SF Luminaries: John Wyndham

John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (1951 / 2009)

Plan for Chaos is a very odd book. It's certainly not without interest. However, I think one can see why no publishers actually leapt at the chance of putting it out back in the early 1950s when veteran Sci-fi writer Frederik Pohl (then moonlighting as a literary agent for John Wyndham and various other clients) was shopping it around New York.

There's the Nazi angle. In that respect, it serves as a precursor to Philip K. Dick's alternative history classic The Man in the High Castle (1962), or - for that matter - M. K. Joseph's Tomorrow the World, written in the late 1970s but only published posthumously in 2020.

There's the evil clone angle. In some ways it's very like Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976), only this time with flying saucers thrown in: quite a novel plot-twist for 1951, given that the expression wasn't actually coined until 1947, as a result of Kenneth Arnold's claim that the objects he saw on June 24 of that year "moved like saucers skipping across the water."

Amazing Stories (1946)

One can see so much in it, and yet it somehow doesn't quite work - it isn't visceral, actual, like his breakthrough title The Day of the Triffids (1951), or even its successor The Kraken Wakes (1953).

I'm not sure how much I need to say about them. I wrote a piece focussing on my early reading of The Day of the Triffids, in particular, in the introduction to my New Zealand Speculative Fiction website. I doubt that it's necessary to repeat all that here.

John Beynon: The Secret People (1935)

Nevertheless, having recently reread as much of his earlier work as I can easily access, it is facinating to see how many false starts one writer can have before settling into their mature style. There are flashes of Wyndham in all of the early novels, but the instinctively colonial attitudes displayed in both The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936) seem pretty repellent now.

John Beynon: Planet Plane (1936)

The John Wyndham heroine - smart, stylish, witty - familiar from later books begins to make an appearance quite early on, which is really the main attraction of these pre-war pulp serials and short stories. For those curious about how he came to create this character in the first place, Amy Binns' recent biography provides a number of new insights.

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that without her book, the so-called "invisible man of Science Fiction" would have remained a shadowy figure, accessible only through his witty prose and a set of curiously repetitive ideas. Fatherless children, wiser than their elders (Chocky, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos); alien invasions of the British countryside ("The Puff-Ball menace", The Day of the Triffids, Trouble with Lichen); the oppressive nature of conventional domesticity ("Dumb Martian," "Survival," "Compassion Circuit") ... Binns supplies vital information about Jack Harris's early life which make seem these far less unaccountable.

But literary talent is, of course, not readily reducible to any such set of causes. Why did it take him so long to break through? Why did he persevere in the face of such steady discouragement? Where did those Triffids really come from?

H. G. Wells: SF Masterworks Series

We'll never know. It is, however, safe to say that without H. G. Wells, there would have been no John Wyndham. So many of his ideas - not to mention the ease of his story telling - find their roots in the vast turbulent sea of Wells's oeuvre (particularly the early SF romances and short stories). But Wyndham is not Wells: he lacks his didactic bent, and has a healthy cynicism about the expression of great ideas. His appeal was to as much to the readers of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse as it was to hard-core Sci-fi fans.

I suppose that John Wyndham's real tragedy was that his success came so late, and that he died so young. But then, that's more our tragedy than his. There's no doubt that he had more to say, but the few books he did write remain classics of the genre. The fact that they're still in print after half a century rather speaks for itself.

The John Wyndham Omnibus (1979)

A great deal of incidental information about him is available online at the John Wyndham Archive website. Beyond that, much though I would recommend Amy Binns's well-written and insightful biography, your first stopping-place should be the books themselves - from the Triffids onwards, at any rate. If you don't find them charming and absorbing at first sight, chances are he's not for you.

Brian AldissBillion Year Spree (1973)

In his 1973 history of the SF genre, Billion (later revised to 'Trillion') Year Spree, Brian Aldiss described John Wyndham's breakout books as ‘cosy catastrophes’:

Both novels [The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes] were totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, who enjoyed cosy disasters. Either it was something to do with the collapse of the British Empire, or the back-to-nature movement, or a general feeling that industrialization had gone too far, or all three.

Aldiss goes on to describe the characteristics of this ‘urbane and pleasing’ SF subgenre as follows:

The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off … Such novels are anxiety fantasies. They shade off towards the greater immediacy of World War III novels, a specialist branch of catastrophe more usually practiced by American writers.

He concludes with a rather premature epitaph on Wyndham and his ilk: ‘the race is not always to the swift, etc.’ Unfortunately, such dismissive judgements on a possible trade rival can cut both ways. Has Brian Aldiss himself fared much better?

Who (besides myself) now reads Non-stop (1958) or Hothouse (1962)? Who wades through The Malacia Tapestry or the Helliconia trilogy? Who remembers that one of Stanley Kubrick’s last film projects was an adaptation of Aldiss’s short story ‘Super-Toys Last All Season Long,’ which he delegated instead to Steven Spielberg, who turned it into the flawed, though not uninteresting, A.I.?

Steven Spielberg, dir.: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

John Wyndham, by contrast, continues to be read. It seems safe to say now that he probably always will be. Aldiss's rather self-conscious attempts to be mod and up-to-the-minute sound even more uncomfortably dated now than what he saw as Wyndham's perverse determination to write "a kind of country-house science fiction."

And, as Hilaire Belloc once put it, speaking (perhaps) for all such writers who pop in and out of fashion with the passing years:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

Amy Binns: Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters (2019)

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John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
(1903-1969)

[His work appeared under a variety of pseudonyms, mostly constructed from his various initials: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, John B. Harris, Johnson Harris, J. W. B. Harris, Lucas Parkes, Wyndham Parkes, & John Wyndham among them]

Novels:


1. [as 'John B. Harris']: The Curse of the Burdens. Aldine Mystery Novels No. 17 (London: Aldine Publishing Co. Ltd. 1927)


2. [as 'John Beynon']: The Secret People (1935)
   • The Secret People. 1935. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1972.


3. Foul Play Suspected (London: Newnes, 1935)


4. Planet Plane [aka 'The Space Machine'] (1936)
   • Stowaway to Mars. 1935. Coronet Books. 1972. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1977.


5. [as 'John Wyndham']: The Day of the Triffids [aka 'Revolt of the Triffids']. 1951. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.


6. The Kraken Wakes [aka 'Out of the Deeps']. 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


7. The Chrysalids [aka 'Re-Birth']. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.


8. The Midwich Cuckoos. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.


9. Trouble with Lichen. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


10. Chocky. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


11. Web. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.


12. Plan for Chaos. Ed. David Ketterer & Andy Sawyer. 2009. Introduction by Christopher Priest. London: Penguin, 2010.


Short Story Collections:


13. Jizzle. 1954. Four Square. London: New English Library, 1973.
    1. Jizzle
    2. Technical Slip
    3. A Present from Brunswick
    4. Chinese Puzzle
    5. Esmeralda
    6. How Do I Do?
    7. Una
    8. Affair of the Heart
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. The Wheel
    11. Look Natural, Please!
    12. Perforce to Dream
    13. Reservation Deferred
    14. Heaven Scent
    15. More Spinned Against


14. The Seeds of Time. 1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
    1. Foreword by John Wyndham
    2. Chronoclasm
    3. Time To Rest
    4. Meteor
    5. Survival
    6. Pawley's Peepholes
    7. Opposite Number
    8. Pillar To Post
    9. Dumb Martian
    10. Compassion Circuit
    11. Wild Flower


15. Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter [US selection from 'Jizzle' and 'The Seeds of Time'] (1956)
    1. Chinese Puzzle
    2. Una
    3. The Wheel
    4. Jizzle
    5. Heaven Scent
    6. Compassion Circuit
    7. More Spinned Against
    8. A Present from Brunswick
    9. Confidence Trick
    10. Opposite Numbers
    11. Wild Flower


16. [with 'Lucas Parkes']: The Outward Urge. 1959 & 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
    1. The Space Station A.D. 1994 [aka 'For All the Night'] (1958)
    2. The Moon A.D. 2044 [aka 'Idiot’s Delight'] (1958)
    3. Mars A.D. 2094 [aka 'The Thin Gnat-Voices'] (1958)
    4. Venus A.D. 2144 [aka 'Space Is a Province of Brazil'] (1958)
    5. The Asteroids A.D. 2194 [aka 'The Emptiness of Space'] (1960)


17. Consider Her Ways and Others. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. Stitch in Time
    4. Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty?
    5. Random Quest
    6. A Long Spoon


18. The Infinite Moment [US edition of 'Consider Her Ways and Others', with two stories replaced] (1961)
    1. Consider Her Ways
    2. Odd
    3. How Do I Do
    4. Stitch In Time
    5. Random Quest
    6. Time Out


19. The Best of John Wyndham. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Lost Machine (1932)
    2. The Man from Beyond (1934)
    3. The Perfect Creature (1937)
    4. The Trojan Beam (1939)
    5. Vengeance by Proxy (1940)
    6. Adaptation (1949)
    7. Pawley's Peepholes (1951)
    8. The Red Stuff (1951)
    9. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1951)
    10. Dumb Martian (1952)
    11. Close Behind Him (1952)
    12. The Emptiness of Space (1960)


20. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Sleepers of Mars. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Fate of the Martians, by Walter Gillings
    2. Sleepers of Mars (1939)
    3. Worlds to Barter (1931)
    4. Invisible Monster (1933)
    5. The Man from Earth (1934)
    6. The Third Vibrator (1933)


21. [as ‘John Beynon Harris’]: Wanderers of Time. Introduction by Walter Gillings. Coronet Books. 1973. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1974.
    1. Before the Triffids, by Walter Gillings
    2. Wanderers of Time [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
    3. Derelict of Space (1939)
    4. Child of Power (1939)
    5. The Last Lunarians (1934)
    6. The Puff-Ball Menace [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)


22. [as ‘John Beynon’]: Exiles on Asperus. Coronet Books. 1979. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1980.
    1. Exiles on Asperus (1933)
    2. No Place Like Earth (1951)
    3. The Venus Adventure (1932)


23. No Place Like Earth [Some stories previously published in 'Jizzle', 'The Seeds of Time', 'Consider Her Ways and Others', Wanderers of Time' and 'Exiles on Asperus'] (2003)
    1. Derelict of Space
    2. Time to Rest
    3. No Place Like Earth
    4. In Outer Space There Shone a Star
    5. But a Kind of a Ghost
    6. The Cathedral Crypt
    7. A Life Postponed
    8. Technical Slip
    9. Una
    10. It's a Wise Child
    11. Pillar to Post
    12. The Stare
    13. Time Stops Today
    14. The Meddler
    15. Blackmoil
    16. A Long Spoon

Short stories:

[Included in Jizzle (1954); The Seeds of Time (1956);
Consider Her Ways and Others / The Infinite Moment {CW / IM} (1961);
Sleepers of Mars / Wanderers of Time / Exiles on Asperus {SM / WT / EA} (1973, 1974, 1979);
The Best of John Wyndham / No Place Like Earth {Best / NPE} (1973, 2003)]


1. Worlds to Barter {SM} (1931)
2. The Lost Machine {Best} (1932)
3. The Stare {NPE} (1932)
4. The Venus Adventure {EA} (1932)
5. Exiles on Asperus {EA} (1933)
6. Invisible Monster {SM} (1933)
7. The Puff-Ball Menace {WT} [aka 'Spheres of Hell'] (1933)
8. The Third Vibrator {SM} (1933)
9. Wanderers of Time {WT} [aka 'Love in Time'] (1933)
10. The Man from Earth {SM} [aka 'The Man from Beyond' {Best}] (1934)
11. The Last Lunarians {WT} [aka 'The Moon Devils'] (1934)
12. The Cathedral Crypt {NPE} (1935)
13. The Perfect Creature {Best} (1937)
14. Judson's Annihilator [aka 'Beyond the Screen'] (1938)
15. Sleepers of Mars {SM} (1938)
16. Child of Power {WT} (1939)
17. Derelict of Space {WT} {NPE} (1939)
18. The Trojan Beam {Best} (1939)
19. Vengeance by Proxy {Best} (1940)
20. Meteor (1941)
21. The Living Lies (1946)
22. Technical Slip {NPE} (1949)
23. Jizzle (1949)
24. Adaptation {Best} (1949)
25. Time to Rest {NPE} (1949)
26. The Eternal Eve (1950)
27. Pawley's Peepholes {Best} (1951)
28. The Red Stuff {Best} (1951)
29. No Place Like Earth {EA} {NPE} [aka 'Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus'] (1951)
30. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down {Best} (1951)
31. A Present from Brunswick [aka 'Bargain from Brunswick'] (1951)
32. Pillar to Post {NPE} (1951)
33. The Wheel (1952)
34. Survival (1952)
35. Dumb Martian {Best} (1952)
36. Time Out {IM} (1953)
37. Close Behind Him {Best} (1953)
38. Time Stops Today {NPE} (1953)
39. Chinese Puzzle [aka 'A Stray from Cathay'] (1953)
40. Chronoclasm (1953)
41. Reservation Deferred (1953)
42. More Spinned Against (1953)
43. Confidence Trick (1953)
44. How Do I Do? {IM} (1953)
45. Affair of the Heart (1954)
46. Esmeralda (1954)
47. Heaven Scent (1954)
48. Look Natural, Please! (1954)
49. Never on Mars (1954)
50. Perforce to Dream (1954)
51. Una {NPE} (1954)
52. Opposite Number (1954)
53. Compassion Circuit (1954)
54. Wild Flower (1955)
55. Consider Her Ways {CW / IM} (1956)
56. But a Kind of Ghost {NPE} (1957)
57. The Meddler {NPE} (1958)
58. For All the Night [aka 'The Space Station A.D. 1994' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
59. Idiot’s Delight [aka 'The Moon A.D. 2044' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
60. The Thin Gnat-Voices [aka 'Mars A.D. 2094' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
61. Space Is a Province of Brazil [aka 'Venus A.D. 2144' - from The Outward Urge] (1958)
62. A Long Spoon {CW} {NPE} (1960)
63. The Emptiness of Space [aka 'The Asteroids A.D. 2194' - from The Outward Urge] {Best} (1960)
64. Odd {CW / IM} (1961)
65. Oh, Where, Now, Is Peggy MacRafferty? {CW} (1961)
66. Random Quest {CW / IM} (1961)
67. Stitch in Time {CW / IM} (1961)
68. It's a Wise Child {NPE} (1962)
69. Chocky (1963)
70. In Outer Space There Shone a Star {NPE} (1965)
71. A Life Postponed {NPE} (1968)
72. 'Phase Two': Excerpt (1973)
73. Vivisection (2000)
74. Blackmoil {NPE} (2003)

Secondary:


24. Amy Binns. Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters. London: Grace Judson Press, 2019.

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John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (2009)

Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)

Crystal

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is the fifteenth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum. Ten years ago I put up a post which listed five major web projects I'd undertaken in the first five years of the blog's existence, and five years ago I published a follow-up, with five more projects undertaken between 2011 and 2016.

The statistics on the blog are interesting. It took till December 2018 for it to break the "Million-hit Barrier", and another two years after that to reap another quarter million hits, so I guess I must be averaging a fairly consistent 125,000 per year (10,400 per month / 2,400 per week / 340 per day). I only have 100-odd followers, so there must be a pretty consistent number of returns on online searches to build up that amount of traffic.

Pageviews (6/12/2018)

Comments are way down from what they used to be. I don't take that too personally, as that seems to be the case for most blogs nowadays - certainly ones that include moderation. I get a large number of comments from spammers pretending to be successful members of the Illuminati every since I put up a mildly sarcastic post on the subject a few years ago now ("Worried about the Illuminati?"). You'd think that the date it was posted - April 1, 2016 - would offer some clue to its nature, but apparently not.

My web-based endeavours do seem to have slowed down a bit, but there are still some reasonably substantial ones to list below. Here they are, then, in (rough) chronological order:

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2016:




1. (December 2, 2016- ) Jack Ross: Showcase.



This ... is meant more as a vitrine than a catalogue: the closest simulacrum I can achieve online to my own personal cabinet of curiosities.

- Jack Ross. "Site-map" (2016)

For a long time now I've maintained a large, quite complex site called Works and Days as a combination curriculum vitae / comprehensive list of publications (and reviews of same). Even I find it a bit difficult to navigate at times, though, so I decided to make a more streamlined showcase site where I could display my major publications in a convenient, easy-to-reference style.

The idea is to maintain both sites in tandem: to put everything of interest on the first site, and to select only those few details likely to concern others on the second. It's a bit difficult to gauge the success of the endeavour so far, but I do feel the medley of covers and titles combine to make an attractive design.




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2017:




2. (September 19, 2017- ) Paper Table.



A few years ago I participated in a fairly haphazard and poorly organised book fair ... The book table that I was helping out at was decorated with a selection of paper models I had made, designed to catch people’s attention, make our table seem more welcoming, and hopefully generate a few sales as a result ...
At a certain point in the day, a little girl approached us. She was about eight years old and she asked if she could buy the paper table from our display. She held out $15.00 to pay for it. Of course, I gladly gave her the table for free, and for some time afterwards I glimpsed her walking around the large room, the paper table carefully balanced on the palm of her hand, staring at it with an expression of utter delight.

- Bronwyn Lloyd. "Mission Statement" (2017)

Having published a number of books through our Arts-oriented small publisher Pania Press, Bronwyn Lloyd and I decided to move into fiction publishing with this new endeavour. Specifically, we hoped to put out a series of novellas which could contribute to the richness of this form in New Zealand writing.

Unfortunately the costs and organisation involved proved more than anticipated, and we were forced to suspend the series after the first three volumes had appeared. It was a nice idea while it lasted, though, and we may well return to it at some point in the future if the commercial balance of such initiatives tips our way again.

The three books that did appear were as follows:



• Leicester Kyle. Letters to a Psychiatrist. Afterword by Jack Ross. Paper Table Novellas, 1. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: Draft Research Portfolio. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (i). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (ii). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.




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2018:




3. (September 20, 2017-March 2019) Poetry NZ Review: Local Poetry Books in Review.



As in the print edition of the magazine, there are a lot of opinions on display in the Poetry New Zealand Review. Some of them the editors may happen to agree with, others not. A well-argued point merits its own space, however, and we see our function on this site more as curators than as advocates of particular views.

- Jack Ross. "Guiding Principles" (2017)

I had hoped to make this a more substantial site, featuring year-round reviews of poetry books which weren't able to be fitted in the annual volumes of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. However, my interest in the project began to wane after I decided to give up the managing editorship of the magazine after six years and six issues (five edited by me directly, one edited by Dr Jo Emeney).

It's a shame, as I think it could have been a useful resource for recording the immense stream of published poetry - much of it of high quality - which appears each year in New Zealand from small presses as well as established publishers. Now that Poetry New Zealand has moved to Waikato under Tracey Slaughter's editorship, I feel that I might just leave the site as it is for the present. Who knows? The time may come to revive it in one form or another.




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2019:




4. (October, 2019) The Lonesome Death of Brigid Furey. Ka Mate Ka Ora 17: 62-79.



It is some years now since I tried to contact Bridget Furey, the elusive and enigmatic poet whom Jack Ross discusses in his beguilingly performative essay ‘The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey or: Pessoa Down Under.’ The nearest I got, when I wrote to the only and clearly out-of-date address I had, was to reach Bridget’s older, doting sister, Maud (Maudlin) Furey. Maud replied to me by snail mail (as I had written to Bridget). She explained that her brilliant, but implicitly erratic, sister had long since done with poetry. And the next sentence hinted that she might have long since done with life itself, too. But Maud did not elaborate or unpick her dark hints. All she added was: “I wish she hadn’t!” Then Maud had copied out by hand into the letter a text message, which she said was the last communication she had received, quite a while ago now, from her sister, and that she feared that would be the final: “Out on the margins the oddballs bounce the highest.” And that was all. Except for a PS added in tiny letters (Maud’s hand-writing was very neat and small) beneath her signature: “My sister overdosed on life – I wish I had.”
Bridget Furey’s characteristically enigmatic text comes into sharp and meaningful focus when applied to this issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora. This is an issue of high-bouncing oddballs ...

- Murray Edmond, "Editorial Notes: Out on the Margins the Oddballs Bounce Highest." Ka Mate Ka Ora 17 (October 2019)

This article - in full: "The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey, Or: Pessoa Down Under,” & (ed.) ‘The Complete Poetical Works of Bridget Furey (1966-c.1997)'" - started off as a paper on the influence of Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa on a number of Antipodean writers, which I delivered in mid-2018 at the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in English in Lisbon, Portugal.

I had originally intended to write it up for the Conference Proceedings, but the editors felt (not unreasonably) that it was more focussed on poetry than short fiction. I therefore rewrote it substantially for our local New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Ka Mate Ka Ora, based at my old alma mater the University of Auckland.




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2020:




5. (January 1, 2018 - September 4, 2020) NZSF: The Psychogeography of New Zealand Speculative Fiction.



George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster were great admirers of the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian literature that would culminate in works by Jack Ross, William Direen, Alan Marshall and Scott Hamilton.

- "Samuel Butler (novelist)." Wikipedia (accessed 17 August 2020)

I originally planned to collect all the various articles and reviews I've written about NZSF between covers as a rather discursive history of the topic, but the publishers I submitted it to seemed to feel that it fell between two stools: two nerdy to appeal to "general readers" (whoever they may be), and too anecdotal and personal to please an Academic public.

However, I think they might have done me a favour, as I feel far more comfortable with this online version of the project. It has the great virtue of being able to be expanded and revised continuously, and it's also far more colourful and image-rich than anything short of a coffee-table book would have allowed me to be.

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So what does the future hold for this blog - and for the bloggy empire to which it constitutes the gateway (38 at last count)? Who can truly say? These are deep waters, Watson.

More of the same, no doubt, but perhaps it might be a good idea to learn to expend my energy in ways which make more sense to the Academic authorities presiding over my professional development: PBRF [Performance-Based Research Funding, for those of you lucky enough not to be in the know], for instance ...

Nah, just kidding.

Geoff Murphy, dir. The Quiet Earth (1985)

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M. K. Joseph: Tomorrow the World

M. K. Joseph: Tomorrow the World (2020)
[cover design: Ellen Portch]

So yesterday I went along to the launch, at the Grey Lynn Returned Servicemen's Club, of M. K. Joseph's latest novel, published now for the first time, forty years after his death, by that determined champion of the obscure and avant-garde, publisher Brett Cross of Atuanui Press and its sister-imprint Titus Books.

Brett Cross

The book was launched by celebrated ceramic artist Chuck Joseph, the son of 'Mick' or 'Mike' or 'M.K.' (Chuck explained that all of these various sobriquets were used at different times by different sets of friends).

Chuck Joseph

Perhaps the most fascinating part of his speech was a series of extracts from his father's letters home about (first) his rather truncated 1939 tour of Western Europe with a couple of friends in an old car - how often do you read in a letter: 'we had to cut things short owing to the invasion of Poland,' as he quipped. This was followed by more letters about Joseph's 1944-45 traverse of the same territory, which seems to have included an active part in virtually every battle during this punishing campaign.

Chuck made the point that this posthumous alternate-history novel about the possible consequences of a Nazi victory in the second world war could be regarded as the third part of his War Trilogy: a follow-up to I'll Soldier No More (1958) and A Soldier's Tale (1976). The knowledge of Nazism and of the war itself it demonstrates was no mere Academic book-learning, but the lived experience of an extraordinarily multi-faceted man.

Scott Hamilton

The other speaker was my good friend, polymathic cultural commentator Dr Scott Hamilton. Scott sees the book as the culmination of yet another trilogy: the set of Sci-fi novels comprising space-adventure The Hole in the Zero (1967) and his time-travel opus The Time of Achamoth (1977) - which I've written about here.

The Cosmos, Time itself, and now a complete Alternate History ... no-one could claim that Joseph was unambitious as a writer. Scott speculated that after a hard day at Auckland Uni, and his various duties as a family-man, it was in his study that M. K. Joseph really let rip: this, the seventh in his tally of published novels, is no less wild than any of the others.

M. K. Joseph: The Hole in the Zero (1967)

I was asked to write a letter in support of Atuanui Press's Creative New Zealand funding application for the publication of this novel, and read the whole book in typescript then. I'd like to quote a bit of that letter here, written more than a year ago when it was still fresh in my mind:

It’s no mere Academic curiosity that leads me to recommend your support of the publication of this work ... On one level – probably the most superficial – Joseph’s novel is a rattling good yarn (possibly the best he ever wrote in that respect). It’s an excellent thriller, with well-managed suspense and a nail-biting plot.

Besides that, though (as one would expect of so groundbreaking and influential a writer) it’s a fascinating meditation on the nature of Nazism and Nazi rule, which picks up on various themes already inherent in The Time of Achamoth, and shows signs of profound knowledge not just of mid-twentieth century history, but also of the mid-European landscapes traversed by the hero and heroine.

Mind you, I think it complements rather than surpasses Philip K. Dick’s classic SF novel The Man in the High Castle (1962). Joseph and Dick have very different concerns, but both clearly spent a great deal of time studying the minutiae of German culture and Nazi nomenclature. (Now, of course, there are online games which foresee similar situations – one, described to me by a student the other day, presupposes a German victory in WW1, which leads to the same Churchill-in-Canada scenario Tomorrow the World envisages).

It's not so much the originality of the particular alternate history behind this novel as the literary quality of the novel itself which leads me to recommend it so highly. I think contemporary readers will enjoy it as much (or more) than readers in 1981 would have done. In a sense, Joseph’s underlying ideas are more in accord with the zeitgeist of this time than they were with his own.

Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

The comparison with Dick's Hugo-award-winning novel is, I guess, inevitable. It was an unusual project for him, written in a more 'formal' style than much of his other work, and the first of his novels to be picked up by a major publisher. It's certainly a masterpiece, but one that hinges more on his then fascination with the oracular wisdom of the ancient Chinese I-Ching (he claimed, in fact, that the book was co-written by the oracle) and the complexities of the Japanese occupiers of the Pacific Coast of the former United States than with the far-off horrors of Nazi rule.

Joseph shares his philosophical bent, but with more of a Eurocentric focus. His novel is probably - unfortunately - less out of place in the world we now inhabit, with its naked white supremacism and neo-fascism at the highest levels of government, than it was when he was writing it fifty-odd years ago.

It's probably no secret that I see New Zealand's own home-grown brand of literary SF, composed by some of our most famous writers, but regarded by most critics - still - as an aberrant outgrowth of the rest of their basically realist writing, as the secret figure in the carpet underlying the apparent conservatism of NZld lit over the past half century. This novel is a major part of that story - it's very readable, and it's well worth your time.

Congratulations, then, to Scott and Brett - and, above all, Chuck - for championing it. Nor is it the last treasure hidden away among Joseph's posthumous papers, I'm told ...

Tomorrow the World

New Zealand Speculative Fiction website launch

Jack Ross: NZSF website

When Massey flew me to Beijing late last year, I foresaw a certain amount of downtime between classes. It does sound strange to say that, doesn't it? Imagine a state of affairs where one could simply fly from country to country with minimum fuss! All Science Fiction to us now, of course.

Accordingly, I decided that I'd better bring some stuff to work on - and what better project to concentrate on than my long-projected, long-protracted series of essays on NZSF (whether defined as 'Science' or "Speculative' Fiction).

Things went much as I forecast. Nothing focusses the mind like being away from home comforts, in the somewhat inimical precincts of the Ariva Hotel:

Some of the essays first appeared in such scholarly contexts as Ingrid Horrocks and Cherie Lacey's 2016 VUP anthology Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand, and John Geraets' special 'New Writing 1975-2000' issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature (2016). One, on Mike Johnson's Lear (1986), was published in brief magazine. Quite a few of the others first saw the light of day on this very blog.

All this meant a certain amount of rewriting and reconciliation of various competing referencing systems had to be accomplished before I could think of the end result as in any way unified.

It did take a while. The main work was done in those ten concentrated days in the hotel in China, but putting the website together has taken me quite some time, too. Funnily enough, a thing called the Coronavirus interrupted all my lofty plans for 2020, and - like everyone in the education industry - I've been struggling ever since to roll with the punches and try to keep on top of my students' needs.

It's good to have a hobby, though - and this has been mine for the past decade or so, before more intensive work on it started this time last year.

And what have I ended up with? A series of essays on what I believe to be some of the true masterpieces of NZSF. I don't claim that anyone else would compile the same list, and I'm certain I've left out a lot of wonderful books, but the great advantage of a website is that it can be added to over time. I've provided a chronology at the end which will certainly be supplemented frequently.

I suspect that new essays will be added as well, however. In any case, if you're curious to know more about it, you can find the table of contents here.

The SF genre seems to be exploding in Aotearoa New Zealand at present, so it will become harder and harder to compile a comprehensive summary such as this. It's hard to move forwards if you don't know where you've been, however, so I don't myself see too much of a problem in taking such a long lingering look at the past. Way back is way forward, as they say, and if I know anything about SF fans (I should do, since I'm one myself), they love detail.

If you have any comments, queries or corrections, feel free to share them with me on this site or the relevant page of the NZSF. As for my dominant metaphor, Psychogeography, you can find out more about that here.

Will Self & Ralph Steadman: Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place (2007)

Millennials (4): Song of the Brakeman (2006)

Bill Direen: Song of the Brakeman (2006)

Blurb:

Song of the Brakeman happens in a world where the earth's resources are almost exhausted, the water supplies are contaminated and parts of the landmasses have imploded. But the crisis into which this novel plunges the reader is not only an ecological one. An urban technician and his tribal lover are forced to take sides in a life-or-death struggle between irreconcilable forces: one in possession of the earth's remaining wealth and power, the other carrying the genetic key to the survival of mankind.

Bill Direen has written about a Balkans refugee in Berlin, a coma-victim at a rock concert, and the underbelly of art-obsessed Paris. In Song of the Brakeman a new cast of edgy characters is born to a world heading for extinction.

To justify the errors of their machine they sent me for a therapy called Writing.

- Bill Direen, Song of the Brakeman (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006): 114.

The blurb above certainly doesn't do justice to the profoundly disturbing nature of William (Bill) Direen's masterpiece, Song of the Brakeman.

Direen is probably more famous, still, as an alt rock musician than as a writer. “Bill Direen is Chris Knox for people who think of Chris Knox as Neil Finn” - as Scott Hamilton once mordantly summarised Direen’s status within New Zealand music. As a solo artist, and with his band The Bilders in all its various manifestations, he's compiled a large back-catalogue of deliberately 'lo-fi' recordings and performances.

His writing career came later, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. You can find an annotated list on his Wikipedia page, as well as in the (selected) bibliography below.

Rather than attempt to characterise his work - in its most extreme form, as manifested in such parts of his œuvre as Song of the Brakeman - it seems easier to quote some examples. Here's a touching anecdote from a conversation his protagonist, the Brakeman, has with a fellow customer in a brothel, early on in the novel:

'It's the month of the partial eclipse. I've lost everything and I'm walking along where my house used to be, looking for anything, a dog collar, a plank of wood painted cosy green. Among those fjords that used to be my suburb there it is, docked between two rocks, a trimaran on stilts. A light is shining from the observation window. I climbs a rock and sees a lean figure, scarlet, part-man, part-woman, piece shining like a diamond. She opens her blouse to another, a two-way him-her, who draws a fiber from her heart and eats it neat. He grows, slow and painful like there's a weight inside him. They mock each other on the slippery decking, spitting in the face, you know, and twining like it ain't, y'know, love, like eels on heat. You seen that?'
The mercenary's rendition was corn porn, but his trade was his will and testament. He had seen a tribeswoman donating to save one of our boys who, like me, was less than tribal. Galveston had him as beefsteak before World Independence Day. [31]

If that doesn't mean a lot to you, fear not. The foreign inflections of the idioms of our future will fall gradually into focus, until finally you'll wonder why you ever had any trouble with them ... One of the central problems with this future, however, is its insistence on the evils of unrestricted writing. One of the Brakeman's earliest misdeeds is cooking up a batch of ink for his upstairs neighbour, an aristocratic young dancer:

When she asked me for ink I couldn't refuse, though I knew the danger. Anyone who used that stuff was regarded as an enemy of the state. I perfected the mix that would be the cause of her arrest, a crimson viscous concoction thickened with carbon from the incineration pits. You could do anything with it, old conning peasant dark drivel, government poetry, South Sea journals, delta discoveries, but that monkey bile would darken her manuscript best of all. [24]

That list could serve quite nicely as a characterisation of the book itself. All of those things (and more) are to be found within these pages.

Matt Kelly: Cover Image (2007)

My brother Ken wrote a review of Bill's book in brief #35. In it he commented particularly on this central linguistic aspect of the novel:

The driving, pulsating, often super-elaborate quality of the language was another fascination. Direen can create a new slang in every page. He can involve mystical reasonings, implied comments on the human condition, in what is largely a fast-moving narrative texture. For those who love language for its own sake, this makes for an invigorating ride. Both these additions and the poetical aspirations of the book take it, in fact, outside the bounds of Science Fiction proper. We could say that by a synthesis of directions, Direen has managed to occupy new literary ground.

- K. M. Ross, 'Review of Song of the Brakeman.'
brief 35 - A brief world order, ed. Brett Cross (September 2007): 120-21.

With due respect to Ken, I'm not quite sure that I agree there. It's true that such violent dislocations of language do seem more designed to evoke Finnegans Wake than (say) The Day of the Triffids (a comparison already made by Scott Hamilton in his launch speech for the book). 'Science Fiction proper' has always been a bit of a difficult beast to taxonomise, however. As Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest remark in the epigraph to their 1962 anthology Spectrum 2:

'Sf's no good,' they bellow till we're deaf.
'But this looks good.' - 'Well then, it's not sf.

- Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest, ed. Spectrum II: A Second Science Fiction Anthology. 1962. Pan Science Fiction (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965): 4.

I'd like, instead, to suggest a few possible analogues:

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)

The obvious one is with Russell Hoban's classic novel Riddley Walker (1980). Because it's written in a gnomic, riddling style, the fact that this is clearly a piece of SF in the standard understanding of the term - plot-wise, thematically, and in terms of intention - was repeatedly denied by critics who felt that it was too accomplished to deserve the appelation. The generic flexibility of Hoban's other work - from fantasy in The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jaachin-Boaz (1973) to the eco-fiction of Turtle Diary (1975) - gave fuel to their argument: somewhat absurdly, in retrospect.

Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom: The Jesus Incident (1979)

I would challenge any reader to go through the first twenty or so pages of the work above and give me an accurate summary of their contents. It takes time for post-new wave SF novels to establish the ground rules both of the cosmos they inhabit and the language in use there. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes (as in this case) extremely challenging. It's something that die-hard fans learn to live with. Non-SF-tempered readers can find it a sore trial, however.

And yet no-one ever proposed the novel above as anything but strict SF, despite its thematic complexity and scope. The same is true of the more conventionally composed Dune (1965), despite its obvious status as one of the most influential novels of the past fifty years (as a pioneering piece of 'planetary ecology', among many other things).

Alan Moore: Voice of the Fire (1996)

My final exhibit is comics-supremo Alan Moore's debut print - as opposed to graphic - novel, Voice of the Fire. The resemblances here with Riddley Walker are strong, despite the prehistoric setting of the first section of his story. This makes it what? Fantasy? Historical fiction? Fantasy-&-SF? In the end, all one can really call it is a singularly ambitious novel, tout court.

And so, without doubt, is Direen's Song of the Brakeman.

Speaking for myself, I found the first fifty or so pages of the book fairly impenetrable on my first run through - after that, however, things settled into a more or less comprehensible narrative. Turning back, however, the first pages seemed no more difficult than the last: it's as if it simply takes that long for Brakeman's language to come into focus - rather like that in use in the memory-less world of Anna Smaill's The Chimes.

Anna Smaill: The Chimes (2015)

Direen's book is in four sections:

1. The Yard (pp. 7-98): The Brakeman in his natural state, working to repair the vehicles that roar up and down the broken super-highways of this devastated future world. The start of his love affair with the queen of the rebellion, Enola, and his meeting with the mistress of theory, Myra.

   It was twenty five years since the world, or what was left of it, had declared itself one state. The world turned twenty six. The new configuration of the earth's plates was holding. Magnetic lines were settling in to the new order. We were belting through time as before, 365 days a ringband, 67,000 miles an hour, the sun beating through the milky way once every 225 million years. It was eternity as usual ...
   I was afraid to sleep, and afraid not to. I sat up nights watching, waiting. The weather was playing tricks. Cloud was condensing in the yard, dribbling down the walls. It was gray all day, every day. [81]

2. Pell (pp. 99-179): The Brakeman in prison, tortured within an inch of his life, but finally contriving to escape in a Blackhawk helicopter with Enola, who's been masquerading as a nurse within the facility.

   It had been a long dry, as great a calamity as when the ice caps had melted and the dried-up viscera of the earth had caved in, fragmenting the continents. True water had sunk beneath the petroleum gunge, the dregs of centuries. Underground caves had sucked it way down till it was too deep to bore. Some of the water had returned as steam from volcanic port-holes but it had changed. Its chemical composition was no longer H2O ... A weight, heavy as earth itself, rose above us. [127]



Cyberpunk 2077



3. The Flood (pp. 181-205): Their subsequent adventures in the viscous soup that passes for the remnants of the world's oceans, in an increasingly dreamlike state, as their son Richie is born and grows into maturity in the space of a few days.

   As we penetrated Flood we found that there were areas which did not congeal in the night, and crusted floating masses which did not dissolve during the morning. These merged on contact to form floating islands. Their terrain appeared smooth but was jagged with dangerous crystal blooms. Not all floating objects were dangerous. Some were boons. One floating crate was full of sealed packets of seaweed powder, rich in vitamins. [192]

4. The Tribe (pp. 207-64): The revelations at the heart of the forest, the final battle between Cadena's forces of destruction and the survivors of the tribe: the birth of a new consciousness beyond the alternating forces of life and death.

   The chiefs lacked the usual combination of elements, of right and left, male and female. They were formed in a way I had never contemplated. Few of the males had scrotums to speak of and few of their penises had stems - they were knobs of Tyrian purple nosing out of thinning fur. The breasts of those who had them, whom I will call the women, were large. In fact, they were being milked and their primary protein source must have contained some antidote, an ingredient that kept many of the limitless poisons and microbes at bay. The ganglia of many were, nevertheless, tumefied. The necks of some were lymphatic pile-ups, Many had stitch marks where apprentice surgeons had implanted digestive organs. Some displayed evidence of freelance experiments: patches of animal fur, non-human mammalian genitals ineptly implanted. This gave me hope. Where there were surgeons there was some form of anesthesia and stitching thread to retrieve Myra's theory. [225-26]

Jean Wimmerling: Cli-fi (2018)

This last section of Direen's book, in particular, defies easy summary. His prose grows increasingly surrealist and disjointed, till it begins to resemble a strange cross between Angela Carter (the first chapter, in particular, of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann - published in the US as The War of Dreams) and the Comte de Lautréamont's visionary Chants de Maldoror.

Mind you, something like this might be expected of a narrator who learned his art in prison, under the watchful eye of his torturers (as well as Enola, his tribal lover disguised as a nurse):

She had a stack of biros and I was soon working with my left hand. Soon we would have a script, a real pot-boiler. Old trash with the hot stink, survival stories, commando raids, jealous killers, androgynous embryo-farming hitchhiking cannibals, city-born unknowing incest pairs, isosceles political love triangles, rebellious impotent pinned entomologists hot for virgins and farmer-savages, heretic self-made execution-rippers caging leper monks and concupiscent boat-boys.
Imagining is free, even in three-word strings. [149]

More to the point, however, when Brakeman finally reaches the centre of his personal labyrinth, the regions of the tribe, he is separated from Enola and acclimatised to the new conditions by his new he/she lover Xanjal:

On the fifteenth day we rose from the bed and she guided me through the city. There were two cities, she said, contained in the same space, but she could only show me one. There was no law against looking through the cracks in the temple walls. There were centuries-old icons there, pheasants being roasted over fires of seasoned cherry wood, a priest sprinkling oregano over the flames. In another chapel I saw women being crucified for having failed impossible tasks. I fell back. She laughed at that. She said no one sees other than what is in his or her own mind. She was so like a ghost when we went through the city together, that I asked her if she had ever been in touch with the dead. She said that death returns us to the future. We arrive every moment from the future. When we die we go there eternally. [230-31]

"No one sees other than what is in his or her own mind" - is that the final message of Direen's book (insofar as any book needs a 'final message')? Certainly Aleister Crowley's motto (borrowed from Rabelais): 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,' appears to be the only rule that applies in this strange multi-layered city / swamp / forest.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)

Another, even stranger influence on his work might be seen elsewhere, in the weird fantasy adventures of Victorian visionary Rider Haggard. Direen's endlessly dying and reviving heroine Enola (named, presumably, for the bomb that spawned all these misadventures and transcendences) reminds one of no-one so much as Haggard's immortal heroine She-who-must-be-obeyed:

Rider Haggard: She (1887)

And not simply in her first incarnation as the white queen of a cannibal tribe in Africa, but her later, even weirder appearance in the mountains of Tibet, as the reborn Ayesha.

Rider Haggard: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905)

We could continue this allusion-hunting indefinitely, however. I have to admit that I still have many questions about Direen's book, though. Why, for instance, is there a state of John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor of television, outside the spurious 'voting booth' on p.25? Does he have a place in this future polity akin to that of Henry Ford in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Is the trimaran found by Brakeman and Enola in the swamps of Flood, on p.188, the same as the one described in my first extended quote above, the one where a tribeswoman is seen donating her heart's blood to save 'one of our boys'?

What is the significance of the name 'Richie Tibbetts'? Why is Enola and Ex-P's child called that? The account of his birth and upbringing and the strange sledding expedition to save his mother from a trapper (pp.194-96) is pretty trippy even by the standards of the rest of the book. Is this where the dreamtime really begins?

Bill Direen: Onævia (2004)

One obvious source of answers to this and other tantalising mysteries in the book might seem to be this earlier work by Direen, described by him on the SOUTH INDIES TEXT & MUSIC PUBLISHING site as the "invented history of an imaginary land, taking as its lead such masterpieces as Swift's Gulliver's Travels and More's Utopia. It is the first story of an SF sequence that includes Song of the Brakeman, L, and the two parts of Enclosures 'Jonah', and 'The Stadium'."

There is a somewhat more circumstantial blurb on Goodreads:

The nation of Onævia grows and declines on the edge of a vast continent. Games, cuisine, beliefs and unusual practices offer a glimpse of a polymorphic people, from the coronation of the first king to the capture of the last surviving Onævian.

In practice, though, even if it is meant to serve as a 'prequel' to Song of the Brakeman, there's little in the strange fabular history of Onævia and its gradual descent into decadence and madness that serves to elucidate the latter work in any obvious way. In fact, the doings of the Boowigs and other descendants of the hunter Ighmut sound more like an exercise in Voltairean satire than the nightmarish, Ballardian headtrip of Brakeman.

There is, however, an intriguing paragraph on the god 'Flood' in the section on mythology in the appendix to Direen's book:

Flood was the fourth child of the second generation. Redundant, you might think, in the sea. But he liked nothing better than to glut himself on the shoreline and coastal plains. He reached his slime-coated needle-toes up, and scooped mouthfuls of soil down into his sieve-like gullet. He rose into the sky making beautiful clouds, before rushing down to have his pleasure of the earth, spreading amorphous over the valleys and plains, gathering huts, animals, soil and inhabitants, before spilling, with his plunder, into the discoloured ocean.

- Bill Direen, Onævia: Fable. 2002 (Auckland: Titus Books, 2004): 110.

Certainly one can recognise there some of the imagery of (in particular) part three of the later novel. Even if - as is quite probable - there are other anticipations there I've missed, Song of the Brakeman is surely the Huckleberry Finn to Onævia's Tom Sawyer: a sequel so much richer than its original that it must really stand alone.

Rose Rees-Owen: Scott Hamilton (2015)

In his launch speech for the book, From First to Fourth Gear, poet and critic Scott Hamilton pointed out the rich heritage Direen's book is drawing on:

The story of Bill's Brakeman also calls up some interesting parallels in the canon of Kiwi literature. One thinks of Lear, a post-apocalypse novel by Mike Johnson ... and The Quiet Earth, the Craig Harrison novel which Geoff Murphy filmed in the '80s. The Quiet Earth showed us the conflict between a Pakeha scientist partially responsible for an experiment that has depopulated the earth, and a Maori who rejects him and his science, and ends up stealing the last girl on earth from him. There is a similar tension in Bill's novel between the Brakeman, a scientist implicated obscurely in the ecological catastrophe that has befallen the earth, and his lover, who belongs to a group of people who live a pre-industrial life. In Song of the Brakeman, as in The Quiet Earth, there is the question whether science and technology are hopelessly implicated in a way of life which has led to apocalypse, or whether they can be made to serve different ends. Can the scientist redeem himself, or must he suffer the same fate as the order he once served?

Critic Te Arohi (2019)

In a subsequent interview with Megan Anderson, printed in Otago University's student magazine Critic Te Arohi 7 (2007): 46-7), Direen himself offered some insights into the musical (and political) inspirations for his book:

Song of the Brakeman is set in a world like ours, but it is impossible to treat it as such. The landscape Direen portrays is one in which the continents have fragmented, the environment is irrevocably tainted, the ice caps have melted, and the entire hydrological cycle is suspended. Direen calls it “a world of the imagination, rather than of the future.” This is reassuring, as the world Direen paints is the sort of apocalyptic future one could easily envisage for our own world, if global warming is anything to go by ...

During an interview with the Dunedin-based Bill Direen, Critic got the impression that storyline plays a relatively small role in Direen’s writing ... What’s particularly striking about the novel is its musicality. Direen uses narrative as an expressive tool, constantly altering the narrative’s pace, rhythm and tone to represent what it’s describing. What begins as a choppy, violent urban setting reflected through a film noir / Sin City monologue evolves into a retreat into nature — or what is left of it in a deteriorating world — a lyrical prose flooded with imagery. This performative aspect of Direen’s work is something he is obviously passionate about ... and this is evident in his search for a language which “includes the verbal elements and the musical elements which [are] a part of me, which [have] always been a part of me.” Direen emphasises the sound and musicality of language, rather than focusing on just the semantic qualities of words: “Because I was a musician, and still am” he says, “music and rhythm, and a lot of the musical aspects of language play a big part in the way that I see literature” ...

Direen is adamant that his search for an expressive, musical language is not him “purposely trying to be difficult in this language thing” though he admits, “People have accused me of it” ... The actual song of the Brakeman, sung enthusiastically by Brakeman in the midst of the exceedingly violent interrogation scenes of Part II, is, as Direen says “intended as light relief, really, because of all this heavy stuff.” Direen admits that “It’s a satirical piece, I guess. It’s sort of anti-capitalist.” This makes sense when considering how Direen’s interrogation scenes were influenced by the Guantanamo Bay imprisonments. While Direen refers to America extensively in the novel, he stressed that ‘it’s not anti-American, but obviously I use America as a model for the world state.” ...

At the end of the interview Direen asked Critic of his book, “Did you think it was bizarre?”

Song of the Brakeman bizarre? Perhaps. An absorbing novel regardless? Certainly.

That seems as good a place as any to end - or, should I say, in the words of the X-Files, to suspend investigations.

The X-Files (1993-2018)

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Bill Direen

William (Bill) Direen
(b.1957)

Select Bibliography:

1. Wormwood: Novel (1997)


2. The Impossible: Short Stories. Wellington: Alpha Books, 2002.


3. Nusquama: Novel (2002)


4. Onævia: Fable. 2002. Auckland: Titus Books, 2004.


5. Jules. Wellington: Alpha Books, 2003.


6. Coma. Titus Novellas. Auckland: Titus Books, 2005.


7. New Sea Land: Poems. Auckland: Titus Books, 2005.


8. Song of the Brakeman. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006.


9. Enclosures. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008.


10. The Ballad of Rue Belliard. Auckland: Titus Books, 2013. [In Brett Cross, ed. brief 48 (June 2013).]


11. Enclosures 2: Europe, New Zealand; Centre; Stoat: Canal City; Survey. Dunedin: Percutio, 2016.


12. Enclosures 3: Treatmen(o)t; Scipio Sonn; Nyons-Nice-Venice; Tattoo; from Stoat. Dunedin: in situ, 2017.


13. Enclosures 4. 2018.

Homepages & Online Information:

Wikipedia entry

William Direen: Jules (2003)

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