Teen flowchart

Three teen fantasy heroines, one scenario

Review: Subversive

"Subversive" by Mack Reynolds (1962)

The Free Enterprise company is offering a new business model by completely eliminating the middle man and providing goods directly to the consumer, but the men tasked with suppressing this sort of thing are watching.

Whatever his merits as a writer, this is a short story where Mack Reynolds Marxist views completely overwhelm his fiction.  Despite its meagre sci fi trappings, this is really just a sugar coated lecture on the long discredited Marxist theory of added value.  That is, the idea that most of the price we pay for goods is nothing but pointless costs added on to the "real" value by an army of middle men, such as advertisers, shippers, packagers and so on.  It would require a dry lesson in basic economics about how the "real" value of a thing is a question of supply and demand and that most middlemen do add value to their goods–if for no other reason than that without them, for example, you'd have farmers with barns filled with rotting produce while families starved to death.   But this is a review, not Econ 101, so we'll let that pass.  Needless to say, the lecture is a dry and often misleading and the procedural plot that it's wrapped in proceeds to a twist ending that was laughable even during the Cold War. 

Still, it would be interesting to find out what Reynolds would have made of ecommerce.  Probably result in a paradigm shift without a clutch.

Review: The Colour Out of Space

The Colour Out of Space by H P Lovecraft

A meteorite lands in the Gardner farm outside of Arkham, Massachusetts, but this is no stony or iron/nickel visitor from the stars.  This one is soft like putty, is shrinking by the hour and gives off a colour that is impossible to describe in earthly terms.  Shortly after being examined by scientists from nearby Arkham University, the meteorite dwindles to nothing and over the coming months strange things start happening on the farm as plants and animals start to mutate, the Gardner family become more sickly and everything takes on the strange, glowing colours of the thing from space.  It soon becomes apparent that what is happening isn't a simple poisoning or radiation, but that something has infested the farm and is living in the well.

One of Lovecraft's early classics, "The Colour Out of Space" is his early success at conveying the "Other" to the reader.  It also sets the tone for his work at pushing weird fiction in a direction that is spine-tingling, nightmarish and other-worldly, yet at the same time completely materialistic.  By definition, this story could certainly be called science fiction, yet by description it is anything but.  The growing sense of dread, the atmosphere of helpless doom and the realisation that the only hope lies in flight and willful forgetfulness is the antithesis of the more optimistic approach of sci fi, which is to exorcise the devil by naming him.  Here, he remains nameless and worse than malevolent, he is indifferent.

Review: The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (1951)

Summarising this one is easy:  It's a collection of Bradbury short stories that have no connection whatsoever to one another wrapped in a thin framing device that Bradbury himself forgets about a quarter into the book.

The eighteen stories here a mixed lot.  The horror stories, such as "The Veldt" and "Zero Hour" work mildly well while the sci fi stuff, such as "Kaleidoscope" and "Rocket Man" are unbelievably sentimental and twee.  And some seem just plain pointless.  Bradbury contends that he doesn't write science fiction, which is true.  He has zero interest in science or technology.  He doesn't even put enough effort into it to create an air of verisimilitude.  Instead, he uses the vocabulary largely for effect.  And in more than one story, there isn't any science fiction element at all.

In the end, this is typical Bradbury; sentimental, floridly written, deeply distrustful of technology, filled with snobbish disregard for the middlebrow and middle class, yet close enough to mainstream fiction to find a niche in the more upmarket magazines of the day.  It's also a read that's about as satisfying as making a meal out of orchids.

Review: The Wilt Alternative

The Wilt Alternative by Tom Sharpe (1979)

Henry Wilt's life never seems to go quite right.  Even though he's now head of liberal studies at his college, it gives him even more headaches than when he was a teacher because now he not only has to deal with crude students, but raving revolutionary instructors as well.  His home life isn't much better.  At his wife Eva's insistence, they now life in a great pile of a house where Eva can give full vent to her current enthusiasm for alternative living while their quadruplet daughters only become more horrifying as they grow older.  

Worst of all, Eva has rented out the attic flat to a German woman who Wilt moons after, regretting that he'd laid eyes on her twenty years too late.  No, actually, the worst is that the woman is a wanted terrorist and Wilt's home is about to become ground zero when the authorities try to arrest her.  Unfortunately for the terrorists and the authorities, neither has reckoned on what will ensue when the Wilt family is caught in the crossfire.

Tom Sharpe's strategy for his second book in his Wilt series is to amp up the farce to the nth degree.  It seems bad enough when Wilt has an alarming encounter with a rose bush, but that turns out to be only the prelude to a much larger symphony of madness.  Farce is next to impossible to do justice to in a review and the only way to appreciate Sharpe's humour is to read it, but one thing you can say is that he knows how to handle the beats of his plot.  Time and again when things are at their peak you expect him to pull off his trick and take his bow.  Instead, Sharpe keeps heading the ball into the air again and again until you wonder how much more insane things can possibly get.

But Sharpe is a merciful writer as well.  This time around, poor Inspector Flint, who was driven to distraction in  Wilt has the satisfaction of warning all and sundry about what is going to happen when Henry Wilt is involved and then sitting back and seeing himself proven right.

Review: Deadly City

Deadly City by Paul W Fairman AKA Ivar Jorgenson  (1953)

A man awakens two days after a brutal mugging only to discover that the whole of Chicago is devoid of human life.  Finding three other survivors, they learn that the city has been evacuated against the advance of alien invasion force.

This short story formed the basis of the science fiction film Target Earth and the plot is nearly identical.  If anything, the screenplay by Arch Obler managed to smooth out some of the faults.  This is one of those "frank" and "adult" stories that sci writers would try on during the '50s and like most of them, it's a bit embarrassing with its hooker, hairy ape, timid spinster and seedy hero.  Not surprisingly, there's lots of frank, adult drinking; frank, adult talk; frank, adult brawling and frank, adult shouting of "sex maniac" for good measure.  In other words, it tries too hard at a plot that the premise just can't support.

The greater problem is that Fairman fails on a fundamental level.  A short story is essentially a gag.  There has to be a twist or a revelation or a pay off that makes the story work.  Here, the pay off is a damp squib that is nothing more than a worn out deus ex machina that even H G Wells used out of desperation.

Hiatus

Going on hiatus. Returning on 10 April.

The Deadline

I've got two deadlines due today,  so posting will be a bit spotty through tomorrow.

Interview: Anne Rice

Tales of H P Lovecraft

Cover: Science Fiction: What It's All About

H P Lovecraft examined

The BBC and horror author Ramsey Campbell look at the life and influence of H P Lovecraft.

Ray Bradbury

Review: The Wrong Box

The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1889)

When we think of Robert Louis Stevenson, we generally conjure up images out of Treasure Island or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but we usually don't associate him with Victorian comic novels.  Yet The Wrong Box, which one of several novels he wrote in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is just such an example.  Filled with thoroughly silly characters, asides to the reader, complaints against the publisher being stingy about including maps and barrow loads of word play, it chronicles the chain of events centred around the last two surviving members of a tontine.  That is, an investment set up in the name of a group of young boys decades ago with the profits going to the last surviving boy.

Perhaps "boy" isn't the right word, because they last two brothers are in their mid seventies.  At any rate, a mix up in identities in a rail accident lead to the heirs of one brother thinking that he's died in the wreck when, in reality, he's merely taken the opportunity to escape from the smothering care of his relations.  Hoping to keep in the running for the tontine, the two cousins who accompanied their supposedly dead uncle on the train pack up what they think is his body and ship it to themselves in hope of keeping their uncle literally on ice until his brother dies.  Unfortunately, there's a mix up in the packing labels and the wrong box goes to the wrong address.  Now the cousins are in possessions of a giant marble statue and an artist has a dead body.  How is one party to recover it before the second party fobs it off on a third party?  And what will the third party do with the body?  And what about the escaped uncle?

The Wrong Box is definitely a funny read.  Rudyard Kipling pronounced it a real thigh-slapper, though not in those words.  His characters are often very odd from the uncle who is a terrifying bore to a very unartistic artist and the book's voice has the clever, conversational snap of Jerome or Wodehouse.   It's meringue, but one can't fault meringue for what it is.

The only fly in the ointment is that Stevenson and Osbourne missed the opportunity to crank this funny tale into full-on farce by making it more relentlessly logical.  Each of the instances follow on very nicely fromthe previous, but there isn't any real tangling of the skeins and we never worry about how anyone is going to get themselves out of the snarl.  Worse, the resolutions come sequentially rather than in fast order, so when the final plot point falls, it has a feeling of anti-climax.

Once a rarity known only to the haunters of the more obscure secondhand book shops, The Wrong Box is now easily available on line to anyone who wishes to just follow the link at the top of this review.