'New Ark City' by Caza

from the August, 1979 issue of Heavy Metal

It's August, 1979, and amidst the never-ending, annoying rotation of 'My Sharona' on the FM radio stations, there are some good songs getting precious airplay, including Ian Gomm's 'Hold On'.

Anyone picking up the August issue of Heavy Metal magazine will find that one of the best pieces in the issue is, not surprisingly, by Caza. 

'New Ark City' is a clever retelling of the Noah and the Ark story, set in the summer swelter of the Big Apple.....

Harry Harrison dies
March 12, 1925 - August 15, 2012

Born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Stanford, CT, Harry Harrison was a major sf writer for nearly 5 decades, from the 1960s on till the 2000s. 

His books were a major part of my reading during that time, starting with The Stainless Steel Rat series and the Deathworld series of the 60s and 70s; the Eden series of the 1980s; The Hammer and the Cross series of the 1990s, and the Stars and Stripes Forever series of the 2000s.

And a bunch of singleton novels, stories, and Harrison-edited anthologies all along the way.

Even during the height of the New Wave movement, Harrison never adopted the stylized prose styles then much in vogue, preferring to stick to comparatively straightforward narratives. His writing was deceptively simple at first glance, but as one continued to read a given Harrison novel or short story, it gradually became qite clear that he knew how to plot, and how to keep a story rolling along.

Harrison was a prolific author, and not every one of his novels or stories were gems. But plenty of them were, more than enough to justify him as one of the best sf authors of his time.

Book Review: The Unreal People

Book Review: 'The Unreal People' by Martin Siegel

1 / 5 Stars

‘The Unreal People’ (158 pp) was published by Lancer Books in 1973; the cover art is by Ron Walotsky.
 
Lancer was a major 'budget' publisher of paperback sf and fantasy titles in the late 60s and early 70s. Much of what they printed was mediocre. Some titles were downright awful, but once in a while there were also those rare titles that were above-average.

Unfortunately, ‘The Unreal People’ is in the ‘awful’ category. I gave up on it halfway through my reading.

The novel is set in the future, in the aftermath of World War Three. Humanity has since retreated from the devastated surface to live in a crowded underground city. The populace is kept compliant, and moderately free of depression, via a regimen of psychotropic drugs issued by the ruling cabal. 

The lower depths of the city are occupied by half-starved, mutant, homicidal scavengers, and a police force serves to keep them from penetrating to the more affluent sectors of the city.

The main character is a policeman named Conrad, second in command of the ‘Narko Skwad’. As the novel opens, the populace of the city is growing increasingly restive, a state partially induced by the rumors of people who have escaped the city, to live lives of fulfillment and ease on the now-reborn surface of the Earth. The rioters want permission to emigrate to the surface, something the ruling oligarchy is loath to allow.

Conrad and the Skwad brutally subdue the rioters, an action that deepens Conrad' s misgivings of the ruling oligarchy. He decides to flee to the surface. But his escape is complicated by the knowledge that friends of his, deemed subversives by the oligarchy, are going to be assassinated. Can Conrad rescue his friends, and escape with them to the surface, before the government realizes he has switched sides ?

The writing in ‘Unreal People’ is bad, even by the relaxed standards of New Wave sf of the early 70s. 

Author Siegel regularly uses a mangled, stream-of-consciousness effect to bring us deep into the psyche of selected characters. Here’s a sample passage of the wordy, empty prose that occupies much of the book:

You don’t, can’t, interfere in the jungle unless you want to live there, he told himself. And that’s flat. No more. He wished it didn’t feel it was an escape of his reality. And then – why the hell not escape ? That’s what the kid’s like, right ? He didn’t know. Satin wanted out and got out. Maybe the kid….not the point, a voice said. Hearing voices today. No point in getting into this. That’s the point. Unless you want to enter it, stay out of the jungle. And I’m leaving.

As a regular reader of New Wave sf, I have acquired a great tolerance for the prose styles employed by that Movement and its imitators, but I could only take so much of ‘The Unreal People’ before bailing out. This one is best avoided !

Abelmar Jones: 'Bad Day 'Cross 110th Street'

by Bill Dubay and Alex Nino

from Eerie #92, May 1978 

Vintage Ghetto Action, including 'right - on' 70s phrases like:

 "hot 'nuff t' fry chitlin's on the roof"

 "Honkieland"

"Jeezus Lawd !"

and ending the adventure of our two young homeboys (actually, the term 'homeboy' was not in use in 1978....)  with a bottle of Gallo 'Ripple' brand pop wine......

Abelmar Jones was a recurring character in several Eerie issues in the late 70s. His adventures involved supernatural phenomena that happened to take place in the ghetto, as opposed to Transylvania or the desolate heaths of England.

'Bad Day 'Cross 110th Street' was the first of the Abelmar Jones stories.

I'll be posting more of his adventures in the coming weeks.

'Heavy Metal' magazine August 1982

It's August, 1982, and in heavy rotation on the FM stations is 'Eye in the Sky' by the Alan Parsons Project.

The latest issue of Heavy Metal magazine is on the stands, featuring 'Voltomat', by Thomas Warkentin, on the front cover, and "Just A Bit Off the Top, Mac !", by Christopher Mark Brennan, on the back cover.

The Dossier is the usual lively grab-bag of reviews and commentary.

Rok Critic Lou Stathis examines what he calls 'Ear Movies', i.e., soundtrack / instrumental albums by the likes of Vangelis and Georgio Moroder. Back in the early 80s the concept of Chill Music didn't really exist, and there were no internet or satellite radio channels devoted to the genre. So even if groups like The Thievery Corporation had existed in 1982, there was no real broadcasting outlet for them, save perhaps as a Sunday night show on the college radio stations.

The movie reviews cover gems such as John Carpenter's The Thing, as well as E. T., Poltergeist, and Tron.

There is an interview with the British sf author Brian Aldiss, who provides his list of top-ten books 'To Be Stuck In An Indian Urinal With'.

The graphic content of the August issue is underwhelming. Ongoing installments of Corben's 'Den II', Jodorowsky and Moebius's 'Incal Light', 'Zora' by Fernandez, 'Yragael' by Druillet, and 'The Voyage of Those Forgotten', by Bilal, consist of too few pages to maintain much in the way of mental continuity with the reader.

One promising development is a new serial by Berni Wrightson, titled 'Freak Show'; this would become one of Wrightson's more memorable comic art creations.

I've posted the 'Voyage of Those Forgotten' entry below.

Sabre issue 2

'Sabre' issue 2

Eclipse Comics, October 1982

Issue 2 - which reprints, in colored form, the second half of the 1978 original Sabre graphic novel - opens with some skilful artwork from Paul Gulacy depicting our hero in the midst of interrogation. This provokes some flashbacks which reveal more of Sabre's past, such as his growing up in the 'hood under conditions of violence and privation.....

Don McGregor's prose, as usual, encrusts every page, but it can't totally obscure Gulacy's rendering of a fight sequence between Sabre and the psychopathic Overseer. 

So closes the first two issues of Sabre, the color comic book. Issue three would inaugurate all-new content, and will be the topic of a future Sabre posting.

Book Review: 'The Ace Science Fiction Reader' edited by Donald A. Wolheim

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Ace Science Fiction Reader’ (251 pp.) was published in 1971 and features cover artwork by Charles Volpe, John Schoenherr, and Jack Gaughan.

In his introduction, Donald Wolheim (with a self-congratulatory note that may, or may not, be justified, depending on your own opinion) remarks upon the critical and commercial successes of the 'Ace Double' imprint. 

The Science Fiction Reader, he informs us, is an experimental effort at creating a trial ‘Ace Triple’ volume, relying on reprinting novelettes previously appearing in various Doubles.

The leadoff novelette, Clifford Simak’s ‘The Trouble With Tycho’, first appeared in print in 1961. It’s about a young prospector on the colonized Moon; he encounters a swell dame who enlists his aid in an effort to explore the forbidden area around the immense Tycho crater. The story has aged reasonably well, and is the best in the anthology.

Jack Vance’s ‘The Last Castle’ (1966) is typical Vance, and if you are not a Vance fan, you probably won’t like it. Set in the days of the Dying Earth, ‘Castle’ features a tribe of decadent lotus-eaters confronted by a slave rebellion. While the plot eventually gets reasonably engaging,  it is subordinate to Vance’s displays of carefully crafted turns of phrase.

Samuel R. Delaney contributes ‘Empire Star’ (1966). The plot deals with a callow young man, named ‘Comet Jo’, who is selected by a trio of aliens to carry an important message from his backwater planet to the far-off Empire Star. The story is a sort of sci-fi picaresque, filled with oddball characters, offbeat dialogue, and contrived plot developments. The New Wave movement was gaining ascendancy in the mid-60s and ‘Empire Star’ was the perfect example of the type of story that would come to epitomize the movement. In truth, I thought it trite, cutesy and a chore to finish. Of the three tales in this volume, 'Empire Star' has aged the most poorly.

In sum, ‘The Ace Science Fiction Reader’ is primarily useful as a marker of the shift in editorial attitudes towards sf in the mid-1960s. This was a shift away from standard, technology-based pieces like 'Tycho',  towards the more imaginative approaches to prose style exhibited by 'The Last Castle' and 'Empire Star'. 

Modern readers, however, will find 'The Ace Science Fiction Reader' underwhelming. For Ace Books completists only.   

Hunter episode 2 from Eerie No. 53

'Hunter' from Eerie magazine (Warren)
episode 2
from Eerie No. 53, January 1974
(A bit out of order in my posting....I mistakenly put up Hunter episode 3 on July 5 2012)

 

Book Review: Metrophage

Book Review: 'Metrophage' by Richard Kadrey

5 / 5 Stars

‘Metrophage’, released in 1988, was one of the 12 ‘New’ Ace Science Fiction Specials published between 1984 and 1990. The cover art is by Earl Keleny.

Metrophage is a ‘first generation’ cyberpunk novel that, stylistically, belongs with members of the Canon such as 'Count Zero', 'Neuromancer', 'Dr Adder', and 'Islands in the Net'.

With its near-future, dystopian Los Angeles setting, 'Metrophage' is a direct descendent of Jeter's  ‘Dr Adder’, which was written in the early 70s (but not published till 1984).

Metrophage is set in a chaotic, partially destroyed LA, early in the 21^st century. The city is divided into small clusters of wealth and affluence, and a larger, impoverished metropolis, peopled by various tribes of techno-enthusiasts, scavengers, self-styled anarchists, and ethnic groups. 

The hero is one Jonny Qabbala, a street punk who supports himself by selling drugs and moving contraband for the Smuggler Lords, the de facto rulers of L.A. 

As the novel opens, Jonny is looking to avenge the death of one of his friends at the hands of Easy Money, another dealer. Impulsive and prone to making bad decisions, Jonny soon runs afoul of Colonel Zamora, the head of the city police force; this is a quasi-facist oganization that periodically sweeps into the city to engage in combat with its less tractable inhabitants. 

On the run from Zamora, Jonny becomes entangled in a vast, but secretive, underground conflict being waged between offworld economic blocs, and the militant, far-right organizations formed in the aftermath of the collapse of the US and Europe. 

Complicating things is the rise of a disturbing new plague, a plague that in fact may be a bioweapon loosed in a deliberate effort to eliminate the lumpen proletariat from LA.

Self-centered and indifferent to the welfare of the common people, Jonny is not inclined to get involved in efforts to arrest the outbreak. But he may have no choice but to become involved, because Jonny may hold the only hope for a cure for the plague….. if he can live long enough to discover where it came from….

Metrophage is a worthy cyberpunk adventure, less so because of its plot, which is often meandering, and heavily reliant on contrivances to provide it with some degree of momentum. 

Rather, the appeal of Metrophage is author Kadrey’s careful imagery of a near-future LA resembling a cross between ‘Blade Runner’ and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’. The novel is filled with offbeat, imaginative visual vignettes.

 As well, Kadrey’s dialogue is well-written and melds nicely with a cast of quirky characters: the smuggler lord Mister Conover, kept alive into advanced age by regular pharmaceutical infusions; Nimble Virtue, the L5  colony expatriate forced to travel LA in an exoskeleton that moves her atrophied limbs; Man Ray, the anarchist weaponsmith; and Groucho, the idealistic leader of the LA anarchists.  

Metrophage shares the same faults as ‘Neuromancer’: a prose style that at times is too dense and descriptive; a plot that relies overmuch on nick-of-time escapes to get our hero out of his self-inflicted jams; and final, last-chapter revelations that don’t seem to justify all the sub-plots circulating in and out of the main narrative. 

But its imaginative drive outweighs these drawbacks, and  Metrophage rightly stands as one of the best of the first-generation cyberpunk novels.

'The Final Tap' by Caza

from the August 1982 issue of Heavy Metal