What the *@$%!?!?!

My two biggest fears on earth:

Snakes and butter.

Ignoring the second one for now, it’s suffice to say that I have a debilitating pathological fear of most reptiles, and snakes far and away top the list. If I see one in the paper (and the Metro here seems to be full of snake-related stories) I scream like a girl, fling the offending page as far as possible and try to regain some measure of composure on a packed train.

I’m sure they don’t like me much either, but I make it a point to keep away from the vile creatures if they follow suit, and so far it’s been a rewarding mutual understanding.

Which begs the question: Why, oh why, would some twisted, depraved deity have pulled such a prank on me?!?

I was happily walking along one of the Jubilee Bridges yesterday, in what turned out to be a glorious evening, fully enjoying life for the first time after a few long, hard weeks at work. Finding myself in high spirits I decided to take in the London sunset and fill myself with the buzz of the city, so I stopped along the bridge to admire the paintings of one of the artists who litter the South Bank and the surrounding area.

It was then that I turned to the person standing at my right shoulder, and came face to face with a creature from the pits of hell.

Oh, I’m sure that underneath it all she’s a pleasant enough individual. But, for the love of all that’s holy, why did she have to be wearing a wolf’s head for a helmet while holding Satan’s love-child at eye-level!?

Yes. She was wearing a wolf’s snarling head over her own. And cradling a fricken’ snake. At eye-level. My eye-level. Within touching / snapping / biting / striking / devouring distance.

Seeing a snake was bad enough. Turning into a Gorgon with a decapitated wolf adorning her head at point-blank-range was bad enough. Both together was unbearable.

I freaked. Not in a screaming kind of way. In a very serene-two-hour-walk-home-before-dissolving-into-a-puddle-of-tears-and-piss kind of way.

I’m investing in a mongoose. One that’s been modified to fight an anaconda. I’ll call him Arnold.

And no, I don’t care what anybody thinks of me taking my mongoose with me on the train. If somebody can dress up like a cross between a lamprey and a werewolf while walking around in public with a snake at head height then I’m sure that a frikkin’ mongoose will be the least of this city’s worries!

A light-hearted joke

Question: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Answer by Hemingway: “To die. In the rain.”

I’m reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. With every passing page the vial of painkillers seems to roll closer to the vodka.

The Stars My Destination

Following in somewhat a similar vein from my last post, I decided to pick up a book that has been on my to-do list for a very long time: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (or Tiger! Tiger! as it was known under its original title).

It is firmly positioned within the science-fiction community as one of the leading books in its genre. If you were to believe every review that you were to come across, Dune would be the quintessential reader’s book while The Stars My Destination would take the place of the book that all of the genre’s authors look up to.

You generally know that when you pick up one of these 300 page long ‘masterpieces’  that you’re not signing up for the typical dramatic adventure. Rather, the focus steers away from the drama and remains on a message or theme. Often this is associated with a cost to gratuity, where a few extra pages could provide some fast-food fan-service.

Bester however, steers well clear of this, and while perhaps this limits his audience away from the casual Star Wars reader who might be hoping for more details into the space battles, it does allow him to deliver his message without diluting any of its substance.

Gully Foyle, the protagonist and driving force behind the story, is not a nice guy. He’s a brute with a barbaric mind, who rapes when he can, speaks in a gutter based language that hardly makes any sense and abandons any seemingly meaninful bonds that he develops (this last strips away any sort of redeeming qualities the reader would normally assign to him).

Not a nice guy

Ultimately this is the story of a cipher and of unfulfilled potential, both of Foyle and of the human race as a whole. The message is a simple one, but one that so many people still don’t understand; it’s delivery and revelation however, are purely phenomenal. (It is worthwhile noting that the most common comparison is drawn with Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.)

Grealty accredited with inspiring the cyberpunk genre 30 years before it rose to prominence, the book is both a simple (if not pleasant) read and an incredibly rewarding one.

As Neil Gaiman says in his poigniant introduction, ‘Nothing dates harder or faster than the future.’ The fact that Bester’s 50 year-old vision of the future still provides the same relevant context and perspective that it once did is a testament both to his skill as a writer and to the message that he seeks to deliver through his execution.

Messages like these (providing an outside context problem that forces the reader to reevaluate his own position) are what the genres of science-fiction and fantasy are all about. Far too often this gets lost when authors focus on delivering as much gratuity as possible and neglect the genre’s one clear advantage over all others.

Bester’s book is worth the read simply to see the genre (and I refer to both fantasy and soft science-fiction here) in its purest form. The fact that it is delivered by a brilliant author who is at the top of his game is just the excuse that you need to pick it up.