Popular Culture in Fortean Times

In the comment thread to last week's post, I mentioned that Fortean Times occasionally touches on various aspects of popular culture, from cult TV and movies to comics and pop music. So I thought I'd do a quick run-through of a few examples today.

To start with some very obvious topics, there are the three shown above. The X-Files (FT 82, August 1995) was not only one of the most fortean TV shows of all time, but its first appearance in 1993 coincided with the wider distribution of FT to "mainstream" retailers like WH Smith, and almost certainly contributed to the magazine's popularity at that time. Around a decade later, Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (FT 193, March 2005) was a publishing phenomenon, bringing fringe theories that had previously been the realm of specialist writers (and FT contributors) like Lionel Fanthorpe and Lynn Picknett to a much wider audience. Just over a century earlier, Bram Stoker had done something similar in his novel Dracula - the title character of which went on to become one of the most recognisable and ubiquitous pop-culture icons of them all, as recounted in the cover feature of FT 257 (January 2010).

At a less obvious level, you can find references to popular culture in almost every issue of FT. Taking the one I discussed last week, for example - FT 73 from February/March 1994 - there's an interview with cult author William Gibson, generally credited as the originator of the cyberpunk genre. And I spotted something else in that issue, too: a book review by comics legend Alan Moore. I don't mean a review of one of his graphic novels - I mean a review written by him of someone else's work. Looking online, I see he actually did quite a few reviews for FT in those days - which pleases me enormously, as I've done over 40 of them myself. It's always nice to discover that you have something in common with a famous person!

Sticking with books and comics for a moment, here are three more covers that caught my eye. No apologies for a second appearance of The Da Vinci Code (FT 212 this time, from August 2006) - both because it's one of my favourite novels, and because I love the illustration on the cover. In addition to people like Picasso and Orson Welles, it features Da Vinci himself in the act of strangling Dan Brown! The middle cover (FT 256, December 2009) features Dennis Wheatley - best remembered today for The Devil Rides Out (the only one of his novels that I've read), although in his day he was Britain's most prolific author of occult fiction. Finally there's the only comics-themed cover I could find - FT 320 (November 2014), relating to the Fredric Wertham-inspired anti-comics paranoia than swept America in the 1950s.

I found a few shorter comic-related pieces on interior pages as well. The most interesting of these was an article in FT 277 (July 2011) called "The Morning of the Mutants", speculating that Stan Lee and/or Jack Kirby got the idea for the X-Men from the seminal (though now largely forgotten) fortean conspiracy book The Morning of the Magicians, written in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. There's also a feature about Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange in FT 349 (January 2017, to tie in with the movie), which discusses the character's origin and fictional predecessors.

Regarding the "popular culture" of the mid-20th century, I can't resist mentioning a couple of pieces by myself - in fact the only two full-length feature articles I've had in FT. First there was "Fanthorpe's Fortean Fiction" (FT 297, February 2013) about the large number of mass-market paperback novels that Lionel Fanthorpe churned out in the late 1950s and early 60s. This was followed by "Astounding Science, Amazing Theories" (FT 355, July 2017), looking at fortean themes in the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1940s.

Pulp magazines were a huge part of popular culture in the first half of the 20th century, but - with a few notable exceptions - they're only of interest to die-hard fans today. Of those exceptions, perhaps the most important is H. P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu Mythos first took form in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s, before going on to develop a life of its own to rival that of Bram Stoker's Dracula. I found no fewer than three Lovecraft-inspired FT covers: FT 184 (June 2004), FT 369 (August 2018) and FT 390 (March 2020 - this one tying in with the movie adaptation of The Color Out of Space). Here they are:

As regards cult TV shows, I've already mentioned the most fortean of all, The X-Files - which not surprisingly made several further appearances after the one pictured at the top of this post (including FT 85 from February 1996, which had a rundown of all the fortean references in the show's first season). Three other TV-related covers are shown below, the middle of which - FT 215 from October 2006, celebrating 40 years of Star Trek - needs no introduction. The other two relate to the screenwriters (both with wider fortean interests than you might expect) behind two of Britain's most famous sci-fi icons: Kit Pedler, who created Doctor Who's second-most-famous villains, the Cybermen (FT 209, May 2006), and Nigel Kneale, creator of Professor Quatermass (FT 418, May 2022). The latter may no longer be a household name, but back in the 1950s he was really the first great TV sci-fi hero, in this country at least.

Turning to movies - I was spoiled for choice here, so I've picked out three covers that really speak for themselves. First there's a celebration of 50 years of Hammer Horror films (FT 223, June 2007), then a look at one of the mainstays of those films, Peter Cushing, on the 100th anniversary of his birth (FT 301, May 2013), and finally a 40-years-on retrospective about The Exorcist (FT 313, April 2014):

To be honest, my favourite thing about The Exorcist is the music - the snippet from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells that it uses, I mean - which brings me neatly onto the next subject. When I talk about "pop culture" on this blog, I most often mean fairly specialized things like pulp magazines, comics (from the pre-multimedia franchise days) and cult TV shows such as The X-Files. But to most people, pop culture means just one thing, and that's pop music. This is such a pervasive part of modern life that it's acquired a plethora of fortean connections - so much so that I'm going to split them into two distinct parts.

To start with, here are three cover features that deal with direct fortean influences on musicians. The first, from FT 88 back in July 1996, describes how various pop stars from David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix to Kate Bush and The Orb absorbed ufological and similar speculations into their music. Second, there's a somewhat more arcane take on the same subject by Ian Simmons (FT 244, January 2009), featuring the likes of Stockhausen and Sun Ra - a much-referenced source for my own book The Science of Sci-Fi Music. Finally, in the immediate wake of David Bowie's death, there was a cover feature about the numerous fortean influences on his work (FT 338, March 2016) - including the aforementioned Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier.

Another aspect of pop music that's of fortean interest is the way weird conspiracy theories grow up around the subject. So to round off what I honestly believed would be a shorter-than-usual post when I started it, but has ended up as probably my longest ever - here are three cover features addressing this aspect. The one on the left (FT 166, January 2003) deals with the numerous legends and conspiracy theories associated with Elvis, while the one on the right (FT 384, October 2019) does much the same for the Beatles. As for the one in the middle (FT 258, February 2010), it concerns the notion that the "Illuminati" employ popular music - and the musicians themselves - to manipulate the thoughts, beliefs and behaviour of the general public. But that's not really a conspiracy theory, is it? I mean, if you substitute "global media" for "Illuminati", I'd say it's an indisputable fact.

 

The Saint and the Spy Revisited

(courtesy of Bing Image Creator)

As I typed out that headline, it occurred to me that some readers might expect something about Roger Moore - so for their benefit, I'll insert a suitable photo from my collection to the bottom of this post. But what I really want to talk about is the legend-laden Dorset village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, which I wrote about in A Saint, a Spy and the Holy Grail back in 2014. The Holy Grail doesn't feature in this revisit, but both the Saint and the Spy do - thanks to some intriguing new information supplied by a reader of that earlier post.

When I came back to this blog after its long hiatus, I found the following comment awaiting moderation (fortunately only since January 2023 - a few other comments had been sitting in limbo for much longer than that!):

Bonjour, my name is Bruno Mevel. I used to live in Bridport and was involved in a play in Whitchurch years ago. The play was about the different possibilities as to who was Saint Wite. That play was written by a certain Christopher Dilke, journalist and author. He was also Georgi Markov's father-in-law... the reason why he is buried in Whitchurch. Don't know if this will reach you, if it does and you want some more info here is my mail address...

I didn't actually publish that comment, as I didn't want to give Bruno's email to all the world's spambots, but I did contact him and he very kindly sent me quite a lot of info. But before I get into it, here's a quick reminder of our two protagonists:

• Saint Wite, also known as Saint Candida (from a Latin word meaning "white"), who probably lived in the early middle ages but about whom nothing is really known (though there are several legends and speculative theories). Her remains are interred inside the church of St Candida at Whitchurch Canonicorum - one of only two genuine church shrines to survive the Protestant reformation in England.
   
  
• Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC. He wasn't actually a spy, but he was accused of spreading anti-communist propaganda by his former compatriots. One morning in 1978, while he was waiting at a London bus stop on his way to work, some still-unknown assailant shot him in the leg with a sugar-coated ricin pellet fired from a rolled up umbrella (you can't do this with any old umbrella, by the way - you need a specially modified one from the Bulgarian equivalent of Q branch). Markov died a few days later, and he's buried in the churchyard of Whitchurch Canonicorum, with a gravestone inscribed in both English and Cyrillic.

In my earlier post, I said I couldn't find out how Markov came to be buried in a Dorset village churchyard - so that's one thing Bruno has cleared up, with the revelation that Markov was married to someone from that area. As well as expanding on this point, the additional information he sent also revealed a rather roundabout connection between Markov and St Wite herself. Here's a summary of the whole story.

In his comment above, Bruno mentioned that Georgi Markov's father-in-law was an author named Christopher Dilke (1913–87). In his later years Dilke moved to Whitchurch Canonicorum, where he wrote a play called Legends of St Wite for the church's 900th anniversary in July 1980 (I found this mention of it on the church's own website). Bruno happened to share mutual friends with the Dilke family, and Christopher Dilke asked him to perform one of the roles in the play. The plot involved a new Saxon bishop placed in charge of Whitchurch trying to ascertain just who St Wite was. In the process, he asks various people to give their opinions on the matter. Bruno (who is French) played the role of a Breton nobleman, presenting the Breton version of the St Wite legend.

The play was only performed once, inside the church itself. As much as anything, Bruno remembers the costumes they made for themselves, which were copied from the Bayeux tapestry (if you subtract 900 from 1980 and remember your history, you'll see this gets the period pretty much spot-on). Bruno also kept hold of the poster from the event, which was designed by a local artist named Albert Duplock. Here it is:

 Switching over to the Markov story, there's a connection with Christopher Dilke there too, because Markov married Dilke's daughter Annabel in 1975. After Markov's murder three years later, Annabel's mother claimed the Soviet KGB must have supplied the ricin that was used. This was the height of the Cold War, remember, when East-West espionage and intrigue was at its most intense. During Markov's funeral in St Candida's churchyard, the mourners - who included several other Bulgarian defectors - were protected by armed Special Branch officers who mingled discreetly with them.

As for the Roger Moore connection I mentioned - well, there isn't one really, except with my "The Saint and the Spy" title. Moore is best known, of course, for playing the most famous fictional spy of all, James Bond, in the 1970s and 80s, but those of us of a certain age also fondly remember him in the TV adaptation of The Saint, by Leslie Charteris, in the 1960s. In that series, Moore's character drove a distinctive white Volvo P1800 coupe, which I happened to see at the Bristol Classic Car Show in 2017. Here's my photo of it:

 In case you can't decipher the label on the windscreen, here's what it amounts to: This is the original Roger Moore "ST 1" 1962 TV Saint car. It was used in the first series and made its debut in the first episode [...] The registration "ST 1" was only used for filming - actual reg is 71 DXC.

50 Years of Fortean Times

Having got this blog back up and running, my next problem was to think of new things to write about. Since this month sees the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Fortean Times, it seems an obvious place to start.

Actually the magazine only carried the name "Fortean Times" from issue 16 onwards - prior to that, it was simply called The News. When its first issue appeared in November 1973, I was just short of 16 - i.e. old enough to have been interested in it if I'd known about it, but as it happened I was blissfully unaware of it. I believe the magazine's founding editor, Bob Rickard, was a member of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group, which I also joined around that time, so maybe I saw him there without knowing it (though I did get a brief but nice email from Bob many years later, as documented further down this post).

[Just as an aside before I forget - I did have one encounter at the BSFG with someone who, though now forgotten, was a big name in the fortean world at the time. This was Professor John Taylor, who was one of the first mainstream scientists to carry out laboratory experiments on Uri Geller and other people who displayed seemingly ESP-like powers. I attended a talk by him at the BSFG in April 1976.]

In common, I suspect, with many other people, I only really became aware of FT's existence in the early 1990s, after copies started to be distributed more widely to British newsagents. My first few issues (starting with #67 in February 1993, more than 30 years ago) are shown at the top of this post. Notice that the magazine's covers - by the brilliant and inimitable Hunt Emerson - were a lot livelier and more colourful in those days than they are today!

Over the years, I've made enough appearances in Fortean Times to consider myself a "regular contributor" to the magazine. To keep track of them (for myself if no one else), I've put a list of contributions on my website. So far they amount to 18 articles - mainly 1 or 2 page Forum pieces - and 46 book reviews, as well as 12 "letters to the editor", the first of them appearing way back in January 2001. But my personal high point came in June 2019, when FT printed David Clarke's interview with me about my time working in the Ministry of Defence (when I was peripherally involved in their UFO/UAP research). Here it is, complete with a photograph of me talking to a Russian scientist in Red Square (top picture on the right-hand page):

Returning to the subject of FT founder Bob Rickard, he's been mentioned quite a few times in previous posts on this blog, including a couple in the context of comic-book homages. The first (Fortean Agent of SHIELD) actually predates the founding of Fortean Times, coming from issue 12 of Marvel's Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, cover-dated May 1969. That particular issue's creators, Steve Parkhouse and Barry Windsor-Smith, were friends of Bob at the time and named one of the story's characters "Robert Rickard" after him.

The other comic-book connection I wrote about, in The Department of Fortean Events, relates to a 2000 AD story called "Shamballa", featuring the Judge Anderson character. Written by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, the story is reprinted in book form in Judge Anderson: The Psi Files volume 02. As I explained in that earlier post, "Doc Rickard" - an obvious homage to FT's founder - is a paranormal researcher at the "Department of Fortean Events" (which doesn't really exist, but ought to).

I mentioned earlier that I once received an email from Bob Rickard, and I'll get onto that now. Back in February 2011, I put a short video clip on YouTube showing a scene from a video game which namechecks FT. It's from a Sam & Max episode called "Night of the Raving Dead", in which Sam, inspecting a complicated-looking piece of equipment, says "I'd bet my lifetime subscription to the Fortean Times that that's an alchemy machine".

I sent the video link to FT editors David Sutton and Paul Sieveking, and one of them must have forwarded it to Bob - because shortly afterwards I received an email from him saying "Great - my kids loved the first Sam & Max adventures". Here's the clip in question:

There's another connection between FT and video games that I'm aware of, which I mentioned on my other blog in May 2017, shortly after this one went into hiatus. It's a cameo appearance by a (sadly fictitious) magazine called Freaky Times, in the game Barrow Hill: The Dark Path by my favourite team of adventure game developers, Matt Clark and Jonathan Boakes. In case the magazine's oddly familiar cover design isn't enough of a giveaway, Jonathan himself once described it as "a little nod to the Fortean Times". Here's his cover mock-up from the game:

 

Astronomical debunking

ESA’s Gaia spacecraft was in the news a few weeks ago, when it produced a detailed map of the Galaxy (pictured above). But images like these don’t really reflect Gaia’s main mission, which is to measure accurate positions and velocities for millions of individual stars. That’s something I was interested in 30 years ago, and in fact I co-wrote a paper on the subject in 1986. Tucked away in an appendix to that paper is my one and only all-out attempt at scientific “debunking”. It probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me – but then I thought last week’s post (about a popular video game) would have mass appeal, and it only got 81 views. So I really don’t care any more. I’m going to indulge myself.

The paper in question was co-written with James Binney, who was my boss at the time, and quite an authority on galactic dynamics (he co-authored the standard textbook on the subject, and I think he’s now involved in the Gaia project itself). After I’d dug out a hard copy of May & Binney (1986), and carefully scanned it into my computer, I discovered that all my astronomical papers are freely available online. There’s one about Black Holes from The Astrophysical Journal, and seven others from Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Among the latter, there’s one called “Solar-neighbourhood observations and the structure of the Galaxy” – and that’s the one I’m talking about here.

The title may sound odd, because the “solar neighbourhood” is usually taken to be about a thousand parsecs across, while the Galaxy as a whole is fifty times that size. But it’s only in the solar neighbourhood that we can measure the velocities of other stars with any accuracy. You have to extrapolate from these measurements to work out what’s happening elsewhere in the Galaxy. That’s helped by the fact that the oldest stars in the solar neighbourhood – sometimes called “halo stars” or “Population II” – tend to move on wide-ranging orbits that take them all over the place.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, an American astronomer named Olin Eggen claimed that some of the halo stars in the solar neighbourhood were moving on very similar orbits, even though they were physically separate from each other – not gravitationally bound in a tight cluster. That’s known to occur with some young stars in the Galactic disc – they’re called “moving groups”, made up of stars formed in the same gas cloud which haven’t had time to disperse – but the idea of equivalent moving groups of halo stars is something else altogether. It’s not “bad astronomy” in the Velikovsky league, but it’s the kind of brash, attention-grabbing claim that really needs to be examined closely. And that’s what we did in Appendix B of our paper (at this distance of time, I can’t remember if it was my idea or James’s – probably his, though in either case it would have been me who did all the calculations).

Like I said at the start, we ended up debunking the whole idea, using a mixture of statistics and dynamical calculations. You can see the whole appendix in the scan at the bottom of this post. I have no idea if anyone actually read this part of the paper, or paid any attention to it (according to Google Scholar, the paper has only collected 41 citations in the last 30 years). I don’t know what the current thinking about “halo moving groups” is, either. My guess is that (with the Galaxy being a more complex place than it used to be) they’re not as a-priori impossible as we thought – although I’d still put money on the specific halo groups “found” by Eggen being nothing more than wishful thinking.

I just had a quick look at Wikipedia’s article about Olin Eggen. It says “He first introduced the now-accepted notion of moving groups of stars” ... but I imagine that refers to Population I groups, not Population II. I did pick up another interesting snippet from that article, though. It says “After his death he was found to have been in possession of highly significant historical files and documents that had apparently gone missing for decades from the Royal Greenwich Observatory”.

No comment.

WHAAM!

The new extension to the Tate Modern museum opened last week. I only need the slimmest of excuses to visit London, so I went to see it. The new part (called the Switch House) mainly houses contemporary art installations, while the original building (which used to be Bankside Power Station) contains older works of “modern art”. Prominent among the latter is Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic painting WHAAM!, pictured above. This was far and away my favourite item in the whole museum – not surprisingly, given the irresistible combination of comic-book nostalgia and military aircraft nostalgia!

Roy Lichtenstein was a controversial artist, because so many of his paintings copied the layout of published comic-book panels (for numerous examples, see this page). But I think it’s wrong to belittle his work for this reason. Yes, it’s a shame that the original artist goes uncredited, but the artistic medium, display context, gigantic size and sheer painstaking precision of Lichtenstein’s works make them totally different from the original (a fact that isn’t always clear when you see small side-by-side comparisons on a web page). In any case, the comic-book industry is much more relaxed about the "swiping" of panel layouts than it is about, say, the unlicensed use of lucrative franchise characters.

The display caption to WHAAM! states that it is “based on an image from All American Men of War published by DC comics in 1962”. But looking at its Wikipedia entry the situation is a little more complicated than that. The basic layout (including the words “I pressed the fire control and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky” and the sound effect “WHAAM”) does indeed come from a single panel in All American Men of War #89. However, the American aircraft in that panel is clearly a jet – probably a Korean-vintage F-86 Sabre. The plane in Lichtenstein’s painting looks more like a P-51 Mustang – and Wikipedia makes a good case for that being taken from a panel in the following issue, #90. Lichtenstein’s victim aircraft is noticeably different from either of those panels – Wikipedia suggests it comes from #89 again, but from a different story in that issue. Whatever sources Lichtenstein used, I still think the result is one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century.

As regards the new Switch House, I have to confess that most of the items on display went over my head. For the most part I mean that figuratively, but the small object pictured below was literally over my head ... because it was hanging from the ceiling in one of the rooms (sorry it’s out-of-focus – my camera was on maximum digital zoom). Regular readers will know I have an uncanny ability to spot things that “look a bit like a dick” (see for example this statue of Balzac or these 1940s comic-book aliens). The work pictured below is a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois entitled Fillette, which is French for “little girl”. I guess that’s what it’s meant to depict ... but it still looks like a dick to me.

More Research

I usually aim to do a blog post every weekend, but earlier this year I said I might skip an occasional week if I ran short of ideas. Today is a case in point – but just so you know I’m still here, here’s a photo of some more research material for the book I’m writing. All these items were bought since my previous post on the subject three weeks ago!

As you can see, I managed to get hold of one of the two missing issues from the near-complete run of Skull the Slayer I acquired this time last year. I spotted the missing issue on a shopping trip to London last week, which also yielded four of the books shown in the photo. The other two books were bought online, while the DVDs came from my local HMV store.

In broad terms, the book is about the crossover of ideas between science fiction and Fortean-style speculation. I picked that subject partly because I already know a bit about it, but mainly because it’s the perfect excuse to indulge in lots of lowbrow “research material” of the kind pictured above!

The Return of the Lone Gunmen

The new X-Files episodes are being shown in the UK (on Channel 5) a few weeks after their US airing. Last week’s episode, called “Babylon”, was notable among other things for a brief cameo by the three Lone Gunmen characters from the original series. Sadly, it really was only a fleeting glimpse – I almost missed it on Monday and had to watch it again on catch-up the next day (I also had to see Agent Einstein again, but that’s another story). The official publicity shot, pictured above, shows the characters more clearly – from left to right: Byers, Frohike, Langly (by coincidence all three of them are wearing bolo ties, which I mentioned in Green-skinned nostalgia two weeks ago).

I have very fond recollections of the Lone Gunmen. Partly this is nostalgia for a time when only a small number of highly eccentric individuals, such as these three, believed in conspiracy theories (as opposed to half the internet today). Also they are among the very few TV stars that I can really identify with (I like to think I combine Byers’s scintillating personality, Frohike’s stunning good looks and Langly’s impeccable fashion sense).

Actually I really do have a rather tenuous connection with Byers – or rather with Bruce Harwood, the actor who played Byers. If you look back at the December 2002 issue of Fortean Times, then on page 52 (the letters page) you will see the names “Bruce Harwood” and “Andrew May” in close proximity to each other. How this came about is a rather long story, but it’s an interesting one – so here it is.

Back in 2001, the Lone Gunmen briefly had their own TV series as a spinoff from The X-Files (see the publicity image at the bottom of this post). I saw most of the episodes when they were shown in the UK the following year on the Sci-Fi Channel – with the exception of the pilot show, which was missing from the UK run. I found a full transcript of that episode online, and it reads like a fictionalized version of a fairly standard 9/11 conspiracy theory… except that it had aired in the US six months before 9/11. This bizarre coincidence wasn’t mentioned when Fortean Times ran their first article on 9/11 conspiracy theories in September 2002, so I sent them the following letter:

The pilot episode of the Fox TV series The Lone Gunmen, which first aired in March 2001, involved a conspiracy theory as persuasive as anything which emerged post-9/11. In that episode, the Lone Gunmen (three characters who will be familiar to viewers of The X-Files) uncovered a plot by a group of Pentagon officials who were unhappy with the decline in defence spending following the end of the Cold War. The plotters seized control of a domestic airliner en route from Washington DC to Boston (not by hijacking it, but by hacking into its flight control computer), and set it on a collision course for New York’s World Trade Center. Their reasoning was that in the wake of such a high-profile atrocity, extremists around the world would be quick to claim responsibility, an outraged government would declare an all-out war on terrorism, and defence budgets would soar. In the TV version, the Lone Gunmen foiled the plotters, saving the plane and the Twin Towers. Tragically, in the real world six months later there was no such happy ending. Whether or not the US military/industrial complex really was behind the attacks, there’s no denying that it’s profited from them. The pilot episode was omitted from the Sci-Fi channel’s UK run of The Lone Gunmen, but a full transcript can be found at http://www.insidethex.co.uk/transcrp/tlg179.htm

As it turned out, Bruce Harwood sent them a letter saying pretty much the same thing. Needless to say, the intimate perspective he was able to offer meant they printed his letter in preference to mine. He concluded by saying “I think it’s safe to say that our pilot … will never be seen on network television anywhere. Ever.” – after which they printed the last sentence of my letter.

I was more than happy with this result. It was only the second time I’d had something of mine printed in Fortean Times – and it linked me with one of my favourite characters from the X-Files!

Green-skinned nostalgia

Here are three Hulk-related oddities I accumulated over a period of 15 years or so. If the period in question was 2001-2016 that would be little more than the blink of an eye – but actually I’m referring to circa 1970 to 1985, which was a very long time indeed. As most readers of this blog will be aware, time used to pass a lot slower in the 20th century than it does nowadays.

The earliest of the three items is the paperback book, published by New English Library in 1967. It contains black & white reprints from the original (1962) Hulk comic and from Tales to Astonish. According to the copyright page, it was previously issued in the USA by Lancer Books. I think I acquired my copy in 1970, possibly in a “swap” with a schoolfriend. At one time I also had a similar Spider-Man paperback, but I couldn’t find it when I looked for it last week.

The medallion is inscribed “The Incredible Hulk – World’s Strongest Mortal” with a copyright date of 1974. I probably bought it that year – via mail order from The Mighty World of Marvel or another British Marvel comic. It came in the form of a bolo tie – a type of neckwear that was briefly popular around that time (Isaac Asimov was wearing one when I saw him in Birmingham in June 1974). You can see it in the photo at the bottom of this post, which also shows the “tails” side of the medallion. This depicts Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk, together with the quote "Within each of us, ofttimes, there dwells a mighty raging fury”.

The third item in the top picture is a Hulk video game for the Commodore 64. This is dated 1984, but I didn’t get my C64 until the following year, which must have been when I bought the game. By that time I was working in Oxford as a postdoctoral research assistant, running computer simulations on a “grown-up” computer (a VAX 11/780 – which invokes a completely different type of nostalgia). According to the user guide, the game features Doctor Strange and Ant-Man (Henry Pym) as well as the Hulk. The background info mentions that “Among Pym’s more dubious accomplishments was the creation of the mad robot Ultron” … which is perfectly true, of course (despite any nonsense the youth of today might believe about Ultron being created by Tony Stark).

I Call It Research

As mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve just embarked on a new writing project. It’s a book about the cross-fertilization of ideas between Fortean-style speculation and popular culture (which is why I was reading up about the X-Files last week). Obviously that’s a subject I’ve often written about on this blog, and there’s already a lot of potential material (books, magazines, comics, DVDs) lying around the house. But being ultra-meticulous about research, I also tracked down various other relevant fiction and nonfiction books on eBay. A selection of these are pictured above, together with some nostalgic DVDs I bought from my local HMV store (all in the interests of research, of course).

Some old X-Files

I don’t usually hoard old magazines (except Fortean Times), but I kept these three issues of Cinefantastique because between them they contain complete episode guides to the first four seasons of The X-Files. I was prompted to dig them out last week – not because of the “reboot” currently showing on Channel 5, or from any general sense of nostalgia, but because I needed to do some research for a new book I’m working on. In looking through them, I was struck by how highbrow some of the X-Files episode titles were. Here are a few of the more Fortean examples – two from each of those first four seasons (just focusing on the titles, not the storylines).

The Jersey Devil (Season 1, Episode 5). One of America’s lesser known cryptids, this one dates back to those pre-Darwin days when mysterious creatures weren’t required to conform to the logic of evolutionary genetics. According to Wikipedia it’s “a kangaroo-like creature with the head of a goat, leathery bat-like wings, horns, small arms with clawed hands, cloven hooves and a forked tail”. Wings AND arms AND hooves… they don’t make them like that any more.

Ghost in the Machine (Season 1, Episode 7). This cool-sounding phrase was coined by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949, as a disparaging description of the dualistic theory of human nature (i.e. a spiritual soul inhabiting a material body).

Little Green Men (Season 2, Episode 1). A facetious term for extraterrestrials, which was already well established when Mack Reynolds wrote The Case of the Little Green Men in 1951 – a Fortean-themed detective novel I wrote about in a blog post last year.

Fearful Symmetry (Season 2, Episode 18). This phrase comes from William Blake’s famous poem “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright”. The poem isn’t very Fortean, but its author was – as I explained in A 19th Century Contactee. One of the strangest spiritual creatures Blake claimed to have encountered was “The Ghost of a Flea” – his painting of which I happened to see in the Tate Gallery last year (see photo at the bottom of this post).

Paper Clip (Season 3, Episode 2). This is a reference to Operation Paperclip, a real world “conspiracy” that brought hundreds of German scientists – many of them war criminals – to the United States in the aftermath of WW2, giving them clean new records and salaried positions working for the U.S. government. It may be no coincidence that “Nasa” sounds a bit like “Nazi”.

Talitha Cumi (Season 3, Episode 24). This is one of several X-Files titles derived from a foreign language. In this case it’s Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. It’s a quote from the New Testament, which of course is full of Jesus quotes, but most of them only appear in translation. This example (from Mark 5:41) is one of only about a dozen that are given in the original Aramaic first (I’d be interested to know why they were singled out in this way). From the King James version: “And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.”

Tunguska (Season 4, Episode 8). This, of course, was the site of a mysterious explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest in 1908. It was probably caused by a meteor impact, although several odd things about it have led to various alternative explanations (e.g. an exploding UFO). As mentioned in my post about Ian Watson last year, his novel Chekhov’s Journey offers a particularly weird interpretation of the Tunguska event.

Terma (Season 4, Episode 9). This has to be one of the most obscure X-Files titles of all. It’s a technical term from Tantric Buddhism, referring to secret teachings carefully handed down among the inner circle of adepts. Such as, for example, that Tantric classic “Sex Secrets of the Ancient Masters” (which I really must get round to writing one of these days).

Planet of Vampires

Here are two more nostalgic comics from 1975. Unlike Arrgh! #3 and Marvel Preview #1 which I wrote about recently, these aren’t something I deliberately sought out on eBay – I found them (for just a pound each) at a collectors’ fair in Shepton Mallet last Sunday. And unlike those two comics (which, on a scale of 1 to 10, rated 1 and 3 respectively) Planet of Vampires #1 and 2 turned out to be really excellent – 8 out of 10 at least.

As you can see from the masthead, they were the product of the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard company I mentioned in The Department of Fortean Events last year. This was set up as a direct competitor to Marvel (see the whole fascinating story here), and had some good things going for it (to quote Wikipedia: “Atlas/Seaboard offered some of the highest rates in the industry, plus return of artwork to artists and author rights to original character creations”). Possibly 10 or 20 years later, with the proliferation of “direct market” comic speciality shops, Atlas might have taken off… but in the newsstand-dominated world of 1975 it collapsed after a few months.

My memory from the time is that Atlas/Seaboard comics were OK but not great. That’s certainly true of the Devilina magazine I mentioned in the earlier post, and of Rich Buckler’s Demon Hunter #1 which I bought at the same time. By coincidence, just as I was buying these comics last weekend, Kid Robson’s blog was in the middle of a complete cover gallery of Atlas/Seaboard titles (Part 1  – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7). The consensus that emerged in the comment threads was that Atlas tried too hard to copy what Marvel was doing at the time, without being original enough.

In the case of Planet of Vampires, I can’t deny that’s the impression the cover gives. At the time the first issue came out (February 1975) Marvel had several vampire-themed titles (Tomb of Dracula, Vampire Tales, Morbius the Living Vampire) as well as a Planet of the Apes magazine. But apart from the title and the covers (which are misleading, as I’ll get to in a moment) Planet of Vampires really has nothing in common with any of these. In my opinion, it’s much closer to “grown up” science fiction than any of them. If I had to liken it to a Marvel series of that period it would be Skull the Slayer (which actually dates from later in 1975) – but only in the general sense that it’s about a group of ordinary, flawed humans caught up in a “world they never made”.

The story is set in 2010, 35 years in the future from 1975. Issue #1 opens with a spaceship crew returning to Earth after spending several years in orbit around Mars. While they were away World War Three broke out, and they haven’t heard anything from Earth since. They land in New York to find the survivors divided into two factions – super-rich capitalists who were able to take refuge in a vast dome, and ordinary people who live a ragged existence outside (and seem to be more interested in gang warfare than anything else). Initially there are five astronauts (not six as it says on the cover), but almost immediately the token “middle-aged scientist with a beard” is killed off, leaving just two male-female couples (one white, one black).

After the introductory scenes, the story turns into a pretty intelligent dystopian adventure, with the astronauts persuading the gang leaders to forget their differences and team up against the common enemy – the Domies. It’s important to stress that the latter aren’t “vampires” in any literal sense. They aren’t undead, they don’t have fangs and they don’t dress up in gothic clothes. It’s true they harvest blood on an industrial scale, but they do it in laboratories, not by biting necks. The war saw the widespread use of biological weapons, to which people outside the dome developed an immunity. As a result, their blood contains antibodies which the non-immune Domies need whenever they venture outside their closed environment. The blood of the Mars astronauts, who escaped exposure to the toxins, is considered even more valuable.

If they awarded a Pulitzer Prize for dumbing down, then the cover of issue #2 would win it. It depicts a cliché comic-book vampire doing a cliché comic-book vampire thing. This bears only the most tenuous relationship to the actual scene inside the comic, which goes like this:

Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars

Earlier this year I came across a cover scan of Marvel Preview #1, which was clearly inspired by the “ancient aliens” concept. It came to mind again when I wrote my recent post about Space-Gods and Venusians, so I sought out a low-priced copy on eBay and bought it (or rather “won it”, in an auction in which I was the only bidder). The magazine dates from 1975 – a period when I was buying a lot of Marvel colour comics, but not many of these black and white magazines. So buying it now is a kind of “faux nostalgia” for something I might have read 40 years ago but didn’t.

Text items in comic magazines are often highly skippable, but in this case they’re arguably the best bit. The longest of them is a ten-page article by Ed Summer which is surprisingly well-informed and well-balanced. He makes it clear that “In Europe, von Daniken’s book was one of many others on the same topic”, and devotes half a page to the work of Charles Fort. He points out that von Daniken often has a cavalier attitude to facts (such as the weight of pyramid blocks) and to established scholarship (such as Thor Heyerdahl’s work on the Easter Island statues). He also raises an interesting question: What would future archaeologists think if they unearthed a buried hoard of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comics? Would they imagine they portrayed real events, or “determine that it is a symbolic code for some mystic achievement that mankind as a whole must strive for?”

As well as that main article, there are a couple of biographical pages about Erich von Daniken and – perhaps best of all – a four-page bibliography of “The Books of the Gods” … by von Daniken, Charles Fort, Robert Charroux, W. Raymond Drake, Andrew Tomas, Brinsley LePoer Trench and many others.

Coming back to the cover, which is what led me to buy the magazine in the first place – “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars” is the main, 37-page comic feature. That striking cover image is by Neal Adams, but the interior art is by Alex Nino, whose style is a little too impressionistic for my taste. The script, by Doug Moench, is also something of a struggle due to his excessive fondness for Big Words (“The cybernetic deciphering of their language into terms perceivable by us does not dictate reciprocating translation of our speech to them”).

I found the story disappointing for another reason too. For me, one of the big attractions of the Ancient Alien hypothesis (regardless of its validity) is the prevalence of exotic settings, such as the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the middle-east of Biblical times, or the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas. But “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars” misses out on all that by going for a much earlier time period, in which humans dressed in animal skins co-exist with woolly mammoths and sabre-tooth cats. The result isn’t a bad story, but it’s not an especially memorable one either.

Having said that, the story does contain a couple of thought-provoking ideas. First, there’s a conflict between one of the aliens, who enjoys being treated like a god, and the rest of the crew who want to adhere to a Star Trek style “prime directive” of non-interference. That raises the interesting prospect that if our ancestors did interact with alien visitors, then maybe the ones they interacted with weren’t at the top of the ethical scale!

The story’s other provocative idea doesn’t hold water scientifically, but it’s a clever piece of post-Vietnam political satire. It turns out that von Daniken was right when he suggested that homo sapiens resulted from alien genetic engineering – but it took place on a distant planet, for the purpose of creating an army of semi-mindless soldiers to serve as cannon fodder in an interplanetary war. When the war was over, the leftover soldiers were no longer needed so they were quietly dumped on Earth.

The magazine contains a second story, just ten pages long (possibly a last-minute filler, because it doesn’t appear on the contents page). It’s called “Good Lord!”, and it’s written by Marv Wolfman and illustrated by Dave Cockrum. Personally I found both the script and the artwork a lot more enjoyable than the main feature. This one is set in the future, following a group of space travellers as they search alien planets for “God” … with disastrous consequences. The story is outrageously over the top, and about as dark as dark humour gets.

I can’t really talk about comic books and Ancient Aliens without at least a brief mention of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals. The series premiered in 1976, a year after “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars”. By that time, at the urbane and sophisticated age of 18, I’m afraid that Kirby’s style (both artwork and dialogue) struck me as embarrassingly old-fashioned and childish, so I never read The Eternals at the time. However, in another example of “faux-nostalgia” I bought second-hand copies of the first few issues in the 1990s. Here are the covers of the first, featuring “The Tomb of the Space Gods!” and the second, “More Fantastic than Chariots of the Gods!”

From Science Fiction to Science Fact

Brian Clegg is a popular science writer who also runs the Popular Science book review site. When it comes to his own books he has to find someone else to review them, and I was lucky enough to be asked to do this in the case of his latest title, Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future. Brian sent me an advance copy to read some time ago, but the book has now been published and my review of it has duly appeared on his website.

I started reading science fiction in the 1970s, and many of the stories I read at that time were set in the period 1980 to 2015 – in other words, the future then but the past (or present) now. I still find such stories fascinating, because I have a clear memory of the time when they were written AND of the (usually less dramatically different) “future” as it actually unfolded. This is a subject I touched on in my recent Back to the Future post, and it came to mind again when reading Brian’s book.

One thing that can’t be said too often (Brian says it in his book and I say it in my review) is that SF writers almost never set out to “predict the future”. Writers make money by selling as many books as they can, and the way to do that is to write stories that readers are going to find exciting at the time the book comes out. “Exciting” technology in the 1960s and 70s meant things like space rockets, supersonic airliners and (in a scary way) nuclear bombs… so that’s what people wrote about, rather than “boring” technologies like computers (which were mainly used by accountants and mathematicians) and telephones (which had barely changed since the early 20th century). Today our lives are dominated by phones and computers, while people can go for months without ever thinking about nuclear war or space travel. But how many readers would have found this “future” credible or interesting 40 years ago?

Another thing that’s changed in the last 40 years is that SF used to be almost exclusively a geek subculture, with the emphasis on written works rather than movies or other media. Today the geeks are still there, but (thanks to a constant stream of blockbuster movies) the awareness of SF tropes among the general population is much higher than it was. By and large Brian’s book is aimed at this latter audience – quite rightly, since SF geeks are also likely to be science geeks, and hence know a lot of this stuff already.

Having said that, the book does get off to a rather geeky start, with a chapter about computer games and The Matrix, followed by one focusing on a comparatively obscure novel from the 1950s, The Space Merchants. After that, however, the book takes off on a whirlwind tour of themes that should be familiar to the most casual SF consumers – force fields, robots, clones, exoskeletons, ray guns, aliens, the end of the world, cheap energy, teleportation, trips to the moon, faster-than-light communications, cyborgs, cloaking devices and artificial intelligence.

In chapter after chapter, the same message comes across: Modern science can do that, but it can’t do it as impressively or effectively as it’s portrayed in science fiction. To take one example, “teleportation” – in the form of quantum teleportation – is possible under laboratory conditions, but it only works on a subatomic scale. That’s a far cry from science fictional teleportation (e.g. a Star Trek transporter), which is supposed to work on ten thousand trillion trillion atoms all at once. I discussed this in more detail last year in an article entitled Three Types of Teleportation (which points out that the word “teleportation” was coined by Charles Fort – a fact also mentioned by Brian in his book).

Generally when I’m name-dropping “famous people I used to work with” there are just two names on the list – Seth Shostak (I overlapped with him in the same department at Groningen University in 1982-83) and Nick Pope (I worked in the same office building in Whitehall between 1996 and 1998). But Ten Billion Tomorrows drew my attention to another minor celebrity I could add to the list – Kevin Warwick, who features in the chapter about cyborgs (“Since the late 1990s, Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England has been experimenting with a range of implants under his skin that have been described as specific attempts to turn himself into a cyborg”). I crossed paths with Kevin back in 1991-3, when he was consultant to a project on neural networks that I was working on (I had a paper on the subject published in the Aeronautical Journal – I just had a look for it online, but all I could find was this entry on a French bibliographic site).

Space-Gods and Venusians

Glastonbury is one of the few towns in this part of the world that still has a healthy number of second-hand bookstores. Even better, all these shops have sizeable sections devoted to Fortean subjects. On a visit there last week I bought ten books from three different shops, including these two classic “skeptical” works from the 1970s: The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story and Can You Speak Venusian? (second edition, 1977) by Patrick Moore.

As I’ve probably said before, the striking thing about Fortean books of this vintage is how much less aggressive and bad-tempered they are compared with the situation today. Believers were content to get their ideas across in a calm voice, without gratuitous ad-hominem attacks on their opponents. And the same was true of skeptical authors, as these two books show.

On the face of it, Can You Speak Venusian? isn’t a skeptical book at all. Its subtitle is “A Guide to Independent Thinkers”, and the views of these Independent Thinkers (on subjects ranging from the Flat Earth, the Hollow Earth and Atlantis to Creationism, Flying Saucers and Astrology) are presented in an objective way with hardly any explicit criticism. Instead, the author relies on the old adage “If you give someone enough rope they’ll hang themselves”. The identity of the author is a clue, too. Until his death three years ago, Patrick Moore was the presenter of the longest-running science series on British TV, The Sky at Night.

Patrick Moore was famous for being an eccentric as well as a scientist. As a result, he seems to have had considerable respect for other eccentrics, even if their views were the opposite of his own. As he puts it: “The Independent Thinker is a genuine, well-meaning person, who is not hidebound by convention, and who is always ready to strike out on a line of his own – frequently, though not always, in the face of all the evidence.”

The book’s title is a reference to the last of the Independent Thinkers described in it, one Mr Bernard Byron of Romford. He claimed to be fluent, by means of interplanetary telepathy, in not just Venusian but also Plutonian and Krugerian (the language spoken on one of the planets of Kruger 60, a red dwarf binary star). The book includes an example of written Venusian (part of Mr Byron’s translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), while a sample of the spoken language can be heard in this YouTube clip.

Mixed in with Moore’s deadpan account of crackpot theories, there’s a hint of active mischief-making. In 1957 a UFO magazine called Cosmic Voice printed a series of pseudo-academic articles which included such dubious-sounding names as R. T. Fischall (artificial), E. Ratic (erratic), Hotère (hot air) and Huizenaas (who’s an ass?). Initially the editor – George King, the founder of the Aetherius Society – was happy to print these, but he later “came to the conclusion that some of his contributors were not quite so serious or so scientific as he had been led to expect”. King’s prime suspect was Moore himself – who of course denied the whole thing (the book also refers to the Adamski-style contactee Cedric Allingham, who is widely believed to have been another of Patrick Moore’s mischievous alter egos).

Can You Speak Venusian? contains only a couple of relatively brief references to Erich von Däniken, but he’s the central target of Ronald Story’s The Space-Gods Revealed, which also dates from the mid-seventies. I’ve written about the “ancient astronaut” hypothesis several times before (see for example this article and this blog post). I don’t think it’s the “stupid idea” many people believe it to be – on the contrary, it would be stupid NOT to consider extraterrestrial visitation as a potential explanation for certain ancient legends, images or artifacts. Where the ancient alien enthusiasts go astray (and lose the sympathy of most ordinary people) is in always preferring an extraterrestrial explanation to a terrestrial one.

But on top of that, there’s another annoyance about von Däniken in particular – the way he gets all the credit for ideas (sometimes quite clever ideas) that were expressed much more carefully and precisely long before he wrote Chariots of the Gods (see numerous books by Desmond Leslie, Morris K. Jessup, Pauwels and Bergier, Robert Charroux, Brinsley LePoer Trench and W. R. Drake, to name just a few). So I was pleased to see that The Space-Gods Revealed isn’t so much a debunking of ancient aliens per se, as an exposé of von Däniken’s slapdash style. Here are a couple of good examples:

• In support of his ancient astronaut hypothesis, von Däniken makes an astonishing claim: that “ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilization,” and that it is “without recognizable prehistory!” Is he serious? If he had looked at almost any one of the approximately twenty thousand volumes of books and periodicals that have been written on the subject, he would have realized the absurdity of such a statement.
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• The “evidence” claimed by von Däniken to represent the science and technology of the ancient gods falls far short of what might be expected from an advanced race of beings capable of interstellar space travel […] Von Däniken refers to the Baghdad batteries as if they were indeed the products of an advanced alien technology […] If they are really batteries, then they would be the most primitive form of simple cell possible.

Tarzan versus Doc Savage

In my post about Jane Gallion last month, I mentioned in passing that the “pornographic” Essex House imprint published several novels by Philip José Farmer in the late sixties. By coincidence, on my visit to London a week later I saw one of these – A Feast Unknown – on sale in a second-hand shop. It was only a couple of pounds, and according to the blurb it featured a character based on my favourite pulp hero, Doc Savage, so I snapped it up. This particular copy is a mass market paperback from 1975, with no content advisory or age restriction, so I guess it’s heavily expurgated compared to the original Essex House version. Nevertheless it’s a really good novel – and quite a Fortean one too, with an unusual variation on the “Secret Rulers of the World” theme.

The book is set in the swinging sixties, when it was written. The first-person narrator is Lord Grandrith – an English aristocrat dividing his time between estates in Africa and the Lake District. He’s supposed to have been the “real-life” person on whom Edgar Rice Burroughs based the fictional character of Tarzan, who flourished circa 1912 – 1940. The name that Burroughs used was Lord Greystoke, but in A Feast Unknown Lord Greystoke is merely a near-neighbour of Grandrith’s estate in Cumbria (there is an amusing scene in which Grandrith accidentally demolishes a huge statue of Tarzan, which the locals have erected as a tourist attraction in the village of Greystoke, by crashing an Aston Martin DB4 into it). Although Grandrith is almost 80, he looks 50 years younger – and is likely to stay that way for thousands of years to come – thanks to a Faustian deal he made with a shadowy group of near-immortals called “The Nine”.

The deal involves being given regular shots of an “Elixir of Life”, in return for carrying out various tasks on behalf of the Nine when ordered to do so. At any given moment the Nine have hundreds, if not thousands, of such servants working for them – others include Grandrith’s wife Clio (presumably the inspiration behind the “Jane” of fiction). The Nine are master manipulators – not just of world history but of their servants too. At the start of the novel, Grandrith is deliberately put on a collision course with another servant of the Nine – one Doctor Caliban, the “real-life” inspiration behind Doc Savage (“A writer of pulps had somehow learned something of his strange rearing and training, his extraordinary, perhaps unique, qualities and abilities… The writer had used Caliban as the basis for a character, under another name, of course, in a series of wild science-fictional adventures, most of which were the result of his imagination.)

The oldest members of the Nine are supposed to be at least 30,000 years old, and to have given rise to various legends of pagan gods and goddesses. This may sound like a hackneyed idea, but Farmer’s version struck me as distinctly different – and very clever – in one important way. Normally these manipulative, all-powerful, long-established Illuminati-type groups are assumed to be either (a) extraterrestrials, (b) terrestrial but non-human (e.g. shape-shifting reptilians) or (c) survivors of some ancient but highly advanced civilization from Atlantis or Lemuria. All these theories take a far-fetched idea and convolve it with something even more far-fetched. Farmer’s brilliant twist is to start with that one far-fetched idea (a 30,000-year-old secret society) and combine it with the mainstream academic picture of what Homo Sapiens was like 30,000 years ago.

To palaeontologists and anthropologists, that was still the Palaeolithic era, or Old Stone Age. In spite of anything misty-eyed New Agers might want to believe, human society in those days was intensely hierarchical, patriarchal, ignorant, superstitious and brutal. In other words, pretty much the way Illuminati-believers imagine “They” would like it to be today. So put that way, Farmer’s set-up makes a lot of sense. The most shocking scene in the book (one of the most repulsive scenes I’ve ever encountered in a mass-market paperback novel) involves ritual genital mutilation and cannibalism. Yet if there were secret rites dating back to Palaeolithic times, that’s probably the kind of thing they’d be.

The narrative adheres to the time-honoured “crossover” formula, whereby the two heroes spend most of the novel fighting each other, before finally realizing they ought to team up against their common enemy (who set them up in the first place). Because it’s told from Grandrith’s point of view, that means that for most of the story the “Doc Savage” character is presented as a bad guy. His very name, Caliban, is taken from the monstrous villain in Shakespeare’s Tempest (for a comic-book version of which, see my post from two weeks ago). Nevertheless, Farmer does eventually explain how such a villainous name got attached to someone who is essentially a “Super Boy Scout”.

The shop where I bought A Feast Unknown was 30th Century Comics in Putney. My next stop was The Book and Comic Exchange in Notting Hill, where I bought a reduced-price replica edition of the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze (pictured below). Although I’ve read more than a dozen Doc Savage books, I’d never got round to reading this one – until now! The plot revolves around a hidden city in Central America, where the inhabitants speak the all-but-dead language of the ancient Maya. Thanks to Doc’s enormous erudition, though, he’s able to converse with them in that language. Impressive as that may be, in A Feast Unknown Lord Grandrith (who has a PhD in linguistics from the university of Berlin) goes a step further – he can understand “Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans”, as spoken by the 30,000-year old members of the Nine!

The Case of the Little Green Men

I found another book to add to my Charles Fort in Fiction list. The last addition was Anthony Boucher’s 1942 murder mystery Rocket to the Morgue, and this new one is another murder mystery – The Case of the Little Green Men by Mack Reynolds. Originally published in 1951, it’s now available as an ebook – either from the UK Kindle store, where I got it, or from the US Kindle store, and probably other places as well.

Like Rocket to the Morgue, The Case of the Little Green Men is set against a backdrop of science fiction fandom – which was significantly larger and better established in 1951 than it was in 1942. Boucher’s novel included a passing mention of the third Worldcon, held in Denver in 1941 and attended by just 90 people. The latter part of The Case of the Little Green Men – including the second of its two murders – takes place at the tenth Worldcon in 1952, which was still a year in the future when the book came out (the actual 1952 Worldcon took place in Chicago and had 870 attendees). Any murder set at a sci-fi convention is bound to involve cosplay, and this one is no exception. The villain is dressed as a six-limbed purple Martian – “the godawfullest costume of the convention”.

The Case of the Little Green Men isn’t science fiction. The novel’s title comes from the fact that it starts with the first-person narrator – a private detective with a reputation for mediocrity – being hired to find evidence of extraterrestrials living among the human population. “Little Green Men” is a pejorative term used by the hero and other skeptical characters, but the actual idea is that the aliens are shape-shifters who can make themselves indistinguishable from humans. The investigation was never meant to be taken seriously – it started out as a joke item for the convention. Nevertheless, some people do seem to take it seriously… and after a while it provides our protagonist with a good excuse to stick his nose into the murder case (there’s a nice touch of realism in that, unlike most fictional private eyes, he wouldn’t dare investigate a murder openly for fear of antagonizing the police).

The reference to Charles Fort comes when one of the more serious of the UFO-believers is trying to persuade the hero that there really might be extraterrestrials on Earth:

He came back with a heavy book and handed it to me. I looked at the title: The Books of Charles Fort. “What’s this?” I asked him. “Isn't Fort the screwball that tells all about the rains of frogs and that sort of crap?”
“That's hardly a proper description of Charles Fort,” he said stiffly. “Fort has gathered material for decades in an attempt to show that modern science is too smug, too hypocritical – and too ignorant. He made a hobby, a lifetime work, of gathering evidence of phenomena that modern science has as yet been unable to explain.”

Not surprisingly the novel also includes references to quite a few SF writers, including four who are particular favourites of mine: A. E. van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, Fredric Brown and Eric Frank Russell. The last-named is perhaps best known for his explicitly Fortean novel, Sinister Barrier. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m the proud owner of the original issue of Unknown magazine (March 1939) in which Sinister Barrier first appeared. I paid £25 for it – considerably more than the cover price of 20 cents. Apparently that’s always been the case! Here is another excerpt from The Case of the Little Green Men, where the protagonist is trying to blend in with the real fans in the dealers’ hall:

I picked up one of the publications and thumbed through it. It was pretty well worn, the date was 1939, the cover was gruesome, and the title of the magazine was Unknown. I asked “What’s the price on this?” reaching in my pocket for some change. I figured that I’d look more authentic wandering around the hall if I was carrying a magazine with me.
”Three dollars,” he told me.
I glared at him indignantly. “You batty? This magazine is falling apart; it’s more than ten years old.”
He took it from my hand with as little gentleness as was consistent with the magazine’s condition and glared back. “That’s the issue in which Sinister Barrier was first –.”
”All right, all right,” I cut him off. “Keep it.” I got on to the next table before he assaulted me.

All in all I really enjoyed The Case of the Little Green Men. It’s the first novel I’ve read by Mack Reynolds, although over the years I’ve read quite a few shorter works by him. When I scoured my bookshelves a couple of days ago I found eight stories by him in various anthologies and magazines. The most Fortean of these is a short-short called “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”, which takes the form of a conversation between two undercover aliens, from different planets, who bump into each other in a café in Morocco.

All the other Reynolds stories I’ve read are Cold War thrillers, with a strong focus on the Communist-Capitalist battle of wits, sometimes with a science fiction twist. One of them (illustrated below) even has aliens in it! It’s called “Combat”, and I read it in the February 1961 issue of Analog magazine (British edition). It’s not a great story, but it makes nostalgic reading if you hanker after the simpler world of the Cold War period. The essence of the story is that the aliens choose to land their spaceship in the middle of Moscow, which confuses the heck out of the Americans (who assumed they would land in the world’s most advanced country).

Although the story is dated in many ways, some of its sentiments are as valid as ever. Here is a striking quote from the second page of the story: “The best men our universities could turn out went into advertising, show business and sales – while the best men the Russians and Chinese could turn out were going into science and industry. The height of achievement over there is to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. Our young people call scientists eggheads, and their height of achievement is to become a TV singer or a movie star.”

After 55 years, the depressing thing isn’t that things haven’t changed – but that they have changed. What applied to the United States then applies to pretty much the whole planet now!