by Adam Roberts
Anyway, no rest for the narrator, I’d better tell you the rest of the story. So they rush up to the cockpit, or brig, or whatever they call it, but here it’s all pretty murky and sketchy. Not much light, you see. Not that I’m suggesting that, after blowing their budget on the swordfight-striptease hyperreal section the directors had no money for more detail than vague squirmy shapes and a couple of explosions. Not at all. But, as narrator, it’s a little tricky for me to be exact – some fighting, shooting at attacking SQUIDS, explosions, and it all ends tragically. If I were you I’d go back to the opening paragraphs with the two beautiful semi-naked people prancing around.
2. McAtrix Ghost Story
Pretty much a regular ghost story, only it turns out that the ghost is actually a malfunction in the logic of the McAtrix.
3. McAtrix Vampire Story
Once again, this is pretty much your basic vampire story, only it turns out that the vampire is actually a malfunction in the logic of the McAtrix. You see? Clever, isn’t it? By using this same explanation the creators of the McAtrix can rationalise almost any supernatural or unusual tale they like.
4. McAtrix UFO Story
Well, I’m assuming you’ve got the hang of the basic premise here.
5. McAtrix Chicklit
Sally works in a boring office job and has no luck with men, until one week she cops off with two handsome and wealthy blokes at the office party! Follow her hilarious adventures through one event-packed week whilst she tries to balance friends, work, love and laughter before eventually settling down and marrying a malfunction in the logic of the McAtrix.
6. What Not To Wear in the McAtrix
Transistor and Su-Circuit show what the clued-in silicon chip is wearing this season. Out go flares, colour, shirts, sweaters, loafers, kaftans, hats, brown suede waistcoats and jeans, and in come black suits, white shirts, sunglasses and National Health hearing aids.
Also available in the Victor Gollums SF Masterpieces Cheaper Than Commissioning New Novels Reprint Series
* * *
Build your Science Fiction Library with these essential SF Masterpieces:
Dung
by Francis ‘Dip’ Sherbert
In the year 468,579, the family Atrydeezbutinolikedem leave their home planet to make a new life for themselves on the world of Arrantpis, also known as ‘Dung’, a planet whose entire surface is wholly covered by ordure. Duke Jonwain Atrydeezbutinolikedem is assassinated by Sheriff Fatman; and the Duke’s young son Paulie Atrydeezbutinolikedem has no choice but to flee into the deserts of Dung. The landscape is not pleasant, and the imperial citizens (who all live inside the hermetically sealed and extensively deoderised Pod City) consider it utterly insupportable of life, so much so that Sheriff Fatman gives up his pursuit of Paulie, convinced that he must be dead. But Paulie survives by pinching his nose, and not thinking too precisely about what he is walking through, and is eventually rescued by the native Dungians, the Pheuweemen. Eventually he is accepted by these simple but brave (obviously) people, and is recognised as the Mud-Dibbyk, the saviour prophesied by their religion. He comes to understand the precise relationship between the mile-long Tapeworms that live under the surface of this strange world and the Tomatoes that grow only there, and are prized throughout the galaxy.
‘A masterpiece. I had to take three showers after finishing reading it before I started to feel clean.’
Clarke ‘Kent’ Arthur.
Also available:
Dung Messier
Children’s Nappies of Dung
God-Awful Smell of Dung
Hairy Ticks of Dung
Champignons Housed in Dung
Nerdomancer
by William ‘Wild Bill’ Hiccough-Gibson
In Hiccough-Gibson’s famous near-future dystopia, Casey is a cutting-edge info-hacker, a man who spends almost all his life programming, playing with, dismantling, rebuilding and hacking into computers. Then one day the beautiful leather-clad Maggie presents him with the offer of a lifetime: if he can hack into the Snark-guarded virtual world of Megacorps and rescue one particular mcguffin, then the two of them will be rich beyond the virtual dreams of avarice. ‘So whaddaya say, bright boy?’ she asks him. ‘You in?’ Casey, as you’d expect, adjusts his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose with his index finger, and calls out, ‘Mom? Mo-o-om? Can Maggie stay for supper? I’ll be online for only a couple more hours – if you bring us up some pizza and Doctor Peppers and maybe some coo-oo-ookies?’ And, from downstairs, his mother calls up, ‘Casey you’ve been on that computer long enough, I think, you remember what Doctor Kugelman said about keeping your weight down, about eating greens and getting a little exercise, two hundred thirty pounds is just too much for someone your age. And you promised me – no more hacking, of any kind. All right, sweetie? I’ll bring you and your friend some lemonade and apples if you like.’ And Casey says, ‘Awww . . . Mom!’ There’s pretty much three hundred pages of that. But, what can I tell you: it’s computers. You try and make computers, and the people who live and breathe them, sexy or interesting.
The Invisible Man
by H. G. ‘Ill’ Wells
The timeless classic. Wells’s evil scientist invents a ray that renders him invisible, a power which he plans to use to take over the world, ruthlessly tricking and murdering his way to the top. Laughing maniacally, he places himself in the path of the ray, and becomes invisible to the naked eye. Sadly his own naked eye is one of the organs rendered invisible, such that his retina is no longer able to register the light that strikes it. Accordingly he stumbles about completely blind, banging into walls, walking into lamp-posts, tripping over small dogs and falling down open manholes.
Read all the sequels in the complete ‘H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man’ series:
• Son of Invisible Man
• The Invisible Woman
• The Invisible Dog
• The Invisible Frankenstein Meets Invisible Abbot and Invisible Costello
• Invisible Invertebrates
• Invisible Invertebrates 2: Invisible Invertebrates Invade
• Invisible Invertebrates 3: The Return of Invisible Invertebrates
• The Invisible Tailor Makes Clothes for the Emperor
• Invisible Book.*
The Leather Handkerchief of Darkness
by Lester le Gurn
Gently Ow, diplomat from the Central Galactic Administration, visits the unique world of Gachoo, a planet on which everybody has a cold all the time. He sneezes, groans, sniffs, shivers and goes bleary-eyed in an attempt to persuade the Gachooians to join the CGA, before eventually giving up.
The Man in the High Chair
by Flippy Penis
Penis’s Alternate History won the Nebulous Award for ‘Best Sort-Of Book, Kinda SF-y, We Like It Anyhow’ of 1967. It is set in a timeline in which Hitler won the Second World War, and America is divided between the Nazis in the east and the Visigoths in the west (a slightly confused timeline, to be honest). In this world Gilbert Fah, the ‘Man in the High Chair’ of the title, writes an SF alternate history called The Cricket Squats, set in a world in which America won the Second World War. The main character in this novel is a medium called Jim who receives messages from an alternate reality in which Hitler won the Second World War. The individual from whom the medium receives the messages, Madox, is a film director in his own dimension, making a movie set in a fantasy world where America won the Second World War. Madox’s movie is about a group of female close-harmony singers who release a concept album set in a world in which Hitler won the Second World War. The third song on this album [cont. p.293]
(Publishers’ note: this Gollum Masterpiece Reissue comes complete with an appendix by a famous historian that reminds readers who it was who actually won the Second World War. So far as we can tell.)
Flash
by Merry Gentile
In this epic, 4,700-page retelling of the Flash Gordon story (the single largest one-volume novel booksellers have
been prepared to unpack from their boxes and lug upstairs to the shop shelves)* award-winning author Merry Gentile has created something unique. Her ‘Flash’ grows up a discarded waif on a military camp of the army of Myng the Non-Merci. A girl in a man’s world, she disguises herself as ‘Gor Don’, a honed fighting machine (with a university education), to survive. Accordingly she rises through the ranks until she is able to lead an army against the thankless Myng; and yet – her tragedy – she cannot wholly purge her masculine persona of feminine attributes. Her followers start to suspect that her various camp mannerisms, the gaudy decorations she prefers, the extremely clean spaceships she insists upon and her general attention to detail are incompatible with the rough, crude, belly-scratching world of men fighting wars with other men in a manly way. And so the book moves, not hurriedly, towards its tragic climax.
‘I started reading this novel in 2001, and I have found it impossible to put down. I am absorbed in it every night before I go to sleep, I keep a copy in the toilet, take it on the train with me, and spend my weekends immersed in it. I hope to finish it by 2007.’ Martin Amis.
Fundament
by Isaac Maseltov
The millions worlds of the Cosmic Imperium have lasted for thousands of years, and its decadent population assume it will last for thousands more. Only the psycho historian Hairy Shelgoon can foresee the inevitability of its collapse. Accordingly, he creates the Fundament on the planet Gluteus Minimus: an organisation devoted to preserving the memory of True Civilisation for future generations by writing a multi-volume Hitchhikers’ Encyclopedia of the Galaxy. Work on this great work proceeds whilst the Cosmic Imperium does indeed collapse: it gives the people of the galaxy hope, with the Encyclopedia becoming for many a sacred work. But then the compilers of the Guide become distracted by writing piffling detective-agency novels, undertaking rainforest conservation projects, CDROMS about the Titanic, appearances on Parkinson and Wogan, articles in computer magazines about slight improvements to user-interfaces, and the like. Tragically, the great Hitchhikers’ Encyclopedia of the Galaxy is unfinished, and civilisation is unable to function properly without it. Woe.
The remaining titles in the ‘Fundament’ trilogy:
Second Fundament
Up Your Fundament
The second trilogy:
Cream of Foundation
Garment of Foundation
Al-Qaeda of Foundation
The third, or ‘cash-in’ trilogy:
Foundation, Robots, Time Travel, and Everything I’ve
Ever Written About Are All Part of the Same Universe,
Difficult As That May Be To Believe
Forsythias for the Foundation
Fortepianos of the Foundation
The fourth or ‘not even written by him’ trilogy:
Footlings of the Foundation
Forty Winks with the Foundation
Four-poster time for the Foundation
The fifth, or ‘oh you cannot be serious’ trilogy:
Fortissimo, Foundation!
Foundate, Foundation!
The Fourteen Fountains of Forever (Foundation 15)
Chairlifts of the Gods
by Erich von Donut Dunkin
Was Earth colonised forty thousand years ago by a decrepit race of gerontaliens, who sculpted the landscape to make it easier to get from the bedroom to the kitchen? Is Stonehenge a picnic table for an alien day trip? Is Tower Bridge an aerial for picking up intergalactic afternoon hypervision programmes such as Rocketlaunch Countdown and Murder She Wrote in Undecipherable Hieroglyphs Engraved upon a Mysterious Artefact made of Hitherto Unknown Metal?
Obviously no.
Also available: the sequels: How Wrong I Was: No Spacemen in Earth’s History At All, and Boy Is My face Red, I Made Up Most of my Evidence.
The Second Mars Trilogy
by Stan Lee Kim-il-Sung Robinsonade
Three enormous books that continue the saga begun with Robinsonade’s original Mars Trilogy.
Mars 4. Purple Mars. Something goes very wrong with the terraforming of Mars, and a purple haze descends over everything, all in my brain as well as all over the planet. What’s that? Terraforming, yes. That’s what I said. All right, all right, ‘areoforming’, phhw, if you’re really so pedantically minded – for crying out loud, who cares? Areoforming, schmareoforming. Terraforming is the general noun covering all such cases. That’s right. That’s my position, and I’m sticking to it.
Mars 5. Lime Mars with Regularly Spaced Dark Brown Circles. An alien race whose only contact with Earth civilisation consists of a brief window of 1970s design magazines that accidentally fell through a wormhole in the etc. etc. arrive and remake Mars in what they assume are colours humanity will applaud.
Mars 6. Beige Mars. Many thousands of years in the future posthumans revisit Mars and alter it so it conforms with what is now considered the most beautiful colour in the cosmos.
What Hologram, Jeeves!
by Pee Jee Woodenspaceships
The classic comedy.
‘Comedy’ – Breamwatch: Fish-Fanciers Monthly
‘Classic’ – SFZ ‘The’ – Prepositions Quarterly and Digest
* You may already have this book on your shelves. To be honest, it’s pretty hard to be sure one way or another.
* There was a Peter Hamilton novel that ran to 5,150 pages, but the booksellers refused to handle it without heavy-lifting equipment and so it never made the shelves.
New From
Victor Gollums Video
Sighs
Directed by M. Night Shamalamalamalamalamalamadingdong
Starring: Mel Gibbon, Joachimp Primate, Ann Ape
The chilling SF classic. Alien creatures who are by their nature intensely allergic to water (to the point where water acts upon their body much as sulphuric acid acts upon human flesh) decide to invade Earth – a planet where water lies around on the surface in vast pools, where water vapour hangs densely in the air at almost every latitude, and water falls regularly out of the sky. They land and parade about our world wearing no protective clothing of any kind. They are easily defeated.
It later transpires that these aliens were inmates of a galactic lunatic asylum who had been out on a day trip to Ursa Minor when their minder had popped into a space toilet to relieve himself and they’d wandered off unsupervised. Their fate causes galactic outrage, and Earth is shunned by the more civilised alien races for picking on such obviously harmless cretins.
‘Fun whilst it lasts. However afterwards, when you think about it, it makes prodigiously little sense.’
Imperial Film Magazine
Apollo 14
Dir: Ron Howard
In this sequel to his Oscar-winning smash hit Apollo 13, Howard returns to the world of 1970s space exploration. The film follows the launch of Apollo 14, its uneventful three-day voyage through space, its successful landing on the moon, its astronauts collecting rocks, driving about in a car made of knitting needles and wire mesh, collecting some more rocks, eating processed food in their module, going out to collect some more rocks, planting a flag with a wire support along the top edge to make the cloth stand up in the vacuum, picking up some more rocks, and then flying home safely and without incident.
‘Perhaps the most boring science fiction film every made’ –
Rock Collectors Monthly
‘I used to be in Happy Days, you know’ – Ron Howard
Blade Runner
Dir: Scott ‘Scotty’ Scott
An evil scientist creates a matter-transference machine, into which he puts (a) a movie about two guys (or ‘blade runners’) smuggling medical supplies and scalpels into 1980s Latin America, and (b) another movie about an ‘android hunter’ hunting androids in a far-future dystopia. He presses the button, and at the other end emerges a monstrous mutated combination of the two – a film with a title that bears no relationship at all to its subject matter.
Do you dare to view the resulting hybrid freak? Do you dare sit
through it with friends, drinking beer and eating potato chips, to face their puzzled questions afterwards, ‘So why was it called Blade Runner then? Where were the Blades? Did I miss something?’? Do you dare to find Rutger Hauer strangely arousing, even though you’re straight, honestly you are, no, really, although it’s true that those builders whistled at you last time you walked past that building site, although perhaps that was more sort-of taking the piss, now that you come to think of it?
Also available: the soundtrack: Blade Runner, Music By Mintgellies.
‘If your idea of good music is early 1980s synths and somebody wailing in the background very slowly, then this will appeal to you.’ –
MNMNME
Blade 3: The Runner
Dir: Scott ‘Scotty’ Scott
In Blade you were awed by the high-octane action adventures as Wesley Schnaps hunted evil vampires. In Blade 2, you were staggered by the even higher-octane adventures, as Schnaps became caught in an eon-long war in which vampire-vampires preyed on regular vampires. Now, in Blade 3: The Runner, prepare to have your socks blown quite literally off your feet as Wesley Schnaps encounters vampire-vampire-vampires, specialist predators who prey only on the vampires who prey on ordinary vampires. As with any pyramidic food chain, there are only a very few of these vampire-vampire-vampires about, but they’re pretty scary, believe you me, so scary that Schnaps’s character spends most of the movie running away from them.