UFO song #2

 

Image by Bing AI

The album pictured above doesn't exist yet (and probably never will), but at least I've now got a second song for it. It's basically an electronic arrangement of Gilbert & Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from The Pirates of Penzance, with reworded lyrics covering all the clichés of modern ufology that I could think of. The synthesized vocals aren't always clear, so you need to see the words on the screen to follow them, but apart from that I'm really quite proud of this one. So do please have a listen to it before reading any further!

A typical song has 8 syllables per line, with pairs of lines rhyming on the last syllable. But this one has 16 syllables per line (which isn't a problem) and rhymes on the last three syllables - which is a problem, at least for me. In the original by W. S. Gilbert, he makes it look easy, with rhymes like "lot o' news ...  hypotenuse" and "Sir Caradoc's ... paradox". In my version, I was quite pleased with "Zeta Reticuli ... particu'ly" and "there was a clash ... saucer crash", but a lot of the others are distinctly strained (such as "correct approach ... rectal probe" and "disastrous course ... astronauts"). Then again, I think there's a sense in which these almost-but-not-quite rhymes add to the humour!

As I often do with these musical experiments, I beta-tested it on five friends - and this was the first one that's ever come back with five "yeses". One person (who liked it enough to share it on Twitter/X, despite describing an earlier song of mine as "tuneless wibbling") raised the interesting question of what a "ufologist" should be called, now that the US government has deprecated UFO in favour of UAP. I suspect the answer is that UAP will very soon (if not already) come to be associated with "debunkers" who seek to explain sightings in non-extraterrestrial terms, leaving UFO for the true believers - who will thus always be ufologists.

Also on the subject of feedback, I can't resist including this nice comment from my cousin - I never knew such specialized emojis existed!

The singing synthesizer I use is a Japanese one called Sinsy, which is actually a deep neural network (i.e. AI) that gets better the more it's exposed to training data. It's been updated a couple of times since I started using it in 2020, and has improved noticeably in that time. For example, the synthesized voice doesn't sound nearly as good in my previous UFO-themed song, which I did in 2022 for my book The Science of Music.

One of the topics in that book is "algorithmic composition" -  specifically the use of Markov chains. If that's something you've never heard of, it simply means analysing a piece of music to work out its "transition matrix" - the probability that any given note will be followed by any other particular note - and then getting a computer to generate a new piece of music using the same transition probabilities.

Since the editors wanted a focus on well-known music, the transition matrix I used came from Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You". This was something of an in-joke, since he was busy extricating himself from a plagiarism accusation at the time, so I thought he wouldn't mind if I borrowed his transition probabilities (the fact that his song only uses five different notes made the maths easier, too). For the lyrics, I dug out some UFO-themed limericks I wrote ages ago, and called the result "Mark of (Markov - get it?) the UFO". Apart from the rather strange synthesized vocals, I think it sounds quite good. Here it is:

Ron Goulart's Cheap Thrills

If you’ve come across the name Ron Goulart the chances are it was as a historian of 20th century popular culture – comics and pulp magazines in particular. But Goulart was a poacher as well as a gamekeeper, churning out over a hundred short and easy-to-read novels of his own (the small selection that I’ve read so far is shown above). One of his best-known non-fiction books is called Cheap Thrills (pictured below) – and the same phrase sums up his fiction too!

Ron Goulart was born at the height of the pulp era in 1933, and began his full-time writing career in the 1960s. His novels are an intriguing blend of the straightforward plots and larger-than-life characters of the thirties with a satirical take on the consumerism and hippie zeitgeist of the sixties. As far as I know he’s still alive, and I hope he won’t be too offended if I describe him as the late 20th century equivalent of a pulp magazine hack. His novels are all very short – typically 40 to 50,000 words – and were clearly written with the aim of meeting deadlines rather than getting onto award shortlists. All of them came out as paperback originals, and very few of them ever saw a second edition. Inevitably, the quality is variable – some of the ones I’ve read are pretty dire, but others are really very good.

A couple of years ago I wrote a long post about Goulart’s 1979 novel Hello Lemuria Hello. This is still by far my favourite of the ones I’ve read, both for its fortean themes and its “superhero” style protagonist – Jake Conger of the Wild Talents Division. I subsequently tracked down two other Jake Conger novels – A Talent for the Invisible (1973) and The Panchronicon Plot (1977). They’re both enjoyable, especially the latter, although much less fortean. The same is true of a couple of other offbeat “near future” (actually 2002) adventures I’ve read – Calling Dr. Patchwork (1978) and Hail Hibbler (1980) – which feature a husband-and-wife team of private investigators called Jake and Hildy Pace (Goulart seems to like the name “Jake” for protagonists – there is also Jake Cardigan in Tek War, which he ghost-wrote for William Shatner in 1989).

I also enjoyed the three Vampirella adaptations I read (he wrote six in all, but I’ve only got the ones that were reprinted in the UK). After Hello Lemuria Hello, these are probably the most fortean-themed of his novels that I’ve read. He’s also done a couple of other comic-book adaptations – Challengers of the Unknown (1977) and a Hulk novel called Stalker from the Stars (also 1977, co-written with Len Wein and Marv Wolfman under the pseudonym of Joseph Silva). I still need to track those down – along with Goulart’s novelization of that archetypally fortean movie, Capricorn One.

All the Goulart novels I’ve read (except the Vampirella adaptations) have the same basic plot. They start with the protagonist(s) reluctantly accepting an assignment to track down some nefarious criminal or criminals. They’re given an initial lead, which in due course puts them onto a second lead, and so on through half a dozen wacky and often outright comical scenes until the final showdown. This is a perfectly good plot structure, as long as the hero is constantly racing against the clock, falling into traps, getting double-crossed, chasing after red herrings, etc, etc. In Goulart’s best novels, that’s exactly what happens ... but in some of the others he forgets to do this, and the protagonist sails through the story with no real obstacles to overcome. The result in these cases is inevitably dull, no matter how original and imaginative the incidental details are.

I’ve been looking for a pattern, to give me a better idea what to look out for in future. Based on my experience so far, the novels that involve series characters (either Goulart’s own creations or franchise characters) and are set here on Earth are all pretty good. Novels set in Goulart’s fictitious Barnum system (of which I’ve read three – The Fire-Eater, Shaggy Planet and Flux) were rather dull and forgettable in my opinion – as was the one that was set on Earth with a non-recurring protagonist (After Things Fell Apart). I suspect in reality it’s not as clear-cut as this, and – as with 1930s pulp fiction – you just have to accept that some of the novels are good and some are bad.

The dozen books pictured at the top of this post were purchased second-hand on various occasions over the last ten years. The one in the bottom right – the embarrassingly-titled Hail Hibbler – came from a paperback book fair in 2009. It contains a hastily scrawled signature on the title page, which I assume is Ron Goulart’s autograph:

Arrgh! Bigfoot

Here is another comic I tracked down on eBay after seeing a cover image on Tumblr. Like Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars this one dates from 1975, when I was buying a lot of Marvel comics. However, it’s another case of “faux nostalgia”, since it isn’t one I owned at the time (in fact I don’t recall seeing any issues of Arrgh! before).

As it turns out, the cover (by Alfredo Alcala) is by far the best thing about the comic – not just for the layout, but for the promise of an intriguing “Bigfoot-hunting” scenario. Unfortunately the cover bears very little relation to the interior story – “Beauty and the Bigfoot”, written by Don Glut and drawn by Mike Sekowsky (as you can see from the sample below, the setting and characters – and artistic style – are completely different).

The story (just 7 pages long) is a slight one, about a Bigfoot falling in love with a human female. The latter, despite already being married, quite enjoys the situation. While the set-up has distinct possibilities, the Comics Code stamp on the cover means that Bigfoot has to keep his trousers on (probably the only time you’ll ever see Bigfoot wearing trousers, in fact). The only positive thing I can say about “Beauty and the Bigfoot” is that it’s better than the other two stories in the comic (“Rat Reborn” and “The Mummy Walks” – the latter being a recycled political satire from the 1950s that wouldn’t have made much sense in 1975, let alone now).

I still think it’s a great cover, though.

The Writer’s Secret

In the comment thread after my Who Remembers Guru? post last summer, I mentioned that I wanted to try my hand at creating a similar “comic strip collage” using public domain images. A few weeks later I did a sort of trial run with the cover image for Jill Trent and the Flying Saucer Mystery, but with plenty of idle time over the Christmas break I thought I’d try something a little more ambitious.

I had a look round for a suitable idea, and came across this unpublished poem I wrote several years ago:

A world-renowned writer named Blott
Said of genres, “I’ve written the lot:
From horror and mystery
To fantastical history
And all of them have the same plot!”

Turning this into a Guru-style cartoon wasn’t as easy as I thought. There are thousands of free images on the web, but finding ones that fit (both thematically and stylistically) was harder than I’d expected. Also, the last line caused problems because it doesn’t have a natural visual interpretation. A fairly obvious idea did spring to mind, but I couldn’t use it on account of the “no porn” clause in Blogger’s terms and conditions. So I decided to go with a more abstract notion instead.

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!”

Going Down… Beneath the Bermuda Triangle

I’ve just read two stories – a longish novelette and a shortish novel, both dating from the 1970s – by an author I’d barely heard of, called Jane Gallion. Previously I’d only seen her name in the context of a notoriously violent post-apocalyptic novel called Biker, which dates from 1969 and is still banned in the UK. But the two stories I did get hold of are quite different in tone, and it’s a shame they’re not better known. They’re both clever, well-written and interesting, and the longer of the two is bordering on a masterpiece.

To start with the shorter story – it’s called “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” and it was published in the June/July 1979 issue of Galaxy magazine. This was a few years after the Skull the Slayer comic series I mentioned earlier this year, and it’s just as wacky a take on the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It’s got jewel-smuggling hippies, malevolent aliens, survivors from Atlantis, underwater pyramids and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

As far as I can tell, “Beneath the Bermuda Triangle” is the only story Jane Gallion ever wrote that doesn’t have any sex in it (apart from a couple of indirect references to Tantric Sex). But there is a tenuous connection to the world of erotica. The stand-in editor for that particular issue of Galaxy was “Hank Stine” – an alter-ego of Jean Marie Stine, who used the same byline on one of the avant-garde erotic novels published in the late sixties by the short-lived Essex House imprint (see my post about The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez). Jane Gallion’s Biker was another Essex House novel – and according to an autobiographical note, she also worked as an editor there. At the same time, she seems to have been active in science fiction fandom – see this photograph of her (there were other links between Essex House and science fiction – Philip José Farmer also published several novels with them).

The novel I just read, and found so impressive, is called Going Down. In her autobiographical note (which dates from 1990), Jane Gallion says the book was written for Essex House but never published (partly because it broke two of their house rules – “no humour” and “no politics”). However, it was eventually published as an ebook in 2001, two years before the author died.

Unlike Biker (which is available as an ebook in America but not in Britain), Going Down is listed on the UK Kindle store, which is where I got it. I don’t think the listing does the book any favours – there’s no cover image or preview, the blurb is misleading and it’s classified as erotica, which it isn’t really – it’s a dystopian SF satire in which sex (or the suppression of sex) plays a significant role.

Going Down is written in the kind of avant-garde literary style that was popular in the early seventies – all in the present tense, and with no quotation marks around dialogue. In that sense, and in other ways, I found the style reminiscent of Barry Malzberg, who was one of the big name writers of the time. Thematically, on the other hand, the novel is closer to Philip K. Dick – all about a sharply stratified future society in which information is tightly controlled, and the government knows more about you than you do. The book’s structure is also reminiscent of PKD, with the point of view alternating between three different characters – one high up in government, one at the very bottom of society, and one who is a major figure in the (ultimately fruitless) rebel movement. Also, like both Dick and Malzberg, the novel has a strong undercurrent of humour, even though it’s basically a very angry book.

I mentioned science fiction portrayals of the future last week – and Going Down is one of the most prophetic I’ve come across. The society it describes is ultra-capitalist and ultra-puritanical. The government has electronic spying machines everywhere, ready to pounce at the first hint of subversive or “perverted” behaviour. Giant corporations charge people (who are always referred to as “consumers”) for absolutely everything – including having sex and going to the toilet. If you try to avoid paying for something, it’s a serious crime because it “damages the economy”. Also prescient (given recent headlines) is the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, who impose puritanical laws on ordinary citizens while indulging in the most disgustingly obscene behaviour themselves.

Although Going Down was originally written in the early seventies, I’m not sure if it was revised for its ebook publication in 2001. If it wasn’t, then it contains one amazingly prescient reference. I can’t remember anyone back in the 1970s worrying about Genetically Modified crops, but one of the characters in the novel does. It’s in a scene between a high-ranking member of the government, named Hennering, and his boyfriend Penrod (“a slender lad of eighteen”). Hennering wishes to deep-throat a certain part of Penrod’s anatomy after said anatomical part has been thrust up a chicken’s backside:

The pullet had been organically raised. Penrod refused to have anything to do with a chicken exposed to genetically engineered or chemically adulterated food. He was afraid it might give him high blood pressure or possibly a rash. There’s a lot of that around. But Hennering made sure the bird was clean before he gave it to Penrod. Heavens to Betsy, he couldn’t have Penrod catching anything, could he?

This scene struck me as doubly prophetic – not just the reference to genetic engineering (and pathological aversion thereto), but also the way a conservative politician indulges in behaviour that’s so perverted it wouldn’t even cross a normal person’s mind. Remember this news story from a month ago?

Jill Trent and the Flying Saucer Mystery

Jill Trent, Science Sleuth was a golden-age comic book heroine who appeared as a back-up feature in Wonder Comics #8-14 between October 1946 and 1947. Those comics are now all in the public domain, and can be read online (the Jill Trent stories start around page 16 in each issue). The character herself is also in the public domain, and last year I saw an online competition to write a 5-page script featuring the character. The winners (of which there were several) had their stories drawn by artists and published. Sadly my entry didn’t make the cut – presumably because it won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t an aficionado of Retro-Forteana.

I couldn’t help noticing that Jill’s career overlapped with the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the start of the Flying Saucer mystery, so I took that as my cue. To make the story visually attractive I set it amid the science fiction fandom of the time (Yes, they did have cosplay in the 1940s – see Anthony Boucher’s description of the 1941 Denver Worldcon in Rocket to the Morgue: “They had a costume party on the last night. Come as your favourite SF character. Berni wanted to go as Dale Arden, but I’m afraid it was an overambitious project.”).

I thought the script came out OK, but unfortunately it’s way beyond my artistic abilities to take it any further (the cover above is a paste-up job using public domain images). So I decided I might as well post the whole thing here...

PAGE 1

PANEL 1
Full page splash. A bustling street scene with people converging on a large big-city hotel, possibly Art Deco style. Vehicle designs indicate this is the late 1940s. There is a large banner on the hotel: “SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION”. On the sidewalk, there is a newsstand with the headline: “FLYING SAUCERS SEEN OVER CITY”. Most people are in 1940s cosplay – think Buck Rogers, Startling Stories etc. Lots of brass brassieres and impractically skimpy spacesuits. JILL and DAISY, however, are in regular clothes of 1947... and getting a few strange looks as a result.

TITLE: JILL TRENT, SCIENCE SLEUTH in “THE FLYING SAUCER MYSTERY”

DAISY: They all look like loonies! What on Earth made you agree to demonstrate your latest invention at a convention full of wackos?

JILL: Take it easy, Daisy, everything will be fine!

JILL (continued): I do feel a little overdressed, though...

PAGE 2

PANEL 1
JILL is at a stall inside the convention, looking at a dealer’s display – “SPACESUITS $2.95”. The spacesuits look more like metallic bikinis and fetish gear (some of the kinkier accessories may only become apparent in later panels).

CAPTION: A few minutes later...

PANEL 2
DAISY is looking at something a little more flattering for her fuller figure – e.g. a nylon see-through Space Princess gown.

PANEL 3
JILL and DAISY head to the Ladies’ Restroom with their purchases.

DAISY: And you’re sure this is a good idea, right?

JILL: When in Rome...

PANEL 4
They change into their costumes, looking like something straight off the cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine.

PANEL 5
On stage in an empty lecture theater. DAISY poses in front of a big old-fashioned TV camera. JILL tinkers inside a large retro-futuristic TV receiver.

CAPTION: Before the audience arrive, Jill and Daisy give their equipment a final test...

DAISY: This new color television of yours will really impress those freaks!

PANEL 6
JILL holds up a small, blackened vacuum tube (a kind of fancy light-bulb). She looks pissed off.

JILL: Darn it! The 3K55 triode has blown! We need to get a replacement – and quick!

PAGE 3

PANEL 1
A street with a storefront labeled “GOVERNMENT SURPLUS”. JILL and DAISY are running toward it (still in their sci-fi getup). There are various 1940s-era gadgets in the window.

PANEL 2
Inside the store, JILL rummages through a box of vacuum tubes.

JILL: 3K55... Got it! I’ll pay for it and we can get back to the hotel!

PANEL 3
Silent close-up of the vacuum tube. The reader sees it is actually marked 3K55X, and has “EXPERIMENTAL” stamped on it.

PANEL 4
Wide view of the street outside the Surplus store. Clearly a sleazy part of town – adult theaters and massage parlors etc. A pair of provocatively dressed hookers stare at our cosplay-clad heroines as if they are unwelcome competition (nothing too explicit – just enough to raise the blood pressure of any budding Fredric Werthams out there).

PANEL 5
Close up of one or both of the hookers suddenly looking up at the sky in alarm. A strange sound is coming from there.

SFX: ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ

PANEL 6
Close up of JILL and DAISY also looking up in amazement.

SFX: ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ – ZZZ

JILL: Look – a flying saucer!

PAGE 4

PANEL 1
Full page-width image of flying saucer hovering over the street, projecting a bright beam of light downward. It looks really sinister, but doesn’t actually do any noticeable damage.

SFX: ZZZZZZZZZZAPP!!

PANEL 2
JILL and DAISY pull their weapons from their holsters and aim them at the UFO. They may not realize it in the heat of the moment, but the reader can see they are only toy ray-guns that came with their sci-fi costumes.

PANEL 3
They pull their triggers to no great effect.

SFX: Klik! Klik!

JILL: Darn it, these are just the toys that came with our costumes!

DAISY: We left our real guns back at the hotel!

PANEL 4
They gaze back up at the sky. There are no sounds coming from there now.

DAISY: The flying saucer is gone!

JILL: Never mind that now! We need to get back to the convention or we’ll miss our time slot!

PAGE 5

PANEL 1
Wide view of the lecture theater, showing the audience of 1940s-era sci-fi geeks. JILL and DAISY are on stage with the TV camera and receiver.

CAPTION: Back at the hotel, Jill and Daisy are just in time for the start of their demonstration...

PANEL 2
Closer view of JILL speaking on stage, with the TV receiver next to her. DAISY is off to one side, looking into the TV camera.

JILL: The black-and-white television you’re all familiar with will soon be a thing of the past!

JILL (continued): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future... welcome to color TV!

PANEL 3
The image on the TV is in color all right, but it shows the flight deck of the flying saucer with two men in 1940s-era flying suits. JILL and DAISY look gobsmacked.

VOICE FROM TV: ...Mission accomplished! Flying Saucer #1 returning to base...

DAISY: That’s not me! The TV is supposed to show me!

PANEL 4
Same angle, closer view of JILL.

JILL: It’s because we used the government surplus tube! It’s picking up a government frequency!

JILL (continued): So the government was behind the flying saucers all along! They won’t get away with it now we’ve blown their secret!

PANEL 5
Full page-width image. Wide angle view showing the audience – everyone is laughing and applauding. They think it’s all a big joke – just the thing for a sci-fi convention! Daisy sweeps her arm toward them.

DAISY: So why do I get the feeling no-one believes us?

THE END

Who Remembers Guru?

I’m sure that everyone who reads Fortean Times will be aware of Hunt Emerson’s perennial Phenomenonix strip (which must qualify as one of the most erudite cartoons of all time – especially the episodes written in collaboration with Kevin Jackson). But when I first started reading the magazine there was another regular cartoon feature as well – “Guru” by Pierre Hollins. According to his own website, the strip ran from 1991 to 1997. The example pictured above (just a single panel, as was often the case) comes from FT95, cover-dated February 1997.

Guru is a bovine-headed philosopher who talks like a 1960s hippie. I can’t say I ever found the punchlines particularly funny (the one above is one of the better ones), but I really enjoyed the strip anyway. I liked the surrealism of the Guru character, and the juxtaposition of deep philosophizing with “let it all hang out” hippie platitudes. I also liked the retro style of the art – in high-contrast black-and-white, with most of the characters wearing Victorian garb. These appear to be clip-art collages – something that probably involved a lot more time and effort in the 1990s than it would do today!

I just discovered that all (or most) of the Guru strips are now online at the Guru Files on Pierre Hollins’s website – reading through them stirred many nostalgic memories! There are also some colour cartoons, which I don’t recall seeing in the magazine. I particularly liked the one shown below. The caption (which is the punchline from one of the earlier black-and-white strips) is printed vertically up the left-hand side, for some reason. It reads: “If everyone knew the secret of the Universe, it wouldn’t be much of a secret”.

Old Books of the Fortean Kind

Pictured above is a genuine piece of retro-forteana – Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, produced way back in 1977 by John Michell and the founding editor of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard. It’s one of several books I picked up for a pound each from the Bookbarn shop, just off the A37 about half-way between Shepton Mallet and Bristol. Until a few years ago, this was the best bookshop in Somerset – literally a giant warehouse packed with second-hand treasures. Unfortunately the main warehouse was closed to the public after they catalogued all their decent stock and put it online. But visitors can still browse through the leftovers – the books that were too uncommercial to be worth cataloguing – in a smaller warehouse next door. Everything is a pound – which sounds cheap, although I somehow managed to spend a total of £18 on my visit last week!

You can get a pretty good idea of the contents of the Phenomena book from the words on the cover. It’s a pretty standard compendium of all the usual fortean topics – frog and fish falls, spontaneous human combustion, cattle mutilations, levitation, teleportation, cities in the sky, entombed toads, werewolves and so forth. The last two items on the list are rather more cryptic – “Arkeology” is shorthand for the archaeology of Noah’s Ark, while “Accidents to Iconoclasts” refers to mishaps that befall people who dare to interfere with ancient sites. The “Mummy’s Curse” is the best known example of this, but another case described in the book occurred less than five miles from the place where I bought it.

Everyone has heard of Avebury and Stonehenge, but far fewer people know of England’s third largest megalithic site, consisting of three prehistoric stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The reason for the site’s relative obscurity may be that, in spite of its sprawling size, it’s not really that impressive to the eye – the individual stones are quite small, and the overall plan of the circles is difficult to make out. But perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. According to Michell and Rickard, the first person to attempt a detailed survey of the site was the architect John Wood in 1740. The locals told him that merely counting the stones was a bad idea: “Several have attempted to do so, and proceeded until they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such illness as soon were carried off”. Ignoring such superstitions, Wood continued with his task “and as a great storm accidentally arose just after, and blew down part of a great tree near the body of the work, the people were then thoroughly satisfied that I had disturbed the guardian spirits of the metamorphosised stones.”

Here is one of my own pictures of Stanton Drew:

Another of the books I bought for a pound was a 1978 paperback called Explorations of the Marvellous, containing the text of a series of lectures given by various scientists and science fiction writers. Featured among the latter is John Brunner, who I’ve written about on at least one previous occasion. Brunner lived in Somerset for many years prior to his untimely death in 1995, and I suspect that some of his personal library may have found its way to the Bookbarn. On a previous visit there (about ten years ago, before they went onto the internet) I bought a hardback anthology that was neither edited by John Brunner nor had a story by him in it – yet it has his signature inside. So maybe it was his own copy of the book (it was a collection of science fiction erotica, if you must know).

By a further coincidence, Brunner’s lecture is all about forteana. More specifically, it’s about how shockingly sloppy some well-known fortean writers are when it comes to research and fact-checking. One of the most amusing examples he cites relates to a book I’ve never actually read, although it’s a classic of the genre – The Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier. Apparently they make the claim that one Professor Ralph Milne Farley “has drawn attention to the fact that some biologists think that old age is due to the accumulation of heavy water in the organism. The alchemists’ elixir of life might then be a substance that eliminates selectively heavy water.”  Brunner recognised this idea as coming not from a serious scientific treatise but from a science fiction novel he’d devoured when he was 12 or 13! The book in question was called The Immortals, and it was indeed by Ralph Milne Farley... but the latter was neither a professor nor a scientist. In these days of Wikipedia, it’s easy to do the fact-checking that Pauwels and Bergier failed to do:

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, state of Massachusetts. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of “Ralph Milne Farley”.

The other fortean book I acquired last week came via eBay. This was The Fickle Finger of Fate, which I mentioned I’d ordered in last week’s post about Satirical Superheroes. The most fortean thing about the book is its author, John A. Keel – who as I said last time went on to write about Mothman, UFOs and Men in Black. But this novel from 1966 is just a lighthearted superhero parody featuring Keel’s own creation, Satyr-Man. It has a couple of mildly fortean elements – one character believes he is under a “Mummy’s Curse” (see above), and there’s a running joke about swamp gas and weather balloons (the most common ways the authorities used to debunk UFO sightings).

A satyr is a mythological half-man, half-beast with an insatiable sexual appetite. Coupled with the “ADULTS ONLY” warning on the cover, you might imagine this is a somewhat dirty book. But 1966 was still a year before America abolished its obscenity laws (see The Man who Helped to Free the World), so the book is heavily censored. For those who are only interested in such things, here is its one and only explicit sex scene:

“C’mere,” she grunted, pulling him to her as she ****** her **** and ****** ******** until he ***** ******* ***** and they **** *****. He lifted his **** ****** to **** ******, rolling across the rumpled bed with his mouth pressed to her ***** ********. Then she ***** his **** ******* and her hands ***** ***** ***.

“Ooooo,” she said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Ummmmmmm,” she said.

“Hmmmmmmmmm,” he said.

Finally they **** ********** **** *** ******* **** *******. And then he **** ***** ******* *****. She **** *** ************! Outside the window, the surf continued to pound the beach.

Satirical Superheroes

Michel Parry produced a number of science fiction anthologies in the 1970s, including the one pictured above – Superheroes, dating from 1978. When I saw it in a second-hand shop a few weeks ago I decided to buy it for two reasons – the intriguing cover, and the fact that the back cover blurb (the book was bagged, so I couldn’t look inside) mentioned that one of the contributing authors was the famous Fortean writer John A. Keel (who popularized Mothman and the Men in Black, as well as the “ultraterrestrial” theory of UFOs). I didn’t have high hopes of the book (for some reason superheroes don’t translate well from comics to prose fiction) – but it turned out to be better than I’d expected.

The cover doesn’t relate to any of the stories in the book, but it’s certainly eyecatching. It’s obviously an amalgam of various Marvel heroes – Spider-Man’s mask, Thor’s helmet and hair, and Captain America’s boots and shield. The rest of the costume appears to be modelled on the 1970s Captain Marvel, which seems an odd choice because it’s a lot less iconic than the other three. The globe symbol on the costume and shield is the logo of Sphere Books – one of the more downmarket British paperback imprints of the time, who published the anthology.

As to the stories themselves – the first half of the book is taken up with three pulp novelettes dating from the early 1940s, including one that first appeared in Martin Goodman’s Marvel Tales magazine (a sister publication to the original incarnation of Marvel Comics). These are followed by nine shorter and more recent stories – four reprints (including Keel’s contribution) from the 1960s and early 70s, and six stories original to this anthology. Most of the latter are by “authors” that have no other entries in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database – suggesting they may be pseudonyms of the editor himself. That’s a shame, because there were plenty of well-qualified authors around who would have contributed something if asked. Two names that come to mind are Ron Goulart (who was a historian of comic books as well as a prolific science fiction author) and Gerard F. Conway (better known as Marvel scripter Gerry Conway).

John A. Keel’s contribution is “Satyr-Man”. It isn’t a self-contained story but the first chapter of a novel, The Fickle Finger of Fate, which was originally published in 1966. The excerpt is very good, though – so much so that I sought out a copy of the novel on eBay and ordered it right away! Keel’s story is tongue-in-cheek satire, which is also true of many of the other stories in the book. This reinforces what I said at the beginning, that it’s rare to find a prose fiction story that deals with superheroes in exactly the same way as a comic book. There are a few “serious” stories in the collection – but although they deal with super-powered humans, they’re not superheroes in the sense of having costumes and secret identities etc. The only exception to this rule – and my second favourite story in the book, after Keel’s – is “The Awesome Menace of the Polarizer” by George Alec Effinger. Although it doesn’t take itself too seriously, Efffinger’s story is far from being an outright comedy, and it has a first-class plot featuring a real superhero and a real supervillain.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is the shop where I bought the book. It’s in Putney (which is a bit out of my way, which is why I’d never been there before) and it’s called 30th Century Comics. That’s an excellent name for a shop, but it would be more accurate to call it “Mid-20th Century Comics”, because their entire stock seems to date from the 1940s to 1970s. It’s also unusual among comic shops in that it sells British back issues as well as American, and it has a large stock of pre-1960 American comics. The downside is that almost nothing is priced below £10! That’s why I restricted myself to buying paperbacks, which were a lot more affordable. Nevertheless, I was sorely tempted by their unique “Alan Class Printing Plate Sets” – which not only contain a 1960s-vintage Alan Class comic (often featuring Marvel reprints) but also the original lead plates that were used to print the cover of that comic!

The Cerne Giant

The Cerne Giant is one of the best known features of the Dorset landscape. In fact it’s such a familiar image that it’s easy to forget just how bizarre and unique it is. As I pointed out 18 months ago in my post about Phallic Symbols (mostly small ones), “gigantic erections are something you almost never see in mainstream European art”. Although they went to the trouble of inventing a word, ithyphallic, to refer to the artistic depiction of a sexually aroused male, it’s usually limited to ancient cultures and/or other continents. In this part of the world, ithyphallic images disappeared almost completely with the departure of the Romans in the fifth century. Nudity of any kind never really returned to British art, even during the Renaissance period when it was quite common in the rest of Europe (albeit with tiny little dicks).

Also from around 18 months ago is Paul Jackson’s “Armchair Tour of Britain’s Hill Figures”, the first part covering White Horses and the second everything else. In the latter category, there is only one other human figure besides the Cerne Giant – the Long Man of Wilmington. There’s a similarity between the two, in that both are simplistically drawn outline figures, but also an obvious difference – the Long Man of Wilmington hasn’t got his dick out.

A fact about hill figures that isn’t always appreciated is that they require constant maintenance – decade after decade, century after century. Paul gave a first-hand account of what needs to be done in his post Maintaining the Broad Town White Horse last year. The first step is weeding and trimming to prevent the outline from becoming overgrown, followed by re-liming (in the case of Paul’s White Horse, using over a ton of powdered lime) to restore the figure’s whiteness. Without this sort of attention, generation after generation, a hill figure would eventually be lost to sight and forgotten.

This brings us to the most contentious question about the Cerne Giant: How old is it? Only one of the figures in Paul’s survey – the Uffington White Horse – has been accurately dated to prehistoric times, with most of the others being a few centuries old at most (the Broad Town White Horse, for example, was created in the 19th century).

The oldest surviving records of the Cerne Giant date from the second half of the 17th century. As a result, many skeptical websites (Wikipedia among them) assume it must have originated around that time. One theory is that it’s a caricature of Oliver Cromwell – England’s puritanical leader following the Civil War of the 1640s. This makes sense up to a point. The obscene image would certainly have offended Cromwell and his followers (who took the Biblical injunction against graven images very seriously), and it’s placed in clear view of what would have been a busy road between Dorchester and Sherborne. But on closer inspection the theory is ludicrous.

It’s all very well for people in the 21st century to sit at their computer screens and say “maybe it was a 17th century political cartoon”... but does it look like a 17th century political cartoon? As I said at the start, nude figures – let alone rampant erections – were conspicuously absent from British representational art in those days. It’s true that the people who opposed the Puritans (and came back to power with the Restoration of Charles II) sometimes went to the opposite extreme – a notorious example being the satirical entertainment Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (which includes some great character names like Fuckadilla and Clytoris)... but that was only in discrete private circles, not on public display for everyone to see!

Also, why depict Cromwell bald-headed and whiskerless, when he wasn’t? Why depict him holding a club and not a pistol or musket? Real caricatures of Cromwell are quite different in style, leaving the viewer in no doubt as to his identity. Here is one of him dressed as a king and here he is consorting with the devil. Even crudely drawn cartoons of that period are quite different in style from the Cerne Giant, as you can see from this example or this one. All the adult male figures are shown with long hair and beards, and dressed in the fashion of the times.

The theory that the Cerne Giant is a 17th century caricature seems to be an internet-era thing. I looked in various history books, guidebooks etc that I’ve got (mostly dating from the 20th century) and couldn’t find a single mention of it. Out of 11 books I consulted, one says that nothing is known about the giant’s history, seven suggest it’s a depiction of Hercules from the Romano-British period, and three that it represents a pre-Roman deity.

The association with Hercules is based on similarities of iconography. The ancient Greek hero, who was also popular with the Romans, was often depicted holding a club in one hand and a lion skin in the other – and archaeological evidence does indeed suggest that the Cerne Giant might once have held a lion skin (or something similar) which has since been erased. But Hercules isn’t usually ithyphallic. I said earlier that the Romans often depicted enormous erections, but that was almost always in the context of one specific deity, Priapus. Hercules, on the other hand, usually had a tiny little one (see the second picture in my earlier blog post for a particularly amusing example).

Personally I think it’s more likely that the Cerne Giant originated in pre-Roman times. The artistic style looks pre-Roman, for one thing, and the Uffington White Horse proves that chalk hill figures were not unknown in Iron Age Britain. Maybe it was subsequently adapted by the Romans into a depiction of Hercules, which would explain how it survived into the fifth or sixth century AD. But what happened then?

The full name of the village where the giant is located is Cerne Abbas – the “Abbas” suffix indicating that the village was attached to a mediaeval Christian abbey. At a time when anything pagan was automatically assumed to be the work of the devil, it’s difficult to believe the monks did any proactive maintenance work on the giant (and may even have deliberately tried to obliterate it). So perhaps it was lost to sight and forgotten until the 17th century, when it was rediscovered and restored – hence the misconception that it was actually created at that time.

Fake News Stories

Forteans who scour news media for unusual-sounding stories have always had to contend with deliberate fabrications. One of the earliest, now known as “The Balloon Hoax” (pictured above), was perpetrated by the great writer Edgar Allan Poe in 1844. It claimed that one Monck Mason had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a flying machine – a feat that was not accomplished in reality for another 75 years.

Since the advent of social media, however, fake news stories have become a real plague. Dozens of new ones are created every day by websites which exist solely for that purpose (World News Daily Report, Empire News, National Report and The Daily Currant are among the worst offenders). Ostensibly these sites describe themselves as “satire”, but their techniques (and their motivations, I suspect) are significantly different from those of traditional satirists. Take a story that did the rounds a few weeks ago about a Catholic Priest’s near-death experience in which he came face-to-face with God – only to find that the deity in question was female! That’s a timeless joke, which could easily have featured on a classic satire show such as That Was The Week That Was in the 1960s, or Not the Nine O’Clock News in the 1980s.

But there’s a difference. TV satires had laughter tracks, so the audience knew from the context that it was just a joke. TV shows make most of their money from advertising revenue on first airing, and people are far more likely to tune into a comedy show than a straight news program. But that business model simply won’t work with internet satire. Very few people knowingly visit satire sites just to check out the stories and click on the ads. They are more likely to be lured in unwittingly by an eyecatching link they saw on their Facebook feed – and that’s going to work far more effectively if they don’t realize it’s satire.

I wrote about the tendency for Facebook users to mistake satire for real news before, in Satire and the Internet. At the time I assumed this was because they were stupid, but now I think there are other factors at play as well. I found an article on Wikipedia recently about Poe’s Law, which isn’t named after the aforementioned great writer but some nobody named Nathan Poe. What he said is highly relevant, though: “Without a blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” The same is true of any satire: without that laughter track, how can you tell whether it’s meant to be taken seriously or not?

“Because satire is funny,” you might reply. But that brings us to the other really important new trend in internet satire – most of it isn’t funny at all. It’s cynically tailored to make people click on it because it sounds like it’s true. Often it concerns the sudden death of a popular celebrity, or an arrogant right-wing politician making an arrogant right-wing statement – things that might be true, but just happen not to be. It doesn’t have to be true, though, and it doesn’t have to be funny, when the sole aim is to make the story go viral on Facebook so the hosting site gets plenty of advertising clicks.

Since the whole purpose of fake news stories is to get as many people as possible to social-share them, they don’t often deal with Fortean subjects which usually only have a minority appeal. But there was an exception a few months ago, when a story went viral about Buzz Aldrin finally admitting that the Moon landings were a hoax (“I am ashamed to say this but I cannot hide it any more... we decided to fake the moon landings of Apollo 11 to say we were greater than the Soviets”). That story came from a site called Huzlers, which even has a convenient “submit” form so that anyone in the world can create their own fake news story!

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future is a new collection of 20 short stories, published by Jon Downes at CFZ Press under the “Fortean Fiction” imprint. I included the blurb in my Books, plural post last month, but here it is again:

Twenty tales of High Strangeness featuring conspiracy theorists, mad scientists, hippies, geeks and miscellaneous weirdos: A group of Cambridge academics investigate a crashed UFO... An outcast scientist discovers the secret of anti-gravity... A paranormal author finds himself prime suspect in the Case of the Purloined Poe... A student has a bewildering vision of the future... Four New Agers are regressed back to their past lives... An engineer invents a new way to spy on the competition... A viewer gets too deeply involved in a TV cop show... A young woman battles the spies, aliens and perverts that only she can see... and a dozen more stories!

Most of the stories were written because I was looking for an entertaining way of getting a particular idea across. As a result there’s quite a mix of styles and genres. There’s some science fiction, some adventure, some mystery and some horror. At least half the stories have a humorous element to them, and several are parodies of a specific style. I guess if I had to stick a label on the collection it would be “Fortean satire”.

There’s an account of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery in the style of an M. R. James ghost story, and of the Rendlesham UFO incident in the style of a pulp adventure. There’s Roswell-style paranoia, transplanted backward in time from the Cold War to the period just before the First World War. There’s H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” retold in the style of Philip K. Dick. And there’s a murder mystery featuring homeopathy, Tesla coils and other internet-age wackiness.

The title story, “Museum of the Future”, is very short – but it’s retold five times. It’s a vision of the British Museum in the year 2012, as envisaged in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992. The basic plot is pretty much the same, but the background details are different every time. Not surprisingly, these reflect the political preoccupations of the time the story was written!

The Museum of the Future is published as a paperback (ISBN 978-1-909488-23-6), which I believe can be ordered from “all good bookshops” or via any of the Amazon sites. It’s also available as an ebook, but only in Kindle format (so my apologies to regular reader Colin and anyone else who may buy their ebooks elsewhere). Here are a few links:

• Amazon US – paperback
• Amazon UK – paperback
• Amazon US – Kindle
• Amazon UK – Kindle

The Lemurian Conspiracy

As mentioned in a previous post, I went to the Science Fiction Worldcon in London last month. I was disappointed to find very few stalls in the dealers’ hall selling second-hand pulps and paperbacks – I guess nowadays it’s more cost-effective for them to sell such things via eBay. I did manage to get a few interesting items, however, including this 1979 novel by Ron Goulart: Hello Lemuria Hello.

The Fortean connections are obvious right away. “Lemuria” in the title refers to a reputed sunken continent, similar to Atlantis, which featured in a number of esoteric theories including the writings of Richard Shaver – the notorious “Shaver Mystery” of the 1940s. The latter is mentioned in the back cover blurb, as is the almost-as-Fortean “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley”.

There is another Fortean connection in the book’s hero – Jake Conger of the Wild Talents Division. “Wild Talents”, of course, was the title of Charles Fort’s last book. In the novel, the Wild Talents Division is made up of operatives with paranormal abilities – Jake Conger can make himself invisible, while his female sidekick Wizard Wells is an “87 per cent accurate” Precog. This is the last of three books featuring the Jake Conger character, although it’s the first that I’ve read.

The Shaver Mystery is something of a hobby horse of mine, so I won’t get sidetracked into pontificating about it here. Suffice to say that Shaver’s basic premise – involving decadent descendents of “ancient aliens” living in caverns beneath the Earth, and controlling human destiny through mind control and other methods – is also the underlying theme of Goulart’s novel, although Shaver isn’t actually mentioned by name. The most obvious difference is that Shaver, like all paranoid theorists, was in deadly earnest about everything he said. Goulart plays the whole thing for laughs – to much better effect.

There is a character in the novel, a crackpot author by the name of P.K. Stackpole, who broadly approximates to Richard Shaver – albeit a future version of him, since the action is set in 2022. “Hello Lemuria Hello” is supposedly the title of Stackpole’s latest non-fiction book – winner of the prestigious Goofy award at the annual convention of the Crackpot Writers of America (“all sorts of pea-brained yoohoos who specialize in writing about the weird, the occult, the paranormal...”).

The other person name-dropped on the back cover, Elvis Presley, also appears in fictionalized form, as a wealthy middle-aged pop singer named Amos Binky. He doesn’t have that much in common with Elvis – in fact British readers might detect a closer resemblance to the late unlamented Jimmy Savile (“I tell you that girl scout was over twelve. Somebody done falsified her birth certificate or somethin’ to make me look bad.”). The book was published in March 1979, just a year and a half after Presley’s death, so I guess it was a case of cashing in on a still-topical subject. It’s interesting, anyway, that the idea of a “real reason for the death of Elvis Presley” was already part of conspiracy culture by that time.

The book’s setting of 2022 is now just 8 years away – much closer than 1979, which is 35 years in the past. I love reading retro-futuristic stories like this, both for the things they got right and the things they got wrong. The novel is full of smart-aleck robots, automated skycabs, sentient shopping carts and such like... all still very much in the realms of science fiction. On the other hand, everyone still reads printed books and magazines, with no indication there is any electronic alternative.

But Goulart did get some things right. People pay for purchases by putting a plastic card in a slot. They check into hotels by signing their name on a screen with a stylus. They watch mindless garbage on satellite TV. Even more prophetic is the title of one of the bestsellers of the day: “I Blew the President” – clearly a timeslipped reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the mid-nineties!

The portrayal of the conspiracy theorist, P.K. Stackpole, also struck me as being closer to a 21st century stereotype than one from the 1970s. He goes on about how he’s persecuted by Lizard People, and how the FBI implanted a radio transmitter in his rectum. His writings include articles entitled “Here’s a Microwave Threat They Didn’t Tell You About” and “The Government is Building Concentration Camps Again and You are Footing the Bills.” Just the sort of thing you see on conspiracy websites today!

Ron Goulart (who is still alive, as far as I know) was one of the most prolific science fiction authors of the 1970s and 80s. He wrote literally hundreds of novels and short stories, maintaining the cheap-and-cheerful pulp ethos at a time when most of his contemporaries had switched to writing stodgy, pseudo-literary epics. I haven’t read as much of his work as I should have, given that I share his value system – my excuse is that very little of his output saw print on this side of the Atlantic.

I’ve read one of his non-fiction books – Cheap Thrills, a history of the pulp magazines – but he’s written several others, mainly on comic-book culture. I’ve read a handful of Goulart’s short stories in anthologies, and the three of his Vampirella adaptations that were reprinted in the UK. Apart from that, I’ve only read three Ron Goulart novels (all paperbacks imported from the States)... and Hello Lemuria Hello is definitely the best of them.

Subversive Aliens

I went to two exhibitions of “subversive art” in London last week. The first was Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK at the British Library, which I mentioned briefly in my post about Fortean Comics a few weeks ago. As I said on that occasion, I’ve never been very interested in the subversive side of comics – but I was still disappointed at how little there was in the exhibition that I could relate to. All the comics on show seemed to date either from before I was born, or from after I’d passed the peak of my comic-reading phase.

There was, however, one artist on display whose name is well known to people of my generation – even non-comic-reading ones. That’s Bob Monkhouse, who was a high-profile game-show host in the 1960s and 70s. Before he went into TV, however, he worked in the comics industry for a few years. The “subversive” work on display consisted of a story he produced for a comic called Oh Boy in 1949. This features a superhero named the Tornado battling a villainous race of aliens, whose subversiveness consists not so much of their politics as their physical appearance – which, as you can see from the picture above, is distinctly penis-like (for other monstrous dicks on this blog, see Phallic Satire).

I had to use a picture I found on the internet, because there were signs all over the place saying that photography was forbidden. That struck me as a little ironic for an exhibition that claimed to be subversive. Even more ironic was the fact that visitors had to pay the blatantly capitalist sum of ten pounds to get in!

The other exhibition I went to was much better – Banksy, the unauthorised retrospective at Sotheby’s S2 gallery. This one was free entry and you could take whatever photos you wanted to. And for added subversiveness, just as the title suggests, the exhibit was unauthorised. In fact the artist not only didn’t authorise it, but he was reportedly disgusted that an event of this type was put on at all. Now that’s what I call a subversive exhibition!

You can find good quality images of all the works on show by clicking the link above. My favourite picture was Lenin on Roller Skates, but the most Fortean had to be the one with the flying saucers. Here is my own photo of the picture in situ:

Satan, Sin and Death

The dramatic scene depicted above is the work of the 18th century painter and engraver William Hogarth. This particular engraving is based on a painting he produced circa 1735-40, but it’s easier to see what’s going on in this black-and-white version. It’s a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan, en route from Hell to Earth, encounters two strange figures guarding the Gates of Hell:

Before the gates there sat on either side a formidable Shape. The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair, but ended foul in many a scaly fold, voluminous and vast – a serpent armed with mortal sting. [...] The other Shape – if shape it might be called, that shape had none distinguishable in member, joint, or limb. Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, for each seemed either. Black it stood as Night, fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell, and shook a dreadful dart.

The first figure is the personification of Sin, while the second figure is Death. It’s interesting that Satan himself is portrayed in relatively heroic form, although his facial features look more monstrous in the original painted version than in this engraving.

“Satan, Sin and Death” is an unusual departure for Hogarth, most of whose works are satirical in nature (see for example Paranormal investigation, 18th century style and Another historical myth-conception). Hogarthian satire was pretty gentle stuff, aimed at broad social classes rather than at specific individuals. By the end of the 18th century, however, all that had changed – and political caricatures were every bit as viciously ad hominem as they are today.

James Gillray (1756 – 1815) was one of the first great political cartoonists. His own variation on the theme of “Sin, Death and the Devil”, dating from 1792, is shown below. Death is represented by the Prime Minister of the time, William Pitt the Younger, while the Devil is Pitt’s Lord Chancellor, Baron Thurlow. They are separated by the figure of Sin in the person of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III. Even today, the depiction of the present Queen in such an unflattering way would be frowned on in some quarters (although Conspiracy Theorists might detect a resemblance between Her Majesty and Milton’s personification of Sin, in that both of them are half reptilian).

William Blake (mentioned previously in A 19th Century Contactee and Reinventing Ezekiel's Wheel) was born the year after Gillray. He had something of an obsession with Milton’s Paradise Lost, producing at least 30 illustrations based on it. The earlier of Blake’s two versions of “Satan, Sin and Death” (circa 1807) is depicted below. Like Hogarth, Blake makes the figure of Satan look surprisingly heroic... while his version of Death is a semi-transparent ghost.

Chinese Alchemy

In a second-hand shop a few years ago I picked up a large-format book called Ritual and Magic, which consists of material recycled from Peter Brookesmith’s partwork The Unexplained from the 1980s. It’s really very good, and full of things I’ve never seen mentioned elsewhere. Here’s an example from the very first page of the first chapter:

“Sexual symbolism was in common use among alchemists and some of them interpreted such symbolic phrases as the marriage of the Red King and the White Queen not only chemically but also sexually. Some went so far as to attempt to manufacture the philosopher’s stone – the mysterious substance that would transmute base metal into gold – from human semen. Thus 18th century German records tell of an alchemical group that engaged in experiments of this sort. The leader of the group, an officer of high rank in the Austrian army, collected the raw materials for this curious research by paying soldiers to masturbate. The soldiers under the officer’s command were so enthusiastic to supplement their meagre pay that they neglected their military duties in almost incessant masturbation.”

The idea of collecting semen for use in the transmutation of metals seems a bit far-fetched, to say the least. But there was another side to alchemy, which was concerned with the prolonging of human life rather than the production of gold. In this context, the use of semen – as the basis for an elixir of life – makes a lot more sense. Enough sense for a work of fiction, anyway.

There’s just one problem with the scenario. Without going into gratuitous detail, if the secret of eternal youth simply involved the consumption of human semen, someone would have noticed by now. So there has to be some gimmick that makes the elixir of life really difficult to synthesize in practice.

Something else that’s been on my list of potential story ideas for ages is Chinese five-element theory. The topic has fascinated me ever since I first came across it in the 1990s – particularly as it relates to the interaction between different personality types (as illustrated in simplistic form in the accompanying picture). I produced my Zen Dynamics website more than 12 years ago, but I always thought the five-element cycle would make a good framework for a story as well.

Chinese element theory comes from Taoism, and the Chinese form of alchemy also comes from Taoism... so things were coming together. Taoism even makes a big deal about semen (see Wikipedia if you don’t believe me)... but it’s all about the retention of semen, not its collection. Needless to say, semen retention doesn’t have the same narrative potential that semen collection does. The great thing about fiction, however, is that you don’t have to tell the truth – in fact the whole point is that you’re supposed to make things up. So I made up my own form of Chinese Alchemy.

Chinese Alchemy (ISBN 978-1-611529-69-2) is available in Kindle format from Amazon.com and Amazon UK, and in other ebook formats direct from the publisher JMS Books – and hopefully from other retailers as well. Here is the blurb:

The secret of eternal youth is known to few, and attained by even fewer. It involves the preparation of an elixir, made from the sperm of five copulating couples, under conditions that make the undertaking all but impossible. The couples must represent specific physical and personality types, and ethical constraints rule out all the more obvious approaches to the task. Horny young bisexual Kelvin stumbles across the secret and decides to embark on the quest that has defeated so many before him. A fast-moving romp with a bizarre cast of characters, ranging from students and professors to porn stars and Satanists.

Two Geeks, a Chicken and Bigfoot

The Geek by Alice Louise Ramirez was originally published in 1969 by Essex House – a short lived imprint that specialized in pornographic science fiction. It sounded like something I ought to read. I’ve got a professional interest in pornographic SF stories featuring geeks, since I just wrote one myself (it’s called Chinese Alchemy, and it's published by JMS books). The original edition of The Geek is an expensive collector’s item, but I managed to get hold of the 1995 reprint pictured above (for some reason this edition gives the author’s name as “Tiny Alice”).

It wasn’t what I was expecting. I’ve belatedly discovered that the word “geek” is really just a synonym of “freak”, and it used to be applied to sideshow performers. The Geek in this novel is a kind of sword-swallower, but as well as swallowing a sword his act also entails swallowing a chicken. This might not sound a big deal – except that it’s a live chicken, that goes all the way down and comes all the way back up again... and lives to perform the same act day after day. This requires considerable skill on the part of the Geek, but even more skill on the part of the chicken – who is the real hero of the novel, and its first-person narrator.

The book has a testimonial on the cover from Philip José Farmer, and a dedication inside “To Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad who thought of the Geek”. Farmer, Ellison and Spinrad were three of the biggest names in science fiction at the time the book was written. Its communal genesis is described by Alice Ramirez herself in her Amazon review of the book.

If the author’s recollections are anything to go by, the story was concocted by a group of horny youngsters who were stoned out of their minds. Having read the book, that’s easy enough to believe. Most of the action takes place on a tiny Pacific island occupied by a group of sado-masochistic lesbian nudists. Considering the story is narrated by a pink chicken (I should have mentioned that this particular chicken is dyed pink, for symbolic reasons) it isn’t that bad – but it isn’t that good either. The surreal humour of the novel probably seemed a lot funnier in the drug-addled sixties.

While I was researching the book’s background I came across a strange coincidence. A film with the same title – The Geek – was released two years later in 1971. But as far as I can tell, it’s completely unconnected to the novel – the “geek” in the movie is a wild Bigfoot-like creature with a penchant for human females. Unlike the book, the film is important enough to have its own Wikipedia article. Loren Coleman also wrote about The First Bigfoot Porn Film on his blog a few years ago... although Loren was talking about a shortened 15 minute version released in 1981.

The 1971 original was 45 minutes long, and after a bit of Googling I found an uncut copy on one of those “adult” versions of YouTube. I really needn’t have bothered. The first 35 minutes is completely plotless – a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of horny young hikers. Bigfoot – or rather the Geek – only turns up in the last ten minutes, and his scenes mostly consist of simulated sexual activity. I couldn’t work out if the film was a cynical attempt to make money, on the basis that anything with copulation in it will sell, or if it was an experimental art-house film in the “Blair Witch” mould. It doesn’t really matter, since the effect is pretty much the same either way.

The most interesting thing, of course, is the synchronicity of a 1969 pornographic SF novel called The Geek, and an apparently unrelated 1971 pornographic SF movie called The Geek. It may just be a coincidence – but if so, why was the film called “The Geek”? If they wanted people to go and see it, why didn’t they give it a more commercially eyecatching title like “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch”? Another possibility occurred to me – admittedly on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Maybe the film-makers were such big fans of the novel they told everyone they were going to make a movie of The Geek – and then realized it was totally unfilmable within their budget. So they decided to make an easier movie with the same title instead.