The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (2009)

There are poorly written books, and then there is The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (born 1978).

We have admitted in the past our admiration for well-written science fiction.  (Apologia coming.)  Many of the finest adventure novels of the past hundred or so years fall into that category of fiction, and there are several important contemporary novels that inhabit the genre as well -- consider Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, for example. The science fiction genre is plagued by myriad problems, including a rabid and largely unintelligent fan-base, a surfeit of series novels and/or novelized movies and television shows, and an uneasy alliance with comic books.  Add to that list of ills a slew of subgenres within science fiction that do little to help elevate the field to literature, and you have a pretty mess.

One of these subgenres is steampunk, which is one of those concepts that sound delicious on paper, but always fall flat in execution.  For the uninitiated, steampunk is the reimagining of a historical period (almost always the Victorian era), altered by a different strain of scientific progress.  In steampunk it’s not impossible to find steam powered robots attending the Queen, for instance, or airships robbed by the James gang.  The major problem with the subgenre is that it is almost always … silly.  More damning, steampunk seems to always be written by people who learned all they know about the Victorian era or European history from comic books, bad television shows, or other, silly steampunk novels.  Those who are familiar with an actual historical era are more than happy to swallow any number of 007-type gadgets if the small historical details are observed.  Otherwise, the whole subgenre is just thrillers in bad fancy dress.

Which brings us to The Affinity Bridge.  In Mann’s novel, consulting detectives Newbury (interested in the occult, takes drugs, ripped off from Sherlock Homes) and his sidekick, Hobbes (Mrs. Emma Peel in a bustle) investigate a crashed airship, a series of ghost-policemen murders, and a plague of zombies.  (Yes, you read that right.)  Now, there is nothing at all wrong with puffery like this … when it’s well written.  When it’s poorly written, the results are excruciating.

Mann’s grip of both dialog and prose is loose at best.  Characters speak in the most stilted manner imaginable (thank heavens for ‘he said/she said,” or we would never know who is speaking), and the prose has a studied artificiality, as if that is somehow “Victorian.”  One wonders if Mann has actually read the great popular writers of the era, who are as fresh and exciting today as they were in fin de siècle Britain.  There is nothing in the prose of such writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or H. Rider Haggard that does not read easy and contemporary – creating layers of faux artifice is not “Victorian,” it’s simply bad writing.

This bad faux Victoriana is largely the fault of comic book scribe Alan Moore (born 1953), whose stories about The League of Extraordinary Gentleman read more like parody of bad Victorian women’s books rather than a pastiche of more accomplished thrillers.  Steampunk has followed Moore's lead with dire results.  He has much to answer for.

Opening the book at random, here is Mann at his ham-fisted best:

Newbury glanced at Veronica, a sardonic expression on his face, and then turned his attention to Inspector Foulkes.  “Do you know if Sir Charles will be attending the scene?”

“Not initially, sir.  He has ceded responsibility for the case to me for the time being.  He’s still caught up in this damnable Whitechapel situation.  They found another body this morning.”

“Indeed.  Miss Hobbes and I were present at the scene.”  He glanced back at Stokes, who was attempting to clean the dirt from his shoes by rubbing them on the grass.  “Do you know how long it’s been since the vessel came down?”

The other man didn’t look up from his ministrations.  “Witnesses are reporting seeing the vessel come down between ten and ten thirty this morning.”  He emitted a tutting sound as he continued to rub the side of his shoe on the wet grass, to no avail.

Newbury flushed red.  “Damn it, man!  Fifty people are dead!  Show some decency, and pay attention to the issue at hand.”

All of the pointless stage-managing goes on for page after page (including a servant who is sitting in his master’s home – harder to believe than zombies! – with his hands behind his back; try that at home), and none of it ever crackles.  From an eighth grader with literary aspirations, it would be promising.  From a published author, it’s simply sad.

Here is the truly amazing thing about it all – Mann worked as an editor for Outland Magazine.  Yes, a man who writes likes this edited the work of other people for a living … A development more astounding than anything to be found in The Affinity Bridge.

The Getaway Special, by Jerry Oltion (2001)

One of the many pleasures of summer reading is the serendipitous discovery of new authors.  Since I have raley read much science fiction since my boyhood, I had missed the ascendance of Jerry Oltion (born 1957).  Fortunately, I have just come accross his delightful 2001 novel, The Getaway Special.

Few books would better define summer reading than The Getaway Special, the very theme of which is escape.  It is the story of NASA space shuttle pilot Judy Gallagher and what happens when research scientist Allen Meisner tests his new invention, a hyperdrive that enables spacecraft to travel light-years through space in the blink of an eye.

Meisner is a member of INSANE, the International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination.  He believes that hyperdrive technology available to the masses will drive humankind’s pioneer spirit, and people will travel through the vastness of space in homemade space craft, populating the universe and ensuring that humanity survives possible nuclear extinction here on earth.  While on the shuttle, and with Gallagher’s help, Meisner broadcasts the secrets of his hyperdrive, which can easily be made with parts at the local Radio Shack.

Instead of being hailed as heroes upon their return, Gallagher and Meisner become fugitives – it seems that the US wants to cover up the whole thing as a hoax and keep the technology for themselves; similarly, governments around the world believe that easy access to off-planet escape technology would greatly reduce the control of people entrapped by their own nations and governments.

Hiding in the American Midwest, the couple are befriended by a redneck cowboy libertarian, his wife, and a friendly Robin Hoodesque bank robber.  With their help -- and with some easily available around the home parts and a well-stocked septic tank (don’t ask) – they leave the earth in search of habitable planets.

In space, further than any human being has ever traveled before, they encounter a race of super-intelligent, space-travelling butterflies, sentient trees that uproot themselves and move around, and … a submarine full of belligerent Frenchmen.

As you can tell from this quick synopsis, The Getaway Special is a lark, designed to amuse and entertain – which is does wonderfully.  It is a very funny book (a rarity in science fiction), and is ultimately extremely humanistic and optimistic (a rarity in contemporary science fiction). 

While reading The Getaway Special, I had the curious feeling of renewing an acquaintance, and then it hit me – in mode of storytelling and imaginative prowess, Oltion was writing a book very much in the vein of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels.  Like the Oz novels, our heroine and her male friend (often inadequate in some way), travel far and meet a serious of outlandish peoples, who eventually help them return home and resolve the problems that sent them on the road to begin with.  In short, Oltion has written an extremely amusing children’s book for adults.

When looking at Edgar Rice Burroughs yesterday, we said that science is really always about the time in which it is written, and not the future.  That is certainly true here – released before September 11^th, The Getaway Special is frank and honest about how severe a compromise to American interests would be viewed.  However, Your Correspondent read it with a trace of nostalgia – there was still some semblance of law and checks-and-balances of power at play in the novel, and one imagines that today that our heroes would have been shot out of space while broadcasting the hyperdrive specs.

Also interesting is the politics at play.  Oltion seems to appreciate the often good sense of the Right to perceive real and present threats, while also giving credence to the Left and its belief that the vast majority of human beings want the same things.  (And with a forest of sentient trees, Oltion is literally a tree-hugger.)  And one of the more heroic characters (indeed, the one perhaps most responsible for humanity’s eventual survival … is a beer-guzzling libertarian in a cowboy hat.

Oltion’s work is new to me (though he has been active for some time), and I will happily seek out other books.  I was also amused to learn that there is more than a little Allen Meisner in him.  Oltion is the inventor of the trackball telescope, an equatorial mounting system with an electromechanical star tracking drive.  He has put the patent-able portions of it on his Website, making his invention accessible to other telescope makers.

Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta), by William Joyce

This week, we look at some books that make for perfect summer reading, and we start with something special.  Any new book by author, illustrator, filmmaker and poster boy for high-spirited shenanigans William Joyce (born 1957) is a cause for celebration.  But his new book – Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta) – is sufficient for bursting out into song, headstands while doing a Tarzan yell, and unrestrained fits of the hokey-pokey.

Not that Billy’s Booger is your ordinary, wonderful book.  It’s snot.  It is something quite unique – an illustrated memoir by a master of the form.  In it, he chronicles his participation in a school-book competition, and includes his first opus, Billy’s Booger – The Memoir of a Little Green Nose Buddy.  In short, this is the portrait of the artist as a (very) young man, and provides an insight into the formative components that make up Joyce’s protean imagination.

The story does snot have many fairy tale elements, despite its very traditional beginning of Once upon a time.  Or, as Joyce starts his narrative, Once upon a time, when TV was in black and white, and there were only three channels, and when kids didn’t have playdates -- they just roamed free in the “out of doors” there lived a kid named Billy.

And we’re off for an in-depth look into the Joycean imagination.  Most books in Joyce’s oeuvre exist largely as showcases for his stunning depictions of glowing, nostalgic Americana.  Billy’s Booger, however, is different – it has the full complement of stunning illustrations (some, the finest of his career), but is more of a masterpiece of design than anything else.

Consider – Joyce includes his initial foray into book creation as a special insert into the book itself, published on different weight green construction paper (and printed in what appears to be white chalk).  In addition to that, Joyce reproduces the illustrative style of 1950s-60s hygiene texts, along with loose-leaf paper doodles, and also includes several loving homages to classic newspaper comic strips.  Nor does he miss an opportunity to display his obsessive creativity and imagination: the endpapers include schoolboy doodles of the most mischievous sort, including my favorite: Replace Hallway Floors with TRAMPOLINES – why has this not happened? 

Joyce fills the book with quotations of his many obsessions, as well as many of his early books.  In what may be my favorite illustration in the book, Joyce’s depicts his younger self creating his first magnum opus.  In the background, just perceptible, is the poster from the 1933 King Kong, one of Joyce’s seminal influences.  Nearby is a model spaceship in the mode of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers (Joyce’s sense of science fiction, like that of your correspondent, is locked in 1930s art deco futurism).  On his desk is a brontosaur that may well serve as the model for his later creation, Dinosaur Bob, and doodles on his desk bring to mind his most recent book, The Mischievians.

In other parts of the book, you will see references to his earlier works, including George Shrinks, Roli Poli Oli, and perhaps even a nod to his sometimes collaborator, Michael Chabon.  There is even a little doodle that will become the logo for his animation and imagination company, Moonbot.

And Joyce simply never lets up.  In those pages where he recreates classic comic strips, I was able to spot homages to Peanuts, L’il Abner, a gorgeous Little Nemo page, Flash Gordon (of course) and Dick Tracy.  It is in his affections and deeply-rooted loves that Joyce reminds me most, perhaps, of the late Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).  Like Bradbury, one of the great writers of the last century, Joyce wears his heart and his loves on his sleeve – which is perhaps where they belong.  It is not a fashionable way of looking at the world; and certainly the last thing anyone could ever accuse Joyce of was being “ironic.”  But it is honest, and sweet and boyish and … peppy.  I can’t read Joyce (or Bradbury, for that matter) and not feel young again, or at least young at heart.  If for no other reason, Joyce deserves a medal, perhaps with an oak leaf cluster, if they have one lying around somewhere.

More literal minded readers will wonder how much of Billy’s Booger is “true.”  Well what does it mean when one promises the truth in a memoir?  Is this the actual book Joyce created in his boyhood, reproduced here without editorializing?  Did he, in fact, have such a happy relationship with his principal?  (If so, Joyce was doubly, if not triply blessed.)  And … are these pages lit by the glow of personal nostalgia?

Well … what does it matter?  Billy’s Booger is thickly crusted with enough biographical data to have more than a kernel of truth, and this is the artist’s biography as he remembers it.  Perhaps, one day, there will be a full-fledged autobiography or third-person biography to enjoy in addition to the Booger.

In a culture that values its heroes and children’s entertainment when it’s “dark,” the wonderful world of William Joyce provides a much-needed corrective.  His world is a place of sun-kissed landscapes, mid-century American optimism, and unfettered fun.  His books are for very young children, very old people, and everyone and anyone in between.

For those reasons, and many others, the book Billy’s Booger is our pick of the week.

Empire State and Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher

The cover, sadly, is the best thing about Empire State

We should make it clear from the outset that we here at The Jade Sphinx read a great many trashy novels.  However, as with all things, there are degrees of trash … and I will happily champion the work of writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Zane Grey (1872-1939) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961).  However, most genre fiction is barely readable, and much of it downright embarrassing.

This is particularly true in two new subgenres that seem to have taken the science fiction world by storm: steampunk and superhero novels.  Superheroes, of course, are familiar to anyone who has been awake and attentive to pop culture for the past 25 years; steampunk, however, may take some explaining.  Steampunk is science fiction set in the past (usually the Victorian era), but featuring retro-futuristic gadgetry or inverted social structures.  One would think that the possibilities are limitless, but, actually, nearly all steampunk is gimcrack stuff.  The overarching problem with the steampunk genre is that its practitioners really do not understand the past, or, worse yet, that everything they know about the past was gleaned from comic books and old television shows.

These thoughts – and others – drifted through my mind while reading two novels by Adam Christopher (born 1978), an emerging voice in the science fiction arena.  His first book, Empire State (2012), is about an alternate 1920s-1930s: a pocket universe of supervillains, lesser gangsters, hard-bitten PIs, airships and superscience.  In summary, it sounds like something right up my alley – I love that era and the pulp fiction written during it, and the book sounded like goofy fun.  I pulled this, and his second novel, The Seven Wonders (also 2012) from the shelf.  The Seven Wonders, if anything, looked like even more fun: a West Coast city full of superheroes, an ordinary man suddenly gifted (or burdened) with superpowers, and a threat from outer space.

Well… both books are major disappointments to even the most cursory readers of the genre.  Empire State is a thudding bore, and your correspondent found it a slough to get through it.  The book is innocent of a single fresh idea, and the situations and characterizations are third-and-fourth-hand: everything is a reflection of some earlier trope, or, worse still, a reflection of a reflection.  Readers looking for an Art Deco romp should go elsewhere.

More egregious was The Seven Wonders.  The book deals with a team of superheroes and how they react when a new, superpowered entity emerges.  It also has a supervillain who changes alliances, a duplicitous sidekick, a moon base and various global threats.  In it is nothing even remotely resembling a human being: the characters are all riffs on existing comic characters, and the story a pastiche (not a meditation, mind, but a pastiche) of comic book conventions.  Complete with four (or five – I lost count) finales, it seemed to this reader like a novel that wouldn’t end. 

The Seven Wonders also has to be the first book in recent memory that uses the word f-ck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, expletive and gerund.  Such linguistic flexibility may satisfy undemanding readers, but adults may be looking for a little bit more.

Both novels were written by someone who knows a great deal about science fiction and comic books, but nothing whatsoever about life.