Find Page One on APPLE PODCASTS or STITCHER.
(This episode is marked as explicit because of sexual imagery.)
Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov, published in 1967 by Panther.
For this week's Page One, Charles Adrian looks into the future and the past and alternative reality and other planets. It's a whistle stop tour of science fiction and should satisfy the soul of anybody who has ever wondered what things might be like if they were different.
Charles Adrian writes: “I can only apologise for the offensively bad Scottish accent used at around the 13-minute mark.”
Another book by John Windham, The Trouble With Lichen, is discussed in Page One 22 and Page One 161.
Natalie Clarke, who is mentioned, is featured in Page One 64; she talks about Mary Doria Russell’s book The Sparrow.
More info about Friends Of Friends, who composed the jingle used for the first time in the episode, can be found here and more info about the Anti-Valentine Festival can be found here.
Vera Chok, mentioned here, has appeared on the podcast many times; her latest appearance, at the time this episode was released, is Page One 52. You can find out more about her here.
Ms Samantha Mann’s show At Home With Samantha, A Show About Love, Death & Rabbits, also mentioned here, became the multi-award-winning show Stories About Love, Death & A Rabbit; you can find out more about it here.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 11th February, 2014.
Book listing:
Cryptozoic! by Brian Aldiss
It's Only Pinball! (C’est du Billard!) by Philippe Curval (trans. Maxim Jakubowski) and The Gunboat Dread (La Canonnière Epouvante) by Daniel Walther (trans. Beth Blish) from Travelling Towards Epsilon: An Anthology of French Science Fiction edited by Maxim Jakubowski.
Daybreak 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton
The Crysalids by John Wyndham
Sucker Bait from The Martian Way by Isaac Asimov
Links:
Friends Of Friends on Soundcloud
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello everyone, normal Page One coming up in just a moment but before we start today I wanted to play you my brand new jingle. This is the first time I'm playing this so I'm rather excited.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 68th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and the music for that jingle has been composed especially for me by the band Friends of Friends, about whom more later. Although, for those of you who are not intending to listen to the whole of this podcast, please just go and look up Friends of Friends on SoundCloud. Do it for me. For the rest of you, this podcast is going out on the week of Valentine's Day and, with that in mind, it seemed to me that we should spare a thought for those among us who are condemned to spend the evening of the 14th performing emotions for a loved one. So here to kick us off is Michel Polnareff with Love Me, Please Love Me.
Music
[Love Me, Please Love Me by Michel Polnareff]
Charles Adrian
Michel Polnareff and Love Me, Please Love Me. Sharp-eared listeners would have noticed a bit of French in there. There's going to be some French writing later on – in translation. [in bad French accent] It is the language of love! And also, as it turns out, of some somewhat sexy sci-fi. And sci fi is the theme for this week's Page One so it all ties together.
Now science fiction is an odd genre. What is it? This is – don't answer that by the way – this is what Wikipedia has to say: “Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life”. It also says: “Science fiction has been used by authors as a device to discuss philosophical ideas such as identity, desire, morality, and social structure”. So that's... that's a good enough definition for me. I can't really tell you why I like science fiction so much. It has something to do with a fascination for the science, certainly, but it also has something to do with the idea of these books as thought experiments. They're models for alternative realities, in which some things change and some things stay the same and we work it through to find out what might happen, knowing all the time that none of this has happened or is very likely to happen when it comes down to it. So, essentially, it's a safe space – pun very much intended – in which to explore fears and hopes and desires.
Now, the first book that I have here has nothing to do with space as it happens. This is concerned with time travel. It's set in the future but it imagines a society that has discovered how to travel back – far back into what the back of the book calls “The dim ages of geological time”. So it's a futuristic book about the past, which is kind of confusing. It's Cryptozoic! by Brian Aldiss, who is one of the giants of the genre. And while I don't completely buy what he's proposing here, the ideas that he's playing with a fun and interesting. And he does his best to solve some of the questions that time travel brings up about meeting oneself and how ageing works if you're travelling backwards and forwards in time and how you deal with the fact that you're now moving around in time as well as moving around in space – which sounds obvious but how can you ever be sure that you will meet somebody that you might be looking for? And so on and so forth. This is a Sphere SF addition from 1977. Apparently, it was first published in 1967 under the title An Age. Here's the first page:
BOOK ONE
Chapter I
A BED IN THE OLD RED SANDSTONE
THE sea level had been slowly sinking for the last few thousand years. It lay so nearby motionless that one could hardly tell whether its small waves broke from it against the shore or were in some way formed at the shoreline and cast back into the deep. The river disgorging into the sea had built up bars of red mud and shingle, thus often hindering its own way with gravel banks or casting off wide pools which stagnated in the sunshine. A man appeared to be sitting by one of these pools. Although he seemed to be surrounded by green growth, behind him the beach was as bare as a dried bone.
The man was tall and loose-limbed. He was fair-haired, pale-skinned, and his expression in repose held something morose and watchful in it. He wore a one-piece garment and carried a knapsack strapped to his back, in which were his pressurised water ration, food substitutes, some artist's materials and two notebooks. About his neck he wore a device popularly known as an air-leaker, which consisted of a loose-fitting hoop that had a small motor attachment at the back and in front, under the chin, a small nozzle that breathed fresh air into the man's face.
The man's name was Edward Bush. He was a solitary man, some forty-five elapsed years old. As far as he could be said to be thinking at all, he was brooding about his mother.
At this phase of his life, he found himself becalmed, without direction. His temporary job for the Institute did nothing to alleviate this inward feeling that he had come to an uncharted crossroads. It was as though all his psychic mechanisms had petered out, or stood idling, undecided whether to venture this way or that under the force of some vast prodromic unease.
Resting his chin on his knee, Bush stared out over the dull [...]
I have no idea what “prodromic” means. I should have looked that up. I haven't. I will do.
My second book, which is a New English Library edition from 1976, is the French writing I mentioned. It's a collection that the back of the book would have us believe is “Some of the best in francophone sci fi writing, collected and edited by Maxim Jakubowski”. It's called Travelling Towards Epsilon and to be honest the writing here – or perhaps it's just the translation, I don't know – it's... it's... it's a mixed bag, I would say. A disappointing amount of it is also that kind of little-boy-in-bedroom fantasy sex that so often ends up being downright misogynistic when written out in full, although some of it is just ludicrous. I'm going to read you a paragraph that I actually quite liked from a story called It's Only Pinball! by Philippe Curval.
She slipped the pink plastic sheath off her body, her naked breasts beamed, the nipples distended, the breasts divided, multiplying into supple, warm clusters, her hips thinned out, her legs grew longer, her buttocks enlarged themselves, her sex flowered. The carnation of her face harmonised with the colour of her hair; these were soon reflecting every colour in the rainbow, her eyes widened and became as deep as black lakes, her arms lengthened, changing into tentacles, satin creepers.
‘But you're only a robot, Luella!’ Yorge said, manipulating a flipper on her back.
And and here's the first page of the first story, The Gunboat Dread by Daniel Walther.
The river Ez resembled a wide avenue of mercury, under a violaceous sky: it flowed with coagulate majesty between banks buried in a vegetation whose exuberance was only matched by the unbearable suffocating heat. Birds with metallic silhouettes flew over the heavy foliage searching for invisible prey. Low shimmering cliffs encrusted with fabulous gems sometimes plunged into the current, abruptly interrupting the thick vegetable wall, while prodigious but indefinable animals, with impatient fangs and shining scales, disappeared into the greasy wave in a silvery spout. They would shoot towards the gunboat at great speed, but stop short a few fathoms from its sparkling hull as if they could guess that this mass of metal wallowing in the impassivity of the great river was capable at any moment of spitting out mortal lightnings, of reducing them to crackling cinders.
The gunboat Dread, strong in her twelve cannon, descended the Long River towards the faraway sea of Offuz, in the blood-stained homage of an unheard-of sun sliding slowly nearer to an impure horizon scarred with sulphurous fringes.
‘The colours of this world are going to end up driving me raving mad or neurasthenic,’ declared Lieutenant Baird as he leaned limply against the rail of the turret. ‘Sometimes I dream that we are being shipwrecked down there...’
His thin hand pointed towards the silver-grey river where several huge, scaly beasts were disporting themselves with sham clumsiness. Second Lieutenant Sigurd nodded with an air of gravity that could be surprising in a boy of his age.
‘But even so,’ continued Baird, ‘it's as if I were intoxicated by it. Every time I go away on leave, I can't stand it: I have to come back here. Here, in the rottenest corner of the Periphery. I'm warning you Sigurd, you're still young... change your trade, nobody's going to thank you for leaving your mortal remains in this godforsaken place. I hope you're not one of those people whose only thought is for glory...’
Sigurd muttered a perfectly incomprehensible response. Baird shrugged his shoulders, grimaced a sad smile. ‘Unless you've fallen for their slogans: the exotic, hot nights under trees a thousand years old, lagoons of erotic languors, green girls with pink pubes... that whole marmalade of bad taste, the most offensive of propaganda, that nauseating masquerade which hardly hides the snout of the bad war...’
I didn't actually know I was going to do a Scottish accent there – that's what it was, by the way – for Lieutenant Baird. I suddenly decided in the middle, “Why not? Why not? He's called Baird. I think that's a Scottish name”. Anyway, I feel like playing you some bad music now. This is Anyone Who Had A Heart sung by Cilla Black. Listen out for the amazing backing wails and the grade five bassoon solo.
Music
[Anyone Who Had A Heart by Cilla Black]
Cilla Black singing Anyone Who Had A Heart.
Now, my next two books both deal with an imaginary post-nuclear world – in the sense of post nuclear holocaust – and the first one is one of those amazing books that I think you'll only ever find on other people's bookshelves or in the dustiest of secondhand bookshops. Also subject to a name change, this was published Star Man's Son before being repackaged sometime in the 1950s as Daybreak 2250 A.D. It's by Andre Norton and here's the first page:
1. A THIEF BY NIGHT
A night mist which was almost fog-thick, still wrapped most of the Eyrie in a cottony curtain. Beads of moisture gathered on the watcher's bare arms and hide jerkin. He licked the wetness from his lips. But he made no move towards shelter, just as he had not during any of the long black hours behind him.
Hot anger had brought him up on this broken rock point above the village of his tribe. And something which was very close to real heartbreak kept him there. He propped a pointed chin—strong, cleft and stubborn—on the palm of a grimy hand and tried to pick out the buildings which made straight angles in the mist below.
Right before him, of course, was the Star Hall. And as he studied its rough stone walls, his lips grew tight in what was almost a noiseless snarl. To be one of the Star Men, honoured by all the tribe, consecrated to the gathering and treasuring of knowledge, to the breaking of new trails and the exploration of lost lands—he, Fors of the Puma Clan, had never dreamed of any other life. Up until the hour of the Council Fire last night he had kept on hoping that he would be given the right to enter the Hall. But he had been a child and a fool to so hope when all the signs had read just the opposite. For five years he had been passed over at the choosing of youths as if he did not exist. Why then should his merit suddenly become diamond bright on the sixth occasion?
Only—his head dropped and his teeth clenched. Only—this was the last year—the very last year for him. Next year he would be over the age limit allowed a novice. When he was passed over last night—
Maybe—if his father had come back from that last exploring venture—If he himself didn't bear the stigma so plainly—His fingers clutched the thick hair on his head, tugging painfully as if he would have it all out by the roots. His hair was the worst! They might have forgotten about his night sight and too-keen hearing. He could have concealed those as soon as he learned how wrong it was to be different. But he [...]
And the next one is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. And while both books deal with genetic mutation, Andre Norton dreams of a world in which everybody has a place whereas John Wyndham is happy to sacrifice those who cannot keep up. I mean, it's retribution but still. Of the two, this is the better-written book by far. The characterisation, the setting, the drama, it's all just better. And if I found the ending a little disturbing... well, what of it? These books are supposed to make me think. This, by the way, is a lovely orange-and-white-striped Penguin from 1961, priced two and six. I mean, it's a book but it's a... it's a Penguin edition.
I
WHEN I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city – which was strange because it began even before I knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat....
And the buildings were quite unlike any I knew. The traffic in the streets was strange, carts running with no horses to pull them; and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds.
Most often I would see this wonderful place by daylight, but occasionally it was by night when the lights lay like strings of glow-worms along the shore, and a few of them seem to be sparks drifting on the water, or in the air.
It was a beautiful, fascinating place, and once, when I was still young enough to know no better, I asked my eldest sister, Mary, where this lovely city could be.
She shook her head, and told me that there was no such place – not now. But, perhaps, she suggested, I could somehow be dreaming about times long ago. Dreams were funny things, and there was no accounting for them; so it might be that what I was seeing was a bit of the world as it had been once upon a time – the wonderful world that the Old People had lived in; as it had been before God sent Tribulation.
But after that, she went on to warn me very seriously not to mention it to anyone else; other people, as far as she knew, did not have such pictures in their heads, either sleeping or waking, so it would be unwise to mention them.
That was good advice, and luckily I had the sense to take it. People in our district had a very sharp eye for the odd, or the unusual, so that even my left-handedness caused slight disapproval. So, at that time, and for some years afterwards, I did not mention it to anyone – indeed, I almost forgot about it, for as I grew older the dream came less frequently, and then, very rarely.
Okay, so my last book is another collection of stories but by Isaac Asimov, who is also one of the real greats of the genre. Chances are even if you haven't read any sci fi you'll have heard of Isaac Asimov. He's the author of I, Robot among many, many other things. This is a lovely collection of four short stories called The Martian Way. I really like them. And, interestingly, I've spotted a couple of ideas in here that also appear in Mary Doria Russell's book The Sparrow, which Natalie Clark gave me when I interviewed her for the 64th Page One and which I've been reading this week with enormous pleasure. So I suspect that she's also fan. Anyway, here's the first page of Sucker Bait, which is the last story in the collection.
Sucker Bait
ONE
The ship Triple G. flashed silently out of the nothingness of hyperspace and into the allness of space-time. It emerged into the glitter of the great star cluster of Hercules.
It poised gingerly in space, surrounded by suns and suns and suns, each centering a gravitational field that wrenched at the little bubble of metal. But the ship's computers had done well and it had pin-pricked squarely into position. It was within a day's journey—ordinary space-drive journey—of the Lagrange system.
This fact had varying significance to the different men aboard ship. To the crew, it was another day's work and another day's flight pay and then shore rest. The planet for which they were aiming was uninhabited, but shore rest could be a pleasant interlude even on an asteroid. They did not trouble themselves concerning a possible difference of opinion among the passengers.
The crew, in fact, were rather contemptuous of the passengers, and avoided them.
Eggheads!
And so they were, every one of them but one. Scientists, in politer terms—and a heterogeneous lot. Their nearest approach to a common emotion at that moment was a final anxiety for their instruments, a vague desire for a last check.
And perhaps just a small increase of tension and anxiety. It was an uninhabited planet. Each had expressed himself as firmly of that belief a number of times. Still, each man's thoughts are his own.
As for the one unusual man on board ship—not a crewman and not really a scientist—his strongest feeling was one of bone-weariness. He stirred to his feet weekly and fought off the last dregs of space-sickness. He was Mark Annuncio, and [...]
And... and... and... And that's the end of our podcast.
Now, I have a couple of notices to add here. First of all, the band Friends of Friends, who've written my jingle music, are going to be debuting some brand new material as part of the Anti-Valentine's Festival that's going on at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club this month. It's all being put together by the amazing Vera Chok, whose website is beautifulbitchmonsteridiot.com. I'm serious. It really is. The festival itself kicks off this Thursday, assuming you're listening to this on the week it goes out. I'm talking about the 13th of February 2014. With a lineup including me as Samantha Mann performing my full-length show At Home With Samantha, A Show About Love, Death and Rabbits. And then there's another fantastic lineup on the 20th of February, and then Friends of Friends will be playing on the 27th. Go and look this up if you live within travelling distance of London. It's going to be awesome. I'm putting a link in the description.
The other note is... concerns these podcasts. Just to let you know that you can give feedback if you want. You can do this by tweeting me – @charldrian - or by leaving a comment on the website pageonepodcast.com. Or, if you're feeling particularly passive aggressive, by writing and publishing a novel in which the first page is a detailed critique of what I'm doing. You'd then just have to arrange for a copy – preferably one with a damaged spine and some coffee stains on the cover – to be left at one of my local second hand shops and then... well... wait and see if I pick it up. Or you can rate me on iTunes, which is completely anonymous – in case that worries you.
Okay, that's it. That's me out. Speak to you next week, peeps. Thanks very much for listening. This has been Page One.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast please go to pageonepodcast.com
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]