Iain M. Banks - Fearsum Endjinn

Well, have just finished readingh this, my 5th Iain M. Banks novel, and delivered it back to the sad green trolleys where library books go when they get returned.

It's not one of his Culture novels, being an earthbound story with a side serving what might be called "Virtual Reality", but shares a lot of their characteristics - separate storylines featuring three or four main characters that gradually come together for the finale; an interest in aritificial means of mind expansion, and an initial threat to humanity from a rather vague source ultimately secondary to the threats its appearance pre-empts.

As ever, it is a brilliant, vibrant read, if a real headache to get into at first because of the phonetic text style speak one of the characters employs, but ultimately as with every other Banks sci fi work I've read, it has one major frustration. The ending is just a colossal anti climax that doesn't really seem to resolve anything.

It's maddening! The journey is always amazing and engrossing, but always far more interesting than the destination. I suppose that vague threats generate woolly endings, but it always disappointing from such a wonderful writer.

STORY - What Are Hooples?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/03/2013

What Are Hooples?

The warp probe sent out to Tau Ceti found the first signs of extra solar life on the fourth planet of the Tau Ceti system. The 11^th dimensional transmitter sent back instantaneous pictures of a lush, green world ripe with oceans of water and a temperate climate. The temperature was clement, and the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere was an absolute giveaway.

Life was present. But what kind of life could not be ascertained by this single rapid flyby.

Another mission was commisioned, this time with an automatic lander shaped like a bedstead with a couple of eleventh dimensional imagers upon it. Tau Ceti 2 was launched from the Geo-Synchronous ring under ion drive, until it reached beyond the orbit of mars and engaged the gravitational warping propulsion which caused the probe to surf Space Time on a series of waves. It reached the star system in barely two weeks, and sent back quantum entangled messages instantly saying it had arrived and would it be alright to deploy the lander thank you very much?

The message was returned in the affirmative, and the lander was deployed. It rode an atmsophere rich in oxygen and inonised neon that made everything glow blue-green, and settled on a small island in the middle of a purple sea of freshwater heavily laced in iodine.

Within seconds, the camera registered curious lifeforms, rounded creatures covered in thick curly brown fur, with dark black eyes showing through the upper half of the body. Short arms and legs with six fingered hands were used as with humans, and the mouth was small and “H” shaped and rather hard and horny looking, as if it was used for eating crustaceans. They regarded the camera with an unfrightened interest, and tapped out a musical rhythym on the titanium surface of the lander.

“My god!” cried one of the mission controllers. “They look like Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople!” and it was unanimously decided that our first ever stellar neighbours should be known as Hooples.

Ah the joy and hope of those naieve times. Little did we know what peril these inoffensive looking Hooples would pose to the Earth, and how devastating their first ever “tour” would prove just as soon as they mastered the eleventh dimension warping technology we had delivered to thier doorstep.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/03//13

John Wyndham - The Outward Urge

As a follow up to what I said of Asimov, and the similar "clunk-tech" sci fi writing of the 50s, I find myself writing about John Wayndham's - "The Outward Urge" - a novel essentially compirisng four novellas linked down through a family's timeline about how a putative conquest of space might work. It's another sci fi novel
I'm reading in my breaks to get myself away from the soul destroying work environment.

It is written in collaboration with a proper scientist of the time (says the blurb, although the Lucas Parkes mentioned turns out to be a pseudonym for Wyndham himself for stylistic reasons) and purports to be a serious exploration of how the nuts and bolts, and politics, of space exploration might develop through time, seen through the eyes of Britain in 1959.

"Don't expect another Day of the Triffids" warns the back cover write up, and indeed, nothing could be further from the walking plants action stingathon of that classic work. This book is a dry as dust, stiff upper lip hard sci fi work, a work of girders and inflatable domes, grind, toil, and cold war missiles.

It is a hard read. Not because of anything technical, or high concept language or anything like that, but because frankly it is so very boring. The characters are cardboard cut outs of heroic english conventionality given to the gin and pipe smoking cliches of the time, the peril isn't very exciting; and the book seems to read like a less imaginative version of Arthur C. Clarke early works written ten years earlier.

But it isn't just the writing style that's the problem. The idea that Britain would be building massive space stations in the 90s, and later landing on the moon in competition with the Russians and the Americans, must have seemed ludicrous, if patriotic, even in the late 1950s as Sputnik and Explorer were already bleeping their way through near space. The idea that space would be used essentially as a launch site for nukes might have reflected the worries of the time, but the missiles themselves, which as described sound like space borne steam engines, seem like something from Verne and a bit low tech even for HG Wells.

I wish us Brits were up there in Space, but this far fetched piece of speculation must have seemed so dated even then. It also goes to prove that what I said about living the low tech imagination of 50s sci fi, does not always hold true!

Multivac and the World of Valve-Punk

I don't know if "Valve-Punk" is a thing or not, but it's a term I increasingly mentally use to describe the short stories of the 50s golden age of Pulpy magazines, and collections like "Earth is Room Enough" by Isaac Asimov.

At the moment I only use it 'mentally' in case I get regarded as a fruitcake for using it in public.

It's an analogue world, a world of tremendous artifical intelligences that can only be accessed by dipole switch, lever and punch card. I world of spaceships that can travel faster than light, but folk can only communicate with each other using a Bakelite telphone with a far out name.

Fantastic machines exist, and no-one gives a damn about explaining how they work. They just clunk and whirr and overheat...and they just work! dammit!.

Solid state? Transistors? No thank you! Everything is vacuum tubes the size of your arm, and chunky glass valves, and things that light up, and things that chatter and hammer like a typewriter. Computers don't talk, or have screens. Like Asimov's multivac, they exisit in caverns the size of a city, are full of people working within them - shades of men working within the brains of greater men in Olaf Stapeldon - and get on with the serious business of deciding elections results from the thoughts of just a single man, or working out just exactly why humans have a sense of humour.

The answer is unspoken, merely spat out on rolls of ticker tape.

How I love the idea of this clunking, whirring non-digital world where we can yet reach the stars...

Ray Bradbury - The Silver Locusts

This shift, I've been getting through my elegant, silver be-covered 1960s paperback of The Silver Locusts, a 1950 Ray Bradbury novel that seems to have been collated out of a serial, or collection of short stories, from Pulps like Amazing Stories.

I've not finished it yet, it is hard to get a proper reading stint in when you're surrounded by loud folk whose idea of a cultural decision is whether to watch "Top Gear" on Dave or Dave Ja Vu. But after a sticky start where the rather "folksy" language somewhat bogged me down, I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the story by the dreamlike construction and western pioneer fairytale atmosphere.

The chapter where someone constructs "The House of Usher" on Mars, and populates it with double bluff calling robot doppelgangers, is an absolute standalone standout. The Martians themselves, in contrast with the zippered green suits and antennae creatures of the sci fi of the times, are never truly revealed in themselves - they exist only as delusions of loss and desire in the humans that see them.

Think of the alien manifestations in Carl Sagan's "Contact", and The Gelf of Red Dwarf, and no doubt many more besides, and you think of the apparent influence of this tale. I couldn't also help but think of the reports of UFO encounters described as "High Strangeness", which again this novel seems to predict compared with the friendly Adamski "Nordic" Extraterrestrials, or on the other hand the terrifying Hopkinsville Goblins found in reports of the time.

Better known in the US as The Martian Chronicles, a big budget TV miniseries was made that I've never seen, but attracted derisory reviews. I hope to track it down soon.

The Mad Death and Urban Foxes

The fact that baby eating Urban Foxes are in the news at the moment immediately made me think of the 1981 BBC TV Rabies drama "The Mad Death" - see clip above - where foxes were involved in spreading an outbreak of Rabies throughout the British Isles.

Never mind babies having their fingers bitten, this TV show showed in gory glory the real chaos foxes can cause. This poor infected Alsation in the clip, foaming mouth spreading diseased saliva in front of the faces of terrified children and shoppers, was just one victim.

Any of the humans that got infected started frothing at the mouth like they'd been eating Remegel filled with Ariel Automatic, but this was the least terrifying part of the deal. Violent hallucinations followed, involving the insane faces of foxes, naked women with golden foxes eyes for navels, and worst of all, the constant sense that you were drowning, even in your own saliva. Hydrophobia. Ugh and double ugh.

To a ten year old boy, the whole thing was pant shittingly scary. Every trip abroad from then on involved nervous scouting for any sign of mangy looking dogs or cats. Not even that, any animal was potential death on four legs; an inquisitive German Shephard in a french town called Josselin scared me so badly I vowed to my parents I'd never visit there again.

And so far I haven't.

So remember this TV show when you next read about babies being attacked by foxes. Cute Mr Fox isn't just walking infanticide; he's a chicken killing bio warfare weapon of foamy mouthed mass destruction to which the only solution is a vulpine final one...and no doubt the chaps in red jackets on horseback will be calling for just that.

Memories of the Space 1999 Eagle

An image of my childhood, the classic toy Eagle transporter from Space 1999. At home in Scotland, I used to have one of these in our home up on the hill, overlooking the Bowling Green and the museum, and the long lawn me and the Murray boys used to play golf on with little plastic clubs and balls.

I used to hide in the strange cupboard under the stairs that didn't have a door, rather a maroon velveteen curtain, and make whooshing noises as I pretended to be Commander Koening or that Aussie guy called Alan who was always my favourite. Even then, I was a childhood who spent a lot of time looking inwards rather than out, although I had a fair few friends.

I always remember the episode where they thought they had returned to Earth, only it was an illusion placed in their minds by these blobby looking aliens that looked like the ones in "It Came from Outer Space".

Tragedy finally occurred when I made a high speed release of the transporter pod once too often, and I broke the release mechanism. The pod probably flew off behind the dusters and retro carpet sweeper, never to be found again, and the now rather skeletal looking spaceship ceased to appeal to me. It just didn't feel right.

Alas, like many things I owned in childhood, it would probably be worth a fortune now if I still had it in good nick...