Heroes and villains

Is your view of early flight a series of comical errors, as naive experiments that more often than not went wrong or as as a bunch of courageous and incredibly skilled individuals to whom we owe the fact that modern air travel is still a statistically safe way to swallow up huge distances quickly and efficiently?

Bill Bryson's One Summer America 1927 captures all aspects of this story from the downright stupid to the breathtakingly adventurous to the scandalously eye boggling. Did you have the American government down as committing mass murder on their own population - never mind others? Thought not. Read the section on prohibition. Al Capone and the bootleggers come out looking like public servants. I must admit the sexual exploits of Babe Ruth (or was it rounders, sorry baseball) got a little dull during the score reporting but that's a homage to Bill's Dad who was a sports journalist in Des Moines (after all someone had to be).

Star of the book is undoubtedly Charles Lindbergh. I can't say I got to understand him in any meaningful way because he is an extremely enigmatic figure who endured extreme fame, personal tragedy and political error of judgement in equal measure. But what a pilot. It's wrong, of course, to ascribe celebrity status to one individual amongst so many who tamed the skies and pushed flight into the twentieth and twenty first century. But then again this is what this book is about: an extraordinary moment in time with a whole cast of characters you really couldn't invent.

Unspeakable experiments

Yesterday I visited Uppark, the house where the young HG Wells' mother was Housekeeper and father was Gardener. This was no idyllic Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbey environment and Sarah was eventually dismissed for gossiping about the Featherstonhaugh family. Standing below ground level in the servants quarters with little windows above head height where you can occasionally glimpse the ankles of the rest of humanity you really get a sense of the unseen workers scurrying around in the tunnels to support a few lucky to be born into a different life. Read the young Bertie's Tono Bungay for more direct commentary on Uppark. But what interests me is how that social and moral conflict between two very different views of society is expressed in other contexts like the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine and the men and beasts in this little horror show.

In some ways this story has dated less well than some (and he really was prolific) because it contains elements of Victorian style melodrama and fear of exotic unknown places where Johnny Foreigner got up to unspeakable things with the natives. But, of course, in other ways it is enormously prescient and raises all those issues of scientific, medical and biological advances and the balance of motivation and benefits. For those of you who haven't read it I won't add any spoilers here but it's a fun little potboiler and acts as an invitation to read some of his more obscure and less known stories many of which are out of copyright and freely available on the web.

The Invisible Man reads in parts like a penny dreadful Victorian newspaper report but there is no doubting Wells' ability to explore fantasy in an engaging realistic way by setting it in contemporary society. He captures the foibles of crowd behaviour but also the corrupting nature of power rested in a single individual.

The Time Machine is probably the best story of this set I read (I'll get around to War of the Worlds shortly). Although it is based around a single individual narrative voice again it contains enough room for a more episodic development and a look at different types of society in different times - both Victorian and fantasy future. There is even space for some post-apocalyptic descriptive dream-like passages. Whereas some of Wells' stories a bit slight, and you can see why they have the novella depth that appeals for film adaptations, the Time Machine is fully rounded in both forms. Which brings me back to Uppark. It is frightening to stand underground there, in the servants' quarters, and think of the people that devoted their working lives so that a lucky few could pass the time in vacuous indolence.

A seed contained within

I picked up Christian Cantrell's debut novel free on Kindle so I didn't have any great expectations but it was sci-fi. I love sci-fi. Don't I? Do you?

Initially I struggled with this book and it reminded me that good writing is highly readable in any genre and you should base your choices on that. I'm not really a great fan of genres anyway and would much rather bookshops were simply arranged alphabetically so that you could come across delightfully weird surprises in sci-fi and fantasy sandwiched between the ghostwritten 'autobiography' of a footballer and a guide to making chocolate crepes.

One reason I struggled until nearly half way through this book (and I always finish a book I've started) was some wilful description of technology for technology's sake (and I speak as a fellow geek). There was also too much focus on a smart ass male lead (and I speak as a fellow smart ass male) who was difficult to care about and consequently excluded the rounded development of other family members and group characters. Then there was the claustrophobia of the setting - a colony struggling to survive in a harsh alien environment which is fine as long as you introduce a dash of gallows humour and you can then feel comfortable in their company. 

But this book deceives on a number of levels and you have to take it in the context of it being a fairly short novel by a writer just starting out with further adventures of the "Children of Occam" already written which address pretty much all of the shortcomings of this debut. If you accept that, and you have a natural predilection for the genre, then this is definitely worth a look. Now many of us are living digitally you get to see the evolution of a writer online and that can be a satisfying progress to follow from the beginning. Also check out his Star Wars toy comics - it will help you in not taking it too seriously as high literature and to enjoy it for what it is - a fascinating idea imperfectly told.