Friday, July 3, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Book Review: The Warlord of the Air
5 / 5 Stars
…He sighed. “But you know, I think I’m not meant to be here.”
“Oh, nonsense.”
“No, it’s true. This is 1903 – or a 1903 – but it - it isn’t my 1903.”
Thus says Oswald Bastable, Nomad of the Time Streams, in Michael Morcock’s 1971 novel ‘The Warlord of the Air’.
Oswald Bastable is a Captain in the British Army in northern India in 1902. He and his troops are sent to the state of Kumbalari, in a remote part of the Himalayas, to confront a local bandit named Sharan Kang. When a parlay with Kang goes badly, Bastable finds himself lost within an ancient temple, named Teku Benga, filled with mysterious passageways that may lead to other dimensions and other eras. An earthquake releases a strange vapor, which in turn puts Bastable into a deep sleep. When he awakes, it is to find himself alone in the ruins of Teku Benga, his clothes crumbled into dust, and the area devoid of signs of life.
Bastable hears a strange sound approaching his location and is astonished to see a massive airship, bearing the livery of the ‘Royal Indian Air Service’ and the Union Jack. His frantic cries to the airship are answered, and Bastable ascends into the gondola to find a group of puzzled British officers. It turns out the year is 1973, and no one has been seen among the ruins of Teku Benga for nearly 70 years. Bastable realizes that somehow, the vapor that he encountered in the ruins of the temple has kept him in suspended animation for decades, and he is still a young man in a future he would otherwise never have lived to see.
Upon his return to civilization, Bastable is awed by the sight of modern cities, monorails, electric lights, and steam-powered motor cars. The entire world seems safe and prosperous under a benevolent Rule Britannia. Bastable soon obtains a job working aboard one of the large airships plying the skies and comes to relish a life spent traveling from one exotic locale to another in Her Majesty’s service. But then fate intervenes, and Bastable learns that the world’s social and political order is not what it appears, and desperate characters are conspiring to bring about revolutionary change. Will Bastable stand with the anarchists, or against them ?
‘Warlord’ was a seminal novel in terms of promoting and mingling steampunk and alternate world adventures into one book. In its depiction of a parallel world ruled by an ever-enduring British Empire it echoed the theme of Ronald Clark’s earlier proto-steampunk novel ‘Queen Victoria’s Bomb’ (1967), but Moorcock was much better at assembling a fast-paced adventure tale. ‘Warlord’ is instrumental in paving the way for the new genre of alt-future Rule Britannia media, particularly in comics and graphic novels, from Brian Talbot’s ‘Heart of Empire’ series , to the ‘Scarlet Traces’ books by Ian Edginton, and more recently, Alan Moore’s ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ series.
‘Warlord’ is very much a product of the late 60s – early 70s, in that it presents a Rule Britannia in a less than salutary light. Moorcock has always been an ardent proponent of Marxism – it is ever the fashion among European and American intellectuals – and the infatuation with third-world liberation that was rampant among the cognoscenti in that era quite naturally made its way into the underpinnings of ‘Warlord’.
However, Moorcock avoids turning the book into a polemic, instead weaving the Liberation Struggle into the narrative along with sly jokes on the alternate 1973 in which Bastable finds himself: there is a young lieutenant in the Air Service named Michael Jagger; an elderly, cranky Russian expatriate, named Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), rues his missed chance at leading a revolution earlier in the century; a decadent aristocrat named Count (Ernesto ‘Che’) Guevara wanders the globe as a dilettante revolutionary.
The second and third books in the Nomad of Time trilogy, ‘The Land Leviathan’ and ‘The Steel Tsar’, continue Bastable’s adventures. They all are entertaining reads.
The DAW books edition (No. 291) of ‘Warlord of the Air’ appeared in May 1978 and features a cover illustration of the airship ‘Pericles’ by Gino D’Achille.
I’ve posted another cover illustration, this one by Patrick Woodruffe, depicting Oswald Bastable emerging from the ruins of Teku Benga to espy the Pericles motoring by.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Book Review: Hour of the Horde
2/5 Stars
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
I remember seeing ‘Amazing Adventures’ No. 18, featuring Killraven and the War of the Worlds, on the shelf with the other comics at the 7-11 store in Elmira Heights, New York, in 1973.
After looking through it I thought it was an interesting comic, set in a near-future Earth devastated by a successful second invasion of the Martians from the H. G. Wells novel. The opening issue featured the ruins of New York City, mutants, monsters, high-tech weaponry, and an offbeat hero in Killraven. But I didn’t have enough extra cash to purchase it (even though 20 cents seems like a paltry sum nowadays, back then it was a lot of money in terms of allowance; this was when a Fudgesicle cost only 5 cents, and a gallon of gas less than 50 cents). So I wound up buying a copy of Jack Kirby’s ‘The Demon’, and a copy of ‘Conan’.
Fortunately Marvel has released all the first generation Killraven stories in one of its omnibus b & w ‘Essentials’ formats. At more than 800 pages in length, ‘Killraven Vol. 1’ gives you the Amazing Adventures’ run of ‘War of the Worlds’ from issues 18 to 39. There’s also issue #45 of ‘Marvel Team Up’ featuring Killraven and Spider Man (?!) and two one-shot Killraven issues from the 80s.
The Killraven stories are derived from many pop-culture idioms of the early 70s, with perhaps ‘Beneath the Planet of the Apes’ serving as one of the more central idioms. Each issue has the sort of frantic, if unsophisticated, energy that defined superhero comics in the early to mid 70s.
Amazing Adventures No. 23 is a gem in this regard. The story features a mutated, former Secret Service agent (!) named ‘Rattack (!) who lives in the tunnels beneath the ruins of the White House. Borrowing heavily from the film ‘Willard’, already a sci-fi landmark in the early 70s, the plot sees the bucktoothed Rattack and his furry rodent friends commissioned to eliminate Killraven in gruesome fashion (particularly for a Code-approved comic !). I’ve tried to scan a couple of the more gripping pages without breaking open the spine of my yellowing copy of the book (my Canon 4400F scanner lacks a beveled edge best used for scanning bound books).
I won’t spoil the story by posting the finale of the story, but these pages make for great art by Herb Trimpe, arguably the best of the Jack Kirby-inspired artists on Marvel’s staff at the time.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Book Review: Hestia
3/5 Stars
Friday, June 19, 2009
The June 1979 issue of ‘Heavy metal’ featured a cover painting by Angus McKie titled ‘The Performer’, and a back cover painting titled ‘What Happened to Betty (Page)’ by Marcus Boas.
This was a rather unimpressive issue of the magazine. Yet another installment of Corben’s seemingly never-ending ‘The New Tales of the Arabian Nights, Sinbad in the Land of the Jinn’, as well as another installation of McKie’s ‘So Beautiful and So Dangerous’. In a rarity for Heavy Metal, Serge Clerc’s ‘Captain Future’ b & w comic appears in its entirety, although scattered in chunks throughout the magazine in an effort to force the reader to view intervening material. By this time I was beginning to tire of reading stories in drips and driblets, and I had begun to give serious thought to discontinuing purchasing the magazine.
The June issue featured another ‘Pyloon’ tale by Rae Rue and LeoGiraux, and I’ve posted it here. Like the other Pyloon stories appearing in Heavy Metal, it features drawings cribbed from the pop culture archives, in a deliberately cheesy sort of tribute to the originals.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Book Review: From the 'S' File
2 / 5 Stars
Playboy regularly published a lot of SF stories, many by well-known authors in the genre. As one of the so-called ‘slick’ magazines, it paid high rates and represented a coveted outlet for short fiction throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even the early 80s, after which the advent of video porn, and later, DVD and internet porn, severely curtailed its circulation.
There were some drawbacks to being published in Playboy; there were of course restrictions on story length – after all, no one really bought the magazine for the ‘articles’ – and the SF content had to be dialed down in order to appeal to the magazine’s hedonistic-oriented readership. Both of these drawbacks probably influenced the tenor of the stories appearing in this anthology.
‘From the “S” File’ (1971) contains stories published from 1956 to 1970; as the book’s title indicates, all the authors have surnames beginning with the letter ‘S’.
The editor(s) in charge of purchasing SF tales seem to have liked Robert Sheckley a great deal, since 5 of the 16 the entries in this anthology originate from that author. I myself have never been all that enchanted by Sheckley’s writings, which tend to focus on satire, with the SF themes merely serving as a sort of painted backdrop for the author’s efforts at critiquing social mores. Of his stories presented here, only ‘The World of Heart’s Desire’, about a man seeking an extended bout of escapism, is really all that impressive. The other Sheckley tales: ‘Can You Feel Anything When I Do This’, ‘Triplication’, ‘The Same to You Doubled’, and ‘Cordle to Onion to Carrot’ all come across as underwhelming efforts to meld SF tropes with a Cheever-esque styling.
Theodore Sturgeon contributes ‘The Nail and the Oracle’; like Sheckley’s work, it’s a lackluster effort at social and political satire.
‘Control Somnambule’, by William Sambrot, deals with an Apollo astronaut and a mysterious lapse in his recollection of the period his spaceship spent traveling on dark side of the Moon. Well-written and effective despite an understated style, it’s one of the better tales in the anthology.
‘The Man From Not-Yet’, by John Sladek, deals with an encounter between the famous 18th century English philosopher Samuel Johnson, and a time-traveler from the future.
Henry Slesar is represented by ‘Melodramine’, in which a near-future narcotic gives hallucinations of a too-pleasurable kind. ‘Victory Parade’, is a short, mordant tale of the celebration of a war..... in which everyone loses. ‘Examination Day’ is a somewhat clichéd account of a very important test administered by an authoritarian regime, while ‘The Jam’ is a brief but quietly effective story, and will undoubtedly make for uneasy thoughts when one is next in a traffic jam on a hot summer's day. ‘After’ is a collection of vignettes, set in a nuclear war’s aftermath, infused with a dark sense of humor.
Jack Sharkey contributes ‘The Pool’, a moral fable about conquistadors and the fabled fountain of youth; and ‘Conversation with a Bug’, a comic tale about over-reaching one’s grasp.
The final entry is Norman Spinrad’s ‘Deathwatch’, a succinct tale that relies on a shock ending. It’s one of his more effective stories.
The verdict on ‘From the ‘S’ File’ ? To some extent the stories suffer from having to be coherent to Playboy’s audience, as opposed to targeting, say, contemporary SF magazines like Analog or If. But the inclusion of too many tales in which the SF content is subordinate to social satire makes it hard to recommend this volume to fans.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Slow Death comix Number 9
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Book Review: Gate of Ivrel
‘Gate of Ivrel’ was published in 1976 as DAW book No. 188. The cover art for this printing is by Michael Whelan.
This was author Carolyn Janice Cherryh's first published novel. Succeeding volumes in this ‘Morgaine Trilogy’ include ‘Well of Shiuan’ (1978) and ‘Fires of Azeroth’ (1979). Cherryh produced a fourth book in 1988, ‘Exile’s Gate’. The first three volumes are available in the DAW omnibus ‘The Morgaine Saga’ (2001).
The Gates are portals to wormholes capable of mediating instantaneous travel not only from one locale to another, but, via use of the ‘major’ or ‘universal’ Gate, to other planets. Built long ago by a humanoid race called the qhal, the Gates also permit travel back in time; this is fraught with danger, as a careless journey can lead to interference with causality and the triggering of a ‘time-quake’.
One or more of such time-quakes have led to the destruction of qhal civilization. The humans who have descended from the qhal Empire have decided that the remaining Gates must be destroyed to prevent further catastrophes.
On a nameless planet with a medieval level of technology, Venye, an outcast tribesman, finds himself forced into the service of a mysterious woman named Morgaine, who vanished a century ago after an effort to destroy the Gate of Ivrel, the universal gate on this world, failed. Awakened from suspended animation by Venye, Morgaine renews the quest to destroy the Gate of Ivrel.
The novel is one long chase sequence as the hapless Venye accompanies Morgaine on her travels to the northern reaches, the Gate, and the kingdom of Hjemur, where rules one Thiye, a human who has acquired enough knowledge of the Gate’s power to be a dangerous adversary.
En route there are various violent encounters with clans of superstitious, but cunning, characters, and much of the book’s adventures revolve around the efforts of Venye and Morgaine to overcome one batch of pursuers after another. And while the book slows mid-way to belabor a psychodrama involving Venye and some of his estranged relatives, overall, the narrative maintains its rapid pacing.
Morgaine is plainly modeled on Michael Moorcock’s ‘Elric’ character, what with her bouts of guilt-stricken angst, ‘doomed’ sword ‘Changeling’, pale complexion, and white mane of hair. But she is less powerful than Elric, and not every encounter necessarily leads to barbarians falling by the hundred. Venye is not so much a heroic figure, as a sort of dogged, dim-witted ally who manages to survive by his wits and some luck.
‘Gate’ suffers from some stilted writing: tree branches ‘writhe’ against the night sky, the clopping of horses’ hooves sounds ‘lonely’, and no one ever employs contractions in their dialogue, making many conversations wordy and rather pretentious.
However the novel features some entertaining characters, a well-realized world, an interesting quest, and, unlike many contemporary fantasy novels, its short length (191 pp.) means it can be read in a few day’s time. And if you like it, three more installments await.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Pudsuit: Quintessential 70s wardrobe
Left to right: ‘Killraven’ from Marvel comics, 1973; 'Vampirella', from Warren Comics, late 60s; and bottom, a hapless Sean Connery in a still from the movie Zardoz, 1974.
My brothers and I referred to them as ‘pudsuits’, since they left uncovered most of the body save for one’s privates. They seem to have been an exclusively 70s phenomenon, since I haven’t observed many dedicated sci-fi characters in the popular culture sporting similar outfits over the past 20 – 25 years.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
2/5 Stars
John T. Phillifent (1916 – 1973) was a British author who published a number of SF novels and short stories in the 1970s, some under the pen name of John Rackham. ‘Life With Lancelot’ (1973) is part of Ace Double No. 48245, with ‘Hunting on Kunderer’ by William Barton, serving as the other portion of the book. At 132 pp in length ‘Lancelot’ consists of three stories: ‘Stainless Knight’, ‘Logical Knight’, and ‘Arabian Knight’.
Lancelot Lake is a janitor on a space station in the Galactic Federation; Lake is prone to spending most of his waking hours engaged in Walter Mitty-style ruminations. His life gets a major turnaround when he foolishly commandeers control of a damaged spaceship, and fails to prevent it from crashing on the surface of the planet of the Shogleet, technologically advanced creatures who are able to shape-shift, and become invisible, among other useful traits. The Shogleet revive the dying Lancelot, and using his brain’s imagery as a guide, re-create him as the physical embodiment of the Lancelot of mythology: not too bright, but strong and handsome.
Lancelot returns to the Federation and enrolls as a trouble-shooter for worlds where the cultures are lodged in a feudal or medieval state. A ‘Prime Directive’ prohibits the overt intervention of the Federation, except as a covert operation cloaked in the guise of the existing technology.
Each of the three stories sees Lancelot dispatched to a different planet, where he must intervene to prevent rouge Federation agents, or their loosed technology, from disrupting the normal order of the host society. The main focus of ‘Lancelot’ is humor, as our witless hero blunders about the landscape, getting into various combats with medieval knights or dissolute Arabian caliphs. Phillifent tends to center each tale on sophomoric humor derived from encounters between Lancelot and a series of lubricious females. Overall, the book reads as a gently sarcastic take on SF and fantasy clichés, and owes more than a bit to Harry Harrison and his writings.
‘Life with Lancelot’ is mildly entertaining, but that’s about it. If readers stumble upon it, that’s fine, but I don’t believe it’s worth a deliberate search in the used bookstore catalogues.