Colin Wilson

Turn Off Your Mind

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I’ve longed liked Gary Lachman’s articles in the Fortean Times. I’m also an admirer of his work, under the name Gary Valentine, with the rock band Blondie, particularly his song “X Offender”.

So, it was only a matter of time before I decided to read one of his books.

Review: Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, Gary Lachman, 2001. 

Lachman’s basic thesis is that several elements of the mystic 1960s led not just to the Summer of Love but the murders of Charles Manson and that the strains of thought that produced both go back to the late 1890s.

It’s an interesting story, but most parts of it were familiar to me already, and I’m not going to talk much about them. I am also not sympathetic to mysticism, the Summer of Love, or the spirit of the 1960s.

What I am going to talk about is the surprising amount of material in the book about writers and works of fantastic fiction and how they were connected to the mystic Sixties.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s not only wrote the very popular The Morning of the Magicians, but Bergier also wrote a letter praising H. P. Lovecraft that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960, had Fortean material and centered on mysticism, transcendence, mutation and the evolution of consciousness. It was a heady mix that drew from the zeitgeist.

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Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Fiction

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This one gets a low-res scan designation because it seems rather pointless to spend a lot of time on some of the pieces in this reprint collection.

Low Res Scan: Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Fiction, Brian Stableford, 2007.

In “Slaves of the Death Spider: Colin Wilson and Existentialist Science Fiction”, Stableford talks about Wilson’s Spider World series in a way that convinces me there’s probably not much of merit in them. He finds them not that original – specifically derivative of Star Wars and Murray Leinster’s “Mad Planet”. He finds it ironic that Wilson, who once accused science fiction of being fairy tales for adults who have not outgrown fairy tales, has written, inspired by his occult interests, a story that seems to suggest, a la L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, that mankind’s salvation will come. In short, Stableford says Wilson neither delivers a new plot or anything conceptually satisfying

“H. G. Wells and the Discovery of the Future” is a very informative essay on Wells. Stableford points to Wells’ 1901 futurological work Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Human Progress upon Human Life and Thought as marking a change in his career and approach to speculative fiction. From that point on, Wells’ would attempt to forecast the future rather than just deal with possibilities. His classic works – The First Men in the Moon, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes – predate this turn. These, and three short story collections between 1895 and 1901, are realistically, what Wells’ reputation as a vital sf writer rests on – not the turgid utopias he wrote later on. Interestingly, Wells’ The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904) is seen as an example of Wells’ new direction. Begun as a scientific romance, it diverted to a new direction with the giants becoming an example of  what Wells’ thought humanity should be concerned with in the future. The giants are an example of a “new wisdom and new spiritual strength”. Stableford sees Wells’ participating in a general turn, around 1902, by British sf writers to pessimism, most specifically seen in the natural catastrophe and future war story. As the world became more secular, the belief that salvation and ultimate survival was not guaranteed begun to have effects. After World War I, the British scientific romance became fatalistic to the point of nihilism. Hope for civilization was in short supply. Optimism took a peculiar turn in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men where man goes through various cyclic rises and falls in his civilization. But, says Stableford, Wells’ earlier approach did not go to waste. It was taken up by American sf. Ultimately, Stableford is fairly critical of the later Wells saying his work had a large element of folly. He says that the best of modern sf tries to strike a balance between the two Wells: an energetic, fun, romantic exploration of possibilities tempered with a desire to see and shape the future.

“The Adventures of Lord Horror Across the Media Landscape” is a history of a notorious British novel and accompanying multimedia adaptations of it.

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Mars — The Red Planet

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Since Mick Farren came up over at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations, I thought I’d post this.

In case you’re interested, I just finished all the first drafts of a long series of blog posts, and I hope to start posting the final versions soon.

Raw Feed (1991): Mars — The Red Planet, Mick Farren, 1990.

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Cover by David Schleinkofer

I bought this book because I couldn’t resist the title and cover blurb: “Glasnost was dead, and the cold war on Mars was heating up…”.

I hadn’t read any Mick Farren before and didn’t know what to expect.

The book was competently done. Farren, particularly in his delightfully baroque spacesuits, is obviously trying to do a cyberpunk novel on Mars. He even borrows John Shirley’s terminology of ICE — intrusive counter-electronics.

Farren knows his science, doesn’t over plot, packs in lots of plausible description that makes Mars seem like a plausible Old West, and paces well and uses lots of dialogue, some humorous.

But Farren is an essentially derivative writer. Besides Shirley, there is an explicit reference to Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers (the malevolent influence of a buried spaceship is used here) and, I think, to King’s Misery (two characters remark on the disappearance of King in the mid-nineties — his car wrecked in a Colorado snowstorm but no body was ever found). The mind parasites mentioned in the last chapter are perhaps based on Colin Wilson’s novel of the same name which I’ve never read it. [I did review it later.]

At first, I thought Farren’s serial killer and his mental entity were merely a conventional metaphor for psychosis but, since this is sf, Farren decided to literalize the metaphor. Continue reading →

The Mind Parasites

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The Lovecraft series continues with a novel and more ruminations on Lovecraft. I should add that, while the Amazon link takes you to the edition I read, Wilson scholar Gary Lachman, whose blog you’ll find on the lists of blogs I follow, wrote an introduction to a new edition.

Raw Feed (2005): The Mind Parasite, Colin Wilson, 1967.Mind Parasites

In his preface, Wilson recounts his history with H. P. Lovecraft.

His first encounter was entirely provoked by the similar title of a Lovecraft collection, The Outsider and Others with his own first work, the non-fiction The Outsider. Wilson initially found Lovecraft a sick, pessimistic recluse who weakly turned away from the world he was alienated from, taking vengeance on it in “gloomy fantasy”.

While he doesn’t come right out and say it, this seems to back up S. T. Joshi’s contention that Wilson found Lovecraft a pessimistic (Lovecraft would have said indifferent) materialist to be the polar opposite in temperament to Wilson and reacted accordingly. Wilson proceeded to put forth this view in his The Strength to Dream “in which Lovecraft figures largely.”

Later, Wilson came to see Lovecraft as one of those rare, obsessed outsiders doomed by circumstances of economics, not able to give free reign to his powers unlike more famous outsiders like Shelley, Keats, and Byron. He speculates that a financially independent Lovecraft would have given free rein to his curiosity and produced less horror and more fantasy like “The Shadow Out of Time” or “The Call of Cthulhu”. A richer Lovecraft would have had more time and energy, probably would have produced more fiction, and, if it was well received by those he respected, he would have continued to write it. Continue reading →

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 2

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More “modern” Lovecraftian goodness in a retro review from December 11, 2005. (And I’m not sure if “Cthulhuian” is an accepted word even in the world of Mythos reviews.)
Review: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 2, ed. August Derleth, 1973.Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos 2

The weakest of the lot here are two by Brian Lumley: “The Sister City” and “Cement Surroundings“. As usual, one part of your mind, while reading, is noting which Lovecraft stories and ideas Lumley is recombining this time — and he believes in reusing all of Lovecraft. Yes, these are pale imitations of his model and provide only a tiny bit of Lovecraft’s cosmic paranoia, but they’re still more engaging than August Derleth’s work.

Plotwise, the teenaged Robert Bloch’s 1934 effort, “The Shambler from the Stars“, doesn’t have much to offer. However, there is the fun of a thinly disguised Lovecraft who meets a grisly end. The master returned the favor with his last story, “The Haunter of the Dark“, which has one Robert Blake meeting a horrible end after uncovering a fearsome alien artifact in a Providence church. Bloch’s 1951 story “The Shadow from the Steeple” completes the trilogy and shows how much Bloch developed as a writer in those 17 years. There’s no imitation of Lovecraft’s style here, but Lovecraft and his characters from “The Haunter of the Dark” show up and Cthulhuian horrors are effectively moved to the atomic age. Bloch also makes nice use of Lovecraft’s poem “Nyarlathotep”. Another Bloch work, “Notebook Found in a Deserted House“, uses an old Lovecraftian standby — a journal desperately documenting horrors closing in on its writer. But here the narrator is a type Lovecraft never used: a twelve year old boy telling us about the monsters in the woods around his aunt and uncle’s farm.

J. Ramsey Campbell aka Ramsey Campbell started out with Lovecraft pastiches set in England, but the style of his “Cold Print” isn’t Lovecraftian nor is its unseemly, vague linking of sexual taboos with Cthulhu entities. Here a teacher is lead to a mysterious London bookstore where something a mite stronger than bondage and discipline porn is offered.

James Wade’s “The Deep Ones” brings Lovecraft into the sixties with a John Lily-like researcher studying some decidedly sinister dolphins, a Timothy Leary-like professor warning against it, and a telepath with some family ties to Innsmouth. It’s quite good.

Surprisingly an even better story is Colin Wilson’s “The Return of the Lloigor“. Surprising because Wilson’s earlier attempt at writing a Mythos story, The Mind Parasites, was so bad. Wilson uses his erudition to create a plot mélange of Welsh crime, Mu, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, the Voynich Manuscript, the Kabbala, Aleister Crowley, and Charles Fort. Mixed in is some delightfully absurd metaphysics about the sinister and congenitally pessimistic Lloigor. This clever story may use some of the themes and furniture from Lovecraft and his work, but it’s no accident that the hero is a Poe scholar because the tone is that of the latter author in his hoaxer mode.

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.