Comedy, Tragedy, and Radio 3.

I will be blithering about comedy this weekend, as part of BBC 3's Free Thinking Festival, if that’s the kind of thing that scratches your scrotum or tickles your cervix. There's lots of good stuff in the festival, but my event will be a gory battle to the death between Tragedy and Comedy, that will take place live in The Sage, Gateshead (near Newcastle), and be broadcast on BBC 3's Nightwaves some time later (not sure when). Wearing the black hat and jackboots of tragedy, Professor of English Carol Rutter and comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes. Wearing the white hat and extremely long floppy shoes of comedy, passionate comedian Janey Godley and me. It's ticketed, but free.

More details on that, including how to get free tickets, here.

The problem of comedy has certainly furrowed my mighty brow this month. “Reality Is A Bananaskin On Which We Must Step” addresses that very subject, in the latest issue of A Public Space. For those of you too lazy to click through to the whole thing, I’ll sum it up for you in a line:

The relationship of a rock to its mountain will never be funny, because the rock does not believe it is the centre of the universe.

Meanwhile, let me recommend a book, or at least 50% of a book: I am halfway through Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, and so far it’s the most enjoyable thing I’ve read all year. A splendid novel about Soviet economics in the 1950s, it reads like the satirical science fiction of the wonderful Strugatsky brothers. (They wrote the charming Roadside Picnic, which Andrei Tarkovsky filmed, in far bleaker form, as Stalker.) But it’s all true. A superb novel of ideas, deeply researched, deeply felt, deeply enjoyable, if it stays this good to the end it will be my novel of the year… I‘ll post a final verdict when I’m done.



Great Books for Teenage Boys: No. 4 & No. 5 - The Man In The High Castle / A Scanner Darkly

 

OK Ariel, I know this is long overdue, but at least you get two recommendations this time...

The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.

And...

A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. I couldn’t decide between them, so… read them both.

Philip K. Dick is the North American Borges (and if that doesn’t mean anything to you Ariel, don’t worry, Jorge Luis Borges is coming up soon…) Philip K. Dick (like Borges) is obsessed with the nature of reality. Dick tries to look behind the surface of things (behind the cars and jobs and furniture, behind politics and status, jokes and gravity, faces and skin) - behind the assumptions we make without even noticing we’re making them. Dick thinks that when we think we’re looking at the world, we’re merely looking into a mirror that reflects our own beliefs and prejudices. Dick, like Borges, believed there was a world behind that mirror, hidden from us, that was infinite and strange. That contained patterns which connected the points of chaos we perceive as life.

And their main vices are, appropriately, mirror images of each other. Borges wrote too little (his collected fiction makes a single fat book). Dick wrote too much (over seventy titles).

Philip K. Dick couldn’t get his early attempts at “normal” novels published, so he ended up, almost accidentally, writing science fiction. (To fail at being normal is to succeed at being weird.) Science fiction was the only publishing genre that saw the deep peculiarity of his worldview as a virtue rather than a vice, but SF didn’t pay well. (Its word-rates assumed you were pumping out disposable industrial product, as many SF writers were.) And so Philip K. Dick wrote fast, on speed, for money. At his speediest, he wrote eleven books in two years. As a result, many of his books have wonderful philosophical ideas, undermined by clunky, first-draft prose.

The Man In The High Castle is one of the few books he had time to rewrite and polish, so it reads better than most of his work. (And it won him his only award, a Hugo). It’s an alternate-history novel, where the Allies have lost World War Two. It’s set in a Japanese-occupied America. There are rumours that a reclusive novelist has written a book which describes the real universe, in which the Allies won the war… The hero tries to track down the writer, and the book. You slowly realise that perhaps neither of these universes is our own…

His other best book, from later in his career, is A Scanner Darkly, but you’d want to be in the whole of your health to read it. A book about paranoia that’s so powerful it can induce paranoia, it stars a man who goes so far undercover to investigate a drugs ring that he ends up ordered to spy on himself. It may be the best book about drugs ever written.

The Man In The High Castle strips off layers of physical reality to see what lies behind. A Scanner Darkly does the same with our psychological reality.

Good luck out there.

Good luck in there. 

 

Talking sexy science fiction, over at the Guardian Books blog

Spent all day yesterday talking about science fiction and literature on the Guardian Books blog. The row is still going on, feel free to pop across and join in.

 I'll copy over one of my contributions to give you a flavour...

 

(From the Guardian Books blog:) 

A lot of those who don't like SF, and who seem not to have read much of it (and fair enough) are speaking about SF on this thread as if it were naive and unaware of its failings. But SF is one of the most intensely self-aware and reflexive genres. SF writers think and argue about SF, its vices and its virtues, all the time, always have.

Frederik Pohl wrote one of the best defences of SF in his autobiographical essay "Ragged Claws", collected in Hell's Cartographers (edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and a book I recommend highly to anyone interested in either writing or science fiction.)

I'm going to quote, at length, his defence of an almost indefensibly bad writer, E. E. "Doc" Smith, the inventor of space opera (and yes, I read a ton of Smith's stuff between the ages of twelve and sixteen. I even read the unreadable Spacehounds of IPC, under my desk in Irish class...)

Pohl first takes apart E E "Doc" Smith's awful failings, which are many. Then he writes:

"And yet-

None of this greatly matters. It turns many readers off, and that is a pity; but there are few novels that don't turn a good many readers off for one reason or another, and to close one's mind to Doc Smith because of his conspicuous flaws is to miss his conspicuous virtues. One might as well reject Moby Dick because of Melville's really pathetic inability to write the sounds of Chinese dialect, or because of his gross mis-statements of the natural history of cetaceans.

What Smith set out to do he did, and he did it superlatively well, and he taught a hundred other writers how to do it.

(...)

All of the things Doc Smith did badly fade in comparison with the one thing he did well. He taught a whole generation how to dream on a cosmic scale.

In the bestiary of science fiction, Doc Smith was a fiddler crab. The male fiddler has one huge claw. It is so big and clumsy that he can't use it to fight, defend or eat, he can only use it to brandish in a sexy, provocative way, impressing the hell out of the dewy-eyed female fiddler crabs.

Smith is not sf's only fiddler crab, they run rampant over the pages of the early Amazings and they are with us today: Harlan Ellison is one, so is A E van Vogt, so is Ray Bradbury. They are characterized by such extreme hypertrophy of one aspect of their writing that we forgive them conspicuous lacks in others.

What Doc Smith, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a dozen others gave us was a new way of looking at the world, at all the worlds. In the grimy, chill early thirties the vision was revelatory. It is revelatory today."

-Frederik Pohl, "Ragged Claws", from Hell's Cartographers, 1975.

And let me second Readgrin's post, way up the thread, recommending Frederik Pohl's Gateway. A beautiful, thoughtful novel which takes the legacy of Smith and Burroughs and adds bleaker, modern layers of doubt, of despair in the face of the enormity and unknowability of the universe. (I also second, or third, McLeodP's plug for Roadside Picnic, a great piece of Russian SF by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Those two books, cold-war era US and Russian, read very well together.)

-Julian Gough
London, Boherlahan, Berlin
http://www.juliangough.com/
"The novel rejigged while you wait"