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| RTomens, 2023 |
I've spent the last few days in the Space Age - nothing new in that, except to say that recently I've been focused on both interplanetary and inner space, travelling back in time to the golden (space) age optimism of the 50s, hence the collage above - and towards a future (The Future?) where my bank balance is considerably smaller thanks to Stephen E. Andrews' YouTube channel. That's a recent discovery. In a reasoned, well-informed manner, Stephen explains why books he chooses should be read.
I won't spoil your enjoyment by naming the books he chooses for his Top 25 in two videos, suffice to say I agree with some of the choices and haven't read a lot of them. I have an on/off love affair with sci-fi; thinking it's the greatest genre one minute, then the most stupid. It's the first genre I read as a mid-teenager, naturally choosing the big names such as Asimov, Clarke and Herbert.
Its appeal probably stems from the fact that I was always accused of just 'staring into space' as a kid - it's true, I was, but not Outer Space, no, inner space more like or, actually, that weird zone between what I could see out of the classroom window and what was between, without focus...a mental drift into another dimension, my eyes not seeing anything clearly...my mind altered to suit another dimension.
Fast forward through many decades' reading and I've always dipped into science-fiction but spent more time with writers such as Graham Green and the hard-boiled school (Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, for instance). Yet there is a connection. J.G.Ballard is on record as a big fan of Greene. In the latest collection of Ballard's writing there's an essay on G.G. It's a great book and I'll be reviewing it soon.
William Burroughs is another writer I've been into for years. The connection between hard-boiled American writers and WSB is also there in Bill's perversion of pulp fiction and the private eye (or 'private asshole'). His use of street slang ('Wising up the marks') and the exploits of the Nova Police.
It was good to see Burroughs in Andrews' Top 25. He's too radical for most sci-fi fans, I would guess. Whilst the early ideas of space travel and alien menace seems 'radical' on paper, it became a hackneyed cliche, a space trap into which all sci-fi writers seemed to fall, the end results being no more than Boys Own adventures in space. Well, as Ballard once said when explaining the appeal of sci-fi to him as a young man, at least no-one lived in Hampstead. Burroughs, meanwhile, was rewriting the book, exploiting space-age cliches to radically alter literature and our perception of time through extensive use of cut-up texts which sampled Graham Green, Conrad and a host of others. It felt to me upon discovering his universe that this was 'true' science-fiction; speculative texts for the multi-media overload age.
Stephens' Top 25 got me thinking. I'm in no position as an expert to name that many but here are 10 that would be in my chart. In no particular order:
Nova Express - William Burroughs
Hard To Be A God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Man Who Fell To Earth - Walter Tevis
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G Ballard
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philp K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
I'm bound to have forgotten some!
Here's Stephen's first 25. His channel is highly recommended.
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