12 - Hard To Be A God

In the wake of Trump's election at the end of last year, it was reported that the sale of dystopian fiction increased dramatically in America. Most notably, George Orwell's 1984 jumped roughly 80 places up the fiction chart to become the best-selling book on Amazon, 70 years after its publication. My criticisms of that work are numerous, and I won't go into them here, but I was more struck by the fact that it doesn't actually relate particularly closely to the situation in America.

As I write this in a nation under CCTV, yes, I can admit that Orwell did get some things right. But American readers looking for literature offering some foresight into the direction their country is headed would be better off tracking down Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Hard To Be A God.

I was first introduced to the Strugatskys' work by the excellent 1979 sci-fi film Stalker, an adaptation of their novel Roadside Picnic, which I read last year. While the film's primary merit is as a masterpiece of cinematography, the book goes several layers deeper. The premise remains the same, but the setting is developed far further, resulting in a bitter critique of the empty promises of the USSR's ruling party and the endless mazes of bureaucracy that meant the working classes had no chance of benefiting from them anyway.

I was amazed that a book so critical of the Soviet Union had been allowed to be published at the time, until I read the afterword and found that, in fact, it hadn't been. Instead, the authors had engaged in a relentless process of drafting and censorship by the state before finally conceding a heavily edited version in the 1980s. As per policy, the book's highly cynical tone was blunted, and the result must have been substantially different to the version that I read, approved by the brothers as being the intended original in the 1990s.

Somehow, it seems that Hard To Be A God suffered no such obstacles, despite, in my opinion, being a far more open critique of the direction of Soviet society at the time. This is perhaps due to its plot whereby, in a distant future, envoys are sent from Earth to a planet very similar to our own but which has yet to emerge from the Dark Ages. The result is a fantasy-style adventure story with plenty of sword fighting, castles and wizards.

Despite this, though, the novel's true purpose is clear. Our hero Anton, undercover as nobleman Don Rumata, is tasked with ensuring the planet's societal development into the Renaissance and Enlightenment; preserving art and literature and aiding the advancement of technology without intervening to too great an extent. Instead, he finds himself fighting a relentless tide of wilful ignorance, as gangs of uneducated, untrained mercenary soldiers roam the cities wiping out anything perceived as intellectual. All this under the command of prime minister Don Reba, a man intelligent enough to play the game of politics, but not intelligent enough to do anything worthwhile with his success. Reba was based on Lavrentiy Beria, state security chief under Stalin, but the parallels with Trump are plain to see - surrounded by yes-men and faceless mobs of unflinchingly loyal supporters, he builds insurmountable power over his kingdom as Anton/Rumata battles his conscience over whether to intervene.

The book's conclusion - which I can only assume was allowed to be published thanks to the reversal of Stalinist policies over the 1960s and 70s - is that intervention is essential if society is to develop, whatever the consequences. Don Reba's government is nowhere on the political spectrum, as his society has not yet reached that point, but comparisons are made, both concretely and by allusion, to both Hitler and Stalin. And while comparing Trump to that pair is definitely oversimplifying, there are general lessons to be learned about avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Ultimately, Anton appears to have done the right thing by using his powers for revolution, and that is where this book is more useful than 1984 ever would be - Winston Smith would have had a much better chance had he chosen the sword over the pen.

On a side note, my forays into Russian literature have been limited: Roadside Picnic, Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033, Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and a handful of (largely failed) attempts at Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky are about it. This is partly because I found in all cases that the translations were very similar - the writers' own styles were masked by the attempts to liven up Russian's grim syntactical efficiency into English with resulting empty prose styles and characters that seemed underdeveloped. Yet Hard To Be A God suffers none of those issues and the fast-paced plot created a complex world that Tolkein and George R. R. Martin would be jealous of in less than 300 pages. So, full marks to Olena Bormashenko on the translation.

5/5

Before the Strugatsky brothers were sticking it to the man with their writing, Dmitri Shostakovich was doing something similar with music. Without going too deep into music theory, his Fugue in A Major for piano appears to be perfectly in line with tradition, but subverts those rules into an increasingly bizarre sequence (under the conventions of classical composition), creating discord where there should be none and sarcastically calling out Stalin's oppressive control of his music.

11 - Station Eleven

What seems like a lifetime ago, in 2012, I found myself living in small-town Germany. It was a year that involved a certain amount of travelling around on the country's surprisingly poor rail network - windswept hours spent huddling on platforms in the Ruhrgebiet's least interesting backwaters, endless empty stations on the route from Düsseldorf airport which were nevertheless deemed essential stops, flashbacks to fighting sleep on a painfully slow S-Bahn trip from Essen to Düsseldorf as the sun rose on a freezing December morning.

It was early on in my time there that I decided I should find some form of entertainment for said journeys. It was a different time, long before my Kindle, and when network operators charged extortionate per-kilobyte data use rates, a far cry from today's brave new world of no roaming charges whatsoever.

With this in mind, I happened upon a mobile app which was basically a database of plain text format copies of the internet's most popular horror stories. Over the course of the year I ended up reading them all - some very good, some which had potential but were under-developed, the vast majority forgettable or unoriginal, some just plain bad, and a few raising serious concerns over the author's mental state.

A lot of these stories imagined a post-apocalyptic world - post-society, post-humanity. It is a genre that has already been fairly well covered, and I don't think I once saw it done well. Partly due to the fact that there was no requirement for these writers to have any writing talent, but mostly because they tended to fall back on the tired tropes and stereotypes.

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is a book that does post-apocalyptic well. In fact, it does it brilliantly. More than just a step up from what has been done before, it combines detail in its setting, development for its characters, and a complex, interwoven plot that seems to swell and flow almost organically as the pieces fall into place around each other. It reminded me more than a little of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, jumping around in a manner that at first seems random, but makes more and more sense as the book goes on, and ultimately works from an aesthetic point of view as well.

Starting on the eve of a global health crisis that will go on to wipe out 99% of the world's population, the narrative introduces the novel's main characters as fate brings them together at a performance of King Lear in Toronto. Then, just as it seems things are getting going, we are taken twenty years into the future. What has happened cannot be reversed, the world has changed beyond recognition and what is left of humanity now do their best to survive with what is left. Mandel then proceeds to recap the character's story arcs in non-linear fashion, showing how their lives had always been connected and influenced each other. It helps that she does seem to care about her characters, and this means that by the end of the book so does the reader.

A mantra that keeps appearing in this new world is "survival is insufficient" - and it is here where Station Eleven is light years ahead of any post-apocalyptic fiction I have read in the past. From the Travelling Symphony that crosses the Great Lakes region performing orchestral music and Shakespeare plays to anyone who will watch, to the Museum of Civilisation that houses remnants of the old world in an airport, Mandel adds touches that show that the end of the world need not mean the end of optimism, or of culture, or of humanity. If I had to live in a fictional post-apocalypse, I would choose this one without hesitation.

5/5

Something, something, post-apocalyptic sci-fi rap. Seriously just watch all of this, it's basically the pinnacle of music.

10 - The Devil Rides Out

For as long as I can remember, I have had an interest in the paranormal. Inspired by a book of my parents' on unsolved mysteries of the world - itself a mystery, completely incongruous with the rest of their collection - I loved being frightened and fascinated in equal measure by tales of strange creatures, alien abduction and the planet's least explored corners.

At the same time, however, I have always remained fairly sceptical in the face of such claims. Much as I would love all UFO reports to be real so we can start living in The Fifth Element already, I don't believe aliens have ever visited Earth. Sightings of ghosts, Bigfoot and the likes of the Jersey Devil are probably testament to the power of imagination. The Loch Ness Monster might just be explained by the 9ft long wels catfish that inhabit the lake. And the two theories dominating the internet in recent years, Flat Earth and the Mandela Effect, are in my opinion nothing less than proof of the collective stupidity of mankind.

As such, I have never had much interest in the occult or black magic. While some of the above phenomena are perhaps vaguely plausible, or at least have their origin in real-world happenings, hinting that there may be more to discover, black magic always seemed too far-fetched to merit serious consideration. This is probably not helped by its image as the preserve of goth teenagers in small town America with nothing better to do and the super-rich elite with, well, nothing better to do.

Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, however, contends that not only is black magic real, it is being used at this very moment under our noses to help people with less than honourable intentions to wield immeasurable power over the world and the people in it. Or at least it was in the 1930s. Sparked by the writings of the likes of Aleister Crowley, the medium saw something of a resurgence at the time, with Hitler being probably the most notable proponent.

It was against this background that Wheatley set his hugely successful series featuring the Duc de Richleau, a set of adventures spanning the globe that deal with the occult, other worlds and mysterious forces. The second book in the series, The Devil Rides Out has all the ingredients to be a thrilling caper but ultimately falls just short.

This mainly stems from the fact that Wheatley is very, very serious about the book's basis in the occult. The result is a narrative that is less Indiana Jones and more BBC crime drama procedural. The peak of this occurs just as the novel's story is about to switch up a gear. Faced with his friend Simon Aron being used as the centrepiece of a satanic ritual, the Duc and his American sidekick Rex prepare to mount a daring rescue, driving right into the heart of the gathering and hauling Simon into his car by the passenger door. But first, Wheatley takes great care to explain every one of seemingly dozens of steps taken by the Duc to ensure protection against any dark forces. Once the escape is attempted, in the last couple of pages of the chapter, it almost feels like an afterthought. Add in theories such as Rasputin having started World War I by summoning the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the relic of an Egyptian god holding the key to world power and we're firmly in tin foil hat territory.

And so it goes for most of the book. But the plot, equal parts burdensome and ridiculous, is at least alleviated by some entertaining writing from Wheatley. Of particular note is a chapter where the action is documented by the minute as three different plot lines unfold simultaneously, but credit is also due for the way in which he sets up a P.G. Wodehouse-style domestic scene at the book's main location at one point, only to tear it all apart moments later. The result is the book's most satisfying sequence, the tension ramping up relentlessly as the characters repel a series of increasingly bizarre attacks from the antagonist Mocata - who seems to have been inspired, at least in his physical description, by Crowley himself. And while the double-twist ending seems like something of a cop-out at first, it does serve to keep the work grounded while still hinting at something more.

Despite Wheatley's earnest assurance in the preface that all of this has been extensively researched and is representative of genuine goings on in England at the time, I have to conclude that the truth is somewhere between the two. The Duc ends the novel stating that we are far from knowing what is really out there, which I agree is true. But it's probably not quite as exciting as he, or this book, would suggest.

3.5/5

2spooky4me.

Halfway there!

9 - Make Something Up

I would think the vast majority of people are only familiar with the works of the Seattle writer Chuck Palahniuk through the film adaptation of his first novel, Fight Club. And still more who do count themselves as fans will have been introduced to him by that film.

My path was slightly different - when reading an article about the most famous bodies of water in literature (must have been a slow news day), I learned of Palahniuk's short story Guts, a tale supposedly so shocking it caused people to faint at live readings. I was intrigued, but ultimately forgot about it. And then I saw Fight Club.

In fairness, the film's success is well deserved, and it is thanks in no small part to Palahniuk's writing which transposes perfectly to the interior monologue of Edward Norton's narrator, itself broken down into convenient soundbites to spawn a million anti-consumerist tweets sent from a million iPhones. Not long after I decided to hunt down Guts and read it as part of the short story anthology mashed together into a meandering novel titled Haunted. I didn't pass out, but Guts certainly hit home, a shocking tale of the depravity and subversion simmering literally just below the surface of American suburbia. The other stories were somewhat inconsistent but there were still a few gems - most notably Obsolete and Foot Work, both of which deserve big-screen adaptations of their own.

Make Something Up is Palahniuk's second collection of short stories, and ultimately the same appraisal can be made. While it drops the overall plot that weaved in and out of Haunted, there are still a few subtle connections between the 24 pieces that form the whole. This is most obvious in a triptych of stories featuring anthropomorphised animals loosely resembling Aesop's fables but with moral conclusions so brutally mean-spirited they leave a sour aftertaste. Similar in nature are the likes of Cannibal, Zombies and Tunnel of Love, three tales in keeping with the general theme of the grim reality of American society. These are hardly enjoyable reading and ultimately I failed to see the point, unless there was no point other than to show that, a lot of the time, life is arbitrary and unfair.

Equally hard to get on with were the more experimental stories. The dense word-fog of Smoke and the endless malapropisms shoved into Eleanor result in prose that is borderline unreadable, and while they undoubtedly took a lot skill to write, there is not much enjoyment to be gleaned. It's akin to listening to a world-class musician practicing scales for hours on end. Slightly more successful was Liturgy, an exercise in the art of the euphemism of upper-middle class society.

But as with Haunted, there are more than a few stories here that just work. Essentially a shaggy dog story told in stream of consciousness style, The Facts of Life is perhaps the most shocking of the bunch, but also the funniest in my opinion. Torcher cleverly doubles up as a murder mystery caper and a savage satire of the trust fund hippie culture; Expedition mixes Kafka and de Sade into a foreshadowing of a possible Fight Club sequel. And call me soft, but while Fetch and Mister Elegant may seem incongruous with their happy endings, they stand out as the two most enjoyable stories here.

Objectively the best, however, would have to be Inclinations. Being the longest story in the book, it has room to develop its characters, lurch from ironic to funny to terrifying to foul and back again, and deliver plenty of twists along the way. Again, while I am perhaps not quite tuned into its portrayal of the unique pressures and intricacies of American life, it does deliver a sensitive look at the teenage experience that is not often seen in literature.

Overall, I found the quality of these stories to vary immensely. While all were shocking in their own way, it is what Palahniuk actually does with that shock value that means at least a few of them go above and beyond that basic level. One thing is for sure - the collection's subtitle, Stories You Can't Unread is more than suitable.

2.5/5

Undoubtedly, this is a pretty punk form of writing, but that's another area I'm not particularly attuned to. In the end, while I'm sure there are plenty more out there, the best act I could think of to blend punk aesthetic with a certain level of technical ability is Pixies. Oh, and their song Where is my Mind plays over the closing credits of Fight Club, so that'll do.

8 - Les Stiene de la Castafiore

I must have been around 8 when I first became a fan of Tintin. Within a couple of years, I had managed to read every one of Hergé's albums featuring the character - or rather, the 21 of the original 24 that are freely available in English - thanks to a local library. The adventures of the young reporter provided an ideal combination of fun and excitement, not to mention the brilliant scope of Hergé's artwork. Although how Tintin managed to keep his job while doing so little actual reporting will remain a mystery.

As my interest in languages grew, I began to collect Tintin albums in French and German as easy reading for practice, which allowed me to cross Tintin in the Congo off my list - a book widely restricted in the English-speaking world due to its broadly racist portrayal of Africans. And since I was on a beginner's Dutch course for the last six months, my parents thought it would be a good idea to add to my collection with a new title in Dutch. There was just one problem - the book I received was actually in Bruxellois.

Bruxellois, as you might expect, is the language spoken by the residents of Brussels; however, as stated in the explanatory notes at the back of the book, the term actually covers five distinct slang dialects. Principal among these are French, Flemish and mixed Bruxellois - the latter providing the basis for this Tintin translation. The Brabantian-based Marollien dialect and Bargoentsh are much more obscure, and barely spoken today.

Unfortunately for my Dutch development, Bruxellois is grounded mainly in French, with the occasional interjection of Dutch, plus some Spanish and a few words with no obvious background. Still, I would probably have struggled with French alone - words such as 'astableeft' ('alstubleeft') meaning 'please' and 'band' in the context of 'tyre' are, to my knowledge exclusive to Dutch. Mainly, though, Bruxellois is used for the character's exclamatory interjections - Tintin's English catchphrase 'great snakes!' becomes 'potverdèkke!' while the creative cursing of Captain Haddock is rendered as an impenetrable lists of nouns and adjectives with no obvious basis in anything.

Ultimately I found myself skimming over the dialect words because the intended meaning was nearly always clear. The translator's note clarifies that Bruxellois is nowhere near a complete language, being limited to only a couple of hundred words used to embellish conversation with irony and self-deprecation, and as such I thought it was actually a very good fit for the dynamic dialogue of the characters and in particular the captain. While a glossary is provided I referred to it increasingly little as the book went on, preferring to follow the plot at its intended pace.

As for the book itself - well, it falls firmly in the middle of the late-era Tintin albums. Not as grand in its scope as Tintin in Tibet or The Calculus Affair, but mercifully lacking the half-baked weirdness of Flight 714 to Sydney and Tintin and the Picaros, it is the opinion of the majority of Tintin academics (yes, that's a real thing) that this would have been a suitable end to the series. I have to agree: the majority of the recurring characters play a role and still more are referred to in passing, a sort of final reunion. The opera singer Castafiore and her entourage seem finally to be moving on to bigger things, and the Thompson twins leave as they first arrived, in a state of chaos. As the work concludes, Tintin, Snowy, Haddock and Calculus seem ready to retire in the peaceful surroundings of Marlinspike Hall, their adventures at an end.

The plot is a meandering detective story, revolving around the disappearance of Castafiore's jewels and Tintin's attempts to solve the mystery. It unravels in a farcical manner as time and again Tintin follows a clue to a dead end, before finally coming good in working out the twist ending. The only work to be set entirely at the characters' "base camp" of Marlinspike Hall, it showcases Hergé's talent for humour in dialogue, and ability to tell a story without relying on adventure to exotic settings. No coincidence that it was written at the time in his life immediately following a period of depression due to his divorce.

5/5

Reading this was undoubtedly a rather hipster undertaking. So here's some Belgian hipster music which is also actually good:

7 - A Brief History of Time

Around two and a half years ago, I went to the cinema to watch The Theory of Everything, James Marsh's biopic detailing the life and career of Stephen Hawking. It left me inspired to learn more about the scientist's research into physics and cosmology, and I decided the place to start would be to read his hugely popular and successful book for the layman, A Brief History of Time. Fortunately my parents already had a copy, so I borrowed it and then proceeded not to read it. But now I felt it might be a good time to break up all the science fiction on my list with some science fact.

A Brief History of Time was published in 1988 and collates all of the existing theories surrounding the relationship between time and space and the connection of forces within the universe that had been developed up to that point. Hawking then discusses the possible directions this research could take, with the overarching theme of whether mankind will ever be able to comprehend the nature of the universe.

I suspect that, if such an answer is ever found, I will not be the one to do it. Hawking states in his introduction that he had been advised to include as few equations as possible; that for each one that appeared in print, the readership of his book would halve. The problem that results from this is that he must then describe a number of highly abstract concepts by way of roundabout explanation - and often I found that words were probably not the best way of going about it. The use of diagrams helps in some cases, but I actually found myself wishing that he had simply used an equation and then elaborated upon it to aid visualisation.

Too often, Hawking describes a concept using an analogy only to refer to it in passing later on under the assumption that the reader has absorbed and understood all that it entails. While this might be possible with more serious study of each idea, that wasn't the book's intended purpose and the result is that, towards the end, nearly every sentence becomes a dense fog of technical terminology that does more to create confusion than to clarify.

But I suspect a lot of this will relate more to me as an arts student than anyone with a more in-depth knowledge of maths and physics. While the ideas he describes can be dense and abstract at times, Hawking's writing style as a whole is largely the opposite - as you would expect from a scientist he is methodical and precise in his work. I found the chapter on elementary particles to be quite engaging, and in fairness he does stress that a lot of the theories discussed are, by definition, theoretical. I am not sure what advances have been made in cosmology since 1988 but at the time there seemed to be a general lack of concrete evidence for pretty much everything. Otherwise he does manage to slip the occasional joke in, the anecdotes about the lives of scientists of the past are fun, and the underlying philosophical discussion of the nature of our existence, the possibility of God as creator and which direction the human race will take next is one that any reader should ponder.

Almost 30 years on from this book's publication, I am not sure we are any closer to finding the Grand Unified Theory that Hawking suggests could provide all the answers - but if we do, it will be in no small part due to his work. Just not necessarily this book.

3/5

Remember this?

6 - Stories of Your Life and Others

It will become clear over the course of this year that I am a fan of science fiction. So it was with some regret that I did not make it as far as seeing Denis Villeneuve's much-praised Arrival when it was in cinemas at the end of last year. I could, however, read the story on which it was based.

Stories of Your Life and Others brings together the short(ish) stories that make up the first half of the career of American author Ted Chiang. While there are elements of science fiction in the stories, they could perhaps best be described as speculative science fact. In short, Chiang asks the question "what would happen if..." and then sets up a world in which that is reality. At the same time, he manages to establish a cast of characters and begin, develop and conclude their story arcs. This is an achievement in itself given that most of the stories are under 50 pages. But it's really only half of the whole.

Chiang is clearly a very intelligent man. While Wikipedia states that his academic endeavours concluded with a bachelor's degree in computer science, I find it hard to believe that he is anything short of PhD level in pretty much every discipline. In fact, the story Understand follows the path of a man who is endowed with a superhuman intelligence that allows him to collate and then transcend all existing human thought, and I imagine Chiang's mind to be on the same plane.

The collection starts in a relatively straightforward manner with Tower of Babylon, an account of the biblical tale of a tower constructed with the aim of reaching God. Once you can get past the physical differences to our world, the story builds nicely to a surprising conclusion and you find yourself immersed in the setting. But that's about as easy as it gets.

It's probably no coincidence that I found Story of Your Life, the inspiration for Arrival, to be the next-most accessible story. During my MA course I was forced to attend a module on research methodologies in applied linguistics. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the lectures were held at 9am on Monday mornings, but I found it hard to see any significant application beyond that study of the vocabulary sizes of various rappers and the recent article breaking down Donald Trump's speech patterns. But Story of Your Life provides another possible use - when aliens first make contact with Earth, a linguistics researcher is sent in with the seemingly impossible task of deciphering what the aliens are saying, and then replying to them. The zen-like approach to language that Chiang invents for the aliens is truly inventive, as is the way in which the story develops and then concludes once the main character begins to understand how to speak and read it herself. It's an abstract story in a lot of ways, but I felt that my knowledge of the area helped keep me grounded.

Consequently, I think there was probably a lot I didn't catch in the other stories. GCSEs in maths and biology only got me so far with Division by Zero and Seventy-Two Letters, while my knowledge of theology (Hell is the Absence of God), sociology (Liking What You See: A Documentary) and genetics (The Evolution of Human Science) is even less developed. And as stated above, to fully understand Understand would require multiple lifetimes of study in a multitude of subject areas. Which is actually the point of the story.

But none of this matters too much, because Chiang can write. While in less capable hands these stories might be frustrating, falling into either textbook-like descriptions of the worlds they describe or focusing too much on the characters and leaving the setting underdeveloped, Chiang balances the two perfectly, meaning that while the concepts require a lot of additional thought, the stories themselves are surprisingly easy reading.

4.5/5 for making me feel stupid.

If The Life & Death of Scenery was the 2nd-best sci-fi hip hop album of 2016, then clipping.'s Splendour and Misery was the best. Producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson work on a high level of theory - the latter may have completed a PhD in experimental music, but the concise and entertaining flow of rapper Daveed Diggs means you don't need one yourself to enjoy it.