Painting Fakes

Speaking of socially tinged science fiction, I picked up another book at the same Lifeline sale. It’s called Out of the Silence be Erle Cox . It was published in 1925, and what I said about the advance of science fiction writing since 1977 goes double. It’s a clumsy book, but fascinating. After a very obviously SF prologue, the story proper starts like something from Miles Franklin or Frank Dalby Davison. A young vineyard owner, Alan Dundas, works on digging his dam, is visited by his friend from town, and gets lined up for a romance with a nice local girl. The difference, however, is that he is prevented from getting very far with the dam because a huge solid construction is in his way just beneath the surface. Intrigued, he digs on and finds the door. There follows a rather laboured rewriting of Sleeping Beauty as he is forced to overcome various life-threatening traps on his way to the centre of the structure, where he finds an extraordinarily beautiful woman in suspended ani...

Well, I finally got to the top of the holds list for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . It’s a bit of a hoot – Jane Austen’s original with inserted zombie killings. It provides a kind of twist to left-field on the original story – it’s main characters have studied martial arts in the East, have dojos attached to their houses, and in Lady Catherine’s case are attended by ninja bodyguards. It has some quite funny moments, like when Charlotte Lucas gets infected shortly before her marriage to Mr Collins and slowly turns into a zombie, unnoticed by all but Elizabeth. Other bits are more predictable, like Elizabeth’s interview with Lady Catherine ending with a sword fight – no prizes for guessing the winner. Overall it’s a bit flat – I certainly won’t be lining up for any of the further Austen rip-offs leaping onto the gravy train. More to my taste was a little book I picked up from the Lifeline book sale in January and finally got to reading. It’s a science fiction novel by Kate Wilhelm c...

On the cover of Mermaid Avenue there’s a great picture of Woody Guthrie playing a guitar painted with the words “this machine kills fascists”. It’s a good introduction to the idea of music as a subversive activity, which was taken up so enthusiastically by the next generation of American folk musicians, led by Pete Seeger and later Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary. These men and women were subversive in a very overt political way. However, I was led to think about some more subtle forms of subversion recently while listening to one of my son’s favourites, Blackfield . A collaboration between the Israeli Aviv Geffen, and Englishman Steven Wilson (prolific songwriter and muso in a number of different guises), Blackfield are not political at all. They sing melodic rock songs of lost love and general depression. I was struck by one song in particular, called “End of the World”, which illustrates exactly what I mean. It has a killer piano hook which sucks you into a famili...