The Noughtie List.

I also considered rounding up a selection of news, reviews and so on, but again, it just felt like old hat.

When I thought about it some more, it became fairly obvious that I was woefully underqualified to talk about 2009 in any meaningful sense except one — how it seemed to me. That may not be a ‘fully leveraged’, ‘needs-focussed’ or ‘vertically segmented’ view of the year, but it does have the virtue of being honest.

My main sense of 2009 was of a lull between storms. 2008 was tumultuous, peaking with the global economy screeching right up to the very edge of total catastrophe, and with Obama’s victory at the American polls. Last year, by contrast, felt like we were all holding our breaths, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Governments world-wide poured torrents of money into the banking sector. The financial sector immediately stopped wailing doom and went back to binging itself stupid on cash. The sense of terror eased, but circumstances didn’t change all that much. We’ll have to start paying for those bail-outs soon… but we didn’t really start in 2009.

A nice picture of the Algarve in Portugal. Irrelevant, but so much nicer to look at than politicians or swine flu victims.

Swine flu and terrorism were the two huge sticks we were told to be scared of in 2009, but neither actually smacked us. Swine flu deaths, whilst tragic, were less than those from regular flu, and effective terror attacks were pretty much non-existent in the west. Even global warming, the big long-range Bête Noire of modern life, had its fear aura slightly blunted by the scandal over made-up data.

None of these things have gone away, and any one of them could still potentially become a hideous nightmare — yes, including the economy — but for 2009, they were little more than phantasms.

We had some things to distract us, as usual. In the US, Obama made some pleasant noises to the cameras without really achieving anything much; In the UK, we somehow spent most of the year being shocked that our politicians were greedy and unscrupulous, but even then, the MP Expenses firestorm didn’t really change anything in the real world. I was particularly revolted to note that everyone, everywhere seemed to be astonished that an ugly woman should possess a good singing voice and be a nice person.

As for my own life, I spent most of 2009 wrestling with arthritis. I’ll spare you the tedious details, and just say that Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory is as perfect a summary as you’re likely to find anywhere. I didn’t have any family dramas, massive job stresses, or relationship crises, unless you consider continued supply shortages in all three areas to equate to problems. Forgive me if that sounds downbeat; it’s not supposed to. I got back to the UK late in ’08 after several years Dubai and Australia. My arthritis only really started taking off in ’06, so for two years I’d been working around it, but not actually seeking treatment. I simply didn’t have enough money to do so whilst abroad. One of the reasons I came back home to the UK was to start getting the disease properly treated, and that’s what 2009 was about for me: working my way up the treatment ladder step by step. In that sense, it was a firm success. I hope to move up to drugs that can actually keep the disease fully at bay in 2010, at which point things like having ‘a life’ can resume!

In summary then, 2009 felt like a year on hold — both for me personally, and for the world at large. I suspect that my experiences have coloured my perceptions, but they’re the only ones I have.

Right from the start, World War Z treats its subject absolutely seriously. It takes the form of a series of stories recounted by survivors of the zombie apocalypse, which takes place in what is presumably the near future. The stories have been assembled by a scientist compiling statistical information on the war for the United Nations; when his bosses insist that he removes individual data from his official report, he decides to preserve the tales independently for historical reasons. As you’d expect from a premise like this, the material covers all sorts of different viewpoints, from primary movers and shakers through to ordinary people who scraped through.

It’s a difficult approach to take when writing a book. The wide range of characters can be disjointed and difficult to identify with, and there’s always a danger of slipping into mawkish melodrama or gung-ho action. Brooks does a fantastic job, however. It’s very easy to forget you’re reading a work of fiction — apart from the zombies, of course. The characters are sympathetic, varied and totally believable. Some of their stories are touching; others are positively harrowing. As events unfold, you really get the feeling of what it would have been like to live through the experience, and to witness the scars that it left. It calls to mind similar real-world eyewitness accounts from previous conflicts, particularly Studs Terkel’s famous book of stories from WWII, The Good War. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a healthy dose of social commentary in there as well.

World War Z gave a huge boost of new energy and potential to the Zombie genre, and I strongly recommend it to anyone with any fondness for our moany dead friends. It is currently under development as a movie with a script by J. Michael Straczinsky.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here; the Malazan Book of the Fallen is some of the best high fantasy ever written.

The first thing that hits you is the sheer scope. The books are set in a vast world, layered throughout with history, texture and gritty realism. Erikson trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist, and it shows — he knows how cultures work, and clearly wasn’t afraid to put in the huge time investment required to ensure that every part of his world made sense long before he began writing about it. The setting began as the backdrop for a role-playing campaign in fact, back in the ’80s, and Gardens of the Moon was initially conceived as a movie script.

This leads me to another outstanding element of the sequence: its freshness. Erikson takes great pleasure throughout his work in overturning cliches and avoiding tired fantasy tropes. There are no cookie-cutter kingdoms, no wise wolves, no thinly-disguised elves or dwarves or orcs, no mystical objects of overwhelming dark power. Instead, Erikson offers a stunning array of  unique creations. Wherever there’s an easy, familiar path, Erikson turns away from it. Nothing is hard and fast, nothing is black or white. There are no moral absolutes to be found — just wonders, mysteries and evocative questions.

The characters are just as varied, innovative and flexible. You’ll find a psychopath who can turn into a horde of rats, a renegade priest with hands of pure chaos, a noble barbarian on a quest to destroy all of creation, and a dazzling array of lunatics, charmers, soldiers, schemers and godlings — and that’s just amongst the secondary cast. They’re complex, flawed, and vibrantly real. All of them. And that’s a hell of a lot of different people. Forget any notions you might have of one primary hero, one group of heroes, or even one set of heroes working on the same side. Over the series, Erikson creates a tapestry of different characters, situations and interests, each of them following their own logic and beliefs. They range from the lowliest grunts and paupers up to the very primal powers of creation itself. No one is totally virtuous or totally wicked. They co-operate and clash, ebb and flow, and the story dances with them.

But although it may all sound chaotic, impossible to follow, Erikson’s real genius lies in welding all of his boundless inventiveness into a compelling whole. He’s a masterful builder of tension. The story may move between a range of people, but they’re each faced with different aspects of the same rising tide. Each has a part to play, and as events move toward their inevitable, shattering climax, the different pieces slot into position. The end result is breath-taking in its power.

The single greatest flaw with the series lies in its first seventy pages or so. It’s just not easy to get into, initially. Something is off — the characters just don’t gel with the reader to start with — and quite a few people find themselves giving up in the first fifty pages. I was one of them; I tried Gardens of the Moon shortly after it appeared, gave up on it quickly, and only returned in 2008. Persevere, I beg of you, and commit to reading the first hundred pages. By that point, you’ll be hooked almost without noticing, and the rewards are greater than you would imagine.

“Mythago Wood” was British writer Robert Holdstock’s artistic and commercial breakthrough, and won him the first of his two World Fantasy Awards. Richly deserved it was, too; this is beautiful, eerie, entrancing work.

A portmanteau word compounded from ‘myth imago’, a mythago is the idealised embodiment of a mythic being or place, its archetype. Holdstock’s masterpiece deals with a mysterious woodland realm, Ryhope Wood. In the novel and its later follow-on works, Ryhope Wood is a sort of sinkhole into the collective unconscious which can manifest mythagos drawn from the minds of the people who live around it. Figures such as King Arthur and Robin Hood mirror superficial awareness of the British mythology layered into the nation’s collective unconscious, while the Green Man and the Wild Hunt represent deeper, darker layers of the mind.

Mythago Wood by Chris J Fry

The wood is peculiar in other ways, too. It is much, much larger inside than out, with barriers and defences to turn back the voyagers. In fact, it can even prevent aircraft from flying overhead. The main character of the story, Steven Huxley, finds himself desperate to penetrate the Wood to rescue both the mythago girl he loves, and his own brother. It’s a journey on several different levels, dense with symbolism and meaning.

The mythagos that the wood creates are fully physical and – when living beings – sentient. Their personalities and drives reflect aspects of the archetypal character they represent, as conceived of by the mind that brought them into existence. They can only survive over time within the wood, however. Their natures are as varied as the characters of myth, but, like most genuinely mythic figures, the humans that interact with them seldom find a happy ending to their stories.

I’m always amazed that Powers isn’t more famous than he actually is. It seems extremely unjust, given that he’s quietly out there writing some of the best fiction on the market. Powers specialises in true Urban Fantasy — thrilling yet haunting stories where reality and true historical events are overlaid with magic, and the two become blended together in strange and unpredictable ways. No vampires, fairies or P.I. wizards here; instead, in Powers’ books, Albert Einstein’s time machine, poets who never were, and Russian double-agents chasing the secret of eternal life.

Last Call by Tim Powers

Last Call is set in the American west. The hero is a poker player, a man who spent his childhood being steeped in the curious superstitions of professional card-players, riding high by following the rules. Twenty years on, he’s still paying for having broken them when things long-dormant start to wake up and he finds himself the subject of some very unwelcome attention. It’s the end of a cycle, and his old debt is being called in.

The resulting journey weaves Fisher King legends, the Tarot, poker, and the glittering dream of Vegas into a dazzling mystic swirl, as dark and seedy as it is beautiful and engaging. It’s a very modern haunting of the American dream-scape, exciting, absorbing and wildly imaginative. Urban fantasy really doesn’t get much better.

The premise behind “Night Watch” is that our world is inhabited by Others, supernaturally gifted people and other beings, mostly living amongst us as human. Every other belongs either to the Light or the Dark, a choice that cannot be revoked once made. The two sides have fought for millennia, but have come to a historic accord – rather than utterly destroy each other, they maintain an uneasy peace, each letting the other side indulge in a certain amount of activity unopposed.

Series protagonist Anton is a mage and a member of the Night Watch, working on the side of the pro-human Light to monitor and regulate the forces of the Dark. Anton sits uneasily in the Light, but it’s an either-or choice, and the Dark are predatory, callous and prone to breaking the rules. A new, untrained Grand Sorceress is just starting to discover her talent, and the magical repercussions threaten all of Moscow. Meanwhile, a significant intrigue is starting to unfold around a young boy whose fate, uniquely, is entirely in his own hands – he may have the power to tip the balance one way or the other. An interesting premise and fast-paced action are blended well with a starkly realistic look at modern Moscow, and there’s a strong streak of darkly fatalistic humour. There’s also a hell of a lot of moral ambiguity — despite the set-up, there’s no nice, easy heroes and villains in this world.

The ‘Night Watch’ book was also turned into a pair of movies, Night Watch and Day Watch. They’re fun, and capture Moscow beautifully, but they’re not as engaging as the book. Lukyanenko has also done a number of sequels to his original book — Day Watch (yes, I know, but it’s not my fault), Twilight Watch and The Last Watch. They retain the trifurcated but thematically linked structure of the first book, although The Last Watch is closer to being a regular novel. They’re well worth getting hold of.

David and Matt are well aware of the pitfalls of tackling such a taboo and sensitive subject:

In writing this book we have come to learn that death is arbitrary – impersonal, uncaring, totally indifferent to any force you care to invoke for protection against it. Death can strike anyone at anytime. The most frightening thing is that while many of the deaths we have chronicled here occurred because of ridiculous stupidity, an equal number of them happened due to ridiculously bad luck.

[...]

All death is a tragedy for someone, and even the most ridiculous death leaves the deceased’s family and friends in pain. Our thoughts and sympathies are with all those who have been left behind. However, it seems to us that instead of obeying the cultural influences that see death as taboo subject – or turn it in a complex dance of fetishes and mythology – laughing at its most outrageous manifestations is a healthier way to go. [...] Both of us have already faced moments when we could have exited the stage of life in manner ridiculous enough to gain an entry in this book. From falling into a bear pit to choking on a bit of carrot or getting death threats from the Albanian Mafiya, we have seen first hand that death can always lie just around the corner. The only sane response to this knowledge is to laugh, love and live as much as possible.

So, with that said, here’s an entirely random selection of some of the book’s entries. If you enjoy them, well, you have the title and author to go find a copy!

DEAD AS A DILDO

When we were both fresh-faced journalists, we worked with an older and wiser deputy editor called Phil Higgins who always used to say: “It is always the priests and ministers you need to watch.” How right he was, as the tale of Baptist minister Gary Aldridge from Montgomery Alabama illustrates.

In June 2007, Aldridge’s body was discovered in his home. He was found on the floor, hogtied, wearing two full wetsuits and a diving face mask. If that was not surprising enough, the full autopsy report revealed that underneath the wetsuit the minister had “a dildo in the anus, covered with a condom.”

The report concluded that Aldridge had died of “accidental mechanical asphyxia” – what the average person usually thinks of as autoeroticism gone wrong. Very wrong. Ironically, the minister was renowned for being a vicious opponent of sex outside of marriage and of homosexuality, and had been a strong supporter of a law that banned the sale of sex aids in the state of Alabama.

IMMORTAL IDIOT

There are idiots and then there are grand spanking idiots who help redefine the whole concept of idiocy. Dmitry Butakov from Lipetsk in Russia was one of those grand spanking idiots. Having survived an accident in 1994 when he came into contact with 10,000 volts of electricity, Butakov became convinced he was immortal. While most of us would have been happy to survive such a close brush with death and taken more care, the Russian decided that nothing could kill him. In 2004, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his first accident, he called a press conference where he proceeded to drink a half-litre of antifreeze. Halfway through attempting to drink a second half-litre, Butakov collapsed, fell into a coma and died in hospital the next day. Butakov’s only immortality was carving his name into the history books of stupidity.

PAYING THE PRICE FOR PIPER

In 2001, 28-year-old New Zealander Peter John Robinson slipped as he went to feed his cat Piper. He knocked himself unconscious and managed to fall face down into Piper’s water bowl, where he drowned in less than 5cms of water.

PROPHETS’ LOSS

The end of the 20th century saw a lot of pre-millennial madness. Crazy cults proliferated more quickly than bacteria grow on a fast-food burger, and led to some spectacularly ridiculous deaths. Bucking the trend of the believers of frankly insane things topping themselves was one tale of pre-millennial triple death from the east of Java.

Three cult leaders in the village of Sukmajaya were chased by an angry mob of fellow cultists after the world did not end at 9am on 9/9/1999 as they had prophesised. Their followers had sold or given away all their worldly goods in and spent the last nine days locked in their homes in expectation of the imminent global destruction. When 9/9/99 came and went without the four horsemen of the apocalypse putting in an appearance, feelings among the cultists were running high.

According to Saadi Arsam, village chief of Sukmajaya: “The members were really mad. When they caught the false prophets they lost control of their tempers. Nothing could make them see sense, and they beat them to their deaths.” Shame the self-styled seers had not seen that coming.

The movie in an animation, filmed entirely from old computers and broken toys. The creator, who calls himself mdotstrange, undoubtedly has a wild imagination and a nice touch for disturbing imagery. Throw in all the visuals and sounds derived from old tech, and the result is a paean to 8-bit computing. It draws furiously on sounds and graphics styles of that era, with the sporadic dialogue is as unhinged as any badly-translated Japanese classic of the time.

It is an audio-visual attack, relentless, nonsensical and wonderfully compulsive, and it’s garnered mdotstrange a bunch of awards. It’s not easy viewing — and at 1h 25m, it’s one hell of a piece of animation for a solo creator to produce — but it is genuinely fascinating, evocative and, yes, very, VERY strange.

This is the English version; mdotstrange has subtitled versions in sixteen different languages, including hacker Leet Speak, over at his youtube video page.

Part 1:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1wD3hGCVco

Part 2:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pdK1dEa5Gc

Lovecraft was a troubled, reclusive man, and his long-standing personal demons and his alienation from everyday life provided a foundation for everything he wrote. In the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, as his mythology is now know, human life and civilisation is a tiny speck of light floating on unimaginable depths of darkness and horror. We are an aberration, suffered to survive only because the true masters of the cosmos have been locked out of existence for a short time. They are all-powerful, amoral forces of pure corruption and devastation. When the stars are right, they will return, and that day will see the world scoured clean of the careless infection that is life. Even now, banished from reality, their influence and agents sew chaos and misery amongst us, seeking ever to guide humanity to its destruction.

The Necronomicon by and (c) Marc Simonetti

In Lovecraft’s stories, the traces of evil can be seen and felt in wrongness — geometry that doesn’t work, places that have an inappropriate feel, people who have degenerated back towards primitive forms. Encountering this evil is incredibly dangerous; there are no ‘the hero whips out a gun and saves the day’ stories in his work. The usual results are madness and death.

Lovecraft’s stories have a cumulative power. The more of them you read, the more his world seeps into your bones, the more disturbing and unpleasant it becomes. Despite the broadly contemporary setting (for the time, anyway), they really aren’t quite set in our world. Lovecraft conjures vivid places, histories, institutions, artifacts and pieces of lore, then weaves them into reality so that the lines start blurring. It is this sense of hidden decay that really represents the mythos, rather than any primal god — and also why a book, the Necronomicon, is the aspect of the mythos that is most widely known.

There are plenty of problems with Lovecraft’s work, of course. His xenophobia and racism are almost comical to the modern eye. Ditto some of his more obscure vocabulary. He hated writing dialogue too, so almost all of his stories are presented through a narrator who tells you what is going on. Despite this, the sheer force of his vision makes him absolutely worth reading.

If you want to have a go, and haven’t read any Lovecraft before, I’d recommend:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Dunwich Horror

The Whisperer in the Darkness

The Rats in the Walls

The Colour out of Space

Dreams in the Witch-House

At the Mountains of Madness (which is long),

and, once you’ve read at least one other story and got to grips with the style a bit, The Call of Cthulhu, which is probably his ‘signature’ piece.

Toastboy, however, is flat-out horrifying. I could keep on throwing adjectives at it — nihilist, twisted, oppressive, lunatic, depressing, powerful &c &c — but really, it’s like trying to describe one of Lovecraft’s monsters. It’s been around for a while, and it’s a Flash animation, but the three episodes viewed back to back make up one of the most unpleasantly unsettling bits of viewing that the web has to offer.

If, despite everything I’ve said, you actually want to go and watch Toastboy, you can find the first episode here at Firth’s website, fat-pie.com. Click ‘next’ for the second and third parts, episodes -1 and -2 respectively.