman's Model and The Shadow Out of Time. The latter is one of his slightly longer works, a whole 76 pages in eight chapters, and is about a man possessed by a mind of a Great One from several epochs before humans evolved and consequently possessed the body of the Great One for a few years. Like In the Mountains of Madness, his longest work I think, it's less gripping than some of his shorter pieces but the atmosphere of dread slowly works a pervasive spell over you and the history of the world and the Great Ones and Elder Gods etc is quite fascinating.

Pickman's story has a more immediate effect, following in the Poe mode of first person 'I know this is unbelievable but it's what happened okay'. The plot itself is quite see-through these days but the descriptions and atmosphere are classic Lovecraft who truly knew the language of nightmare.

Keep dreaming - but not about Great Ones I hope.