peter young’s listopia

'Bart Somers' was a pseudonym for the prolific comics creator Gardner F. Fox who also penned over a hundred skiffy novels, and the 'Commander Craig' series was intended to be a string of 'Perry Rhodan'-like adventures about the fix-it guy to end all fix-it guys in humanity's vast Empire in space. The series ran to a total of, um, just two books. It's easy to see why.

 

8) Bart Somers (Gardner F. Fox), Beyond the Black Enigma, 1965
The all-heroic Commander Craig is dispatched to solve the riddle of the Black Enigma, an expanding dark area of space that seems to be swallowing up space fleets and entire solar systems. Once inside, he discovers an all-powerful computer that has devised its own way of enslaving a group of human survivors, and within the Enigma there's also some puzzling travel between past, present and future times that I never really figured out. This is a fairly standard space adventure, but the huge Star Trek-like infodump at the end is where the story should actually have begun. It's stodgy and slow, with little fun to be had, and overall has very little to recommend it. Okay, make that nothing.

9) Bart Somers (Gardner F. Fox), Abandon Galaxy!, 1967
As a fan of pulp SF – one who's fully aware that precisely 90% of it is crap – I simply can't resist a title like this. It's a big oversell, of course: there are no galaxies being abandoned anywhere nor, as the blurb offers, any threat of the universe being blown up, just the end of the world for a hedonistic little Pleasure Planet in the back end of nowhere. There's far more of a James Bond feel to this caper and Fox's writing is livelier than in Enigma, as if he knew he'd previously got the tone all wrong and had to perk things up this time around. Unfortunately he went a bit overboard in the other direction, sacrificing believability for over-the-top thrills and unashamedly engaging his readers' teenage hormones, and in going for true 'Golden Age' status (in the Peter Graham sense) he rendered it all a tad trite. But it never takes itself seriously – even the villains are comically called the 'League Of Outer-Space Thieves' – L.O.O.T. for short. Fox tried to be as risqué and suggestive as he could get away with, but if he'd played it more for laughs he might have had a winner on his hands.

40) Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore), The Far Reality, 1946
This is often described as the companion novel to Tomorrow and Tomorrow, although it was written a year earlier. The high tension surrounding the plot is certainly comparable: a fractious world embroiled in a war between Europe and the US – where all major cities have had to relocate to a mile underground – and a hallucinating American under pressure to solve an impossible problem involving the enemy's weapons that seem to rely on the physical application of variable truth. And then there are the matters of a mysterious equation that drives mad anyone who tries to solve it, and a number of extra-temporal domes that have appeared across the US. On the whole I'd say this was a more accomplished novel than Tomorrow largely because Kuttner and Moore gave themselves a whole host of concepts to juggle with and they're jigsawed together in a rather clever manner; the downside to this is the feeling that readers are given little room to piece it together for themselves while the story races to its complex resolution. This is also the only SF story I know of that applies the concepts of fairy chess to its plot – indeed this novel's original title was The Fairy Chessmen. Not a bad book for ideas, but the functionality of the writing and the absence of much characterisation left me a little cold.

17) Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, 1973  ( RE-READ )
This month's choice for my wander through the funniest books ever written was something I reckoned was certainly in that zone when I read it in the early 1980s, and it also predates the ascendancy of Douglas Adams by five years. There are definite parallels too between Star Smashers and Hitchhiker's, but they also differ largely in accordance with my not-quite-unshakeable belief that while the best American comedies are about self-improvement, the best British comedies are about being trapped; both books are emblematic of spoofing SF in idiosyncratically American and British ways to take readers on improbable galactic adventures specifically designed to poke fun at the genre. I have to say, when Harry Harrison is on form his best jokes are still just as funny as the best of Douglas Adams's, but he just doesn't get the same readership. This adventure has all-round brilliant and handsome American college kids Jerry and Chuck, along with their pointless girlfriend Sally and their black janitor John, head out into the galaxy after discovering that the chemical composition of a piece of home-made cheddar cheese could also double as an interstellar drive when rigged up to their private 747. It inevitably turns into a rather daft galaxy-wide caper of good vs. evil and you sometimes have to read closely for Harrison's wittiest gags – there are certainly some excellent ones more subtle than his clever and increasingly ridiculous explanations as to why all aliens happen to speak English. Even the serious swipes at racism and sexual stereotyping are sugar-coated, and if it's ridiculously self-indulgent to the point of making readers abandon their disbelief wholesale this is still a very okay book.

Battlefield Earth, 2000, USA   DIRECTED BY ROGER CHRISTIAN
When he wrote Battlefield Earth in 1982 L. Ron Hubbard said he knew he would "be accused of not including any of my serious work [Scientology] in this book, but I have just put on my professional writer's hat and written a science fiction novel." Then, exposing a masochistic streak, Dave Langford dutifully read the book So We Don't Have To (so I haven't). Inevitably, serious film critics with no particular love for a manufactured science fictional religion/cult surrounded the announcement of this film like hounds baying for blood even before it went into production, then have been congratulating themselves ever since on killing off the monster at birth. It had that Hollywood 'smell of death' about it, and they were right, of course, this is a pretty dire movie and best left forgotten, though there have been worse contemporary films made with smaller budgets that at least one remembers with some affection. This has none of that appeal, at least not yet; I suspect it may turn out to be the cult Plan 9 From Outer Space of this generation, though that may be an insult to the memory of Ed Wood. Battlefield Earth's director Roger Christian, not a Scientologist, had to quickly mount a defence which amounted to little more than "how dare they call my film a turkey", though he was right in saying it should be taken for what it is without any excess baggage informing our prejudices, much as we would watch a film with both a Jewish screenwriter and producer without crying "Judaism!". I avoided it when it came out, though I watched this now because it's good to crawl out of your comfort zone once in a while: eight years on it's hard to watch objectively without the clamour of its universal panning ringing in your ears – my favourite put-down is from Richard Roeper who placed it at number 5 on his list of "40 movies that linger in the back chambers of my memory vault like a plate of cheese left behind a radiator in a fleabag hotel."

If you do take it for what it is, it's a poorly realised far-future skiffy adventure, a colourful piece of pulp SF filmed with every single shot dutch-angled like a comic book. When the book was first written, John Travolta wanted to make the movie and star as Johnny Goodboy, the young hero, but could get no investors to back the project. When the movie was eventually made he was too old to play the part and instead opted to play the villain, Terl. Travolta is awful – but is he being ironic? – and part of anyone's reason for watching it now is to see how awful he really is (Get Shorty, at the other extreme, will always serve to show what he can do really well). Much of Patrick Tatopoulos's production design gets hidden behind the cheap effects instead of being shown off to proper advantage, but then even after just fifteen minutes it really is hard to care at all what happens to anyone or anything. It's hard to say why, except that maybe you never get under anyone's skin, there is too much emphasis on superficialities. Apart from Hubbard's hatred for psychoanalysts remaining as the name of the alien overlords, the Psychlos, I really couldn't detect anything subliminally Scientological in this at all. Hence this is not nearly as controversial a film as some made it out to be, which now leaves me doubly disappointed for having wasted two precious hours with only this short review to show for it. And this film was only the first half of the book.

37) Joseph Millard, The Gods Hate Kansas, 1964
Invisible aliens arrive in meteorites that crash in Kansas, turn scientists into zombies who are then transported to the moon as slave labour to fix their spaceship, and zombified female scientist is rescued by non-zombified boyfriend. This first appeared in Startling Stories more than twenty years earlier in 1941, is pure pulp now, and provides a case study in how spectacular titles can make weak stories look like good books while giving them extra shelf-life too: this was later filmed as They Came From Beyond Space, and this first edition cover has since become something of a pulp icon.

29) Harold M. Sherman, The Green Man, 1946
I found this piece of mid-century pseudo-SF via a local dealer in rare books. It's about a messiah-like alien from the other side of the Milky Way who arrives in Hollywood in a cigar-shaped UFO with a message for humanity. It first appeared in Amazing Stories in October 1946, at a time when the magazine was edited by the UFO-obsessed Ray Palmer. A novel like this only makes sense contextually if you can visualise it in the era from which it comes, hence it's best imagined as a 1940s black-and-white TV comedy caper; indeed it was probably written with that kind of thing in mind, otherwise it's one of those pulps that are best left to decompose further beneath several more decades of 'real' science fiction. Sherman, a prolific author of pseudo-science and self-help books, also wrote a sequel The Green Man Returns, which I will not be reading.

20) J.T. M'Intosh, World Out Of Mind, 1953
An alien hostile takeover of Earth is planned by placing 50,000 espionage agents in strategically important positions, including the President of the United States. It goes where you expect it to, taking a hundred pages to warm up after which the action is over in the next sixty-five, with a final battle of Independence Day proportions condensed to just ten pages. Two curious aspects: the world population takes voluntary intelligence tests, with the lowest level coded Brown and the highest White – I hope this wasn't intentionally racist – also in that nine years after publication in 1953, the events depicted in the closing chapters uncannily resemble the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

75) Howard Fast, A Touch of Infinity, 1974
One wouldn't normally associate the late Howard Fast with SF, his most famous Roman novel Spartacus later being turned into the 1960 film by Stanley Kubrick, but in his short preface to this collection he says the first story he ever sold was SF and that he always found it to be "the best means of saying what I want to say". Many of these stories lean more towards fantasy, and I don't know what other SF he had written but he had a knack, certainly, as well as particular kind of nudge-and-a-wink wit, and a way of concluding his short stories in a very unexpected but also, somehow, logical fashion. In some settings he was clearly writing with a grin while at others he comes across with deadly seriousness, and he usually talks to the reader with the ease of a good narrator. Enjoyable and light, but also sometimes surprisingly intense.

23) Philip K. Dick, Dr. Futurity, 1960
An awkward time travel tale that also shows PKD really didn't do adventure tales very well, and the characterisation is minimal at best. A doctor gets flung forwards then backwards in time, caught up in a plan to prevent the European incursion into North America in the sixteenth century. Unmemorable and far too convoluted for my personal liking.

Mike Resnick, The Soul Eater, 1981
Resnick is a choice for one of this year's "SF authors I wish to know more about", so I've begun with one of his first books under his own name, The Soul Eater (and will move on towards his much-praised Kirinyaga). It's a straight ahead tale of the hunt for an elusive beast that inhabits interstellar space and what that pursuit does to the hunter, drawing on both Moby-Dick and the legend of the Flying Dutchman for inspiration. Resnick's sense of fun is apparent and the protagonist is somewhat predictable though two other characters, one of them alien, are particularly well-defined by their dialogue. An adequate enough novel.