A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury produces particularly thin and rather poor names for his Hollywood altar egoes.  There’s the stop motion animator Roy Holdstrom and the director Fritz Wong, who are based on Bradbury's friends Ray Harryhausen and Fritz Lang — the latter combined with James Wong Howe.  Another character, the autograph collector Clarence, can be read as an alternate autobiographical image of Bradbury, who as a young person hung about outside Hollywood studios for glimpses of movie stars.  It's a crazy gang, in a crazy business, in a poetic, Gothic and mysterious crazy town called Hollywood.

The satire of Hollywood is difficult to access in A Graveyard for Lunatics, possibly because Bradbury is too close to his subject matter, and feels a tremendous love for it.  Sure, we all love the movies and love collecting trivia and hearing Hollywood tales, but most of us can look at the bigger picture and see what a dumb farce the business is.  That’s a crucial word that — business — because it proves that Hollywood is making productions — products — for business reasons, and not for artistic reasons.

I feel that Bradbury really did love Hollywood, and to take it away would have left him bereft.  A Graveyard for Lunatics is set in 1954, when Bradbury was working as a writer at a Hollywood motion picture studio — in A Graveyard for Lunatics it’s called Maximus Films — and there he helped create such masterpieces as It Came from Outer Space, King of Kings, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Now, when I picked up A Graveyard for Lunatics I didn’t know that it was Part Two of a set of three mystery books, being Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let’s All Kill Constance — but I don’t think reading these out of order is too much of a problem, it certainly didn’t bother me although in retrospect I would have probably wanted to do these in the correct order.

For a hook, we got?  On Halloween night, the Bradbury character sees a dead man on the wall that separates the studio from the neighbouring cemetery, and he finds that it is the body of the former leader of the studio, dead now for twenty years.  Then he notices that the body isn’t actually real, and that it’s a dummy — and from there we enter a maze of lies, nostalgia and deceit that the studio has held on to for decades.  There have been murders aplenty, secrets are revealed, and there is at least one actual monster that haunts the movie sets.

Although he mostly wrote what we now class as SF, Ray Bradbury’s storytelling is suited to the mystery genre.  He can drag the reader pretty far in to the ghastly depths with those sharp claws of his, although on its ground level, the writing can be a little disjointed and you have to concentrate hard to keep up at times.
Ray Bradbury started writing in pulp science-fiction magazines in the 1940s, and in The Martian Chronicles (1950) he offered the colonisation of Mars in the 21st Century as a retelling of the frontier style American stories that are always popular, while getting in some great commentary concerning the destruction of Native Americans, creating an elegiac book in a way.  

By the mid-'50s, Bradbury’s stories were appearing in Esquire, and Gilbert Highet had called him "the finest living writer of fantastic fiction".  Bradbury was in the 1950s a rising star in film writing also, working on projects including "It Came From Outer Space" to John Huston's "Moby Dick."

A Graveyard for Lunatics is a kind of nostalgia trip for Bradbury,  and he describes both the Hollywood he knew and aspired to as a kid and the Hollywood he came to work in.  The book is without mercy shown, a collision of the two.

Out of this rises a tall tale, a true rendering of the Hollywood Gothic style, in which Bradbury's unnamed narrator, whose biography parallels Bradbury's own, meets many wild characters including Stanislau Groc, the makeup artist responsible for embalming Lenin, and a guy called J.C., a philandering alcoholic who’s played Christ in so many films that he has permanently adopted the role.  Bradbury’s moody poetic style is also to the fore, as he describes the last dying momentray glow of the great studios of yore:

Late at night a motion-picture studio talks to itself. If you move along the dark alleys past the buildings where the editing rooms on the top floors whisper and bray and roar and snack-chatter until two or three or four in the morning, you hear chariots rushing by in the air . . . or Niagara pouring itself down the studio towers into the film vaults . . . the night people keep working these shadowed hours because they prefer the company of Moviolas and flicker-moth screens and close-up lovers to the people stranded at noonday, stunned by reality outside the walls. It is a long-after-midnight collision of buried voices and lost musics caught in a time cloud between buildings, released from high open doors or windows while the shadows of the cutter-editors loom on the pale ceilings bent over enchantments . . .

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Strangers by Gardner Dozios

This is a book about alien sex, and concerns among greater themes, marriage rites and emotions. Perhaps it’s just a basic allegory of the ill-fated lovers type; but it seems to offer more.  I’d hate to cast general aspersions on the genre as a whole, but Strangers feels far too sensitive a read to be true science fiction. There is some pretty predictable ‘colony of earthlings’ stuff, in which regular character types appear and perform, but the real meat of the book is the extended theme of alien sex; the emotions, the pros and cons, and the damned unusual consequences of falling for an alien.

Science fiction usually becomes a bit boring when the point is too far pressed, or appears close to the surface, and I don’t think it does here. That is to say that there are obvious points being made, such as miscommunication between genders as well as many of the social problems of the 70s, such as interracial marriage, changing male-female relationships post-feminism, and the horrible difficulties of people refusing to deal directly with these issues. Yes, the allegory is there, but it’s never pushed in favour of the main chance, the story. This is the main balance in most science fiction, and a hard one to achieve; years of reading has shown me this.

A kind of hopelessness permeates the book, especially typified by the rather meaningless and unfulfilled life of the protagonist, an artist. This turns out to be quite addictive, and I think it was this ‘sad 70s’ tone that got me to the end. Once you’ve started out with this unfortunate character, and his emotional adventures with his alien love, it becomes hard, if not impossible to stop. What it means is that this novel feels like a downward slide, a downward, downward slide, to a sad ending, as sad as everything that has come so far.

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The Day The Machines Stopped

by Christopher Anvil

The Day the Machines Stopped by Christopher Anvil, issued back in the prophetic days of 1964, is a disaster story dealing with the kind of popular themes we’ve seen since Richard Jeffries published After London, back in 1885. The end of the world is an idea that’s never far from the surface. In the pre-industrial age, end of the world literature still abounded — only it was religious apocalyptic. Post industrialisation, end of the world literature has been scientific or political in nature — and although it’s sometimes aliens, generally it’s been science or nature or even politics that are going to bring an end to things — not the Hand of God.

This Epic Volume features an epic blurb:

The day the machines stopped began in an ordinary way. There was little warning of the impending disaster.

Suddenly, all electrical energy was destroyed on the earth. Planes, cars, rockets, machinery of all kinds became useless.

By week’s end, total chaos enveloped the world as the wheels of civilisation ground to a halt. Then ruthless leaders began to emerge, seeking a way to gain control of the almost helpless population.

Only a handful of scientists remained to fight the inexplicable phenomenon — until they were captured and forced to use their knowledge to help the ruthless power combine take the world back to the Dark Ages.

It’s telling then that the most sustained and energetic nuances in The Day the Machines Stopped are saved for what is the core story of the book — not the end of the world, but an office romance, which is frankly nothing more than barely suppressed office lust. The true story of The Day the Machines Stopped is that an office nice guy is harassed by an office bad ass who is better paid and higher up the chain, but who frustratingly is a nasty and unpleasant person. On top of this, the hero feels his low pay and low status will not net him the girl, despite him being an upstanding and pleasant person.

These are the reader dilemmas in The Day the Machines Stopped. The mundane start which shows a man arriving at work is typical of much workaday science fiction — the fictional scientist in this case just can’t get it together, but you know he’s bound to come good by the end.

It’s one of the problems of The Day the Machines Stopped, a lack of confidence in the material, which is a shame, because the task couldn’t be simpler. Even if Christopher Anvil had stuck to the synopsis he’d written, he would have felt the angelic powers of his writing flash into action, instead of watching them become bogged down in the sort of office badinage which might entertain for a page or two, but which sets up the scene so thoroughly, it takes nearly a sixth of the book.

Never mind. The mundane is also an apocalyptic theme. In Tomorrow! (1954) and Triumph (1963) by Philip Wylie presents no relief from totally destructive holocausts, which is what one hopes for in earnest.   There is a great 1984 novel by Janet and Chris Morris, titled The 40-Minute War, in which the nuclear war is triggered by Islamic jihadists, and in Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974) the war has already come and gone, and exists as a back story, if you will. These are conceits that confidently engulf the reader, and leave me to see The Day the Machines Stopped as a a more half hearted effort.

See also The Shadow on the Hearth (1950) which is in keeping with classic survival SF such as The Shrinking Man, as it shows a New York housewife taking practical measures to cope with a nuclear attack, and a slightly sanitised version of the same in the very popular Alas, Babylon (1959) by Pat Frank, which sees a Florida town coming to terms with a similar apocalyptic strike — there was so much more going on in 1950s and 1960s apocalyptic.

Consider: Not This August (UK: Christmas Eve) (1955) by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Vandenberg (1971) by Oliver Lange, both describe a post-nuclear USA governed by Soviets. This semi-realist approach works best of all in Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1957), which shows a group of survivors awaiting the arrival of the nuclear fallout, a great subject.  These novels place the disaster centre stage, creating a darkened and strangled world — the sort of places the author of The Day the Machines Stopped seeks to avoid.

Post the fallout, the theme is sometimes a return to agrarian or a pre-industrial ruin, as in Ape and Essence (1948) by Aldous Huxley or The Wild Shore (1984) by Stanley Robinson. In books like Alfred Coppel’s Dark December (1960) and James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends (1985) the landscape is broken, people are shattered and there’s little hope at all.

While I am here then, two special favourites of nuclear fiction must be mentioned, being A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller, and Riddley Walker (1980) which is a post-nuclear-style Canterbury Tales, which presents a fascinating and mutated England, with plenty punning, bastardised language and effective combinations of the ancient (Adam and Eve, for example) and the futuristic (splitting of the atom):

Eusa wuz anger he wuz & he kep pulin on the Littl Man the Addoms owt strecht arms.

So while The Day the Machines Stopped is a disaster story, it is at times a tad confused by the medium. There are points when it inadvertently conjures up the sort of imagery we see a lot later in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and these arise from small conversations about what’s happening further down the storyline.

The villain is called ‘the Duke’ — think Escape from New York — and the ultimate war zone is a country that turns out to be ‘Not America’ — a fact that belies the novel’s real locus — the fascist past, as opposed to the broken down future. This is one vision of the end of the world, but it is one that looks to the anti-fascist and anti-communist wars of the recent 20^th Century, finding all it need to shock in the factual apocalyptic of extremist politics.

If you make it to America, tell them to come as soon as they can. The teaching in the schools here is changed; all the children swear allegiance to the Duke, and the secret police plant spies in every town and in every house. My own daughter is in it, and she’d turn me in as soon as she’d spit, except that this morning (sic) she’s away at a group meeting.

Brian stared at him. “That bad? But what do you mean, ‘If you make it to America’?  This is America.”

Barnaby shook his head. “No it isn’t. I mean, where they still fly the flag. Where they still vote.”

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The Iron Thorn

By Algis Budrys

The opening of The Iron Thorn hints at dramatic action in the form of a violent encounter between man and alien. Instead of presenting alien encounter as a development of the plot, Algis Budrys addresses it as a function of test-tube living — the idea that when people are under the microscope, and are uncertain subjects in greater experiments, then this is no life at all. In fact, primitive living on this far away planet has created a kind of infantilism, where everyone gets by on the most base of motivations. Of course this violence leads to its natural home — the consumption of feminity as visual lure, as it tends to be in science fiction.

So often, the character’s experience in a science fiction novel is that of a young man coming of age — The Iron Thorn is a prime example. White Jackson, the peculiarly named character here begins the book with a great cultural rite of passage — the killing of his first Amsir.   In this strange place, the world of The iron Thorn, two cultures live side by side — the humans and the Amsirs — and they skirt around each other, clashing violently when they meet.

From reading SF in general, you will guess early on in The Iron Thorn that what you are reading about is a closed environment — a socio-genetic experiment of sorts. The characters seem ignorant of the giant iron ‘thorns’ that they live within and around even though they sound to the reader for all the universe like spaceships.  This is a conditioned planet, where the two species people and amsirs live as neighbours but are physcially unable to enter each other’s habitat, meeting instead in the sandy dunes between and there hunting each other for sport and kudos.

So often, the young man coming of age in a SF novel is somehow different from those around him — as in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, for example. White Jackson in the Iron Thorn thus winds up leading his race, at least what is perceived of it, out from under the barrier of lies from which they suffer, and into a stranger more mixed up and recognisable world. White Jackson has no time for falsity or even for tradition or authority, and ultimately he finds the world of the iron thorn's creators a pointless place, full of fakers and rather pointless actors. As an artist, Jackson has too sharp an eye for what’s really going on: ‘To me I am the only sane man conceivable.’

There is a great scene, when captured by the Amsirs, White Jackson is presented with a door that nobody can open, and told he will have to remain captive until either he starves — or can open it. It’s indicative of the great tension Algis Budrys can build up, in what easily like a throwaway novel. I say that because the two or three chapters which concern the door, could easily form a novel in themselves, they are so well sketched and create such mystery.

There is a metaphysical element to The Iron Thorn however which makes it worth reading. We see a backward society, predicated on various crude hierarchies formed from sex, technology and violence, and within it a hungry minded individual who discovers the next society up, as it were. This bunch, despite their sophistication, likewise fail to please him and the result is a calm and collected lack of satisfaction with the universe that any long term SF reader will recognise.

How is it these smart loners always appear in the genre? Something to do with the nature of the readership, I shall guess.

The Iron Thorn is also discussed on Epic Volumes' Home Planet

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The Man From P.I.G.

by Harry Harrison

A colony of farmers watch in great joy as a starcruiser lands before them.  You have opened The Man From P.I.G. by Harry Harrison, published in 1968.  On board are the galaxy-saving commandos who are going to protect them from the hideous ghosts that have been attacking them from the horrible haunted plateau.  Only when the hatch opens, it isn’t starship troopers that come marching out — instead the door opens and a thundering wave of pigs descend to save the planet.  This is the Porcine Interstellar Guard.

The Man From P.I.G. then is definitely an oddity, and is certainly an epic volume, but is it worth picking it up if you happen to see a copy?  Firstly, The Man From P.I.G. won’t take you or anyone else very long to read.  Generally with novellas, publishers either bite the bullet and print a small and for them costly book, or they publish a novella in a collection, or with short stories.

Here they’ve taken a slightly different tack, which is to make the book as large as they can using the following three devices — large, large print size — several two page spread illustrations — and blank pages, where they can be justified.  The result is a 120 page book that should in earnest be somewhere around the 60 page mark.

I wonder firstly what inspired Harry Harrison to write the story, and then what stopped him from writing more of it?  Then, given that it works, I wonder what stopped there being more in this series.  After all, these pigs could go on saving the universe, even though this adventure seems a little curtailed — as well of course as being curl-tailed.

If you’re a serious SF reader, you’ll spot the spoof elements here straight away.  Everything is about efficiency and expectation, and although we’re used to armies and lasers, presenting the habitual space corps of traditional science fiction as a marauding herd of pigs is quite interesting, possibly even funny.  The normal problem with such jokes is that when they wear off, something else is required, which is probably why this book is so short.  This is possibly a lack of nerve or willing, because once the pig characters are ste up they are strong enough to carry a full novel, or even a series of novels — but here, in this instance, once the point is made, it’s time for Harry Harrison to check out.

People call pigs dirty, but that’s only because they have been made to live in filth.  They’re naturally quite clean  and fastidious animals.  They can be fat.  They have a tendency to be sedentary and obese—just like people—so they can put on weight if they have the diet for it.  In fact, they are more like humans than any animal.  They get ulcers like us and heart trouble the same way we do.  Like man, they have hardly any hair on their bodies and even their teeth are similar to ours.

Their temperaments, too.  Centuries ago, an early physiologist by the name of Pavlov, who sued to do scientific experiments with dogs, tried to do the same thing with pigs.  But as soon as he placed them on the operating table, they would squeal at the top of their lungs and thrash about.  He said that they were ‘ inherently hysterical’ and went back to working with dogs.  Which shows you, even the best men have a blind spot.  The pigs weren’t hysterical—they were plain sensible; it was the dogs who were being dim.  The pigs reacted just the way a man might if they tried to tie him down for some quick vivisection….

The point that Harry Harrison makes is funny and could have been made in any genre, when you come to think of it.  Again it’s a question of expectation, the bucking of which can generally be quite funny.  So space opera is reduced to spoofery, as is the dignity of military operations, and human endeavours in general.

It is also hard to say what addition the illustrations make.  The illustrations in The Man From P.I.G. are by John Schoenherr, whose works are so evocative and stunning that they bring gravitas and an extra layer of imagination to any book they grace.  The effect here is pretty odd, and a strange kind of grandeur is brought to the very silly story, merely by the addition of these stately and sophisticated pictures.

Schoenherr (1935 – 2010 was best known for bringing Frank Herbert’s Dune to life, but he also did over 40 children’s books and did paintings for Nasa.  John Schoenherr’s illustrations for The Man From P.I.G. are typical of his black-and-white work using the scratchboard technique, and he was long known as the only commercial artist who specialised in it.  Schoenherr’s  paintings were often egg tempera, another unusual medium.

Look at John Schoenherr’s work and you won’t just see the Dune worm however.  There are so many that I like, with spacemen, beasts and other worlds in them — as well as many other pictures that are nature illustrations from our own dear planet.

Bron Wurber had a degree in animal husbandry, a doctorate in galactic politics, and a black belt in judo.  He said he was a pig farmer — but what pigs!  Queeny, eight hundred pounds of Poland China fury; her twin Moe, the mutant pig; Jasmine, brilliant though hysterical; and Maisie Mule-Foot, a good mother and a great fighter!  Somewhere in this strange universe there was a need for brutal porcine force, and Bron, THE MAN FROM P.I.G., had just the team for the job.

The Man from P.I.G. on Epic Volumes Home Ranch
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The Overman Culture

by Edmund Cooper

The Overman Culture (1972) by Edmund Cooper is without doubt the strangest, most unreasonable, far-fetched, peculiar and probably unnecessary story ever told. The mystery hangs together very well, but its explanation is not far from drivelsome. It’s a mercifully short book, and I say merciful because a pay off like that, even with a reasonable build up, is probably not worth the wait.

Yet still pick it up. The idea of trying to overcome a world made of fantasy is such a compelling theme, and it doesn’t matter if it’s somewhere between The Truman Show, The Stepford Wives and The Matrix, the very fact that it’s got Zeppelins in it betrays its fast-beating steampunk heart.

Edmund Cooper (1926 – 1982), who also wrote under the names Richard Avery, George Kinley, Broderick Quain and Martin Lester (those are just the ones I know about) wrote quickly, like many SF authors, and his books are typical to the genre, and very often about one person against the world, and very often a post-apocalyptic world at that.

Time and again Edmund Cooper has been in trouble for his supposed attitude towards women and gender equality. This is always problematic when one of your favourite writers turns out to have had an unethical or downright amoral (or should I just say ‘wrong’) stance concerning something. I think of the problems I’ve had with Céline over the years, and no matter how much one can ignore these things, or write them off as culturally specific or inherited traits, it still doesn’t make it easy. In Cooper’s case with gender equality, it seems that while he believed in equality, he didn’t give it much thought, and even less when it came to expressing it. Although quotes have surfaced which make Edmund Cooper look like a misogynist, and Céline look like a Nazi, I can in both cases think of quotes which redress or would at least attenuate these sentiments.

In the case of Edmund Cooper, his Wikipedia entry notes that the novel Five to Twelve (1968) ends with the phrase "if we do not make any more mistakes, we can create a balanced world of men and women", which would seem fair enough.

Whichever way the cookie crumbles, Edmund Cooper was one of these writers that was in big demand when he was alive, for the quick fix SF he wrote, which was always of interest to the fans of the genre. In the 1980s, the science fiction section of our local bookshops always featured a row of his titles, but nowadays I’m lucky if they even turn up in the second-handies.

The Overman Culture is one of the better written Edmund Cooper novels in my opinion. They pretty much always had far-fetched and fantastic premises, but this wasn’t always dealt with in a style that was completely riveting. Many writers come alive when writing about children and childhood, and Edmund Cooper wasn’t an exception.   It must have been great fun to write The Overman Culture, simply because of the massive jam that Cooper creates — Spencer Tracy, Queen Victoria, Apollo 12, Gone with the Wind and Emily Bronte, all hemmed into the same mad circumstance.

What I recall as being most dear about The Overman Culture was however the research that the young protagonist does to establish what the hell is going on in his world. It’s a simple metaphor for something that every teenager goes through to a degree, when the facts of the universe are there to be discovered for the first time. Going to the library, or the cinema, both are valid explorations and discoveries as a young person, there is lurking an expectation that new knowledge will be found, but often that new knowledge just generates more and crazier questions. And as this goes on, and as the hero’s relationship with his parents deteriorates, we inch closer and closer to the truth.

It’s one of the great catharses of science fiction that in a good book like this, we reach the end with the truth in hand, although the reality of life is that generally, although we get the facts, the truth eludes us like a shifting horizon, remaining as a philosophical promise as opposed to a dramatic revelation which will resolve everything on page 190.

‘The night spent in the library had been harrowing, exciting and finally restful. For the first time in their lives, forty-three human beings felt both free and united. They had been made free by their discovery of the truth; and they had been united by the discovery of their origin.’

This is why it’s such a great metaphor. Should the world turn out to be an illusion, as it often does, so very much would be explained.

The Overman Culture at Epic Volumes Home Planet

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Vertigo by Bob Shaw

Vertigo (1978) isn’t from Bob Shaw’s vintage period, but neither is it one of the less successful novels from the 1980s, when some of the passion seemed to leave him for a while. It concerns a much cherished human ambition — personal flight — and the consequences for us poor infallible humans. It’s true, and many SF authors would back this up — but people should never be allowed new inventions, because great as technology may be, it’s always going to be screwed up one way or the other.

So in Vertigo, Bob Shaw delivers a world in which aeroplanes have been largely forgotten due to the dangers posed by vast hordes of individual flyers wearing their personal counter-gravity devices, and as an amusing aside, scores of people are killed each month by falling objects dropped by these flyers. Folk navigate by glowing lines in the sky called Bilasers, but unlike most of Bob Shaw’s preceding novels, it doesn’t so much deal with the technology as the people who use it.

Like a lot of SF, you get the sense in Bob Shaw’s Vertigo that what you are reading is our own world, thinly disguised, and this is helped along with the emphasis on characters, and the hordes of typical social groups that we come across. All you need to do is imagine what teenage gangs would be like if they had personal counter-gravity devices, and you are half way there — because they wouldn’t be hanging around the chip shop, but instead they’d be doing what they do in Vertigo, and terrorising rooftops, flying here and there while high on drugs and up to no good — such as playing chicken with commuters.

It means that whereas you don’t get a full on SF novel, it means that with Bob Shaw and Vertigo you get something more akin to social satire and black comedy, in which the ills of the world are amplified by seeing that world gone crazy with a new technology.   At heart, Vertigo is a story not unlike say the film The Wild One, and talks about youth gangs, people’s inability to deal with them, and the ultimate fact of those same people taking the law into their own hands. Having said that, the passage that sticks with everybody when reading Bob Shaw’s Vertigo, isn’t anything to do with technology, flight or science, but is (if you will recall) a funny story about a shopkeeper and some boxes of matches.

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