Power in the Darkness — Wiebren Rijkeboer

Cover of Power in the Darkness


Power in the Darkness: Britse Postpunk en New Wave
Wiebren Rijkeboer
213 pages
published in 2022

If you judge a book about music on how much it makes you want to listen to the music it’s talking about, Power in the Darkness was a huge success. After reading it I spent weeks going through my post-punk and new wave album, while also looking for some of the artists that were new to me Wiebren championed in its pages. Not that I needed much encouragement: this is part of the music I grew up with, background noise growing up as a kid in the eighties. If I wasn’t old enough nor cool enough to have bought the singles myself, at least I knew them from their appearances on the Dutch equivalent of Radio 2. Wiebren Rijkeboer, born in 1959, a decade and a half before me, on the other hand is old enough to know the bands covered first hand and that comes through in the book.

Power in the Darkness‘s structure is quite simple: a short introduction that lays out the parameters of the project, followed by a chronological look at some eighty-five post-punk and new wave albums released between 1978 and 1993, each by a different band. It starts in 1978 with the Buzzcocks’ Another Music in a Different Kitchen because punk’s definitively dead by then and ends in 1993 with East Village’s Drop Out for less obvious reasons, roughly where Britpop took over. Geographically Wiebren’s focus is limited to the UK and Ireland (and forgive the Dutch habit of calling this all British in the title). He also limits himself to bands, so no Elvis Costello or Ian Dury here. This is very much a personal project, a sampler of what post-punk and new wave have to offer, not the ultimate guide. As you may expect, the emphasis is on the years 1979 to 1982, with a long tail through the rest of the eighties and early nineties.

Each album discussion is only a few pages long, in which Wiebren introduces the band and context in which it was made, gives a quick impression of what it sounds like and takes a quick look at the band’s other noteworthy releases. Most of postpunk’s usual suspects are there: Buzzcocks, the Fall, Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, but there are also some much less well known bands mentioned. Doll by Doll, The Records, Cowboys International, Random Hold: all new to me. Always a good thing when a book can introduce you to new to you artists and give you enough context to know whether or not you’ll enjoy them.

Genre wise, the boundaries of post-punk are not very strictly guarded here. A lot of gothic acts like The Mission, Sex Gang Children and Sisters of Mercy creep in here as well, though Wiebren calls them ‘positive punk’ which, no. Post 1985 as well what makes the featured acts post-punk or new wave becomes a bit less clear too. The Stone Roses or Primal Scream don’t quite fit in here, if obviously inspired by the earlier bands.

In all, if you can read Dutch and have a limited knowledge about post-punk and the period in which it was dominant, this is a good introduction. There are no obvious omissions nor anything included that clearly shouldn’t have been. You could listen to worse music than the albums featured here.

The Soul of Anime — Ian Condry

Cover of The Soul of Anime


The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story
Ian Condry
242 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Sometime in 2015 I became obsessed with anime. I’m not sure why, but from something that I had only a passing interest in, it became an overwhelming passion in the course of a few months. Before long just watching anime wasn’t enough and I wanted to know more about its history and the context in which anime was made. So I started reading blogs and anime websites and then looking for books. At the time a few books kept popping in any anime discussion that went further than whether Goko could beat up One Punch Man. Those included Sait Takami’s Beautiful Fighting Girl, Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and this, Ian Condry’s The Soul of Anime. I bought all of them, I tried to read all of them, but never managed to finish or understand any of them. I can only blame my own inexperience and lack of knowledge; I just didn’t know enough about anime back them to be able to understand them.

I was reminded of this book earlier this week by a tweet complaining about the lack of understanding of what anime is, which brought me to pick it up again. This time I managed to understand its purpose a lot better, now that I wasn’t labouring under the misunderstanding it was intended as any sort of history of anime. Instead what Condry was trying to accomplish should’ve been clear to me from the title. He was trying to pin down the essence of what makes anime anime, when it was no longer sufficient to say that anime is just Japanese animation. Much of the actual animation work after all is outsourced to other, cheaper countries, like Korea or the Philipines. At the same time, anime even at the time of writing was increasingly aimed at an international market, not necessarily the domestic Japanese markets. Similarly, the success of anime in e.g the United States also led to various local anime-like projects, like Avatar: the Last Airbender. Yet anime is clearly is its own thing, so how do we find out what that particular thing is made of?

Condry tries to answer this question through making use of techniques developed in ethnography. Specifically, he does so by interviewing and especially observing the people working on creating anime. For Condry, what makes anime interesting is the way it is being made. And he means that in the broadest possible sense of the word. The Soul of Anime looks not just at how various studios work, but also at e.g. the fansubbing community. As Condry explains in the first chapter, the book is the result of half a decade of field work done between 2004-2010 at various anime companies: mainly Gonzo, Aniplex and Madhouse, supplemented by visits to other companies in both Japan and the US as well as explorations into various fan activities. Condry also looks into the history of anime, though it’s fairly superficial, to further support his thesis.

For Condry, the “Soul of Anime” is its social aspect. Anime as a collaborative enterprise, networks of people interacting with their own ideas about anime, where the distinction between professionals, producers and fans, consumers is not that clear. It’s that collaborative creativity that links fan labour and professional labour for Condry, that made anime into the worldwide media success it is now. So for example you had the top down push of Nintendo’s global marketing campaign and the pull of overseas fans wanting to see the anime version of their favourite game that made Pokemon a global powerhouse. It is a decent enough explanation for what makes anime and the anime media complex different from other media, but I’m not quite convinced that this really is all this unique to anime, especially now.

There is no getting around it: The Soul of Anime is dated, in some aspects badly dated. The book was published in 2013, which already makes it ten years old, but worse, most of the field work Condry did was done in 2005-2006. A lot of his references therefore are almost two decades old at this point and take place in a very different world. There’s no mention of streaming in here. Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 but was still a piracy site at the time. Overseas fans still had to get their anime either from tv broadcasts or through licensed DVDs. Anime was popular outside Japan, but still very much a cult phenomenon mostly. Espcially in the fansubbing section of the book, things have changed so much that it has become mostly useless for understanding modern anime culture.

Reading The Soul of Anime is like opening a time capsule of what anime was like in 2006, on the cusp of global success and mainstream acceptance, but hesitant about what that would mean. Which means that Condry spends time examining the Gonzo series Red Garden as an example of an internationally orientated anime series because it’s set in New York. In a world in which Netflix and Disney order their own anime series this is small beer indeed. In 2023, with anime being a globally consumed medium and streaming media in general being much more globally orientated; Netflix streaming Korean game shows and cute romcoms alongside Mexican and Spanish mafia dramas, some of its uniqueness has been lost. This is also true in fandom, with fandoms for mainstream ‘properties’ evolving to be more like anime fandoms.

I’m not sure whether this undercuts Condry’s thesis, but it is something to take into account when reading The Soul of Anime. In the end it is a very mid-2000s look at what anime is, with very mid-2000s idea of what anime fandom and otakus are like. I’m not sure it really fits modern anime fandom anymore. Nevertheless a good, accessible book to get into anime criticism with.

Analog One — John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)

Cover of Analog One


Analog One
John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)
169 pages
published in 1963

There’s a version of the history of science fiction that goes a little bit like this. It was invented in the late nineteenth century by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (in a slightly more progressive version, in the early nineteenth century, by Mary Shelly). Then, in 1926 Hugo Gernsback made it a genre, with the creation of Amazing Stories, the first ever science fiction magazine. Sadly however, the quality of science fiction published remained low, most of it being space opera, just more pulp fiction. All this would change when John W. Campbell, Jr became editor of Astounding Stories, one of the many Amazing Stories imitators. Together with authors like Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and especially Robert Heinlein Campbell would create the Golden Age of science fiction. Post World War II science fiction having gained even more popularity, finally got the respect it deserved. No longer dismissed as ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’ fit only for infants, now, as Campbell’s editorial here has it, it’s literature to truly challenge yourself, for people unafraid to use their brains. In a symbolic gesture, in 1960 Campbell changed the name of his magazine Astounding Stories to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, heralding the changed status of science fiction. This is the context in which Analog One was published.

It’s a beautiful myth, but no more than that. The reality is that science fiction became respectable the moment the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That staple of the American imagination, the weapon that can wipe out an entire city, had become reality. Nothing really to do with Campbell, who in any case was diving deep into pseudoscience like the Dean Drive and Dianetics at this point. The new Analog too was no longer the top science fiction magazine either, with newcomers Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction taking its place. The writers who had made the magazine had left it, either like Asimov, leaving science fiction entirely for a while, or moving on to other magazines. Analog‘s decline is clear when you look at this anthology’s table of content: the biggest writers listed are Lloyd Biggle and Gordon Dickson, not quite up to the standard of a Robert Heinlein or Theodore Sturgeon.

Which of course doesn’t mean the stories here are bad, but they are typical Analog stories, all but one having been published in 1961. Each at its heart is a puzzle story, where the protagonist — like the writers invariably a man — is presented with some problem or conundrum he has to solve and through some clever deduction, manages to do so at the end of the story. Some of the stories in this volume, like Teddy Keller’s The Plague are more straightforward than others. The best, like Lloyd Biggle’s Monument are a bit more elaborate in disguising the formula. Stylistically there’s little variation either: each story is told in a matter of fact, no-nonsense style with little room for any stylistic flourishes. Winston P. Sander’s Barnacle Bull was the exception to this, which is not a surprise as Sander is a pseudonym for Poul Anderson. Overall this is not a bad anthology, but very much of its time and type with no real surprises. There are of course no female authors included.

Monument (1961) • novelette — Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
For an Analog writer, Lloyd Biggle was a bit of a liberal, here writing a story you could call anti-colonialist. A lone astronaut crashes on an idyllic alien planet and as the end of his life nears, he’s gripped by the fear that once this planet is officially discovered, the inhabitants will be quickly assimilated and have their culture destroyed. So he hatches a plan. Decades later, once first contact has indeed been made, the inhabitants still follow the Plan to the letter, as seen through the eyes of a series of well intended but confused witnesses. Written at a time when tourism and cultural imperialism were indeed destroying native cultures all over the world, Monument‘s heart is in the right place, but this is still a very liberal sort of white saviour fantasy. It’s cynical about how developed countries deals with native interests but not cynical enough — no mass graves here. The best story in this anthology, despite this.

The Plague (1961) • short story — Teddy Keller
A new mysterious plague — or is it a poison attack — is sweeping America and it’s up to one tired non-com to solve the mystery. This seems to be Keller’s only science fiction story, judging from the ISFDB. Competent but very straight forward as said.

Remember the Alamo! (1961) • short story — T. R. Fehrenbach
Fehrenbach was actually a Texan historian rather than a science fiction author; this and one other story for a Texas themed anthology are his only sf stories. This one is a neat little story about a confused time traveller who comes back to a pivotal moment in American history which a lot different from what he remembered happening.

The Hunch (1961) • short story — Christopher Anvil
An interstellar scout is sent on a dangerous mission with all the experimental, high tech new gadgets he didn’t want nor trusted on his ship, to understand just why two equally high specced scout ships had disappeared. The answer turns out to have been a particular bit of technology that was a bit too helpful for its own good. Something that any computer user stymied by some equally helpful piece of software can appreciate. Christopher Anvil was the quintessential Analog writer, good at writing clever puzzle stories, delivered with a sense of humour. He also had a bit of a libertarian streak, as best shown in Pandora’s Planet.

Barnacle Bull (1960) • short story — Winston P. Sanders
If you didn’t know that Winston P. Sanders was a Poul Anderson pseudonym, you could’ve guessed from the protagonist being Norwegian. Serving on a Norwegian interplanetary expedition in fact, attempting to cross the Asteroid Belt when things start getting wrong. The radiation levels in the ship keep slowly rising, communication with Earth is lost and the crew has to make the decision to continue or turn around. Each option brings its own dangers and the fact that multiple expeditions before theirs never made it weights heavily on their minds. The cause of all this misery can be found in the title; the solution is obvious in hindsight but not when you’re reading.

Join Our Gang? (1961) • short story — Sterling E. Lanier
This is actually Lanier’s first story, a typical Analog ‘Earth men beating aliens by clever trickery. In this case a proud, caste bound alien species is on the brink of space travel but refuses to join the thousand worlds of Sirian Combine, the one thing that ensures peace in this part of the Galaxy. Through what’s basically biowarfare they are persuaded to change their minds and join the gang. More cynical than many such stories are, like the one straight after it in this anthology. Lanier was an interesting, if minor writer, friends with Tolkien; Hiero’s Journey is a minor post-apocalyptic classic.

Sleight of Wit (1961) • novelette — Gordon R. Dickson
A human scout lands on the same planet in the same part as an alien colleague. Now each has to find a way to take the other prisoner and take them home just in case the other is hostile. Naturally the Earthman comes up with a clever scheme. This is apparently the sort of story Campbell approved of. Dickson had written and would write much better stories. His Dorsai novels about a planet of superhuman mercenaries being his best.

Prologue to an Analogue (1961) • novelette — Leigh Richmond
The world keeps running into crisis after crisis that are miraculously resolved through inexplicit means. Could the Witch themed commercials for cleaning products shown after each news broadcast have anything to do with this? Weakest story in the whole anthology for me, as it’s all done so very plodding and in service of a mawkish point about the power of the common people. Might be forgiven because it looks this was Leigh Richmond’s first published story.

Save for Monument there are no essential stories in this anthology, but it is a good look at where the Campbell edited Analog was at at the start of the sixties. Campbell of course was a massive racist and (borderline) fascist, whose best days as an editor were long behind him, but the stories here are mostly harmless. Probably not of interest to anybody who didn’t inhale this sort of science fiction as a child like I did. You can see why the New Wave that would sweep this all way a few years later was so necessary. Speaking of which, there is still a certain innocence to these stories that you don’t see with similar stories post-New Wave, as those were written in the knowledge that they were obsolete.

1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

Cover of 1983


1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

The way Taylor Downing sets about showing why this is the case is by providing a chronological overview of the year and its crisises, until about two-thirds into the book we hit the ultimate crisis point, the moment civilisation could’ve ended if things had gone even slightly differently. He starts with a short explanation of the context in which these incidents took place. How the detente of the seventies had ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan, gun-ho to take on the Evil Empire, in 1980. That with the death of Brezhnev in 1982, the head of the KGB, Andropov would be made the leader of the USSR,a man made paranoid by the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which he played a role in suppressing. Here there was a leader of the Free West who started talking about a winnable nuclear war opposite a Soviet leader deadly paranoid about attacks on his ‘socialist paradise’. Not a good combination in a time when tensions were already rising due to Afghanistan.

In 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had already launched Operation RYAN, an intelligence programme aimed at determining whether the US and NATO were preparing for a nuclear first strike. By 1983 this operation was intensified as the US was starting to deploy cruise missile and Pershing II nuclear missiles to Europe as part of Reagan’s general re-armament plans. While RYAN was intended as a safety measure, its real effect was to feed Andropov’s paranoia, making him increasingly concerned that the US was planning a first strike. Reagan meanwhile, cheerfully unaware of this, was talking up plans to create a missile defence system against nuclear attacks, making America invulnerable. Regardless of the technical merits of Star Wars, even thinking about such a defence against nuclear attack was threatening the status quo of mutually assured destruction. Peace was being maintained because both sides could destroy the other completely, regardless of who shot first. There was no advantage in starting a nuclear war as long as everybody died in it. But if an increasing technological advance meant the US could defend itself, or could unleash such a devastating first strike that retaliation was impossible, that put the USSR in a dilemma. If the US was preparing a strike, the Soviets should strike immediately before the strike had even launched, or risk being caught off guard. And that was much more ripe for error than if you wait until the missiles have actually launched.

And then, in September 1983, a Korean airliner blundered into Soviet airspace, was mistaken for an American military spy plane and through a series of tragic errors, shut down with all passengers and crew killed. That immediately shut down any tentative prospect of unfreezing the Cold War. It strengthened Reagan’s opinion about the USSR being an evil empire, while it also fed Andropov’s paranoia about the country’s vulnerabilities, that an airliner had been allowed to enter sensitive airspace unchallenged. All this set the stage for Able Archer, a NATO military exercise, which simulated a Soviet invasion of West Germany culminating in a NATO nuclear strike to stop the advance. A so-called command post exercise, in which the various military headquarters were involved but not so much soldiers out in the field, the USSR was convinced it would be cover for a real first strike against it. It had take measures to reduce its vulnerability, by putting its nuclear forces on high alert, by making the preparations for a strike so that if it was necessary it could be done almost immediately. All that was needed was for Andropov to become convinced America was about to strike and give the order to strike first. And the moment that would happen came increasingly close as the NATO exercise grew in intensity.

At this point in the book Downing had thrown me deep into that paranoid mindset; my relief when the crisis passed was palpable, even knowing full well nuclear war hadn’t happened in November 1983. The rest of 1983: The World at the Brink is more cheerful, describing how both leaders walk themselves back from the abyss. How with the deaths of first Andropov and then his successor Chernenko the way was freed up for Gorbachev, a true reformer who managed to build a personal bond with Reagan, who set in motion the events that would lead to the end of the Cold War as well as the Soviet Union. Even more than three decades onwards, it’s still a miracle such a vast and powerful empire could be dissolved mostly peacefully, that we didn’t all die in nuclear shock waves in November 1983.

If you’re my generation, this book then is the confirmation of all the old bad dreams you had back then. If you’re too young to have lived through it yourself, a good look back a period where all this was normal.

A Night in the Lonesome October — Roger Zelazny

Cover of A Night in the Lonesome October


A Night in the Lonesome October
Roger Zelazny
Gahan Wilson (illustrator)
280 pages
published in 1993

A Night in the Lonesome October is a special book: except for the various collaborations he did with Robert Sheckley and others, it was the last novel written by Roger Zelazny before his death two years later. It was also a return to form. Zelazny had been one of the more interesting writers to emerge from American New Wave science fiction back in the sixties and had been a steady Hugo and Nebula nominee and winner in the sixties and seventies. the latter half of the eighties he had been mostly concerned with writing the second, lesser Amber cycle while in the nineties he mostly collaborated with other writers. A Night in the Lonesome October was the first new, solo non-Amber Zelazny novel since 1987 and more than that, it was good. As such it became a bit of a fan favourite among the people on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written, which resulted in a tradition of reading the novel day by day during October each year. This is possible because each chapter is a diary entry devoted to one day in October. I never took part in this, but this year I decided to try it when I wanted to reread it. (UPDATE: liar.)

Set in Late Victorian London, A Night in the Lonesome October is the diary of a dog named Snuff, companion to a man called Jack who has a special knife. Yes, that Jack. He and Snuff are participants in the Game, held every few decades when there’s a full Moon on Halloween, October 31. There are some other, very recognisable characters taking part in this game: a certain Count, the Great Detective (of course), the Good Doctor and his self made man, etc. There are also some less recognisable people taking part in the game, like Crazy Jill and her cat, Graymalk, the latter as close to a friend that Snuff has in the Game. What the Game is about is only gradually made clear, but it is one played between two sides, Openers and Closers. Each player may not know which side the others are on; each player is basically playing on his own until the climax. Therefore there’s room for schemes to be drawn up, alliances to be made and betrayals to happen.

It takes discpline to read A Night in the Lonesome October this way, day by day, especially at the start when the chapters are sort. The tendency to read ahead is great because Zelazny sprinkles enough interesting tidbits around even in these short chapters to tempt you into reading further. Why is a dog keeping a diary and why is it Jack the Ripper’s dog? What are the Things it is guarding in the Mirrors, Circle, Wardrobe and Steamer Trunk? What is it patrolling for and what is it his master is seeking? What does it all mean? Luckily ultimately every question does get answered, albeit often indirectly and in passing. The backstory is only hinted at, never explained. There’s also a little bit of legerdemain going on; not every player is what they seem, nor is every player even in the game. Not everything that looms large in Snuff consciousness as part of his duties is as important as it seems either, especially in those early chapters.

A Night in the Lonesome October at heart is a horror mystery pastiche where a lot of the fun comes from that frisson of recognition as characters wander in and out of the story and understanding their true roles in it. It’s a fun little book that you’d normally read in an hour or two, but reading it spread out like this heightens the anticipation for each chapter. I’m not a patient man and it did take some effort to stick to it, but I’m happy I did. Even if the whole book seems to have written for the truly awful pun in the second to last line of the story…