The Hell of it All

I once walked into HMV and walked out again clutching Dead Set on DVD and a couple of books called Screen Burn and Dawn of the Dumb. About a week later a show started called You Have Been Watching. As introductions go, it was a pretty immersive one into the world of Charlie Brooker.

Of course, by that point Brooker had been plying his trade for ages and it is, quite frankly, embarrassing, that I'd never heard of him before. Kind of par for the course with me though.

Anyway, cut to now and I am a fully paid up member of the sad case fanboys, the existence of whom no doubt causes Brooker no end of embarrassment. Not a big enough fanboy to actually read the Guardian (never could get into the habit of buying a newspaper) or pick up his latest collection in Hardcover but you know...

Collection number three of Brookers selected columns from the Guardian is much like the first two; really clever, really funny, and really galling in that what he says tallies so perfectly with my own opinions and views but I know that I could never express said views with so much as a fraction of the wit and flair that he does. It's almost enough to make you hate him the way he purports to hate the unwitting victims of his vitriol. But not quite.

The Hell of it All sees him compare The Apprentice to a gangland kangaroo court in which someone gets their knees sliced off with an angle grinder; mock the embarrassingly overblown media furore that erupted over the Ross/Brand/Sachs incident; cast his eye over the Obama/McCain election; have several pops at rolling news stations (he really doesn't like them); and have several rants about such riveting topics as noisy neighbours, old people who don't understand technology and getting old himself. All cracking stuff to be sure.

Oh, and he calls one pseudo celeb a "simpering human perineum". Guess who.

"A genius of spleen" cries out the cover. The words of the Independent, people. The Independent. You know it must be good if those lads are pimping it, so you don't need me to tell you to read it. But I'm going to anyway. Read it. Go on, you know you want to.

Retromancer

It is a fact well known to those that know it well, that pseudo-cosmic antimatter, (properly transperambulated of course) will solve most any quantum conundrum, or if not solve then cause. It works best when judiciously applied in the presence of an observer, preferably female and if at all possible wearing a straw hat.

And who can argue with that.

This is just one of many cosmic truths that I have learned from my many years reading the works of one Robert Rankin. Who may be very well be a genius. Or certifiable. Or possibly both, I'm not sure.

I've never tried to explain a Rankin book to anyone before. I've turned people on to his work, but that has usually just been a case of throwing one of his books at them and saying "read the first chapter and tell me what you think". Something which it is impossible to do, because either you share his sense of humour, in which case there is no way you're stopping at one chapter, or you don't, in which case I guarantee you will keep reading, if only to reassure yourself that you didn't dream the first bit.

Retromancer features the lad himself, Hugo Rune (Hugo Artemis Solon Saturnicus Reginald Arthur Rune to be precise. And I can't tell you how nerdy I feel whenever it pops into my head that I know that, months or even years after I last read it. It's one of those things that just sticks, you know?), who enlists the aid of his Acolyte, Rizla, to travel back from Rizlas native 60's to the bombwracked streets of London at the height of the blitz. Their mission? To prevent Count Otto Black (The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived) from using futuristic technology to help Hitler win the war.

Along the way we visit The Ministry of Serendipity (the real brains behind Britains military strategy), learn the shocking truth about Winston Churchill, find out what the emergency services were really up to while people were huddled in shelters and of course find out the secret origin of the Steel Pan, as played by Trinidadians in the Notting Hill Carnival. (Or more accurately the Mark Seven fully chromatic/acoustic metallic idiophone. Which is an improvement on the Mark Six in that it doesn't give you spots.)

Pirates get involved at one point, as do a couple of werewolves. The Statue of Liberty is destroyed, a bottomless pit is discovered in a newsagents and much of the now legendary old toot is talked. By, amongst others, Fangio the barman, who is not yet a fatboy although he has already taken to the chewing of the fat.

I love Robert Rankin. A review of one of his earlier books compared his writing to hard drugs, in that it will make you feel sick at first but is extremely addictive. It certainly was in my case. The reason for my love of his work though is that no matter how many plot holes there are, how many loose ends dangling, how many unexplained anachronisms, how little overall sense it all seems to make, he knows exactly what he is doing at all times and it all makes sense come the denouement.Except the bits that don't, which he'll point out to you with a cocky grin and a "I don't care and you don't either, because we're all having so much fun." You find yourself chuckling at the audacity as the author basically sits and says "I bet you thought I'd forgotten that bit" and "see, that does make sense, you just weren't paying attention". His finales are scarily tightly plotted, making the seemingly random, stream of consciousness nonsense all the more impressive. Genius? Certifiable? Definitely both.

Nerd Do Well

Slight change of pace this week as I venture into the seldom visited realm of the non-fictional. Yes, for all my talk of giant robots, teenage witches, board game inspired shoot-em-ups and Jesus based conspiracies, I can, when the mood takes me, be all, like, intellectual and junk.

I'm not going to be here mind you, I'm just saying I can be. No, for my first non-fiction book in a long time I've gone with a movie stars autobiography. Because that's how I roll.


Nerd Do Well is, the cover tells us, "A small boy's journey to becoming a big kid" and charts the life of Simon Pegg as he grows up, realises he's funny, and parlays that into a huge television and movie career. Jammy bastard.

Pegg is funny. He is also charming and disarmingly honest about his childhood. (I assume he's honest. If you were making stuff up, you wouldn't make some of these stories up.) He seems at times to be embarrassed by the idea that he is important or interesting enough to warrant an autobiography and some of the funniest moments are self deprecating ones.

I can relate to Pegg, in that I was and still am very much the 'geek/nerd'. His obsessions were my obsessions, his heroes mine, although the way things are looking it's highly unlikely that I'll be making any movies with Steven Spielberg any time soon so the similarities probably end there. The fact that I can relate to Pegg so strongly probably explains why I didn't feel let down by this book. Nerd Do Well is not an industry tell-all. It barely scratches the surface of Peggs career. Instead it is a deeply personal account of the man himself, his influences, his relationship with his family and the friendships that have shaped his adult life. Anyone looking for Star Trek anecdotes or scene by scene production diaries for Hot Fuzz need look elsewhere because this is not the book for them. I'd have been happy with that book, but I'm happier with this one.

And it bears repeating, Pegg is funny. Not least in the chapters, inserted throughout the book at choice moments, that are not autobiographical at all, but rather are a bizarre 3rd person narrative in which Pegg is cast as a (pompous and dim) James Bond/Batman figure, jetting around the world with his trusty robotic sidekick to take on evil geniuses intent on world domination. I don't know whether Simon Pegg has read any Robert Rankin but it was Rankins distinctive brand of 'far-fetched-fiction' that these chapters reminded me of, which is a good thing, because few can pull off this level of ridiculous, fourth wall breaking, nod and wink insanity and not fall flat on their face, and I can't help but hope that if Pegg ever decides to write a novel he dares to embrace this style completely. The world needs more toot.

This book is fried gold. You should buy it, or at least get it out of the library, if for no other reason than to look at Peggs baby photos, in which he looks exactly the same as he does today. Seriously, it's uncanny. Oh, and The Galaxys Greatest Comic, 2000AD, gets a brief but positive mention. That's 10 points right there.

I Shall Wear Midnight

Josh Kirby, late great cover artist extraordinaire, is to be thanked for awakening in me a need I never knew I had. A need to read as many stories by one Terry Pratchett as I possibly could. The book was The Light Fantastic and the cover was a chest of the kind you might expect a pirate to keep his booty in. The chest had legs, actual cute little pink legs, but it wasn't using them, for it was flying through the air, and holding on to the chest, in various states of excitement/terror were wizards, warriors and strange looking little men. They say never to judge a book by it's cover but had I not done so here I would have never known the delights and wonders of a little place called the Discworld.

That was 20some years ago now. Terry Pratchett is still writing Discworld books (the latest is no. 38, not counting short stories and narrative inserts in non-fiction books) and I am still reading them. Sadly Josh Kirby is not still illustrating the covers, having passed away several years ago. I say sadly, and I mean it, because while the man currently tasked with providing cover art (Paul Kidby) is a fine artist, and his work could even be said to suit the slightly more serious tone of the later books better than Kirby's cartoony (but insanely detailed and intricate) style might have, I still can't help but think that a new Pratchett just doesn't look right without a new Kirby on the jacket.

So yes, the Discworld series. The series as a whole comprises, as I've said, 38 books so far, but these can be split, roughly, into subsets. There are Rincewind (failed wizard) books, the Witches (pretty self explanatory), the City Watch (police procedurals in Discworlds largest city) and numerous others.

I Shall Wear Midnight stars one Tiffany Aching, a character who has been the lead now in 4 novels, beginning with Wee Free Men, and continuing through A Hat Full Of Sky, Wintersmith, and now ...Midnight. Tiffany is a witch, and seems to have cornered the market in Witch stories set on the Discworld, as the previous 'star' witch, one Granny Weatherwax, and her established supporting cast, have not had a book of their own since Tiffany came on the scene, although they have made cameos in her stories.

The Tiffany Aching stories were originally marketed as Young Adult novels set in Discworld, somehow seperate from the 'grown up' books, but in truth there was little to seperate them, other than the lead characters young age (and even in that the main series had form, with early book Equal Rites having a child protagonist) and the conceit has been dropped now, possibly due to Tiffany herself having grown up (9 in her first book, she is almost 16 in her latest).

Did I enjoy ...Midnight? Indeed I did. Pratchett is one of the best in the world at what he does so compared with the rest of the overcrowded marketplace this book is right up there with the best of them. On a sliding scale of Discworld though, I'm afraid it's only middle ground for me. The reason is that the whole Witches subset has never been my favourite aspect of the series, so any book in that setting is going to be a minor dissapointment, if for no other reason than it's not a City Watch book, or a Rincewind book. This is purely my own prejudice talking though. As a Tiffany Aching/Witches story it's a belter so those for whom those stories are favourites, this will be a welcome addition.

It is quite dark in places though, touching on teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse and suicide, being sympathetic to everyone involved and allowing no easy answers to be found. All of the other usual Pratchett ingredients can be found here as well; real world folklore given just a hint of a twist to fit Discworld, wry and insightful commentary on human nature (good and bad), and of course an ancient supernatural threat that has to be defeated with good old fashioned common sense.

It also has jokes though, and will make you laugh. It is not the riotous, laugh out loud at every second line, eyewateringly hilarious stuff of the early Discworld books but it is still funny. Oh, yes.

If I have one problem with this series it would be this : because Discworld is a fantasy setting, every book seems to have a supernatural antagonist and they can sometimes feel shoehorned in. Quite often, I will be engrossed in the story of the hero or heroine as they go about whatever their agenda is and then boom, suddenly there is a demon or a ghost or an ancient prophecy to deal with. Human antaganists can be scary too. Indeed, the evil entity Tiffany faces in this book is a reincarnated witchfinder from the past who corrupts people with his old 'witches are evil' spiel. In flashback we see him as a human, before his death. He was far from pleasant then. A modern (at least to Tiffany) version of that character would have sufficed for me, and might perhaps have been more chilling, if he was shown to be corrupting with his prejudices through sheer charisma and force of personality, like a cult leader, rather than being able to 'posess' people.

That is just a pet peeve of mine and is the only one I have regarding Pratchetts books, which are, to my mind at least, nigh on perfect in every other respect.

Droid Files

This was going to be about Cross Bones (Kathy Reichs) or Judge Dredd Case Files vol 15 (John Wagner, Garth Ennis and various artists) but sadly, childcare commitments prevented me from finishing either of them in time. So instead I'm going to talk about the Rebellion collection I read immediately prior to starting JD15. Namely this little beauty. Robo-Hunter : Droid Files Volume 2.



John Wagner and Alan Grant between them wrote all of the original run of Robo-Hunter and if you are in any way familiar with the world of comics you will know that those two names together is as close to a guarantee of quality as you're likely to get. So two great writers with an excellent pedigree, a superb artist in Ian Gibson (also responsible for drawing the sublime Ballad Of Halo Jones amongst many others) and one of the best characters of 2000AD's early years, all of which had led me to absolutely adore the first volume. Imagine my disappointment then when I found myself struggling to fully engage with this one.

The problem is that the first two stories are very gimmicky runs that really don't stand the test of time all that well. The first was based around a football (soccer to our American chums) tournament in which all the players and pundits were robots and someone was sabotaging them. I don't follow the sport and I'd have struggled to get all the jokes if it was published now so I was completely flummoxed by the lampooning of personalities from decades ago.

Then we move into a story about men banding together (The Human League, which I'll concede is genius) to commit hate crimes against robots and Sam having to put a stop to it. Now, in theory this should have been a good story but unfortunately it's set against a backdrop of a new law being enacted that requires everyone to sing all the time. Seriously, pretty much every line of dialogue is presented in song form. Now, as annoying as that is (imagine having to sing every conversation in your head as you read it) it's multiplied 10x by the fact that if you don't actually know the tunes you are meant to sing to the lines become meaningless. I mean, you can still understand what they are getting at but the lines just don't flow properly. Words and phrases are distorted/shortened/elongated to match the music and it doesn't read right at all as straight dialogue.

Not to worry though, all is forgiven with the 3rd story, as gimmicks are put aside and we get back to good solid comics storytelling. First up is 'The Slaying of Slade' in which some old enemies return to, well, slay Slade. This leads into 'Sam Slades Last Case', and from there we get 'Farewell My Billions', which is introduced with the somewhat classic line "Sam Slade, Robohunter, in his first case since his last case". These 3 long stories combined comprise an epic arc that sees Sam rise higher than he ever has before bringing him back down to Earth and depositing him right where he started at the very beginning of Volume One. They also mark the end of the original run and of John Wagner and Alan Grants writing tenure on the character. (Grant would return to the series many years later with a run of stories considered by most to be okay but far from classic, focusing on Sams Granddaughter, with the man himself playing a much reduced role)

The book also contains a one off story by John Smith and Chris Weston and the final stories in the 90's revival, written by Peter Hogan and drawn by Rian Hughes. These stories are excellent, managing to combine the strengths of the new guys with everything that was great about Wagner/Grant. The only slight niggle here is that Chris Weston and Rian Hughes are both absolutely incredible artists whose work sadly doesn't shine *quite* as much as it should after the greyscaling process. Some colour artwork translates better than others and some of the stuff here suffers. That's only a minor niggle though, and I'd much rather this than the stories not be included at all as they can sometimes be overlooked. Here is an example of Hughes Robo-Hunter in the intended colour, the cover to 2000AD issue 910:



Not included are the stories that started the 90's revival. These stories were written by Mark Millar and are somewhat, well, loathed, by fans of the character. Millar is not the most popular of writers to have worked on 2000AD with many fans and his Robo-Hunter run is a big part of this (along with his run on Judge Dredd, considered one of the worst ever). I can't comment, because I've never read his stuff, coming as it did before I started reading the anthology. To be honest, I kind of wish it had been included, so I could make my own mind up about it. There is a tendency to dismiss a lot of 2000AD's output from the 90's as unrepresentative and unworthy of reprinting and I'm starting to despair of ever getting the chance to read it. Maybe the push into the US will prompt a reprint of Millars stories to cash in on his name value there. Time will tell I suppose.

So that's my first attempt to write up a book I've read. I hope it wasn't too bad. I'm dithering over whether I should include a rating system on here? Am I going to 'review' stuff or just waffle about it? Which does the above read like? I'll see how the next couple turn out.