Mist Softly Happened

Here, at long last, is the third collection of my book reviews, assembling everything written between 2016 to 2018, and a few which didn't get posted on Pamphlets of Destiny for the sake of diplomacy. I say at long last because it's been ready to go since about June and the interim has been spent wrangling with Lulu over the cover failing to print right, which seems to be sorted out now. I mention this only so as to indicate the degree of care and attention I plough into producing these books, which I mention having recently come across a number of sniffy comments regarding print on demand, none of which have been made directly to my face for fucking obvious reasons.

Anyway, the blurb runs as follows:

Mist Softly Happened is the third collection of Lawrence Burton's book reviews as originally posted on his Pamphlets of Destiny blog. This time there's more van Vogt, more comic books, the significant presence of material by both Murray Leinster and Robert Moore Williams, and less actual science-fiction than featured in the previous two. We also have extended rambling essays on Philip K. Dick's Exegesis (which he enjoyed) and Alan Moore's Jerusalem (which he didn't), along with the usual exclusive selection of embittered rants which he was too scared to share online for fear of them being read by those he had deemed authors of shite. Additionally we have the inception of a potentially new literary sub-category - Theosophic science-fiction, tentatively encompassing the work of Richard Shaver, William Dexter, the aforementioned Robert Moore Williams and others, which is probably comparable to Gretchen Wiener's attempts to get fetch happening in the movie Mean Girls, but never mind.

The book is thick in girth and substantial in content due to the vast wattage of  chuckles, entertainment, and sarcasm I've pumped into the thing, and it represents great value for money. You can read it online for free, or most of it, but a website link makes for a fucking lousy Christmas present; unlike the physical book, which is fab etc. etc.

Snap up your physical copies here at my Lulu store. Also, if you first take a quick look at the Lulu main page, there's usually some sort of discount code to be had.

Pamphlets of Destiny

Two whole years later than intended, I have extruded another self-published book, yet another pulse-pounding agglomeration of stuff you can already read for free on the internet. Pamphlets of Destiny is the second volume of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks, this time named after the blog for which most of the reviews were written and covering 2013 through to 2015. There's some material which was never posted for one reason or another, and a few of the reviews are slightly expanded, but otherwise it's pretty much the same, just reproduced in a more civilised form suitable for reading at bedtime or while doing a poo. There's no eBook because I dislike eBooks and I've got better things to do than format the fucking thing yet again when, as I say, it's already online more or less in its entirety.

Lest the Lulu blurb appear too cryptic and you object to taking a look at the Pamphlets of Destiny blog on religious grounds, I'm trying to sell you a fat six-hundred-ish page book - proper traditional paperback size, but just a bit fat - of reviews of science-fiction novels, non-science-fiction novels, comic books, and one song I hated so much that I just couldn't hold back. I've had a few stabs at vaguely literary discourse, but it's mostly sarcasm and swearing. It would make an ideal Birthday or Christmas present for a friend or relative who enjoys some of the above, or for a friend or relative you don't really care about so they get what they get and should be glad of getting fucking anything.

Buy it here.

Smoking Mirror

I produced a POD version of Smoking Mirror some time ago, so it really is old and probably not very interesting news. Nevertheless, it's just popped up as a topic of minor curiosity on the Outpost Gallifrey forum, presumably someone working their way backwards from my more recent, arguably more legitimate written efforts; and I realised I'd never got around to reposting this 2011 review from Andrew Hickey's wonderful Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, so here it is:

Obligatory disclaimer-cum-explanation as to why I've bought this book. I've vaguely known Lawrence Burton as one of the more intelligent posters on the Doctor Who forum Outpost Gallifrey and on the Faction Paradox forum for a year or two. We've recently become Facebook friends, and he wrote a very flattering review of my most recent book. So I may be biased here.

On the other hand, I don't know him well enough that I think I'm biased - and if you read through that thread (Lawrence reviewing several hundred science fiction books) it's obvious both that he can actually write, and also that he shares a number of my tastes - of the books we've both read, I'd say I agree with at least 80% of his reviews, and especially the stuff he's most glowing about (Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Miles, David Louis Edelman) and his tastes in individual works by writers (preferring The End Of Eternity and The Gods Themselves to Asimov's Robot stuff).

So when I saw he'd self-published a couple of books himself, I bought this one without even reading the description.

It turns out to be an unofficial Doctor Who novel. I'd hesitate to call it fanfic, partly because it was intended for BBC Books (and quite why it was rejected I can't understand) and partly because fanfic tends to suggest something of poor quality, and this is anything but. It's a Doctor Who novel that happens not to have been licensed by the BBC, that's all. (Lawrence is selling the book at cost price and not making a penny from it, I hasten to add).

Given that it's self-published, there are surprisingly few criticisms I can make of it. The review thread linked above is called Crappy 70s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spaceships on the Cover, and the cover design is a perfect imitation of those, the typography on the back being spookily reminiscent of some of them (the closest comparison I can find is the Granada paperback copies of The End Of Eternity and The Zap Gun, but I know I've seen something even closer). However, the typography in the book itself is less wonderful, being in Times New Roman (or a facsimile thereof) and eight- or ten-point type. Having a legally-blind wife, I know from experience that ideally one should print things in at least twelve-point, and wherever possible use a sans-serif font, for readability.

Other than that, the only really jarring thing about the book is a moment of lampshade hanging, when the Doctor is on a collect-the-plot-tokens quest and thinks about how he hates this kind of thing when it happens in books. It's not done quite well enough to overcome the problems.

One other problem I have - and one that's my problem rather than the book's - is that the book is set in pre-Columbian Mexico, and so the characters' names are all phonetically unlike anything I'm accustomed to. This gave me some difficulty in keeping track of the characters, but that can hardly be helped, given the subject.

The plot is a pretty good one - why has the universe shrunk, so that it now consists of only a small area of Central America and a few centuries? Why are the Gods walking among the humans? - but the plot is less important than the writing. Lawrence obviously has a huge love for the Mexica culture and mythology, and this comes across in every word. Before I read this, all I knew of the Mexica culture was that some of their sculptures in the British Museum look like they'd been made by Jack Kirby, if Kirby had had an obsession with skulls (which is a good thing). But Lawrence manages both to make this seem like a sympathetic culture (putting even the human sacrifice into a context where it seems entirely reasonable) and to bring out the utter strangeness of the culture's myths.

A lot of individual scenes will stay with me for a long time - the Doctor getting an inkling that problems are starting when Carl Sagan starts talking about how the Earth is a few thousand years old, the god at the centre of the TARDIS, the journey through Mictlan - this is a book as much about the journey as the destination, and Lawrence isn't afraid of devoting time to his interests, whether that be retelling old myths or explaining Mexica social structure or making asides about old sitcoms.

In fact, after the obvious in-joke that the Third Doctor used to watch Dad's Army (which starred Bill Pertwee) I started wondering about the other references - what does the confirmation of a Doctor-Who-universe Wilfred Brambell and Tony Hancock mean for the careers of the 'Whoniverse' Ron Grainer and Terry Nation? - but that's just the 60s-TV fan in me coming out.

And there's a very sitcom feel about parts of this book, but in a good way. It's a funny book, but the humour all flows from the situations, whether it be the Doctor's other console rooms (I want to see the McConsole Room™ now) or the TARDIS translation circuit malfunction that renders speech more… idiomatically than before. The one funny bit that doesn't quite fit in is the bit with three priests (trying not to spoil anything here). But that is so funny - and so incongruous - that it works, even though it could easily have fallen into the too-common trap of mistaking a reference for an actual joke.

The characterisation is spot-on as well. Lawrence catches Peri's voice perfectly, and his Sixth Doctor is definitely Colin Baker (although the character here is closer to the TV series than to the more nuanced portrayal in the audio stories - understandably, as this was written in 2002, when the audios hadn't been going that long). At times the Doctor seems almost too verbose, but then this is a Doctor whose defining writers were Pip & Jane Baker, and the fact that nobody else talks like that shows it as a stylistic choice rather than a tin ear.

It's a first novel, with all that that entails, and Lawrence's influences are clear (and he thanks Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgements, if it hadn't been obvious) - I'm sure the use of Mictlan here is at least in part a reference to its use in the Faction Paradox books - but while this doesn't rise to the level of the very best Doctor Who books, it's funny, clever, well-written and written by someone with an obvious love for his subjects - both Doctor Who and pre-Columbian Mexica culture - and is certainly better than a good 90% of the Doctor Who books I've read.

Now if only Air France hadn’t lost my bag with my DVD of The Aztecs in, I could do a compare / contrast here. Oh well…

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to a non-fan of Doctor Who, but it's an excellent self-contained story which requires a minimum of continuity knowledge, so if you're even a casual fan - especially if you're a fan of the Sixth Doctor, who's otherwise even worse-served in print than on TV - this is well worth a read. I'll definitely be buying Lawrence's book of short stories.

So there you go - that all seems fair. It's available here if anyone's tempted.

Finally, I should probably stress for the benefit of the three of you to whom this might make any sense, although Smoking Mirror shares a setting with Against Nature, it's a distant ancestor rather than a direct relative, and certainly isn't the first draft of the more recent title.

Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers

Back in 2008 I embarked upon a slightly obsessive course of reviewing more or less every science-fiction novel I read, slowly branching out to incorporate comic books and things that you would only term science-fiction by a very loose definition. I posted these reviews as a thread first on one forum, then moving onto another, finally granting them their own blog and taking the opportunity to change the overarching title from Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers to Pamphlets of Destiny.

It's now been five years, and I've collected all of this material dating to December 2012 into a chunky Lulu paperback in order to sell it to you. So that's 308 occasionally opinionated reviews of novels, short story collections, a couple of non-fiction titles, comic books, and one CD which I hated so much I just had to squeeze out that poison; and that's including thirty-six Philip K. Dick novels, twenty-two by Clifford D. Simak, fifteen by A.E. van Vogt and twelve from Michael Moorcock. The reviews vary from rambling autobiography and general examinations of my own navel to mini-essays and rants, and as a single body of work could probably be regarded as a biased history of science-fiction literature in no particular order if you felt so inclined.

Accordingly there are reviews and thoughts on a great many of the classics from Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells; and arguably more literary classics such as Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Dracula, Plato's Republic, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comic History, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais; and William Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre and Will Self who didn't quite seem to fit but I wrote about them anyway; and not forgetting - deep breath - Poul Anderson, Neal Asher, Margaret Attwood, Iain M. Banks, Clive Barker, Greg Bear, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Ray Bradbury, Eric Brown, John Brunner, Simon Bucher-Jones, Algis Budrys, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Octavia Butler, Michael Chabon, Michael Crichton, August Derleth, David Louis Edelman, Joe Haldeman, Peter F. Hamilton, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Mark Hodder, Fred Hoyle, L. Ron Hubbard, Aldous Huxley, Ursula LeGuin, Fritz Leiber, Murray Leinster, C.S. Lewis, David Lindsay, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine MacLean, Ken MacLeod, Richard Matheson, Anne McCaffrey, John Meaney, Lawrence Miles, Mark Millar, Frank Miller, Walter M. Miller Jr., Pat Mills, Grant Morrison, Jim Mortimore, Ray Nelson, Larry Niven, Daniel O'Mahony, Marc Platt, Terry Pratchett, Christopher Priest, Lester del Rey, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carl Sagan, Richard S. Shaver, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, Clark Ashton Smith, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, John Smith, Olaf Stapledon, Jim Starlin, Brad Steiger, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Dave Stone, Charles Stross, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter Tevis, E.C. Tubb, Vernor Vinge and Yevgeny Zamyatin to name but the ones of whom you will have heard...

It's expensive because that's the nature of print-on-demand vanity publishing I'm afraid, so it's hardly a casual purchase, but if you've read and enjoyed any of my reviews, it should keep you going for a good few weeks, or it can be used as a defensive weapon as one might use a house brick; and I've tarted up the crappy grammar of the material originally posted on the Faction Paradox forum. The faint of heart should probably be warned that I'm not a massive fan of steampunk (Mark Hodder excepted), Neil Gaiman, Doctor Who since 2005, or the short stories of Brian Aldiss, and I got a bit carried away in places, at least where those specific founts of unmitigated shite were concerned; also I personally thought Stephenie Meyer's Twilight pissed all over Bram Stoker's surprisingly tedious Dracula, a view which I am aware some may find irritating. Oh - and there are almost certainly sexual swearwords.

Buy Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers here.