Stanislav Szukalski - Behold!!! The Protong (2019)

 

I vaguely remembered this guy from the first issue of Weirdo about a hundred years ago, which left me with the impression of someone who, if unusually talented, seemed slightly racist in a way I couldn't quite identify; and I didn't understand what the article was doing in Weirdo. Decades later, I stumble across the Netflix documentary and it begins to make sense, sort of…

Szukalski was, so it turns out, Poland's greatest artist and a man whose work was beginning to attract a lot of attention on an international scale; then the Second World War bombed most of his sculptures and associated work out of both existence and public memory, leaving the man somewhat beached in the United States, unable to pick up the thread of his career. The notion that this may have constituted a great loss to twentieth century art is far from hyperbole, as we see from surviving photos. Prime Szukalski seems to represent a unique fusion of nineteenth century symbolism, deco, and with a touch of later Futurism as practised by Fortunato Depero and others - but with a kind of biological elasticity which foreshadows Giger.

Unfortunately, by the time anyone realised, Szukalski's mind had gone somewhere strange, specifically the formulation of what he termed Zermatism - the study of all those bits of human history which science had missed but which were obvious if you knew where to look, or more importantly, how to look. Having been trained as a sculptor, Szukalski knew how to look at examples of primitive or tribal sculpture from all across the globe in ways which eluded members of the archaeological profession, most of whom had been trained to the point of blindness. Thus, were they at a disadvantage, unable to comprehend that which Szukalski saw because he was a genius, as he admits on more than one occasion in this book.

Behold!!! The Protong distills the basics of Zermatism, as set down in the thirty-nine volumes of Szukalski's great work, compiled over three or four decades. Zermatism holds that there really was a global flood as described in the Bible, and that it was caused by the earth inflating, pushing the water up out of the ocean to cover the land. This inflation is part of a natural cycle whereby the sun draws water away from the earth, then replaces it, like breathing in and out but spread across periods of 26,000 years. Humanity came from Easter Island, proof of which can be found in the ancient artefacts of every culture if you know what you're looking for, but also in the names of ancient places, most of which are in Protong, the once universal language. Protong was a simple language, mainly nouns with a few verbs amounting to the sort of things cavemen used to say in the movies - food good, or stranger make sun go away, me afraid, and so on. Luckily Protong was ancestral to modern Polish meaning Szukalsi was well qualified to decode and record this lost tongue; and in doing so he discovered that most place names refer to the flood and those who survived, so it definitely really happened. Those who survived were human beings, and also yeti - their evil, thuggish cousins of such unfortunate genetic proximity as to allow for interbreeding, resulting in Yetinsyn who look sort of like people but are something else entirely. More or less everything bad that has ever happened has been caused by the Yetinsyn. You can identify them by their short arms, piggy eyes, small noses set above a spacious upper lip like Stephen King and John Major, and general gluttony. They tend to seek out positions of authority from which they can wreak the most havoc. Communism was one of their ideas, in case you were wondering how all that got started.

Behold!!! The Protong came about when Glenn Bray and Lena Zwalve were putting together a book of Szukalski's early works, to which the man only agreed on the condition of it being a companion piece to this summary of Zermatism - it arguably being his life's work, and that to which the sculpture was merely a preamble. This is why some people really need editors, or even just a brutally honest pal who will ask what the fuck were you thinking?

It's an undeniably impressive piece of work in terms of how much has gone into it, not least the beautiful illustrations by which our boy was able to underscore or emphasise the features of ancient sculptures to which he felt we should be paying most attention; but, as you may have realised by this point, the whole thing is fucking bananas. It's the same deal as with that pillock, von Däniken - ancient art and even language scrutinised for whichever coincidental and arbitrary resemblance proves whatever stupid point we're trying to make, with evidence to the contrary either omitted or dismissed as a distortion caused by conventional thinking. Szukalski, for one example, claims that no-one knows the meaning of the name of the Mexican state of Jalisco, because - guess what - it's Protong; and it's the same deal with London, and the Mexican Sun God, Tonatiuh - all Protong, you see! Do I actually need to point out that the etymology of these names is mysterious to absolutely no-one, presumably unless you've encountered them only in library books while searching for stuff to force-translate into caveman Polish?

Yet, Behold the Protong!!! must count as a great work at least on the grounds of it involving actual work, which is more than can be said of Erich von Däniken deciding that K'inich Janaab' Pacal is clearly wearing a space suit; and it's difficult to remain unmoved in the face of a lifetime's labour expended on something so patently screwy - a tragedy but for the pleasure it evidently brought Szukalski and the meaning it gave to his existence. In this sense, I'd compare it to the similarly weird belief systems developed by Richard Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others as, if not exactly useful, then not entirely without value on some level. Rarely in art has the journey been so much more vital than the destination.

The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.

Jongor of Lost Land

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

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

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

The Moon Pool

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Underwater Menace

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes that's all you need.

Mu Revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing Stories (February 1946)

Raymond A. Palmer (editor) - Amazing Stories February 1946 (1946)
I found this in a comic book store. It was falling apart, missing the final three pages and back cover - although I don't get the impression they featured anything vital - and flakes of yellowing paper came away each time I read it; but it was three dollars and the cover promising material by both Richard Shaver and Robert Moore Williams made it an essential purchase.

Palmer is credited only as managing editor - Bernard George Davis being listed as the actual editor - but his influence seems overpowering, this influence being expressed as a carnival barker's huckster enthusiasm for scientifiction and the idea that if we are able to imagine it, then one day it will happen - a position I recall having been taken by Bez of Happy Mondays during some television interview wherein he described what he liked about Star Trek. Palmer's editorial accordingly suggests that the contents of the magazine should be read as prediction as much as fiction, giving as an example the notion that readers of Amazing would not have been too surprised by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, having encountered such weaponry in the magazine many years earlier. Palmer, in true pseudoscientific spirit, actually seems to have regarded Einstein as merely a fellow visionary, and suggests that many of his theories were obviously wrong, as demonstrated by tales published in previous issues because if you can imagine faster than light travel, then one day it will happen.

The divide between imagination and reality was clearly an issue with Richard S. Shaver, arguably the star of the magazine at this point. Shaver's I Remember Lemuria had already been rapturously received and Palmer was quite happy to capitalise on its success. The protagonist of the story tells of his being kidnapped by a race of degenerate subterranean beings called the Dero, whereupon he learns how the Dero have influenced human history by use of special rays which cause people to act with evil intent. It's a paranoid fantasy which seems fairly typical of certain types of schizophrenia, and Shaver seems to have related what he believes to have been actual events as fiction, so as not to cause panic as the legend has it.

While Shaver's tales weren't the revelation claimed by Palmer and others in mythology-building articles featured elsewhere in this issue, and nor did they necessarily constitute classic material, neither were they quite the incomprehensible pulp turds recalled by more stringent critics. The worlds and beings described are patently those of a man with mental health issues, and the plot of Invasion of the Micro-Men in this issue is as prone to absent-minded swerves as any of Shaver's fiction, but there's nevertheless something fascinating and compelling here - plus I suppose it could be argued that he foresaw nanotechnology ahead of the curve. This issue transposes the author's usual concerns to outer space with the Dero replaced by their interplanetary equivalent, the Jotun, degenerate inhabitants of abandoned caverns on a myriad of worlds, but tolerated by the utopian Nortan race, who are elevated and therefore almost certainly white. As with the Dero, the Jotun aren't so much evil as simply irresponsible and prone to mischief. Naturally they have a tendency to kidnap Nortan women for their wives, transforming them - so it is primly hinted - into freaks, which I take to mean that they give them comically massive tits by means of special enlargement rays. Even as we read, we can sort of sense Shaver wrestling with thoughts he doubtless regarded as dirty and therefore part of whatever was wrong with his head, itself expressed as the dominant theme of malevolent, invisible influence - whether it's those special rays or tiny men in the bloodstream.

Robert Moore Williams' The Huntress of Akkan is, roughly speaking, Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss but with its team of plucky, hard-boiled adventurers mysteriously transported to another world. It's pleasant enough, and although it hints at some of the strangeness of Williams' later efforts, it lacks their ponderous and peculiar allegorical quality.

The rest of the magazine is competent but about what you would expect of its kind - pulpy and sort of predictable but not actually offensive; and Final Victim by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse isn't anything special. The pseudo-factual articles are more speculative than scientific, pretty much Charles Fort with a few grudging nods towards Einstein and the like; and there's The Bearded White Prophet by L. Taylor Hansen which suggests that Quetzalcoatl was almost certainly Caucasian, which is pure bollocks. If anyone familiar with this idea should still, in 2019, be wondering why it's all bollocks, it's because 1) the native records from which this legend derives were all written half a century after the conquest and represent an after the fact attempt to rationalise it, and b) some indigenous Mexicans actually could grow beards.

So it's underwhelming, but fascinating as an historical document, dating from before science-fiction was really a thing in the same way as it is now, even before the advent of the science-fiction paperback. Amazing Stories inhabited a world in which its genre was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, a few other bits and pieces here and there, and then these generally frowned upon magazines with their lurid covers and arguably more in common with the trashier end of Hollywood than all that fancy book learnin'. Yet, there's worth here, even imagination, and if it amounts to compost in literary terms, then we should keep in mind that things grow very well in compost.

The Face in the Abyss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

Fletcher Hanks
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (2007)
You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation (2009)
I first became aware of Fletcher Hanks as a result of discussion on facebook, leading to online articles and my immediately recognising his style from the Tiger Hart strip in Planet Comics, as distinguished by characters with tiny heads on top of huge muscular bodies. Having discovered that there was more of this stuff to be had, I immediately knew that I needed it, for Hanks' work seemed to be the absolute distillation of everything I'd enjoyed about Planet Comics.

Fletcher Hanks, as Paul Karasik's introduction suggests, was never really an outsider artist despite the mythology. He took to writing and drawing his own comic strips at the very birth of the form in its modern sense, before the conventions of strip fiction were fully established. Additionally, it's worth remembering that the printing process and paper quality of Fantastic, Fight and other titles obliged artists to keep it bold and simple, nothing which would end up looking too scrappy on the page. Hanks' art is unusually stylised, but his flights of fancy are expanded from a powerful sense of realism and a keen eye for the solid form, with only a very occasional lapse of scale to muddy the waters; although admittedly his draughtsmanship is often eclipsed by the sheer weirdness of his work.

Hanks' audience required heroes of specific and direct type, men - and one woman - who have scrapes and adventures and who vanquish the bad guys. For the most part we have variations on Hugo Gernsback's science-hero as developed by E.E. 'Doc' Smith and others, and Fletcher Hanks' cast of characters are variations on this theme. Arguably the greatest is Stardust the Super Wizard, most likely created in response to Action's Superman. Stardust lives out in space, and his initial adventures mostly began with the reportage of some nefarious activity befalling New York revealed on his crime detecting space television. Each story therefore begins with a commute, but I suppose Stardust's living in outer space serves as a measure of how amazing he is more than anything. Stardust generally achieves victory by use of a seemingly endless variety of absurdly specific yet poorly defined rays which shrink, enlarge, render invisible, or otherwise effect an almost immediate resolution to whatever the problem may be, meaning we can get on with the closing pages of just desserts. Stardust comic strips typically spend half of their page count punishing the criminal by cruel and unusual means.

Someone on facebook recently described some noise act as a boy sat alone at the back of the class frantically scribbling scenes of wartime atrocity in the back of his exercise book, Stukas fly low strafing the crowd with bullets, blood everywhere… which is probably as good a description as any of the mood and intensity of Hanks' work. Biology is malleable, disembodied heads fly through the air, faces always seem to be turned away from the reader, fight scenes resemble ballet, and the image of objects and people mysteriously suspended in the sky occurs with surprising frequency; so while there's a touch of Basil Wolverton, it's Basil Wolverton in a landscape described by Giorgio de Chirico.

While Hanks characters tend to inhabit the same basic story, the variation of themes is surprisingly imaginative, and enough so as to demonstrate that this guy knew exactly what he was doing and was exploring the limitations of the form. Where Stardust has his special rays and extended scenes of urban poetic justice, Space Smith's adventures occur beyond the Earth and are much closer in spirit to E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Skylark of Space series. Big Red McLane follows the exploits of a stout-hearted lumberjack defending honest enterprise by punching racketeers and corporate criminals from rival companies without a special ray or mysterious transformation to be seen; and the skull-faced Fantomah mounts a supernatural assault on those evil forces who seek to control the jungle, whatever the hell that even means. Towards the close of Hanks' two year career in comics he had begun to expand here and there - Stardust defends Chicago rather than New York, then has adventures in space; Red McLane leaves the forest behind and travels to San Francisco in search of a childhood sweetheart; and then Fletcher Hanks simply stopped. He is described by his son as an angry, troubled man and a violent alcoholic, so I guess his own itinerant existence finally got the better of him.

This work seems fairly typical of its time on first glance, and a skim through an issue of Planet Comics leaves the definition of Fletcher Hanks as unique seeming less than clear cut; and yet the more of this stuff you read, the stranger and more beautiful it appears - or maybe arresting rather than beautiful. Hanks' work has the random swerves and dreamlike ambience of van Vogt and a few others, but in comic book form and quite clearly aimed at a younger audience. I'm tempted to consider him as something in the tradition of Shaver or Robert Moore Williams but that may be overthinking it a little, and I suspect Fletcher Hanks was driven more by impotent rage than schizophrenic philosophy. More than anything, it's hard not to wonder where Hanks would have gone had he kept at it; but I suppose had he been capable of such, he never would have possessed whatever quality it was that drove him to create works of such twisted majesty in the first place.

Children of the Void

William Dexter Children of the Void (1955)
With Children of the Void, I think I've finally identified a previously unrecognised science-fiction subgenre. I'm tentatively naming it Theosophic science-fiction, in reference to its scrambling towards some image of a cosmos subject to the secretive or otherwise hidden influence of a Godlike figure or figures. Characteristic of the genre - and which arguably excludes Philip K. Dick, although he's clearly related - are novels of occasionally allegorical persuasion utilising science-fiction tropes as support for what otherwise reads like mythology, and making frequent use of telepathy, subterranean realms, idealised or angelic alien visitors, mind control exerted by unknown forces, and other conditions commonly associated with certain forms of schizophrenia. So far I have William Dexter, Richard S. Shaver, and Robert Moore Williams on the list, and George Adamski's accounts of trips aboard flying saucers tick most of the same boxes - keeping in mind here that Shaver similarly claims the events described in his fiction to have actually happened to him. It's been a while since I read Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race but I've a feeling it may also count.

Without getting bogged down in what some other fucker is welcome to write up for Wikipedia if they care that much, I'm not proposing that Theosophic science-fiction should be considered an actual school so much as that it's a distinct type just as Menippean satire is a distinct type, the essence of which can be distilled to A.E. van Vogt rewriting Madam Blavatsky, or thereabouts; so it's arguably cranky, and may count as outsider art in so far as that it's never going to achieve the relative respectability of Asimov or Clarke - although 2001 might have made the list had Arthur thought to include an underground race of mole-people.

I resent the term outsider art, but we're generally talking about novels which may eschew certain literary or grammatic conventions to tell stories with a peculiar dream-like quality not unlike those of the aforementioned van Vogt. It is this quality, often dismissed as a basic inability to tell a coherent tale, which has marginalised the authors under consideration, possibly meaning that I'm the first to attempt to define this thing as an actual literary tradition, and I suggest that it's worth defining as a literary tradition - albeit a vague one - for the sake of discussion. These books have elements in common, not least that they make for very weird reading. I like it very much when a novel surprises me, and Shaver, Dexter, and Williams score very high in this respect.

Anyway, this one came to my attention when someone took the piss out of its admittedly ludicrous cover art on Tumblr, or one of those things - as you will see if you scroll to the foot of the page. It made me laugh but I felt sorry for the book, and a little research revealed it to have formerly been Children of the Void by one William Dexter, rather than Zorgo the Red's Come Be My Friend. Sadly, it seems Dexter's publishers weren't significantly more respectful of his art than whoever mocked up Come Be My Friend. The bat-winged creatures of the planet Varang-Varang are eight rather than hundreds of feet tall, and both front and back cover blurb refer to Earth torn from its orbit and sent hurtling through space. Not only does this not happen in the novel, but it's not even referenced as anything likely, so they were probably thinking of the aforementioned Varang-Varang, upon which our heroes spend some time, and which has enjoyed an unpredictable orbit.

As with World in Eclipse, to which this is the sequel, here we have a fairly straightforward morality tale about how it's good to not blow ourselves up with atomic bombs, in this case expanding the idea to suggest that despite our differences, we're all brothers, that we're all - quite literally - children of the void. This understanding is achieved through a series of scrapes and encounters experienced by Denis Grafton, our narrator, as he travels between worlds in a flying saucer piloted by creatures called the Nagani. They become lost in the tunnels beneath the surface of the near dead world Varang-Varang, then escape to an Earth depopulated by the events of the previous novel - specifically to Crystal Palace and south-east London, which was nice for me seeing as that's my old manor. The Anerley Road even gets a mention.

I would guess that Dexter was inspired by either Wells or Wyndham, as his prose has some of the same qualities, sober or even stately whilst retaining a conversational tone. The story is narrated very much in the style of a travelogue, even incorporating peculiar references to the typewriter our man has on board the Nagani saucer; and as with van Vogt, there's a sense of constant motion combined with a disorientating absence of focus. We're never quite sure where the story is going, or what anyone is trying to achieve, but the pace is such that this never becomes a problem. Children of the Void is one of the weirder things I've read this year, and it came as an immense pleasure after the turgid and surprisingly predictable plod through Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

The Secret People

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

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

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

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

Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight

Robert Moore Williams Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight (1970)
Having discovered that this novel, sold as science-fiction, is actually an autobiographical ramble through Williams' peculiar life, I had to own it at any cost. Luckily the cost was peanuts because no-one remembers or cares who Robert Moore Williams was, which is an enormous shame. I've read three of his novels and they've each been strikingly bizarre, undeniably pulpy, but suggesting the dream imagery of A.E. van Vogt turned towards ponderous allegorical or philosophical ends, like a Gernsbackian update of nineteenth-century Symbolist novels such as A Voyage to Arcturus or Lilith - and yes I know Lindsay's novel dates from 1920 because I've just looked it up. Anyway, it seems obvious that there was a lot more going on here than a guy hacking out tales of rockets and aliens for the sake of making a living.

Williams' story begins with him growing up on a farm in Missouri, inspired by the writing of Abraham Merritt - also a big influence on both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, with whom Williams' writing shares certain conceits - so clearly a name I'm going to have to investigate. I'd say Bob wasn't the full ticket, and his understanding of reality suggests possibly schizophrenic or otherwise psychologically unorthodox tendencies, but I don't know how much use it would be; and certainly there's not much point reading this thing with the opinion of it having been written by a nutcase. Williams experienced, not quite visions, but certainly voices and inexplicable occurrences, and whether or not they were all in his mind probably shouldn't matter.

Williams fixates on love early on, not just by the terms we already acknowledge, but as though it should be considered an ethereal force roughly akin to the animating yolia of Nahua mythology, or - if you must - the force of Star Wars. From then on he dabbles with Hubbard's Dianetics, specifically the notion of contemporary ills deriving from engrams of long forgotten trauma; then takes part in a new age commune in Colorado Springs, a group he refers to as the wild bunch; invents something called the colourscope with which he put on light shows for an audience towards some spiritual purpose; finally ending up dropping acid on a ranch in California.

Checking out this kick that the kids had going, using minimal quantities of LSD, the experimental work being done in nearby Mexico, I discovered that the kids knew exactly what they were doing! LSD opened a channel into this higher love that had been coming to me in other ways!

What the kids had found was love! Perhaps they had also discovered a way around the meaning of hydrogen!

They were doing exactly what I was doing, but doing it differently and better. They were seeking a path into tomorrow. And so was I! Love was not restricted to writers who lived in lonely mountain cabins and who were sometimes up at dawn to talk to weaning colts beside a horse corral. It was in these wonderful kids too. On university campuses and in little coffee houses the talk was of this astonishing love. Sometimes the regents of various universities were annoyed at demonstrations they could not understand, but my strong feeling was, and still is, that these young people with the shining faces were closer to the heart of life and nearer the path to tomorrow than all the regents who ever existed.

The seemingly esoteric reference to hydrogen stems from Williams' horror at the creation and use of the hydrogen bomb, which comes to symbolise the antithesis of the force he identifies as love.

Of course, on many levels it's all bonkers, but I'm sure we've already established as much, and simply being bonkers doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether or not Love is Forever has value as a piece of writing, which I believe it does. Williams takes a sort of shamanic journey through his own existence which, incredibly, is actually fairly coherent, and works because it is seasoned with self deprecation, just enough self-doubt to render it  readable, and the author's insistence that he is himself nothing special in the great scheme of things. As with so many others of his generation, Williams was simply looking for the way forward in human terms, perhaps not quite dreaming of supermen so much as a species which could at least move past the desire to blow itself up; and even with the testimony coming from the very edge of what the rest of us tend to regard as sanity, there are plenty of worthwhile truths in this book because it comes from a place of great honesty.

At the end I found Williams a likable character, a somewhat driven man who believed in his own experiences and wished only to share them with others; and it gives me cause to regret that he isn't better remembered. His work may not have been what you'd call mainstream, and at least two of the four novels I have are amongst the strangest things I've read, but he's not inaccessible, and at heart he was a populist.

Back when I first took to picking up old science-fiction paperbacks with lurid covers, I always hoped I'd discover some long forgotten master of the art. I just didn't imagine it would be anything quite so peculiar.

Robert Moore Williams, June 19th 1907 - May 12th 1977.

Flight from Yesterday

Robert Moore Williams Flight from Yesterday (1963)
This is the third I've read by Robert Moore Williams, and the one which seems to confirm certain ideas I've developed about the man's style and what he was trying to achieve. King of the Fourth Planet and Beachhead Planet both felt somewhat like philosophical allegory filtered through a narrative sensibility not dissimilar to that of A.E. van Vogt, and that this one should play with roughly the same deck of cards suggests that I wasn't simply reading too hard.

That said, Williams feels more conventionally pulpy than Alfred Elton, more pitched at a particular audience. Here we have persons projected forward in time from the last days of an advanced antediluvian city - identified as Atlantis on the cover but not in the actual text - their personalities possessing the present day bodies of a guy who runs a curio shop and who occasionally sells porn on the side, a nightclub bruiser, and a couple of prostitutes - salacious details hinted at in couched terms presumably designed to elude censorious editing, but some way from the usual cast of characters one might expect to encounter in a novel of this general type. These persons find themselves pitched against Keth Ard, our main protagonist - an out of work test pilot apparently for no other reason than as an invocation of something adventurous and futuristic; and Keth Ard is assisted by his psychiatrist.

With personalities switching between bodies and time zones, and with objectives seeming a little nebulous beyond the basic existence of conflicting interests, Flight from Yesterday is confusing and occasionally difficult to follow compared to the other two, neither of which could have been described as straightforward in the first place; and this one is maybe not quite so engagingly bizarre, but it's still pretty fucking weird in places. The narrative seems to be something to do with karma, reincarnation, redemption and so on, at least more so than it's about time travellers from Atlantis; and it's this invocation of philosophical depth which renders it so readable, even if it resembles the gonzo philosophy of a crazy person - like someone sat Richard Shaver down and made him really think about what he'd been saying. I dislike the term outsider art for all sorts of reasons I can't be bothered to go into right now, but Williams' novels probably qualify; which isn't to say that he's a bad writer in any sense, because there's too much conviction in this for it to have been the work of a person without any real clue as to what they're doing; but he seems to have been playing by his own rules, and yes, that is a recommendation.

Beachhead Planet

Robert Moore Williams Beachhead Planet (1970)
To set the scene, tourists arrive at Golden Fleece, Colorado by helicopter. Golden Fleece is an old mining town which has been restored as a heritage experience by the inventor of something called simulated brain substance, but as the latest arrivals show up, a half-naked fugitive emerges from the mine entrance on the nearby hillside. He is pursued by a ten-foot tall being with two heads, one of which faces backwards and which spends most of the time arguing with the other head. A small orifice opens in one of the creature's foreheads dispensing something like a hornet which chases the fugitive before causing him to spontaneously burst into flames. An individual named Valthor undertakes to investigate Golden Fleece following consultation with members of his mysterious staff, a man who tells the future by referring to a deck of cards and a Gypsy woman who consults her crystal ball. Valthor uncovers a conspiracy. The inhabitants of Golden Fleece are green-skinned zombies, their ghastly complexion deriving from a green oil which is able to revive the dead at the expense of a loss of autonomy. Worse still, beneath Golden Fleece the mines have become a labyrinthine underworld of robot miners, two-headed guards, and captive humans, all at the behest of a race of invisible aliens called the Narks.

Beachhead Planet reads not unlike one of A.E. van Vogt's more coherent works, not just in terms of peculiar concepts but also in the means of their delivery - succinctly descriptive sentences laying out one fact after another like cards dealt by a croupier - or even like Valthor's precognitive buddy - with wild flourishes of surrealism and borderline dream imagery forced to obey some kind of narrative logic by the tightly delivered prose; and given the subterranean aspect of the story, it's hard not to be reminded of Richard Shaver's schizophrenic fantasies of a hellish underworld.

As with the last one I read by the same guy, whilst you might not want to call it great literature, Beachhead Planet is far too idiosyncratic and weird to be written off as mere pulp. The aforementioned King of the Fourth Planet explored Suzusilmar, a Martian holy mountain which lent the narrative a suspiciously allegorical subtext, as though Williams might be trying to say something deeper than is obvious at first glance. Similarly, his Shaver-style underworld is explored with a portentous tread which seems almost to present a counterpart to the other book. The message is either ambiguous or best left to the individual reader - whichever you prefer - but I'm sure there's something tied in to resurrection by the green oil, the fate of the stinking corpses for whom resurrection fails, the two-headed monsters, and the seemingly biological robots. It's something to do with freedom or possibly the false promises of utopian ideologies - which I deduce mainly from certain sentiments expressed and the novel having been written at the tail end of the sixties. It's hard to say for sure quite what is going on here, but it's weird and thought provoking.

Also, extra points for cover artwork depicting nothing relating to the actual story.

The Alien Tide

Tom Dongo
The Mysteries of Sedona (1988)
The Alien Tide (1990)
Mysterious Sedona (2000)
Sedona is a small town or possibly a city - albeit not by my own ingrained European definition of the word - somewhere in the upper half of Arizona as you head for the Grand Canyon. Mrs. Pamphlets and myself stayed there in honour of our shared birthday and the occasion of my turning fifty; which was nice because, possibly excepting a couple of places in Mexico, Sedona is host to what is more or less the most beautiful landscape on Earth so far as I can tell. My wife and I very much enjoyed the Grand Canyon, by way of comparison, but as we returned to our hotel in the Village of Oak Creek, we agreed that we both preferred Sedona. The Grand Canyon is off the scale spectacular, but is somehow so spectacular that you can't always tell what you're looking at. Human eyes are not accustomed to viewing that much earth at that angle or at such distance, so in some respects it's almost like being in space. Sedona is nestled within the same general kind of geology but on a smaller, more human scale, semi-desert and layered red rocks sculpted by several million years worth of wind in comparison to which the Canyon seems overstated, the geological equivalent of the worst kind of progressive rock concept albums of the seventies. Arriving in Sedona is like walking into some epic Biblical painting of the nineteenth century, or maybe one of Albert Bierstadt's sublime landscapes.

I have a pet theory that we are each of us a product of landscape, at least by the logic that anyone growing up near the sea will tend to have different views concerning boats to those who know only dry land - this formulated whilst wandering around Mexico and realising just how much sense Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and all of their theological pals seem to make in context of the environment. Land, and particularly mountainous or otherwise spectacular land, provides an ambient noise of forces greater than can be immediately understood in everyday terms and so, I dare say, will tend to inspire its people towards certain metaphysical modes of thought; or if you prefer - if your mouth falls open with an exclamation of holy shit every time you step outside the front door and set eyes upon your own little bit of world, chance is that your daily thoughts will stray to provinces other than those of insurance policies and which brand of washing powder represents best value for money. So, having spent four days in Sedona - which really is more astonishingly beautiful than I could hope to describe in case I hadn't quite made that clear - I can see why the town has a sizeable New Age community. Ordinarily I might be sharpening the knives at this point of the paragraph, but there really is something special about Sedona, and so special that I'm not going to begrudge anyone a few healing crystals or faintly suspect claims made regarding my aura. If it works and hurts no-one, then fine.

Actually the thing that pisses me off about New Age thought isn't so much seemingly wacky beliefs as the pick and mix appropriation of whichever indigenous culture has something which might go well next to the Navajo rug tastefully hung from the wall next to the telly; and appropriation without really showing that much respect for the source, which means you end up with crap like Aztec Horoscopes borrowing the symbols, changing their meanings to something a bit less aggressive, and pinning everything to an entirely unrelated set of spiritual post-it notes. At worst, New Age thought can be comforting slogans passed off as philosophy without either the depth of an actual philosophy or any of the work one might ordinarily be required to do in order to get your head wrapped around the thing. On the other hand, it's probably worth remembering that no-one was ever beheaded in the name of New Age thought - at least not so far as I am aware - so one should probably try to maintain some sense of perspective here.

Anyway, there I was in the Worm, an excellent Oak Creek book store with its own friendly hound numbered amongst the staff. I picked up The Alien Tide, indulged in some smirking, and then returned it to the shelf. Later in the day I realised I just had to go back and buy the thing no matter how ludicrous it might seem. I read a few chapters in the hotel that evening and then returned to the Worm the next day and bought the other two Tom Dongo titles they were carrying.

My initial fascination had been founded on an impression of The Alien Tide as something equivalent to outsider art, the self-published testimony of a local man who sees flying saucers, amongst other things - although this is an admittedly cynical description of that which drew me, and I tend to dislike the term outsider art, believing that the validity of individual expression depends on the work itself rather than either the approval or financial backing of persons other than the creator; and whilst I don't necessarily believe in flying saucers and the like, neither do I actively disbelieve, and I find the subject interesting as contemporary folk mythology at the very least - a roughly coherent understanding of the world which appears self-organising and as such owes nothing to mainstream or consciously directed culture - or to consensus reality, it could be argued.

Tom Dongo covers certain aspects of this subject with which I might ordinarily have pronounced reservations. He tends to the view that psychic phenomena, channelling, extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitors and the rest are probably part of the same thing. Of course, one might suggest that each is simply a variation on delusion, imagination, or even bare-faced fibs, which is great except that it doesn't really take us anywhere useful and can be kind of insulting. For example, the science-fiction of Richard S. Shaver - supposedly based on events which he claimed happened to him - features ancestral voices, thought projection, underground alien civilisations controlling surface dwellers and mysterious forces operating behind the scenes - all equating to manias associated with certain forms of paranoid schizophrenia, specifically variants in which the two sides of the brain fail to properly communicate with each other, resulting in that which is perceived or conceived in one part of the mind being understood as something occurring externally to the individual in another part. Whilst Tom Dongo potentially ticks a couple of these boxes, I would suggest his writings and observations contain too much to contradict such a refutation for that refutation to be worth anything. Much of what Dongo describes of his own encounters and those of others read as direct experience, by which I mean that whether or not it really was a flying saucer from another world - for one obvious example - it would seem rash to deny that something out of the ordinary was experienced, not least because many of these accounts involve more than one individual experiencing the same thing. The possibility that anyone could just be telling stories is, I would suggest, made similarly ambiguous by the nature of the stories, many of which are just too plain weird. If you were going to make something up, you would probably try to come up with something more consistent, more convincing, more digestible in terms of established UFO lore. Additionally, whilst one may always invoke rational explanations, when a phenomenon can only be rationalised by an improbable cat's cradle of chance and circumstance above a certain baroque level of complexity, it might simply be more useful to admit that something weird happened for the sake of argument, then work ahead from that point. This is roughly what Tom Dongo does, his purpose being discussion rather than proving anything which characteristically eludes examination.

Of course this still leaves a few subjects with which I have some difficulty, notably that of channelling as represented by the testimony of one Erika Porter in The Alien Tide. Unfortunately it reads to me very much as a rambling daydream, and as such seems out of whack with the rest of the book; although on the other hand, I suppose if one is going to investigate this kind of phenomena, it logically can't be just the neat and tidy things which won't offend the sensibilities of some English bloke living in San Antonio; and by the time we get to Mysterious Sedona, Dongo himself expresses certain misgivings about proposals made in the earlier books, certain aspects of channelling significantly amongst them. This is one aspect of why I found these three volumes so compelling, specifically the attitude of the investigation as much as that which is investigated.

There's some seriously far out stuff here - saucers, alien animals, rock spirits, black helicopters, underground bases and all manner of oddities which seem particularly consistent with the geological territory, at least to me; and the author is only interested in making sense of his bizarre world, even if he never quite gets there. He writes openly, honestly with infectious enthusiasm, a conversational tone and none of the crankiness which defeats much paranormal literature; and by Mysterious Sedona it has become clear that he no longer even really cares about whether we, his readers, believe him or not. He's doing this for himself, and similarly we are spared any of those droning overly defensive testimonials about what science may be scared to admit, the things they don't want us to know and so on.

Tom Dongo weaves a genuinely weird, fascinating, and endlessly puzzling account of his experiences regardless of whether we're on his side. There is a generous spirit informing these books, and one of such conviction that it disarmed even my own customary tendency to sneer. This man deserves our support and encouragement.