The JunkMonkey Reading Diary for 2026

[JunkMonkey]

Every year I say I will start a diary keeping track of all the books I read. Like I do with every film I have watched. This year I will actually do it:

January:

1. La Loi de Mandralor by Peter Randa Fleuve Noir n° 249 (1964)
   
   
   
   
   
   One of the drawbacks of plucking an old Fleuve Noir paperback from the shelves, and then just diving in, is that sometimes you find yourself two chapters into a sequel before you realise it IS a sequel. Earlier books in this imprint don't have blurbs either on the back or in the front matter. The back cover will more often than not just be an advert for a different book or series, and that's it. The only clue you have as to what to expect inside the pages comes from the front cover art which, as anyone who knows even the slightest thing about pulp cover art's relationship with the book's contents knows is a pretty pointless way of trying to judge anything. La Loi de Mandralor it very quickly became clear is a sequel - not that I have the first book on my shelves.
   
   In the first book, from what I could gather from some helpful flashbacks and characters needlessly telling each other stuff that they already knew about, our narrator is from the planet Mandralor whose society was prone to sending out explorers in suspended animation in extremely well equipped interstellar craft. When the ship found an inhabited planet the explorer was woken up and explored, while the ship auto-destructed and left the explorer alone to follow 'The Law of Mandralor' of the title, which forbade interference with the planet's development. Quite what the 'Elders of Mandralor' (or indeed anyone!) got out of this one way Prime Directive type setup escaped me. Maybe it was better explained in the first book... or maybe I just missed something.
   
   Interestingly this Prime Directive type idea comes in a book from 1962 , five or so years before it was first mentioned in a season one episode of Star Trek. Not that I am in any way saying Roddenberry lifted the idea from what would have been, to him, a (very) obscure foreign language SF book but it is heartening to see that French pulp SF authors weren't just churning out rehashed 'cowboys in space' plots but were (maybe) coming up with some ideas of their own.
   
   For whatever reasons (but mostly because he's the hero of an SF book and that's what heroes of SF books do) in the previous book our narrator hero questioned this weird rule and had set out alone pursued by another couple of less questioning of the status quo classmates. Together they encountered a gelatinous THING (it's called that in the original " La CHOSE qui se trouvait dans les sautes...") which at some point absorbs one of the less questioning classmates (the one our hero isn't in love with), steals their ship and sets off to threaten humanity with our hero (and the girl) in hot pursuit - well - in cold pursuit because everyone is in suspended animation.
   
   At the start of this book proper our hero (and the girl) wake up in orbit around a very Mandralor like planet which may very well be Mandralor! They have no idea how long they have been in suspended animation while their ship chased the THING around the cosmos it could be millennia later as far as they knew. The ship the THING was in is empty and it has made it down to the surface. Hero and girl go down to find they are on Earth in the middle of the 20th century. They meet cute with a girl reporter who may or may not be described as whatever the French for 'feisty' is, but is certainly up for some jolly adventures with beings from another planet. (Especially hot hunky ones like our hero.) They learn French from her via telepathy; she learns how to shoot a disintegrator pistol and off they go. But how to find the THING that has absorbed their friend and is out to gobble up the whole human race? A newspaper report about a small village in Switzerland doing a Midwich piques their interest. Of they go, find the THING which is rapidly absorbing units of the Swiss army and end up destroying the village and killing a lot of mindcontrolled people. The good guys are now International Enemy Number One and whatever is eating the Toblerone munchers is their fault. Lots of running around and gunplay later their old friend forces his way to the surface of the THING and gets in touch. He wants to become human again. He can control the THING to an extent. If they turn him human again (by launching him back into space and doing Fantastic Four Cosmic Ray science on him) he will help them destroy the THING once and for all. They launch him off. The THING isn't as dormant as everyone thought, takes over our heroes and is about to gobble up the girls when they are all saved by their friend returning from space like a carefully set up Deux Ex Machina, completely human again but with superior THING controlling mindal powers. Zap! Zap! Zap! They destroy the THING. They destroy their ship, and all get married then, in accordance with the Primo Directive try not to mess with human development too much - though they do give the occasional nudge to some interesting lines of research when they see them.
   
   Fin
   
   Workmanlike.
   
   There were some obvious markers put down to set up an 'Ancient Astronauts' type sequel which never happened.
2. Rayons Pour Sidar by Stefan Wul GALLIMARD Folio SF n° 289 - originally FN Anticipation, n° 90 (1957)
   
   
   
   
   
   The second of Wul's eleven novels written for Fleuve Noir and the last of the eleven which I read. And what a fun little novel it is too. Utter bonkersness from start to finish.
   
   The book takes place on a planet orbiting Proxima Centuri, the 'Sidar' of the title. The planet has been colonised by humans and the indigenous population are portrayed as the kind of happy, innocent childlike 'Natives' of early Tarzan movies. For one thing none of them seem to grasp the concept of the personal pronoun and always refer to themselves using their own name. We open with a human making his way through the dangerous jungle with a native guide. He is on his way to his isolated factory which is being run by his robot duplicate. In this society all humans get a robot companion for life made in appearance as a duplicate of themselves. He stops off at the local Colonial Officer's compound (we are really in Sanders of the River territory here - only in space). The human population is supposed to be evacuating Sidar. The planet has been ceded to the rat-like Xressians who we know are nasty because they are rat-like, and have an X in their name. Quite who has decided the Human race has to cede Sidar to the Xressians isn't made clear at all. It just has been decided. The old Colonial Officer has decided he isn't going to leave. This is his home - the happy smiling natives look up to him as a father figure etc. etc. He gives our hero a map of the area with location of the factory on it and a very plot convenient X marking the spot where his own robot companion died many years before crushed by a landslide.
   
   Our hero's native bearers desert him and he gets trapped in a confusing maze of dried gullies when he encounters the body of one of the giant creatures that haunt the region. He is just about to back away when the body convulses and his robot double cuts its way out of the beast's belly. Or at least half of him does; the upper half. The beast had bitten him in two and the legs are nowhere to be found. Our hero drags his robot self to the nearby factory and drops him in a bath to wash out all the beast's digestive juices before they do irreparable damage. Our hero goes back outside to pick up his gear - and gets himself killed by the local natives. Three spears in the chest. Very dead. The robot manages to get out of the bath recovers the body and shoves it in the deep freeze. There is, he knows, the possibility of reviving his master if he can get him to a decent medical facility. He builds himself a wheeled crinoline-type walker and, realising that won't do across any of the terrain they will have to traverse, pulls the body of his master out of the fridge, saws it in half, and wires himself into the hero's legs.
   
   Still not complete he decides to go back to the Colonial capitol via the plot convenient X on the map site and see if he can salvage a pair of lungs/bellows from the old robot's corpse. He wraps the hero's head in a super-efficient, solar powered thermal blanket and sets out. Nearing the X marks the spot, he comes across a native village worshipping an idol - which turns out to be the head of the old robot. The old robot is not as dead as he had been due to the natives sticking a branch in his ear and accidentally pushing two wires together and switching him back on again. Sometimes when the wind blows he dies again, then comes back to life when the wind changes. This is one of his good days.
   
   Now encumbered with two heads to carry (one robotic, the other frozen) but after a bit of robocannibalism a working voice-box he arrives at the Colonial Officer's compound just as the Xressians arrive. They sneak into the village and because the Colonial Officer happens to have a complete medical facility in his hut our hero isn't dead any more and has his old legs back while the robots get a rebuild.
   
   There was a point to our hero's journey. He is a brilliant physicist and had come up with one fantastically overly complex plan to save the planet. Proxima Centuri's 'E' radiation (I don't know either) reflected off the red moon and then filtered through negatively ionised Martian crystals will penetrate to Sidar's Duterium core converting the Deuterium to hydrogen. This will make the planet lighter and by also liberating a shedload of neutrinos (which will shoot out like a rocket exhaust) they should be able to push the planet out of orbit.... and if he gets the timing right they'll get it shunted right into our own Solar System... (Stop laughing! by the internal logic of this book this is one of the more sensible ideas.) But how would they get enough negatively ionised Martian crystals in one place without raising the Xressians' suspicions? I know.
   
   "This is crazy but it just might work; why don't we pay the local natives in mirrors to harvest wild fruit for us? Mirrors made from.. "
   "Negatively ionised Martian crystals!"
   
   Did I mention earlier in the book our hero held off a tribe of savage spear-waving bloodthirsty natives by playing a Bach toccata at them on a mouth organ and scaring them off?
   
   
   It's one of those kind of books. I really think Wul had a lot of fun writing this one. I loved it!
3. Emperor Fu Manchu by Sax Rhomer - the second Fu Manchu I have read and I am really starting to wonder why I bothered. They really are dreadful books but worse than that, they're boring. Most of this book seemed consist of people waiting for other people to come back from wherever they had gone, anxiously wondering where they were, and then not being told when whoever it was went returned from wherever it was they had been. Two western characters who could 'pass for Chinese' spent an interminable amount of time in each other's company not suspecting the other wasn't who they said they were but managed to fall in love anyway - one of them ending up with a Chinese name, the English translation of that Chinese name, and her English birth name - all of which were used interchangeably (sometimes, I think, all three on the same page).
   And I have still to work out what the hell it is makes Fu Manchu the villain. In the first book I read, Drums of Fu Manchu - written in 1939, the scheme our heroes foiled was his plot to assassinate thinly disguised portraits of Hitler and Mussolini who, Fu Manchu was convinced, were going to lead the world to war. In this one (1959) his scheme was to bring down the 'evils' of International Communism; a sentiment our British Secret Service hero heartily endorsed but did his utmost to oppose anyway because... because... why?
4. Bureau de l'invisible by Jean-Gaston Vandel FN n° 61 (1955)
   
   "Grand prix du Roman Science-Fiction 1955"
   
   
   

   
   Behind this awful non-event of a cover (which has nothing to do with anything in the book - though it is considerably less misleading than the cover of the 1976 reissue):
   
   
   
   

   
   « Merde ! J'ai oublié mes gants ! »​
   
   
   ...is the title page, which announces:
   
   
   Jean-Gaston Vandel
   
   Bureau de l'invisible
   
   Grand prix du Roman Science-Fiction 1955​
   Cool! I thought, a prize-winning novel! This should be good....
   
   Halfway through reading the book I went and checked that title page again. No, I hadn't misread: 'Grand prix du Roman Science-Fiction 1955'. I concluded that the other books in competition that year must have been pretty rubbish. When I'd finished I went aGoogle-hunting to find out who, and what else, had won this prestigious accolade. I could find very little anywhere other than it had been awarded to two other books: in 1954 to Jimmy Guieu's L'Homme de l'espace and in 1956 to Stefan Wul's Retour à "O"*. All three books were published, by some amazing coincidence, by... Fleuve Noir. (I'm sure there was much Gallic giggling in their marketing department when they came up with that little idea.)
   
   The book opens in the London of the not too distant future with a young woman visiting an address in Baker Street: the offices of the newly-opened Invisible Agency. She'd read their small ad in the newspaper and they may be her only hope.... her daughter is dying and she needs her husband to return before she does - but her husband is a spy working for the Secret Service and she doesn't know how to contact him... "Ah! but he's not a spy is he?" says the mysterious man who interviews her at the Invisible Agency. "He's a thief who has absconded with oodles of cash - but have no fear, you are innocent of any involvement with his crimes so we will take your case." (I paraphrase - but not much.) In Monte Carlo the husband gets a sudden compulsion to return home. So he does; and, after 28 pages, he, his wife, and the dying daughter just totally vanish from the rest of the narrative as if they had never been.
   Then a rich industrialist requires their help. "I'm afraid I'm trying to kill myself by accident. I keep waking up in the middle of the night on the third floor balcony of my house... about to throw myself off!" The Invisible Agency take the case and, by group remote-viewing mystical psycho-woo magic, determine that the rich industrialist's wife's lover (the rich industrialist's doctor) is also using remote viewing mystical psycho-woo magic to try to compel him to commit suicide. Luckily our heroes' woo-fu is stronger than the off page villain's woo-fu and there is a battle of what I pictured to be turbaned mystics doing hand wavy finger wiggly impressions of Bela Lugosi playing Chandu the Magician for the long distance control of the industrialist's somnambulist body . (An image helped along by one of the Invisible Agency's team being called 'Hamid' and being constantly referred to as 'The Hindoo'.) The team working together remotely hypnotise the doctor into not loving the wife any more and at page 61 they disappear from the book never to return.
   When they are not working for clients a couple of the team are translating mysterious writing on a mysterious alien?/trans-dimensional? object one of them found on some hitherto unexplored desert plateau. Translating consists of one of the team peering at the miniscule writing through a microscope and copying it out bigger then giving it to Hamid who goes into a trance and plays with a Ouija board while what he spells out in English is transcribed. They've just got to a terribly important and exciting bit about being able to hypnotise whole planets by projecting woo at the sun and altering its wavelengths when they get another client.
   The new client tells them he believes his sister was murdered by her now dead husband - could they help? No problem say our heroes and set off in their Scooby-mobile to the place where the woman was drowned in the lake of her now abandoned country home. They materialise her from beyond the grave, and her husband too who admits he killed her but regretted it - so he writes out and signs a confession using Hamid's automatic writing skills to make it in his own handwriting. The one snag in the ointment is that the woman didn't have a brother and the confession is going to be used by the racketeer who pretended he is, to blackmail the dead husband's second wife - with me?
   Once they have the confession the racketeer and his associates decide they want their money back from the agency. They set up a complex alibi which involves flying to Bristol and swapping places with some identically dressed confederates who will be noisy around the night clubs. The bad guys fly back to London and burgle the agency but are foiled when the Scooby gang (who all live in the Baker Street clubhouse) project images into the bad guys' minds and make them fall down the stairs when they make them not see the top step etc. The baddies flee, taking with them the alien artifact and the suitcase full of transcribed notes which, for some reason, they have decided are valuable. They fly back to Bristol as per the original plan, to pick up their van and find out what they were supposed to have been doing in public while they were robbing the good guys. They then fly back to London. Which seems like a hell of a lot of work for a thousand quid to be shared between six people but that's inflation for you.
   While they are flying to Bristol Hamid has an attack of the vapours. Some overwhelming sense of SOMETHING threatens to turn his brain to psychic mush something is coming. Something from outside of the Solar System- this is not the first time this feeling has has happened to him but by the gods it's really bad now! The gang decide the best way to save him from brainmushing is to put him in a state of swami-like near suspended animation - so they strip him naked throw him in a bath of ice-water... and when the ice runs out they fold him up and shove him in the fridge.
   Then! Sirens go off. Everyone rushes out into the street and the BBC early warning system announces that the Soviet Union has fallen asleep and a wave of unconsciousness is sweeping westward with the rising sun! Everyone is to go inside, not commit suicide, and turn off the gas. Our heroes rush inside and concoct a hyper-anti-soporific and, coked to the eyeballs, watch as a vast featureless rectangularish cuboidaly THING! floats into view over London. There's a sudden minor earthquake and it vanishes. People stop falling asleep and everyone wakes up and wonders why a house in London has suddenly disappeared. Only we know it was the bad guys' hide-out that had vanished and the THING had come to pick up the lost alien object. Luckily for the Scooby Gang, Hamid survived his sojourn in the fridge (and they had memorised all their notes).
   
   End
   
   The final bit wasn't badly done. The inevitable inexorable creeping death bit. Reminded me of The Purple Cloud and the Niven story Inconstant Moon but the rest of it was pretty rubbish.
   
   *Not that my 1956 copy of it mentions this fact anywhere.
5. Gilded by Vicious - a not very good self published book I got given in return for a review: https://www.librarything.com/work/35206598/book/304547676
6. A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges - because it’s the thinnest Penguin Classic within reach on my bedside TBR pile and because he has the cunning decency to flatter his audience by writing in the introduction:
   
   

   Sometimes I suspect good readers are blacker and rarer swans than good writers.

   I mean, who wouldn't be seduced by such flattery?
7. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours by Jules Verne in the free to air, Librevox audiobook which was, for the most part, pretty well read. I have never actually read (or listened to) the original before; knowing it only from film versions and by that general cultural osmosis that makes you think you've read something without ever having picked up a copy. I really enjoyed it. The story clips along, the characters are actually interesting, the final twist that resolves everything is beautifully set up in plain sight at the start of the book, and Verne's habit of getting sidetracked by meticulously listing things actually plays an integral part of the narrative and doesn't look like page filling which is sometimes does. And parts of it are actually (intentionally) funny. For one thing I was surprised to realise the Indian princess character (Mrs Aouda) wasn't made up for the 1956 film version (as played by Shirley McClaine) but was there in the book.
   
   My enjoyment did however come to a grinding halt when I fell down what I suspected was a gaping plot hole. The book is set in 1872. It says so in the opening sentence. During the course of the novel the hero, Phileas Fogg, is pursued (then accompanied) by a British policeman convinced Fogg is a thief. Fix has an arrest warrant in his pocket which is useless unless used on British controlled soil. His attempts to use it in Hong Kong and Singapore failed, and there was not enough time to get an extradition order when they crossed America. The ship they are all on taking them to Liverpool runs out of fuel so instead of making directly for Liverpool they disembark at Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland, take the train to Dublin and then a ferry to Liverpool, still in time to reach London before the deadline. Once on English soil, Fix arrests Fogg. Huh? In 1872 all of Ireland was part of the UK and The Republic of Ireland only became independent in 1922. Fix could have used the warrant as soon as Fogg set foot in Queenstown. Later reading through that passage (as opposed to listening) I realise Verne did realise that this was a problem (that Ireland was just the British territory Fix had been waiting for) and fudges the issue with a quick (out of character) hesitation on Fix's part.
8. Tu Mourras moins bête by Marion Montaigne - a chunky non-fiction (sort of) comic book about how people wouldn't survive most of the dumb things characters do in movies - because science. A fun (if sometimes gory) little read which I just learned has spawned a TV series:
   
   
   

   Tu mourras moins bête - ARTE

   Le Professeur Moustache et son assistant Nathanaël expliquent les phénomènes scientifiques du quotidien. De la bande dessinée à la vidéo, c'est le pari tenu de cette série qui répond à des questions scientifiques avec humour grâce à la plume de Marion Montaigne et la voix truculente de...

   www.youtube.com
   
   Any book that has General De Gaulle telling the post-war French populace that, to replace the fallen dead, they need to 'Niquez comme des lapins' has got my vote.
9. Planéte a vendre by F Richard Bessiere FN 232 (1963)
   
   
   
   New York Newspaperman Sydney Gordon (why his name is spelled with a y, 'Sydney', which was, even at the time, usually the girly of spelling it, and not with an i, 'Sidney', I have no idea) gets given a birthday present by his wife. It's an ancient Egyptian statuette of the Pharaoh Sourakhamon which (because it's an ancient Egyptian artifact) comes with a curse and a warning lifted from Stevenson's The Bottle Imp* which says that the owner should sell the statue for exactly half of the price they bought it or the bad luck that comes with the statue will bedevil them all their lives. This presents a bit of a problem to our hero as his wife only paid one cent for it - though come to think of it, why isn't she the one that the curse falls upon? Mind you, French women only got the vote 18 years before this book was published; I guess the argument whether married women could actually own things or whether they were the property of their husband hadn't been settled yet...
   
   Syd's researching into the history of the ownership of the statue does indeed lend credibility to the story as previous owners have been financially ruined, died in mysterious circumstances, or gone mad (or all three - though obviously not in that order). As he does his research a series of mishaps, including his car being stolen, happen to Syd. Then, just as he is really scratching his head about how to sell the thing for less than one cent, the thing gets broken and a terribly mysterious scrap of hieroglyph covered papyrus falls out.
   
   Syd rushes the papyrus round to his brainy friend who, I suspect, is a recurring character; one of those useful savants who are an expert in EVERYTHING. Whatever his speciality the brainy friend soon translates the manuscript and tells Syd it was a message from Pharaoh Sourakhamon to his son. Pharaoh Sourakhamon was the leader of one of those Graham Hancockian, highly advanced civilisation unknown or unrecognized by "mainstream" archaeologists who had, at the time of writing the papyrus, just lost a war with the highly advanced civilisation unknown or unrecognised by "mainstream" archaeologists next door. "My son," the message reads, "I am captured by Memphis-Khan and his Arian minions, but the main part of our mighty space armada has escaped as planned to our secret hideout on the planet Xeres. It's yours now. Go join the fleet, regroup and come back to retake this miserable planet from the miserable Vedic hordes and their superpowerful fundamental universal force manipulation trickery!"
   "Golly gosh!" says Syd.
   "I should say so," says the savant "because this scrap of papyrus means you are the proud inheritor of the planet Xeres."
   Double golly gosh with sprinkles!
   
   While all this has been going on there are news reports of something strange happening in the Pacific Ocean. A new island has appeared from nowhere with no volcanic activity. Syd is summoned to cover the story by another of his friends who just happens to be the lead scientist studying the thing. So off he and his wife go - losing the luggage and other misfortunes along the way.
   
   They, Syd his wife, scientist chum and his wife, are flown to the island on a helicopter. The island on closer examination turns out to be a giant metal thing that has obviously been underwater for a long time. They land and explore. They find an airlock and enter. They step through a glowing door... and wake up somewhere else. Well our heroes wake up, the helicopter pilot who did get a name but no lines just dies because he'd outlived his usefulness to the plot.
   
   Wherever they are it wasn't Kansas; it's a barren sandy desert, after climbing to the top of a dune they are rescued by the crew of a passing flying machine and flown to a futuristic (but very Egyptian looking) city and taken before the supreme leader. Now there's a thing that always confuses me about books like this. Why is it that as soon as our hero steps across the border to a new realm or unknown planet he is immediately whisked away for a one on one interview with the tribal leader/president/king/emperor/holy high poobah or whatever is ultimately in charge? They never spend six months in a dingy border town detention camp or struggling with layers of tedious bureaucracy it always "Look! A stranger Take him to the palace!"
   
   So they get taken before the local Pharaoh, and are kitted out with telepathic translators (why a homogenous society made up entirely of Egyptian refugees would need to develop such a device is never explained). They are informed that yes, they are indeed on the planet Xeres which is 44 light years from Earth and since nothing can travel faster than light it has taken them 44 years to get here as measured from Earth. Syd and his wife are more than a little upset to realise that the four year old son they left behind is now older than they are and may well be dead from old age by the time they get back (even if they set out immediately and arrive home 'tomorrow'). It also transpires that they left Earth just before the Xerian invasion fleet, which had set out 44 years prior, had arrived. Did they succeed in conquering Earth? No one knows and won't know for another 44 years.
   
   Because Syd has the papyrus in his pocket they are not all immediately executed but instead kept in some comfort while they wait for news of the invasion.
   
   Some unspecified time later Barny and Topper, two Earthmen, arrive to join them. The Xerian invasion had been successful and these two were scientists who, under Xerian control, had cut the travelling time between the two planets down to five years with the hope of getting it down to no time at all. Needless to say a couple of chapters later they do better than that and travel backwards in time. After a brief stop over in revolutionary France for repairs they end up arriving in ancient Egypt just in time to witness, then get caught up in, the fall of Pharaoh Sourakhamon's Graham Hancockian super-civilization and then! just to pop a cherry on the cake - Syd ends up in the cell next to Sourakhamon as Sourakhamon seals the cursed papyrus in the statuette. A wee bit of bish bash bosh and the statuette and several superfluous minor characters are disintegrated by small arms fire ray gunning.
   
   Syd meeting up with his comrades finds they have (off the page) destroyed the fleet heading for Xeres and, as far as anyone could work out, history had been put right without the cursed statuette to mess things up. Returning to their own time they slip back into their own lives as if nothing had happened - apart from Barny and Topper who revert to being the children they were when the Xerians invaded.
   
   Fin
   
   Knockabout nonsense with no great message. Some okay jokes but I'm still trying to make the maths of the to and froing from Earth to Xeres work - and keep failing miserably. There is no way it can. Even if our heroes' arrival and the invasion fleet arrived at their destinations simultaneously years would still have to go by before the two scientists who arrive on Xeres only months after our heroes grew up to be the men they are. One of them states he was in the same orphanage as Syd's son. And then add another five years in transit?
   
   *Which, in turn, I now find out was lifted from an earlier play (called 'The Bottle Imp') which in its turn was inspired by a German story (called something in German) collected by the Brother Grimm.

February

1. Tales From a Long Room by Peter Tinniswood - very short collection of absurdist cricketing tales which was mildly amusing. I might have found it funnier if I knew anything at all about cricket.
2. The Persian Boy - Mary Renault's dense but insanely readable 'autobiography' of Alexander the Great's eunuch lover. Read in three sittings. Renault has long been on my 'I must get round to one day' list.
3. The Time Machine by HG Wells as an audiobook (in a French translation) as I worked - which has now made me want to reread it in a real book again. Pages, paper, real words in front of my eyes.... It's okay listening to a book but it's not the same.
4. Le Gardien du cristal by Jean-pierre Garen
   
   
   
   
   
   - which was awful: a real B movie western plot with a villain taking over a frontier town on a barely colonised planet and then kidnapping, and trying to force our hero's GF to sign over the deeds to the diamond mine just outside of town. All very predictable. The way our heroes overpower their opponents and then just casually execute the helpless bad guys because they are inconvenient is alarming - these are our heroes? The fact that nearly every female character was the victim of an on-page rape attempt raised a eyebrow too. One, the villainess lover of the chief bad guy (who she killed by setting off the grenade attached to his chest by our hero's sidekick robot) gets herself gang-raped and then killed after she shoots one of her attackers dead. Thinking about it maybe not a B western; more a spaghetti western. Our author just watched a couple of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies and just swapped out the hardwear: Colts for zap guns and horses for gravsleds... The 'Guardian of the Crystals' of the title is an ancient device left by a long-forgotten race which used the planet as a penal colony aeons before. It only comes shoehorned into the story, seemingly as an afterthought, when our author presumably realised he had to SF-up his plot a bit and as a way to get our heroes out of the dynamited mine they'd got themselves trapped in.
   
   The book is part of a series our heroes are trouble shooters for the Primitive Planets Surveillance Service - Dear gods! There were over 40 books! This was number 21.
   

   SSPP (Service de Surveillance des Planètes Primitives) - Série - nooSFere

   nooSFere

   www.noosfere.org
5. Keep the Giraffe Burning by John Sladek - short story collection of surreal stuff which I'm still not sure I understand even after having read at least three times over the years. Very funny in places though.

March

1. Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark - a collection of short stories by Celia Fremlin from the early 1970s Some nicely done stuff though they were feeling a little samey by the end of the collection.
2. Monsieur Lecoq by Émile Gaboriau - a beautifully read Audiobook from Librivox which has to be the most gloriously enjoyable high Victorian melodramatic nonsense I can remember ever having come across; murders (shootings and poisonings), plots, counter plots, wicked Counts, revenge, peasant revolts, daring escapes from prison (contrived by the jailers for various reasons), executions, besmirched family names, more incriminating letters than the Epstein Files, madness, accusation and counter accusation, mysterious characters running around in disguise, unrequited love, buried treasure, blackmail, deathbed confessions, duels, cross country manhunts, a baby conceived out of wedlock (needless to say the mother - the nearest thing we get to a heroine in the book - dies but not before she has ensured her child is carried far away from all the intrigue but she dies (poisoned) before she can tell the woman (an erstwhile friend) who has poisoned her where the baby is after asking her (her own poisoner) to look after the child (...it's one of those books), attempted suicide, and more mind-boggling coincidences that I can enumerate, and more than one plot convenient and unexplained plummet from a high place - seriously! one loose-end character is written out, off page, with the author just telling us he 'fell of a cliff' with no other explanation than that. (I never did work out who cut the rope during the second prison escape.)
   
   I seriously suspect the author wrote the epilogue because he realised he'd missed 'having a character pull off a false beard and moustache to reveal who they are' off his Melodrama Trope Bingo Card. To add further joy, the book was all told in that, "But wait! let's go back five years and find out what happened to character X! Unbeknownst to anyone else, X just happened to overhear the fatal conversation between Y and Z and then, jumping to his own (wrong) conclusions about what they were talking about, sets in motion a whole new series of events involving minor characters who, in their turn will be returned to at a later date to see what skulduggery they got up to when they had finished the minor part they had to play in X's perfidious scheme. One vital clue the detective was working from at the end of the book was his realisation that one of the character's parrot didn't have a German accent!
   
   Part two of the book takes place before part one and details the events leading up to the violent episode in chapter one which starts the whole ball rolling*. I had real trouble keeping up with the flashbacks within flashbacks at times. But I did notice what I suspect was a stonking great continuity error in the book in that two people burst open the same locked and bolted door within a few moments of each other without anyone having called a carpenter (or even closed the door) in the interim.
   
   I loved it.
   
   
   
   
   *A narrative Structure Conan Doyle used (borrowed?) for the Sign of Four - I don't know how common this story structure was in Victorian literature but it's a good one.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea - pretty good.
4. Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark a collection of short stories by Celia Fremlin. Some nicely done stuff though they were feeling a little samey by the end of the collection.
5. Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (Audiobook from Librevox.) by Jules Verne which is the usual Vernian travelogue disguised as adventure with a scarcely sketched bunch of characters traversing great distances - this time in search of the survivors of a shipwreck - while giving each other long and tedious lectures. Highlights so far include the moment where our heroes, having crossed the whole of South America on foot and horseback, are suddenly caught up in a huge flash flood. To avoid being drowned they all climb the only tree in sight. They have just settled themselves in comfortably and prepared to defend their new home against "Indians and other animals" (sic - just one of many incidents of less than casual racism in the book) when one of them has a massive brainwave and realises they have all misinterpreted the cryptic message that sent them on their adventure. They are on the wrong continent! they should be in Australia! And at that point a huge storm blows up, the tree is struck by lightning and bursts into flames - they are just trying to decide whether it would be better to be burnt alive or drown when they notice the waters around the base of the tree are swarming with rapacious caymans...!
   
   But!
   
   A whirlwind suddenly appears and whisks all the reptiles away - apart from one.
   
   Which they shoot...
   
   ...then the tree falls over.
   
   I think I have finally reached a limit; the whole (very long) book was an endless, tedious cut and paste of travelogues, natural history text books interspersed with a sustained exercise in shark jumping with incredible co-incidence piled on incredible co-incidence, upon incredible co-incidence. The breaking point for me, I think, was when Verne's obsession with volcanoes reached its apotheosis. Towards the end of the book our heroes find themselves in New Zealand, trapped on top of a mountain, surrounded by screaming, gesticulating cannibalistic Māori who want to kill them for having shot dead one of their chiefs for daring to touch a White woman. The Māori will not climb the mountain because it is 'taboo'. Faced with the prospect of starving to death on the mountain top - sneaking out at night was tried and proved impossible - the group's tedious savant Paganel* - notices the mountain is, just a few inches down below the surface level of the soil, unnaturally hot. Steam jets out of a hole made by a disturbed rock. Aha! he cries. and, with a will and no little effort, the trapped adventurers prise loose the biggest boulder they can find and unleash a stream of lava which fries enough of the Māori to let them escape. I'd really got to hate this bunch of shits by the end of the book.
   
   That's me done with Verne for a bit.
   
   * Who when asked will give chapter-long histories of European exploration of anywhere you care to name with names and dates of every White man who ever went south of the equator with the day by day account of the longitude and latitude of their peregrinations, their shoe size, inside leg measurement, and the regularity of their bowel movements.
   
   etc. etc.
6. L'homme de Nulle Part by Fred Noro - a 1964 pulp spy novel which goes through it's pulp spy novel sex, car chase, disguises, and gun-battle routines with a minimum of fuss. I doubt if I will remember a word of it in a week apart from this one sentence; the winner of The prestigious JunkMonkey Bizarre Simile of the Month award for April 2026:
   
   'Une minute passa, lente comme un escargot rhumatisant.'
   
   'A minute passed, slowly like a rheumatic snail.'

April
​

1. Lake of the Wind
   
   
   
   Tidying up the village bookswap place yesterday I picked this up in passing and realised had never read a Harlequin Romance or any others of that ilk. It didn't take me many pages to realise I never will again. But I finished it. If I didn't know this book was published in 1971 I would have assumed it was AI produced. It has that same weird superficial, inconsequential, uncanny valley gloss that colours AI 'writing'. The plot is Nancy Drew simplicity - not that I have ever read any Nancy Drew books*. Two school teachers on holiday find themselves at the edge of a mystery involving the hidden loot from a bank robbery... who is the midnight prowler breaking into the summer homes? Who is the mysterious old man who lives in the ramshackle house? Who is the mysterious stranger looking for work? Why does blond, blue-eyed, handsome hunk Kit think it's acceptable to smoke his pipe at a restaurant table as the two heroines tuck into a lovely meal? ("Reassuringly masculine aroma" my arse.) Why does our heroine 'lovely' Tracy Danford keep polishing her guitar so assiduously? I read it in one sitting. It took me an hour or so - it probably took less than that to write.
   
   There are no horses in the book.
   [*]The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis (1899) by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne Which I came across mentioned online somewhere, thought "that sounds interesting I'll see if I can find a copy" then saw that it was on Gutenberg.org just as I was wrestling with how to download books on to my newly acquired out of date Kindle...
   
   I'm glad I didn't pay money for it.
   
   It is compulsively awful.
   
   The plot: Deucalion a warrior priest (and, as it turns out later in the book, a virgin) is summoned back to Atlantis from spending 20 years being the governor of one of Atlantis’s colonies. The empress - the first woman to have ever ruled - needs a husband and he's it (for reasons that don't really get explained). He's not keen on the idea but he is ordered to marry her by the head of his order. Atlantis is under siege by discontented citizens. Everything is going to pot because the new empress is A: a woman. B: not a man. Deucalion meets a rebel manic pixie dream girl who falls in love with him and who he later buries alive (on the order of the jealous empress) after giving her a suspended animation potion. The Empress finds out that her rival is not as dead as she had supposed and waxes wrathful. Deucalion flees. Deucalion comes back. All has gone to even more pot than before while he was away and the last of the priestly old guard are being besieged in their fortress of solitude. Deucalion agrees to help them but only if they first help him rescue his girlfriend from being under a big rock in the middle of town. They agree and arrange an earthquake. Deucalion rescues his girlfriend, brings her back to life - and loses the war with the empress. As a final act, the priest shove Deucalion and his girlfriend into a big, well stocked barrel and sink Atlantis as the empress's forces batter down their last defences.... the end.
   
   Highlights included our hero burying his beloved alive under a stone throne but slipping her a suspended animation drug and coming back nine years later and getting her out again. He spent those nine years sitting up a tree feeling sorry for himself because the plot had to move on without him and the author couldn't think of anything else to do with him. The author chose here to ignore the massively easy way out he'd set up for himself. All through the book we are told that Atlantis was the only civilisation worth a damn with outpost colonies in Egypt and Yucatan (which seems a bit of an odd combination till you realise they've both got Pyramids and our author fills Atlantis with them too). Everywhere else is populated by ugly brutish savages. We are told many many times how ugly brutish. and stupid, 'fit only to be slaves', the population of Europe is. Europeans are ugly. Europeans are stupid. Just before he goes and sits up a tree for nine years our hero is offered the opportunity of sailing with an escaping bunch of Atlanteans aiming to form a colony on the newly discovered islands to the north of Europe: the 'Tin Isles'. Huzzah! In the most blatant bit of British exceptionalism I have read for a while - the jolly old British Empire was, it turns out, the direct result of us Brits being descended from the god-kings of Atlantis and not 'brutish', 'ugly' Europeans! Why there isn't a bloody big pyramid on Salisbury Plain instead of a mere tatty looking ring of rocks is a good question I need answered! A couple of chapters of expelling brutish Picts to the far corners of Britain before sailing for home would have been far more fun and a lot more believable than a bit of moping around not being eaten by giant lizards (this book has dinosaurs).
   
   Our bad girl villainess, Phorenice, was almost interesting. And, for the time, I guess quite a radical character. She's a bit Rider Haggard's Ayesha, a bit Flaubert's Salammbô, and a great big dollop of Boudica. A girl from a peasant background who, with cunning guile and ruthless determination, becomes first empress then self-proclaimed sole goddess of Atlantis (thus pissing off the old polytheistic priesthood who in a fit of the sulks sink Atlantis by magic rather that let her have her fun). She's prone to having people executed for the slightest reason and is quite capable of killing people herself - as she does with great relish when she and the hero are attacked by discontented fishermen. She does a real Red Sonja, leaps into the fray and hacks away and skewers people with skill and relish.
   

   “Your back to mine, comrade,” cried she, with a laugh, and then drew and laid about her with fine dexterity. Bah! but it was mere slaughter, that first bout.
   
   The crowd hustled inwards with such greediness to seize what they could, that none had space to draw back elbow for a thrust, and we two kept a circle round us by sheer whirling of steel. It is necessary to do one’s work cleanly in these bouts, as wounded left on the ground unnoticed before one are as dangerous as so many snakes. But as we circled round in our battling I noted that all of Phorenice’s quarry lay peaceful and still. By the Gods! but she could play a fine sword, this dainty Empress. She touched life with every thrust.

   There's toing and froing, and several layers of unbelievable coincidence piled one on top of another - the young rebel woman our hero just happened to rescue from being eaten to death after she had been tossed into a pit of sabre tooth tigers by bored guards, turns out, not only to be the twin sister of the Empress's chief handmaiden but also the daughter of the high priest of our priestly hero's order. Later (after some more ultra-coincidence heavy toing and froing) our hero and bad girl empress are trapped on the howdah of a panicked mammoth which leaps into the harbour just at the point where 'the great sewers, which science devised for the health of the city in the old King’s time, vomit[ed] their drainings' and into 'the solid matter ... quickly deposited as an impalpable sludge.'
   
   eeeeeew!
   
   Needless to say they are rescued by a passing galley with two newly minted prisoners on board one of whom, the woman, is none other than sabretooth tiger pixie rebel girl. It's a small continent. She's the one our hero later buries alive because she won't renounce her love for him
   
   Actually written down like that this all sounds jolly exciting but it's all delivered in a stodgy, self-consciously arch, pseudo archaic style that is supposed to invoke the idea that it really was written by an ancient Atlantean but just comes over as camp twaddle.
   
   

   Phorenice laughed as she swam. “You handle yourself like a sore man, Deucalion. I owe you something for lending me the cushion of your body.
   By my face! There’s more of the gallant about you when it comes to the test than one would guess to hear you talk. How did you like the ride,
   sir? I warrant it came to you as a new experience.”
   
   “I’d liefer have walked.”

   
   
   The book uses that well-worn Victorian formula framing device of the discovery of ancient documents. Not that it returns to the framing device at the end so it's not really a 'framing' device just a kickstarter. People declaim at each other in lllloooong paragraphs. Here's our hero
   
   “My friend,” I made answer, “my brother in all but blood, there is no man living in all Atlantis or her territories to whom I had liefer hand over my government. For twenty years now have I ruled this country of Yucatan, and Mexico beyond, first under the old King, and then as minister to this new Empress. I know my colony like a book. I am intimate with all her wonderful cities, with their palaces, their pyramids, and their people. I have hunted the beasts and the savages in the forests. I have built roads, and made the rivers so that they will carry shipping. I have fostered the arts and crafts like a merchant; I have discoursed, three times each day, the cult of the Gods with mine own lips. Through evil years and through good have I ruled here, striving only for the prosperity of the land and the strengthening of Atlantis, and I have grown to love the peoples like a father. To you I bequeath them, Tatho, with tender supplications for their interests.”
   
   ...and breath...
   
   No more Victorian fiction for me for a bit.
   
   
   
   
   ​

​

 

[JunkMonkey]

Part the deuxième

May

1. 
   
   Le Stols by Louis Therion. Another in one eyeball out the other bit of routine space opera which I was forgetting as fast as I was reading it.
   
2. 
   Sex Life of the Gods by Michael Knerr. I was hooked from the off:
   
   
   
   Foreword​

   
   He left the mother ship and headed for Terra; he smiled at the instrument panel and watched the operation of the big scout ship as it rocketed toward the light ribbon of atmosphere that enveloped the planet. It was a joke, in a way. In a manner of speaking, he was the first Terran to fly an alien space ship, but he wasn’t thinking of that. He was thinking of the woman, Elizabeth Danson of Everett, Pennsylvania.
   
   She was waiting.
   
   And he could see the warmth of her body, sheathed in the web-like gown that seemed spun over her turgid breasts and curved hips by an army of artistic spiders. It would not be a hard thing to love a woman like that.
   ​
   
   Golly! Turgid breasts!
   
   Sadly the rest of the book didn't live up to that rip roaring opening and our hero, crashes looses his memory wanders into his old life again and having recovered his memory finds out he wasn't the missing artist he thought he was, but an impersonator from outer space on Earth on some weirdly unspecific mission to foster interstellar trade. The fact that he only finds out after spending several chapters having sex with his 'wife' and his model gave our author the chance to write some bland 'sex' scenes to justify the publisher putting spidersilk-covered, turgid breasts on the cover.
   
   
   He grinned at her and peeled off his clothes quickly. She came into his arms then and they made love, letting the glowing warmth of the fire caress them hotly. His hands smoothed her breasts while his mouth worked at the fire that was coming to life throughout her body.
   
   “Just like old times?” He asked, softly.
   
   “Better, darling ... much better.”​
   
   and that, sadly, was as raunchy as it got.
   
   Anyhow, he finds he's fallen in love with her and releases her husband who has been held captive in space for a year so she can be truly happy again. (And he has a voluptuous alien girlfriend anyway so it's not as if he wasn't not going to be getting his end away after the book had finished.)
   
   "it's not as if he wasn't not going to be"? I think it's about time I read some books by people who can actually write again. I'm loosing whatever tenuous grasp I ever had on the English language...
3. The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger - rediscovered and reissued by the British Library in 2019 as a 'Science Fiction Classic' and is, according to the back of the book, no less than "A significant cornerstone in the foundation of the dystopia genre". Hmmmm. It left me rather more than underwhelmed. Plot wise it's pretty simple. A young socialist minded clerk, unhappy in love, goes into a theosophical trance in 1926 and wakes up 200 years later to find the ill-defined, vaguely egalitarian society he wakes up is is even more vague than it first appeared and a bit less egalitarian and is really not much better than the society he left (though it is somewhat cleaner). There are a couple of subplots: an off the page murder, sentencing, and execution and a religious revival that just peters out without changing anything. How the society came into being isn't explored and what the source of the endless free energy that powers it doesn't get explained. There are blissfully beautiful inviting suicide parlours to deal with criminals and the mentally unstable (and provide a bit of eugenics backstory). The society is divided into 'intellectuals' and 'normals' - and there is the strong implication that intelligence is genetically linked - though there doesn't seem to be any real tension between the two groups they intermarry - the children of such marriages are always 'normals'. Some of the intellectuals do have to get their hands a bit dirty later in the book when so many 'normals' get caught up in the religious revival they forget to do the minimum of work required of them. But there is nothing here that Wells didn't do so much better in The Time Machine thirty years earlier.
4. Le mystere de la chambre jaune by Gaston Leroux (Librivox Audiobook) - one of those classics of early detective literature, an early locked room mystery, which goes off the rails a bit at the end with the detective turning up in the final chapters with shedloads of backstory that the reader had no access to that explained away a lot of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. It also included the revelation that during a dramatic moment someone had whipped off a false beard and instantly became unrecognisable - which strained the credulity a little.
5. A Honeymoon in Space by George Griffith (1901) - Half way across the Atlantic a passenger liner encounters a strange flying machine, the Astronef, powered by the mysterious anti-gravitational 'R Force'. The pilot, owner, and builder of the craft, Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, Baron Smeaton in the Peerage of England, and Viscount Aubrey in the Peerage of Ireland, is on an urgent diplomatic mission to deliver the final draft of an agreement between the American and British governments. And just in time too because the dastardly French and Russians have made a deal with some local Chinese ruler that threatens a British monopoly in China. Because of this deal the whole world is about to be plunged into war for very vague reasons - but, given that the author refers to 'the Anglo-Saxon race' as 'the Race that Rules', and calls the British Empire a 'magnificent fortress of individual liberty and collective equity', I'm pretty sure it's because Johnny Foreigner is getting ideas above his station and needs taking down a peg, don't you know?
   
   The reason he has stopped off en route is that he is aware that Lilla Zaidie Rennick, millionaire daughter of the late inventor of the mysterious R Force that powers his prototype ship is onboard; she's on her way to England to marry some impoverished English lord.
   
   Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, Baron Smeaton in the Peerage of England, and Viscount Aubrey in the Peerage of Ireland and Lilla Zaidie Rennick, millionaire daughter of the late inventor of the mysterious R Force have a history of not quite being able to realise they are really in love with each other so he kidnaps her (and a chaperone - he's not a total cad) and flies her Washington where, after they have delivered the diplomatic accord and done a bit of electioneering for the Presidential election with their amazing flying ship, they get married and head off for a trip round the solar system as a honeymoon.
   
   They were happy to hear before they departed that the war was off. The dastardly Frogs and pesky Ruskies backing down - cowed by the sheer awesomeness of Anglo-Saxonistic unity.
   
   First stop Mars where they are attacked by flying ships. They destroy a couple and land to find the local population speak English. They invite an obviously important Martian onboard.
   
   ​
   "What we want to know just now is, why you speak English, and what sort of a world this Mars is?"​
   ​
   The Martian evidently only understood the most direct essentials of her speech. He saw that she asked two questions, and he answered them.​
   ​
   "Speak English?" he replied, with a little shake of his huge head. "We know not English, but there is no other speech. There is only ours. Cycles ago there were other speeches here, but those who spoke them were killed. It was inconvenient. One speech for a world is best."​
   ​
   "I see what he means," said Redgrave, looking towards Zaidie. "The Martian people have developed along practically the same lines as we are doing, but they have done it faster and got a long way ahead of us. We are finding out that the speech we call English is the shortest and most convenient. The Martians found it out long ago and killed everybody who spoke anything else."​
   
   Anyhoo the King of the Martians, overcome with interplanetary lust, makes the moves on Zaidie who shoots him through the head. They throw the body overboard, machine gun a few hundred annoyed Martians and go and see what Venus has to offer.
   
   Venus it turns out also has a breathable atmosphere and is populated by angelic, innocent winged creatures whose language is pure music. Zaidie communicates with with 'the sons and daughters of the Love-Star' by singing 'Home, Sweet Home', 'Swanee River' and for all I know Stephen Foster's entire back catalogue at them. After a while the author can't think of anything exciting to do with a planet full of anodyne saccharine, childlike innocents and our heroes wonder if their mere presence could pollute this heavenly perfection, so they pack up and go before they do something silly leaving a whole planet humming "Oh! Susanna" and the "Camptown Races" to themselves.
   
   Next stop Jupiter - sorry, 'His Majesty King Jove'. On the way the writer demonstrates how little he knows about astronomy by telling us:
   
   
   [Jupiter's] phases are invisible from the Earth owing to the enormous distance; but from the deck of the Astronef they had been plainly visible for some days, and, since the huge planet turns on its axis in less than ten hours, or with more than twice the speed of the Earth's rotation, the phases followed each other very rapidly.​
   ​
   Thus at twelve o'clock noon by Astronef time they might have seen a gigantic rim of silver-blue overarching the whole vault of heaven in front of them. By five o'clock it would be a hemisphere, and by five minutes to ten the vast sphere would be once more shining full-orbed upon them. By eight o'clock next morning they would find Jupiter "new" again.​
   ​
   Huh?
   
   
   They stop off first on Calisto (which for once) doesn't have a breathable atmosphere so they stroll around a bit in their 'breathing-dresses' before getting bored and nipping across to Ganymede where they find 'Whole cities under glass, fields, too, and lit by electricity or something very like it.' They visit the nearest city. The inhabitants are tall, good looking, and 'gorgeously attired'.
   
   ​
   "Haven't you noticed that, although they have the most exquisite skins and beautiful eyes and hair and all that sort of thing, not a man or woman of them has any colouring? I suppose that's the result of living for generations in a hothouse."​
   ​
   "Very likely," she said; "but has it struck you also that all the girls and women are either beautiful or handsome, and all the men, except the ones that seem to be servants or slaves, are something like Greek gods, or, at least, the sort of men you see on the Greek sculptures?"​
   ​
   "Survival of the fittest, I presume. These are probably the descendants of the highest races of Ganymede; the people who conceived the idea of prolonging the life of their race and were able to carry it out. The inferior races would either perish of starvation or become their servants. That's what will happen on Earth, and there is no reason why it shouldn't have happened here."​
   
   And that is a good example of the taking it in turns to tell each other things dialogue that these two talk in for the whole book. It's really not good.
   
   Why the godlike, noble, wise Ganymedians don't speak English is not asked or answered (though it does mean the author doesn't have to think of anything for them to say, he merely throws a couple of vague mentions of 'musical language' - but not apparently as musical as Venusian because Zaidie doesn't offer to sing them any show tunes). The Ganymedians are a dying race, fantastically advanced but their natural resources dwindling. They did build a ship like the Astronef once, a long time ago but it got swept away somehow and they couldn't be bothered to have another go. A couple of the Ganymedians accompany our heroes on a trip to Jupiter and nearly get sucked too deep into its gravity to escape but luckily an insanely serendipitous conjunction of the Galilean moons* gave them enough lift to get out again.
   
   Then it's off to Saturn where they encounter lots of flying monsters including one with two heads which attached itself to the ship and only came off when they rose up far enough to cause its internal pressure to explode it.
   
   A perturbation in their course - which is very sensitive to the interactions of the gravity of nearby celestial objects with their R Force generator is discovered to be two dead stars which collide and fuse into a new luminous body.
   
   
   Instantly the forward end of the Astronef was bathed in light and heat — the light and heat of a re-created sun, whose elements had been dark and cold for uncounted ages.​
   
   This is supposed to happen INSIDE our solar system!
   
   They land on Ceres which possessed a breathable atmosphere and
   
   
   a fluid resembling water, but nearly as dense as mercury. A couple of flasks of it form the greatest treasures of the British Museum and the National Museum at Washington. The vegetable world was represented by coarse grass, lichens, and dwarf shrubs, and the animal by different species of worms, lizards, flies, and small burrowing animals of the rodent type.​
   
   and then, running short of whatever go juice makes the R Force work they set off for home
   
   
   "I am going to try to steer a middle course between the orbits of Mercury and Venus," he replied. "They just happen to be so placed now that we ought to be able to get the advantage of the pull of both of them as we pass, and that will save us a lot of power.​
   
   Which is probably the earliest mention of the idea of a gravity assist slingshot manoeuvrer I recall having read in an SF book. But even then our heroic navigator captain is doubtful they will make it as they are so short of fuel. They could make it safely to Venus but gamble all instead on getting home. Their calculations are off and they find themselves falling into the sun. Doomed! No way they can escape. They are just about to drink deadly doses of morphine rather than fry to death when suddenly in THE most WTF?! Get out of Jail Free Card plot rabbit pulled out of a hat way imaginable way they aren't and there's Earth and they are safe
   
   
   "Goodbye, darling, God grant that we may!" But the agony of that last farewell was more than Zaidie could bear. She looked away at the little glass in her hand, a hand which even now did not tremble. Then she raised her eyes again to take one last look at the glory of the stars, and at the Fate Incarnate in Flame which lay beneath them. Then, even as the end of the last minute came, a cry broke through her white, half-parted lips:​
   
   
   "The Earth, the Earth—thank God, the Earth!"​
   
   
   With the hand that held the draught of Lethe—which in another moment she would have swallowed—she caught at her husband's hand, pulled the glass out of it, and then with a little sigh she dropped senseless on the floor of the conning-tower. Redgrave looked for a moment in the direction that her eyes had taken. A pale, silver-grey crescent, with a little white spot near it, was rising out of the blackness beyond the edge of the solar ocean of flame. Home was in sight at last,​
   
   
   One of those books I was more than glad to get to the end of.
   
   *According to Opera's AI sidebar: 'The exact frequency at which all four Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) come into conjunction is extraordinarily low—mathematically, it would take roughly 750 billion days (about 2 billion years) for a perfect alignment based on their orbital periods.'
   
   

 

[JunkMonkey]

June

1. Inherent Bound by Trinity Cunningham - a by-the-numbers piece of self-published high fantasy that I got via a Librarything give-away in return for a review. It was sh*te. I had fun scribbling 'WTF?' and 'you are kidding me' in the margins, and underlining every time the hero 'clenched his fists', or the heroine 'fought back tears', or either of them felt their stomachs 'knotting'.
   
   The book had several blank pages at the back which I filled with notes. I copied some of them out here:
   
   https://www.librarything.com/work/35792543/t/Inherent-Bound
2. Spykos 4 by Peter Dagmar - a read prompted by this Youtuber
   
   who described it as 'unbelievably boring' - I realised I had a copy which had been sitting on my shelves unread for three of four decades - so I read it.
   
   It is one of the most 'unbelievably boring' books I have ever read.
   
   (I pretty much agree with everything else that guy says so I won't repeat it.)
   
   Prompted by the video I can now claim to be the SECOND person to have got to the end of the book. I just finished it - and he missed a couple of things. The alien attack at the end doesn't come out of nowhere. In fact our 'heroes' start the conflict by transmitting bombs through their experimental matter transmitters without ANY attempt to discover if the unknown aliens (who already posses the technology) might want to talk about stuff first. And he's right about the names but it's a pity he started collecting them halfway through the book because on page 50 [line 9] suddenly, out of nowhere, there is a character called 'Smith'. I kid you not, in a book full of 'Kyris's, 'Kabris's', 'Nasen's, and 'Hekron's there a 'Smith'. He's only there for one line line and then vanishes. Re-reading the passage he appears in it becomes very obvious that the character of Nasen was called Smith in an earlier draft of the book and the writer missed changing it here.
   
   On my shelves I have another Digit book by Peter Dagmar called Alien Skies. I haven't read it but I did flip through it sufficiently to glean that it is set on Earth in the (then) near future of 2011 and looks to be more fluently written than the staccato, declarative short sentence style of Spykos 4. It also has a character called Smith and, at the end of the book, the narrator (who has obviously during the course of the book revealed himself to be an alien living amongst us) returns to his home system - double star system called 'Spykos' and his home was planet number 4!
   
   Spykos 4 is a prequel to Alien Skies which appears to have been published first. Whether it was written first I have no idea.
3. The Neptune Files by Tom Standage. An accessible, well written non-fiction account of the discovery of Neptune and the aftermath. Which didn't try to turn the events into some kind of dramatic historical romance which so much modern pop science history writing seems to do.
   

July

1. Metalikus by Maurice Limat - feverdream French SF
   I'm not sure how many people Maurice Limat is but it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that this one was written in turns, chapter by chapter, by at least two people - neither of whom knowing what the other other had just written. You know that kids' game 'consequences' where you take a piece of paper and, following a set of prompts, write a part of a story then fold it over so no one can read it and pass it to the next person to write the next part?
   
   This is that book.
   
   A valley in France. A brother (Igor) and sister (Corrine) climb a hill to watch the arrivals at a space port. The boy is eager to become a spaceman and the girl is waiting for her fiancé who by the sheer power of his name ('Lancelot Scott') is destined to be the hero of the book. The world has recently been plagued by a series of strange mishappenings. Previously dormant volcanoes are erupting. Icebergs are appearing far further south (and north) than they have ever before and strange, red, luminescent scientist-baffling balls fly willy-nilly around the globe. The balls inexplicably appear almost at random but a pattern emerges that shows them disappearing off to the dark side of the Moon. An expedition was launched to investigate. It is this expedition, commanded by Lancelot Scott, returning from the Moon that the two youngsters are waiting to see land. As the ship approaches one of the mysterious red balls appears over the horizon. Kaboom! The ship crashes. Quelle horreur!
   
   Lancelot, it turns out a few weeks later in the next chapter, was the only survivor of the horrendous crash. And like all astronaut survivors of horrendous spaceship crashes (and three years before Martin Caidin wrote Cyborg the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man) French medical science rebuilds him...
   
   "Messieurs, nous pouvons le reconstruire. Nous avons la technologie. Nous avons la capacité de créer le premier homme bionique au monde! Lancelot Scott sera cet homme... Mieux qu'il n'était avant... Meiux... plus fort... plus rapide!"
   
   Lancelot gets a new leg, and a new arm and a set of super new electronic eyes because in the crash his face got horribly burnt. But, before he gets a new face to match his new eyes, his fiancé strong-arms her way into the hospital to see him but is sent packing because he is 'no longer a man' - he is a machine! How can she love someone so disfigured? Oh the pathos! Handkerchiefs are twisted, and sobs are sobbed, and she flees the hospital like the heroine of a cheesy gothic romance cover. Henceforth, Lancelot announces to everyone in the room who didn't flee sobbing into the night, he wants to be known only as 'Metalikus'! - the nickname some less than sensitive hospital staff have given him.
   
   Later Metalikus whose eyes have developed capabilities beyond their designer's specs (did you see what I did there?) discovers he can see the red balls even when they are cloaked from normal human vision. (Why no one thought to see if they could track them with radar or in the infrared or some other part of the non-visible spectrum isn't asked. Or answered.)
   
   Then, suddenly, it's later...
   
   A ship, weirdly named l'Hippocampe (the Seahorse), is nearing its destination, 'Point Z' which the world's scientists have, between chapters, worked out is the epicentre of all the weird stuff going on. Point Z is 'Well within' the Antarctic circle and near the South Pole. As they get near their destination our heroes are astounded to discover, lurking between the icebergs, a perfectly circular artificial looking island with a seemingly bottomless crater at its centre. Why they aren't astounded that the whole of the continent of Antarctica seems to have vanished isn't mentioned. The last time I looked at a map of the world* most of the inside of the Antarctic Circle - especially the bit 'near the South Pole' was solid rock. The North Pole is just ice, no rock. So either there has been a geomagnetic reversal and North and South are swapped over, or they've mined Antarctica flat (and then some). Either way it would have been nice to have been told.
   
   Metalikus tells the captain of l'Hippocampe to stay clear of this mysterious island - he and two others will go explore before putting the ship in danger. 'Righto!' says the captain who (despite not noticing he may be on the wrong end of the planet) is no fool. The captain delegates a couple of the crew to go with him. One of them is - gasp! - Igor, the young brother of Lancelot 'Metalikus' Scott's erstwhile fiancée ( as he was last seen in chapter one saying "Gee willickers, I wish I could be a spaceman!"... I guess it's not really THAT much of a surprise that he turns up.)
   
   The three descend the smooth, circular, vertical shaft in the centre of the island. As they descend they meet one of the glowing red balls coming up and have to flatten themselves against the wall as it passes. Deep underneath the place where Antarctica isn't they find humongous caves with HUUUUGE stalactites and stalagmites - a cave so big it has its own weather system which means they can look down on glowing lava flows as it snows on them. Bedding down for a wee kip, Metalikus' two companions are suddenly wheeked away by invisible forces. Invisible to them but clearly visible to Metalikus's supranormal vision. Lectroids from the eighth dimension!
   
   Metalikus sets off in pursuit but loses them and becomes helplessly lost in the warren of caverns. As a side quest he tracks down the source of the mysterious sounds he keeps hearing and, from a vantage point on an underground cliff, watches a triceratops digging a ditch to channel lava... and is attacked by a pterodactyl! because...? who the f*ck knows? because the author was asleep when he wrote that chapter? or it was four in the morning and he was on his 23rd coffee of the day with an eight a.m. deadline? it's anyone's guess.
   
   The Lectroids appear before Metalikus and telepathically info dump some backstory. They aren't Lectroids at all, they are from the planet Kob and aren't actually from Kob because they are still on Kob and what Metalikus is seeing are ectoplasmic projections - the Kob-men's real bodies are still on their distant planet which is dying of being cold and needs great chunks of Earth's pyro-sphere to get it warm again. For reasons the Earth, of all the planets in the galaxy, has the most suitable pyro-sphere to mine (possibly due to the abundance of cheap, underground, non-unionised dinosaur labour). The glowing spheres that have been causing Earth's population so much consternation were literally great balls of fire, lava mined by scab dinosaurs and invisible ectoplasmic machinery, wrapped in heatproof non melty ice stuff and shot into orbit around the Moon to be collected at a later date. (The author by now must have been mainlining espressos.) One of the semi-invisible ectoplasmic Kob-men offers a handshake of friendship to Metalikus who accepts but recoils angrily when the Kob-man tries to electrocute him. Luckily Metalikus had proffered his bionic non-electricutible arm. There are fisticuffs and Metalikus grabs the only Kob-woman of the group and flies off with her using his Buck Rogers anti-gravity belt.
   
   Still clutching the ectoplasmic alien babe he rescues his two companions from their underground iceberg prison just as it rips a hole in the roof of the cave beneath their spaceship which falls into the cave... coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee.... Metalikus with the help of the Kob-woman convinces the Kob-men to rescue the ship and offers himself as hostage and self-appointed negotiator. They say okay and push the ship up back out the hole with their fantastically under-explained invisible technology. One of the rescued companions goes with the ship having contributed NOTHING to the story and Igor stays with Metalikus 'to the end'.
   
   Then it's off to the Moon in an invisible spaceship where they take over a small Earth outpost for unexplained reasons. Igor decides, after all, that his loyalties aren't with Metalikus who has, in his eyes, not only betrayed Earth by throwing his lot in with the Kob-men but also has fallen in love with an invisible women on another planet despite the fact his sister is still madly in love with his bionic bod. Igor sets off to walk half way round the Moon to another Earth base, falls into a Lunar crevasse and is about to be eaten by Selenites (the shadows and deep places of the Moon are populated by the degenerate descendants of shipwrecked aliens apparently) when he is rescued by a passing Earthship (who saw him fall in) - who are then, in turn, rescued by Metalikus in his invisible space fighter and the Kob-men who drop one of the orbiting lava balls down the hole.
   
   Igor tells all to the Earth military who in a "Quick we've only got three pages to finish this book" flurry of activity, organise a space fleet and start to shoot the lava balls (why???) The Kob-men sacrifice six of the dozen or so lava balls to the enemy who blow them up just so the author can justify this part of the book being called "Space Volcanoes!" (oh that's why...)
   
   And the Kob-men, Kob-woman, Metalikus and the remaining lava balls all just vanish off by superscience to the other side of the galaxy where the Kob-woman's inert, ectoplasm projector machine encased body has a faint smile; she is waiting her lover because she and Metalikus are just so made for each other...
   
   f*ck me sideways that made very little sense from one page to the next, let alone from scene to scene. I hope Maurice Limat had a good week's sleep after that one.
   
   
   *About three minutes ago.
2. Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond Vol1. the original strips from 1934 onward. It's odd stuff. I've never read the originals before.
   
   Originally a weekly one page the story is pure 'with a single bound he was free - look out! a monster argh! he kills it but falls into the Pit of Certain Horrible Doom! (it says so on the door.)... Next week...
   
   The page layouts are sometimes so constructed that the panels had to be numbered to tell you which order to read them. And even then the descriptive caption boxes are often (but not always) below the images - so you either have to read the panels bottom up, or read the dialogue bubbles then find out where and who you are looking at. At times the format becomes very abstracted and breaks free of the rigid sequence of identical rectangular panels ; the artwork is gorgeous but resembles a series of posed book illustrations rather than a sequential strip. Very little continuity of action - or anything else for that matter with characters changing costume almost at random (sometimes on the same page) while standing around looking heroic or grappling with each other.
   
   Fascinatingly 'other'.
3. Lost Mars - a collection of short stories in the British Library Science Fiction Classics series ed. By Mike Ashley. Some new to me stories - inc. Wells' The Crystal Egg which made me wonder if Bob Shaw ever read it and thought "aha!" and came up with Slow Glass. And how many copies of Ylla by Ray Bradbury DO I own in various collected stories? Lovely little tale though.
   

August

1. Valdar the Oft-Born by George Griffith - the author of A Honeymoon in Space which I read a few months ago. I chanced up a 1st edition copy of this on eBay in a very beat up state, water damaged covers detached spine but very cheap. I had fun rebacking it and getting it into a readable condition again. And so I had to read it... hoooo boy!
   
   A stupendous number of SPOILERS ahead.
   
   After a brief prologue: one of those "You may find this hard to believe in this modern age of 1878 but it's all true" addresses to the reader, Valdar the Oft-Born starts with the most un 1878 opening to a book I have ever come across.
   
   Our hero narrator wakes up, naked on a hillside, with no idea who he is, where he is, how he got there, or... well anything really. It's the sort of opening you'd expect from a 1950s Science Fiction novel where the hero goes on to find he is a mind-wiped superman who is the only one with ability to save the universe. Most Victorian novels I have read seem to start with, "My parents were of the noblest sentiments and good breeding and came from families well established in the annals of the county of H----- ... etc. etc. for page after page of family history, scenery describing, the history of the scenery being described, a brief discourse of the possibilities of future improvements planned for the scenery described and why they were likely to increase crop yields to the benefit of all, and so on and so on. About half way through the first chapter our hero might get himself introduced - whether as an adult or just being born and the story will slowly lumber into motion. But what does NOT happen in the opening paragraph of a normal Victorian novel is our hero waking up naked on a hillside...
   
   Anyhow our hero is sitting there, being all blond and muscly and naked, when a bunch of hunters comes along and take him to their city. There he impresses the hell out out of every one by being big and blonde and muscly - because it turns out we are in the middle east some time in the bronze age and everyone else is short and dark. And less muscly. Our hero now named Valdar teams up with the local princess to resist the annual attack from the tyrants of Nineveh. He wins the first battle and takes the fight to the very gates of the enemy city - when there is an earthquake and the mightiest tower in the city, The Tower of Bel, falls. Driven out into the desert, Valdar and the princess are dying of thirst when he nobly relieves her of the problem of dying a painful lingering death by killing her (she asks him to) with a sword thrust to the chesty area - then dying himself...
   
   ...and wakes up covered in sand next to the crumbling remains of a skeleton clad in the princess's armour. A passing caravan takes him to the nearest city (which is not the pile of ancient ruins that Nineveh has become). There he swaps the dead princess's armour for a slave girl who is the dead spitting image of the princess he'd killed hundreds of years ago. (Pay attention and keep track; it gets even more complicated later.) A passing remark by a trader reveals that the slave girl is not only the spitting image of the dead princess but also the spitting image of the Queen of Sheba who happens to be visiting Solomon in Salem at that very moment. So off Valdar goes (slave girl in tow) finds that this is true and, what's more, the story the slave girl had told him was a pack of lies and she (the slave girl) is in fact the identical twin sister of the current Queen of Sheba and rightful co-Queen, usurped and sold into slavery. At the court of Solomon the two sisters are seemingly reconciled. Valdar marries the (former) slave girl and, after a night of (very implied) passion finds he has been (impliedly) banging the evil queen all night. The Queen had, just after the ceremony the night before, murdered her sister and taken her place. Valdar is all wrathful and just about to plunge his sword into her perfidious chest - when he dies...
   
   ...and wakes up with an Egyptian priest mumbling over his sarcophagus bringing him back to life. Looking over the priest's shoulder is Cleopatra! who - you will no doubt be totally unflabbergasted to learn is the dead spit of the Queen of Sheba, her identical twin sister, and the long dead warrior princess. Valdar and Cleopatra hit it off and everything is going hunky-dory when history gets in the way and, before he knows it, Cleopatra has dumped him and is making babies with Julius Caesar. Valdar wanders off to a life of freebooting and piracy (in which he goes far far to the west and discovers lands which no one else will discover for a thousand years). He returns to Egypt just in time to be in the room when Cleopatra asps herself. Then, after a bit more vague, off the page, wandering, he ends up back in Jerusalem - where he's just in time to see Jesus dying on the cross. He notices the woman kneeling at the foot of the dead Christ's cross bears an uncanny resemblance to Cleopatra etc... etc... and drops down dead...
   
   ...and gets reincarnated hundreds of years later in the body of an Arab goatherd who has vague memories of stirring deeds lived in past lives. (Presumably the realisation that, while he'd been wasting his time in his last incarnation sailing about, killing people, and discovering America, his on/off alive/dead girlfriend had given birth to the Messiah had shocked him into actually getting born properly this time and not just waking up on a hillside. Or a sarcophagus.) Eventually, prompted by his martial inner visions, he becomes Khalid ibn al-Walid: The Sword of Allah. He teams up with another incarnation of the recurring woman and sets about slaughtering the world into accepting Islam. She gets killed in battle - one thing about this book the women (or rather this one woman in many guises) is no shrinking violet; she swings swords and charges into battle like a real Xena). After she dies Valdar (bereft again) wanders aimlessly (again), finds himself at a mysterious temple visited earlier in the book and wonders if he still remembers how to access the secret chambers within its walls. He does. And then, once within, and the door firmly closed behind him, realises he never knew how to open the thing from the inside. It's pitch black. So sits down on a chair...
   
   ...and wakes up sometime in the early 12th century. A once in a millennium shaft of sunlight (would have been a bit of a bugger if it had been overcast that day) is lighting up the room revealing the inscription that gives him the clue he needs to leave. In the next room on a table he finds a scroll from the (now dead) last of the generations of priests who have been awaiting his awakening. Before he died the priest had helpfully liquidated all the cult's assets and left Valdar a fortune in cut jewels.
   
   Valdar sets out awandering, he bumps into a bunch of Vikings, talks them into taking him with them (by killing a whole boatload of their enemies) and they go to the Northland where - guess what! Yep. He bumps into Brenda, a princess who bears an uncanny resemblance etc. etc.
   
   Converting the locals to Christianity (a process which consists entirely of a one on one fight with the local pagan zealot and chopping off both the zealot's hands - and then his head) he bankrolls 550 hand-selected Vikings to join the Crusades and liberate the Holy Land from the current Islamic occupants (with the promise they can keep whatever they can loot on the way). How and why this bizarre religious volte face happens is not really obvious but if I was a Muslim reading this book I would be more than disturbed to see the historically real Khalid ibn al-Walid suddenly launch a crusade against the religion he helped found. There are a couple of passages Griffith inserts where Valdar explains the current followers of Mohammed were a 'mongrel' breed and had lowered the tone a bit but it is hardly convincing and probably even MORE insulting to modern Muslim readers, let alone contemporary ones. In the near orient, he and Brenda rescue Richard Lion-heart (as is obligatory in any story set during the Crusades). Valdar gets knighted, Brenda gets wounded and everyone sets off home again. Most of the fleet founders on the return journey and Brenda only survives a few days before (once again) dying in Valdar's arms. Valdar fed up to the back teeth with his wife dying in his arms all the time, sets out on his drakkar alone (but for the body of Brenda), sails into the middle the ocean, sets fire to the ship, lies down to die...
   
   ... and wakes up in a crypt with YET ANOTHER incarnation of BrendaCleopatraQueenofSheebaandhertwinsister etc. polishing his chain mail (not a metaphor).
   
   Valdar, it turns out, had left it a bit late to set fire to his longboat and the flaming ship had drifted within sight ('half a mile') of England where it was seen from the shore. The local lord sent out a rescue mission; the lord who, by the most AMAZING coincidence, not only shares my surname but had also met Valdar out in Syria and recognised him instantly. The year is now 1585, the crusading noble's descendants have for generations been tending his recumbent form, polishing his mighty sword, and dusting his chain-mail. The current incarnation of his multi-lost love is called Kate. The latest generation of his rescuer's family are near impoverished but because of honour and all that stuff have never touched the bundle of rich jewels found on Valdar's body all those generations ago.
   
   Valdar suddenly realises that England is really where it's at. Not Islam not Christianity but ENGLAND! (Honestly, this guy is like Tigger looking for his breakfast. Yes! ENGLAND! That's what Tiggers like best....) Using some of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of precious gems he's been lugging about for the past thousand years, Valdar fits out a fleet of five ships, gets to meet Queen Elizabeth the First, receives a patent to privateer to his heart's content and sets out with Sir Francis Drake to show the rotten Spanish nogoodnik papists a thing or two...
   He returns with a boat-full of loot and helps restore the fortunes of the semi-destitute family of his guardians. And (yet again) he proposes to Kate (the current BrendaCleopatraetc.) They marry but he has to set out almost instantly to stop the Spanish Armada - which he does by suggesting the Fire Ships idea to Drake - and then, with the Armada scattered and going up the North Sea trying to get round Scotland, he stops off at the old homestead in Northumbria to find Kate has been kidnapped by Spaniards. He sets off in pursuit, and, via a set of incredible coincidences, is led to believe Kate has been raped and murdered. He sinks the ship she is supposedly on (without bothering to check). A short while later he is captured by Spaniards and gets to watch Kate (who wasn't as raped, murdered, or sunk to the bottom of the ocean as he had thought) burnt at the stake in an Auto-da-fé attended by Philip of Spain. Valdar bursts his bonds, throws a bishop on the pyre and escapes on his own boat which, during a storm, he sails into a sea cave....
   
   ...and wakes up to the sound of cannon. A small side quest of the Napoleonic War is happening just outside his bedroom! The last couple of chapters are a real Gish gallop through the fall of Napoleon's ambitions as Valdar takes centre stage at both Trafalgar and Waterloo - but without Griffith making the kind of history-tweaking revisions that he does in earlier chapters. The history of the Napoleonic Wars were (as Griffith says several times here) very well known to his readers. They were such a touchstone in the British Empire mythos of the time that it would have been too much for his audience to swallow if Valdar had been anything more than an observer to well-known events.
   He meets a descendant of Kate's family line who is the spitting image blah blah blah - she is wearing the family heirloom that she remembers being given in an earlier incarnation blah blah blah and, dear readers, a happy ending. A brief epilogue as the author lays down his pen with his beloved hand on his shoulder (Though, confusingly and without any explanation, he lays his pen down in an English garden in Northumbria, not the modern Babylon of London where he picked it up in the prologue - which makes the framing device a little lop sided.)
   
   By the end of his narrative (as mentioned in the prologue) Valdar has come to believe he is "Valdar the Asa, son of Odin the Father of Ages") and is prone throughout the book to call on any and all gods to help him. How this fits with his muscular crusading Christianity and infidel massacring Islamic incarnations isn't addressed at all but - again from the prologue- as Valdar says, "The myths of to-day were the faiths of yesterday" so maybe it doesn't really matter.
   
   There is a third reborn character who crops up from time to time in some of Valdar's incarnations who variously serves as a mentor or facilitator but his presence on each occasion is fleeting and no real explanation is ever given for his motives in helping Valdar.
   
   The book is full of lumbering, overwrought, mock archaic, 'ere thou wert' filled hyperbolic language: Some of which I suspect Griffith made up on the spot though apparently 'chidden' is a real world; "the past tense and past participle of chide, which means to scold or reprimand".
   
   Stuff like this:
   
   ​
   "Amemphis, the unworthy minister of Amen-Ra, to Terai, the Stranger, greeting! In the blindness and the presumption of my half-knowledge I betrayed thee into a false hope, which has gone the way of all such. That which is awaited is not yet come, but it is written that neither thou nor I shall see the dusk of Amenti till together we have beheld the revelation of the Invisible. When thou art weary of wandering and fighting, return to the Temple of Ptah, and there thou shalt find me waiting for thee, and in that time shall my last spoken words to thee be fulfilled. Till then farewell!"​
   ​
   Many a long year passed before the snows of my first life-winter on earth whitened and thinned my once thick golden locks, and so made true the words which Amemphis had spoken on the deck of the galley which bore him back to solitude.​
   
   And is incredibly violent. There's hardly a page goes by without someone being killed. Sometimes they are just hacked to bits, or have their heads stove in, or split in twain. On one occasion Valdar wakes up and the first people he encounters are Spanish so he kills them. Doesn't bother to find out what the current political situation is and who is allied with whom, just Spaniards! Kill them! Chop! chop! chop! hack! skewer! (Mind you, he had just woken up and was probably grouchy not having had breakfast yet and the last thing he would have really remembered was Torquemada setting his wife on fire, so maybe that's a bit understandable). Sometimes it gets a little more inventive:
   
   
   There was neither time nor room to use a weapon in the press, so, opening my arms, I picked the pigmies up two and three at a time, and pitched them back over my head and shoulders under the feet of those who came after me; and so I tore my way through the crowd till I came to where Ivar lay, now sorely wounded by the showers of blows that had been rained on him while he was down.​
   One yellow-skinned knave was just stooping over him to drive a dagger into his neck as I reached him, and him I picked up by the ankles and swung him round my head like a flail, till his head and arms and shoulders were smashed out of shape against the weapons and mail of his fellows, and his blood and brains spattered them from head to foot in such a ghastly shower that they fled screaming and half blinded out of reach, only to be cut down by the axes and swords that were rising and falling in a ring outside them like hammers round an anvil.​
   
   It's like Walter Scott rewritten by Sean Hutson.
   
   Halfway through the book I did wonder if Michael Moorcock had ever read Valdar and this book had somehow sparked his Eternal Champion idea but a cursory web searching doesn't come up with anything.
   
   Whole book is online here if you are feeling masochistic:
   
   https://freeread.de/@RGLibrary/GeorgeGriffith/Novels/ValdarTheOftBorn.html
   
   
2. Le Fauteuil hanté by Gaston Leroux - a beautifully read Librivox audiobook. Three candidates for the same vacant seat at the Academie Francais die one after the other. Coincidence or murder? What is ancient Egyptian 'Curse of Thoth'? What is the source of the mysterious terrifying screams coming from the isolated scientist's house? How does an illiterate bric-a-brac dealer get himself elected to become one of 'the Immortals'. Great page turning fun.