Fireball XL5 vs Alien; Time Team with Sapphire & Steel; Doomwatch and Danger Man! Today we cover The Curse of Fanfic – a charity anthology of mad fan fiction and crossovers which is only available in paperback until 1st September 2020 through pre-order (an ebook may follow). And we have reviews of two Philip José Farmer specials from Meteor House, A Rough Knight for the Queen and the far more serious Up From the Bottomless Pit…
THE CURSE OF FANFIC
Edited by Paul Castle, Obverse Books
Paperback, £12.95
obverse books – curse of fanfic
Reviewed by Dave Brzeski
How exactly does one get away with publishing an anthology of fan fiction, featuring crossovers with assorted characters from TV shows that are very much under copyright? Fanfic, as it is more commonly referred to, is tolerated to some extent, as long as it’s not profited from. The only way a publisher can possibly get away with it is when it’s for charity – which is the case here. None of the writers, the editor, nor the publisher will make a single penny from the proceeds of this book, and they won’t even receive a free copy – if they want one, they have to buy it. They really just did it out of sheer, unadulterated love. Only the printers and postal agencies will be paid for their professional services.
All profits from The Curse of Fanfic go to Parkinson’s UK, a charity that tirelessly researches the possibility of a cure for Parkinson’s Disease, the illness that eventually led to the death of the editor’s father, Donald John Castle, in 2017. It’s a great cause. My grandfather suffered from that disease too. It’s not something you’d wish on anyone.
A quick look at the assorted characters gives the impression that this book is going to be rather silly. This is not unusual as comedy and charities for very serious causes have long gone hand in hand. For my part, I saw “Steve Zodiac and the Alien Facehuggers” in the website description and immediately asked the publisher for an advance copy, so I could help promote it.
Paul Castle writes a brief, but very moving foreword about Parkinson’s and its effect on his father, and thus himself. I’d pretty much decided I would buy a hard copy for myself at this point. An introduction follows in which he talks about how many authors get their start writing fanfic and covering the copyright issues.
There are far too many stories in this collection for me to cover them all, so I will limit myself to the ones that were my personal highlights. However, I feel I would be doing the book a disservice if I didn’t at least list the full contents, so here it is…
- The Addams Family, The Monkees and The Beatles
- Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game
- Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z
- Doomwatch and Danger Man
- Eerie Indiana
- Fireball XL5 vs Alien
- The Goodies and Space: 1999
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Inspector Gadget
- Jonathan Creek and Jason King
- Knight Rider and Airwolf
- Lost in Space
- Match of the Day and The Omega Factor
- The Nanny and Super Mario Bros.
- Only Fools and Horses and Dynasty
- The Persuaders!
- Quick Draw McGraw and Brisco County Jr
- Red Dwarf in Man Alive
- Sooty & Co. with Iris Wildthyme
- Time Team with Sapphire & Steel
- UFO
- Van der Valk and Doctor Who
- Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen
- The X-Files and Rentaghost
- The Young Ones
- Zorro and The Wild Wild West
As can be seen, most stories involve crossovers of some sort, but not all of them.
I used the word ‘silly’ above advisedly. Anna Maloney proved my point pretty well with her contribution… The Addams Family in ‘Monkees and Beatles and Addamses, Oh My!’ It’s Wednesday Addams’ birthday and her parents have booked two of the most popular musical groups of the sixties to play at her party. The trouble is, they were under the impression that they were bands of performing monkeys and beetles! There’s an inspired mash-up of the lyrics of ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Last Train to Clarksville’, which left me wishing it existed on a disc somewhere. I have to say that, in my head, I saw this more as an episode of the 1973 animated version of The Addams Family.
Basil Brush and Larry Grayson’s Generation Game in ‘The Fox Files’ is very clever. Author Paul Magrs hints at an X-Files crossover in the title, but it isn’t. Mulder and Scully, however, weren’t the only people to have investigated alien incursions. He we see Basil and his manservant Chummers (Chummers and the concept of Basil Brush as a detective of sorts were introduced in the comic strip version, which appeared in the UK weekly, TV Comic) taking on some familiar aliens on behalf of a certain branch of the UK military, devoted to dealing with alien problems. This one is really fun, as I would expect from a writer of Magrs’ calibre.
The thing about fanfic is that it does rather rely on the reader’s familiarity with the characters. Cutie Honey and Mazinger Z are early 1970s Manga comic book creations of Go Nagai, and both made a quick transition to anime television series. Despite Nagai’s tendency to write crossovers with his characters, these two had apparently never enjoyed a significant clash before this. Doesn’t mean a thing to this reader, I’m afraid. Never read the Manga, never saw the anime.
In Cutie Honey vs Mazinger Z in ‘Flash Forward!’, Kara Dennison (an author as unfamiliar to me as the characters she writes about) gives us a useful little introduction that serves well to introduce the characters. As for the story itself… I. Loved. It! Look, I’m not a huge fan of manga, or anime, albeit I do like some of the less cartoony stuff (Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima, Ryoichi Ikegami, Masamune Shirow etc.) but this was gripping.
I note that Kara Dennison has contributed to Paul Magrs’ Iris Wildthyme series, which is something I’ve long wanted to get into.
Having recently read and reviewed The Immortal Seaton Begg, I’m fairly confident that I would have known that Doomwatch and Danger Man in ‘Tomorrow (’s World) the (Roland) Rat’ was by Simon Bucher-Jones, even had I not seen his name on it. There are a handful of authors I know, who simply can’t resist throwing in a few oblique crossover references in their work that don’t really affect the story, but provide an added level of interest for those who get it. Win Scott Eckert and Frank Schildiner immediately come to mind. Bucher-Jones is definitely of this ilk, and names like Bernard Quatermass and ‘Q’ (of James Bond fame) are casually name-dropped here. Others are more subtle and not everyone will pick up on them. I’m pretty sure I missed at least one myself.
Tobias Wren is at the Tomorrow’s World studio, investigating a suspicion that not all of the super-intelligent rats from the Doomwatch episode, ‘Tomorrow, the Rat’ have been destroyed. Dangerman, John Drake is sent to assist. If we are to believe Bucher-Jones, we finally have definitive proof that John Drake is not the same man who ended up incarcerated in The Village… or do we? A chat I had with the author revealed that he had to cut a section which folded in The Prisoner, due to his having had to work to a strict word count. Now I really want to read the uncut version!
Fireball XL5 vs Alien in ‘Alien Encounter’ is the story that hooked me in the first place. As such, author John Peel was well-placed to disappoint me. I shouldn’t have worried. Peel did an excellent job of rationalising some of the dodgy science in the original Supermarionation puppet show, giving them force fields to go along with the oxygen pills they took to allow them to breath without an atmosphere. If I had one small complaint it’s that he pretty much ignored the acid blood aspect of the Xenomorphs. We all know that Robert the Robot was made of a very hardy plastic, otherwise his outer skin wouldn’t have been transparent, but I would have expected some mention of the fact that the facehugger’s blood was dissolving the metal spar Robert used to defend Venus from them. Even so, I still loved it. It’ll obviously never happen, but I’d love to see this story adapted for television by the folks responsible for the Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet revivals.
Knight Rider and Airwolf in ‘Knight and Hawke’ is one of the longer stories. I was more familiar with Knight Rider, having never actually watched Airwolf. However it was one of my favourites in this collection. Genuinely exciting, albeit we’re left at the point where the newly teamed-up heroes go off in search of the bad guy – leaving me wanting more.
Most of this book is dedicated to that most popular area of fanfic, that of crossovers between two properties whose copyright owners are unrelated. In the case of John S. Drew’s Lost in Space fanfic, in ‘The Times they are a-Changin’, we have another trope of the form – that of a story written specifically to address an unexplained detail in the original series. This time it’s why exactly Preplanus, the Robinson’s adoptive home of the first series, disintegrates, forcing them to relocate. I will risk a spoiler by revealing that it was Doctor Zachary Smith’s fault.
There are no crossovers in Liz Evershed’s Red Dwarf in ‘Man Alive’, other than the use of the title of Man Alive, which was a documentary show, presented by Esther Rantzen amongst others, which ran in the UK from 1965 to 1982. It is, however, one of the better stories in the book.
It makes a refreshing change when the good guys, who take on the task of fixing inter-temporal/dimensional screw-ups actually seem to know what they’re doing! I very much enjoyed Time Team with Sapphire & Steel in ‘A Matter of Time’ by Jenny Shirt. One could complain that Tony Robinson accepted what was going on rather too easily, but this, I suspect, was simply down to word-count limits.
UFO in ‘The Other 1980s’ by Adrian Sherlock has Ed Straker, Commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation, transported to an alternate universe by a UFO – our universe! He is horrified with the England of this alternate 80s, especially the ‘Big Brother Sister’ like woman who appeared to be in charge of a nation that had seriously lost his way. He is thankful to escape back to a world under siege from alien invaders. This is not going to appeal to staunch Tories (or Republicans in the USA for that matter). I loved it!
Worzel Gummidge and The League of Gentlemen in ‘The Story of Worzel of Scatterbrook Farm and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Royston Vasey’ certainly looked set to be one of my favourite stories in this collection. Author Dan Barratt didn’t let me down – it’s every bit as terrifyingly insane as I’d hoped.
As I said, those were my personal favourites. The others were good, but if I had any criticism, it’s that many were simply shorter than I would have liked. I suspect this was down to space restrictions and possibly limitations set by the copyright owners.
I can not review The Curse of Fanfic without mentioning the fabulous artwork by Paul Cooke on the covers plus a few internal illustrations.
In conclusion, this is a fun book, featuring so many mash-ups between popular characters that it’s unlikely that anyone wouldn’t find most of it of interest.
It’s for a great cause, so I encourage everyone to go pre-order it now, as once pre-orders close on September 1st, you won’t be able to get a copy.
Get it here: the curse of fanfic
UP FROM THE BOTTOMLESS PIT
Philip José Farmer, Meteor House
Paperback $20.00
Reviewed by Dave Brzeski
It’s that time of year again. Under normal circumstances, Meteor House would be launching their new books for 2020 at Farmercon. For obvious reasons, this is now not happening; albeit a virtual version of Farmercon is now planned – just search on Virtual Farmercon XV (2020) for details.
Up From the Bottomless Pit has been previously published, initially as a serial in the first ten issues of the Farmerphile fanzine, published by Meteor House’s Michael Croteau, and then in the huge hardcover collection from Subterranean Press, Up From the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories, which is also now available as an ebook in the USA (sadly, not in the UK for copyright reasons). This, however, is the first ever affordable trade paperback edition.
After a brief foreword by Christopher Paul Carey on the context and publishing history, we get an introduction – subtitled ‘The Ides of March’ – by Sharman Apt Russell. She writes of the prophetic nature of Farmer’s book and that “Most of us feel that we are living at the beginning of an apocalyptic novel, in a state of foreshadow and suspense.” Russell states that the reader will know much more about what has happened in the World since she wrote this introduction on March 15, 2020 – literally the Ides of March.
Up From the Bottomless Pit is not about a global pandemic, neither is it about the erosion of human rights. Before those things became the huge issues they are now, we were seeing evidence of an environmental catastrophe that may well already be beyond any hope of averting, even if all the nations of the World would accept it and agree to work together to save the planet. Sadly, that sort of cooperation is a pipe dream. Our leaders appear to be far more concerned with increasing their personal power and wealth than looking after the people who have to try to survive after they’re all gone.
I, of course, refer to the ever-present – and much denied by those who refuse to open their eyes – threat of global warming. In Up From the Bottomless Pit, however, Farmer brings things to a head even faster in the form of something easy to believe could happen – a catastrophic oil industry accident, which threatens all life on Earth.
America needs oil, and they need to be free from the yoke of dealing with those who have it. Despite the protestations of environmental agencies, they plan on drilling with their new lasers off the shore of Los Angeles. There’s no cause for alarm. After all, the problems caused by the previous minor earthquake were easily enough dealt with, and they had new equipment which could handle 50% higher blowout pressure than ever before. Far more than they could ever envision needing.
They were so very wrong! That’s no spoiler. Had that not been the case, there’s be no book. It’s in the meticulously researched details of just how overwhelmingly, horrifically wrong they were that Farmer scores here. That this is all well within the bounds of possibility, is truly terrifying.
James Cable is an engineer for Cal-Pax, a California based oil company. He’s a conservative Republican, and to a great extent, he shares some responsibility for the disaster. On the other hand, he’s a beacon of common sense in the battle to halt the momentum of an unimaginable shitstorm, which could destroy all life on the planet. Farmer makes much depressing use of politics and religion to put obstacles in his way. At the time it was written, some may have thought he was exaggerating the stupidity of people. In recent years it’s become pretty plain that he actually toned it down somewhat.
There’s a long sequence, which follows Cable and others as they try to evacuate the city while hurricanes & firestorms rage toward them. It’s one of the most gripping, edge of the seat pieces of writing I’ve ever read. Eventually, Cable returns to his new position as head engineer of the Bureau of Crises, and takes charge of Project Glory Hole. They battle to cap the huge gusher, all the while having to deal with interference from the money men and sabotage from crazy religious groups. There’s no happy ending. We leave the story at the end of one battle in a crisis that will take much, much longer to reverse. If, indeed, it can be reversed.
That Farmer managed to create such an entertaining thriller story out of a situation made more depressing by events that have occurred since he wrote it, is testament to how great a writer he was.
A ROUGH KNIGHT FOR THE QUEEN
Philip José Farmer, Meteor House
Hardcover $40.00, Paperback $15.00
The excellent cover and frontispiece are by Charles Berlin. The fact that we have this book at all is apparently down to Craig Kimber, who owned the only copy of the manuscript and was not obliged to share it with the world. We should all be truly grateful.
I’ve read non-fiction by Philip José Farmer before, that is to say I’ve read fictional non-fiction if you like, in his fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage. There are also many interesting essays, convention speeches etc. amongst Farmer’s published canon. This, however, is his only full-length non-fiction work, although at only 100 pages or so it’s not especially long.
The book opens with ‘Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Erudite Adventurer’, in which Michael Walton (author of Sir Richard Burton and his Circle) gives us a useful overview of Burton’s relationship with fantasy, and how he appealed to Farmer. I, in common with (I suspect) many readers, have long been aware of Burton, but have never really taken the time to actually read his works. Indeed, my introduction to Burton was as a character in Farmer’s acclaimed Riverworld series. This introduction alone goes some way toward making me wish to redress that oversight.
Mark Hodder – another author who employed Burton to great effect as a character in his excellent Burton and Swinburne series – supplies the next introductory piece in ‘Philip José Farmer: The Liminal Writer’. Here we are shown how Burton’s ‘liminal’ nature, that of ever being between two worlds, never quite belonging to either, made him an ideal fit for Farmer’s (and Hodder’s) fiction.
Editor, Paul Spiteri brings both threads together in the final introductory piece – ‘Burton and Farmer: Incredible Adventures and Eternal Writings’. Here we discover the history of ‘A Rough Knight For the Queen’, originally written for a men’s magazine. The first book publication was in the collection of Farmer rarities, entitled Pearls From Peoria (Subterranean Press 2006). This is the first separate book publication, re-edited (Farmer never had a chance to proof the original) and with additional footnotes by Paul Spiteri.
As with Up From the Bottomless Pit, I had some concerns as to how entertaining a read this might be. With the former, it was the ‘too close to reality’ nature of the story which could have led to it being too depressing. Here it’s the fact that it’s a biography of an historical figure. Would it turn out to be a bit dry? On the other hand, I was aware that Richard Burton led, to say the least, an interesting life, and it’s written by Farmer. I’m pleased to say that it reads like a short novel, and a very entertaining one at that, all the while being as informative and well researched as a biography should be.
In fact, it occurred to me while reading that it would have just needed the addition of some dialogue, the fleshing out (fictionalising) of certain aspects of the story that are sparse of detail, due to there being little documented proof of events, and this could easily have been expanded to an adventure novel, which could have even stretched to more than a single book.
Other, earlier posts on Philip José Farmer can be found elsewhere on greydogtales, such as here:
