Book Review: Inseminoid

Book Review: 'Inseminoid' by Larry Miller

1 / 5 Stars

In the aftermath of the success of the 20^th Century Fox film ‘Alien’ in the Summer of 1979, schlock producers released a stream of low-budget imitations: ‘Alien Contamination’ (1980) ; ‘Inseminoid’ (aka ‘Horror Planet’) (1981);  ‘Parasite’ (1982); and ‘Xtro’ (1982).

This novelization of 'Inseminoid' (158 pp) was released in April, 1981 by UK publisher New English Library.

Team Nova is an archeology expedition housed in an installation on a remote planet. In the course of excavating some ancient ruins, the team discovers a burial crypt containing a deceased alien creature, preserved in a sealed, coffin-like chamber.

When the alien is returned to the laboratory, it gradually comes back to life, to the astonishment of the crew. However, their carelessness about securing the alien proves their undoing, as the creature succeeds in escaping, and rapes crewmember Sandy.

The hapless Sandy rapidly devolves into a pregnant, homicidal quasi-alien, endangering the lives of the rest of the crew. Can the surviving members of Team Nova kill Sandy…or will she succeed in giving birth to the alien offspring ?

I never saw more than brief snatches of trailers of ‘Inseminoid’ when it was released back in the early 80s. Needless to say, the segments I did see confirmed the film’s low-budget, schlocky underpinnings. The film did have a strong cast of veteran British actors, including Stephanie Beacham (‘Dynasty’, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’), Victoria Tennant (‘Flowers in the Attic’), and Judy Geeson (‘Star Trek Voyager’).

The novelization differs from the film in terms of selected scenes and events (i.e., the fate of Sandy). But not unsurprisingly, the novelization really fails to improve on the original script, in terms of making a dud narrative into something worthwhile. Some of the goofy contrivances that take place in ‘Inseminoid’ exist for no other reason than to provide the film with an opportunity to display disemboweled corpses, a la Alien.

What little suspense that exists in the narrative comes about mainly because the crewmembers of Team Nova are abysmally stupid and clumsy. In the end, I wound up rooting for the monster, if only because so many of the horny, dim-witted crew-members deserved to die.

In summary, even the most dedicated fans of Bad Films may want to pass on the novel or DVD of 'Inseminoid'.

The Canal by Corben

'The Canal' by Richard Corben 
based on the poem by H. P. Lovecraft
originally published in H. P. Lovecraft's Haunt of Horror (Marvel / Max) issue #2, September 2008
scanned from the graphic novel compilation (2009)

The Age of Darkness by Caza

'The Age of Darkness' by Caza

Caza is the pseudonym used by the French artist Philippe Cazaumayou (b. 1941).

Caza was a regular contributor to the magazine Metal Hurlant, which began publishing in France in December 1974.

In the mid-70s Leonard Mogel, the owner and publisher of The National Lampoon magazine in the US, was visiting France and saw a copy of Metal Hurlant. Impressed, he obtained the licensing rights to produce an American version of the magazine. Heavy Metal debuted in April, 1977. 

It frequently incorporated translated versions of Metal Hurlant stories, and during the late 70s and early 80s, those of Caza were present in almost every monthly issue of Heavy Metal.

HM's use of higher-resolution printing plates, and ‘slick’ paper stock, well served the crisp colors and highly detailed line work of Caza’s black-and-white, and color, stories.

Accomplished as a draftsman, Caza also displayed considerable skill as a writer, particularly within the confines of the 4 - 10 page story, the lengths he used for most of his contributions. While most of his Metal stories relied on offbeat, quirky humor, when he chose to explore the horror and action genres, his work continued to be of consistent quality.

The Heavy Metal editorial staff made much of the contributions of Moebius (the late Jean Giraud) but in my opinion, Caza’s work was equal to, if not oftentimes superior to, the graphic work of Moebius.

Sadly, a number of Caza’s most impressive Metal Hurlant stories never made it into the pages of Heavy Metal, and an English-language compilation of Caza’s Metal Hurlant / Heavy Metal work has yet to appear. The best effort to date remains 1987's trade paperback Escape from Suburbia, which compiled 12 comics, most of which appeared in Heavy Metal.

 

As well, ebooks of some of Caza's work are available at his online store.

Caza fans do have at their disposal ‘The Age of Darkness’, published in 1998, in English, in full-color. 
 
'The Age of Darkness' doesn’t provide much information on the origin of the comics presented in this volume, but judging by the artist’s signatures, they were produced during the interval from 1980 to 1997. Some (all ? ) of them appeared in Heavy Metal magazine in the 70s and 80s.

The 14 stories in ‘Age’ are all loosely related, and can be read as standalone entries. Most revolve around the sometimes violent interactions between the mutants or free-spirits who roam the wastelands, and a race of humanoids called ‘Oms’, who resemble the ‘Weebles’ children’s toys from the 1970s (‘Weebles Wobble, But They Don’t Fall Down’).

The Oms represent a regimented, sterile, mechanized society that retreats from the  dangerous, but also more vibrant, natural world outside their gates. They are depicted with some degree of pathos.

Caza’s artwork is stunning in its detail and use of color, and is ably reproduced in this book. Although each entry rarely is longer than 5 - 6 pages, the plots are well-composed and display quirky humor, horror, and pathos.

Readers who appreciate quality graphic art, and a European sensibility to the sf genre, will want to get a copy of ‘The Age of Darkness’. 

[ I was able to purchase 'The Age of Darkness' from the Heavy Metal online store, where it was available for $12.95, in Fall 2012. As of October 2013, there still are copies in stock at the Heavy Metal online store. There are copies available at amazon, but for exorbitant prices.]

Here is 'Nighttime' (1980) from 'The Age of Darkness'. A neat, nasty little horror tale.....

Book Review: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series X

Book Review: 'The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series X' edited by Karl Edward Wagner

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X’ is DAW Book No. 493 (240 pp) and was published in August, 1982. The striking cover artwork is by Michael Whelan.

All of the stories in this volume were first published in 1980 or 1981, in 'slick' magazines or small press anthologies.

In his Introduction, editor Wagner provides an overview of the genre in 1981, covering both new and failing print outlets for horror fiction. Wagner also notes that, with volume X, The Year’s Best Horror Stories series has achieved the ten-year mark, with the first volume being ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: No. 1’, DAW Books No. 13, released in the US in 1971.

Wagner had an unfortunate affinity for the work of the grossly over-rated Ramsey Campbell, not only foisting two Campbell stories on readers of Series X, but also doing so for other DAW volumes, such as Series XVII.

In this volume, we are given ‘Through the Walls’, which has something to do – deep within its remarkably bad prose – with a suburban husband undergoing a nervous breakdown. Campbell actually uses the sentence: The hinges of the gate shrieked jaggedly; Pears felt as if the sound were being dragged through his ears. The entire story is crammed with these metaphors, all of them straight out of a 'how not to write fiction' class.

Campbell’s other contribution, ‘The Trick’, deals with Halloween in the UK, and the neighborhood bag lady, who may be a witch. This tale is more accessible than ‘Through the Walls’ but still suffers from such clotted, figurative prose that wading through it was tedious.

The other entries in ‘Series X’ are of varying quality. ‘Touring’, By Dozois, Dann, and Swanwick, meshes rock and roll with ghosts. ‘Homecoming’, by Howard Goldsmith, is an embarrassingly bad haunted-house tale.

There are two entries in the classic English Ghost Story mode. ‘Wyntours’, by David G. Rowlands, and ‘Old Hobby Horse’, by A. F. Kidd, adhere to this genre without adding anything really new or novel.

‘Firstborn’, by David Campton, features a remote estate, an eccentric uncle, and a strange greenhouse; there is a Roald Dahl-ish quality to this story that makes it one of the better ones in the anthology.

The obligatory Charles L. Grant story, ‘Every Time You Say I Love You’, is actually one of his better stories, featuring an ending that, unlike so many of his other short stories, delivers a neat payoff.

The mandatory Dennis Etchison entry, ‘The Dark Country’ has nothing to do with horror, being more of a psychological drama involving dissipated American tourists loose in Acapulco. Even as a psychological drama it is over-written and plodding.

‘Luna’, by G. W. Perriwils, features an astronaut troubled by unusual nightmares. ’Mind’, by Les Freeman, deals with a day-tripper to the English town of Whitby; the train service offers something out of the ordinary.

The magazine Running Times was the source for David Clayton Carrad’s ‘Competition’, about a jogger who takes a turn down a forbidding causeway. It’s another of the better tales in the collection.

‘On 202’, by Jeff Hecht, centers on a late-night drive through spooky New England countryside.

M. John Harrison’s ‘Egnaro’ is a tale about a middle-aged bookshop owner whose life is afflicted with entropy. He seeks salvation in the existence of the eponymous mythical country. While well-written, 'Egnaro' is devoid of any horror content, and its inclusion either a sign of how slim the pickings were, or Wagner’s limited capabilities as an anthology editor.

The final entry, Harlan Ellison’s ‘Broken Glass’, deals with telepathy gone bad. It’s rather graphic sexual content is something of a surprise to encounter in a ‘Year’s Best’ anthology, and indicates that Wagner was willing to embrace this aspect of horror fiction, even as he deliberately avoided entertaining any submissions with graphic violence.

The verdict ? ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X’ has a couple of worthwhile entries, but the rest are mediocre. It’s a pretty clear picture of the genre as it stood in the early 80s, a genre experiencing increasing commercial success, primarily due to the novels of Stephen King, but also a genre that, in the main, was content to recycle the same old tropes and plot devices.

Although in the early 80s James Herbert and Shaun Hutson were bravely promoting fiction with genuine horror content, the advent of Clive Barker and ‘The Books of Blood’, and the much-needed changes essential to the emancipation of the genre, were still three years in the future.

Survivor or Savior

'Survivor or Savior !'
by Doug Moench and Gonzalo Mayo
from Creepy No. 62 (May, 1974)

 

Great artwork from Gonzalo Mayo in this sf comic from Creepy #62 (May 1974). (Scanned from the Creepy Archives,  volume13, Dark Horse / New Comic Co., June 2012)

 

Book Review: Hothouse

Book Review: 'Hothouse' by Brian Aldiss

3 / 5 Stars

‘Hot House’ was first published as a series of five novelettes in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1961, with the fix-up novel released in the UK in 1962. This Sphere paperback (206 pp) was released in 1971. The cover artwork is by Eddie Jones.

(Abridged versions of ‘Hothouse’, retitled ‘The Long Afternoon of Earth’, were released in the US).

The story is set millions of years into Earth’s future, when the Sun has enlarged (en route to going nova). The planet has stopped rotating, which means that one side is perpetually exposed to the Sun, and has acquired the characteristics of the novel’s title. The other half of the Earth is in perpetual darkness and cold and supports little, if any, life.

On the hothouse side of the Earth, plant life has assumed ecological supremacy; indeed, a single enormous banyan tree occupies most of the terrestrial acreage of the hemisphere. All animal life has long since been extinguished by the increased solar radiation, but mankind lingers on – in the form of 2-feet tall, tarsier-like creatures who survive in the upper branches of the banyan. Life for these people is a constant battle with giant insects and a vicious array of carnivorous plants.

As the novel opens, the reader is introduced to a band of humans, led by the elderly Lily-yo, and featuring the main character, a man-child named Gren. A vividly described series of battles against the relentless plant life results in Gren leaving the tribe, cast into the unknown regions of the forest, filled with creatures even stranger than those occupying the teeming boughs.

As the novel unfolds, Gren finds unlikely allies in his journey across the landscape of this ‘hothouse’. But Gren doesn’t realize that the planet upon which he wanders is itself destined for extinction, for the Sun is beginning to swell even larger…..and soon the plants and animals on the surface of the Earth will have to confront the end of all life..........

For a novel first written in 1962 (and, of course, well before author Aldiss became increasingly infatuated with the New Wave movement and its literary contrivances) ‘Hothouse’ has a surprisingly modern prose style: clean, direct, and for the most part devoid of figurative passages. 

The ecology of this far-future Earth is well-conceived, and features some of more interesting monsters depicted in sf. The middle stretches of the narrative do suffer from some loss of momentum, a plain consequence of ‘Hothouse’ s genesis as a fix-up.

But overall, Hothouse stands as one of the better novels the genre produced in the early 60s, and one of its more imaginative treatments of ecology.

Spaceship size chart

Spaceship Size Chart
by Dirk Loechel
link from The Verge

Truly a sci-fi fan labor of love, a massive chart comparing the dimensions of an amazing number of ships from books, film, comics, and video and tabletop games.

There are too many entries from 'Warhammer' cluttering up the chart for my taste, but with some careful searching you're sure to find some vessels that you recognize....

Born of Ancient Wisdom

'Born of Ancient Wisdom' by Bob Morello (story and art) and Budd Lewis
 from Eerie No. 121 (June 1981)

One of the more entertaining stories to appear in Eerie in the early 80s was a three-part serial titled 'Born of Ancient Wisdom', with story and art by Bob Morello (Warren misspelled his surname), and additional story input from Budd Lewis. Episode 1 debuted in Eerie 121, with episodes two and three appearing in Eerie #123 ('In Sight of Heaven, In Reach of Hell', August 1981) and #124  'God of Light', (September 1981).

The series had a unique artistic style, one that probably represented the closest approach of any Warren magazine feature to the Heavy Metal aesthetic that was dominating the comic genre at the time.

I'll be providing the second and third installments of 'Born of Ancient Wisdom' in future posts here at the PorPor Books Blog.

Max Headroom by Bryan Talbot

'Max Headroom' by Bryan Talbot
unpublished magazine cover, 1980s
from the book The Art of Bryan Talbot, NBM, 2007

Book Review: Nowhere on Earth

Book Review: 'Nowhere On Earth' by Michael Elder

2 / 5 Stars

'Nowhere On Earth' was first published in 1972 in the UK by Robert Hale; this mass-market paperback edition was published in the USA by Pinnacle Books in June, 1973. The cover artist is not identified.

The novel is set in the UK in the year 2173. The population stands at 450 million, 5,000 people per square mile, and it's growing. Most of the open land in the British Isles has been paved over to contain high-rise communal apartment, or 'comapt', buildings, which can accommodate the teeming masses only through the use of revolving periods of 8-hour habitation (while one set of lodgers are at work, another set sleeps; when the latter wakes and goes off to work, the other occupants come home for their sleep period).

To keep social unrest from crippling this precarious system, the ruling authorities utilize 'Thought Police', a force comprised entirely of telepaths. The Thought Police constantly hover over the pedways of the city in their air-cars, scanning the minds of the populace, and directing police to apprehend those citizens harboring disruptive thoughts.

When Roger Barclay accompanies his pregnant wife to the hospital, he is filled with anticipation over the forthcoming birth of his daughter. However, Barclay receives crushing news from the doctor attending the birth: due to unforseen complications, both mother and child are dead. Barclay is allowed a brief moment alone with their corpses before they are consigned to the crematorium.

Devastated, Barclay returns to his comapt, there to lie in a stupor. His reverie is interrupted by a vidphone call from none other than his late wife !

Barclay soon finds himself caught up in the sinister machinations of the government and its efforts to control the population. But if he is to have any hope of rescuing his wife, first he will have to discover the truth behind the rumors of a resistance movement, and its charismatic leader, Cornelius Gunn.....

'Nowhere On Earth' is a middling sf novel. Author Elder is a competent writer, and the narrative moves at a good pace.The premise of a dramatically overcrowded England would seem to be a good setting for a sf novel published in the heyday of the Population Crisis. 

But I failed to find the novel all that engaging. The plot is more of a backdrop on which the author can tackle the moral and philosophical issues of government surveillance of the thoughts and desires of the inhabitants of his created world, rather than a novel analysis of the way an overpopulated UK might be managed. The book's ending veers into a 'cosmic' solution to things that struck me as contrived.

Unless you're determined to read every sf novel from the early 70s that deals with overpopulation, 'Nowhere On Earth' can be passed by.