MOON - Book review

 

The last James Herbert book I read was Fluke in 2012. So it was about time I read some more of his impressive output, starting with his 1985 novel Moon.

Moon begins dramatically with a boy tormented in his bed; this is ‘before’. The rest is ‘after’. A particularly gruesome evisceration of a dead woman is followed by a diver experiencing a waking nightmare that almost threatens his life. Jon Childes survives, being hauled out of the sea by Amy, a fellow teacher. Both work on a Channel Island; Jon teaches IT, Amy teaches French and English.

It appears that Jon had fled the mainland – England – after being instrumental in tracking down a serial killer. Reluctant to admit it, Jon somehow possessed a weird psychic ability that enables him to get into the killer’s mind and pinpoint where the bodies were buried. Unfortunately, the sensational press and sceptical police cast suspicion on him. That was three years ago. Since then, he has not received any psychic imagery or suffered grisly nightmares. Until now.

Herbert’s success is partly due to his ability to create an atmosphere of dread – usually surrounding innocuous individuals who find it difficult to cope with the supernatural. ‘The mourners were grouped around the open grave, dark clothes struck grey by the sunlight. Stained white crosses, slabs, and smiling cracked angels were dispassionate observers in the field of sunken bones. The mushy cadence of traffic could be heard in the distance…’ (p42)

During a meal with Amy’s family and other guests, Jon briefly discusses computing. ‘You’re talking of an ideal situation where the computer is a normal household item, a regular piece of furniture like the TV or stereo unit. We’re a long way off from that situation’ (p48). How times have changed since 1985! Envisioning video-calls on mobile phones must have seemed like Star Trek then.

Complications arise when Amy’s influential father takes a disliking to Jon and institutes an investigation into his past…

Even nowadays, there are plenty of people who still retain an open mind about extra sensory perception and other related phenomena. So perhaps it is not unusual for Amy to accept Jon’s talent – or curse. Amy says: ‘It isn’t stupid at all; it makes a weird kind of sense. Strong emotions, a sudden shock, can induce a strong telepathic connection between certain people, and that’s well known’ (p79).

The moon begins to evince significance for Jon: ‘He was aware of what was happening to him and dreaded what images were to be further unveiled. He experienced a desperate need to be safe inside his home, feeling terribly exposed, vulnerable to the luminescent night, the moon’s stark glare causing the surroundings to appear frozen, the trees oddly flat as if cut from cardboard, the shadows deep and clear-edged’ (p111).

Jon enlists the help of Detective Inspector Overoy, who had been involved in the cases three years ago. Overoy is a rarity, a believer in Jon’s ability. The case almost cost Jon his sanity, but it did ruin his marriage, though he remains on speaking terms with his ex-wife Fran and fairly regularly sees his daughter Gabby.

Inevitably, this new killer becomes aware of Jon while Jon sees through the killer’s eyes. Now it is a battle of wills, and the killer taunts him, threatening all Jon holds dear, and more tragedy and deaths are to follow before the grim climax.

A fast read. A page-turner. Suspend disbelief in the supernatural and enjoy the ride!

The Rostron Ultimatum - '...one hell of a set up...'

Reader, writer and reviewer F.R Jameson is reading and reviewing my first short story collection, Gifts from a Dead Race, commenting on each story in Goodreads. The sixth in the contents is 'The Rostron Ultimatum'  was written in the 1970s and this is what he says :

"An astronaut messages back from The Moon demanding The President's resignation, which is frankly one hell of a set up for an entertaining story.

"The President of the story is a hard-core evangelical Christian, but reading it I couldn't help imagining the current occupant of the White House and what would ensue if he was the main character.

"Within minutes of the demand there would be a tweet about low ratings for Moon broadcasts, he’d swiftly suggest that Crooked Hilary had done worse than he had ever done, blame the media for maligning him and the batshit craziness would just pile on from there. Something for Nik to think about, in fact, if he’s tempted to write a 2017 version."

Many thanks, Mr Jameson!

[His reviews of other stories in the collection can be found in Goodreads].

Available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon here

One small step…

Wikipedia commons

 

Forty-six years ago today, the first man stepped on the moon. At the time I was serving on HMS Zulu and we were berthed in Bahrein 21-29 July. It was a momentous event for most of us.

Neil Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours after the landing, on July 21. Broadcast on live TV to a world-wide audience, Armstrong said, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

He spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, Aldrin who followed spent slightly less, and together they collected 47.5 pounds of lunar material for return to Earth. Expensive rock samples – and yet in their way paradoxically priceless. It seemed as though a new space age had dawned, though of course that isn’t what happened, because of political, economic and safety reasons. Yet mankind’s future is among the stars – perhaps after we’ve attained ‘world peace’ – as envisaged by Gene Roddenberry.

And I wonder how the fiftieth anniversary will be marked.

My take on Armstrong’s quotation can be found in this previously published sci-fi short story, 'A Gigantic Leap':

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/saturday-story-gigantic-leap-1-of-2.html

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/a-gigantic-leap-part-2-of-2.html

Saturday Story - 'The first is the worst'

THE FIRST IS THE WORST

 

When Tim Thorn first entered Bragg Crater Hospital's antiseptic-smelling room it had appeared to be quite spacious.  Yet now, after he had paced from bulkhead to bulkhead for what seemed like an age, it felt unbearably close, almost claustrophobic.  The sealed windows that offered panoramic views of the moonscape palled very quickly and were of little help.

            He crushed his twentieth cigarette into the ashtray provided alongside the long low polyglass bench.

            Anderson, the only other occupant, eyed the dispenser. He seemed to be continually chewing something. 'Thoughtful of them, don't you think, providing cigarettes?'

            Tim grunted affirmatively and resumed his pacing. His fingers fumbled with his jacket's Velcro fastening; finally, it peeled crisply away from his throat. He wiped his moist neck with a dispenser-issued paper handkerchief, then thrust the soiled thing in the disposal chute. The orifice emitted an asthmatic sigh.

            'I guess this is your first, eh?' Anderson sallied, chuckling as he leaned back on the bench.  Like the rest of him, his cheeks were bloated; the incessant munching sound carried to Tim's ears and grew more and more irritating.

            'Yes, our first.  It takes two to make a baby, so it's not only mine, but hers - Karen's - ours - '

            'No need to get so edgy, feller, I've been through the same waiting game before.'

            'What's keeping them, anyway?' He sullenly eyed the airlock door. MATERNITY THEATRE said the large red stencils: they glowed, indicating occupation. The theatre door stayed shut.

            Anderson sat beside him, far too close for comfort, his sweat and chewing intruding grotesquely. 'Shouldn't be long now,' Anderson said. His bespectacled fresh-faced features - an odd mixture of boyishness and dissolution vying for his physiognomy's topography - remorselessly followed Tim's every move. 'After three, you stop counting. Sort of get used to the waiting bit. Mind you, the first took about ten hours, give or take a few drinks...' Anderson pulled out a hip-flask and gulped back a quantity of aromatic liquor, his Adam's-apple bobbing. 'Ah, that's better. Brandy - I swear by it. Actually, I abstain till occasions like this.' He burped. 'Mind you, I've got to be careful. If I get a taste for it, no telling what the moon's population will be like, eh?'

            'But the Edict - one child per family, how'd - ?'

            'Early settlers, lad,' Anderson explained, patting Tim's thigh. 'The Edict was introduced only after Phase Three Settlement was established. You're Phase Six, aren't you?'

            'Yes...' Tim looked puzzled, head to one side.  'Earlier, did you say your wife was in labour ten hours?' He stood up, paced the floor yet again. He absently registered Anderson's nod. He held the image of Karen lying there, the mound of belly they had both created. 'But the doctors had said it would be painless, they assured me - us, I mean. But she's been gone - been in there - three hours already!' He balled his fists, impotently thumped the utilitarian magazine table. 'Why did they insist on me staying outside?'

            'Moon-base regulations,' Anderson shrugged. 'Mind you, I've never particularly fancied being there, actually there when it happens... 's enough to put you off for life, eh?'

            'They never mentioned this at the colony recruitment centre. Back on Earth - I - I'd be with her now, holding her hand, giving her support, sharing the experience...'

            'Don't worry none, it's a damned sight easier having a kid up here. Something to do with the one-sixth gravity, they reckon.'

            Tim withdrew another cigarette from the dispenser.  Anderson seemed to go on and on, damn him!  Wouldn't he ever stop?  He rasped a match on the box, a memento from an Olde English nite-club in Apollo Crater: it snapped. He struck a second, sucked in the calming smoke, and resumed his metronomic tread.

            Anderson never stopped, though. 'Pretty good, isn't it, up here, eh?'

            He couldn't help but answer: 'In what way?'

            Anderson guffawed. 'Any way you choose, conceiving up here is way out, don't you reckon?'

            Tim turned away, but Anderson was insensitive to any cold shoulder treatment. 'Sometimes,' Anderson went on, 'I wonder if any space radiation we don't know of might get at us, even get through the shields, through to our genes. My wife gets nasty when I think up these silly ideas. Well, I mean, I suppose they are silly, really...'

            Tim, as though sleepwalking, nodded.

            'What do you want - a boy or a girl?'

            What a bloody cliché!  Face suffused now, Tim swerved round. He could sense his temple's prominent vein throbbing insistently. 'I don't care what it is - as long as it's healthy!' he answered, somewhat vehemently.

            At that moment the airlock hissed and the theatre door slid up into the roof.

            Wearing a shiny white trouser-suit, an attractive blonde nurse entered, her face drained, ashen. She seemed to be in shock, falteringly seeking support against the airlock frame.

            'My missus!' Anderson cried, jumping up, his feet unsteady. 'Is she - ?'

            The nurse seemed to collect herself, shook her head, swallowed. 'No, it's Mr. Thorn...'

            Tim's heart pounded, gave a foreboding lurch.  He wanted to ask, but his throat and chest seemed dry, constricted. He paled.

            'Your wife's all right, Mr. Thorn,' she barely croaked.

            Relief surged, strengthened his legs and filled his face; then, jarringly, panic twisted his mouth, clouded his eyes: 'The baby?'

            'It - it isn't a baby... I - I don't know what it is... but it's healthy...'

 

***

 

Previously published in Death Rays magazine, 1981; a rewrite was also published as ‘Pregnant Pause’ in Costa TV Times, 2010. Copyright Nik Morton, 2014.

 

As you can see, the cliché about an expectant father smoking to ease his nerves is no longer viable in drama. Who could have envisaged in 1981 that smoking would be banned from all hospitals and offices? The later version has all mention of cigarettes expunged!

A new kind of novel

Jules Verne brought something new to fiction and his influence is still felt to this day...

In the latter part of the nineteenth century an author emerged whose novels predicted submarines, flying machines, skyscrapers and even the moon landing. His works inspired some of the world’s scientists and, with H. G. Wells, he fathered the literary genre of science fiction. His name was Jules Verne. He died in 1905.

 

Best known for his books in English translation Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days, he in fact published 65 novels, 20 short stories and essays, 30 plays, some geographical works and even opera librettos.

Jules Gabriel Verne was born 8 February1828 in Nantes. So that he could follow in his lawyer father’s footsteps he was sent to study law in Paris. Here, he became fascinated with the theatre and, influenced by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, he wrote plays; his first one-act comedy was performed when he was 22.

He abandoned law and over the next ten years continued to write plays but to support himself he became a stockbroker which gave him a modest financial stability, sufficient in 1857 to marry a widow, Honorine de Viane, acquiring two step-children. In 1861 they had one child, Michel Jean Pierre.

The following year his career took off in a new direction after he met a publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who offered insightful editorial suggestions to improve Verne’s writing. Verne was a devoted admirer of Edgar Allan Poe’s works and was clearly inspired by the American. After spending hours in the Parisian libraries studying geology, engineering and astronomy, Verne wrote his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.

 

This was a new kind of novel. Because of Verne’s narrative style, many readers believed the story was true. It was an immediate success.

These days we think of Verne as an optimist and an unswerving supporter of scientific progress. Yet, like many writers using science as their fictional springboard, he harboured doubts about the effects of too much technology.

In 1863, at the beginning of his successful writing career, he wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, a novel about a young man living in a future world with skyscrapers of glass and steel, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators and a worldwide communications network. But the hero cannot find happiness in this highly materialistic environment and comes to a tragic end.

However, Hetzel declined to publish the book as he feared it would damage Verne’s career, adding, ‘Nobody today will believe your prophecy, nobody will care about it.’ The manuscript gathered dust until 1989 when it was discovered by a relative and finally saw print; an English edition appeared in 1997.

From the Earth to the Moon (1865) has many uncanny similarities with the Apollo space programme of a century later. The characters first test the idea of a manned flight by launching a cat and a squirrel (NASA later used monkeys), recovering them at sea. Three men are launched (the same number of astronauts in the Apollo craft) from Florida, a location just a few miles from the Kennedy Space Centre. When they returned, they splashed down in the Pacific...

In his Clipper of the Clouds (1886) the evil genius Robur threatens the world from a flying ship utilising rotors. At the time, it was hotly debated whether the future of air travel was with heavier-than-air craft or balloons. Verne supported the airplane concept.

 

In his later years Verne wrote about the misuse of technology and its impact on the environment. In Propeller Island he lamented the destruction of the native cultures of various Polynesian islands. In the story The Ice Sphinx he predicted the decimation of the whale population.

And in The Begum’s Fortune he warns that technology and scientific knowledge in the hands of evil people can lead to destruction. In a story entitled ‘The Eternal Adam’ a far-future historian discovers the twentieth century civilisation was overthrown by geological cataclysms and the legend of Adam and Eve become true...

In 1871 Verne settled in Amiens and was elected counsellor in 1888, two years after surviving a murder attempt by his paranoid nephew, the bullet in Verne’s leg disabling him for the rest of his life.

Verne died on 24 March, 1905, aged seventy-seven. But he left behind a legacy which can still excite the imagination even today. The late Ray Bradbury said, ‘We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.’

Explorers and scientists will often cite their interest in their careers first took hold after reading Verne. In 1886 the first all-electric submarine, built by two Englishmen, was named Nautilus in honour of Verne’s creation in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1955, also carried the name Nautilus.

The website http://epguides.com/djk/JulesVerne/works.shtml is an excellent bibliography of Verne’s works, many of which even to this day are not translated into English.

While www.jules-verne.co.uk will give you the opportunity to read all his works in the public domain online, for free, and also the French editions if you’d prefer to read them in their original language. And of course you can enjoy the various movie versions of his most popular books.