Relative Family Values

Since there are no more important issues facing the country, let alone the Conservative Party, a private member's bill has been introduced to place a legal ban on marriage between first cousins. The private member in question, Richard Holden MP, is the kind of third cousin to the human species who runs an anti-litter campaign one year and gets fined for litter-dropping the next, and the matter has been thought through with expectable scientific precision. As children can only be born in wedlock, and as about six per cent of children from cousin marriages suffer congenital health problems, such unions patently pose an unacceptable risk to the quality of the nation's breeding stock. Outside the aristocracy, who would no doubt receive an appropriate dispensation, the majority of cousin marriages in the UK happen to be Islamic ones; but that's just a coincidence.

Blocked Passage

Brazilian democracy has demonstrated its immaturity in comparison to the sometime British colony of New Trumpsterdom by refusing permission for a far-right chancer to attend the inauguration of a far-right chancer. Like the tangerine dreamblob and his head-tribble, Jair Bolsonaro stands accused of involvement in an attempted coup to prevent the accession of a legitimately elected successor; however, while Murcan demoxey has exercised its powers of Christian forgiveness in hopes that the Trumpster may refrain from jailing everyone who doesn't worship him, the Brazilian judiciary has taken a less charitable view. Bolsonaro has even been forbidden to seek re-election until 2030, apparently for spreading electoral misinformation rather than allowing friendly fellow-manbabies to spread it on his behalf. Then again, Bolsonaro has proclaimed himself so excited at the idea of viewing the Trumpster's alien zest that he has cut out Viagra; so perhaps the head-tribble will feel a certain sneaking relief that its virtue is still safe.

Clean British Blue

As long as we're putting Orwell on the postage stamps, it's appropriate that the spirit of Ingsoc should sweep forth in commemoration of all that the nation has striven to eliminate from its collective life and consciousness. A blue plaque is to be put up in the name of a youth opportunities beneficiary whose lack of encumbrance by Health and Safety bureaucracy led to his presumably ungrateful demise in 1875. Since the boy was gainfully employed and not an immigrant, his case was publicised by a sentimental Tory aristocrat who thought that children should be made to work no more than ten hours a day and eight on Saturdays, and was even in favour of their spending some of their copious free time at school. These unfortunate and un-British eccentricities, which today would see the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury banished to the most naïvely ideological margins of the Labour Party, were redeemed in part by his dismissal of the Syro-Palestinian Untermenschen as a non-existent nation and his fervent advocacy of the Zionist Great Replacement.

Wellcome Windfall

In keeping with Wideboy Wesley Streeting's hopes for Britain's world-beating position in the business of profitable healthcare, a health research charity has resoundingly done its part for the fiscal wellbeing of its investment executives. The Wellcome Trust enjoyed a rise in returns from its portfolio last year, and naturally celebrated by reducing its charitable spending and splurging eleven million on the nice people who advise its comparatively modestly-paid governors on how to reduce health inequalities. Almost half of the eleven million went to the chief investment officer, aptly named Nick, who is leaving in a couple of months having apparently made the shrewd decision that even the rudest fiscal health might not suffer by a tactful exit.

Apolitical Correctness

Those in charge of the Auschwitz museum have made the laudable decision to keep the politicians from speechifying at the commemoration for the eightieth anniversary of the liberation. The taint of politics has been expunged yet further thanks to the Polish government's pledge not to arrest the Netanyahoo or his cohorts over their little indiscretions against the Arab Untermenschen, and the director of the museum has held forth in fine apolitical fashion about the difference between Russia's dirty war in Ukraine and the Righteous State's cleansing of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Although the Red Army liberated the camp, no Russian delegation has been invited to the commemoration, on the grounds that Putin's Russia does not understand the value of liberty; presumably Stalin possessed some spark of freedomising instinct through being allied, however temporarily and mistrustfully, with Mr Churchill and his American chums. Survivors of Auschwitz will be permitted to speak, so it is to be hoped that they remember to keep their contributions sufficiently apolitical for the occasion.

Barry N Malzberg

Most likely the first I knew of Barry (middle N optional but usually present) Malzberg, who died on 19 December, was his novelisation of Saul Bass's outstanding mutant-insect film Phase IV. In those dear dinosaurid days before media streaming and before the reissue of formerly real books as Kindle content, the only alternative to waiting for a film to show up again on one of the four available TV channels was to get hold of the cash-in paperback, which if the film was science fiction would have an odds-on chance of having been written by Alan Dean Foster. Censorship meant that certain films had no chance of turning up on TV at all, so it is to paperback cash-ins that I owe my first acquaintance with Cronenberg's The Brood and Videodrome. Being prose transliterations of the screenplays, novelisations often included details that didn't appear in the film as released; Dennis Etchison's versions of Videodrome and of Carpenter's The Fog are both interesting in this regard.

The prose in such works was generally workmanlike, professional and anonymous; among the exceptions are Videodrome, Ramsey Campbell's versions of Universal's 1930s monster movies, and Malzberg's Phase IV, all of which can be read on their own merits. Malzberg's novel de-mystifies the enigmatic happenings in space at the beginning of the film; in a verbal as opposed to a visual medium this is perhaps unavoidable to some extent, but the ending is characteristically Malzbergian. The theatrical cut of Phase IV ends with an ambiguously transcendental merging of the human characters into the newly-evolved insect hive mind; Malzberg finishes with a disembodied voice saying "please clear all channels" and the start of an unspecified Phase Five.

Later I happened upon Guernica Night, which I found considerably less accessible; but it came with a useful afterword by Jeff Clark (no, neither have I) that pointed out some of his distinguishing traits: notably an intense, present-tense focus upon the consciousness of a single protagonist and a style combining meticulous syntactic precision with liberal use of the vernacular and long sentences with under-use of punctuation to convey the impression of a mind both rigidly controlled and ready at any moment to run haywire. The afterword also named two of Malzberg's best books, The Falling Astronauts and Beyond Apollo, both concerned with the internal affairs of pathologically alienated astronauts; and quoted the narrator of the latter to the effect that "the universe was invented by man in 1976 as a cheap and easy explanation for all his difficulties in conquering it."

Deservedly his most acclaimed novel, Beyond Apollo touches on many of the author's themes. Richly endowed with the Malzbergian astronautical character traits of outer passivity, inner resentment and confusion, and sexual uncertainty, Harry Evans is stuck in an institution where the authorities demand a full account of the recent disastrous Venus expedition, of which he is the sole survivor. He explores a number of scenarios in both the voyage and his private life, including hostile Venusians, the Captain's insanity, and the trauma of being cooped up with another human being in a marriage or a metal box with nothing but space outside. He plans a heroic novel about the expedition, which has the same length and the same number of chapters as the decidedly unheroic document we are reading. He plays with anagrams, whether to achieve new perspectives on the jumble in his mind, or simply to pass the time, or perhaps to remake his life and the universe in more user-friendly models: "Evans and I are the same person ... Each of us has a dissociation reaction, but mine is stronger than his."

Padded-cell humour also enlivens Herovit's World, one of Malzberg's numerous satires on the shortcomings of science fiction, the lunacy of fandom and the generally horrific business of writing for money. Jonathan Herovit churns out sub-literate space opera under the pseudonym Kirk Poland (surname courtesy of "the goddamned Gomulka government" which attained newsworthiness at an opportune moment); when Herovit finally collapses under pressure, the pseudonymous personality steps up only to suffer problems of his own, leading to a terminal fiasco too good to reveal here. Galaxies, a novel in the form of notes towards a science fiction novel, subjects the genre to a more overtly metafictional assault.

When not deconstructing science fiction tropes, Malzberg happily bent them to his own obsessions. The Men Inside is a deranged variation on the Fantastic Voyage premise, wherein young Blount is miniaturised and injected into a rich old man for healthcare purposes; like most Malzberg protagonists, Blount suffers from bureaucratic bullying, existential anxiety and unfair women. In Overlay the mind of Simmons the horseplayer (Malzberg was an enthusiast of the racetrack) is ridden and reined by a minion of an alien Bureau, with unfortunate consequences the only safe bet. Revelations and The Destruction of the Temple both prefigure the horrors of reality TV: the former depicting a talk show and another discontented astronaut, the latter an attempt by a future video creator to reconstruct the assassination of the sainted John F Kennedy.

In the 1990s, when Kathe Koja was producing superb stream-of-consciousness horror novels like The Cipher and Skin, Malzberg collaborated with her on several short stories. Notable among the hundreds of short works that he wrote on his own are the fatalistic love story "Gehenna" and the essays collected in Breakfast in the Ruins. Malzberg had a genius for titles; one fears to attempt anything called The Sodom and Gomorrah Business in case the content fails to measure up.

Malzberg was insanely prolific during the sixties and seventies, producing dozens of short novels (such that they can be collected by threes in volumes the size of a moderately concise Stephen King opus) in various genres, and under various pseudonyms which one must hope proved less fatally assertive than Kirk Poland. Even within the fraction of his output that has come my way, there is inevitably a certain amount of re-tread and repetition; but none of Malzberg's work could be mistaken for anyone else's, and the best of it is among the best there is.

Precautionary Unpatriotism

Despite the Trumpster and his head-tribble having said they will impose prohibitive tariffs on imports, it seems there really are people who believe that the Trumpster and his head-tribble will impose prohibitive tariffs on imports. Rather than giving thanks to Baby Jesus, providing jobs for native-born launderesses, and military-industrialising their way to laptop and white-goods autarky, Guardian-reading Americans are unashamedly hoarding goods and appliances, including those manufactured by racial enemies such as the Heathen Chinee and Canada. With the way that even toilet paper is rolling off the shelves, an un-American might suspect the imminent approach of a shit-storm. Thus it appears that a spectre is haunting New Trumpsterdom: the spectre of planned economy.

Noble Rot

Though often maligned as being divorced from the truth on grounds of persistent adultery, the National Johnson in fact has as intimate a relationship with reality as any other caricature. Like the mainstream British establishment, he believes that laws are for the little people, that the state exists to serve his own interests, and that competence is less valuable than sycophancy. His eventual defenestration came about through inefficiency and bad manners; had there been any genuine divergence of principle, he would not have attained office in the first place. Thus it has come about that, after a mere eighteen months of investigation, a journalist has discovered that the House of Lords is a house of lords and that those appointed there are not always elevated purely on a disinterested assessment of their service to the public good. The National Johnson is so luminous an embodiment of the realm's meritocracy that not even freedom of British information can cover it up for more than a year and a half.

Truss Demands Restraint

Just as the fiend Putin has not personally invaded Ukraine, and the Netanyahoo has not with his own hands driven the Arab Untermenschen from their underground dens, and even the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble will most likely make use of intermediaries in shredding the Constitution of the United States, so it is no more than literal truth to say that the forty-nine days' wonder which was Prime Minister Mary Elizabeth Surgical-Appliance did not stricto sensu crash the economy. Accordingly, La Truss has taken loud and legalistic exception to the CEO of Team Starmer repeatedly and blatantly proclaiming that she did crash the economy: an allegation all the more outrageous in that La Truss was forced out of office before she had time to achieve the levels of unemployment and GDP collapse that would have put the matter beyond any doubt. Never one to stop and think when looking ridiculous will do, La Truss has dispatched, or caused to be dispatched, a six-page order to Cease and Desist upon the subject; it remains regrettably unclear whether the missive is written in green or purple ink or in block capitals, or even whether it commences You probably won't dare to read any further... Nevertheless, there is as little doubt as ever that if it hadn't been for the Communist cabal running the markets and the hard-left conspiracy on the Conservative back-benches, and if everyone had just listened and done as they were told, the whole unpleasant episode need never have occurred.

Look Over There

The World Cop by the grace of God has condescended to notice a genocide, though not the one there's been so much fuss about over the past year or so. For the second time in a generation, paramilitary forces in Sudan are accused of systematic atrocities, in the course of a war in which tens of thousands have been killed, millions displaced and a famine perpetuated. Doubtless contributing to the moral indignation of the World Cop and its clients is the Arab and Muslim persuasion of the militias involved and the more ethnically virtuous persuasion of the victims. Meanwhile the World Cop has denied that the killings, forced removals and famine in Gaza constitute a genocide, presumably on the grounds that the perpetrators are non-Arabs and therefore ineligible for indictment in any court whose jurisdiction could be considered worthy of recognition by the master race.