A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

Headline, 2022, 287 p. First published 1987.

When originally published the trilogy of which this is the first instalment was titled Xenogenesis. It now seems to be called Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith Iyapo wakes up in what appears to be a prison cell, provided with bland food. She has memories of this happening previously and also of her life on Earth when her husband and child had died in a traffic accident. This was shortly before a nuclear war left the planet uninhabitable (to humans at least.) She soon learns that a few humans were rescued from the apocalypse by an alien race, the Oankali; a species for which genetic engineering is essential.

The first appearance to her of an Oankali shocks her: they are covered in small tentacles acting as sensory organs, and which are attracted by movement. The Oankali have three sexes; male, female and ooloi. All have the ability to sense the biochemistry of genetics but the ooloi can manipulate it and build offspring from their mates’ genes.

Lilith is told a cancer has been removed from inside her and that the spaceship she is being held on is alive. The Oankali find cancer to be an attractive trait for their genetic manipulation purposes. They want to blend their own and human genetics, in part as their biological imperative but also to eradicate hierarchical tendencies from humans. They envisage Lilith’s part in this as to Awaken other humans and prepare them for this gene trade and a return to Earth. Lilith and the subsequent Awakened find the prospect repugnant.

When a sufficient number of people have been Awakened there are problems within the group. Specifically, some are wary of Lilith not only as a black woman but of her closeness to the Oankali and of the capabilities to manipulate the structure of the ship with which the they have endowed her, abilities naturally seen as suspicious by those not so treated.

In Dawn there are early similarities to other works of SF where people have been kept in captivity. The whole, though, depends on the credibility of the aliens and their motivations. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Pedant’s corner:- “Where had all this been, Lilith wondered” (needs a question mark,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of direct speech, “gasses” (gases,) “had come on to the bed with her and lay down” (and lain down,) “clean shaved” (clean shaven,) “Paul Titus’ wall” (Titus’s. Titus’ appeared again later,) “their own betrayal: No trip to Earth” (colons are not usually followed by a capital letter; ‘betrayal: no trip…’) A paragraph beginning with a piece of direct speech without having an opening quotation mark (I know this is a publishing convention but to me it feels wrong,) repellant (repellent.) “She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away” (is expressed awkwardly.) “It said nothing more, made no sound of its own pain” (ditto,) “she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate as the owner” (she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate, as the owner.) “She waited almost eager for the darkness” (needs a comma after waited,) Ahajas’ (Ahajas’s.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1891, 218 p plus iii p Contents.

Again, as in Auld Licht Idylls, our narrator is the local dominie in Thrums, who has a lodging at the home of the McQumpha family; father Hendry, mother Jess, daughter Leeby and son Jamie, who now lives in London. Jess, who is an invalid, has never got over the loss of her other son, Joey, is a fine embroiderer and sits at the window of their house at the top of the brae leading out of Thrums, looking out at the world and hoping to see Jamie coming up the road. Leeby, when younger, was excessively devoted to Jamie and that devotion has spilled over into her caring for Jess which leaves her little time for her own life. Hendry, thoug hard working and honest is more of a background figure.

Along the way Barrie gives us, through the minister, snippets of life in Thrums and of the various characters who lived there. The man who tried to get out of his engagement to one woman because he had taken fancy to another, the older man who came back to the village with a much younger wife and was shunned by his hitherto prospective heirs, the exploits of the town comic.

On Jamie’s last visit Jess is much disturbed by the fact that he has a handkerchief secreted in his clothing. This she takes as a sign that he has a woman friend in London and like many a mother of sons is displeased that another woman could replace her in his affections.

Incidents in the book have parallels with Barrie’s upbringing in Kirriemuir and are reflective of the small town Scots life of his youth which at time of writing would have all but disappeared.

Most of the dialogue is in very broad Scots. Occasionally a Scots word was followed in brackets by its (nearest) equivalent in English. This has the effect of breaking up the narrative. I agree that to readers in England – or elsewhere – these might be required but a glossary would surely suffice for any who are troubled by it. However, the practice did not occur with every Scots word, some of which I therefore had to look up for myself, my Scots vocabulary not being extensive.

Pedant’s corner:- mantlepiece (mantelpiece,) largess (largesse,) youre (you’re,) “therenever was in Thrums” (there never was.)

Unwin, 1989, 188 p.

This is apparently the third in Greenland’s Daybreak series but I wasn’t really aware of this when I bought it recently. I read The Hour of the Thin Ox many years ago and reviewed Daybreak on a Different Mountain on the blog in 2009.

Other Voices is a slightly unfocused tale set in the standardised pre- (or never-) industrial fantasy milieu. Greenland doesn’t fall into the clichés of the genre though, he’s too good a writer for that.

At the novel’s start Luscany is on the verge of being conquered by the Eschalan, a people to all intents human, but orange. The book promises to be the story of Serin, daughter of Tarven Guille, a medical experimenter.  It soon spreads out, though, to encompass the life of Luscany’s Princess Nette kept unwillingly in her palace by the victorious Eschalan as a figurehead.

Tarven and his wife Amber’s first two children either didn’t survive birth, or only barely did. Nevertheless, their bodies are kept in the house in a drawer in which Serin is forbidden to look. For Tarven is on the point of discovering how to bring the recently dead back to life.

The fantasy elements don’t overwhelm the story which is mainly one of accommodating to the occupying power and of resisting it.

Not one of Greenland’s major works but eminently readable.

Pedant’s corner:- “seemed to sooth her rage” (to soothe her rage.)

Penguin, 2019, 126 p. Translated from the Japanese 光の領分 (Hikari no ryōbun,) by Geraldine Harcourt. First published in 1978-1979 as a series in the literary monthly Gunzō.

The book outlines in first person narration the life of an unnamed woman recently separated from her husband, Fujino, in the year following his leaving. They have a two-year-old daughter, also unnamed, who begins to react badly to her new life after mother and daughter move into an apartment on the fourth floor of a building which has mostly offices below. Its large windows flood the interior with light, hence the book’s title.

Over the course of the year we see the daughter’s behaviour deteriorate; she throws objects out of the window onto a roof below and gets into trouble at her daycare centre.

This is paralleled by her mother’s increasingly difficulty to cope with her life, turning up late for her job in a library, having a one-night stand with the father of another child at daycare.

There are parallels here with the other of Tsushima’s novels I have read, Child of Fortune.  whose protagonist is also separated from her husband (but in her case divorced.) The absence of Fujino, like that of Hatanaka in Child of Fortune, is core to the narrator’s sense of drift. This is an indictment of the men involved, though, not of the women they have left.

The book’s origins as a series of twelve monthly instalments in the magazine Gunzō (群像) lead to some repetitions in later chapters of information the reader already knows and which would have been unnecessary to include in a novel per se.

I note as an aside that the living space in Japanese dwellings is described in terms of how many tatami mats the rooms can accommodate.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) a similar missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence.

American University of Cairo Press, 1987, 256 p, including vii p Introduction by Trevor le Gassick. Translated from the Arabic Zuqāq al-Midaq by Trevor le Gassick. First published in 1947.

The back cover blurb describes this as probably Mahfouz’s most popular work. Set during the Second World War – there are mentions of air-raids and the British Army – it depicts life in the titular alley, in a poor area of Cairo, and features a variety of colourful characters each with a distinctive trait and several of whom have chapters devoted to them, some several chapters. It occurred to me while reading it that this may have had an influence on Mahfouz’s fellow Egyptian Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.

Perhaps the main character is Hamida, an orphan who was adopted by Umm Hamida but suckled by the wife of café owner Kirsha, whose son Hussain she was nursing at the time. Kirsha himself has a taste for teenage boys. Umm Hamida arranges marriages and her landlady Saniya Afify makes use of her service in this regard. Dr Booshy isn’t (a doctor that is) but has parlayed his reputation into providing dentistry, sourcing the gold teeth he offers his clients (but unbeknownst to them) from the mouths of the recently buried dead. The unkempt and filthy Zaita makes his supplicants into cripples so that they can make a living through begging and thereafter exacts a toll from them. Retired teacher Sheikh Darwish is fond of quoting English words and spelling them out. Abbas, the young barber, wants to marry Hamida but doesn’t have the money so takes himself off to work for the British Army. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman getting on a bit who imbibes a special concoction to stimulate his sexual appetite. Tiring of his wife, he proposes marriage to Hamida but has a heart attack before any arrangement can be made

Then Hamida comes to the attention of one Ibrahim Faraj, who habitually gazes on her from a seat in the café. At once attracted and repelled, Hamida eventually falls under his spell but his intentions for her are far from honourable.

Midaq Alley is one of those books which represents the world in microcosm. If not all human life is depicted in its pages then certainly a good deal of it is.

Sensitivity note. A character uses the phrase “nigger-black face.”

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Mahfouz’ (x 5, Mahfouz’s.) Elsewhere; translated into USian, “piaster” (several times, piastre,) “reflexion” (reflection, used later,) “Tell-el-Kebir” (several times, usually spelled Tel-el-Kebir,) “struck a responsive cord in the boy” (responsive chord,) “Abbas’ face” (Abbas’s,) a missing comma after a piece of dialogue embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) such a comma placed after the end quotation mark not immediately before, similar placing of a question mark – and of a full stop, “abcess” (abscess,) both “jewelry” and “jewellery” appear in the text, “and bid them welcome” (bade them welcome,) a missing opening quotation mark on a piece of dialogue, “by her sexuals instincts” (sexual,) “Hedjaz” (usually spelled ‘Hijaz’.)

Marion Boyars, 1983, 163 p.

A company called PAX has been developing various projects to improve crop types and yields over the world. This culminates in a product known as freefood, which promises to make human existence easier. It is widely welcomed nearly everywhere – a notable holdout is the indigenous Australian community of Murngin in Arnhem Land, North Australia, which has achieved a kind of independence.

Like in Mitchison’s other Science Fiction forays there is in the narration a high degree of telling not showing. Most of the story concerns itself with the scientists involved and interactions among the people running PAX and the reading experience is somewhat dry. Very little of what would be the social ramifications of such an innovation as freefood is explored. War has apparently ended because, as one character says, it was fought for food.

(Well, to a point: water too, and resources, but let’s not forget in these troubled times personal aggrandisement.)

The ‘future that never was’ that bedevils older Science Fiction stories is illustrated by Mitchison’s characters’ long distance communication methods (video calls) anticipating Skype or Zoom but not, of course, the internet or email.

There is an implicit racism – reflecting the times of 1983 but perhaps not Mitchison herself? – in one character referring to ‘Abos’ saying, “‘They could be a no-good mob,’” but admitting, “they got treated in a no-good way in Queensland,’” plus another use of ‘Abos’ in an unflattering context.

The promised paradise of hunger being banished from the world is disturbed when deaths start to occur among some of those using freefood. This is due to a compound called dioscorin which is found in yams and usually removed by the processes of preparing and cooking. Freefood production has omitted these steps.

Mitchison’s writing is usually perfectly agreeable. Her other (ie non-SF) fiction does not suffer from the flaws I have noted above and before here and here – even though some of it is set in such alien (to us) societies as Ancient Greece or Rome. That tendency to didacticism apparent here is missing from those.

Pedant’s corner:- In the inside cover blurb “polictical” (political,) skillfully (skilfully.) Elsewhere; a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded within a sentence (x 3, one without a capital letter at the beginning of the dialogue,) “fresh lime, nimbupani” (fresh lime nimbupani,) a switch into a different font size and back again (x 2,) an end quotation mark in the middle of a piece of dialogue, Bangla Desh (nowadays spelled Bangladesh,) Campuchea (nowadays spelled Kampuchea,) Quazulu (nowadays spelled Kwazulu,) grand-parents (nowadays spelled grandparents,) “none of them were any longer newsworthy” (none of them was …,) “nobody would be allowed to turn in into money” (to turn it into money,) Djuvalji (elsewhere always Djiuvalji,) “a dangerous precendent” (precedent,) peole (people.) “‘Still and on’” (isn’t the phrase ‘Still and all’?)

Little Brown, 2018, 428 p.

This is the fifth outing for Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, at the start here still trying to come to terms with the death of her romantic partner, Phil Parhatka, unable to sleep until she has walked herself to exhaustion in the streets of Edinburgh late at night.

She is juggling three cases, two hers, one not. The HCU is working on a series of brutal rapes from the 1980s whose perpetrator’s make of car they have a new lead on when a murder in Wester Ross, linked to the burial there of two Indian motorcycles left behind by the US Army after World War 2, turns up. Karen also has a peripheral involvement in a murder case she takes an interest in after a conversation between two women she overheard in a café twitched her police instincts.

Her hopes at the replacement of her old boss by the new one being a woman – female solidarity and all that – are swiftly extinguished. Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markie has saddled Karen with a new DS, Gerald McCartney, mostly in order to spy on her. My suspension of disbelief at this second boss in a row wanting rid of Karen was not quite assuaged by the reasons given for it, which seemed altogether too programmatic. But fiction is all about conflict. And Karen’s approach to her work is unconventional and occasionally confrontational, if not downright bolshie. Not qualities likely to endear you to a boss sensitive to public and political scrutiny.

There are ongoing updates on Karen’s background, the café Aleppo she helped Syrian refugees to establish in the previous book has been a success and her assistant DC Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray is growing into the job while the tedium of some police work is not ignored.

But the duty of the detectives in a novel is to set the world to rights by finding the perpetrators and calling them to account. So job done. Inasmuch as a murder can be set to rights.

Pedant’s corner:- “River’s voice was a clear as” (was as clear as.) “There were a handful of Lanarkshire towns” (There was a handful,) scoffed (various characters do this at various times; e g ‘Jason scoffed.’ Scoffing usually requires further elaboration,) “a pair of gin and tonics” (the main noun here is gin; it is that which should be plural: ‘a pair of gins and tonic’.)

A Journey to the Heart of Scottish Golf. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, 289 p, including i p Acknowledgements and Thanks and ii p Contents.

This project was undertaken after Greig’s surgery for a serious condition involving pressure on his brain, surgery from which recovery was by no means guaranteed. Thankfully his brain and other functions remained unscathed but it prompted a look back on his life and the golfing experiences of his youth. His father had introduced him and his two brothers to the game when they lived in Anstruther and he had become proficient enough to be asked to represent his county in youth tournaments but he drifted away from the game quite early.

The book is divided into eighteen sections (naturally) each reflecting an outing to a particular course or courses and each with its own addendum musing on the nature of life and golf, especially as related to Scotland and the Scots. All are tinged with Greig’s customary humaneness.

The courses range from South Ronaldsay, whose greenkeeping is entrusted to the local sheep – a feature which leads to its own all but unique hazards which the sheep leave behind them – to Anstruther, St Andrews, Bathgate, North Berwick, Gigha and even Iona, among others.

Greig says about his Dad and his golfing cronies, “They share a very Scottish sense that good fortune must come with a penalty.”

An attitude which has rubbed off. After being congratulated on a good shot by a woman called Joan (who came from the US) Greig replied, “‘It doesn’t happen often,’” only to be asked ‘Have you never heard of positive thinking?’

“‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘In Scotland we call it kidding yourself!’

‘I call it unhelpful pessimism.’

‘We call it realism.’”

Of that quintessentially Scottish weather phenomenon he elaborates, “Dreich is our word for it. Our climate has made the word necessary, and its persistent, clinging gloom accounts for a lot of the Scottish mindset.”

Apropos his round at Bathgate – a much spruced up course from the one Greig remembered and a development he does not quite approve – he quotes playing partner Alastair McLeish, “‘Aye, Scottish Protestants,’ Al remarked after struggling himself in the opening holes. ‘We’re perfectly able to torture ourselves without any assistance.’”

The course on Gigha invoked in Greig thoughts which are an enduring theme of Scottish literature, a sense of important things lost. “The sorrow and loss are part of the beauty, but that doesn’t make them good. One of the reasons I’ve never lived in the West, despite it being part of what I must call my soul, is it’s too damn sad.”

In the end golf can be seen – like most sports – as some sort of metaphor for life. “Mostly golf is about self-inflicted suffering, self-knowledge and hard-won (precious because hard-won) joy. Who but the Scots could evolve a game that offers such opportunities for humiliation and failure, and no-one but oneself to blame for it? And such transcendent moments?”

Pedant’s corner:- “but there no witnesses” (but there were no witnesses,) “the unspoken immanence of death wasn’t terrifying” (immanence does make a kind of sense; but imminence seems more to the point,) “boys and girls getting up to good in the open privacy of the this coastal strip” (of this coastal strip.) “Princes Sreet Gardens” (Princes |Street Gardens,) “before dying in Iona” (on Iona,) “Forres’ first tee” (Forres’s.) “”I wiled away my last Dollar hours” (whiled away,) “more like one those summer evenings” (one of those summer evenings.)

Penguin, 2013, 349 p.

When you start to read a book written by someone raised in a Muslim country and its title is Honour, you will most likely have a certain expectation of what will be in store. That expectation isn’t disappointed here. But this novel is written by Elif Shafak. Things are a bit more nuanced.

The novel does not have a linear structure. It starts in 1992, well after the main event it is concerned with exploring, before flipping back to a village near the River Euphrates in 1945, where the twin Kurdish girls Pink Destiny (Pembe) and Enough Beauty (Jamila) are born to a family already overburdened with daughters but still striving for a son. Its succeeding chapters stray unchronologically over the times in between those dates. Most of the scenes are rendered in third person past tense but there is a first-person account by Esma, Pembe’s daughter, and a journal written by her brother – “He a murderer” as Esma tells us in Chapter One, so not a spoiler – Iskender/Askander (the Kurdish and Turkish renderings of the name equivalent to Alexander) as he serves time in Shrewsbury Prison for that murder.

The plot gets in train when a man called Adem visits relatives in the Euphrates village and falls for Jamila. Unfortunately, she had been kidnapped in a dispute some while before and held hostage so her purity is in doubt. In such a place, “Men – even schoolboys – had honour. Women did not have honour. Instead they had shame.” Whether that is warranted or not.

Knowing his family would therefore not agree to a union with Jamila, Adem agrees to marry Pembe instead, eventually taking her to London while Jamila stays and becomes a sought-after midwife. Unsurprisingly Adem’s and Pembe’s marriage is not overly happy. When he leaves home to take up with an exotic dancer their eldest son Iskender takes on himself the mantle of protector of the family’s honour. However, Esma and younger brother Yunus are more liberal in their outlook. Pembe meanwhile muses on the way in which British people say of something minor, “It’s a shame.” To her, shame is a burning thing; not to be thought of as anything trivial.

Like Adem’s brother, Tafiq, Iskender is heavily under the influence of his traditional past. A Muslim known as the Orator tells a gathering Iskender has arranged that, “The two major industries in the West are the machine of war and the machine of beauty. With the machine of war they attack, imprison, torture and kill. But the machine of beauty is no less evil. All those glittery dresses, fashion magazines, androgynous men and butch women. Everything is blurred. The machine of beauty is controlling your minds.” Maybe so, but it illustrates the Orator’s blind spot. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the machine of religion also does that – usually far more effectively.

Tafiq reflects that, “Their honour was all some men had in this world.” For the rich it didn’t matter as they could buy influence. But; “the less means a man had, the higher was the worth of his honour.” His hint to Iskender that Pembe might be seeing another man (innocently enough, but Tafiq and Iskender don’t know that) sets the central tragedy in motion.

Honour is inflected with magic realism, but with a light touch. The twist towards the end which alters the perspective is signalled in the book’s first sentence and inherent in the plot, which is elegantly constructed with incidents and relationships which are seemingly peripheral turning out to be carefully inserted.

Shafak displays empathy with her characters, not condemnation. Despite the act of violence around which it revolves Honour is an intricate and ultimately humane read.

Pedant’s corner:- “The undeveloped baby had remained joined to her twin” (the undeveloped baby was previously described as a boy; so ‘had remained joined to his twin’.)