Book Review: Solution Three

Book Review: 'Solution Three' by Naomi Mitchison

 1 / 5 Stars

‘Solution Three’ (Warner paperbacks, 1975, 142 pp., cover art by Vincent di Fate) was one of a number of novels and short stories produced by Mitchison during the late 60s and 70s, her novel ‘Memoirs of A Spacewoman’ perhaps being the best-known of these.

‘Solution Three’ is, unfortunately, a chore to read. The author uses an oblique prose style, inserts too many unhelpful euphemisms (food riots are labeled ‘The Aggressions’),  and has too many sentences displaying awkward syntax. It’s unclear if this is an affectation designed to give the book a ‘futuristic’ tenor, or just.......poor writing.  

The story is set in the near future, after overpopulation has caused the collapse of society. In North America and Western Europe civilization has reconstituted itself within a number of crowded, but technologically advanced, mega-cities, with most of the territory around these city-states devoted to food production. These city-states are governed by cabals of technocrats, who have implemented the ‘third solution’ of the book’s title: conditioning people to embrace same-sex relationships, and thus limit procreation. 

Breeding is limited to the production of clones, derived from the germplasm of a mythical ‘He’ and ‘She’, Adam-and-Eve figures from the pre-collapse period. Motherhood essentially consists of serving as surrogates for implanted zygotes; at age nine or ten, the progeny of these pregnancies are taken off for ‘strengthening’, a closely managed program of schooling and psychological testing designed to make the adult clones a super-race of problem solvers. This approach to replenishing the population represents Solution Four, in the jargon of the technocrats.

There are several threads to the narrative, the main one involving a bi-racial couple, Miryam and Carlo, who have refused to adopt homosex and instead live as ‘deviants’, i.e., a heterosexual couple who reproduce the old-fashioned way. The ruling Council, handicapped in large part by the desire to be politically correct in all aspects of social policy, tolerates their deviancy, but makes clear that any bestowing of economic and professional perks will be limited. When the vast monocultures of cereals that feed the megacities start to show signs of infection with plant pathogens, Miryam and Carlo must investigate the causes of the outbreaks; their research may have unexpected implications for the Council, and indeed the entirety of post-collapse civilization.

‘Solution Three’ is not a 'feminist' novel, but it does focus on female characters and their relationships rather than the usual tropes of eco-catastrophe SF. Perhaps as a consequence, this is not the most exciting of novels. What little conflict or tension that makes an appearance is muted, and mainly serves to elicit some musings about the personal interactions of the characters. 

‘Solution Three’ doesn’t stand the test of time as one of the more engrossing examples of 70s SF.

John Norman of Gor interview 1980

John Norman (aka John Eric Lange) interview
from Questar magazine, February 1980

There are no more quintessential examples of the PorPor ethos than the novels of John Norman, the pen name of American author John Frederick Lange. Starting with 'Tarnsman of Gor' in 1976 and working up to 'Captive of Gor', I dutifully purchased the Ballantine paperbacks with their Boris Vallejo covers, and then, when publishing rights for the remaining entries in the series moved to DAW books, 'Hunters of Gor' on up to 'Tribesmen of Gor'. 

I thought the Gor books were cool. When you're 16 years old, and it's 1976, and there is no such thing as the internet, the Gameboy, and your TV has only 4 channels, and you really don't know what a 'dominatrix' is, or why some adult men might have Impure Thoughts involving clothespins, 'Tarnsman of Gor' is real entertainment.

It's beside the point to mock the Gor books for having puerile plots, stilted dialogue, a relentless atmosphere of misogyny, and an unhealthy obsession with S&M. Despite all these flaws they were always very readable. I'll take 'Raiders of Gor' any day over 'Island of the Blue Dolphins', 'To Kill A Mockingbird', 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' or any other piece of literature handed out to generations of hapless high school students. Indeed, the Gor books are nowhere near as subliminally warped and perverted as 'A Separate Peace' by John Knowles - !

Posted below is a five-page of an interview with John Norman from the February 1980 issue of 'Questar' magazine. Norman, who at the time of the interview was a member of the philosophy department at CUNY, is wordy and pompous and plainly stung by the criticism heaped on his books. Of course, the interviewer carefully avoids inquiring about the Freudian underpinnings of Norman's fantasy vision of Bondage and Domination....

'1941: The Illustrated Story'

'1941:The Illustrated Story' by Heavy Metal magazine / Pocket Books

After the great commercial and critical success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whiz-kid director Steven Spielberg could do no wrong by the Hollywood moguls, and thus Columbia and Universal Studios together handed over an estimated $30 million for him to make a comedy about a (true-life) Japanese attack on California in the early days of World War 2.

Preceded by a massive marketing campaign, 1941 was released during the 1979 Christmas season, and while it failed to get much in the way of glowing reviews, it did do quite well at the box office, aided in no small part by the tremendous popularity of Blues Brothers stars John Belushi, who played ‘Wild’ Bill Kelso, and Dan Aykroyd, who played Sgt. Frank Tree.

Heavy Metal magazine released a graphic novel adaptation of the movie, ‘1941: The Illustrated Story’, by Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch. The graphic novel is a strange collage of both original art, and advertising images and photographs from the early 40s. Thus one may see a black and white photo of popular 40s singer Kate Smith in one panel, and a distinctive illustration by Boris Artzybasheff in another.

[The depiction of the Japanese as buck-toothed subhumans was well in keeping with the tenor of the World War 2 era but, needless to say, is very politically incorrect by today's cultural standards.]

The plot is barely coherent and I won’t divulge it in any detail to avoid spoilers, but it’s sufficient to say that the entire comic – and by extension the movie script – relies heavily on the sort of crazed presentation pioneered by the early Mad comic books of the 1950s.

Readers looking for something different in terms of art, layout, and plot, as well as readers nostalgic for late 70’s – early 80’s comic art, might want to give this graphic novel a try. Copies of ‘1941: The Illustrated Story’ can be had for affordable prices from amazon.com and eBay.

 

 

Book Review: The New Tomorrows

Book Review: 'The New Tomorrows' edited by Norman Spinrad

2 / 5 Stars

‘The New Tomorrows’ (Belmont Tower, 1971, 235 pp., cover artist uncredited) is compiled by editor Norman Spinrad to showcase the New Wave Movement, at the time when the Movement was much in vogue. Many of the stories in this anthology first appeared in the late 60s and early 70s in the very influential UK sci-fi magazine New Worlds.
 
The anthology opens with a Introduction by Spinrad; this is an engaging overview of SF publishing at the time of the early 1970s, with Spinrad mildly rebuking ‘mainstream’ magazines and books for refusing to release works by Movement authors. There is a cogent discussion of the phrase ‘speculative fiction’ and the rationale taken by some authors for adopting the term in order to further their careers. The statistics Spinrad provides on hardback and paperback sales figures and magazine circulations are an interesting snapshot of where the genre stood in the marketplace at the time of the book’s release.

As is to be expected with New Wave content, the majority of the stories focus on mood, setting, and character rather than plot or narrative; many are devoid of traditional SF topics, and some are so ‘experimental’ as to represent self-indulgence on the part of the author. Some capsule descriptions:

‘The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius’ by Michael Moorcock: detective Milos Aquilinus arrives in an absurdist Berlin to investigate a murder; he interacts with various historical personages.

‘Driftglass’ by Samuel R. Delaney: a genetically engineered merman, crippled by an accident at a deep-sea construction project, advises a younger counterpart. This is one of Delaney’s more accessible stories.

‘Sending the Very Best’ by Edward Bryant: an incomprehensible, patently New Wave short-short. It features greeting cards.

‘Going Down Smooth’ by Robert Silverberg: underwhelming tale of a computer that develops a cranky sort of AI.

‘The Garden of Delights’ by Langdon Jones: gripped by anomie, a young British man returns to the abandoned house where he grew up. He experiences an X-rated version of ‘Somewhere in Time’ involving…. incest (!) At the time of its publication I’m sure this story was considered Explicit, Provocative and Daring, but with the passage of time it comes across as little more than skeezy porn….and Jones as a very creepy personality….

‘Surface If You Can’ by Terry Champagne: satirical tale of a couple of grad students who rent a bomb shelter from an absent-minded heiress. There is a surprise ending that makes this the best story in the anthology.

‘Masks’ by Damon Knight: a man horribly injured in an accident survives via transformation into a cyborg, only through the cost of predictable angst and spiritual anomie.

‘Pennies, Off A Dead Man’s Eyes’ by Harlan Ellison: a mutant investigates a woman who steals from the dead.

‘Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit’ by Thomas Disch: in the near future, a man flees high-tech pursuit. An undeveloped fragment rather than a genuine short story.

There are three entries that display the artiest of New Wave prose forms, the ‘experimental fiction’ piece in which the conventional narrative structure is replaced by a loosely connected series of non sequiturs, leaving it to the reader to attempt to synthesize a coherent plot. About all that can be said of ‘198-, A Tale of ‘Tomorrow’ by John Sladek, ‘The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde’ by editor Spinrad, and ‘Down the Up Escalation’ by Aldiss, is that Spinrad’s story is the easiest to follow. But that’s not saying much.

A story by one Michael Butterworth has such a long title that I’m not going to repeat it here. Butterworth’s tale features short stretches of text mingled with hand-drawn geometric diagrams (below); who am I to say this is not Art ?

‘The Definition’ by Bob Marsden: a rock musician encounters unruly fans in a near-future world reminiscent of ‘Clockwork Orange’. A short-short story.

‘The Jungle Rot Kid On the Nod’ by Philip Jose Farmer: William Burroughs does Tarzan. The sort of facile, opportunistic literary trickery that earned Farmer much praise in the early late 60s and early 70s.

The verdict ? There are three or four stories that may please hard-core New Wave fans. But all others can probably pass on ‘Tomorrows’.

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: The Halcyon Drift

Book Review: 'The Halcyon Drift' by Brian Stableford
(the Hooded Swan series, vol. 1)

3 / 5 Stars

Brian Stableford published the DAW  six-volume series referred to as the 'Grainger / Hooded Swan' novels from 1972 to 1975. 'The Halcyon Drift' (1972) is the first book in the series, followed by 'Rhapsody in Black' (1973), 'Promised Land' (1974), 'The Paradise Game' (1974), 'The Fenris Device' (1974), and 'Swan Song' (1975).

'Drift' is DAW Book No. 32 and features a cover illustration by Jack Gaughan.

The story opens with Grainger (he goes by only one name), the first-person protagonist and narrator, stranded on a planet in the fringes of the Halcyon Drift, an immense dark nebula. He has landed in a controlled crash that has killed his engineer. After two years of waiting and hoping, another vessel hears his distress beacon and comes to retrieve him. Grainger is eventually dropped off, penniless, on Earth. He owes his rescuers a considerable sum of money. And to make matters worse, he has apparently picked up an alien ghost or spiritual symbiont in his head, which carries on a running conversation with its human host. [Stableford provides some ambiguity about the nature of the 'alien'; it may in fact be a manifestation of schizophrenia on the part of Grainger].

When the family of his deceased engineer offers Grainger a job piloting a starship, things seem to be looking up. But it turns out this is no ordinary starship; the Hooded Swan has been designed to feature the latest advances in spaceflight technology, including a neural network interface which brings its pilot the ultimate sensory alliance with the ship's systems. Learning to fly the Swan won't be easy. 

But where his employers want Grainger to take their remarkable spacecraft is even more challenging. For floating in the depths of the Halcyon Drift is a starship called the Lost Star, and a treasure of great value is rumored to lie within its hold. The problem is, many other ships have been sent to find the Star...and none of them have come back.....

'Drift' is a low-key, literate space opera with an emphasis on the personality of Grainger, who Stableford portrays as a prickly, cynical middle-aged spacer rather than as a fresh-faced hero. The author uses quasi-New Wave prose to describe the space flight sections of the narrative, but he doesn't overindulge in language that is too oblique or overly poetic.The plot moves along at a good clip and the book's short length (175 pp) means it's a quick read, devoid of the labored detail common to many contemporary space opera novels.

Readers looking for an early 70s space adventure with sufficient New Wave flavor to make it an offbeat take on the genre will want to try 'Drift' and the other Hooded Swan books.

'Heavy Metal' magazine December 1980

‘Heavy Metal’, December 1980, features a cover illustration by Chris Achilleos titled ‘Elle’, and a back cover illustration by Alex Nino titled ‘Finally’.

There are major editorial changes announced with this issue. After only a year as Editor, Ted White is leaving, to be replaced (at least temporarily) by publisher Leonard Mogel. While White’s departure is glossed over as a decision he made to pursue a novel-writing career, it’s clear that the readership has been less than pleased with White’s introduction of columns for comics, SF, film, and ‘rok’ criticism. In a response to a reader’s letter, Mogel announces that "We found, through surveys and the like, that Heavy Metal readers prefer strip work to columns…Heavy Metal is an illustrated magazine, and prose seemed to be getting away from that concept.” 

For all the staff changes, this issue of HM is disappointing. There is a new series by Richard Corben, ‘Bloodstar’, but the dire Lupoff and Stiles strip ‘Professor Thintwhistle’ continues to appear. ‘Mary Quite Contrary’ by Ted White and Terry Lindall, is a cheesy smut piece trying to be arty. A ‘Valentina’ comic by Crepax uses blue ink on a gray background and is visually unreadable. Even the Schuiten Brothers, normally great contributors, strike out with ‘The Cutter of the Fog’, a disorganized tale that doesn’t do much other than provide some mediocre girlie art.

There are one or two worthy pieces and ‘Man’s Best Friend’, a black and white comic by Dick Matena, is one of them. I’ve posted it below.

Arthur Suydam's 'Mudwogs'

Arthur Suydam's 'Mudwogs'

from 'Echo of Futurepast' issue 1

 

'Echo of Futurepast' was an anthology title first released in 1984 as one of the books in the Continuity Comics lineup. Continuity was an independent publisher founded by comic book legend Neal Adams. 

Unfortunately, like a lot of indie comics released in the 80s and early 90s, Continuity had continuous problems with production and financing and the 'Futurepast' series reached nine issues before being cancelled.

Among the stories appearing in issue one was a two-part, 15-page 'Mudwogs' tale by Arthur Suydam. The Mudwog character had first appeared (as best as I can tell) in the May 1981 issue of 'Heavy Metal' magazine, in the story titled ' A Mudwog Tale: the Toll Bridge'.

The eight page Mudwog story in issue one of 'Futurepast' (somewhat confusingly) appeared as three- and four- page segments in the June and November 1981 issues of Heavy Metal. For the Futurepast appearance, Suydam made changes to the content and layout of the original comics.

Suydam's Mudwog's strips are the weirdest, most warped, yet most original take on the 'funny animals' theme. There has never been anything quite like them.

I'll be posting the second part (7 pages) of the Futurepast issue 1 Mudwogs strip shortly.

Book Review: 'Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s' edited by Greg Sadowski

5 / 5 Stars

If there is one book that's a sure-fire gift for horror and pop culture enthusiasts for Christmas 2010, then it's 'Four Color Fear'. This is a thick chunk of a book (Fantagraphics Books, September 2010, 320 pp.) with great production values and it's available from amazon.com for $19.79 (not including shipping).

As editor Sadowski makes clear in his introduction, EC's books made up only around 7 % of the horror comics produced during the early 50s. Many titles of equal, or even superior, quality have tended to be overlooked amidst all the fawning devoted to the EC library. Thus, 'Four Color Fear' is a timely overview of strips from other publishers such as Comic Media, Avon, Fawcett, and Harvey (I had no idea Harvey, who published 'Casper the Friendly Ghost' and other 'kiddie' comics when I was a child in the 60s, had churned out lots of grisly horror books in the 50s).

The book contains 36 stories culled from the best efforts of the abovementioned publishers, as well as a back-of-the-book Notes section with interesting details on the writers, artists, and publishers of each story. The center section of the book contains a cover gallery printed on high-quality, slick paper.

These stories are reprinted on good-quality paper stock, and the color reproductions are very well done. I can't scan full pages without breaking the book's spine, but here are some excerpts of some pages to give an idea of the book's contents.

Here's a striking panel by Jack Cole of 'Plastic Man' fame:

The strip titled ' The Maze Master' by Lou Cameron prefigures Steve Ditko's work a decade later for 'Dr Strange':

'Corpses Coast to Coast', by the Iger Studio, has a novel take on the zombie theme:

 Some well-known comics artists are featured, including of course Basil Wolverton:

In the era well before computerized color, when comics were printed on less than stellar quality paper and considered a product for juveniles, the artwork in many of these stories is quite novel and inventive. 'Nightmare', by Harry Lazarus, demonstrates that printing comics with black borders was something done well before Marvel and DC started doing it frequently back in the 1980s:

And here's an attention-grabbing opening page from 'Amnesia' by Warren Kremer:

In summary, comic book fans will definitely want to have this book on their shelves. It's a great value for the money and editor Sadowski hints that another volume, devoted entirely to the horror comics produced by Atlas (forerunner of Marvel Comics) may be in the wings.

Book Review: Killing Ground

Book Review: 'Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War' by Bruce Powe

4 / 5 Stars

My sisters live in Buffalo, and whenever I go to visit them and we drive around the city, it’s not at all unusual to see many cars with Ontario license plates in the parking lots of the shopping centers and malls and stadiums. The cross-border visits of the Canadians, who make day or weekend trips into the city to shop and sight-see, helps keep Buffalo from sliding into even greater economic decline.

The Canadians can be distinguished from the locals by their habit of pronouncing some words in a slightly different way; ‘about’, for example, becomes ‘aboot’. The visitors from Ontario are almost always relatively affluent, polite, and well-behaved.

And they hate the French-Canadians.

Most Americans are only vaguely aware that during the late 60s and throughout the 70s there was a very real possibility that the Francophone province of Quebec would secede from Canada and form an independent nation. The vacillating Canadian government adopted a policy of appeasement, in the hope that by catering as much as possible to the political desires of the Quebec political bloc, the province could be coaxed into staying.

The moment of truth came in 1980, when Quebec held a referendum on sovereignty (i.e., independence). The referendum was defeated by 60 % of the voters, a resounding margin that sent the independence bloc into a decline from which it has never really recovered. 

By that time, however, the majority of English-speaking Canadians had come to despise the decades-long policies of pandering to the French contingent, and their resentment smolders to this day.

‘Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War’ was published in 1968; this paperback edition (349 pp., cover artist unknown) was released in 1977. I was fortunate to pick up a copy online for around $10. Nowadays, with both the paperback and hardback editions long out of print, copies in even mediocre condition have exorbitant asking prices.

The novel is set in the future, i.e., in the early 70s, when the main character, Lt. Colonel Alex Hlynka, returns to Canada after serving on a UN Peacekeeping mission in South Africa. He is bemused to find Montreal in the grip of terror bombings carried out by militant separatists of ‘The Quebec Legion’ or PDQ. As the Canadian government dithers over how to respond to the attacks, the Army – with all of its best units on duty overseas – ponders how it will summon up the manpower to police the province of Quebec, should the need arise.

In short order, the separatist party declares independence for Quebec; riots and mob violence break out in Montreal, and government institutions are under siege. Forces of paramilitary units – ‘whiteshirts’ – take control of the government and initiate a campaign to expel English-speaking residents from Quebec. 

With the crisis mounting, Alex Hlynka is given command of a Royal Canadian Regiment and ordered into action to liberate Dorval Airport in Montreal, where thousands of desperate refugees await transport out of the province. It soon becomes clear that violence between the French Canadians and the Anglo Canadians is inevitable….and Alex Hlynka won’t be in the mood to hold back…..

‘Killing Ground’ starts out slowly; the narrative doesn’t pick up speed until after the first 100 pages, but from then on until the book’s last page, the pace moves along at a good clip. Author Powe is skilled at writing blood-drenched battle scenes, and while he does tend to invest a bit too much text on extended descriptions of military matters or internal monologues on the part of Alex Hlynka, these are minor digressions and rarely sap momentum from the plot. 

The author consciously avoids providing a happy ending, preferring to end things on an ambiguous note with a plot device sure to make all Canadians, regardless of their language, uneasy.

‘Killing Ground’ is a good 70s action novel and an interesting examination of the psyche of our neighbors in the Great White North. Keep a map of eastern Canada handy – it helps to know where the various locales are – and be prepared to look up some obscure idioms and cultural references (e.g., ‘Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry’ ?).