A Red Sun Also Rises, by Mark Hodder – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

A Red Sun Also Rises, by Mark Hodder (Del Rey, hb, 274pp). Vicar Aiden Fleischer adopts an initially unkempt young woman, Clarissa Stark, as his curate. The favourite of an English Lord whose dissolute son ran her over, breaking her back and legs and killing her father, she was thrown out when the father died and the son inherited. A warm friendship grows between the two, a shared love of reading and science its crucible. When the vicar’s almost innocent infatuation with a local rufty-tufty girl goes horribly wrong, Clarissa accompanies him on a Christian mission to Papua New Guinea.

On the cannibal island of Koluwai disappearances are frequent, and on one lightning-torn night it is the missionaries’ turn to disappear. They wake, to their surprise, on another world, where two suns shine and abducted Koluwaiians serve terribly polite alien masters, the Yatsills. Clarissa and Aiden’s arrival is a dissonance, whose ripples wash over this society and leave oddly familiar shapes behind. Taken to the city of New Yatsillat, they see it being rebuilt to resemble London, and it resounds with jolly good shows, not bloody sures and splendid ideas.

But old problems and dangers remain, and the echoes of industrialisation cause as many problems as they solve. Clarissa and Aiden try to solve the mysteries of this world, she with her cleverness and technical know-how, and he with a sword after being assigned to and trained in the city guard, but half-way through the novel comes a great change, one that would be a great spoiler were it not in the title: the two suns set, and a red sun rises. Under its light we meet the Blood Gods, terrible and hungry.

Though this is an enjoyable novel, with well-drawn action and several interesting mysteries for its heroes to investigate, it will be defined for some readers by having a bad case of the Hermiones, in that Aiden Fleischer does not seem to be the natural protagonist of its story. On the whole, despite his doubts, he’s likeable and decent (even if readers may not be impressed by his “Why Miss Jones, you’re beautiful!” response to his companion following the “correction” of her disabilities), but there’s not a moment of the book when one wouldn’t rather be with Clarissa.

She’s the one experiencing an altered consciousness through her connection to the telepathic field that binds the Yatsill, who is working with their scientists to find a cure, whose childhood designs of battle machines seem to be important. She advances the story, he reacts to it. Perhaps it’s unfair to fault the book for creating a supporting character who is too appealing, and the narrative is of course in theory the memoir of Aiden (found, per tradition, following a second disappearance), but one does wish the focus was on her more often.

While this has the feel of H.G. Wells, were he writing today it’s unlikely he would produce such comfortable reading. The worries of an English vicar about his lack of faith don’t make for gripping drama in the twenty-first century. It’s undeniably fun to see aliens talking like Bertie Wooster, but it was fun too in Moorcock’s The Coming of the Terraphiles, and in the radio programme Paradise Lost in Space. In Dancers at the End of Time Moorcock explored how disconcerting and disturbing such imitation could be, but here it’s simply puzzling.

Authors and fans often think to discern a hint of envy in a reviewer’s negative comments, and, indeed, my ambition would be utterly satisfied by writing a book as readable and exciting as this one! But still it could be faulted for not striking further into uncharted territory. Contrast it with Nathan Long's Jane Carver of Waar, in some ways an American parallel of this book, echoing fondly the Martian tales of Burroughs, but with a modern female protagonist utterly unlike those we’re used to seeing in such books. A Red Sun Also Rises is good entertainment, but old-fashioned science fiction.

Zenith Lives! ed. by Stuart Douglas – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

M. Zenith the Albino is from the rogues’ gallery of Sexton Blake, although a book with the variety and quality of Zenith Lives! (Obverse Books, pb, 2425ll, edited by Stuart Douglas, fourth entry in the Obverse Quarterly series), attracting such high quality contributors as Michael Moorcock and Paul Magrs, makes one wonder whether he might outlive his opponent. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Zenith: all I knew till reading this book was that he had inspired the appearance of Elric of Melniboné; I didn’t even know of his connection to Sexton Blake. Luckily, a couple of stories in, my interest piqued, I was able to refer to Blakiana, a superb website maintained by Mark Hodder, another of the contributors to this book. From there I learnt that the original conception was one that we might now think rather old-fashioned, in that Zenith turned to evil out of bitterness over his albinism, but that aspect isn’t one on which these stories particularly dwell. Unlike Elric, he’s not a weakling; in these stories we read of “his powerful muscles and extraordinary sense of balance”.

Michael Moorcock’s “Curaré” is the book’s main feature, a lengthy novella which begins with a zombie attack in a nightclub, French Tony’s, attended by M. Zenith, his long-term adversary Seaton Begg (standing in for Sexton Blake), and Dr Hoxton Ryman, a mad scientist who claims to have mended his ways, each of them with a smart, dangerous woman on his arm. Long, long ago Moorcock wrote a short Sexton Blake novel, The Caribbean Crisis, and he edited the Sexton Blake Library, and this feels like him having fun with a straightforward pulp action-adventure, the kind of thing he might have written for Sexton in the fifties, without the extraordinary science-fantastical elements that tend to characterise his recent writing; in fact I had a google at one point to see if it was a reprint.

In this story we learn of Zenith’s personal code: “Whoever had kidnapped Vespa had made an inexcusable mistake. / Up to now Zenith had joined in this adventure more for amusement than for profit. But no one attacked a man, woman or child, whom the Prince of Crime had chosen to protect. The game had become serious.” Zenith is a criminal with a raised eyebrow, but he becomes utterly serious when crossed; and is deadly whatever his mood. The story suffers from more typos than the rest of the book, but they are fairly insignificant and it was almost a privilege to see the kind of mistakes Moorcock makes.

What makes the anthology such a treat is that, hand on my heart, Moorcock fan that I am, I couldn’t say for sure that his is the best story in the collection. Another strong contender is “All the Many Rooms” by Paul Magrs, a more experimental, oblique and elegant story—albeit with a few sentences I didn’t understand at all (“We all knew it was going corridors, polishing everything in sight to a gleaming shine”)—in which Zenith makes a late, Christ-like appearance at a party at Ms Mapp’s house, with attendees such as “Ziggy and Alvin Stardust, Dick Turpin, Mrs Slocombe, Sheila Manchu, Eric Morcambe [sic], Eeyore, Mrs Wibbsey and Captain Marvel”. Later mentions of portals (opened by pinking shears) suggest it isn’t a fancy dress party. After having enjoyed Paul Magrs’ audio stories for the fourth Doctor, I couldn’t help reading this one in the voice of Tom Baker (imagine him reading the words, “Quickly, I brought myself off rather grimly, without much fuss, and headed out of there” and I’m sure you’ll be keen to read more), which perhaps gave it an unfair advantage over other stories in the collection.

Zenith’s ennui is a key part of his character, as is his opium use: sometimes shown as a response to boredom, and in others as a way of encouraging lateral thinking. “The Albino’s Shadow” by George Mann and “Zenith’s End” by Stuart Douglas both explore the effect of ennui upon his actions.

In “The Albino’s Shadow” a detective (presumably Sexton Blake, who I’d guess is unnamed in the collection for copyright or trademark reasons) explains to Rutherford, the story’s protagonist, how he has survived his encounters with Zenith:

“He might have killed me more than once, save for his unusual moral code and his desire not to forgo a worthy opponent. Zenith obeys only his own rules, and they are close to unfathomable.”

In this story Zenith has threatened the life of the prime minister, and Rutherford is the man set on his trail (Sexton Blake being otherwise engaged).

“Zenith’s End” sees him in the nineteen-seventies, a youthful ninety-year-old preparing to end his life, a trace of vanity leading him to the Black Museum to recover his accoutrements, that his corpse might be recognisable. They have been sold at auction. The only story told by Zenith in the first person, it begins with his declaration that “my most immediate problem has always been boredom, which deplorable yet apparently inexorable condition has plagued me more and more with each passing year”.

Though these two stories cover similar territory, both entertain and provide useful insight into Zenith’s character.

Overall, a very good collection of stories, and so one hardly envies Mark Hodder, whose “The Blood of Our Land” has the responsibility of going first. But it bears up to the challenge well. It’s perhaps the most conventional of the tales, a story of Zenith in his criminal prime, at the head of the League of the Cobblers’ Last. Not having read other Sexton Blake books, but knowing Mark Hodder to be a fan, I couldn’t help taking this to be the default type of Zenith story, the median from which the others diverge (or not). That aside, it was an exciting story, with lots of intrigue and gunplay, all smartly handled. Like the other stories in the book, it left me wanting to read more, both by this author, and—fortunately, given its position in this collection—featuring Zenith.

If anything, the biggest obstacle to reading this book was the way it sent me off, excitedly, again and again, to read more, learn more about the character, not to mention his enemy Sexton Blake, and then Blake’s other enemies. In that regard the book has to be considered a great success. It presents (or re-presents) us with a fascinating character, demonstrates the wide range of stories in which he can be employed, excites an interest in the novels of the past in which he appears, and works as a very fine collection in itself. My favourite Obverse book so far.