I mentioned Australian band Python Lee Jackson in a recent post about the Nice.

Despite the band’s origins the voice doing the singing here is unmistakable – and not Australian. There are varying accounts of how Rod Stewart came to do the vocal on this track.

In A Broken Dream was, I believe, the first single – as opposed to EP (ask your Mum or Dad; or even your Grandad) – in the UK to have a picture sleeve. Prior to that each label had its own generic sleeve with a circular cut out so that you could see the label, song title, artist, composer, lyricist and copyright info printed on the label. These would have a lower unit cost as they were used for every single the label put out.

You Tube had this listed under Rod Stewart, despite the fact it wasn’t released under his name. I had heard Rod no longer wished to be associated with this track and hounded unmercifully those who referred to it.

Blame You Tube, Rod, not me.

Edited to add: Rod now seems to have come to terms with this as I’ve since seen him perform it on TV.

That’s five we’re behind now. Forfar are worse off but that’s no help to us. Looks like March will be busy.

Next Saturday’s game – assuming it goes ahead – is huge. And we’ll be the more disadvantaged, not having played for three weeks by then.

Any more postponements and the play-offs will be only a hope.

The latest Writers’ Bloc event is:-

Doyle M For Murder at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar, 60 The Pleasance, on Thursday 26th February, 2009, at 8 pm.

Mind-boggling mysteries, jungle high jinks and stringently stiff upper lips. Featuring a new Professor Challenger story!

This show is part of the Edinburgh City of Literature reading campaign for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Gollancz, 2007
This novel is published in the US as Fearless.

The first thing is to ponder on the reason for the alternative title. Black Man obviously does not carry the same freight in Britain and Europe as it would have in the US. I do not know for sure but suspect that Morgan’s US publisher took fright at the thought of a restricted readership had the title been the same in the US as in Europe. Perhaps now, with the change of President, that reasoning may no longer hold so true, but only time will tell.

In the book, the US has fragmented into several parts including the Angeline Freeport, the Rim States (most of the seaboard) and the Confederated Republic (or Jesusland, effectively a fundamentalist version of the old Confederacy) and a rump Union.
Carl Marsalis is a variant thirteen, part of the Osprey programme, a human genetically modified to be in essence effective fighting machines, a throwback to an earlier form of human supposedly bred out when agricultural settlement took place. In this world other genetic modifications exist, such as hibernoids (who sleep for four months but are active the other eight) bonobos (sexually compliant females) but because of their nature (unnature?) all such “twists” are looked down on by “normal” humans but it is variant thirteens who are feared by the general populace. As a result they are either exiled on Mars or quarantined in areas called tracts. That Osprey and its American equivalent Lawman failed in their attempts to gengineer effective soldiery was because thirteens do not like obeying orders.
Marsalis also happens to be black, and British, though the action is set almost wholly in the Americas. He is employed by UNGLA to track down other thirteens who have escaped the reservation and to kill them if they do not surrender. Returning from one such mission he is arrested in Florida – part of Jesusland – held for months and released only when agents of the Western Nations Colony Initiative (COLIN, who seem to run the tracts and Mars colonies) need him to help find a renegade thirteen from Mars, with an interesting sideline in cannibalism, who has been brought back to Earth as an assassin.
The book is intricately plotted; indeed a less complex novel than this would have finished about 7/10ths of the way through when Marsalis finally catches up with the quarry. It is a measure of Morgan’s confidence that the book does not stop there. The viewpoint characters are various and varied with believable (mostly) motivations.
Given the scenario it is not surprising that there is violence here similar to Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels. (I must say however that I preferred the, to me, more grounded and slightly less visceral Market Forces.)
Having said that, in Black Man Morgan is more assured than in any of his previous outings. This world seems deeper, richer, more textured. One of his (non gene-enhanced) characters states that there is no more war because humans have learned the cost is too high. This is notwithstanding the assertion by another thirteen that they, not the milque-toast cudlips (the pejorative name variants use for normals) are the true humans. The high body count in the book also runs counter to the argument.

However, there seems no good reason why Marsalis is black. Other thirteens do not seem to be – or at least are not described as such. Is it solely as a metaphorical representation of the menace inherent in thirteen status? If true, that decision is surely worthy of examination. But I will trust Morgan’s intentions as stated in his dedication that he hates bigotry, cruelty and injustice with an unrelenting rage. His sympathy for the variants does shine through.
This was a world I was immersed in and did not want to surface from. As an example of the SF thriller Black Man is seriously good stuff.

This was the Nice’s first single and a smallish hit.

Emerlist Davjack was an amalgamation of the group’s surnames; Keith Emerson, David O’List, Brian Davison and Lee Jackson. Lee Jackson was said to have taken exception to the band name Python Lee Jackson under which a song called In A Broken Dream was released as he thought it was some sort of barbed reference to him.

I watched a couple of TV programmes on the BBC recently about progressive rock and they featured the Nice’s America. I hadn’t exactly thought of the Nice as progenitors of the form but listening to The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack (for the first time in decades) I can hear foreshadowings of Nursery Cryme era Genesis, though.

The Nice’s version of America – quotations from Dvorak’s New World symphony, portentous spoken word bit at the end made weirder by being voiced by a child – was certainly a conceit, going way beyond the standard format of the time.

I suppose it did point the way to a widening of rock’s horizons, the possibility of song structures more complicated than verse, verse, chorus; verse, chorus; middle eight; chorus; fade out.

Rock had always ripped-off mined classical sources, though. When A Man Loves A Woman was a direct steal from Pachelbel’s canon (as was The Farm’s Altogether Now many years later.) The Beatles weren’t afraid of instrumentation outwith guitars, drums, piano and organ and Procol Harum’s early hits leaned heavily on a classical sensibility.

The Moody Blues “Days Of Future Passed” album went a stage further in utilising full orchestral passages to surround, extend and link the songs. Deep Purple flirted with orchestral settings for a while and Barclay James Harvest went so far as to take an orchestra on tour.

Longer more involved pieces were probably inevitable once the 12″ LP came into being. Given the greater space, some rock musicians were bound not to restrict themselves to around fifteen or so different songs each only about three minutes in length – however perfect encapsulations of a moment or a situation those might have been.

And some of those longer tracks are superb. Pink Floyd’s Echoes from the album Meddle is a great example as is Genesis’s Firth Of Fifth from Selling England By The Pound.

The Nice: The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

This morning I woke to about a centimetre of snow lying outside. Typical, I thought. My week for the car.

As soon as I had scraped the windows and lights, got 50 metres from the house and onto a bus route it was all salted away, though. No hold ups, no problem. Work as usual.

It was just about all gone when I got home again. Ah well.

Yet again our game was off, though I suspect this one was less avoidable than others.

That’s four we’re behind now, two of them against Elgin.

I only hope we do not play Sat, Tue, Sat, Tue, Sat, Tue, Sat, Tue for the whole of March or we’re stuffed.

Knowing the SFL we’ll probably get two double headers in a row against the Shire and the Wee Rovers.

Apart from the ridiculous nature of the phrase itself, what snow event?

All I’ve seen is a few flurries. No roads blocked, no days off work, no sledging in the park. An “event” affecting only parts of the UK at the time is nationwide news? And the worst in Britain for 18 years? Falls like that are commonplace in the Highlands most years.

I know some places have had it badly, but on the other hand there was some twerp saying the road he was speaking from was impassable yet there was barely a covering on the pavement behind him.

I’ve seen bad snow and driven in it. An inch isn’t bad. If you can see the pavement it certainly isn’t bad. But people are not used to it, I suppose.

OK, the worst snow I’ve ever experienced was when I lived in Essex and Hertford. Howling in from the East like this week. But there wasn’t the same fuss nor absenteeism. People tried their damnedest to get to work. They even used skis to get in to the good lady’s workplace!

But that was in the long ago days before Thatcher taught us all to be selfish. This week it was just an excuse for a skivy day or two off.

And as to the supposed cost of the disruption; where did the figure of £1 billion come from? It looks pulled out of the air to me. If folk didn’t buy something today because they couldn’t get to the shops or the shop was closed they’ll buy it tomorrow or next week if they need it, so businesses will make any loss up. It’s a nonsense, yet seems to have been trotted out uncritically by journalists (who, by the way, just love things like this. Any whiff of disaster or anything out of the ordinary and they’re off, almost salivating at the prospect of hogging the screen for a few minutes.)

Rant over. Enjoy the rest of your winter.

The Tory governments of the 1950s and early 1960s did not alter the framework that the post-war Labour Governments had erected. During that time, at the 1955 General Election, the Tories in Scotland secured a majority of the total Scottish vote. There was almost no disparity in electoral behaviour across the UK. Slightly earlier, at the time of the abduction of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey in 1951, the SNP had only 0.7% support.

Yet today the Scottish political landscape has changed utterly. There is a Scottish Parliament – run by the SNP! – and Scottish Tories have great difficulty securing a so-called “first past the post” (a term I detest) seat in Scotland.

So what happened?

By the 1960s the binding force of the Empire had gone, the sense of togetherness engendered by two World Wars, where Britain was in great danger – more so in 1940: though almost as much in WW1, where Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe, “he was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon” – had slipped away. Deference (“the toffs know how to run things”) was no longer the force it was.

All three of these factors apply equally to England, though.

Was it just that the mere presence of the SNP gave an apparently safe home to voters who could not stomach switching all the way from Tory to Labour? The rise of the SNP – especially in rural areas; Labour dubbed them the Tartan Tories – combined with a resurgence of the Liberals certainly helped erode the Conservative vote.

Thatcher, though, completed the process. She was always a Little Englander; a trait most Scots tend to find unattractive. She also appeared hectoring and strident. Scotland’s macho culture wasn’t going to accede to that. She also tore down that framework I mentioned earlier so that only an emasculated NHS was left.

It is possible Scottish voters became canny at working out which candidate could win and adopted tactical voting as a means of keeping Tories out. In this regard doctorvee gives evidence that the Tory vote in Scotland actually still holds up; but then the Liberal vote also did not die away completely in the UK in the inter- and post-war years, while their representation did.

It could be argued that Scotland is – or was – a conservative (small c) country. It was certainly so when I was growing up. (So many things are different now.) That that conservatism came to be expressed in voting for Labour is not quite an irony. As far as Scotland is concerned, Labour were always conservative. And New Labour never reversed the effects of Thatcher’s policies – because they never tried to.

Despite that there is, though, still the strain in Scotland’s culture that emphasises community. It is exemplified in the phrase, “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns.” I think it was a sense of this communitarianism that Scots were hankering for in rejecting Thatcherism and, later, despite the old ties, Labour.

A more significant factor in the SNP coming to power, though, was familiarity breeding contempt. After a time voters in the UK seem to get tired of the same old lot in power and hoik them out. And Jack McConnell was hardly inspiring as the face of Scotland. The hoo-has surrounding the cost of the Parliament building and the demise of Henry Mcleish didn’t endear the administration to the public either.

It’s nowhere near time for, “Come in Alex, you’re time’s up,” – folk are not yet fed up with the SNP – but it will come.

Atheneum, 1990, 144 p.

By means of a neural net Roy Colton’s senses have been sent back to 18,862 BC, a time when the last Ice Age is in the process of retreating. He inhabits the mind of Ramifon, the Crown Prince of Athilan (Atlantis,) in a glittering city lying beneath Mount Balamoris. The letters of the title are sent by Colton to his girlfriend Lora who has also been sent back and is similarly ensconced in an Athilantan official in Naz Glesim, somewhere in the wilds of Poland at the edge of the ice sheets. The pair never actually get together in the book, however, and are restricted to slow long range communication only.

To Colton’s surprise the Athilantans, as they are called, are technologically advanced, with steam engines and electricity, in marked contrast to the Dirt People (their phrase) who inhabit the rest of Earth. Yet through Colton’s filter, Silverberg endows his Athilantans with nobility and forbearance as his – and the King’s, shared with the Prince in the course of the book – knowledge of the impending tragedy still many years hence when Balamoris will explode and destroy Athilantan civilisation colours his perceptions.

The novel is clearly intended for a young adult readership. The absence of any sexual content – something of a staple of Silverberg’s work for adults – would have been enough to signal this even without the lucid explanatory nature of the prose. This and the book’s epistolary form mean we have only one point of view and one narrator. Sometimes that can be refreshing.

Silverberg is a master with this sort of material. He could probably knock it off in his sleep. The setting offers him the chance to describe Athilantan life and rituals in all its (to Colton) glory and magnificence, which he does with economy and ease. The most important ritual involves Romany Star, a sun of great significance to Athilan culture. Silverberg does, though, have Colton use the phrase “lay low” no less than three times. Oh dear.

Colton is, of course, supposed to keep his presence in the Prince’s mind from revealing itself but as the story goes on he finds this increasingly difficult. As this is the only source of conflict in the scenario this is perhaps just as well. Also, we never get to see the gritty side of Athilantan life as this is not really the purpose of Colton’s mental expedition. That might have been more interesting, but from what we do see the Athilantans seem rather a placid lot.

The importance of Romany Star (which is also prominent in Silverberg’s novel Star Of Gypsies) is the point at which credulity begins to be stretched. The suggestion of what will happen to the remnants of the Athilantans after they will flee their exploding island, though – whom they will become – is agreeably subtle as it is never made explicit but rather left to the reader to infer.

The book also contains some excellent illustrations by Robert Gould and the cover admirably conveys the impressions of Athilan and its serenity, as given in the book.

Not a major SF work by Silverberg, then, (there hasn’t really been one of those since his heyday in the late 60s and the 70s) but readable as ever, even though not primarily aimed at adults.