From the Sublime to Something Else

Many are the joys of working in a library at a university with an excellent music school. You meet the most interesting music. This month I discovered a sublimely beautiful CD of Irish songs. It's Caoineadh na Maighdine/The Virgin's Lament: Irish music ranging from a pagan keen – a lament for the dead – to Latin plainchant and medieval Passion ballads to a traditional Christmas carol; variously sung in Gaelic, Latin and English by soprano Noirin Ni Riain and the Benedictine monks of Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick. Noirin Ni Riain sounds more like an angel than anything on the mortal side of hammered dulcimers. The singing of the monks is beautiful in a very different way. One voice has a slight rough edge that makes his song sound incredibly real.

The good Benedictine brothers' involvement in a CD containing pagan musical elements, particularly a keen, comes as a bit of a surprise. My quick research indicates that the Roman Catholic Church at one time outlawed the keens of Ireland. On the other hand, the Roman Church does sometimes change its mind, eventually (see: Galileo) and does sometimes tolerate the envelope of the permissible being pushed (see: Fr. Andrew Greeley, who's not only still frocked but doing brisk business from his Website.)

Then this week I heard about a CD performed by the Brotherhood of St. Gregory Choir. This CD is Gregorian chant (how wonderful) settings of modern music (how remarkable.)

To be exact, it's Gregorian chant settings of songs of Elvis Presley (!!)

Yet doesn't seem to be parody. As far as I can find out, the Brotherhood of St. Gregory is an Episcopalian religious community – one with a really good Gregorian choir. I don't know what Gregorian Chant Elvis sounds like. Someone has it checked out. As soon as I catch it back in the library, I've got to hear this one. Among the tunes soberly detailed in the CD's bibliographic record are Heartbreak Hotel, Stuck On You, Love Me Tender, and Can't Help Falling in Love.

And on that note, Happy Valentine's Day.

Where have you gone, Neil Armstrong?

At Ballardian, Simon Sellars has a great examination of the Lisa Nowak story in the context of J. G. Ballard's Cape Canaveral grounded astronaut stories. Quoting from a footnote in The Atrocity Exhibition:

“Little information has been released about the psychological effects of space travel, both on the astronauts and the the public at large. Over the years NASA spokesmen have even denied that the astronauts dream at all during their space flights. But it is clear from the subsequently troubled careers of many of the astronauts (Armstrong, probably the only man for whom the 20th century will be remembered 50,000 years from now, refuses to discuss the moon-landing) that they suffered severe psychological damage.”

Check it out, then go devour some of those amazing stories if you haven't already.

I'm Robert Heinlein

Yeah, right. Go tell me another one.

I am: Robert A. Heinlein Beginning with technological action stories and progressing to epics with religious overtones, this take-no-prisoners writer racked up some huge sales numbers.

Which science fiction writer are you?

What is it exactly about the interwebs that compels people to code up a seemingly endless stream of these stunningly arbitrary surveys? For that matter, why do we continue to fill them out even though we know they'll be wildly inaccurate at best? The poll above gives readers the various options of being--aside from Heinlein--Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ayn Rand, Ursula K LeGuin... and none of the justifications given for each selection are particularly convincing. I don't write like Heinlein any more than I write like LeGuin, but that doesn't mean I don't greatly admire and enjoy their writing. So with that in mind, I present to you my own anti-survey. There are no questions to answer--just a list of the contributors to No Fear of the Future and flimsy justification for their being included on this list. You simply pick out the one you like best and post it on your own blog with a link back here, plain and simple. Everyone wins!

Which No Fear of the Future writer are you?

You are...

Zoran Živković Your European origins are both stylish and mysterious. Were you not a writer, you'd certainly be a jet-setting international jewel thief. As it is, your Eastern European magical realism is the toast of the literary set, even though many of your fans haven't been able to find most of your work. When they do make it into U.S. bookstores, your works are always shelved in the "European Fiction" or "Translastions" sections, since those are safely removed from the genre ghetto.

Jess Nevins Your knowledge base is enormous--there is nothing genre-related, be it 18th century pulps, Silver Age comics or modern dance interpretations of Joanna Russ' The Female Man--that you can't discuss in dissertation-level detail. You actually view the nickname "Brainiac" as an insult, as the Coluans have misfired with that honorific so many times you consider it tainted.

Alexis Glynn Latner Despite your reputation as a purveyor of Hard SF, you do not have rivets protruding from your head. However, rivets do make up the keys on your keyboard at home. Most of your writing is short form, but you do write the occasional novel in hopes of striking it rich so you can cash it all in on a fleet of solar-powered sailplanes.

Stephen Dedman You have better hair than anyone else on this list. There are rumors that your hair is the Sampson-like source of your creative output, but that's just jealousy talking. In reality, all the disturbing stories about vampire children and deadly Asian mythological creatures come from your endless globetrotting and absorption of myriad cultures you encounter. In fact, because of your travels you could be a suave international jewel thief. The only thing stopping you, however, is your Australian origin. Seriously, name one famous Australian jewel thief.

Chris Nakashima-Brown A guerrilla avant-pop social commentator, you discourage people from describing your wit as "drier than the Sahara" to protest the growing environmental exploitation of the African continent by international conglomerates with little regard to the socio-political instability that threatens the livelihood of small-scale plantain farmers. Bloggers really, really like you.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke You try to develop ideas that are beyond the grasp of your feeble skills and understanding. Your plotting is weak. Your characterization is non-existent. You aren't funny. You do, however, have some skill at crafting alcoholic beverages. Have you considered a job in Hollywood?

Post-Dramatic Stress Syndrome

One can't debate the Master Encyclopedist regarding the inherent imaginative wonder of the marginal fantastics of the 1930s. But in the gap between Six-Gun Gorilla and C.S.I. lies a grittier pulp territory that to me feels more germane to these times: the genre of Men's Adventure.



No doubt, rediscovering the inventory of forgotten 1930s heroes has the wondrous qualities of a naturally occurring Borgesian miscellany, spinning our eyeballs with its wacky intersections of earnest G-Man action and unbounded juvenile imagination. But the reconfigured manifestation of American pulp that incubated during World War II persists as a vivid, if subtextual, presence in contemporary life. You can see it on the news every night, lurking behind the taciturn visages of the grey-haired postmodern Winston Churchill simulacra that stream geopolitical platitudes from their Beltway podia, every work subtly laced with a view of reality framed by a weaning on stories told by men who'd seen war firsthand. You can bet young Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney internalized their fair share of black and white war stories.



As the dust settled from WWII, mainstream narratives of adventure were repurposed to work out the collective experience of a world at war. You can see the germ of the thing in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in which three demobilized servicemen return to their archetypal Midwestern hometown. Shell-shocked war hero Dana Andrews is back to the zero state he left as a drug store soda jerk, gentle high school quarterback Harold Russell returns to his adorable fiancee with hooks for hands, and crypto-bourgeois banker Fredric March is back at the loan desk with a heightened penchant for the hard stuff and an un-businesslike disinclination to turn down fellow vets' requests for credit. A seminal cultural meta-theme for the next twenty years is introduced, as the unspoken savagery of the experience of combat infiltrates the vanilla milkshake social myths of American culture. In its wake, the subtext of every film becomes film noir.



If you look for the indirect influence of WWII in the fictive American media of the late 40s through the mid-60s, it's near ubiquitous, lurking in eyes of the adult male characters in every sitcom and sci-fi B. They have seen things you will never see.



In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell brilliantly elucidated the extent to which the English experience of World War I shaped the twentieth century. In the biographical Wartime, he explored similar things in the American experience of WWII, without the same wider revelatory insights. Maybe because his focus on mainstream cultural product missed the real action?



In contemporary popular culture, few Americans have escaped the repetitive hammering of Greatest Generation myths by the tag team of Steven Spielberg and Stephen F. Ambrose. D-Day, the Good War...we get it. All these Tom Hanks heroics are really a propagandistic sideshow to the real action -- the darker low-budget cultural artifacts that revel in the hidden but imminent world of human barbarity.



Sweat, blood, poontang, torture, and war with nature. The real recipe for all-American fun in the age of Empire.



The genre has been well documented recently by Adam Parfrey in "It's a Man's World" and Max Allan Collins et al in Taschen's "Men's Adventure Magazines." The men's adventure mags married the elements of 1930s pulps -- "mutant Chinks and Japs, vicious enemies of America, spear-chucking, head-collecting savages and damsels in distress saved at the last second by heroic white men" -- with "true story" threads concerning real-world barbarity and violence, albeit often embellished or invented. "The sweats" were produced by creators of "the armpit school," who developed such richly developed sub-genres as the "animal nibbler," "Sintown epics," "prison breakouts," "ingenious G.I. manufactured contraptions," "revenge trackdown," "death treks," and the sadistic "leg shacklers" with their overt sex tortures, "Nazi/Jap/Commie/Cuban style."



Every man a putative Conan, struggling to prevail to live the next day in a savage world of craven human barbarity, sadistic civilizations, and predatory nature waiting for its opportunity to reassert itself. Welcome to the American century (1941-20??), can I get you a drink?



Though consigned to the back racks, these characters and their narratives showed up all over the place in the mainstream media, with the colors a bit more subdued. While the men's adventure mags petered out after the Summer of Love, their archetypes fought their way across the screen in a dozen Charlton Heston apocalypses and their myriad kin, and informed the demeanor of a hundred cathode ray 70s lawmen. The cultural impact of enlisting a large chunk of a society's male population to fight imperial wars has serious legs. And when those soldiers are reintroduced to the society as civilians, the cynical revelations of their experiences spread through the culture, notwithstanding the taciturn emotional reservation of that Great Uncle who doesn't want to talk about the War.



After Nam, the American Ronin take on a more addled aspect -- the Bruce Dern visage of the vet as hallucinatory sniper. Maybe because, in a more liberal media culture, they no longer have lurid underground media to slake their forbidden thirst to explore their experiences of The Horror, these stone-eyed antiheroes work it out on our soundstage alter egos, the civilians walking the streets transformed into the Gooks of their waking nightmares. Hollywood product from 1975 to 1985 had no better explanation for outbursts of random violence than: "Vietnam Flashback." David Morrell's Rambo had a healthy dose of "weasels ripped my flesh," and the Sylvester Stallone version practically mainlined the stuff. To say nothing of Chuck Norris' Bo Gritz routine, Soldier of Fortune magazine's mujahideen travelogues, and all the other P.O.W./M.I.A. adventures that populated the 80s. (And in a parallel realm, the urban street reveals the stories of a generation of African-Americans devastated by the drug wars.)



Fast forward to the present. As discussed last week on NPR's "On the Media," the myths of returning soldiers being spit on by protesters are back, spooling up the meme for its latest re-configuration. Falluja flashback? Other signs are there, like http://nowthatsfuckedup.com, the underground site where returnees from the front lines of the War on Terror gain admittance by swapping their most horrific photos of wartime atrocities and the occasional z-grade amateur porn, complete with captions that make Rotten.com look like a Disney idea of daring. Bring on the warporn.



One expects we needn't wait long for the GWOT-Vet archetype to emerge in the mass media. His base prototype is already swirling around out there in the narrative ether like Deadman, waiting for new shells to appropriate. What will the thousand-mile stare of the antihero back from the front look like channeled through YouTube?



(Note: The 1977 Newsweek cover and Poseidon Adventure poster are both illustrations by Mort Künstler -- can you tell which of the men's adventure covers are his?)

1947 v. 1933

Hey, Jess: I don't know about Gil Grissom , but I think this guy could handle your apes, no matter how well-armed.

Check back later for a more detailed discussion of the memic persistence of the Men's Adventure pulps and weird heroes possessed by the ghosts of World War II.

Back in my day, we had *really* fantastic stories.

In many ways this is the Golden Age of popular culture, if only because so much of our popcult past is now available. When clips of Sapphire and Steel and fan-made trailers for Quatermass episodes are accessible at the click of a mouse, and when formerly unfindable rarities (and that’s putting it nicely) like Anthony Skene’s Monsieur Zenith the Albino and George Brewer’s The Witch of Ravensworth can be easily and affordably purchased, what else can we call this era?

And yet, and yet.

It can be (and has been) argued that the war between the geeks and the mundanes is over, that we’ve won, that science fiction (and more generally, the fantastic) has conquered the mainstream. And certainly the most popular television shows--American Idol, Grey’s Anatomy, the various CSI iterations, and of course Heroes–have science fictional elements to them. But with the sole exception of the much-beloved (and rightly so) Hiro Nakamura, the science fiction and fantastic available now is, for the most part, of the grim, serious, and ultimately dreary variety.

Which is why–and I’m not saying Kristine Kathryn Rusch is right, because she’s not–-the Aughts are not the best years for lovers of the science fictional and the fantastic. No, that title goes to the 1930s, which were in fact the greatest decade in the history of popular culture.

Don’t believe me?

The 1930s gave us the following:

In The Startler, Ray Mon Hai, the white South Seas Tarzan-alike, who fought evil while riding on the back of Gooloo, his intelligent pet shark.



On the radio show Nemesis, Inc, a female private detective who took her marching orders, via a filter microphone, from her dead father, in a Charlie-in-Charlie's Angels arrangement. (Only it didn't, y'know, suck).

In Spain, a "pulp americano" treated readers to the sheriff of an Arizona town fighting the forces of Fu Manchu, capturing what appears to have been Captain Nemo's Nautilus (while clad in ten gallon hat and chaps), and then, after being killed, rising from the grave to continue fighting crime, this time letting his Chinese assistant take the lead.



In the heldromans, the German version of the pulps, several authors, working for a variety of publishers, decided to create a shared pulp world (and what's more, seem not to have told their publishers about it), so that, throughout most of the decade (until the Nazis put the boot on the neck of the industry), you could demonstrate, via published crossovers, that everyone from Captain Mors, Der Luftpirat to Sun Koh, the Nazi Doc Savage, existed in the same world.



In Lisbon, Reinaldo Ferreira, the Lester Dent of Portuguese pulps, wrote a series of stories about a Portuguese aviator who went a.w.o.l. from the Spanish Foreign Legion so he could fight for Abd el Krim and the Rif rebels. The aviator was aided by his 16-year-old Japanese copilot, who was also the aviator's lover. Later, the aviator fought the international crime syndicate, "Trust Z," the Trust's diabolical leader, Dr. Xavier Montanha, and Montanha's gorilla assassins.



Graphic Arts, of Minneapolis, gave us the pulp Vice-Squad Detective, which can be fairly described (it's how I described it for McFarland) as a "Spicy weird menace mystery pulp," which surely is a good example of the axiom that too much is too much, but way too much is just enough.



In Argosy, Will McMorrow described the adventures of Terry Kilroe, industrial efficiency expert, whose job is curing sick businesses: "his is the job of the expert diagnostician, the trouble-shooter, the minute-man, called in to combat waste and carelessness and crooked dealing and the vagaries of human nature. He does not think in digits."

And, most gloriously, the single greatest achievement of humanity:



A baby gorilla is caught in Africa and brought to the United States. In Colorado the baby gorilla is sold to Johnson, a prospector. Johnson is a kind man and treats the gorilla well, naming him "O'Neil" and feeding and raising him. O’Neil grows up to love Johnson. Johnson teaches O’Neil how to dig, fetch firewood, haul up buckets of water, cook, clean, and load and fire a revolver. Unfortunately, Johnson is murdered for what he knows about "the great motherlode." When O’Neil finds Johnson’s body, he swears revenge. O’Neil straps on a bandolier and two six-shooters and begins tracking the murderers across a hundred miles of Colorado mountains and badlands. He picks them off one by one, meanwhile discovering a talent for holding up stagecoaches and using them to chase fleeing gunmen. The death of Johnson is ultimately avenged by O'Neil, better known as...Six-Gun Gorilla!

Now, be honest. Which would you rather watch and read: the ritual humiliation that is American Idol, the celebration of bad writing, bad acting, and appallingly unlikable characters that is Grey's Anatomy, and the fetishistic investigation porn of CSI, or stories about chimpanzees enforcing the law on the streets of London, zombie sheriffs, and dead men telling their daughters about what their next case is going to be?

Thought so.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the superiority of the 1930s.

(Information on all of these characters and 4500+ more will be found in my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, due out in Fall 2008 from MonkeyBrain Books).

Lost Books, Part I: Distress, by Greg Egan

Many writers have written reviews of non-existent books. This irregular feature will be a slight variation on that: I'll be reviewing books that did exist, but are out of print - usually , though not invariably, undeservedly so.

As a part-time genre specialist bookpimp, one of the things that most frustrates me is having to tell people that a good book is unavailable, except through second-hand booksellers (this is especially frustrating when it's one of my own novels). Conversely, one of the great delights is when one of these books comes back into print: I'm particularly grateful to Gollancz for their Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks series, but I've also been glad to see George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon, and Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After reappear. (Emma Bull's War for the Oaks recently came out in A-format paperback, though in a horrible cover, but it seems to have vanished again.)

I'm reviewing these books in the very faint hope that it may inspire someone to reprint them, or at least motivate readers to look for them - but mostly, I suspect, I'm just venting my frustration.

Aptly, the first of these books is called Distress.

Greg Egan has been hailed as 'One of the genre's great ideas men' by no less an authority than The Times (the British version), which is undeniably accurate if rather faint praise. True, most of the Egan stories I've read are driven by strong ideas, rolling towards some overwhelming question. Certainly, he is generous, even profligate when it comes to ideas, and Distress in particular is crammed with brilliant inventions and discussions on a huge range of subjects: biotechnology, international politics, quantum physics, sex and gender, and the nature of reality. And yes, it is these ideas that make his work so distinctive, and very likely it will be the ideas that draw you in and the ideas that you remember long after finishing the story. But at his best, Greg Egan is also as skilled and powerful a literary craftsman as any other in the genre.

The first chapter, which begins 'All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him.', contains more ideas than many sf novels. Its narrator, Andrew Worth, is a science journalist in a world populated with ignorance cultists, voluntary autists, and gender migrants. Having finished the 'frankenscience' series Junk DNA, he turns down an offer to tape a show on the newly endemic Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome (a.k.a Distress), to compile a profile of quantum physicist Violet Mosala, currently at work on a Theory of Everything, or TOE. Worth leaves Sydney and his marriage (both in ruins), and travels to Stateless, a utopian anarchy on an island constructed with pirated biotech. Plots against both Mosala and Stateless escalate as the novel heads towards an astonishing climax.

Worth, though occasionally reduced to a passive observer in some of the more didactic scenes (he is, after all, a journalist, and a specialist in biotech rather than physics or politics) as well as much of the action, is a well-rounded character with his own opinions and motivation. Mosala is a welcome example of a fictional sane scientist, and the asex Akili Kuwale is a masterpiece of sf characterization.

Fascinating yet accessible, and tightly written (apart from a brief rant about Australian stereotypes) with plenty of action amid the scientific and political discussions, Distress is my favourite of Egan's novels. Distressingly, it is also out of print. If you can't find a copy, console yourself with his novel Teranesia, or one of his excellent short fiction collections.