The Moon Maid

Edgar Rice Burroughs The Moon Maid (1923)
After the previous three, I had no real intention of dipping any additional toes into Edgar, but this was in a second hand book store in Kenilworth, England, exactly opposite the charity shop from which I'd bought my first Edgar back in 2011; and my brain had somehow already flagged The Moon Maid as worth a look, for some reason.

It starts well, at least reminding us that Burroughs knew how to pull a sentence together, but before we've even come to the foot of the first page, we're told that the war which has been waging since 1914 is at last over, and that the Anglo-Saxon races have won - which has obviously come as a massive relief to everyone, even the losers who apparently always knew themselves to be a bad lot. To be fair to Edgar, I'm fairly certain he's referring to the Anglo-Saxon as something distinct from the forces of Communism - then making quite a commotion in the east at the time of writing - rather than specifically distinct from other racial groups. Nevertheless, it strikes an unfortunately ambiguous note.

Next we realise we're reading a variation on that narrative device, so popular at the time, where our man strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious explorer at the gentleman's club, and the mysterious explorer is naturally busting to spill the beans on his recent most diverting escapade in the celestial planet of Neptune, or similar. For reasons best known to himself, Edgar goes one better in The Moon Maid, and our guy strikes up a cigar-based friendship with a mysterious adventurer who just so happens to be channeling his own future self, or possibly his son from a few decades down the line, and the son has been to the moon. My friend Neil once had an idea for a movie comprising just a continuous car chase, but which incorporated flashbacks to previous car chases throughout, and the flashbacks would also feature flashbacks to earlier car chases. I'm not sure if Neil ever read The Moon Maid.

Anyway, whichever narrator we eventually end up with, he goes to the moon in the company of his most hated enemy, who also happens to be a technical genius - so that makes perfect sense. They crash inside the moon, because it's hollow with numerous rudimentary civilisations dwelling therein, the first encountered being the Kalkars, a race of cannibalistic centaurs resembling the bastard offspring of Jason King and Germaine Greer if the cover of this edition is any indication. As usual, these creatures are more or less American Indians so there are spears aplenty, various incidents of failing to recognise the inherent superiority of whitey, and so on and so forth. Our guy's most hated enemy runs off to teach the Kalkars how to make guns because he's a wrong 'un through and through, and bringing him to the moon was a huge mistake. The Kalkars were commies in an earlier version of the book, for what that may be worth. Our guy teams up with the noble underdogs, as usual, having fallen in love with a right tasty moon lady of normal human physiognomy, which is handy. You can probably guess the rest.

The great shame is that Burroughs had a genuinely wonderful way with words, an elegant prose at least equal to that of Wells, which keeps you reading no matter how fucking stupid the story gets; and he wasted these not inconsiderable talents on this barely coherent garbage resembling the much older lunar satire of Cyrano de Bergerac and others, but rendered in wax crayon without the satire.

This was definitely the last one for me.

When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

The Return of Jongor

Robert Moore Williams The Return of Jongor (1946)
Admittedly I've read only one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' four million Tarzan books, and so assuming Tarzan of 1912 to be reasonably representative, I continue to be impressed at the Robert Moore Williams knock off doing more than simply replicate the formula; although the difference may be down to the additional influence of possibly Robert E. Howard and certainly Abraham Merritt. That said, the second book isn't quite so memorable as the first, Jongor of Lost Land, although is notable for adding yet another ancient race to the catalogue - in this case a species of centaur, survivors of Arklan which was once the greatest, most advanced city on earth - and so on and so forth. More interesting still are understated intrusions from Williams' personal cosmology, the screwy yet ponderous stuff which renders his later novels so weirdly absorbing.

'Because this was the dream the Arklans set for themselves when they and the world was young. The sadness comes because we turned aside to little things and in turning aside failed to reach our dreams—and also failed to reach the potential greatness that was in us.'

There was great sadness in Nesca's voice as she stood in front of the centaur statue.

'But you can still achieve this greatness—' Anne began.

'Thank you, my dear, again,' Nesca said. 'No, I think not. There is an appointed time for greatness. If you miss the tide of greatness when it flows for you, you miss it until the great river of life brings it back again. When will this happen? I do not know. No one knows. How old is time, how old will it become?'

I realise it's probably not of significantly greater philosophical depth than the concluding speech from an average episode of Thundercats, but the crucial point is that Robert Moore Williams absolutely believed this stuff as part of his evolving vision of a distinctly psychedelic cosmos wherein love is the missing matter of the universe, or something like that; and this belief, whatever it was, informs his writing with qualities beyond what you might anticipate in places so far removed from the world of proper books. It's also nice that he keeps it short and snappy.

Zanthar of the Many Worlds

Robert Moore Williams Zanthar of the Many Worlds (1967)
To continue thematically from yesterday, as with and the Daemons, Zanthar likewise builds upon the ancient astronaut thing while being subject to a puzzling reception on Goodreads. The latter is represented by a consensus view of Zanthar as an Edgar Rice Burroughs knock off, specifically John Carter of Mars, except it isn't anything like as amazing as Edgar Rice Burroughs because, you know, how could it be? The ancient astronaut aspect is, for what it may be worth, more like an outgrowth of Williams' seemingly singular worldview.

As a follower of Merritt - more so than he was of the aforementioned chortling Klan apologist - it shouldn't be too surprising that Williams whisks a brilliant two-fisted theoretical physicist off to an alien world in order to liberate strange beings from their despotic masters. More surprising is how much this one lurches so wildly from the alleged formula, and that Edgar's barmy army should have failed to notice the difference. Robert Moore Williams suffered from schizophrenic episodes and was subject to visions and voices, possibly not so much as to impair his ability to function from one day to the next, but it granted him a certain perspective and one which is vividly expressed in his otherwise notionally mainstream writing. Zanthar returns to certain themes and tropes characteristic of the author and his psychological landscape - the spy rays, the telepathy, a universe ordered according to a sort of theosophical hierarchy - in this case a demonic underworld of endless layers, and a universal force which pervades and affects all. If it's Jon Carter, then it's very much a psychedelic take on the same and can occasionally be as disorientating as you might expect of an idealistic older pulp writer who'd been hanging around with flower children.

Though each knew that physics had begun to lose its walls and barriers of all kinds that had existed for the world of materialistic physics had begun to go down, neither was prepared to face the reality that lay back of this hypothesis. As the great ship flew silently at enormous speed over the Pacific Ocean, each discovered within himself the truly enormous gulf existing between intellectual understanding of the universe and the actual experience of it. They were like hipsters who had read all the books on LSD, only to discover on the first trip that the books hadn't told the whole story.

See? Exactly like Edgar Rice Burroughs!

I'm being sarcastic.

Robert Moore Williams seemingly hammered out a million of these things, and they don't always make for a particularly smooth read where hastily constructed prose does its best to shoehorn pseudo-philosophical revelations into something wherein a man goes around hitting his enemies with a copper hammer; and the orientalism is a bit odd in this one, but - quite frankly - it pisses all over anything written by the genius who came up with Tarzan, and may even be one of the more coherent and engaging representatives of Williams' thoroughly weird body of work.

Jongor of Lost Land

Robert Moore Williams Jongor of Lost Land (1942)
This has been a very pleasant surprise. The cover seems to promise Tarzan with the serial numbers filed off, which is sort of what it is, a bit, but not quite. Much as I love the work of Robert Moore Williams - what I've read of it - I'm under no illusions regarding his membership status within the canon of science-fiction sausage machines churning them out back in the thirties and forties, so it was difficult to get too excited about the prospect of this one beyond the possibility of the author's characteristic narrative brainfarts to liven things up.

In the negative, it's kind of pulpy, but we knew that and wouldn't be reading if it was a problem. You can probably guess at least some of what happens just from the cover.

And yes, it really is more or less Tarzan, but Tarzan under the influence of Abraham Merritt rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning we get a Shaver-esque degenerate race which has inherited the lost city of a once great civilisation, superscientific crystals of power, mysterious rays, mind control, dinosaurs borrowed from The Lost World, and a story which is short, punchy, genuinely weird and massively satisfying. It takes peculiar random swerves as do most of Robert Moore Williams' books, but he's reigned it in a little with this one keeping it all on the coherent side of crazy, more or less; and, frankly, it's better written than Tarzan, greatly more imaginative, and almost completely lacking in any equivalent to Burroughs' dull racist chortling over the slapstick antics of dumb savages. Jongor is astonishingly original for something composed almost exclusively of familiar pulp tropes.

Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.

The Moon Pool

 

Abraham Merritt The Moon Pool (1919)
To recap the salient points from the previous review, Merritt was huge in his day - in terms of reputation and sales rather than actual physical volume - but seems to have pretty much sunk from view in recent years. This was his first novel and is the second I've read, and is probably better than The Face in the Abyss in some respects while being more or less the same sort of deal, belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra. I'm drawn to Merritt specifically because he was a major influence on not only Robert Moore Williams, but also Richard Shaver; and for what it may be worth, the influence on H.P. Lovecraft - with whom he additionally collaborated at one point - is difficult to miss, particularly on the likes of The Dream Quest of Unreadable Kadath. In fact, it's probably fair to say that The Moon Pool amounts to Lovecraft with better planning and less Nigel Farage. I've seen it claimed that Merritt's writing was unfortunately of its time, usually meaning openly racist, but if so - leaving aside certain creaking stereotypes - actual xenophobia doesn't seem to feature in this one so far as I noticed.

In its favour, The Moon Pool gets off to an astonishing start, albeit one which quite clearly betrays the influence of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, promising weird fiction filtered through a semi-scientific lens of such focus as to foreshadow Asimov during certain passages.

 

'I know how hard it is, Larry,' I answered. 'And don't think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energised by a force unknown to modern science—but that doesn't mean I think it outside the radius of science.'

Thus do we venture forth into the depths of a lost underground and formerly advanced civilisation - identified as Muria but probably referring to Lemuria - ruled by the Silent Ones, who clearly aren't human, and at the mercy of the terrible Dweller, the inhabitant of the moon pool of the title and who may or may not be made of moonlight; which Merritt admirably attempts to describe in approximately sciencey terms of sufficient conviction as to facilitate suspension of disbelief. So, as I already implied, it reads not unlike Lovecraft but without the drippy overwritten mysticism.

Unfortunately though, aside from our eminently likeable narrator, we also have his cosmopolitan band of adventuresome guys to contend with, comprising Olaf, Marakinoff, and Larry. The main point of Olaf seems to be the occasional comment about how something or other seems a bit like something from Norse myth. The Russian scientist Marakinoff doesn't really get to do much more than Olaf and never quite delivers on the promise of being the scheming bad guy. Larry O'Keefe, on the other hand, never shuts up, and barely a fucking page passes without our being reminded of just how Irish he is, which gets seriously tiresome.

'Sainted St. Patrick!' O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic. 'An' he expected me to kill that with this. Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife, Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!'

Everything that happens reminds O'Keefe of something Irish and we get to hear all about it, and eventually I forgot what I was reading beyond having a vague impression of it occurring underground. I don't recall any specific mention of O'Keefe wearing a green bowler hat or carrying a pig under his arm, but my concentration wasn't all it could have been during a few of his more extended observations.

Additionally, as we come to the inevitable conclusion in an underground war, I couldn't help but notice misty-eyed eulogies to those making the ultimate sacrifice - which struck me as a little peculiar for something written in 1919; and Merritt mumbles darkly when referring to the Russian revolution, as possibly embodied by Marakinoff. Neither detail necessarily leaves a taste anything like so unsavoury as any of Lovecraft's odes to Tommy Robinson, but it doesn't help after all the greenface we've had to wade through in order to get to the actual fucking story. In terms of novels wherein adventuresome types discover underground civilisations, The Moon Pool could have been one of the best had Larry spent a lot less time banging on about Leprechauns and Brian Boru.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
Purchased back in simpler times when, gripped by a sudden realisation of my having a reading age of about twelve, I thought I'd give this a go because it was the novelisation of Apocalypse Now. You can probably see why I found it a bit chewy first time around.

To be fair to the younger version of myself who probably actually would have considered reading charity novelisations [facetious reference to drivel withheld], I knew Heart of Darkness wasn't the novelisation of Apocalypse Now, and even now that I'm marginally less stupid, I still find it a bit on the chewy side. This is probably down to the method of its telling, narrated to the author rather than by him as an anecdote of improbable length which forms a distinctly impressionist version of events dictated by meaning rather than any conventional sequence, so we flash back and forth - as doubtless would an oral account - examining characters before we've met them or even been told who they are as a sort of narrative cubism; but to settle for a definitive painterly analogy, Francisco Goya seems the closest fit with his sepulchral canvases where night and fog conceal the more tangible horrors.

Anyway, for anyone who still cares, despite having been transposed to Vietnam in the sixties, Coppola's adaptation retains almost all of the details which matter with surprising fidelity - even Dennis Hopper. Kurtz here is an ivory trader who has spent just a little too long gazing into the abyss and by whom Conrad's views on colonialism - amongst other evils - are given voice. Kurtz goes into the night, and then becomes the night which, to expand it beyond just the colonial aspect, seems to have been Conrad's view of the headlong rush of progress which gripped his milieu, not as a refutation of its supposed benefits, but representing its casualties from a fully humanist perspective - the minds, bodies, and even cultures sacrificed in our eagerness to embrace the new century.

Heart of Darkness has been dismissed as racist in certain quarters and its true that it reduces Africa to a dark continent of savage and unimaginable horrors, but in its defence, this is from a colonial perspective, and that's our subject here. The reduction of the Congo to something monstrous says more about the intruders than about the Congo itself, so I would argue that the racist flag might be better planted elsewhere, in something which actually commits racism rather than simply fails to cheer on the perceived victim with sufficient enthusiasm - Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lovecraft for example, neither of whom ever wrote anything approaching the depth of this novella.

It's chewy, but it's short, and your brain will thank you if you can make the effort.

The Underwater Menace

Nigel Robinson The Underwater Menace (1988)
I wasn't quite up to processing Voltaire at bedtime, so I toggled Candide and His Legion of Colourful Pals with this, a novelisation of a childrens' show from the sixties, praying it wouldn't be anything like so annoying as Tomb of Valdemar, my previous helping of time-travelling comfort food. It's a simple story which no-one likes, I reasoned, so there's less that can go wrong.

Amazingly, this actually turned out to be the case. The Underwater Menace was criticised for, amongst other things, its fish people - mutated humans effected by gluing stuff found in a box under the sink to the actors' faces - despite that the television serial was unfortunately wiped so only three people presently alive have actually seen it. Of course, the problem with shit effects is that they remind us we're watching a low budget kids show and not something really graet and proper and grown up like Babylon 5. I'm sure there will be persons who have criticised the writing on this one, but I can't see the point. This stuff was never meant to compete with A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I'm not sure The Underwater Menace actually has a story. I mean, take a look at the ingredients:

• Atlantis survived submersion.
• Primitive types who can be influenced by white person stood behind statue of tribal God speaking in a funny voice.
• Companions captured and immediately subjected to either hard labour or medical experiments.
• Mad scientist.

Seriously, if you still need a fucking synopsis of what happens, you've got something wrong with you; and pointing out that it's all a bit basic seems a little redundant, no?

The Underwater Menace is Edgar Rice Burroughs, more or less. It has a job to do, and the book at least does it well, because Nigel Robinson knows how to write and hasn't somehow misread the commission, assuming it to be a portentous voice-over for super duper audio dramas based on bingeworthy television shows. The narrative is stripped down, as you might expect, but is clearly quite happy to be a novel comprising words printed on pages; and it's written with just enough flair to keep it interesting, even to justify its existence over simply being a substitute for something else. It's corny as shit for sure, but I prefer to view it as a familiar song played well, taking my pleasure in how much this actually reminds me of one of Richard Shaver's weird fantasies, and the beautiful simplicity of a mad scientist who wants to blow up the world because he's mad, and that's exactly the sort of thing a mad scientist would do. Well duh…

Sometimes that's all you need.

Mu Revealed

Tony Earll Mu Revealed (1970)
Despite being in possession of a more or less fully operational brain, I'm a sucker for this kind of Fortean bollocks providing it's entertaining on some level, so this one was difficult to resist. Mu Revealed purports to tell the story of the lost continent of Mu through reference to the eyewitness account of Kland, a young priest and citizen of the same. Kland wrote about his life on a series of ancient scrolls, although obviously they weren't ancient at the time of writing - some thousand or so years prior to Mu sinking beneath the waves. The scrolls were found during an archaeological excavation in the Valley of Mexico, to which Kland had retired at some point in later life.

I knew this one was going to be tough. Not only am I pretty certain that Mu never existed, but I've spent too long immersed in Mesoamericana to suspend disbelief when these crackpots start making it up or citing implausible sources, as they always do - every fucking time.

The alarm bells rang earlier than I'd anticipated. Our boy kicks off describing the excavation of an amazing buried city in the Valley of Mexico, giving no more specific location than that it's in the north-west of the valley. A clay figurine from this dig is named the Hurdlop Venus, having been discovered by Earll's colleague, Dr. Reesdon Hurdlop, later renamed the Texcoco Venus by actual archaeologists, which is weird because Texcoco is very much in the south-east of the valley, and that's one big fucking valley. The author additionally implies that they had specifically set out in search of relics relating to lost continents on the grounds of this unidentified locale being exactly the sort of place a refugee from a lost continent might settle. Then we have page after page describing goings on at the dig, who had which amazing hunch, who was surprised by what they found and so on and so forth - all a bit Edgar Rice Burroughs, I thought.

I vowed that I wasn't going to allow myself to be influenced by researching Mu Revealed on the internet, hoping to give the author a fair crack at pulling the wool over my eyes, but I just couldn't not take a sneaky peak. Mu Revealed, it turns out, is a parody - or so ran the description I found - and the author is one Raymond Buckland writing as Tony Earll, an anagram of not really. Another anagram would be Reesdon Hurdlop, which comes from Rudolph Rednose, and Hurdlop's female colleagues, Maud N. Robat and Ruby Kraut, also sounded suspiciously fictitious.

So I persevered in anticipation of something cannily taking the piss out of the sort of book this purports to be, or at least in anticipation of something amusingly ripe. The closest it came was Buckland's analysis of Kland's testimony regarding the ocean going longboats of Mu being covered in silver. Buckland suggests this as the most likely interpretation of the narrative, although admits he doesn't want to rule out the possibility of said massive boats being quite literally made of silver.

See, I couldn't really tell if that was supposed to be a zinger or not. The civilisation described by Kland seems to be the usual variation on Greek, Roman and Egyptian society with a bit of Ben Hur thrown in, and if it's marginally more entertaining than what Buckland writes as Tony Earll, it's still pretty fucking dull due to our notional priest dutifully recording - for the benefit of future generations - even the most mundane details of his existence and what type of trousers he wore on certain days of the week. It's almost as though this was written by someone with no imagination.

Further research reveals that Buckland was better known for his books of magic, Wicca, and the occult, so it's difficult to see how this is genuinely a parody, as distinct from just some bloke telling lies, making things up, and wheeling out the snake oil in hope of paying a few bills; and Robat, as in Maud N. Robat, was actually Buckland's special magic name—sorry, of course I meant his special magick name. I was hoping that, at worst, this might be interesting as modern mythology, perhaps reflecting upon the psychological aspect of the stories we tell about things which don't exist, but really it's just some dude taking the piss; which is why I skimmed the second half. I have other stuff to read and, crackers though he may well have been, Richard S. Shaver did a better job.

Planet Comics volume two

Planet Comics volume two (1940)
This is my second volume of this one, here collecting issues four to eight as originally published in 1940. Consulting both the first volume and my earlier review of the same, I notice that I've written the following:

Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

As I now realise, those spaceships bearing suspicious resemblance to aircraft of the forties actually turn up in Gale Allen of the Women's Space Battalion, the strip immediately following Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers. I can only assume that by that point I was so punch drunk from having read the thing that I simply powered on through the end of Kenny's adventures without even noticing the sudden emphasis on Feminism, exemplified as it was by men commenting upon how well the women had done and rhetorically asking who says they are the weaker sex?

Anyway, I came back for a second helping mainly because Henry Kiefer's art on the amusingly named Spurt Hammond strip is fucking gorgeous, and surely enough so as to classify him as a neglected master of the form, seeing as how we all know about Fletcher Hanks by now.

I gather my copy of volume one may actually have been part of the original run which was recalled and revised due to the reproduction of the artwork being below standard. I'd assumed the quality of my copy was simply down to its utilising scans of ancient and yellowing comic books, but judging by the massively improved quality of this second volume, I guess I may have had a dud; but even ignoring the standard of reproduction, it seems clear that the issues reprinted here were simply better drawn, so I guess we're watching these artists learning and developing their craft as they work. There's no shortage of eye-popping material, but the general figure work and sense of design is improved. It's still stylised, undeniably of its time, but with a weird elegance - deco filtered through moody classicism resulting in panels with the pensive atmosphere of a de Chirico painting.

Before I get too carried away, I should confirm that I'm still talking about Planet Comics. It was, as I've discovered, the comic book - and hence junior - counterpart to Planet Stories, in which dad would have read the works of A.E. van Vogt and others, so it's science-fiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs with a hint of Hugo Gernsback. Planets are locales of general terrestrial composition, even Jupiter and Saturn, and they tend to be ruled over by Kings who usually live in castles, despite the presence of spacecraft or the occasional mad scientist; aliens are mostly bestial and brutish, distant relatives to the ogres and goblins of fairy tales. The stories are very, very repetitive, but with such a fascinating level of sheer insanity in the failure of any of it to add up as to overcome all shortcomings. Don Granval battles colossal beings to whom the Earth is but a bauble. Buzz Crandall and Sandra help a race of headless people rebel against the plants which have enslaved them, and all in swimwear. Then we have Chas M. Quinlan's beautifully drawn Crash Barker and the Zoom Sled providing a strange, almost ponderous contrast with the other strips in favouring conversation and formative characterisation over simple exposition and dramatic action. Fletcher Hanks single contribution is inevitably peculiar, but not necessarily more so than anything else here. The more of these reprints I read, the more it astonishes me that I hadn't heard of Planet Comics prior to happening upon the first collection back in 2016.

Planet Comics volume one

Planet Comics volume one (2012)
A massive stack of these turned up in my local Half Price, numerous titles from the thirties and forties and entire runs of things I've never heard of reprinted over a number of volumes. I kept a distance, knowing my own tendency to collect complete sets, but curiosity overcame me. Just one won't hurt, I thought, and Planet Comics seemed closest to my interests. Apparently this thing ran to seventy-three issues, of which the first four are reproduced here, and aside from Will Eisner having drawn a couple of covers, I'd never heard of either it or anyone involved.

I guess from this that mainstream comic strips of the forties were in certain respects closer to silent film than the narratives with which we are familiar. The tales here comprise mostly a series of bold images, more summaries than stories, with text usually serving to emphasise or clarify what we're looking at and only occasionally to explain. The art is generally amateurish, but simple enough to survive crude printing on what probably may as well have been Izel toilet paper, and so strongly stylised as to rise above most of its technical failings. Of course, I'm looking at this stuff seventy-five years later, and that which I see as having novel or otherwise exotic qualities may simply be hack work and crap by ordinary criteria; and there's also the possibility that what I'm enjoying pertains to how closely it resembles strips which have parodied or emulated this sort of material - early issues of Viz, Reid Fleming, and particularly Flaming Carrot; but fuck it - it works for me.

The strips are mostly variations on the theme of the loosely Gernsbackian science hero in thrills and scrapes reminiscent of the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs or E.E. 'Doc' Smith - variations on Flash Gordon in other words, right down to the one-then-two syllable names - Flint Baker, Buzz Crandall, and Spurt Hammond, to name but three. The adventures tend to involve alien despots and female companions kidnapped or else terrorised by the same, and other planets of our solar system tend to bear a suspicious resemblance to Earth. Auro, Lord of Jupiter, for example, tells the story of Auro, a human child orphaned and abandoned on Jupiter and raised by a sabre tooth tiger to rule the planet - which seems to be mostly jungle - by virtue of his superior strength and intelligence. It has to be said that aside from the occasional space rocket, Auro is a lot like Tarzan.

As with Flash Gordon, most of our guys seem to inhabit a swashbuckling narrative of kings, queens, castles, and beautiful princesses, with a cursory mention of the tale being set on Neptune or Pluto to qualify it as science-fiction. A particularly bewildering episode of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force takes our man to the planet Zog whereupon the local and inevitably troubled ruler informs him that he must fight a two-headed giant which has been inducing terror amongst the natives, and he must fight the beast whilst disguised as a character called Torro. Unlike Cole, Torro has a moustache and a mullet, and given that the reasoning behind this transformation is never explained, I've a feeling it may have been effected so as allow the artist to recycle an existing strip for the second half of this one. Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

Yet despite all of this, there is genuine charm in much of this material, and the better strips are almost hypnotically weird. Plots twist beyond reason and virtually without explanation in the majority of the stories, conclusions occur abruptly or not at all in a couple of cases, and we're left with the feeling that someone was either drunk or making it up as they went along. In other words, if you enjoy A.E. van Vogt, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Planet Comics.

Above all, regardless of narrative peculiarities, whilst the art remains awkward and angular thoughout, these tales are packed with arresting, even nightmarishly surreal images and an often powerful sense of design consistent with the era. Just about every panel of the amusingly named Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer will pop your eyes from your head, and Henry Kiefer's artwork is genuinely beautiful even if he could have used a few more lessons in figure work. It's a shame Spurt didn't get a longer run in the title, lasting only up to issue thirteen according to Wikipedia, although I suppose at least it means I won't feel obliged to hunt down all eighteen or however many volumes, should I end up going down that road.

On a purely technical level Planet Comics is probably one of the shabbiest things I've ever read, and yet I find myself absolutely transfixed.

The Wild Boys

William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys (1972)
This was bloody rubbish and it don't make no sense and to be honest I'm surprised Simon Le Bon let him write it because it don't even say anything about the band and none of them are in it and it don't even name any of their songs. Mostly it's just about a lot of boys bumming each other and looking at each other's private parts. Disgusting is what I call it. Shame on you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Seriously, in case anyone ever wondered, Russell Mulcahy who later went on to direct Highlander - which is possibly one of the worst movies ever made - wanted to film Burroughs' Wild Boys, so persuaded Duran Duran to record a song inspired by the book, or at least inspired by his description of the book; he then produced the lavish but essentially ridiculous promotional video for the song in the hope of using it as a showreel to impress upon film studio people just how amazing his big screen version of Burroughs' novel would be if they paid him to make it. I guess they weren't sufficiently impressed because that's the end of the story, aside from me suffering a Duran fucking Duran earworm every single time I picked this up to read it.

I looked all of that up so that you don't have to.

Where The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded all seem to constitute fall-out from The Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys - along with Exterminator! and Port of Saints - were generated by The Job, roughly speaking, specifically as the material taking the form of fiction rather than essays. The shift of focus is difficult to define but is nevertheless tangible with much less actual cut-up material despite the occasional lapse into Cubist or otherwise non-linear narrative. The Wild Boys as a novel works with the logic of a dream, meaning the reader's focus remains in the moment, with the before and after of cause and effect being vague and impressionistic. It feels like it adds up even if it doesn't in terms a mathematician would recognise, which is why simpletons insist that none of it makes any sense, which I would argue is the same as saying that a landscape makes no sense as you move through it. It's all a matter of perspective.

The Wild Boys is a science-fiction novel, one which I personally take as a demonstration of what happens once control systems are disrupted and subverted by the events described in The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded; and what happens is revolution as a natural development, a personal and organic process rather than anything political in the traditional sense.

The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.

Naturally Burroughs equates existential liberty with man on man action, so there's a lot of that going on, possibly as a symbol of moving beyond the known and the authoritarian. Sex is, after all, freedom.

'The new look in blue movies stresses story and character. This is the space age and sex movies must express the longing to escape from the flesh through sex. The way out is the way through.'

This idea, that we are here to go, is further invoked as part of an arguably traditional science-fiction narrative by a full page of very specific references to Clifford Simak's Time is the Simplest Thing in chapter six, a novel centred upon telepathic projection of the self to other worlds. I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised to find Bill reading Simak, although I suspect the appreciation would have been very much a one way street.

If you have trouble making sense of Burroughs, The Wild Boys is probably less of a headache than a few of his previous efforts, and I can see why the Highlander dude thought he could make a movie out of it - although I'm glad that he didn't.

The Face in the Abyss

Abraham Merritt The Face in the Abyss (1931)
It seems that Merritt was a big, big deal in his day, a name which dominated the fields of fantasy and science-fiction at the dawn of the pulp era before anyone had quite decided which was which or where to draw the line; and then he just went away, barely surviving as a footnote in popular terms. He significantly influenced both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, but my own interest stems almost entirely from his influence on the work of Robert Moore Williams.

The Face in the Abyss is the first of Merritt's books I've even encountered on the shelves of a second-hand store, so naturally I snapped it up, although I suspect it probably wasn't the best place to start. The influence of H. Rider Haggard is tangible, so we have what feels a little like a more literary Edgar Rice Burroughs - intrepid explorers discovering lost civilisations full of dinosaurs and that sort of thing, embellished with occasional flourishes of sciencey ruminations.

The caverns of the face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium - dull, inert lead?

Yeah, I know - it still belongs to the special kind of ray school of technological speculation, but my point here is that this is essentially a fantasy novel wherein the magic is explicitly identified as advanced science.

The Face in the Abyss is otherwise very much of its time. Our hero learns of the lost gold of Atahualpa, setting off to find it in the inexplicable company of ruffians. Not a night seems to pass without one of them pulling a gun on the other three, tying them up, then delivering one of those hard boiled speeches about how he's known all along how they would turn out to be dirty, double-crossing rats, in light of which maybe he'll be keeping all the gold for himself, see? Of course, everyone is friends again next morning, having somehow risen above their little misunderstanding, at least until they encounter creatures which would almost certainly have been animated by Ray Harryhausen had this book ever been adapted for the big screen.

Merritt's prose has been generously described as florid, or as purple by less sympathetic critics. I fall somewhere between the two in holding that while his writing is ornate and often quite beautiful, a little goes a long way. Hoodlums aside, everyone in The Face in the Abyss speaks in what I have come to think of as Marvel Shakespearean, not quite the full my liege at the termination of every bleeding sentence, but certainly a lot of persons asking what say you, my friend?, and not a whole lot of chuckles to lighten the atmosphere of what begins to feel like one of the more portentous Ultravox records, thematically speaking.

I can see how Merritt's influence on Robert Moore Williams is at least as profound as that of A.E. van Vogt on Philip K. Dick, and I can see why he was popular for at least a couple of decades; and while this novel had a lot going for it, I unfortunately found it a bit of a trudge getting there.

Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust

K.H. Scheer & Walter Ernstling Perry Rhodan: Enterprise Stardust (1961)
I remember seeing a shitload of these in WHSmith when I was a kid, and yet only recently have I come to realise that Perry Rhodan is the main character of the series rather than its author. I hadn't bothered with any of them because I generally prefer to start a series at the beginning for obvious reasons, but it turns out that this was the first one, so here we go.

Actually, it's a translation of the first two, Perry Rhodan having been a weekly digest first published in Germany - each week a new novella amounting to sixty or seventy pages of text. A minimum of research has revealed that Perry endured for decades - still keeping to that weekly schedule - was massively popular, and seems to have given birth to the story arc, from what I can tell. By story arc I mean self-contained tales which form part of a larger narrative within an even broader evolving continuity, as distinct from three or four novels with the same setting or the sort of stuff Edgar Rice Burroughs used to churn out. Maybe there have been earlier story arcs, but I can't think of any right now.

As with both Doctor Who and 2000AD comic, the pressure of a weekly schedule compelled the creators to a certain degree of homage, borrowing, or whatever you would prefer to call it, and the legend accordingly has it that Perry Rhodan has been caught up in more or less every conceivable science-fiction scenario at one point or another, and so we begin the saga with first contact.

These books have a reputation for being somewhat pulpy. This one is more uneven than anything, albeit uneven with a certain pulpy sensibility in evidence here and there. The story is quite slow, even laborious as it tells of Rhodan's historic moon landing in detail which clearly foreshadows the Apollo missions and reads very much like the work of Arthur C. Clarke. Our guys encounter the scout ship of an advanced alien race stranded on the moon, at which point traces of pulp become discernable. One of the aliens is a female called Thora, summoning unfortunately intrusive images of Songs of Praise - at least for me; and we learn that the marooned Arkonides have become a degenerate race, meaning they've reached the peak of evolutionary perfection but now spend all day sat on their fat asses watching telly. This is literally why they're stranded on the moon - because they can't be bothered. Rhodan returns to Earth with a couple of the livelier Arkonides, obliging all of those nuclear superpowers of the sixties to unite and cooperate, having at last realised that Earth is just one planet at the edge of a much larger galactic civilisation. This last element of the story actually seems to have drawn inspiration from accounts of the space brothers as related by Adamski and all of those other flying saucer abductees of the fifties.

So it isn't great literature, but neither is it the worst thing I've ever read, and it's easy to see why Perry Rhodan was popular. The writing is a little uneven, and the narrative occasionally treads water - presumably stretching things out just enough to make up a page count - and the characters creak a little, but it was written - or at least translated - by people with some ability, and doesn't suffer from any of the ineptitude I've seen perpetrated by certain more recent authors. There's a sort of screwy enthusiasm here, that of a fairly stupid story told well, and perhaps Perry deserves to be remembered with a little more dignity than has generally been the case.

The Best of Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson The Best of Jack Williamson (1978)
Earlier in the year I read a collaboration between this guy and Frederik Pohl which impressed upon me the notion that I should probably make an effort to read something by Jack Williamson, his having been somewhat off my radar up until that point; except it appears that I have imagined the whole thing and can find no trace of whatever the collaboration may have been or my having read anything of that description. It would be nice if this were like something from a story written by Jack Williamson, but sadly it isn't.

Jack Williamson was going at it way back when we were still calling it scientifiction. His early tales tell of Gernsbackian science-heroes having the sort of adventures which kept Edgar Rice Burroughs in business, with one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth century, a world in which men were men, women were glad of it - even the liberated sciencey ones, and the canals of Mars seemed plausible. Occasionally he'd throw in a fistful of nosebleed physics just to keep it interesting, but mostly it was about as good as you'd expect.

Nonstop to Mars sees Earth imperiled by a sort of space tornado which sucks Earth's atmosphere off to the red planet, and the protagonist of the story saves the day by flying his light aircraft along the tunnel formed by the distended eye of its storm.

We return to Mars in The Crucible of Power, wherein our rosy-cheeked, two-fisted hero bests the alien weirdies by much the same terms as white people bested Africans back when we weren't quite sure whether or not they were human.

My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new ruler, sent from the Sun.

Breakdown examines the rise and fall of civilisations as the process by which revolutionary tendencies ossify and become the status quo, which would be nice had Williamson chosen to build his future society on something besides labour unions with too much power, because even the term makes me uncomfortable, it being one of those phrases which has taken on the same sort of resonance as I'm not racist but...

This being said, it seems Williamson was nothing if not adaptable, and there's a massive improvement in his writing after the second world war, and so With Folded Hands reads like the work of a different author and is as such not only readable, but even enjoyable. This generally elevated standard is more or less maintained for the rest of the collection; although after another couple of hundred pages it becomes apparent that simply being better than Nonstop to Mars probably isn't enough in and of itself. The Equalizer seems to go on forever, and I had no idea what it was actually about, and thus gave up about twenty pages before the end. The remainder are of more reasonable length and more engaging content, but still tend towards the sort of creaking twist ending in which it all turns out to have been a dream, or they're actually androids, or any other variation on the kind of thing which got well and truly hammered into the ground by Tharg's Future Shocks and others.

Jack Williamson wasn't without talent or ideas, and he wrote well for the most part, but otherwise I dread to think what the turkeys must have been like if this was genuinely his best.

The Secret People

John Wyndham The Secret People (1935)
This was John Wyndham's first novel, originally serialised under a pen name in something called the Passing Show - which I hadn't even heard of until I looked it up in relation to this book; and I've just read a 1973 reprint with a painting of Shrek on the cover, despite that Shrek makes no appearance in the novel, and although the story prominently features fungus, none of it is growing out of anyone's forehead. This doesn't quite beat the spacecraft on the cover of  Simak's Time is the Simplest Thing - a novel in which vehicular space travel is very specifically treated as an impossibility - but it's the same ballpark.

The Secret People are a race of albino pygmies found to inhabit labyrinthine caverns beneath the Sahara desert, as discovered when the first ever jet plane is sucked down into a whirlpool in a sea newly formed by flooding the Sahara towards some sort of vaguely economic end, and the whirlpool strands our guy, actually the inventor of the first jet plane, in the aforementioned caverns beneath this newly formed seabed.

So it's basically Hugo Gernsback's scientifiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs but slightly better written with more of a stiff upper lip and less casual racism. Our man has invented the jet plane, and he has his woman, and he spends his time roaming his futuristic world and explaining all of its exciting developments for the benefit of both that lucky, lucky gal and whoever was paying attention back in the thirties. It's readable, but never quite achieves the escape velocity necessary to propel it beyond the limitations of being a first novel written to a formula. Wyndham made a better, and significantly more interesting job of infodumping than Gernsback ever did, and The Secret People is additionally curious as a document of when it was written, with references to Queen Elizabeth II made a couple of decades prior to her coronation, and Italy innocuously noted as having an interest in reviving the Roman empire in North Africa.

As underground societies go, Wyndham's is more coherent and, I suppose, marginally more plausible than those proposed by either Bulwer-Lytton or Richard Shaver, but once he gets his people down there, he doesn't seem quite sure what to do with them, and so the narrative just ambles on for another hundred or so pages of approximately Burroughsian scrapes and perils until someone finds a tunnel leading back to the surface. Being Wyndham, there's a lot of pleasing attention to detail, so The Secret People is better than I've probably made it sound, but unfortunately not by much.

Stowaway to Mars

John Wyndham Stowaway to Mars (1935)
Here's an oddity - written by John Wyndham prior to his adopting John Wyndham as pen name and having a massive hit with Day of the Triffids: the forgotten, pulpy stuff from before he learned how to write, you might think; and you'd be so wrong that it hurts. See that Wrongy McWrongface from the wrong side of Wrongtown?

That's you.

Unfortunate first impressions can probably be forgiven considering the vintage and a back cover blurb promising that not only are the chaps utterly miffed to discover that they have a bally stowaway on their flight to the red planet, but dash it all, Ginger - the stowaway is a woman!

Born from the golden age of rocketry, Stowaway to Mars kicks off as a seemingly typical tale of scientifically inclined gentlemen hoping to bag the prize money in a race to be the first to make it to Mars, and our main dude has a mousey wife who doesn't want him to go, and is more interested in babies, and believes he needs to grow up and so on. Nevertheless, they all set sail only to discover that there's a woman on board - the plucky daughter of a disgraced scientist who will almost certainly boss them around, complain about the ironing, and wipe their faces with a piece of kitchen roll covered in saliva.

The science is a bit loose and floppy if you look too close, but as for the mechanics of space flight, life beyond gravity, and extraterrestrial ecosystems - you can at least tell that Wyndham gave it more thought than many had done by that point; and the occasional reminders of Flash Gordon are diffused by how seriously he takes his story. Our stowaway is on board following an encounter with some sort of machine creature - and keeping in mind here that robots were a relatively new idea in 1935 - compelling her to trace its ancestry back to Mars, as she later does. What elevates all of this above the bare bones of its plot is the dialogue which bears less comparison to Asimov having his characters tell us about protons, and more to Plato and his pals stood around discussing morality, reality, and all that other good stuff. Here the gang even go so far as to approach an acknowledgement of the genre they inhabit with references to Frankenstein and - of more direct relevance - H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J. J. Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds, with this as preamble to discourse on machine intelligence, what is meant by the term machine, transhumanism, evolution, and the folly of faith placed in the emergence of a race of supermen. So there are thrills and spills and plenty food for thought.

Not only is it a great pleasure to read science-fiction of this vintage and general stripe with a philosophical dimension, but it's a great pleasure to read science-fiction of this vintage with a philosophical dimension which isn't pitched in the direction of subjects demanding we bite our twenty-first century lips and mumble well, he was of his time. Stowaway to Mars is a far more satisfying read than the title suggests, and it might even be Wyndham's greatest novel.

A Martian Odyssey

Stanley G. Weinbaum A Martian Odyssey (1962)
Many years ago, amongst the back-up strips in Star Wars Weekly was one of particularly surreal composition set on Mars and featuring all manner of imagined biological Martian oddities. The strip was split over a couple of issues and made a real impression on me, although not quite enough of one to facilitate my remembering what it was actually called once I'd flogged all my old black and white Star Wars comics to Skinny Melink's in Lewisham. For many years I imagined it was probably some Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, or maybe an extensively revised run through of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, or maybe even Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds, whatever the hell that was supposed to be.

At last I have the answer, for the story turns out to have been an adaptation of Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey, one of five shorts collected in a paperback picked up purely because I liked the cover.

Weinbaum was a contemporary of Lovecraft, writing in the thirties and who died young, so his name seems to be fading from our collective science-fiction memory - at least judging by my not knowingly having heard of him despite the impression made on me by the aforementioned comic strip adaptation. This seems a great shame because this really is terrific stuff.

Weinbaum wrote stories rather than the adventures some of us have come to expect, beautifully crafted tales exploring scientific advances in thought pertaining to his era. It's mostly to do with biology and evolution, and he got some of it wrong, but the sheer pleasure he took in grappling with such ideas is obvious and addictive from the point of view of the reader; and unless it's just that I've been reading a lot of shite of late, vintage Weinbaum doesn't really seem to have dated just as the best of H.G. Wells has similarly endured with such elegance.

It's been a while since I enjoyed anything so much as I've enjoyed this collection, which has served as a reminder of what drew me to science-fiction in the first place.

The Word for World is Forest

Ursula LeGuin The Word for World is Forest (1972)
I realise that James Cameron's Avatar borrows from a great variety of sources - Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dances with Wolves, and the Smurfs to name but three - but it really feels like a massive fucking chunk of it came from this novella, albeit with a few other bits bolted on so as to save the effects guy being stood around all day twiddling his thumbs and looking bored. It's a short novel, really more of a novella, which originally appeared in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology. The story concerns a bunch of industrially motivated human colonists pissing off the natives of a largely arboreal world, and I would guess refers to the historical colonial treatment of native populations in general, particularly in North America and more recently the Amazon, with a sizeable chunk of Vietnam war thrown in. The little guys get treated like shit and so they fight back, and the book carries the kind of ecological message you would probably hope it would carry unless you're some sort of finance-based Republicrat Randian machine consciousness; and it carries the message well, without sermonising or reducing everything to black and white. Having been drawn from the LeGuin spigot, The Word for World is Forest is of course beautifully written in pastoral terms as the sort of rustically poetic folk saga she does so well. My only criticism, I suppose, is that you pretty much know how the story will turn out just from the title and the cover painting even before you've flipped the thing over to read the blurb on the reverse; so although highly readable, it's also kind of short and a little lacking in surprises. Then again, it was written as a long-ish short story and does it's job as such, so I'm not complaining.