Golden Sunsets Redux - 60 Years of Memories - Part 23 - 1989

This time, I’ve gone with a series of books which a lot of people will never have heard of, but which were far better than things might suggest...

1989:

The trivia:

• Scuba diver William Lamm was swimming in eight feet of water off Hutchinson Island in Florida - the kind of shallow, calm depth where the biggest threat is usually stepping on something spiky. However, he drifted too close to the intake pipe for the island’s nuclear power plant, and before he could even register the mistake, the current grabbed him like a giant invisible hand. What followed was 1,600 feet of high‑speed, pitch‑black pipeline travel with  no idea where he was going. And then, unbelievably, he popped out into the plant’s cooling pond like a confused otter. No broken bones. No burns. Not even a dramatic scar to point to at during dinner parties. Just a man who survived the worst waterslide in Florida and now had to figure out how to explain it to friends without sounding like he was making it up.

• An amateur collector of 18th century maps bought an old tattered painting of a country scene for four dollars at a Pennsylvania bargain sale - purely because he liked the frame. The artwork itself was worn and frankly, unremarkable. When he got home and took it apart, he discovered a folded copy of the US Declaration of Independence hidden behind the canvas. Thinking it nothing more than a reproduction curiosity, he just put it to one side until a friend convinced him to contact an expert. It turned out to be one of only 200 "John Dunlap broadsides" printed on the evening of 4th July 1776 - of which fewer than thirty were known to survive. When it finally went to auction two years later, it sold for... US$ 2.4 million.

• A MiG‑23 fighter jet taking off from a Polish airfield in 1989 suffered a malfunction that caused the pilot to believe the aircraft was about to crash. He ejected almost immediately after liftoff. The problem, however, corrected itself the moment he left the cockpit. With no one on board, the MiG levelled out, climbed, and continued flying on autopilot. The aircraft crossed into East Germany, then West Germany, and kept going for more than 500 miles. It finally ran out of fuel over Belgium and crashed into a house near Kortrijk, the impact sadly killing a teenager inside the building. The Belgian government demanded an explanation, and the Soviet Union issued a formal apology, acknowledging the chain of errors that led to the accident. The pilot was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

The memory:

The Cineverse Cycle by Craig Shaw Gardner

In the wake of the success of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" novels, publishers realised that comic fantasy could be big business. The truth is that a more light-hearted take on the standard fantasy tropes had been around for a long time, but it had never captured the general public's imagination. in quite the same way until now. Almost overnight, the fantasy shelves in the UK seemed to shift. What had once been a scattering of Tolkien clones, coming-of-age quest sagas, and the occasional oddball paperback with a pun in the title suddenly blossomed into a riot of new comic fantasies. For a teenager wandering the aisles of  London’s Forbidden Planet store, it felt as if the genre had cracked open and started laughing at itself.

During regular trips to the shop I’d make a beeline for the paperbacks, scanning for anything new. I didn’t have a system - I judged by titles, by blurbs, by whatever caught my eye. So I ended up with John DeChancie's "Castle Perilous" series, Simon Hawke's "The Wizard of Fourth Street", Christopher Statsheff's long-running "Warlock" sequence (although he’d been writing for years before the boom), and Alan Dean Fosters "Spellsinger". Plus  I continued to collect the ongoing "Xanth" adventures from Piers Anthony, plus many of his other novels. Yes, I bought a *lot* of books.

Amongst the dozens of new titles on the shelves, one new author particularly stood out - but what attracted me to his name was not the description on the back, but the cover. You see, in a canny move, the publishers decided to get Discworld artist Josh Kirby to also produce the covers for the books by American writer Craig Shaw Gardner. Kirby’s instantly recognisable swirling, chaotic, overstuffed illustrations told you exactly what kind of ride you were in for - anarchic, colourful and possibly slightly unhinged. I guess they felt that readers who already strongly associated his work with Pratchett's books, would make the same leap and assume "this is more of the same kind of stuff". Well guess what - it worked on me!

Gardner originally released "A Malady of Magicks" in 1986, but it was some time later when it, and the other two volumes in his first trilogy ("A Multitude of Monsters" and "A Night in the Netherhells")  reached UK shores, complete with their Kirby coves

The main plot is fairly simple - Ebenezum is possibly the greatest wizard of the age. After an altercation with a demon, causes him to be cursed to be allergic to magic,  he and his hapless apprentice Wuntvor must journey to the City of Forbidden Delights in search of a cure, all the while avoiding death, disaster and perils such as tap-dancing dragons, enchanted chickens, etc, etc. 

It's your typical episodic quest narrative and very reminiscent in places of "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic" with its send-up of standard fantasy. It's light, whimsical and occasionally funny - good enough to while away the time on a train journey but certainly nothing mind-blowingly original. 

Nonetheless I enjoyed the books enough to pick up the sequel "Wuntvor" trilogy, which ventured into fairy tale territory as the helper becomes the hero and has to save the world with help from (amongst others) an amorous unicorn, a ferret and a cowardly sword. None of the books demanded much, and maybe that was part of their charm. They were warm, silly, and just self‑aware enough to feel clever without ever trying too hard. 

However, these Pratchett-pastiches are not the core of this particular memory. That’s because Craig Shaw Gardner's next series was far more in tune with my tastes - especially my love for all things from the worlds of movies, pulp serials and comic books....

Overall billed as "The Cineverse Cycle", book one - "Slaves of the Volcano God" concerns Roger Gordon - a bored public relations worker, who accidentally activates his childhood Captain Crusader Decoder Ring (found inside a cereal packet) and is transported into the 'Cineverse', a multiverse where the rules of low‑budget cinema are literally true. Westerns, jungle adventures, musicals, serials - each world runs on its own genre logic, complete with cliffhangers, stock characters, and the kind of physics that only ever made sense on a studio backlot. When Roger’s girlfriend Delores is kidnapped by the evil Doctor Dread, he sets off on a rescue mission that takes him through a series of increasingly absurd film‑worlds, picking up unlikely allies and crossing paths with villains straight out of the 1940s. Behind it all lurks a larger mystery - “The Change” - a shift in the Cineverse that has thrown its once‑predictable movie worlds into disarray.

"Bride of the Slime Monster" raises the stakes. Roger is now stranded in the Cineverse without his Decoder Ring, leaving him unable to control where he ends up next. Doctor Dread has gained the upper hand, unleashing hundreds of celluloid villains across the multiverse, and Delores is being pursued by the revolting Slime Monster. Roger’s only hope is to find the legendary Captain Crusader, the one hero powerful enough to restore order. His journey takes him through increasingly chaotic genre realms, including an extended detour into a beach‑party movie complete with musical numbers and surfer gangs. As Roger begins to understand the Cineverse’s rules more clearly, he realises that the crisis is bigger than any single villain - the very structure of the movie worlds is starting to break down.

The trilogy concludes with "Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies", where Roger has, in a true plot twist, become Captain Crusader himself - just in time for the Cineverse to fall apart completely. Genres are collapsing, villains are multiplying, and the underlying logic of the multiverse is coming undone. But the most unexpected complication is personal - Roger’s mother has stumbled into the Cineverse and been transformed into a dominatrix‑style villainess. As Roger tries to rescue Delores, confront Doctor. Dread, and uncover the truth about the enigmatic Plotmaster, he must also deal with the surreal horror of battling his own mother. The trilogy barrels toward a finale that blends affectionate parody with a genuine love of the strange, rickety magic of the movies that inspired it.

I think what appealed to me most about the Cineverse is that it’s obvious Gardner has a deep, abiding love for the B‑movie genre and all its gloriously conventions. His story isn’t just sprinkled with references - it’s built from the same raw material as those old films, with every world operating according to its own lovingly reconstructed rulebook. You can feel the affection in the way he handles cliffhangers, the way villains monologue just long enough for the hero to escape, the way science is always performed in laboratories full of sparking machinery. There’s a deliberate echo of those black‑and‑white Republic serials - the breathless pacing, the weekly peril, the sense that the plot is being made up on the fly but somehow still holds together. Gardner isn’t mocking these tropes - he’s celebrating them, treating them as the building blocks of a universe where the power of cinema means almost anything can happen. 

And all of that was exactly what I needed, because my own childhood was steeped in that same kind of stuff. I grew up on the original serials - Buster Crabbe’s "Flash Gordon", "King of the Rocketmen" - all those earnest heroes in tin‑foil spaceships battling rubber‑suited monsters. Saturday mornings were filled with creature features like "Them!", "Godzilla", or "It Came From Beneath the Sea" -  the kind of films where the special effects wobbled but the imagination behind them never did. These weren’t just movies, they were part of the fabric of my early life - the background of my weekends and school holidays. So when Gardner created a universe where those worlds were real, where their rules mattered, and where someone like Roger could step into them and treat them with the same mixture of awe I always felt - well, it felt like he’d written the Cineverse specifically for people like me. 

It's a far more original work that the humorous fantasies of Ebenezum and Wuntvor - satirical rather than trying to be "funny" and all the better for it. It also helps that there is a rollicking good plot inside the pages. I lapped up all three books in quick succession and enjoyed the hell out of all of them.  Gardner would never replace Pratchett in my affections, but he certainly was up there with the likes of Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin and Tom Holt.

Gardner went on to write one more light fantasy trilogy (the "Sinbad" series), before trying his hand at a a traditional "fish-out-of-water" story with the "Dragon Circle" novels. Both got published in the UK with the requisite Josh Kirby covers, but I never even saw copies of the latter, let alone read them. He also started dabbling in movie adaptations (when those were a thing), with the most successful being novelisations of Tim Burton's "Batman" in 1989 (more on that movie below), plus all three of the "Back to the Future" movies. I recently discovered he later started used pen names for other series - I guess 'Craig Shaw Gardner' had become too synonymous with comedic fantasy...

While there was an omnibus edition of the "Cineverse Cycle" in 1992, the paperback books have been long out of print and prices in the second-hand market are variable. E-books of most of Gardner's novels appear to have emerged around 2014 (complete with the truly woeful US covers), so the stories are still out there if you want to give them a go. For me the trilogy is a bit of a lost pearl amongst an ocean of parodies and Pratchett copycats - a series that understood its influences so well it could play with them rather than simply imitate them The more you know about the movies, the more you will enjoy these books. Not every story has to be epic or life changing or worthy of the Booker prize. Sometimes you just need a series that is really good fun - something that reminds you why you fell in love with stories in the first place, and why a well‑timed cliffhanger or a rubber‑suited monster can still make you smile decades later.

I took one of Gardener's books to a Terry Pratchett signing once. He looked it over and just wrote "nice cover..." on the inside...

Honourable mentions:

• Batman - He could never better the late great Adam West, but Michael Keaton made a pretty good Dark Knight and an even better Bruce Wayne. The costume is excellent, the Batmobile looks suitably cool and Gotham had the right mix of gothic exaggeration and urban decay - even if it did sometimes feel like you could see the edges of the set. Keaton’s casting was loudly criticised at the time, but he shut that down quickly once people saw what he could do with the role, bringing a controlled and grounded performance. I’ve never been fully sold on Jack Nicholson’s Joker though. Yes the Clown Prince of Crime is meant to be theatrical and over the top, but Nicholson went too far in the wrong direction for my personal tastes. Still, in 1989 superhero films were a gamble, and the studio clearly wanted a marquee name to anchor the whole thing and reassure audiences. Of course the strategy worked and the film was a huge success, so clearly I know nothing! Despite this one niggle, I still loved the film when it came out and even though I wasn't the greatest Prince fan, bought both soundtrack albums. As for Vicki Vale Vale - the less said, the better...

• Truckers by Terry Prachett - So after I headlined one of his 'imitators', here comes Terry himself with the first in the "Nome / Bromeliad" trilogy. It was the first non‑Discworld Pratchett novel I read, and it immediately showed how much range he had beyond witches, wizards, and homicidal luggage. The central idea - an entire community of Nomes living under the floorboards of a department store - is one of those concepts that sounds whimsical until you see how carefully he builds the world around it. The characters are small, but the story isn’t. Their search for where they came from and how to get back there gives the book a sense of scale that goes far beyond its setting. The whole Bromeliad trilogy stands alongside his best work - sharp, funny, and surprisingly moving. "Truckers" proved he could write character‑driven adventure with just as much clarity and heart. The 1992 Cosgrove Hall stop‑motion series is also a strong reminder of how adaptable his ideas are. The studio behind "Danger Mouse" captured the tone of the book perfectly, and it remains one of the better Pratchett screen adaptations.

• Doom Patrol - I’ve never really counted myself as a Grant Morrison fan. Too often his work feels like an attempt to be clever for its own sake, a kind of bargain‑basement Alan Moore impression that leans heavily on abstraction without always earning it. But every so often he hits on something genuinely original, and his reinvention of the 1960s DC super-team of freaks and rejects with Richard Case is one of those moments - rebuilding them into something stranger, sharper, and far more ambitious. What drew me in were the ideas - the Brotherhood of Dada, the Scissormen, Danny the Street - concepts so bizarre and specific that they shouldn’t fit, yet somehow do. The stories are absurd, and occasionally pretentious, but they’re also compelling in a way that’s hard to shake. Morrison leaned fully into the team’s outsider status and used it to push superhero comics into territory they rarely visited at the time. For all my reservations about his broader body of work, this run stands out. It’s messy, inventive, and completely unlike anything else DC was publishing. Even if you don’t buy into every choice he makes, the sheer insanity of it carries you along.

• London Boys - The Twelve Commandments of Dance - It's cheesy Europop synth dance music and to be honest it's pretty awful. Why is it even on the list then? Well apart from the fact that the songs were never off the radio in the summer of 1989 (although popularity is no measure of quality), it's here because it was an album I bought and tried to like in order to impress a girl I was genuinely infatuated with. Listening to "Requiem" or "London Nights" now instantly transports me back to a time and place when I was young, naïve and a little bit too keen. No wonder the lady in question tolerated my friendship and nothing further...

• Metropolis :The Musical - With, let's be fair, only a couple of really good tunes, this stage version of the Fritz Lang classic needed something else to make it stand out. Thankfully it marked the UK debut of Judy Kuhn, who brought real presence to the dual role of Maria and Futura.  Opposite her was Brian Blessed at full power - that unmistakable voice and sheer physicality doing a lot of heavy lifting. Jonathan Adams is also in a great supporting role. The production itself leaned heavily on spectacle. The huge metallic set, with its rising platforms, moving walkways and cradles descending from the ceiling, was designed to echo the scale and machinery of Fritz Lang’s original film. What made it memorable wasn’t just the scale but the constant movement. Scenes didn’t simply change - they shifted, rotated, unfolded. The set behaved like a piece of machinery in its own right, echoing the film’s themes of automation and dehumanisation. It created a sense of depth and height that most productions of the time couldn’t match, and even when the score faltered, the staging kept the audience’s attention. Yes it wasn’t subtle, but it was impressive, and for anyone who loved the 1927 movie, it was enough to justify multiple visits. I went three times in quick succession, partly for the cast, partly for the staging, and partly because I knew it wasn’t going to last. And it didn’t. After just 214 performances, "Metropolis" closed and slipped quietly into the category of interesting theatrical footnotes. The machines were beautiful, but only for a very short while...

• Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children - This was the first title launched under DC’s short‑lived Piranha Press imprint, and it immediately set itself apart from anything else the company was publishing. It wasn’t really a comic in the traditional sense - each issue was essentially a prose story accompanied by Dan Sweetman’s stark, scratchy illustrations. But the format suited the material. These were unsettling, off‑kilter fables with titles like "A Cotton Candy Autopsy", "Die Rainbow Die" and "The Santas of Demotion Street" - stories that lived in the margins, far away from capes, continuity and the brightly coloured optimism of mainstream superhero books. Dave Louapre’s writing was bleakly funny, often uncomfortable, and completely uninterested in giving readers sympathetic characters or tidy resolutions. Sweetman’s artwork amplified that tone perfectly. His distorted figures and jagged linework made the world feel unstable, as if everything was slightly out of alignment. The combination created something that felt genuinely different. Across its run, the series was experimental without being pretentious, strange without being incoherent, and confident enough to let its stories be abrasive when they needed to be. For a brief moment, Piranha Press had something truly distinctive on its hands - thirty issues of sharp, unsettling brilliance that still stand out in the landscape of late‑80s and early‑90s comics.

• Legion of Super-Heroes - I fell in love with the Legion during the 80s Paul Levitz era. The series started with a new number one on higher quality "Baxter" paper and Levitz had a real knack of maintaining decades long continuity, yet creating fresh stories for a new audience. Those 63 issues are a high watermark in the team's history - still well regarded all these decades later. But what came after was very, very different. Levitz stepped away and genius writer/artist Keith Giffen took the reigns. We had a new first issue and an ominous title page - "Five Years Later". Giffen along with Tom and Mary Bierbaum took the team into darker territory, presenting a 30th century where the United Planets was crumbling, Earthgov was compromised and the Legion itself had splintered into scattered, damaged former heroes. It was a shock to the system, especially for readers who’d grown up with the cleaner, more straightforward adventures of the earlier runs. What made the book compelling was its willingness to commit to the premise. Characters aged, relationships broke down, and the idealism that had once defined the Legion was replaced by a sense of loss and disillusionment. Giffen’s dense, nine‑panel layouts and heavy use of shadow gave the series a striking visual identity. It wasn’t always easy to follow, and it certainly wasn’t always welcoming, but it was ambitious in a way the Legion perhaps hadn’t been for years. I really loved it, but the changes divided the fanbase. However it did prove that the property could evolve rather than simply repeat itself. Buy the omnibus editions - you won't be disappointed.