Damnation trolley

A spot of technical geekiness for a change: something struck me as very familiar about the "stair-climbing shopping trolley" on the cover of the Late Spring 2015 catalogue for Solutions World, a catalogue of labour-saving devices. It connects, maybe surprisingly, to a 1977 SF movie, and indirectly to a Roger Zelazny novel.

Wild at Heart

A repost of a story, Wild at Heart, that might be of interest; a few years back this was a non-winning entry to the Kenneth Grahame Society's Wind in the Willows short story competition, whose brief was to write a prequel, sequel or countertext to The Wind in the Willows. I'm reposting because I find I posted it to a hosted file, then cleverly changed the server configuration so that the file was inaccessible.

Right: spoof cover for The Wind in the Willows inspired by a Slate magazine piece on lurid covers for classics.

Mystery Devon images #2

Lynmouth, c.1900-1920

 Philip Willis, a correspondent, just sent another batch of images to the Devon History Society: early 1900s lantern slides for identification. The focus so far has been North Devon, but I did spot several taken on the Thames, and one was Niagara Falls!

So check out Mystery Devon images #2. A couple of images in the earlier set, Mystery Devon images, remain to be identified.

The above identified image struck me as particularly interesting, as an iconic location. It's at Lynmouth, looking down the East Lyn river. The building at far left, with the spiked gable, is the West Lyn Hotel; the one just its right, with the round-topped windows, is the Lyn Valley Hotel. Both are long gone; this was one of the central foci of destruction in the 1952 Lynmouth Flood. The confluence of the East Lyn and West Lyn rivers is more or less at the viewpoint of the image, Lyndale Bridge (see the similar Francis Frith image). Pre-1952, the West Lyn had been diverted through a culvert between the two hotels; part of the floodwaters took this route (see English Heritage image AA53/10717), while the bulk followed its older bed (see National Trust image), catching this part of the village in what has been called "a triangle of destruction".

Overnight, over 100 buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged along with 28 of the 31 bridges, and 38 cars were washed out to sea. In total, 34 people died, with a further 420 made homeless. The seawall and lighthouse survived the main flood, but were seriously undermined. The lighthouse collapsed into the river the next day.
- Lynmouth Flood / Wikipedia

It rather puts damage to Topsham's Goat Walk in perspective.

- Ray

After the Crash (1923)

In November 2012 (Muriel ... and After the Crash) I posted a brief critique of Maxwell Gray's short story After the Crash, "written about 1908 or 1910" but not published until her final book, the 1923 story collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

After the Crash, while I think it has weaknesses, is an interesting story, both as an example of the "Where London Stood" genre, and as a personal milestone for Maxwell Gray. She'd spent her whole career writing mainstream fiction - chiefly melodramatic romances with a certain amount of social commentary - but in her 60s broke out of that frame and wrote a single post-apocalyptic SF story that powerfully crystallises her own fears (expressed in earlier works) of disastrous consequences of the social changes brought by the 20th century.


I've posted a scan - see After the Crash - at the official site for my biography of Maxwell Gray, A Wren-like Note.

- Ray

Lanes and landscape

Under the railway bridge, West Town Farm

I mentioned I had a backlog of photography.The above rather post-apocalyptic image is of the viaduct over the long-closed Teign Valley railway, at West Town Farm, near Ide (a village southwest of Exeter).

I went there in June with Clare for a workshop on site-specific writing co-run by Oriana Ascanio of  Resident Writers and Christine Duff of OrganicARTS. I've delayed writing about it because, to be honest, writing spontaneously in situ is not at all my kind of thing - I'm not a fast writer, and I tend to visit places and write later, after reflection and research. Nevertheless, it was a thought-provoking afternoon out. The location touched on a lot of issues I've mentioned previously, particularly the idea of the rural landscape as a construct; and the tension between rural England's role as an economically viable productive resource and as a kind of aesthetic experience for visitors and incomers (a conflict which manifests, for instance, in the controversies over windfarms, solar farms, and polytunnels). See previously: Rural photography - the shaping of aesthetics and Views of the countryside.

West Town Farm looks to me a successful compromise between different functions of the countryside. It's a working farm (producing organic beef, pork, potatoes, apples, squash and pumpkins) but also focuses on environmental stewardship to protect the landscape as a niche for wildlife, as well as hosting various educational and artistic projects (see the West Town Farm website for background).

As part of the visit, we were given a tour of the farm trail, which showcases the various aspects and habitats of the farm. Probably the most distinctive was the railway cutting, maintained as a habitat for badgers and bats. I did a runner from the writing exercise, pleading the not-entirely-untrue excuse that photography was my preferred medium, just to have another look at it alone.

At the moment, I'm finding landscape exploration a continuing fascination. I've found it a coping strategy with my CUP to avoid introspection, which rapidly leads to feeling depressed, and though you might think being alone in the countryside would foster introspection, I've found quite the opposite: for me, immersion in landscape drives out the 'internal' in favour of the experience, and I can go for hours without remembering more than momentarily that I have a terminal condition. I've never so fully understood Dr Johnson's comment:

Boswell. "But is not the fear of death natural to man ?" Johnson. "So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." He then, in a low and earnest tone, talked of his meditating upon the awful hour of his own dissolution, and in what manner he should conduct himself upon that occasion: "I know not (said he,) whether I should wish to have a friend by me, or have it all between God and myself."
- Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

I'm not in denial. I can think about it and discuss it whenever needed. But I'm not letting it dominate my life, and "keeping away the thoughts of it" at other times is part of that.

Anyhow, back to West Town Farm. The cutting, especially the part under the viaduct, has a very "Where London stood" feel. When you think about, however, the line closed in 1958 and the cutting would be completely overgrown if it had been left untouched - as you rapidly find when you reach the south-eastern end of the farm trail section. In fact the cutting, like the rest of the farm, is a tightly-managed habitat, both environmentally and artistically.

This fallen rock is not left in the middle of the path by accident; it was a conscious choice. Originally intended to be sculpted, it was left by the artist untouched as an artwork in itself, and it now supports an Ansel Adams style fern. No doubt the same aesthetic is behind the fallen trees crossing the path, but not obstructing it. This knowledge doesn't detract, however, from the powerful atmosphere of the place, one of complete isolation and seclusion, despite it being only half a mile from the busy A30, and a mile from Exeter itself. It feels as if it could be many miles - or even centuries - from civilisation:

Mounds of earth are said to still exist in the woods, which originally formed the roads for these machines, but they are now so low, and so covered with thickets, that nothing can be learnt from them; and, indeed, though I have heard of their existence, I have never seen one. Great holes were made through the very hills for the passage of the iron chariot, but they are now blocked by the falling roofs, nor dare any one explore such parts as may yet be open.
- Richard Jefferies, After London, 1885, Project Gutenberg ID 13944

One positive aspect of the afternoon was a brief conversation with another of the course members, Clare Bryden. She runs a number of blogs, all of which put me to shame in terms of creativity and committment to real social causes - particularly sustainability - but one of them, And the end of all our exploring ("will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time") shows we share an interest in the connections between past and present landscape.

A trio of posts in particular interested me - collectively tagged Woodwater Lane - which document her exploration, in present and historical past, of a lane at the south-east of Exeter. Though cut by railway and roads, partially erased by development, the lane is still traceable.

The posts link to some extremely cool cartographic resources. I already knew about the Historical Maps section of the A Vision of Britain through Time site, but not the British Library Georeferencing site. This is a user-contributed project to correlate old maps with current Google Earth ones. Contributors identify common data points across an area of interest, then software adjusts for scale and distortion to bring the maps into coincidence. The result is then visible as an overlay, with a slider button to fade between old and new.

The example used in the Woodwater Lane exploration is this 1801 map of Exeter, and there are many more accessible through a convenient graphical map finder. Ones that connect with previous JSBlog topics include Niton (Isle of Wight), 1793; Shanklin, 1793; Axmouth, Devon, 1806; Ottery St. Mary, Devon, 1806; Exmouth, 1801; and Torbay, Devon, 1802.

- Ray

SF on YouTube

Just a few things that caught my attention recently: there is some rather good SF on YouTube. First, Крепость (Fortress) aka Ten years from the beginning of the last war: a Russian animation. It has rather the style of 1950s SF: hardware that's  modernised Cold War style rather than an extrapolation of the present day. But the story still works.


You can get brief English captioning if you click the leftmost of the icons at the lower right of the video, but it's not necessary to the understanding of the animation. I see the Russian commenters to the video know their literature: one has quoted the Russian translation of  Sara Teasdale's There Will Come Soft Rains.

And then there's Tears of Steel, the fourth movie from the Blender Foundation, which develops high-quality animations based on crowdsourcing work with open source software (I previously featured the very moving Sintel).


Spoiler (mouseover whited-out paragraph to read):
If you didn't get this, it starts with a couple who split up on a bridge in Amsterdam because the man is bothered by the woman's robot arm. 40 years later, it appears that bitterness over the split caused the woman - Celia - to turn to the dark side of robotics, leading to a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots. A team of scientists has obtained Celia's brain, the prototype for the robots' programming, and is running a simulation with Celia's now middle-aged ex, to try to find an approach that will placate the robots. The story ends in a ruined Amsterdam, with the outcome uncertain: the plan has been successful with one robot, but it's unclear what the others are going to do.

And thirdly, there's Total Recall 2070.See the trailer:



This is a Canadian SF series first broadcast in 1999 (see Wikipedia) that's more or less a cross between the worlds of Total Recall and Blade Runner. It's an eclectic mix of SF tropes from these and many other sources: impetuous film noir detective with geeky oddball partner (who turns out to be an android); sinister corporations; alien DNA; computer viruses; androids wanting to be more human; androids seeking their maker; murder by genetically-engineered diseases; virtual reality technology; and so on. But despite its being derivative in so many ways, it's very watchable, and the whole series is available on YouTube: see the YouTube channel TotalRecall2070.

- Ray

Habitation One: guilty pleasures

This is one for Felix Grant, who commented recently,

One of my favourite guilty pleasures is reading potted reviews of one and two star rated films.

A conversation elsewhere, that touched on dystopian books and movies, brought to mind a definitely one-star SF novel I read years back, Habitation One (Frederick Dunstan, Fontana, 1983), and I found a few juicy reviews online.

"A conservative Christian allegory ... whose gratuitous cruelty is equalled only by its tedium" — Mary Gentle, Interzone
- quoted in The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, David Pringle, 1995

Another new name in 1983 was that of Frederick Dunstan, whose Habitation One is both extraordinary and alarming. It describes the life and death-throes of an inbred community occupying the top of a vast tower three and a half centuries after the nuclear holocaust that drove its ancestors up there. Heavy with gruesome and macabre incidents,  mutilations, impalings, cannibalism and necrophilia, the book obviously intends to alarm, in the grand old Gothic manner. More disturbing than that, this murky brew of tobacco-fug, misogyny and Christian cant was dreamed up not by the usual decrepit don or febrile cleric, but by a nineteen-year-old Birmingham schoolboy. Having now graduated in English from Brasenose College, Oxford, Dunstan doesn't intend to write any more SF: he doesn't regard it as 'a serious genre'. Thank goodness we shall be spared Habitation Two and Three. One is plenty.
- British Book News - Page 138, 1984

And there's the extended White Dwarf review by David Langford, reprinted in The Complete Critical Assembly:The Collected White Dwarf (And GM, and GMI) SF Review Columns:

The book is a wondrous cornucopia of things for young writers to avoid ... lumpish prose and wooden characters ... gratuitous nastiness ...
...
Hurled skyward and pulverized from the waist down by an immense steam-catapult, one public hero nevertheless retains consciousness throughout his flight, successfully shoots an arrow into the madman who (for reasons never all that clearly explained) is dangling from a rope high up, fields the small nuclear device with which said madman planned to destroy the entire plot, and arcs onward, nuke in hand, to glorious immolation somewhere over the edge of the world. I forgot to mention earlier on that he was tortured by having his moustache ripped off with hydraulic jacks.
...
... a cringingly sententious epilogue which ascribes the unlikely happy ending to divine intervention. I don't see why God should carry the can for the ineptitudes of F. Dunstan. A real running sore of a book, this.
- for full review, see pp 48-49, The Complete Critical Assembly, David Langford, Wildside Press LLC, 2002

Don't get the idea that Habitation One is so bad as to be amusing and worth seeking out; it isn't. I read it once, and don't intend to again. The worst part of it, for me, was not the nastiness, but its excruciating pomposity, which was echoed in author interviews with the pipe-puffing 21-going-on-middle-age Dunstan. I remember particularly loathing that he should get validation as an author via this execrable book inexplicably getting into print. But it's consolation that there's no evidence of his having written anything else that was published. Perhaps, like Grunthos the Flatulent, "his own major intestine—in a desperate attempt to save life itself—leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain" to save the world from further works.

There's a certain poignancy in coming across a copy of Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One, a curious post-apocalyptic novel, in Derek's Bookstall in Preston, and reading in the author biography of Dunstan's "lifelong desire to be an author" and that in 1983, when Habitation One was published, he was "at work on his second novel". No second novel ever appeared.
- Nicolas Royle, Lives & Letters, The Guardian Review, January 12, 2013

- Ray

Scots cyberpunk

The Scottish archipelago as depicted
Map via www.floodmap.net

A while back I briefly mentioned Matthew Fitt's SF novel But n Ben A-Go-Go (Luath Press, 2000), but I finally got a copy and read it yesterday.

As SF, its genre is cyberpunk - "high tech and low life" - but with an unusual setting: an inundated Scotland in 2090 after God's Flood, a melting of the polar ice leaving only the highest mountain-tops above sea-level, most of the population living in Port, a floating megacity tethered to the sea-bed above the submerged Greenock. Disease is rife, from sun-induced skin cancer to the endemic "Mowdie", a virus that turns into a lethal form, "Senga", if carriers have actual sex (though virtual sex is possible in the cyberspace environment .

The protagonist is Paolo Broon, an ex-soldier who works as a "third-class cyberjanny", a kind of enforcer who retrieves data and captures errant employees for "Clart Central". His wife Nadia is incarcerated in a medical unit with Senga - a consequence of an affair with another unknown man. Paolo breaks from his routine life when Nadia's medical insurance runs out, losing the only legal routes to finding the DNA contact that can neutralise her virus. But he suspects that the contact is his estranged father, Diamond Broon, a vastly rich criminal mastermind incarcerated in a luxury prison, "Inverdisney", and resolves to seek him out. As it happens, Diamond - an ailing grotesque who has to be carried around by a giant Inuit bodyguard - is also seeking out Paolo, and via messages received through their respective shady contacts on VINE, their paths converge. Diamond escapes from prison to his luxury island hideout, But n Ben A-Go-Go, as Paolo, now pursued by keen young police lieutenant, swims 200km and braves the dangers of the arid 'Drylands' - sunstroke, renegade American survivalists, and mutant kelpies - to confront his father there.

I've delayed tackling But n Ben A-Go-Go for a long time because I thought it would be hard going: the unusual aspect of the novel I haven't mentioned so far is that it's written entirely in a vigorous broad Scots. A sample from the beginning, where Paolo is visiting Nadia in the Rigo Imbeki Medical Center:

Paolo’s ile-stoor resistant bitts squealed on the ceramic flair as he stepped back an glowered west alang Gallery 1083. It wis a summer Sunday forenoon the clatty end o January an the mile lang visitors’ corridor wis toom. A singil lawyer an her lycra-leggit secretary intromittit the silence, shooglin past on a courtesy electric caur. An indie-pouered germsooker jinked inconspicuously in and oot o Paolo’s personal space, dichtin up microscopic clart as it drapped aff his body.

A quarter mile doon, the wersh blinterin sun forced itsel in throu the UV filter gless at the corridor heid, illuminatin the faces an keek panels o the first fifty Omegas. An as he skellied intae the white bleeze, a troop o droid surveillance puggies advanced in heelstergowdie formation alang the corridor roof, skited by owre his heid an wi a clatter o mettalic cleuks, skittered awa eastwards doon the shadowy vennel. The toomness o the visitors’ corridor offered Paolo nae bield fae the buildin’s oorie atmosphere; Gallery 1083 wis an eerie airt wi or wioot passengers.

As it happened, it turned out to be very readable: about on a level with Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. The author does help us along. As he mentions in the slightly too earnest intro, it is to some extent written in a contrived Scots, where unfamiliar words and any number of neologisms - "stoorsooker", "incendicowp", and so on - are well-framed by context. But on reflection, I'd quite forgotten the degree of familiarity I have from childhood: my grandmother had Scottish roots, subscribing to the Sunday Post and getting me Oor Wullie and The Broons annuals every year (before the days when they anglicized the captions); and my stepfather's family were fairly broad Scots speakers. I think that whatever the context provided, it helps with But n Ben A-Go-Go to have some familiarity with Scots vocabulary: no amount of context will tell you that "coup" (a rubbish dump) is pronounced "cowp", not "coo".

There's a certain level of pastiche to the whole novel. For anyone reasonably familiar with Scottish culture, it's hard not to associate Paolo Broon's name with Pa Broon of The Broons. And the portrayal of the floating city of Port has a lot in common with Megacity One in the SF comic 2000AD (which has considerable Scottish roots - see Scotland's influence on 2000AD's Judge Dredd). It has a similar style in its naming of buildings and institutions after contemporary figures; there's an Evelyn Glennie Music Faculty; a Lorne Gillies Square; and a sports team called Portic Thistle.

However, the novel isn't just an extended Scots joke. Its world is a very dark one, where a tropical storm can sink a city suburb, and characters are forced to unusual motivations: a tight legal system, and a powerful taboo about murder, constrain Paolo from any obvious and lethal solutions to his problems, and point up the sheer unpleasantness of his criminal father. Diamond's sole justification for refusing the DNA sample that will release Nadia from years of torment is "Ah am an awfie, awfie bad man".

If you like SF and languages, I highly recommend it.

Eurasis and Africa as depicted
Map via www.floodmap.net

Geeky aside: the geographical assumptions didn't ring quite true. Fitt's "Gods's Flood" - all polar ice melted - raises the sea level by 700 metres. The actual estimate is 70 metres. As with Marcus Sedgwick's Floodland, the pattern of inundation seems to be a fictional vehicle necessary to create a "waterworld" rather than a realistic one - or maybe the author just got the decimal point wrong.

- Ray

Muriel ... and After the Crash

 Further to the previous Sweet Water Grapes, I just read the two shorter middle stories - Muriel and After the Crash - in Maxwell Gray's 1923 collection A Bit of Blue Stone.

Muriel (dated 1923, which makes it probably the author's final work) is rather a static mood piece, repeating the theme of Sweet Water Grapes: disillusionment softened by the promise of continuity. As he sits watching the sunset in a harbour town, a successful politician, Edward Grantham, meditates on his failure to connect emotionally with his daughter Muriel, who has just married. A cold man who has buried in work all his sadness at bereavement, and farmed off the upbringing of his children to his sister-in-law, he regrets the loss of both children: his son William to World War One, and Muriel, who has departed to India with her Civil Service husband.

A colleague, Jack Bennett, tries to talk Grantham out of this mood by telling them that there can be positive outcomes. He tells the story of a young English soldier who escaped from prison camp, made his way to America, and started a new life there. This soldier, like Grantham, was bereaved, but has come back to England with his child. The biographical details mount up - the soldier had a hard father, and was brought up in a rectory by his aunt - until the reader, if not Grantham, knows exactly who it's going to be, and it is. The long-lost William introduces himself, and father and son are reconciled. He hands his baby daughter, who is also called Muriel, to Grantham:

"And the world is still full of beauty," he replied, taking the little figure presented to him with embarrassment mixed with terror and a throb of deep joy.

I'll move on rapidly to After the Crash. In September 2010 - Maxwell Gray .... where London stood - I mentioned having seen a brief Times Literary Supplement review that mentioned A Bit of Blue Stone having a post-apocalyptic story. The story is footnoted "Written about 1908 or 1901, mislaid, and forgotten till now".

After the Crash tells of the visit of Brother Bernard, a pilgrim who has come from The Holy One of Canterbury, and before that from Australia, to seek a tribal leader called the Ancient of Kingston "to gather knowledge of England, and more particularly of those golden days before the Great Trouble that had preceded the downfall of the European civilization".

Arriving, Bernard sees scenery that makes it clear we're in a "where London stood" story:

Far off in the clear and smokeless air a dull blue dome rising above dull grey masses of broken masonry, partly overgrown by bush and creeper, was traced upon the sky. Here and there among the masonry were trees and woods, and towards the east "four grey walls with four grey towers" * stood, as they had already stood after a thousand years before this, unbroken. West of the dome, the grey towers of the abbey, its walls and windows beached and broken here and there, still watched the waters' never-ending flow from behind the battered and half-ruined palace of Westminster that had seen an empire's rise and fall and survived the crash of civilisation.
...
"And this," mused the pilgrim, contemplating the waste of crumbled brick and mortar and shattered spire, "was London, the London of Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson."

* MG's quotes, an allusion to Tennyon's The Lady of Shalott.

Bernard first meets a savage who "grunts jerkily in a clipped degraded dialect that had some far-off resemblance to Cockney English". After Bernard placates him with a crucifix and "Peace be with you", he directs Bernard to the encampment of the Ancient of Kingston. The Ancient, like Bernard, knows "the beautiful old tongue, the written English", and the two converse. After discussing the church's efforts to bring back civilisation, the Ancient, who is 108, tells how he met in his boyhood a man of 90 who had been born in the Famine following the "Downfall", and who told him of its cause.

"The downfall of Western civilisation was, indeed, caused by socialisms, democracy pushed to a logical conclusion, and its sequence, materialism ... So absorbed were [the ancient English] in money-making they refused to defend their country against invasion ... Moreover the Great Trouble, the anarchy of democracy, was far more acute on the continent than here. State-fed men refused to work or to fight, except among themselves."

Bernard asks the cause of the subsequent international collapse and breakdown of trade and food production.

"They of the century, Brother Bernard, had destroyed authority. They had forgotten God and the needs of the spirit ... The sum of human enjoyment had grown so immense in consequence of innumerable mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries and the enormous amount of wealth and bodily gratification developed by them, the civilised mankind sought its heaven on earth, and ever-growing democracies, grudging that any one man should enjoy more than any other, goaded the craving of material luxury to madness ... Democracy forbade the imposing of religious texts on teachers, or definite religious teaching in schools, people of any religion and no religion being equal. Democracy ... in its revolt against authority and discipline, it threw away every restraint of morality and religion. For pure democracy is the disintegration of humanity, the dissolution of society, the destruction of the atomic cohesion of the race. If you are versed in the science of the Golden Age, you will know that unless atom clings to atom the mass disappears; hence the explosion of society; the vanishing of civilisation."

Bernard, after hearing news of how "John of Kent" is retaking London, including the Tower, from the savages that occupy it, settles to banquet with the clan of the Ancient. He hears how books are being rediscovered; how the chief lady of the clan knows by heart Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur and portions of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and Shelley; and how the clan are to reinstall as king a young man who is the last descendant of the "Great Empress Queen".

Bernard assures the Ancient in return that "English hearts are beating still" in the old colonial lands, if not so much in England, and on that hopeful note settles down to sleep, thinking "Had the English been prepared, they might have saved a civilisation".

This is an extraordinary story for Maxwell Gray having made such a radical experiment in genre writing, but it is overtly polemical. As I've said before, in the preceding couple of decades, MG's works had been giving away signs of her becoming increasingly grumpy and reactionary ...

"Now Art is god, and Pleasure, and the Beautiful is master
Of soul and sense and life; let us worship these!" we cried;
But the old bright gods are dead, as the Christ, so our disaster
Is that nought is left to paint but our hearts unsatisfied.
"Ourselves are gods," we laughed—" are gods in might and glory;
The universe asks vainly for something that is higher
Or holier than the human in nature or in story;
So man himself is god, and his good fulfilled desire."
...
- The Cry of the Nineteenth Century, 1890 (poem)

this very enlightened, hypercivilised day at the close of the century, a day so perfectly informed, so thoroughly schooled, as to have lost faith in virtue, honour, and truth; in decency, authority, and government; so surfeited with fairy tales of science, and rich in the long result of time, as to believe in nothing—save only steam, bacteria, natural selection, natural appetites, money and ghosts.
- The House of Hidden Treasure, 1899

... and After the Crash turns the tap full on.

Even if the story were not killed by this overload of authoritarian anti-modern polemic, After the Crash is not very good science fiction. A plus point is the plausibility of the Church as a uniting factor and preserver of knowledge; this at least has a Canticle of Leibowitz flavour. But the language is faux-mediaeval (there are expressions such as "Nay, brother" and "Not so, Lord"), as is the culture; this isn't a believable post-apocalyptic society derived from early-1900s Londoners. OK, I wouldn't expect Riddley Walker or A Scientific Romance, from Maxwell Gray, but the characters' lack of relict cultural fixtures, after less than two centuries, is a sign of the author not exploring the scenario in any historically or linguistically realistic way. There's no sign even that the narrator is Australian.

It's interesting to see a long-established mainstream author try her hand at SF; and I'm always interested in stories where Macaulay's "New Zealander" makes an appearance, of which this is a late example. After the Crash is also a good example of apocalyptic imaginings as a mirror of the author's own anxieties and dissatisfactions with the world. As such, it's a powerful expression of MG's fears about the collapse of civilisation through war and the rise of socialism. But the idea of the its recovery taking the form of an idealised feudal English court is a bit, and the story for me was very disappointing overall, and not a creditable late work for Maxwell Gray.

The Times Literary Supplement for May 24th 1923 mentioned the story briefly, noting the central problem: that the collapse of civilisation, portrayed as starting in the very early years of the 20th century, hadn't actually happened.

"The Crash" ... looks far into the future and pictures England sunk again in primitive existence as the result of a terrible revolution; "the battered and half-ruined Palace of Westminster" is almost the only relic of today. It is a careful short study, but scarcely carries conviction, for its gloom is at variance with the facts of history.

Addendum 29th July 2013: I've posted a scan at After the Crash (1923).

- Ray

A.P.E.X.

The remarkably selective and inaccurate A.P.E.X. trailer

While Googling the works of Philip Roth, I was pleased to run into a film I remember from years back directed by a different Philip Roth - Philip J Roth: the 1994 A.P.E.X.

It's a time-travel story, the premise being that scientists in 2073 are sending a test probe back to 1973. Following a malfunction, one of the scientists, Nicholas Sinclair, follows the probe through to prevent it killing an innocent family, but he inadvertently contaminates the past with a virus. On his return, he finds himself in the new timeline he has created: a 2073 where humanity has been driven to near-extinction by an endless supply of the deadly robot probes sent automatically from the original timeline to erase the contamination. He finds himself an unpopular soldier-technician, his wife a surly and militarily expendable plague carrier who no longer knows him, and his new colleagues completely unaware of what they're fighting. Sinclair uses what influence he has to get a team to escort him to the ruined time laboratory in this revised timeline, where he hopes to reverse the accident. The team doesn't like it; the robots don't like it; and, increasingly, the fabric of spacetime doesn't like it.

In many ways, A.P.E.X. sucks bigtime, and it has attracted much ridicule. Why would a time probe take the form of a rocket-toting humanoid robot of scary and Baroque design? Where are these millions of robots being manufactured? Why are future soldiers always so ill-disciplined and shouty? There's a pleasantly facetious review at Badmovies.org: A.P.E.X.

And yet there's a lot I like about this film. Roth, who co-wrote the story, seems to have a genuine feel for the tropes of SF. The characterisation is unusual: Sinclair is not the gung-ho protagonist usual in this kind of post-apocalyptic rampage, but a thoughtful character whose brow-furrowing angst as an outsider to this brutal alternate world are as central to the story as the action sequences.

And it has a certain geek interest in being one of the two films to feature the single prototype of the Landmaster amphibious vehicle, with its strange 'tri-star' wheel configuration. See Damnation trolley for the other.

It's on YouTube: if you like SF, check it out.

- Ray

The Last Generation

click to enlarge

Department of Where London Stood: by an entirely accidental Google hit, I just ran into this curious little post-apocalyptic novelette The Last Generation: A Story of the Future by the poet, novelist and playwright James Elroy Flecker.

A fable directed at human hubris, told through the vehicle of the narrator being contacted by the time-travelling "Wind of Time", it tells of the extinction of humanity: not through external disaster, but through a dictator's plan - out of his disillusionment with human progress - for a collective suicide pact.

A visionary Birmingham politician, Joshua Harris, attains world domination as "King Harris". Through a scheme of female sterilization, with death sentences for non-compliance, the discovery of a universal contraceptive, "Smithia", and a fostering of cheerful acceptance among a hedonistic intellectual elite, he succeeds in fulfilling his aim that that this will be the last generation of humanity.

The Wind takes the narrator through the decades of decline that follow until he finds the last man, who dies at the altar of "a massive half-ruined Dome that had been used for the worship of some God" (the book cover suggests it to be St Paul's). But then, it's implied, the whole cycle starts again:

I saw the vast Halls and Palaces of men falling in slowly, decaying, crumbling, destroyed by nothing but the rains and the touch of Time. And looking again I saw wandering over and above the ruins, moving curiously about, myriads of brown, hairy, repulsive little apes.

One of them was building a fire with sticks.

The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (JE Flecker, London / New Age Press, 1908, Internet Archive ID lastgenerationst00flec).

- Ray

Salute of the Jugger

Salute of the Jugger - US trailer

Department of films I unaccountably like: the 1989 Salute of the Jugger (a.k.a. The Blood of Heroes), set in a post-apocalyptic future in what's evidently Australia (it was filmed around Coober Pedy). It follows a disparate team of "Juggers": players of a brutal sport just called "The Game", that involves armoured heavies fighting it out while a lighter but still violent player - a "Quick"- attempts to gain possession of the ball (a dog's skull) and place it on the other team's stake.

The chief threads concern the pursuit of redemption by its outcast leader, Sallow (played by Rutger Hauer), and the pursuit of ambition of Kidda, a peasant girl (played by Joan Chen) whose talent as a Quick and joining the revered "League" will be her only chance of enjoying the opulent lifestyle in what passes for civilisation, the underground Nine Cities.

In many ways this is staple post-apocalyptic stuff: desert setting, nasty brutish and short life, horrible food, grunge clothing, lots of fighting, an underground city run by a decadent elite, and so on. But the script and direction (by David Peoples, who has a track record of co-writing rather superior action SF/fantasy such as Blade Runner, Ladyhawke and The Twelve Monkeys) raise it far above the mundane. The cast is good too; as well as Hauer and Chen, it includes Delroy Lindo. Anna Katarina, Vincent D'Onofrio and Gandhi MacIntyre all bringing strong and sympathetic characterisation to their roles, with the excellent Hugh Keays-Byrne as the suavely vicious Lord Vile. Even what isn't said is just as expressive, as in the constant self-consciousness of Big Cimber, the female Jugger, in attempting to hide the scarred side of her face.

Pavement artist drawing Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross

Often films can get a bit laboured in filling in detailed back-story, but Salute of the Jugger doesn't do this; it just immerses you in the situation, with atmosphere and verisimilitude provided through minor details that stick in the mind. Cogwheels used as currency. The chest of drawers carried as a rucksack by Gandhi, the team's trainer and manager. The lift down to Red City going so deep that its occupants have time to fall asleep. The city that's revealed to be merely better-organised squalor than the surface. Sleeping accommodation on shelves high up a sheer wall. The pallid Lords who, despite their silken clothing, candelabra and chamber music, are still eating insect canapés and goanna (albeit elegantly presented). The pavement artist who, unnoticed, is drawing Bosch's Christ Carrying The Cross, preserving art at a higher level than the Lords, whose art seems to have reverted to the primitive and totalitarian.

Salute of the Jugger has acquired, I think deservedly, a cult following. For a long time this film was very scarce, but it's readily findable now on DVD for £2-£3. I won't directly infringe copyright by linking, but if you do a YouTube internal search for "The Blood of Heroes-parte 1 subtitulada", you'll find a Spanish-subtitled version online.

Insect canapés

There's a very interesting Authorsden article - Blood of Heroes, Salute of the Jugger - by John Howard Reid, reprinted from his 2006 book America's Best, Britain's Finest: A Survey of Mixed Movies. Reid worked on the set for a few days, and has some behind-the-scenes background on the large amounts of what sounds like spectacular footage that didn't make it to the final cut. He comments particularly that it was "a Poverty Row film in reverse"; it superficially looks low-budget, but in fact was filmed with a very high budget, and with great attention to details that we only rarely glimpse (as in the repulsive canapés and the Bosch painting).

You should have seen the Red City street down which I and about two hundred meticulously costumed extras wandered. The shops. Wow! All filmed with the weirdest, most bizarre, most inventively created produce and goods that highly imaginative designers and set dressers could imagine. And what do we actually see on the screen. Zilch!

- Ray

Wild at Heart

A sentence in an article I cited in the previous post just jogged my memory:

An attempt to recreate the river trip immortalised in Jerome K Jerome's classic book with two girl friends turns into a strange hybrid of Wind in the Willows and Apocalypse Now, writes Joanne O'Connor
- How three women in a boat took a trip back in time, The Observer, Sunday 2 July 2006

As it so happens ... I wrote this short story a few years ago. It's failed to get placed in a number of competitions, notably the Kenneth Grahame Society's 2008 competition (despite its invitation for creative angles on The Wind in the Willows). So, rather than have it languishing on file forever (furthermore, a file that I very nearly lost through computer crashes), I thought I'd post it here. I don't recall having read the Observer article back then, but it could conceivably have been the inspiration. Enjoy.

Update: I've moved the post here - Wild at Heart.

- Ray

Richard Jefferies memorial

Richard Jefferies - click to enlarge

I did spot one literary connection in my visit to Salisbury Cathedral on Saturday: the memorial to the Victorian pastoralist and nature writer Richard Jefferies. The inscription reads:

TO THE MEMORY OF

RICHARD JEFFERIES,

BORN AT COATE IN THE PARISH OF CHISELDON AND COUNTY

OF WILTS, 6TH NOVEMBER 1848,

DIED AT GORING IN THE COUNTY OF SUSSEX,

I4TH AUGUST 1887,

WHO OBSERVING THE WORKS OF ALMIGHTY GOD,

WITH A POET'S EYE

HAS

ENRICHED THE LITERATURE OF HIS COUNTRY,

AND

WON FOR HIMSELF A PLACE AMONGST

THOSE

WHO HAVE MADE MEN HAPPIER

AND WISER.

Jefferies isn't buried in the cathedral, nor, though Wiltshire-born, did he even have any much connection with Salisbury. The memorial, unveiled on March 1892, was placed there as the result of a fundraising campaign by his friends and admirers, as described in The Spectator: Volumes 64-65, 1890, page 116:

MEMORIAL TO RICHARD JEFFERIES.

[To The Editor or The "Spectator." Sir,—It may interest your readers to learn that this unrivalled delineator of country life is no longer to remain unhonoured. A wish has been expressed of late by many that some memorial of Richard Jefferies should be erected, and inasmuch as he was a native of Wilts and fond of his county, Salisbury Cathedral appeared to be the most appropriate spot for that purpose. Mr. Charles Longman, an attached friend of Richard Jefferies, and Mr. Walter Besant, the happy author of the "Eulogy," regarding the proposal with favour, a committee has been formed for placing a marble bust of the prose-poet of the Wiltshire Downs in this grand old cathedral, the Bishop of Salisbury and the Dean having most cordially given their assent to this project. The execution of the proposed memorial has been entrusted to Miss Margaret Thomas, an artist of acknowledged ability. The estimated cost of this work will be about £150. It is believed that little difficulty will be experienced in raising this small fund among the admirers and readers of the most remarkable man produced in the Diocese of Salisbury for many years. The committee consists of the Bishop of Salisbury and the Dean, Mr. Burdett-Coutts, M.P., Mr. Walter Pollock, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Rider Haggard, Mr. J. W. North, Mr. George Smith, Mr. Andrew Chatto, Mr. Alfred Buckley, Mr. Osborne, Mr. C. P. Scott, Mr. F. G. Heath, Mr. Walter Besant, and Mr. Charles Longman. The two latter gentlemen will act as honorary secretaries, and I have willingly accepted the office of treasurer, and opened an account with Stuckey's Banking Company for subscriptions.—I am, Sir, &c.,

Haines Hill, Taunton, July 21st. Arthur Kinglake.

The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, Volume 27, issue 79, June 1893, pages 69-99 has a report on the unveiling of the memorial, and an extended contemporary appreciation and bibliography of Jefferies. "The Euology" referred to is Walter Besant's 1888 The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (Internet Archive eulogyrichardje00besagoog), an immediately posthumous biography and appreciation.

I haven't read much by Jefferies; I admit Victorian nature-mysticism isn't really my cup of tea; and some of his writing is even stranger, such as the 1883 autobiographical The Story of My Heart, which expresses deeply personal epiphanies about his life and his soul's journey (it reads to me as if written on opiates - he was undergoing a series of painful operations). But I may well have misjudged him, because his work had wider scope, including a number of interesting-looking novels. For example, in the 1875 Restless Human Hearts:

Nature and nature mysticism are sharply contrasted with the decadence of fashionable Mayfair society. Brimming with original and often audacious ideas, the novel is also notable for its gallery of women characters – Heloise, who experiences mystical raptures alone on the downs but marries a brutal and debased peer; Georgiana, a feminist intellectual who defies convention by entering on a trial marriage with her lover; and the sin-stained Carlotta, a cross-dressing femme fatale whose nemesis comes in a close encounter with a cobra in a train compartment.
- description at Richard Jefferies Society site

One RJ novel I have read is his 1885 post-apocalyptic novel After London: Or, Wild England (Internet Archive afterlondon13944gut) is worth checking out. London has become a toxic swamp, and England, deserted by most of its populace, has largely reverted to woodland. The remaining populace consists of small feudal kingdoms in constant conflict with invading Welsh armies, tribes of gypsies and savage "Bushmen". The actual story - the novel's second section, Wild England - isn't so great. It's an adventure involving a baron's son, Sir Felix Aquila, who is frustrated by the lack of opportunity to prove his worthiness to marry the Lady Aurora Thyma, and so goes on a canoe voyage of exploration to seek his fortune. Unfortunately, the human and cultural side isn't well thought-through. Jefferies, like more than a few authors of post-apocalyptic novels, has just jumped back to mediaeval times rather than plausibly inventing a future. His future culture doesn't contain the 'fossils', via language, names, and half-remembered cultural fixtures, of a world built on a collapsed Victorian England. However, the first section, The Relapse into Barbarism, describes vividly and plausibly the development of the woodland ecology of an English landscape that has ceased to be cultivated.

See the Richard Jefferies Society for more background. The Society also has web pages on the Wilts Community Web - here - with many of his published works, and its journal and newsletter.

- Ray

Isle of Wight for 10,000 years

right-click and view in new tab to enlarge

On the subject of ephemeral landscapes, the above image comes from a children's encyclopedia, The World of Wonder: 10,000 Things Every Child Should Know (Amalgamated Press, Ed. Charles Ray, 1932), which looks a rich lode of interesting and sometimes off-the-wall illustrations.

This one, The Story of the Isle of Wight for 10,000 Years, doesn't seem well-informed geomorphologically, even for the time it was written. The south coast of the island is an entirely erosional coastline, so the new land at bottom right isn't going to form. Nor is the trend on the northern side of the western Wight depositional. The western promontory tipped by the Needles is essentially being eroded from both sides, like a pencil being sharpened.  It'll certainly retreat with continued erosion, but while it exists, it'll continue to be  a promontory because its Chalk erodes less easily than the softer Tertiary rocks that form the northern half of the island.

Note the persistence of the road patterns 5000 years into the future. Probably the artist put them there just there for geographical orientation, but I guess it's not unfeasible; in the UK, we're still using many Roman roads, many of whose routes pre-dated the Roman occupation.

- Ray

On the lost road

15 - Shakespeare Memorial Fountain
There's a better photo, not by me, at Flickr.

I've mentioned in a couple of previous posts - see particularly IOW (3): Return to Blackgang - the "lost road" at the southern tip of the Isle of Wight. This is in the Blackgang landslip complex, where a section of the former road between Blackgang and Niton remains isolated, cut off at each end by major slips (see Google Maps, and for technical details, see page 191, Slope Stability Engineering: Developments and Applications, 1991).

I've been intrigued by it for a while - actually quite obsessed with the prospect of going there - and finally visited it on Saturday. It's completely inaccessible from the Niton end, where Sandrock Road from Niton ends at a sheer cliff above a mess of overgrown landslip (see Google Maps view). But from the Blackgang end, at the end of the truncated road is an established path over the landslip; the problem, however - I'd been warned from reading online discussions of the place - is that this path runs close to the cliff edge. That proved to be an understatement: coastal erosion has proceeded to the point where there are now two short sections where the path is about a foot away from an unstable cliff edge over a drop of some 300 feet to the beach (undergrowth and general terrain stop you taking any alternate route further from the edge). I'm pretty good with heights as such, but it certainly scared me; Clare, very sensibly, stayed behind to raise the alarm if I didn't come back.

Once over the scary section, there's a lot to enjoy about the walk, which is somewhere between country ramble and urban exploration. The landscape is classic undercliff: an overgrown tumbled terrain on a clifftop ledge backed by further, higher, cliffs. There are superb views of the landslip and the 550-foot Gore Cliff above, and (the visibility was good) along the coast to the Tennyson Down and the Needles, and  even across to Old Harry Rocks on the mainland. The road - some quarter of a mile of it exists - is now extensively overgrown, having shrunk to a single tarmac path. But in places, it's still recognisable as a tree-lined country lane flanked by stone walls, and in one of these walls is the now-dry Shakespeare Memorial Fountain with its text "TAR AND THE RO" (the remnant of the logo "The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold" from Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 2, Scene 4).

I admit I found visiting the remains of this fountain, which I remember from my childhood, a powerful experience. I've since had a tattoo of it as a memento: see "Ursula" and Blackgang.

There are still buildings, too, though considerably more overgrown and run-down than in recent accounts; for instance, of a pair of caravans that was there until not long ago (and visible on Google Maps), one has gone entirely and the other has been vandalised. Being by myself, for safety's sake I didn't venture much off the road, but it was possible to see from it the huts of the defunct nudist holiday camp, the South View Sun Club; and at one point the road is crossed by water and power cables leading to an two-storey house some way below - I've since found out that this is the coach house of Southview House, the old home of Thomas Letts - where I could see someone working. I didn't investigate that (a YouTube comment suggested the owner, having had tools stolen, doesn't welcome explorers). I didn't see or meet anyone else on the road.

(Addendum: the house has since been destroyed by fire - see Southview goes west).

It was, overall, a fascinating and probably unique place, at least in England. (While the Lyme Regis - Axton and Hooken undercliffs have similar terrain, those slips are much older and don't intersect roads and recent habitation).

We didn't actually notice, until walking back out, the Isle of Wight Council sign, on a footbridge way above normal viewing height, saying "Danger. No public access. Active landslide. Keep out". That's an accurate description and warning. The access path is genuinely scary and dangerous; and I don't say that as a teaser, boast or challenge. It just is. If you really must go there, don't go alone; and don't try it if you're not very sure on your feet or get very jittery about heights. And even with all possible precautions, the cliff edge is unstable and could well choose to collapse as you're crossing it; in fact the whole landscape is on borrowed time. I had a tense walking-on-eggshells sensation all the time I was there.

In fact, although I've done far more strenuous and objectively dangerous walks, I found this the most intense experience of landscape I've had for decades - the more so for the powerful 'double exposure' sensation of finding a place I just about recall from childhood preserved in post-apocalyptic isolation only a few hundred yards from the mundane world of tea-shops and bus routes.

There's a YouTube video of the walk (not by me) taken five years ago: Walking over the lost Blackgang Road. The creator omits the scary bit.

Addendum: "Stef" kindly sent me a link to an archived ITN report - Shotlist Ref: BSP130194015, 13th January 1994 - of the last major slip in 1994. At 2:03 you can see the hut dwelling in image 10 below.

Addendum 4 May 2014: Chris Bedford sent me a link to his website Dumpman Films, which offers a large selection of videos of out-of-the-way and abandoned places. "Abandoned railways/disused railways feature heavily; what magic there is in seeing an abandoned railway station or tunnel or other such relic left behind as a result of Dr Beeching's axe. However, wartime bunkers, sewers, canal tunnels, collapsing piers, disused industrial sites, old roads and ruined Victorian asylums crop up too." It has links through to many other interesting sites.

- Ray

Here's a gallery of Saturday's expedition (click any image to enlarge):

1 - Blackgang landslip from NW

2 - looking NW from landslip

3 - Gore Cliff

4 - Gore Cliff

5 - the road acquired

6 - vandalised caravan

7 - on the road

8 - on the road

9 - on the road

10 - a hut dwelling

11 - the abandoned nudist site

12 - looking SE, end of road

13 - slip at Niton end

14 - slip at Niton end

15 - "TAR AND THE RO"

16 - looking NW from slip

17 - the drop!

18 - Gore Cliff

19 - Gore Cliff

20 - the warning!

Update, March 2015 We visited Blackgang Chine recently - see Blackgang Chine, March 2015 (which links to some new posts related to the Chine) - and I can confirm what I've seen mentioned in forum discussions: the Blackgang end has now been comprehensively fenced off (whether by the Council or the Chine management I don't know). Apparently this is because the unofficial footpath has now fallen away, which is unsurprising, considering it was only a few inches from the cliff edge in 2011. I don't know if there's any access from the Windy Corner end.

2015: Blackgang end fenced off

- Ray