Harlan Ellison (editor) - Dangerous Visions (1967)

 

Can there really be anyone wondering why I picked up this collection when I saw it, excepting I suppose those who haven't heard of it? I honestly don't want to think about the kind of person who hasn't heard of this collection or who doesn't know what it was, but anyway, Dangerous Visions was the one that changed everything, according to both Harlan Ellison and its subsequent reputation.

It's an anthology of short stories specifically commissioned for the collection, with nothing reprinted from any previous appearance in one of the digests - as was common practice at the time. Ellison was after the sort of material that might be too weird or edgy for Analog, Galaxy, and the rest, with the intention of bringing readers the cutting edge of science-fiction as it was deemed to be at the time - a parallel and complement to England's new wave showcasing how the genre had begun to vibe with the counterculture, so to speak.

So there's some good stuff here, and some great stuff, and at least a couple of masterpieces; but even with some of the contributions being so short - even shorter than Ellison's lengthy introductions in a couple of cases - five hundred pages is a lot. Dangerous Visions isn't a casual undertaking, and while it may be that one is expected merely to dip in every once in a while, that isn't how I read, and I'm sure it's significant that I drew greater pleasure from the first half of the book with honourable mentions warranted by Dick's Faith of Our Fathers and Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage - even though I had to tackle that one twice before it made sense. Unfortunately, beyond these, there's such quantity here that I haven't retained much beyond a general impression of enjoying most of it, excepting Keith Laumer's Test to Destruction. Ellison's introduction to this one laments Laumer being known mainly for Retief the space detective - adventure yarns which he churned out to pay the bills and which aren't a patch on his lesser known serious work; and lucky for us, Test to Destruction is a fine example of his serious work, even though it's a suspense-filled thriller about space espionage. I gave up after a couple of pages so it may blossom into a masterpiece beyond that point for all I know. Test to Destruction is followed by Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels and Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah… so I got to those a bit quicker, which was nice; particularly as I hated the previous thing I tried to read by Delany.

I suppose these visions were dangerous at the time, given the percentage of the American population who believed that the Beatles represented Communism. If they seem less obviously dangerous in 2024, they have nevertheless mostly retained a certain spiky quality and have as such aged well.

The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Rogue Moon

Algis Budrys Rogue Moon (1960)
I'm still waiting to find the one which squares with Budrys' reputation as your favourite science-fiction author's favourite science-fiction author, and I was beginning to think it might be this; but coming to the last page, I have doubts.

This is my fourth Budrys, including a collection of short stories. As with the others, there's something about his writing which seems to resist my attention. It's not badly written by any means, and yet the sentences have bits sticking out at awkward angles. English wasn't his first language, although I'm not sure it's that given that his prose is mostly superior to a few I could name who were born here, in a manner of speaking. His stories unfold unevenly, often revealing crucial details as no more than hints you'll probably miss first time, creating a sense of mystery which is either compelling or frustrating depending on how it catches you, all of which contributes to the atmosphere of cold war paranoia. Budrys asks vaguely existential questions concerning identity, reality and so on in a way which would foreshadow Philip K. Dick were it a bit more freewheeling. His situations and narrative constructions are complex, characterised by subtleties, and are often thought provoking; and yet at the same time he'll shoot himself in the foot with some twist so dumb that it hurts.

Who?, for example, features a protagonist trailed by the secret services. At one point our man makes a phone call from a store, and the powers that be want to know who he called. Our secret service boys ingeniously distract the store owner whilst cleverly replacing his phone directory with an identical copy. They take the original away and study every single page in search of faint impressions left by their guy's finger as he looked for the name and number he was after. In view of the opening of The Falling Torch - wherein counter revolution is planned by a bunch of old men secretly meeting in a garden shed - it somehow doesn't seem that surprising.

Rogue Moon, on the other hand, is the one which has been described as influential. It's certainly an improvement on the others, but nevertheless feels as though it should have been better. The story is that we've mastered teleportation and we're sending a guy to the moon to investigate an anomalous, seemingly philosophical structure of unknown origin. This is tricky because no teleported person has survived more than a couple of minutes, so it's a death sentence because, as Al's detailed and beautifully described theory of how teleportation might work tells us, the process pops an exact copy of the traveller out at the other end while destroying the original. Then we discover that a second copy, copied from the first copy, simultaneously exists back on Earth in telepathic communication with the version of himself on the moon - sending the rest of us scrambling back through previous pages trying to work out whether Budrys already told us this detail or whether we missed it. Also, there's a whole team of helpers already on the moon ready to escort our doomed investigator to the aforementioned anomaly, and not a word of how they got up there or why they haven't felt inclined to investigate the thing for themselves.

These questions remain unanswered, and the pseudo-psychedelic experience of our guy entering the anomaly doesn't shed much light on anything, leaving us with a novel in which men and one woman discuss the nature of being, life, death, existence, and all of that good stuff, often in the form of speeches which seem to foreshadow William Shatner's portrayal of Captain Kirk - not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I get the impression that Rogue Moon wanted to be a serious novel, and it would be but for a lack of focus - as though it keeps changing its mind. It's frustrating, but mostly because it intrigues and plays its cards close to its chest, so I guess that's a conditional thumbs up from me.

How to Get to Apocalypse

Erica L. Satifka How to Get to Apocalypse (2021)
Keeping in mind that I make no claim as to having my finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction publishing, I'm nevertheless beginning to suspect that Satifka may actually be our greatest living science-fiction author. At least I don't recall having read anything vaguely of the moment which has been anything like so good, and even if we expand our definition of contemporary back by a decade or so to include a few of the allegedly heavy hitters - Reynolds, Stross or whoever - I stand by my statement.

Her writing has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick with some frequency, and some justification, although it also recalls the parables of Ursula LeGuin and, more than anything, the dynamic of all those cyberpunk writers warning against the corporate commodification of society; although personally I've only read William Gibson on that last count and I like Satifka more. Whilst I'm reluctant to analyse my own preferences, or possibly biases, there are certain things I look for in a piece of science-fiction writing.

• I like to be drawn in by something which doesn't make immediate sense, which needs figuring out, and which, once I've figured it out, will have something to say beyond simple statements of its own weirdness.
• I dislike the weird or brain-meltingly futuristic just for its own sake. I'm not keen on flashy or self-consciously edgy.
• I'm not actually adverse to adventures, except they're usually too predictable to allow for much wiggle room in terms of the first point. I'd prefer to avoid anything which reads like it would rather be on TV.

Satifka ticks all of these boxes while telling stories of survival, or of just about getting by, amongst people who work at fast food restaurants or have trouble making rent, the sort of people Dick wrote about - those of us who, if we ever make it into space, will still be cleaning the fucking toilets because they can't get a robot to do it. This means a lot to me, because I don't want to read another novel opening with anything like this ever again:

Space Security Agent Lucas Manning watched the red light winking across the screen of his operations monitor with a growing sense of alarm.

In case it's not obvious why I should regard the above as the worst sort of generic bollocks, State of Emergency, the first of the twenty-three short stories in this collection, kicks off like so:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

See! It only gets stranger from that point on, but stranger by terms which come to make perfect sense. All of the stories here inhabit variant versions of the end of the world, or of a world, none concluding with a bang but most with a sigh of such depressing resonance as to crack the foundations of whatever you're stood upon; and depressing because this is satire at its finest, a horrible mirror held up to our own increasingly desperate existence with home truths delivered before you've even noticed anyone was maybe trying to tell you something you needed to hear.

Satifka delivers accounts of places which feel like the world outside our windows, at least thematically, combining the painfully and playfully familiar with wildly flamboyant flourishes of imagination that - just like the real world - defy our ability to predict just what the fuck is happening; and she writes clearly and beautifully without treading narrative water, while making it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

Honestly, this one makes all of those New York Times Bestseller guys clogging up the book store carousels with their eight-hundred page contributions to the Asimov revival look like wankers.

Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)
This is one of Lawrence's leadership novels, as they've been called, although I've also seen the same cited as evidence of his fascism. I'm not sure leadership is quite the right term, and Kangaroo is as much a refutation of the notion that Lawrence suffered from a stiff right arm as anything, unless you regard fascism as everything which isn't actually Owen Jones. However, it can be said that it's one of his more transparently autobiographical novels, with details drawn from his flight from England and three months spent in Australia prior to sailing to the Americas. Central to Kangaroo is the rise of a popular nationalist party, some of which is doubtless drawn from what Lawrence witnessed in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, which is where the fascism supposedly comes in.

Kangaroo is the nickname of one of those dynamic leader types around which angry young men who just happen to love their country tend to cohere; and so far as I'm aware, the character wasn't really based on anything inhabiting the Australian political spectrum of the day. It's also interesting that he's Jewish - much like Bertold Goltz, leader of the paramilitary Sons of Job in Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. Kangaroo's somewhat dilute brand of fascism doesn't seem to go further than a not unreasonable distrust of labour unions, typically nebulous waffle about international banking, and some fairly mild racial stereotyping - at least mild for the twenties - and, politically speaking, he seems to represent revolutionary figureheads making the same mistakes as those whom they aspire to replace. His role in the novel, as with those of his supporters befriended by the itinerant Richard Somers, is seemingly as a screen onto which Lawrence projects his ideas about fascism, authority, and everything that was going on in the world, in order to provide a critique; so we're talking about ideas and beliefs which the author is examining rather than necessarily endorsing; and Kangaroo's eventual assassination during a failed coup of his own instigation doesn't suggest a whole lot of faith in the road trodden by Mussolini and others.

Unfortunately though, not all of the novel is as interesting as this may sound, and Somers' time spent with Kangaroo is mostly extended conversational circles about the possibility of love between a man who was never confused and another really strong man without any of the funny stuff getting in the way, which is fairly typical of Lawrence talking to himself and is difficult to imagine transposed to the lips of Nigel Farage.

Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones around our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers - look at those hibiscus - they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned to stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy.

Huh! What a flipping Nazi!

I gather the philosophy which Lawrence eventually developed had some parallels with Buddhism, or at least the idea of there being nothing permanent but change, and it is expressed here at crippling length but without any coherent development, ideas being set down in whichever order they occurred to the author, Kangaroo being one of his semi-improvised works. The accusation of fascism seemingly comes from the discussion of those details already mentioned in combination with Lawrence's growing misanthropy, the contradiction of which he himself remained very much aware.

It's a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don't like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back.

That being said, Lawrence's cynicism is given thorough account in the two painfully autobiographical chapters flashing back to Cornwall during the first world war. Lawrence had evaded the draft, having been declared unfit for active duty, but was treated with heavy suspicion, and harassed by the authorities beyond reason to the point of being effectively driven from the country; all because his wife was German and he wrote novels and was therefore presumably a bit weird. Anyone who can read these chapters and still attribute authoritarian tendencies to their author is an idiot.

So Kangaroo is some way down the list, but flourishes of poetic genius are to be found throughout, and chapters twelve and thirteen are amongst the most powerful written by the author.

Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Becky Cloonan
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (2013)
Okay, so this is the book I assumed National Anthem would be. National Anthem was a more recent rendering of the original story which became both this and an associated album by My Chemical Romance or, if you prefer, one of them is The Dark Knight Returns where the other is Adam West braining the Joker with a giant inflatable clown shoe. That being said, you can sort of read California as referring to National Anthem a decade or so down the line, with the populace of the latter having become something amounting to urban legends. At least that's how it seemed to me.

Here we have one of those futuristic dystopias of vaguely Orwellian thrust, albeit filtered through Andy Warhol with elements of Mad Max and Walter Hill's Warriors. Society has become a parody of the consumerist present - although as to how much of it is truly a parody is open to debate. The corporation runs everything and the sex robots of Battery City have their own religion predicting the apocalyptic return of the mighty mechanical Destroya. You get the picture.

Naturally we have rebellious outsiders opposed to the status quo, which is where the Killjoys come in, except this one flips the usual script by revealing that life with the idealistic freedom fighters really ain't that great either; unwittingly echoing the current state of internet discourse wherein shitbags occupy the full extent of the political spectrum leaving the rest of us more or less ideologically homeless.

It's massively pessimistic whilst also being a breath of fresh air, and is beautifully told with the narrative sophistication of Philip K. Dick but in a visual medium. Cloonan's art reminds me a little of those horrible Deadline folks of days gone by, except it's much, much better and actually cute where appropriate rather than just turning in twee Hernandez impersonations. I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge it being related to an album by My Chemical Romance, possibly because in terms of mood it seems closer to Bowie's Diamond Dogs to my eyes, or possibly ears. Yet, despite being tied in with the music of a band I honestly can't listen to, this version of the Killjoys is pretty much perfect in every way.

Amazing Stories February 1980

Omar Gohagen (editor)
Amazing Stories February 1980 (1980)
I picked this up from eBay a while back for the Simak interview but never quite got around to reading the rest, for some reason. For what it may be worth, the Simak interview is great and leaves one wishing that it were possible to go back in time and hang out with the guy; and on the subject of the direct testimony of science-fiction authors, we also get observations from Asimov, Silverberg, and Alan Dean Foster of which the latter - often unfairly criticised as a hack for churning out all those movie tie-ins - is particularly enlightening.

Amazing Stories went through a number of significant changes during its lengthy publishing history - cancellation, relocation then revival without much duplication of the success of the Gernsback years, depending upon how one defines success. The sixties version seems to have been remembered as the era of crowd-pleasing big name reprints from which original authors received nary a red cent. I'm guessing the eighties incarnation continued the tradition of great editorial savings with, in this issue, big name interviews - which presumably qualified as promotional for those interviewed - and original stories by people you've never heard of, and possibly won't hear of ever again and who were most likely glad just to be in print.

Hal Hill's Chimera is accordingly underwhelming, despite being the main feature of this issue at thirty or so pages, nearly half of which constitute the biggest extended info-dump I've read in a long time. The story itself isn't actually bad, and I'd hesitantly hail it as a prescient foreshadowing of all that cyberpunk stuff which followed soon after were it not for the fact of it reading like the tie-in to a Quinn Martin telly adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Wayne Wightman's Do Unto Others, if harmless and mercifully short, reads somewhat like the response to a high school English assignment on the theme of just deserts. Michael P. Kube-McDowell - who apparently later co-wrote something with Arthur C. Clarke - continues the scholastic theme with Antithesis, wherein the black sheep of the college physics class writes a paper proving Einstein wrong; which would be okay in itself but for the slightly depressing two page supporting essay describing what we've just read as though we hadn't understood it, delivered in the tone of Leonard Nimoy emerging from the side of the screen to explain how not everything is as it seems; or like an episode of Catfish wherein Trayvon's dilemma with the elusive Tamiqua is reiterated over and over as though we hadn't understood it the first four fucking thousand times; or like me rephrasing the same complaint in three different ways right here.

Talking of repetition, this issue embellishes each tale with a few paragraphs under the heading Why We Chose This Story attempting to reinforce the proposed excellence of each tale but mostly just delivering a redundant summary.

When you are allowed to realise what really is happening, the surprise is as incredible as it must have been for Troy Haver, who then figures how to make the mental leap to liberation after all.

We know. We've just read it.

Linda Grossman's Black Hole, may or may not be science-fiction depending upon how you interpret the story. The editor reckons it is, which feels somewhat like a clandestine attempt to smuggle literature into the magazine of robots and bug-eyed monsters. I personally don't think it is, but it doesn't matter because it's about the only thing here that's worth reading apart from the interviews.

Normal service is resumed in Flight Over XP-637 by Craig Sayre in which the twist ending is that the shape changing alien visitors are disguising themselves as ducks, which is funny because we are led to believe that they are attempting to pass themselves off as human, but they aren't! They're changing themselves into ducks, like I said! Brilliant! Hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone.

Kurt von Stuckrad's Mushroom Farmers, is one of those cold war things featuring silos full of missiles which is, as such, okay in context of its type, I suppose, providing you don't mind that one of the nuclear button pushers had also been the class stud and no woman known had ever turned him down. It didn't bother me personally, although I'm confused by the idea of there being such a thing as a class stud. I don't even know if we had those in schools back in England, although if we did I'm fairly sure it wasn't me.

Finally, and mercifully, and mercifully short too, we end with Steve Miller's, Time Cycle, which is about a bloke who travels through time on a time cycle - which is like a motorbike - hence the title. I doubt it's the same bloke, but if it is, I definitely preferred Abracadabra and the song about people calling him the space cowboy, and I didn't like those at all.

I also have to wonder if people really called him the space cowboy, because it's interesting that he doesn't seem to remember the names of any of these people in the song. Perhaps he just wanted us to believe that people called him the space cowboy.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.

The Bladerunner

Alan E. Nourse The Bladerunner (1974)
Nope, not that one. This is the original novel from which Ridley Scott pinched the name for his movie about how robots have feelings too. He thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounded a bit gay or something. This is why the term bladerunner doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Ridley's high-tech Hovis commercial, and nor does the movie feature anything to which it might apply, unless you regard Han Solo's job as sort of like running along the blade of a massive knife. Here the bladerunner is one Billy Gimp, and his job is to literally run scalpels and associated medical paraphernalia to a medical professional operating outside the law; and so the title makes some fucking sense, Ridley.

Anyway, griping aside, Nourse's novel seems unusually prescient - and keeping in mind that the science-fiction novel has historically been fairly lousy at predicting the future once you get past Arthur C. Clarke and Murray Leinster. Here we find a world for which 2007 was about a decade ago, so it's more or less the present, and although it's a present which approximately resembles 1974, technologically speaking, we have huge sections of the American populace turning its back on the medical establishment, refusing vaccines and so facilitating a massive pandemic. The social furniture is otherwise mostly different, and thankfully Nourse was wrong about the medical establishment pursuing a eugenic agenda, but as a doctor, his predictions regarding the treatment of illness in modern America - or the disease industry as Jello Biafra has called it - were unfortunately well informed in many respects. At least you can see how William Burroughs found potential in this material when it came to writing his treatment for the movie which was never made.

The Bladerunner is approximately a high-tech thriller, or at least high-tech as of 1974, and it's interesting that its urban landscape seems somewhat closer to what we saw in the unrelated movie than anything from Dick's novel; but it's probably not an overlooked classic. The prose does its job, but had the movie option been taken up beyond just a cool title, it's hard to shake the feeling that it probably would have been a Lorimar production featuring Roddy McDowell and Patrick Duffy. Also, the happy ending feels a little weird given the somewhat darker build up.

Yet it's still fucking better than Robots Have Feelings Too.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination - December 1964

 

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination December 1964 (1964)
Someone deposited a stack of these at my local Half Price Books so I bagged all those issues which looked interesting, seeing as they were going for just two dollars each. The thing which looked interesting about this was it being the original home of Philip K. Dick's The Unteleported Man which I'd never read in this form. Dick added a second half for the reprint as an Ace Double, then eventually expanded the thing and renamed it Lies Inc., which I have read, and about which I don't remember a great deal beyond that it probably didn't need quite such a lengthy guitar solo half way through side one. The Unteleported Man seems to have been Phil trying his hand at a spy thriller, or at least something which borrows from spy thrillers. It's fairly typical of what he was writing in the early sixties, although feels a little more forced than usual, or at least lacking both the usual jazzy sparkle and the humour - which is perhaps why he revisited it. The story runs that Earth is suffering from overpopulation and so everyone is encouraged to relocate to a distant colony planet, communication with which has proven suspiciously difficult; so we don't know if the migrants are enjoying a new life in outer space, or if the teleport is simply a more technologically advanced gas chamber, meaning those Germans are up to their old tricks again. The paranoia is pronounced even by Phil's standards, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the suggestion of Germans being up to their old tricks again, but it generally works better than it did as Lies Inc.

Elsewhere we find Harry Harrison's They're Playing Our Song, Gordon R. Dickson's It, Out of the Darkest Jungle, Christopher Anvil's Merry Christmas from Outer Space, and John Starr Niendorff's I Am Bonaro. There's also The Fanatic by Arthur Porges which I read but can't remember any of the details, whether I got anything out of it or what. I'm likewise sketchy where Merry Christmas from Outer Space is concerned because I read no further than the first page. It's one of those stories told as a series of letters, a conceit which has always struck me as gimmicky, kind of lazy, and usually the last resort of a scoundrel, so I didn't bother. Similarly gimmicky and lazy is It, Out of the Darkest Jungle being written as a screenplay, either in reference to its achingly stereotypical b-movie narrative, or because Dickson just couldn't be arsed.

You might expect better from Harry Harrison, but in this instance you would be mistaken. Being 1964 and the height of Beatlemania, They're Playing Our Song is about a hit pop combo called the Spiders. They play a concert for their screaming fans, a couple of whom manage to sneak past security and make it to the groups' hotel room, only to be eaten alive because the Spiders really are spiders.

Clever.

I Am Bonaro was all right - nothing Earth shattering, but certainly readable. I have a few more issues of Fantastic to get through, but on the strength of this one, even with the presence of Philip K. Dick, I'm not too surprised it hasn't lasted.

Highwood

Neal Barrett, Jr. Highwood (1972)
Internet research has revealed to me that Neal Barrett, Jr. had a reasonably respectable career as a writer following this early effort and - of more direct interest to me - was born in San Antonio; so I was well disposed towards this as I turned to the first page, or at least curious or hopeful or something. It came stuck to Barrington Bayley's arse as part of an Ace Double, and gets off to a tremendous start.

Highwood is a relative of Aldiss's Hothouse, or maybe something from Ursula LeGuin, or Ewok soft porn at the less complimentary end of the scale. It's set on a world where the trees are tens of miles high and home to entire communities of lesbian natives resembling lemurs. The males live in a separate segregated community, either in another tree or miles down on the forest floor - the author seems a bit vague about the details. Kearney Wynn comes to this world to study these natives and immediately finds herself at odds with Hamby Flagg, who seems to be some sort of colonial caretaker stationed on this peculiar world. Hamby is accompanied by Teddi, a robotic teddy bear who provides the counselling and emotional support necessitated by such a thankless and solitary posting. Of all the novels which have ever reminded me of Philip K. Dick, this one reminds me of Philip K. Dick a lot, at least up until the last couple of chapters - and in a good way, writing with the same sort of rhythm - expressive without getting too fancy - and characters who could easily be on vacation from Ubik or A Maze of Death or one of the others.

However, Highwood seems often wilfully vague in what it's trying to describe, and I made it right to the end without quite working out what had happened to the colony of male natives seen earlier, or - honestly - what the fuck was going on; and before it gets resolved, the author whips off the mask and reveals that we've actually been reading a very different book, one which seems to promise a lot but turns out to be ham-fisted bollocks. That lesbian Ewok colony was actually some sort of metaphor for women's emancipation, which Kearney realises is all a waste of time, and she only ever thought otherwise due to having had some funny ideas in her head - probably all that book learnin'.

She stepped back from him, thrust her fists stubbornly against her hips. 'No—you listen to me, Hamby Flagg. I didn't climb all over this damn planet and half a dozen others for my health—or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, moth-eaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got. Though God knows you're not what I had in mind—or thought I had in mind, anyway. But I do not intend to waste all that time and effort just to—to provide a very unappetising picnic for those things!'

Highwood opens like some lost Philip K. Dick novella and ends like the sort of conservative and occasionally Christian science-fiction which has always made Analog magazine a bit of a lottery.

Never mind.

Time Tolls for Toro

Robert Moore Williams Time Tolls for Toro (2014)
Regular readers may possibly be aware that I've developed a bit of a fascination with Robert Moore Williams, generally overlooked author of an almost uniquely peculiar body of science-fiction writing. He was a populist who churned them out, very much at home in the digests and so easily dismissed as pulp, and while his writing style allows for the occasional poetic flourish, he reads very much as the self-taught enthusiast bashing them out without concessions to literature or even basic literary conventions. His stories tend to follow their own internal logic, probably made up as he went along complete with disorientating dramatic swerves and elements which seem so poorly fitted to the narrative that it's tempting to think of Williams as having been the science-fiction equivalent of Henri Rousseau or L.S. Lowry.

Yet beyond the occasionally tangible influence of Abraham Merritt's hard-boiled adventure, Williams writing always seems to hint at some intense pseudo-spiritual undercurrent, something almost theosophical and doubtless drawn from the author's own idiosyncratic understanding of reality, itself informed by his schizophrenia; so even when he's writing what amounts to a hard-boiled thriller with some minor element which just about tips it over into science-fiction, it feels somehow biblical in essence. As may not come as much of a surprise from the above description, he was approximately living on the same island as A.E. van Vogt, and given van Vogt's significantly having influenced Philip K. Dick, it probably shouldn't raise too many eyebrows that 1950's Danger is My Destiny - one of the eleven short stories in this collection - features a detective on the trail of a suspect who turns out to be himself; and the other ten stories are of equivalent quality - both wonky and startling, or containing startling ideas, at the same time.

After six novels by this guy, I've anticipated a degree of burn out, as can often occur with the work of those taking what may seem like an exclusively intuitive approach, but it hasn't happened yet; and while some of these are clearly the work of someone who wasn't playing with quite the same deck as the rest of us, there's always something new and unexpected thrown up by the sparkly, crackly energy of Williams' narrative.

Busted Synapses

Erica L. Satifka Busted Synapses (2020)
I don't really keep any sort of finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction and don't have much of an idea of whether it genuinely exists or what it is - and obviously I'm talking about the written word here, having significantly less interest in the more corporate forms. This means that, from where I'm standing, Erica L. Satifka is either one of the best authors we have right now, or I simply haven't noticed the good stuff because the shelves at Barnes & Noble seem to be chock full of things which would really, really like to be on telly when they grow up. Stay Crazy was great, if you remember that one, and Busted Synapses may be better, or is at least as good.

Certain parts of the publicityplex have been mumbling about cyberpunk, which sort of works, but nevertheless feels to me like an appeal to persons who wear aviator goggles at fan events. True enough, here we have the notion of many tentacled corporations as inherently evil combined with something resembling virtual reality, neither of which were invented by William Gibson, and frankly this is a damn sight better than most of his body of work with the possible exception of Pattern Recognition. Busted Synapses isn't an adventure, isn't the cool new flavour, shifts no paradigm, and inhabits the regular unskilled existence of people I immediately recognise from the real world; which is nice because I'd argue that we don't need either Star Captains or plucky day-saving teenagers in 2020. Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should. The call centers, screen addiction, and human populace reduced to economic resource will be known to most of us. The rest is extrapolated from where we are right now, but not by a whole lot, and not enough to leave us cosily reflecting on how at least things aren't yet this bad because they sort of are but for the small print.

There's a chance Erica L. Satifka may eventually tire of comparisons with Philip K. Dick, because she's certainly no copyist and comparisons made with himself usually refer to something blandly cinematic from an adaptation rather than his actual novels; but Busted Synapses is inhabited by those same doomed outsiders we met on Mars fiddling about with their Perky Pat layouts in Palmer Eldritch - or possibly their relatives - and the company is just as faceless, just as lacking in basic humanity as in both Dick's oeuvre and Trump's America. Additionally, Satifka's focus is sharp and without distracting diversions down mystical or otherwise psychological side roads. My only complaint is that this focus means for a short, snappy novel where I could have stood to spend more time reading, although I suppose that's barely even a complaint.

Publishers need to start throwing money at Erica Satifka because on the strength of what I've read, what the world needs right now is more of her work, or work of equivalent quality. Popular and intelligent don't have to be mutually exclusive, and this sort of thing - which aims resolutely higher than the usual bingeworthy consumer product - makes the world a better place.

The Abortion

Richard Brautigan The Abortion (1971)
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.

Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.

Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.

The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.

A Confederate General from Big Sur

Richard Brautigan A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964)
Brautigan's first novel is maybe a little more raggedy around the edges than those he went on to write, but you nevertheless could never mistake it for the work of anyone else. The dry humour is as deeply ingrained in the narrative as ever, with the story being told at the usual tangent to anything the rest of us might regard as reality. The deal here is that one Lee Mellon is the contemporary descendant of a Confederate general, except the general never existed so far as anyone can tell and neither did any of the other allegedly historical foundations upon which Brautigan builds his world of low-level west coast dropouts and amiable losers. Their reality is haphazard, often comical, but sort of heartfelt by terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever read a Freak Brothers comic book. In fact, it's almost Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly but with much softer, more gentle drugs, and hence without the paranoia.

The Confederacy, as was, has become something of a hot topic of late, and not without good reason, suggesting the potential for dunderheads to miss the point of this book; but as ever, Brautigan arranges people and places within situations without editorial or moral commentary, at least assuming that his reader isn't a fucking idiot, which is nice.

I first read The Hawkline Monster when I was nineteen. How the fuck has it taken me this long to catch up?

Oh No It Isn't!

Paul Cornell Oh No It Isn't! (1997)
I realise this is the third Who related thing I've read this month, which is a bit depressing. Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with a to be read pile the size of the Empire State, I've avoided stocking up on too many new books this year, intending instead to read all those I've had for at least a decade which I either never got around to reading, or at least read so long ago that they may as well be new books. Practically speaking, this means that when I come to the end of one thing and suddenly decide I feel like reading something in the general direction of science-fiction, ruling out anything read in the last decade leaves me with either a back issue of some digest magazine or one of four-million Who tie-ins; and yes, it is a bit depressing, because despite the magic of Who being that it can tell any kind of story, it rarely has much to say outside a few very specific kinds of story, with one of the main ones being where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal - which I state in full knowledge of having done this myself.

Anyway, so as to save the usual preamble, let's just assume this is Doc Savage or some other piece of serial fiction. It's Who, but one of the Virgin Who novels after the point at which the BBC reclaimed all of their copyrighted material, the stuff they decided might still yield a few shekels if they could just squeeze hard enough; so it's Who without Who, if you will, sort of like:

Bernice Summerfield is Emma Thompson as an archaeologist who has adventures in outer space, but generally more entertaining than that may sound depending on who was writing. At worst, her books tended towards generic Douglas Adams impersonations based on the sort of boffo larks we all had at uni, unfortunately predicated on the notion that the word bonking was still funny; but occasionally someone got it right with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Paul Cornell always seemed like one of those authors with more to offer than just further Who, which I guess you could say has turned out to be the case. Here he does that thing where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal, but it works because the premise is so deeply fucking ludicrous as to defy expectation, namely that reality has come to resemble pantomime. Professor Summerfield is granted access to an archaeological dig upon an alien planet just as a species called the Grel show up in argumentative spirit and suddenly we're in a world of glass slippers, princesses, and shoddy scenery.

'We have not escaped from a show!' exclaimed Moody. 'we work in our mine, and sell the rubies and diamonds that we find there in the village market.'

Bernice frowned. 'Is there much of a market for precious stones in a small agrarian community?'

The dwarves all looked at her blankly.

Truthfully, it all gets a bit knotted up at the end with far too many characters chasing around for reasons I couldn't quite follow, but it doesn't really matter. This sort of thing could have fallen flat on its arse, but is otherwise actually as great as one might hope, and genuinely funny without digging the reader in the ribs and smirking the whole fucking time. In this respect it reads a little like Terry Pratchett with the post-modernism turned up a notch or two, notably while self-consciously posing for the cover art.

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the room, a rueful expression on her face.

Wolsey looked around the cave to his right, leaning his weight on his right front paw, holding the gun in his other hand.

They stood like that for a moment.

Somehow, there also seems to be a point to all of this beyond the basic requirement of scrapes and chuckles, namely that this sort of thing is essentially absurd at the best of times even without the pantomime, so why the fuck not?

One might easily view Oh No It Isn't! as heir to Simak's Out of Their Minds or even Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, at least more so than to The Underwater Menace or even Cornell's Love and War. As with the best of the line, it counts as a respectable effort in its own right.

Down From

Ursula Pflug Down From (2018)
Of all the writers assembled within Snuggly Books' Drowning in Beauty anthology, Ursula Pflug seemed like someone whose work I should seek out, and the novella length Down From does not disappoint. It's probably a story about depression, schizophrenic episodes, mania and delusion, but is told with the only solid ground being the ever-shifting universe of Sandrine and then Vienna, who seems to be her friend but may also be herself - it's hard to be certain in this world, or rather these worlds, because each time Sandrine comes down from the mountain, everything has changed to the point of her sometimes having to guess what her husband is called this time. So, to render a potentially lazy comparison, think the folksy cosmos of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe filtered through the later, more paranoid writings of Philip K. Dick, at least in so much as that it's left to the reader to decide what's really happening here, then whether what's really happening is what matters.

Otherwise, it's a story of loss, loneliness, and means of coping with the same found in places beyond everyday reality. It's a world viewed from within the existence of a crazy homeless lady who lives in the woods in a house she's made from whatever trash she's been able to find, but from the inside looking out at the rest of us, and seeing things we may not expect to see. Down From is probably not quite like anything I've read before, and actually exceeds the promise of Fires Halfway.

The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (1955)
I suspect this one may take some time so, as I did with both Philip K. Dick's Exegesis and Alan Moore's bloody awful Jerusalem, I'm going to write the review as a diary.

As a child, The Lord of the Rings appealed to me because of its apparent sense of scale, and because of its drawing so heavily on a mythology so firmly rooted in the world I saw outside my window, a mythology which seemingly redefined the trappings of modern life as ephemeral and therefore lacking substance. The world outside my window was almost oppressively rural, beginning on a farm, then moving to a small market town when I was eleven; and in a shire, specifically Warwickshire - half a day from the Oxfordshire landscape which so obviously inspired Tolkien. Reading the opening chapters of this book, I couldn't help but see the fields and villages I knew growing up. I suspect I'd either read The Hobbit - or it had been read to me - and I'd seen Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon, so I'd been thinking about the book when I was awarded some sort of school English prize in what I assume would have been the Summer of 1979. I've no idea why I was awarded the prize, and suspect it said more about the standard of the competition than any real aptitude on my part, but anyway, they asked what I would like, so I said The Lord of the Rings. I recall my parents being required to supplement my prize money which didn't quite cover the full cost of the three paperback volumes published by George Allen & Unwin, which would have come to a whopping £3.75. When we went on holiday that year, I took the books with me for a fortnight in either Wales or Cornwall.

I read the first two, then began the third in the car as we were coming home, but lost interest. It felt as though I'd spent the previous couple of days reading nothing but descriptions of battles, and I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why. I never got any further, aside from following a radio adaptation in 1981, of which I have no actual recollection and only know because I wrote it down in my diary.

I had no further thoughts or opinions on The Lord of the Rings for a long time, at least not until the Peter Jackson movies came out. The first was sort of watchable in so much as that they had clearly spent a shitload of money on the effects. It did it's job, beyond which I found it difficult to get that excited about it.

My cousin and his wife, on the other hand, got quite evangelical, as they often did about anything harking back to a tweedier, more rustic age when it was a whole lot easier to be middle class. I met them in a pub in West Dulwich immediately following their having been to see the second movie, and they talked about nothing else. I explained, and at diplomatic length, how I'd stalled on the third volume, hoping to communicate that I didn't actually care about the thing one way or the other and would be happy to move onto almost any other topic of conversation.

'If you like,' proposed my cousin like a genial form master, 'Andrea and I could put in a good word when we return it to the library, and they may set it aside for you.'

'Set what aside?' I wondered out loud, absolutely lost. 'What are you talking about now?'

'The Lord of the Rings trilogy - the original books.' He spoke as though addressing a person who hadn't realised that the film he'd just seen was based on a novel.

'I've read them,' I said, slightly shocked, 'or at least the first two.'

'Oh - you've read them?'

'Yes. That's what I've been telling you for the last ten minutes. What the hell did you think I was talking about?'

He didn't answer and looked a little awkward as he sat there, five years younger than myself, puffing away on his fucking pipe. I could feel blood rushing in my ears, such was my anger. Here was proof that the fucker never listened to a word anyone said, and I was additionally niggled by the idea that he presumed to have a word on my behalf at the local library, apparently imagining himself a nineteenth century philanthropist encouraging the rest of us serfs to read a book every once in a while.

This doesn't really have much bearing on anything beyond my cousin being just the sort of individual I've come to associate with The Lord of the Rings - deeply conservative despite certain folksy affectations, a group encompassing everyone from the aforementioned cousin to fannish types who dress as elves and attend conventions.

I saw the other two movies, or possibly just the second one, but my inability to summon enthusiasm had turned to active nausea. They were too long, too much time spent on lingering homoerotic glances shared between Sam and his beloved Master Frodo, their eyes CGI-magnified into moist blobs of Hallmark sentiment. The movies were a series of explosions and flashing lights, twinkling Thomas Kinkade paintings stretched out to four hours of screen time; and The Hobbit was even worse, or the first part was. I never bothered with the other two, because I'd enjoyed the book and could still recall having enjoyed it. Paul Ebbs, an author of Who fiction who once penned an episode of Casualty and therefore knows all about how to do writing and that, opined that the only possible reason anyone might dislike the Peter Jackson movies could be that they simply didn't understand Tolkien; you know, like how some people don't understand fucking Schopenhauer.

By around 2005, my admittedly increasingly vague opinion of The Lord of the Rings had settled into a state approximately summarised by my facebook friend Tommy Ross, who wrote:

I'd really loved The Hobbit, so I had high hopes when I picked up Lord of the Rings from the town library and read it, with great concentration, in the space of three weeks.

I thought it was fucking dreadful, but I didn't really trust my original impression, so I renewed it and read it all again. Was my first impression all wrong? No - it was rubbish.

All the characters in it are boring. Everything they do is either egotistical, ill-advised, pointless or in some way accepting of a shitty situation. The only vaguely interesting characters are Gandalf (an old man who is sort-of-Jesus) and Sauron, who arguably doesn't exist at all - the book would make just as much sense if he was a shared hallucination.

The evils in the book are so paltry, a few little hairy-footed people can defeat them by the power of daggers and resting their heads in each other's laps. There are a load of side-stories that don't go anywhere, save for Pippin coming back with some sort of potion to throw the naughty humans out.

Sauron could motivate armies to fight, but surely that was going to happen all the time anyway in a feudalist crapsack world where there's nothing to do but wage wars, especially when the main enemies are orcs. Mount Doom is the kind of hacky bullshit name you'd expect from a Scooby Doo cartoon, not a classic novel. The battle scenes, intended to be epic, are so badly written they end up conveying nothing much at all - the sentence he hit things with a sword conveys all the weight of a Tolkien fight scene. Then there's all the fucking awful singing and poetry, which are at least picked out in italics so you can skip past them with a minimum of effort.

Finally, the moral heart of the story, as I recall, is that it's a complete waste of time doing anything, going anywhere or trying to change, because all we should be doing is living in holes, eating sausages and smoking pipes. Now come on, that's piss poor!

Nevertheless, here I am, giving this thing another crack of the whip after all this time, partially feeling that I somehow owe it to myself to at least finish what I began on that Cornish (or possibly Welsh) holiday forty years ago.

We kick off with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), which I've now been reading for three days and am very much enjoying, much to my surprise. Very little has happened beyond that the hobbits have arrived at some spooky woodland as the author laboriously extricates them from their comfort zone at a bumbling pace entirely absent from the Peter Jackson version, despite whatever Paul Ebbs may have told you. Michael Moorcock famously described Lord of the Rings as Epic Pooh in a critical essay* of that name, presumably because, as with Milne's Winnie, our point of view is equivalent to that of a child and is similarly fixated on comfort, security, and whatever may threaten either - albeit restated in terms of a mythic saga. The hobbits are children without the burden of actually being children, so they can smoke, drink, and probably screw without destabilising the narrative beyond its already stretched credibility.

The landscape is, as I said, familiar from my own childhood, and I presume this has been equally true for many readers over the years. Where Tolkien invokes his setting with a degree of rustic whimsy, it never quite becomes cloying, but is balanced with a degree of wit which has been entirely absent from any of the adaptations. Admittedly it's a parochial wit, the sort of thing I recall from  childhood, observations made by old farts outside the pub as you pass en route to the village shop, the stock of which probably depends on whether you found such observations funny at the time.

I've heard it said that Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the rise of Nazism and the second world war, although Tolkien denies this in his introduction and - seven chapters in - I'm not finding it a convincing comparison. If anything, the story seems a broader parable about how we relate to the wider world and that which may intrude upon our sense of security. The comforting familiarity of the hobbits' world is established in these opening chapters, and gives contrast to their fear of the unquantified and unknown; but I'm not yet convinced of Tolkien's motives being entirely conservative. Rather, I suspect they constitute a dialogue concerning the same. Frodo, for example, is at least able to see some way beyond his own love of home and hearth.

'I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.'

Gildor the elf seems to have an ever better view of the bigger picture.

'Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.'

Of course, he might be talking about Hitler, but if we accept hobbits as at least childlike, the mood of these opening chapters seems more likely to be drawn from a child's conditional sense of security along with its knowledge of a generational horizon beyond which life will become inevitably complicated and characterised by the unfamiliar and presently incomprehensible.

Day 4. Frodo and pals spend an entire chapter in the company of Tom Bombadil. Tom Bombadil seems to be the mythic green man, give or take some small change, and the chapters which feature him have the rhythm of fairy tale, as distinct from the cosy realism of preceding chapters, and are accordingly a bit on the twee side. This section has a slightly Victorian feel and I guess it's significant that Tolkien admired William Morris. Nothing much happens aside from feasting and the singing of songs about how much they've enjoyed the feasting, seguing into some random scrap with a bunch of ghosts, the point of which seems to be to furnish our lads with mystic daggers. It feels a little arbitrary, almost as though Tolkien suddenly noticed how much wasn't actually happening in his epic saga.

Tolkien was a scholar of language, poetry, mythology, and all of that good stuff. I get the impression that his main passion was the construction of languages, notably those spoken by elves and the like, complete with the mythological, pseudo-historical, and geographical background which would account for their evolution; and Lord of the Rings is, very roughly speaking, his attempt to describe those constructions by moving little men up and down the landscape so as to reveal its shape. Hence the questing aspect, and the difficulty he has in giving his hobbits anything to do of real consequence beyond moving them all to another part of the map.

This is probably most likely why, as Mr. Ross observes, they don't really have much in the way of character, unless stuffing your face counts as a personality trait, and they make their way as would children, complete with moments of bewildering petulance - notably when Frodo gets pissy with the busy landlord of the Prancing Pony for failing to dutifully forward an email from Gandalf due to his already having a full time job and not actually being a postman; and we've already established that Middle-earth has postmen in the first few chapters, in case you were wondering.

'He deserves roasting. If I had got this at once, we might all have been safe in Rivendell by now.'

Nevertheless, this isn't actually inconsistent with the narrative having begun to carry a certain je ne sais quoi of Daily Mail readership - nothing overt, or at least nothing quite so strong as the shit my dad comes out with, but it's there.

The Shire-hobbits referred to those of Bree, and to any others that lived beyond the borders, as Outsiders, and took very little interest in them, considering them dull and uncouth. There were probably many more Outsiders scattered about in the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined. Some, doubtless, were no better than tramps, ready to dig a hole in any bank and stay only as long as it suited them.

Remember how I mentioned growing up in a part of the country upon which Tolkien's Shire was most likely modelled? Well, that's why I moved away just as soon as I was old enough and never went back.

There was trouble away in the South, and it seemed that the men who had come up the Greenway were on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace. The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land. Middle-earth is full up, they protested.

I may actually have added that last sentence for the sake of emphasis and because it amuses me. Reading up on the man, there can be little doubt that Tolkien was essentially decent, and was in addition at least as vocally opposed to racism and xenophobia as he was to the modern world, but he was unavoidably a man of his time and culture in certain respects, and even though we've already met the Black Riders and understood them to be dark, vaguely supernatural figures, it's still a bit weird when the pub landlord comes out with, no black man shall pass my doors.

Day 5. More trecking yonder. We've made it to where the fairies live, so it's mostly another round of feasting and singing songs. I've tried to read a few of the songs but I still can't see the point of them. I'm now half-way through Fellowship and it's difficult to miss that not much has happened, besides travel from one place to another interspersed with songs and feasting. What few dramatic encounters have occurred have been resolved by dumb luck or things occurring in the nick of time, almost as though the author resents the dramatic conventions of conflict in tales such as the one he's decided to write; and yet the specifics of travel and landscape are pored over with laborious attention to detail, even to the point of Tolkien describing, for example, what someone would see were they to climb such and such a hill and look west, even if they don't, meaning the information related has no actual bearing on anything. Fellowship is thus far reading a lot like an afterthought to the world Tolkien built for the sake of accounting for his invented languages, and now that he's actually sat down to write the story, it feels as though he doesn't know what to do with it, having been happier describing it in mythic terms as something which occurred off camera, so to speak; which leaves us with somewhat repetitive sentiment for the pre-industrial landscape.

It occurs to me that at the core of this thing is something which isn't so different from people learning to speak Klingon, and Middle-earth seems to be very much a precursor to the whole shared universe deal of Marvel, DC, Star Trek, Doctor Who and so on, hence its appeal to the same sort of individual. It's a faux-mythology based on collectibles, albeit as ideas rather than action figures and plastic bobble-headed monstrosities at the time of publication. In keeping with the nerd credentials, by page two-hundred, it's not even that well written - not terrible, but workmanlike and with very little genuine poetry for something with such a William Morris fixation. Even the wit has sunk to the level of generic cracks about whether or not it might be time for dinner and - oh look - Sam's stuffing his fat fucking face again. Ha ha.

Day 6. We've made it to Rivendell, so that's pretty much an entire chapter of elves, dwarves and others stood around explaining the plot to each other, mostly things we haven't yet seen and which is therefore a bit more interesting than the previous couple of chapters. Sam stuffs his face with cakes, breaks wind, and everyone laughs, and we learn that Saruman, the wizard Prime Minister, has gone over to the dark side of the force, just as Darth Vader did many centuries before in a galaxy far, far away.

In truth there was too, much more song,
Rendering the tale so overly long,
The author methinks sought to add a touch of class,
But really it's just a pain in the arse,
For no cunt wants to read that shit,
Unless they're mental, at least a bit,
Tis like unto being stuck in a lift with some wanker,
Who doth sup his ale from pewter tankard,
All the while singing a-hey-nonny-plughole,
One finger lodged so surely in his lughole.
Pootle-pottle-poo and a ninny-nonny noo.

Otherwise it was okay, nothing mind-bending, and once they've had their conference, they head for the hills which is a bit more interesting than it has been for a few days.

Day 7. The gang take a shortcut through a mountain hollowed out by dwarves, Gandalf seemingly pegs it, and I realise that Star Wars was basically Lord of the Rings but with robots. I'm not sure why I've only just noticed this. Anyway, despite any reservations I may have, or may have had, Fellowship is fairly readable at the moment, at least providing you skip all the fucking singing.

Day 8. A domestic difference of opinion over dishes left me without much enthusiasm for yet more Lord of the Rings at bedtime, so I've only read half the usual page count. Anyway, they've made it out of the mountain. Gandalf hasn't yet come back to life, so I expect that will happen later. Surprisingly they've ended up in yet another Elven realm, meaning lots of stuff which probably seems awe-inspiring if you're easily swayed by overstated mystery and speeches wherein deeds are doth rather than did or done, and not much in the way of wisecracks or funnies excepting the usual stuff about how much Sam has eaten. Galadriel, whom I assume was probably Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie, shows Frodo - or possibly Sam during the three seconds when he's not stuffing his face - a magic mirror, revealing that the Shire has become subject to urban renewal in their absence. Everyone agrees that they miss home, and not for the first time. Also, it turns out that Frodo is wearing some kind of mystic vest of power. I suppose it must have been mentioned earlier, although I don't remember it at all.

Day 9. I finished the first one, and it was generally okay, really just an exercise in establishing a landscape by moving figures from one end to the other so as to give us an impression of shape; and I'm reminded how the book seems secondary to its own mythology. I suspect its author was a big fan of lists and sets and tallies.

All hobbits were, in any case, clannish and reckoned up their relationships with great care. They drew long and elaborate family-trees with innumerable branches. In dealing with hobbits it is important to remember who is related to whom, and in what degree.

Four-hundred pages is one fuck of a long haul for what little actually happens within those pages, but it wasn't a chore given that I've committed to reading this thing even if it kills me. Unfortunately though, it does rather build up one's expectation of something occurring in The Two Towers (1954) which has started off well, at least with an increased sense of purpose. Boromir is dead, although he was never really established as a personality beyond the usual generic warrior shite - lots of valiantly being, swearing fealty, gazing grimly at the northern weald and all that sort of thing, so I'm not sure how much it matters.

The names are beginning to grate a little as I've never found them convincing, and certainly not Legolas who sounds like a plastic brick themed member of the Legion of Super Heroes. There was a pony named Bill at the end of the first book, so I don't see why J.R.R. couldn't simply have used familiar and therefore more plausible names which at least don't get in the way of the story. Then again, I've always thought elves were a bit wanky so I don't suppose it matters.

Day 10. Book two seems to get off to a good start, picking up the pace which the first one lacked, with a much stronger sense of forward motion compensating for a continued lack of clarity regarding the direction in which we're actually heading. Also, they've now split into three groups which makes it a bit more engaging. It has occurred to me that orc sounds somewhat like oik, and accordingly - now that we actually spend time with them - they're an uncultured, loutish rabble, as distinct from our heroes who seem much more akin to the chaps one may recall from one's jolly old varsity days. I'm not sure whether there's much point in reading anything into this, or into the suggestion that Saruman may actually be a foreigner from across the sea and not from around these parts, but it's there if you want it. The theme of progress, or more specifically industrialised society, as a bad thing is reiterated in passing - Saruman is described as having a mind of metal and wheels, and the land clearance campaign of his orcs - trees cut and burned with belching flames and black smoke aplenty - is hardly ambiguous in its symbolism. Taking this theme to a potentially ridiculous limit, we also meet the ents - tree spirits who have, as one, lost their wives and have thus failed to produce a younger generation. The wives, we are told, had all sorts of fancy ideas about growing fruit and farming, so I guess even agriculture represented the first step on a slippery slope for Tolkien.

Day 11. As the sun was westering, I turned once more to my book, yet found its tale as unto the ascent of a mountain made in heavy boots, mayhap resulting from the path which did lead to this divertment being paved with a long and tiring day. Returned to the book did I once the sun rose again and I had revived from slumber, and to a refrain similar to that already sung in these very pages, that nature shalt rise up from the depths to smite the folly of human progress, and that nature's sword shalt be swung by the ents, the people of the trees.

Delivered this message was by Gandalf, returned from that which we had taken for his certain death without an overly generous helping of surprise, but neither with much of an explanation as to why the daisies in the field must yet push themselves towards the light unaided by his wizardly hand. More better was this tale told even by George fucking Lucas, or at least with greater veracity and from a cloth less easily rent asunder by disbelief.

To the court of the Horse Lords did the company then go, where the regent is found to be under the devious spell of a man known as Wormtongue who bends the king's ear with only fake news and its like. Most strange it doth seem that none should wonder at the testimony of a man so named, but then these were the olden days many centuries before moving pictures brought forth the image of the scheming fellow who twirls his moustache between forefinger and thumb as he secures a young lady before the advance of an iron carriage.

Then did they wage war at Helm's Deep, the first of the great battles, sending my thoughts back to that Welsh (or possibly Cornish) holiday of my youth when first I roved my eyes upon this page and found it less than toothsome.

Day 12. I'm sure I recall this part of the second book shrugging off my attention span during one of those battles where I lost track of who was who, but it doesn't seem to be here; so either I've remembered wrongly or Pippin's laborious account of everything that's ever happened was simply too much for me at the age of fourteen. Anyway, the gang trounce Saruman, driving him from Isengard, a realm written as what I assume would be Tolkien's idea of a hellish industrial wasteland, at least allowing for the fact that we're probably not going to find cellphone towers in Lord of the Rings; so, you know, progress is bad and stuff, yeah?

Much is made of the friendship of Gimli and Legolas, and to the point at which it becomes a bit tiresome. Gimli is a dwarf and Legolas is an elf, so they're natural enemies who've overcome their mutual antipathy, and boy - don't we know it. There's actually an entire chapter, The Door of Flangelfoom, where Gimli and Legolas each insist that the other go through the named door first.

'After you, my very good friend.'

'No - after you, I must insist, my dear sir.'

It goes on like that for fifty pages, or it would do had it been written by Tolkien and included in the book, which it wasn't; although it sort of feels as though it was.

Day 13. We're back with Sam and Frodo for the second half of Two Towers as they trek across the mountains, which I vaguely remember from the movie. Thankfully Tolkien's Sam is merely an unusually loyal and slightly basic friend to Mr. Frodo, unlike in the film where it looks as though he's about to start rummaging down the front of his pal's trousers any minute. I found some of those lingering glances really hard to watch. All I can recall of this section, aside from the homoerotic subtext, is the two hobbits crossing the mountain range with Gollum in tow before getting caught by a giant spider. Flipping through the rest of the book I see they don't actually encounter the giant spider for at least another four million chapters, so I assume there's going to be a fuck of a lot of singing in the mean time. I'm beginning to wonder why Lord of the Rings needed to be three books, but then I suppose scale is the whole point.

Day 14. I only managed a handful of pages due to a dental appointment impinging upon my customary reading time, but Sam, Frodo and Gollum have made it to somewhere a bit more pastoral, which I don't remember at all from either being fourteen or the more recent movie - although that's probably not too surprising given that I was bored shitless more or less for the duration of both.

Day 15. Now they're hanging around with Faramir, brother of Boromir, for no immediately obvious reason. Possibly the point of this interlude is so as to increase our sympathy for Gollum whom Faramir regards as monstrous; in contrast with Frodo and possibly also Tolkien's view of Gollum as a victim of the terrible power of the ring more than its agent; or it could be for the sake of delivering this line which, if not a flat out condemnation of industrialisation, is arguably concerned with associated aspects of progress.

'We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.'

In unrelated news, I came across this from Roger Ebert's review of Kyle Newman's Fanboys.

A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to.

I'd say this applies, or at least explains some of the continued appeal of Lord of the Rings as something with an inordinately complex and arguably extraneous backstory over which fannish types may work themselves into a lather, just like all those people who learned to speak Klingon; and as with Star Trek and others, this is how it was designed, rather than simply being something tagged on as an afterthought by persons with too much time on their hands.

At least Star Trek is fun.

Day 16. I'm now onto The Return of the King (1955) so the end is in sight, not least because half of the final volume comprises background material, essays and lists which I have no interest in reading. The Two Towers closes with a scrap between Frodo and a giant spider whom I recall not so much from either the movie or the last time I tried to read this thing, as from my friend Carl's startling recollection of a Joy Division gig, reproduced here in full because it's arguably more entertaining than Lord of the Rings:

At the Music Machine they were chugging along through their impressive ska set when Ian Curtis announced a special guest during an instrumental break whilst all the band members were doing a jazz improv piece. Imagine my surprise when the special guest turned out to be celebrity spider Shelob!

She grabbed the microphone stand and roared out Slade's Get Down and Get With It with the band tearing into the song displaying incredible gusto. I swear Stephen Morris' drum kit caught alight from all the heavy pounding, he ended up playing a set of oil drums with lump hammers. By this point Ian Curtis was completely naked and hurling his stools at Shelob, he somehow managed to fit an entire fire extinguisher into his anus, much to the approval of the mainly teddy boy audience. After this they performed the entire Slade catalogue with Shelob wading into the crowd wearing a giant necklace made of television sets.

If I remember correctly the concert ended up later than usual by a month or so due to the airforce bombing us out of the venue. They don't do gigs like that anymore.

Actually, the closing chapters of The Two Towers are fairly readable, conspicuously lacking those lengthy descriptions of battles wherein I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why, as mentioned above; so I don't know what happened there. I assume it was simply all a bit above my reading age when I was fourteen, given that I was more acclimated to the somewhat lighter fare of Terrance Dicks and 2000AD comic, which is embarrassing because there's nothing deep about Lord of the Rings. Mostly it's simply long-winded and self-important, stylistically speaking.

Anyway, as I say Two Towers is approximately readable, and there's a nice little aside in chapter eight where they all take to wondering whether anyone will eventually tell Frodo's story, just as Frodo and pals themselves do tell of those even more ancient sagas which Tolkien invented in much the same spirit as whoever it was who came up with the reason for the Klingons in Patrick Stewart's version of Star Trek being significantly hairier and lumpier than those encountered by William Shatner.

Contrasting with the close of The Two Towers wherein we overhear orcs conversing in the manner of pie-scoffing working class types, The Return of the King opens with a resumption of courtly language as Gandalf and Pippin arrive in Gondor, the realm from which noble Boromir didst sally forth, so we're back to page after page of Marvel Shakespearean old timey talk with lots of things being yonder. It's tempting to interpret this as some sort of class deal with regal types from better homes who've had the benefit of a proper education set in contrast with orc chavs who probably voted for Hitler because they're a bunch of fucking thickies, but the whole world war two analogy still seems a bit thin beyond the general mood of conflict on an epic scale.

By the same token, I've had occasion to wonder at Gollum, the hunched subterranean troll who creams his loincloth over the precious. Specifically I've wondered at his originally being identified with the superficially Semitic sounding name of Sméagol, where other hobbit names mostly sound vaguely faux-Celtic; but if there's even a thing here, it seems most likely that Tolkien may have simply been drawing on existing mythology rooted in old racial stereotypes, because otherwise I'd say you would probably have to dig so deep as to start tunnelling in search of any dubious subtext. Gollum may even be the most interesting character in the book. He's revolting yet with faint glimpses of former redeeming features, and even Gandalf speaks in his defence when someone suggests that Gollum deserves death back in the second chapter of Fellowship.

'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'

So that's nice.

Day 17. Well, I definitely read another fifty or so pages and had things to say about them, but that was this morning and now it seems to have gone, so fuck knows what happened. The chapters I read mostly covered the two lesser hobbits hanging around with kingly types and everyone getting ready for a punch-up with Mordor. I suspect this was the section I found so dry and hard to process with my fourteen-year old attention span that I've remembered it as nothing but descriptions of battles, and I'd lost track of who was fighting who and why. On the other hand, it's nice to know I was actually right about something at the age of fourteen.

Day 18. I couldn't face any more of the behold and yonder last night and switched to the Tintin book, Destination Moon, because I hadn't read it in probably fifty years and didn't realise I actually had a copy. In fact I had the impression that of all the Tintin books I owned as a kid, only two remained, and yet there's a whole stack of them on my shelf neatly filed between Geoff Tibball's Golden Age of Children's Television and issues of To Feet! To Feet! fanzine, and I have no memory of having come by them. They look unread. I presume I must have picked up a job lot on the cheap at some point and forgotten all about it.

Anyway, I came back to Lord of the Rings this morning and we've definitely reached those chapters comprising nothing but descriptions of battles, although this time I at least have a vague idea of who is fighting who; not sure about the why. Reasons why Sauron might desire dominion over all Middle-earth are implied rather than stated, the implication mostly being for he is most dark and such deeds are as unto the doings of those who from the light have turned; speaking of which.

The black rider flung back his hood and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

See, setting the words down in the wrong order doesn't necessarily lend the text any greater sense of authenticity, whatever that may be, any more than it leaves the narrative any spookier or more portentous. Upon no head visible was it set, for example, barely makes sense, and this sort of syntax really gets in the way of one's comprehension of chapters which needed all the help they could get. I'm not sure that writing the words upon no head visible was it set in the year 1955 is really much different to introducing a French character who exclaims zut alors and oh la la every other sentence.

Anyway, as to the actual battles described, it strikes me as slightly odd that someone should have been writing anything of such composition so soon after two world wars of such unprecedented brutality, and yet in the wake of the trenches, death camps, shoeless prisoners frog-marched across the entirety of Poland in the snow, here we have swords clashing and noble browed sons of the north wind whom their chins they do steel forth and doth stand fast against the hordes of Mordor.

Day 19. Mostly scrapping embellished with conversations regarding the same, of which those involving hobbits seem marginally more engaging, as though that's what Tolkien really wanted to write but had committed himself to composing the biggest big thing ever, requiring shitloads of grunting men in helmets sternly vowing this, that and the other. Also, I've just realised that beyond the sort of vague animism one might expect in something involving elves, there's no actual religion described in this book, which seems odd. There's a mention of some evil of which Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary, but that seems to be it. If Tolkien is mimicking the narrative form of ancient texts, this seems an oversight to me. I'm pretty sure I recall Arthurian legend featuring some kind of Christian element, as suggested by all that stuff about the grail, although more quantifiable narratives such as - off the top of my head - the epics of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and pre-Colombian Mexico tend to incorporate supernatural figures - even Gods by some definition - as characters within whatever story is being told; and neither approach is quite the case here. It just strikes me as odd.

Day 20. Couldn't face it last night due to inebriation from tequila ingested so as to dull my anger over Lulu Publishing now requiring book cover files to be uploaded as PDF documents. This morning I find I've made it to book six (or the second half of part three, if you prefer) so we're back with Sam and Frodo, and it's so obvious that this is what Tolkien really wanted to write that it hurts, or at least so it seems to me. Not that the Sam and Frodo chronicles aren't without their sappy tendencies, but I'll take sappy over grunting beardies who talk like Yoda and do face the north wind in their bold metal helms any fucking day. Haven't yet reached the chapter during which Sam is caught parading around in Mr. Frodo's underwear and must be punished, but I'm sure it's coming.

Day 21. The war is at last won, except it all occurs off screen sparing us any of the actual slaughter, which is all very tidy. Sauron has conveniently fled, as have all of the orcs so far as anyone can tell. After however many hundreds of pages it's been, this all comes as something of an anticlimax; and hints dropped during previous chapters about how we were doing quite well but Sauron wasn't leave this feeling somewhat like a rigged match, the point of which - if there is one - being further speechifying about victory, valour, chivalry and nobility from Aragorn and his helmeted pals. This amounting to what I suppose must have been Tolkien's experience of the second world war, real conflict is remote with nothing so messy as to make our desire for happier, leafier times seem self-involved. Gollum is redeemed by having thrown himself into a volcano with the ring, sparing us the burden of thanking him or pretending to be his mate, so that's wrapped up nicely too. Also, Éowyn, a woman who feistily dons a suit of armour and goes to war just like the men and whom I vaguely recall reading about earlier on, now declares that she's into pretty dresses and baking muffins seeing as how all the fighting and grunting are done and dusted, so that's a relief.

Day 22. The hobbits return to the Shire and the slightly cloying, rose-tinted syntax of earlier, but the Shire has been developed by ruffians who speak like villains in Cagney movies, see? Frodo therefore forms something akin to the Countryside Alliance so that they can take their country back, as stated in more or less those terms. Saruman is found to be at the heart of it all and is revealed as an actual Scooby Doo villain with Wormtongue as his loyal Ygor, which highlights one problem of this book, namely that the characters are subservient to the landscape in which they appear, and pseudo-Wagnerian warriors who do raise their swords for to slash and rend them against the terrible canvas of Mordor turn back into something from Enid Blyton in more temperate surroundings.

There was also a hundred pages of related notes and fictional narrative but I couldn't be arsed.

The Lord of the Rings isn't the worst thing I've ever read, but it's massively underwhelming for something routinely described as a classic. It isn't without enjoyable passages, but there's a lot of padding in the form of general mythic huffing and puffing because, as I said, it seems to be about the map more than it is about the story by which the map is described. I wouldn't entirely agree with Mr. Ross's observation of the message at the heart of the book being that it's a complete waste of time doing anything, going anywhere or trying to change, because all we should be doing is living in holes, eating sausages and smoking pipes, but it's certainly something in that direction, and is essentially conservative and insular. As stated, it's been suggested that Lord of the Rings was a metaphor for the second world war, which Tolkien rejected, and which I don't find entirely convincing; but it's absolutely informed by Tolkien's experience of both world wars and the political and social factors which brought them about. Indeed, the parallels are so difficult to miss - right down to Sauron's preference for red and black - as to render Tolkien's protestations at least a little redundant, even if there's not much joy to be had in reading Saruman as Oswald Mosley in a pointy hat; and given Tolkien having served in the trenches, it seems significant that he should have chosen to write about a world of good and evil as easily defined black and white concepts, a world harking back to those unambiguous heroes of myth and legend before Adolf Hitler ruined Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelung for the rest of us.

Tolkien's military career seems to have been patchy. He served as an officer who found his sympathies usually lay with the lower orders more than they did with those of his own background which, I would imagine, informs the world of at least the hobbits. They're good-hearted rustic folk, simple without being stupid, but not massively interested in anything of the outside world. I grew up with these people and Tolkien's apparent view has a taint of the anthropological as he is charmed by individuals I would have habitually crossed the road to avoid back in my own 'shire where, if someone was described as a bit of a character, you could bet your life they were a borderline alcoholic who routinely killed or tortured the local wildlife for the sheer fun of it. I lost count of the tales I heard of fireworks ignited and shoved up the arse of something living, and whilst those untutored wags might be a hoot should one simply be popping into this wonderful little country pub we've discovered just outside of Oxford, growing up with the cunts as your contemporaries was fucking murder.

So the orcs are braying chavs who facilitate the rise of persons such as Hitler, the hobbits are an idealised working class - salt of the earth as Robert Elms would doubtless have it - and the rest are either toffs or, more likely, just Tolkien wishing the world were a simpler, more noble place; which doesn't really justify a thousand or so pages, and particularly not in the expectation of anyone reading the thing. As another one of those things which has taken up weeks of my time, I'm not sure The Lord of the Rings is even as good as Jerusalem - which isn't saying much - and it's nothing like so weird or interesting as The Exegesis. I'd say Epic Pooh is about right.

*: Which I hadn't read at the time of writing so as to avoid potential bias, although I note with amusement that Tolkien's defenders have mostly responded to Moorcock's criticism by suggesting that he simply doesn't understand epic fantasy, foreshadowing Paul Ebbs' more recent defence of Peter Jackson's tiresome movies. The last defence of the barely articulate and fannish is always that you be a hater.