Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 23 - 1989

When choosing things for the top spot in these posts, I desperately want to avoid the obvious choices (although some do creep into "honourable mentions") - plus other items are excluded because I plan longer posts on them once this is all over. In the end I went with a series of books which a lot of people will never have heard of, but which were far better than their beginnings might suggest...

1989:

The trivia:

• Scuba diver William Lamm was swimming in eight feet of water in Florida when he was accidentally sucked into the intake pipe for Hutchinson Island's nuclear power plant. Carried at speed through over 1,600 feet of pipeline, he was eventually dumped into the cooling pond surrounding the reactor. Thankfully he survived with barely a bruise.
• An amateur collector of 18th century maps bought an old tattered painting of a country scene for US$ 4.00 at a Pennsylvania bargain sale - purely because he liked the frame. When he took the frame apart, he discovered a copy of the US Declaration of Independence hidden inside. Thinking it nothing more than a 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 and sold two years later for US$ 2.4 million.
• A MiG-23 pilot mistakenly ejected on take off from a Polish airfield.The aircraft continued to fly over 500 miles on autopilot only to eventually crash into a house in Belgium, sadly killing a teenager living there.

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 - so suddenly there was a plethora of new authors to choose from in the UK. During regular trips to Forbidden Planet I started to pick up a number of these books - John DeChancie's "Castle Perilous" series, Simon Hawke's "The Wizard of Fourth Street", Christopher Statsheff's "Warlock" sequence (although he had actually been writing for many years beforehand).and Alan Dean Fosters "Spellsinger". In addition I continued to collect the ongoing "Xanth" adventures from Piers Anthony. I bought a *lot* of books.

Amongst the dozens of new titles on the shelves, one author particularly stood out - but what attracted me to his name was not the blurb 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. I guess they felt that readers who already strongly associated Kirby's instantly recognisable work with the quality of Pratchett's books, would make the same leap and feel that they were being told "this is more of the same kind of stuff". Well guess what - it worked on me!

Gardner released "A Malady of Magicks" in 1986, but I think it was some time later when it, and the other two volumes in this first trilogy ("A Multitude of Monsters" and "A Night in the Netherhells")  reached UK shores with their Kirby covers. In a nutshell, the main plot is fairly simple - Ebenezum is a 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 ventures 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.

I've written before how I took one of these books to a Terry signing and he wrote inside "nice cover.,...". But these Pratchett-pastiches are not the core of this particular memory. Craig Shaw Gardner's next series was far more in tune with my love for all things from the worlds of movies, pulp serials and comic books....

Billed as the first volume in the Cineverse Cycle", "Slaves of the Volcano God" concerns public relations worker Roger, an average guy who discovers that his girlfriend Delores is actually from the Cineverse, where each world is based on a B-movie genre. Roger can travel between worlds using his trust Captain Crusader Decoder Ring (found inside a cereal packet). The key to the Cineverse is that "Movie Magic" always applies - so in the Wild West, cowboys never run out of ammo, if you enter the "Musical Comedies" you may never escape as everyone bursts into song at inopportune moments, and good guys always win (except in 1970s gritty dramas). On his quest to rescue Delores from the villainous Doctor Dread, Roger also has to figures out what caused "The Change" (the reason why movies are just not as good as they used to be) and exactly who or what is the Plotmaster... The story continues in "Bride of the Slime Monster" and concludes in "Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies".

I think what appealed to me most about the Cineverse is that it's obvious that Gardner has a deep abiding love for the B-movie genre and it's conventions. His story is peppered with allusions to classics of the past and each of his worlds has been designed to operate within its own rule-sets and contain appropriate challenges. Along with this there is a feel of those black and white Republic serials with their weekly cliffhangers, dastardly villains and bizarre science. My own childhood was one of growing up with a film-loving family and weekends and school holidays filled with the likes of "Flash Gordon", "King of the Rocketmen", "Them!", "Godzilla" or "It Came From Beneath The Sea", The more you know about the movies, the more you will enjoy these books. 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.

Long out of print, the "Cineverse Cycle" is a lost pearl amongst a sea of parodies and Pratchett copycats. Not every book has to be epic or life changing or worthy of the Man Booker prize. Sometimes you just need a series that is damn good fun.

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 feels like somewhere that the bizarre rogues gallery could come from (even if it does look like a movie set a little too much at times). Keaton certainly shut down the haters who lambasted his casting when his name was first attached. I'm not so enamoured with Jack Nicholson's Joker. Yes the Clown Prince of Crime is meant to be over the top, but Nicholson went too far in the wrong direction for my personal tastes - but I guess superhero movies were a big gamble back then and they needed a "name" actor to anchor things for cinema goers. Despite this, I still loved the film when it first came out and even though I wasn't the greatest Prince fan, bought both soundtrack albums. The less said about Vicki Vale the better though...

• Truckers by Terry Prachett - So after I headlined one of his 'imitators', here comes PTerry himself with the first in the "Nome / Bromeliad" trilogy. It was the first non-Discworld book of his that I read, and I instantly became enamoured with the tiny characters and their journey to find where they came from and how to get back there - especially this first novels central concept of an entire tribe of Nomes living under the floorboards of a department store. "Truckers" showed the world that Pratchett was capable of more than just tales of witches and wizards and luggage with legs and the trilogy as a whole is as good as any of the best Discworld stories. Animation experts Cosgrove Hall of "Danger Mouse " fame did an excellent stop-motion adaptation in 1992.

• Doom Patrol - I can't really be called a Grant Morrison fan. Much of the time (especially in recent years) he feels like a bargain basement Alan Moore tribute act, revelling in trying to be clever for clevers sake, but occasionally he does have real flashes of originality and brilliance. His reinvention of this 1960s DC super-team of freaks and rejects with artist Richard Case is one such occurrence. I was fascinated by the bizarre storylines and creations he came up with, such as the Brotherhood of Dada, the Scissormen and Danny The Street. It's all so absurd and abstract and a little bit pretentious that you can't help being swept away by the insanity.

• 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, it's here because it was an album I bought and tried to like to impress a girl I was genuinely infatuated with. Listening now instantly transports me back to a time and place when I was young, naive 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 had the UK debut of future star Judy Kuhn as Maria / Futura and the deep voice and magnetic presence of the one and only Brian Blessed - and actor Jonathan Adams in a great supporting role. In addition there was the huge metallic moving set with it's rising platforms and cradles coming from the ceiling. That, plus my love for the original film was enough to get me to the theatre three times in quick succession. Which was just as well as "Metropolis" only lasted 214 performances before being consigned to a footnote in musical history. "The machines are beautiful..."

• Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children - The first series from DC's alternative imprint Piranha Press was not really a comic book at all, more a series of text stories with accompanying illustrations. But what stories they were. Forget the brightly coloured pantheon of superheroes, this was a monochromatic world of unsettling, twisted and creepy fables with titles such as "A Cotton Candy Autopsy", "Die Ranbow Die" and The Santas of Demotion Street" . Written by Dave Loupre and drawn by Dan Sweetman,whose scratchy yet beautiful penmanship offered a distorted view of the world, these tales were full of dark humour, unsympathetic characters and unhappy endings. It was thirty issues of brilliance. 

• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - The best film ever about time travel in a phone box (well at least until a proper "Doctor Who" movies gets made). Every viewing (and there have been many) is a wonderful joyous experience. It's damn near perfect and incredibly the sequel is even better. What else can I say except...