pornokitsch

Review Round-up: Jesus, Bridesicles and New York City

Three recent releases with very little in common.

Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty (2013) is coming this June. I've not read him before, but from what I understand, Mr. McIntosh is sort of an ebook/indie sensation, not in the "sells like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking" way, but in the "there's this guy quietly making great books in the corner" kind of way. Love Minus Eighty is his first UK print publication and it is a corker.

A hundred years in the future, death isn't... conquered, but it is beat-up a bit. Cryogenics and medicine have both advanced spectacularly, so if you've got the cash, you can hang on for quite some time. If you don't have the cash, but you do have insurance, you can freeze yourself - give yourself that tiny bit of hope that someone, someday will pay to bring you back. And if you don't have the cash or the insurance? Well, look both ways before crossing the street.

One pervy side-effect of this brave new world is the idea of the "bridesicle". Beautiful women in fatal accidents - and without insurance - are carefully preserved. Rich men drop by, interview them, and, if they like what they see, the 'suitor' pays to thaw/fix the young lady in turn for marriage (and all that entails). It is... horrible. Mr. McIntosh lets us know exactly how horrible it is - prostitution, grinding misery, the soul-crushing loss of all agency. It is one of the most grim and least titillating visions of the future ever committed to print. 

Love Minus Eighty is the story of how this premise impacts a half dozen people: a frozen young woman (thawed and killed and thawed and killed over and over again with each interview), a struggling musician who inadvertently kills someone, the woman he kills, a slightly neurotic writer who runs a dating service and a host of minor characters. Love Minus Eighty is a love story, I suppose, but less about people than an ode to love itself: natural, messy, serendipitous, ungainly love. Everyone in the book is busily trying to programme or direct something that refuses to be tamed. Love can't be purchased, wrangled, controlled or predicted - a lesson that everyone in the book learns, occasionally to their own detriment. It should be romantic, but Mr. McIntosh is wisely even-handed. For every couple that wins, there's also one that gets away.

Review Round-up: Vintage Classics (and Not-So-Classics)

We've just returned from a long weekend in Lyme Regis, our favourite escape. Dinosaurs and literary landmarks! Bakeries on every corner! We spent most of our stay buying delicious foodstuffs and eating them on the terrace (which had a sea view if you stood on the table). Occasionally inclement weather forced us to nap. It was exhausting. To make things worse, the trip was bracketed by train rides to and from London, during which we could only... read. 

Lyme Regis has an amazing bookshop, and after 4? 5? vaguely-annual visits, I think the owner kind of recognises me. At the very least, he sees me walking out with most of his "Pulps" section every year. This year was the perfect sort of bookish travel: go down with a Kindle and an empty bag, come back with a few dozen new treasures. (A future Post-Scripts, I think.)

Anyway, my travel slides aside ("click-click" Here's us at the pub! "click-click"), a long list of short reviews follows:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920). Before this year, the only Fitzgerald I'd read was The Great Gatsby, and that was high school and I've already forgotten it. Recently, prompted by some book research, I've been plowing through all the Fitzgerald I can find and loving it. Sarcastic, funny, touching, witty, straight-forward language and wonderfully complex eddies under the surface - pretty much made to order for My Taste. Who knew? This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's debut which a) bloody hell and b) like the vast proportion of debut novels is b1) a little too much about the author, b2) clearly based on post-event philosophical rendering of the author's own experiences and b3) slightly wanky. That said, back to a) - bloody hell. Astounding book and a fascinating look at an era and class that I don't know anything at all about. An amazing combination with all the Westerns I've been reading lately - hard to think of all this happening in the same country at the same time. 

The Fox by Conrad Williams (2013). A really nice little chapbook from the folks at This is Horror, who, understandably, know their horror. A family go camping and things start to get creepy. There's a long slow build and then the reveal and payoff all hit at the same time - as a mystery, it is a bit clunky. As an atmospheric bit of horror, it is smothering (in a good way). You just know horrible things are happening, pitter-patting around in the background, and the bits of mundane detail only make it worse when it finally kicks off. I'm glad it ends when it does, a bit of a new Scary Story to Read in the Dark, rather than any sort of greater parable. A nice book, and well worth a fiver.

[Seventeen more after the jump!]

Review Round-Up: Ants, Comics and the Universe

Three reviews spanning 1890 to 2013: Max Allan Collins' Seduction of the Innocent, Liu Cixin's Of Ants and Dinosaurs and Camille Flammarion's Urania. 

Seduction of the Innocent (2013), by Max Allan Collins, is Hard Case Crime #110. I figured I could say a few words now and then revisit it in two years when the re-read gets there. Seduction is a great little parody - there's a guess there about authorial intent, but I don't think Mr. Collins intends for this to be read 'straight'. Jack Starr is the "fixer" (and co-owner) of a newspaper comic strip empire. The majority owner is his foxy widowed stepmother, Maggie Starr. Jack is the Archie to her Nero Wolfe, roving around 1954 New York City in search of clues while she pieces together the big picture.

Seduction is a murder mystery based that's inspired heavily by Dr. Frederick Wertham and his crusade against comic books. Most of the characters, including the victim ("Dr. Werner Frederick") are drawn (no pun intended) from life. The story is over the top, but fun, Mr. Collins loves his comics (as noted previously) and the whole book is permeated with a sense of, well, joy. Murderous, sexpot, hard-drinking, gun-totin' scandalous joy.

A marginally big deal has been made about EC artist Terry Beatty's illustrations, but Glen Orbik's cover really steals the show.

50 Essential Science Fiction Novels (Part 2: 1979 - 2011)

Ian Sales, J.P. Smythe and I are all sharing our fifty 'essential' science fiction books (inspired by Abebooks' Essential Science Fiction list). You can find Ian's here and James' here. The first 25 of mine (1812 - 1979) can be found here.

The rules:

• No more than one novel from each author
• No collections or anthologies
• You can only list books that you have read. 

I have excluded (but highly recommend) both Mr. Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains and Mr. Smythe's The Explorer, as well as all the finalists for this year's Kitschies.

Here we go...

26. Edward Packard's The Cave of Time (Choose Your Own Adventure #1) (1979). How convenient that the first of this series is a time travel adventure, but, really, The Cave of Time is just the token representative of this franchise's insane significance in indoctrinating the youf of many generations into science fictional narratives.

27. Thomas Disch's The Brave Little Toaster (1980). Yes, it is about a toaster. And yes, it became a (amazeballs) movie with songs about trash compactors. But also, yes, it is science fiction that's about our relationship with inanimate objects and the stuffs of life. It is about the balance between progress and nostalgic, the tension between "owner" and "owned", loyalty and slavery and, to no small degree, robots and machine sentience. Also, this song is awesome.

28. Julian May's The Saga of the Exiles (1981 - 1984). Sadly, not every selection can possess the same level of literary significance as The Brave Little Toaster. But The Saga of the Exiles is a sterling example of the Vast SF Epic. In a semi-utopian future, the malcontents and misfits throw themselves through a portal to Earth's distant past. There they find that they have company: two disgruntled species of aliens. The four book series juggles politics, adventure, psychic battles and a quest or two. A great example of SF as entertainment - made more so by the complex plot and well-developed characters.

29. Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows (1982). With apologies to Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Simon Morden's Thy Kingdom Come, I think this slim and poignant graphic novel makes the most essential of the essential post-nuclear reads. In a few short (and beautifully illustrated) pages, Mr. Briggs brings home the real horrors of the apocalypse.

50 Essential Science Fiction Novels (Part 1: 1812 - 1979)

This list arose from a conversation with Ian Sales and J.P. Smythe. We all admired Abebooks' Essential Science Fiction list, but, as is human nature, found the list problematic in completely different ways. Being gentlemen, we decided to settle this the old-fashioned way - by scampering back to our various Internet hidey-holes and writing our own lists. (Ian's is here; James' is here.)

The rules:

• No more than one novel from each author
• No collections or anthologies
• You can only list books that you have read. 

The last one is the nastiest of all, as I can't even fake it - this exercise has definitely exposed some fairly notable gaps (say... Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, Diana Wynne Jones, Octavia Butler and anyone not Anglo-American) in my reading. Oops.

I also excluded two more categories: my co-conspirators (I particularly recommend both Mr. Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains and Mr. Smythe's The Explorer) and finalists for this year's Kitschies ('cause that's a bit weird).

The term "essential" caused a bit of existential wibbling, but I finally decided on a rough sort of definition that these fifty books, as a set, had to paint some sort of picture of the best (the full spectrum of many bests) that science fiction can offer. 

Enough of the caveats, here are my first 25 picks, in chronological order. The remaining 25 will be posted tomorrow.

1. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1812). This position works both chronologically and in terms of overall ranking. If there's a single, inarguable, essential work of science fiction, here it is. And what's not to love? Brilliant character development, twisty-turny plot, cutting-edge scientific ideas, moral ambiguity, even astounding, epic action. This one has it all.

2. George Tomkyns' The Battle of Dorking (1871). One of the original "invasion literature" pieces, Mr. Tomkyns' short novel describes the invasion of a contemporary Britain by a militarily-superior Germany. It is the grandfather of many apocalyptic scenarios (as it begat Wells' The War of the Worlds) and alternate histories (as it begat through If It Had Happened Otherwise). The Battle of Dorking is also a great example of how science fiction is about the "now" and not the future. Inspired by the Franco-Prussian War, Dorking examines fears that the British may be complacent in their military and naval superiority, and the days of Empire could be on the decline...

3. Edward Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). Probably should get this out of the way early - Flatland is the closest thing I'll have to "hard SF" anywhere on the list. Ostensibly a math text (and, in all fairness, a really good one), Flatland is also a brilliant social satire, lampooning the social rigidity, classism and misogyny of the time. Also, cool illustrations.

4. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895). Mr. Wells is one of the few authors that could conceivably be on here multiple times, but with Tomkyns (above) covering off invasion scenarios, the choice is narrowed down pretty swiftly. The Time Machine uses a science fictional concept to talk about class (and the Morlock/Eloi trope has informed countless novels since then), has some fairly badass pulp adventure sequences and covers the "dying earth" scenario. This book should be essential for the harrowing final chapters alone.

New Releases: Electric Velocipede 24, reviewed by Harry Markov

Since an early age, I've always thought of reading speculative fiction as setting off on an expedition. I'd peel off the pages (or, in this case, tap the screen of my phone) and stare wide-eyed into lands outside possible realities. The setting would rush at me with intense, vivid imagery, the sounds of off-kilter cultures would swarm and swallow me, and the sentences would coil and arrest me in my place.

The first books I read, I used to re-enact in my mind. The stories would serve as stepping stones for my own imagination, and I'd picture myself as the hero of my own tale, stepping outside the lines the author had written.

Electric Velocipede #24 brings me the same sense as these first experiences with fiction - a collective of immersive landscapes that all, to some degree, draw me in.

In one sense, the stories are also united by their low-key approach. Even the boldest effort in the issue, “To Dive Into a Godling, Where Life Begins” by Jacques Barcia, has more to do with the personal implications of a character finding the "Ground Zero" - where reality became undone - rather than the greater significance of the discovery.

You have to be a fearless reader to jump into this story, because its very concept relies on you handling the antithesis of reality. At the beginning I couldn't exactly connect with where it took me, as it mainly contained maritime undertones and the (very technical) fishing for singularities. With the story's progression, more of the society revealed itself, including a subspecies of humans, the mules, which have a connection with the singularities and the Ground Zero. Although the narrative indulges with the bizarre, I adore this piece.

Review Round-up: Secret Histories

Two books that re-examine the present, in light of the past – and the future. Confused yet? I'm just getting started. Read on for looks at The decline and fall of the British Empire and Alchemy: Ancient and Modern.

The decline and fall of the British Empire - full title -  A brief account of those causes which resulted in the destruction of our late ally, together with a comparison between the British and Roman Empires, appointed for use in the national schools of Japan, Tokio, 2005 (1905) is an angry little pamphlet that, according to the press notices, created quite a stir upon publication. The anonymous author (later revealed to be Elliott E. Mills) spells out the collapse of the British Empire, with parallels to the fall of Rome, as seen through the eyes of a Japanese academic from the future: 

There is no written history of the Decline and Fall of England. A Chinese historian is reported to be engaged upon one, but he might spare himself the trouble, for, as I hinted in my Preface, it is all to be found in Gibbon. (3)

Conceptually, this is hard not to love - a great example of using a layer of speculative fiction to make a dry (and politically self-serving) essay on social policy more accessible and entertaining. The author does a good job balancing the medium with the message. Long paragraphs of historical (contemporary) fact are broken up with cheekily science-fictional footnotes, helping to identify "the author of Walden" and "newspapers of that period". The world-building is done with a sort of casual self-awareness, merely name-dropping a future in which "India has fallen to Russia, South Africa to Germany, Egypt to the Sultan [Ottoman Empire]; while Canada has taken shelter under the wings of the American Eagle and Australia has become a protectorate of the Mikado" (3).

New Releases: Channel SK1N by Jeff Noon

Jeff Noon's Channel SK1N (2012) posits an oddly believable future, one that's heavily rooted in our own media-saturated present. The author's first new novel for a decade, SK1N is a stylish post-modern gospel, depicting the transcendence of celebrities into something even more ubiquitous.

The concept (and creation) of celebrity is one of the underlying assumptions in SK1N. Manufactured icons battle for their fifteen minutes on the top of the social standings (which are carefully measured and audited). Blandly attractive talent is recruited, trained and blurred to the point where they all become interchangeable, commercial pap; each star flaring up and then fading into its successor. 

The center of the noise - or at least the focal point - is the ultimate reality show: the Pleasure Dome. The Dome holds a single person (carefully selected from a host of competitors). That person - or prisoner - then lives in total isolation, with their every thought amplified and reflected in the surface of the Dome itself. They're not just living in their own head - they're broadcasting it.

The Dome has fans (cults, even) ranging from the analytical to the shamanic, looking for meaning in the Dome's every flickering move:

Dearest viewers,
Here we meet on each side of the glass
To sizzle and purge
and plug our souls in.
To lick the screen for static
To burn our eyes with dazzle... 

Underground Reading: The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin

The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin is a staggering vision of a post-Apocalyptic world. Or, more accurately, post-post-Apocalypse. When scientists discover that the Sun is turning into a Red Giant a few billion years ahead of schedule, Earth's governments unite to find an escape from destruction. The Spaceship Faction proposes city-sized spaceships. The Earth Faction propose something even wilder: that the Earth itself be removed from orbit and slung across space.

The Earth Faction wins the debate, and an uneasy truce is forged. Enormous "Earth Engines" are bolted across the planet - huge matter-consuming fusion drives. As the world's population moves into enormous subterranean cities, the Earth is slowly stopped in its orbit, slung around the Sun at an increasingly velocity and then flung out into the reaches of space.

At least, that's the plan.

PK Interview: Jane Rogers

Jane Rogers has published eight novels - the most recent of which, The Testament of Jessie Lamb won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for The Kitschies, a rare feat of recognition from both genre and literary prize panels that places her amongst authors such as Kingsley Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood.

Her other writing awards include the Somerset Maugham Award, Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book, a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Serial, Guardian Fiction Prize runner up and an Arts Council Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jessie Lamb takes place in a world caught in the grip of an unknown virus – one that wipes out all pregnant mothers before they can bear their child to term. Although the doomsday scenario is fascinating, Jessie Lamb’s critical success stems from its compassionately written protagonist and realistic depiction of the dynamic between parents and children. 

We spoke to Ms. Rogers to gain some insight into how she approached her novel and its compelling heroine.

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Pornokitsch: What do you keep in mind when writing a teenaged protagonist? Do you approach them differently from adult characters?

Jane Rogers: To state the obvious, every character is different, and I think what I try to do is find the character’s voice (particularly for first person, like Jessie, but also for third person – the language reveals the character). So what mattered in writing Jessie was to find a teenage voice which I could hear in my head and which rang true. Once the character’s voice has come clear, I find it fairly straightforward to know what she would care about and understand, and what would be outside her ken. So no, the approach is not different from the way I approach other characters – each character is different, and age is only one difference. I guess I drew on many sources for Jessie: my own teenage years, my own children’s teenage years, the teenagers I have loved in novels and films, and so on.