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Warrington, Freda
Whitehouse, David
Wollheim, Richard
Wyndham, John


Freda Warrington


Freda Warrington's homepage: http://www.fredawarrington.com

Dracula the Undead


Dracula the Undead
==================

Seven years have passed since the power of Count Dracula was destroyed, and it 
is now surely safe enough for the Harkers and Doctor Van Helsing to revisit 
Transylvania and lay some old ghosts to rest. However, the ancient evil of 
Dracula is awakened once more - the nightmare is not over yet.

================================================================================

Marking the centenary of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, Freda Warrington's 
sequel is written in a similar style, using letters and journal entries to 
describe events. I'm full of admiration for the way the author has done this - I 
think she has kept close to the spirit of the original but added her own fine 
creative touches. On the whole this works well, preserving the Victorian (or 
should this now be Edwardian?) atmosphere of the scenes. From the stifling gloom 
of Carfax Abbey to the stark backdrop of the Carpathians, Freda Warrington 
depicts the world of Dracula and his adversaries in a very authentic and 
evocative way.

I thought the vampires were depicted intelligently, never as complete monsters 
but as three-dimensional beings with both attractive and repellent qualities in 
good measure. The living characters too, are shown in an ambivalent light, their 
weaknesses and limitations displayed along with their heroism. The author thus 
adds a degree of depth to the Dracula story, developing and amplifying 
characters and relationships without pushing the novel beyond its boundaries as 
a sequel. 

Where Dracula the Undead also shines, in my opinion, is where Freda 
Warrington expands the original story and enlarges on the notion of the 
Scholomance, a secret undead academy deep under the mountains, where the Devil 
claims his fee of one out of every ten students (Van Helsing mentions the 
Scholomance very briefly in the original Dracula - blink, and you may 
miss the reference.) This dusty subterranean realm is well-described - read 
about it if you dare without coming over all claustrophobic...

Occasionally the epistolary style is pushed to its limits. Young 
Transylvanian farmer's daughter Elena seems to absorb from Mina Harker, as if 
by osmosis, both her fluent English and her urge to record everything in her 
daily journal. Now that is what I call supernatural.

There are other moments where the Victorian spell is broken. The lusts of the 
flesh are depicted in a way that comes across as modern, despite the attempts 
to avoid being too explicit - where Bram Stoker would have hinted very 
obliquely, Freda Warrington makes it abundantly clear what is going on, 
painting a picture of vampiric seduction which would have scandalised Stoker's
contemporaries. One of her characters also writes about the unconscious mind 
in a way that would not have been possible at the time - true, Freud would 
have been formulating his theories about the id and the unconscious at about 
this point in history. However, I don't think his ideas would have been in 
general circulation for another half century at least.

All things considered, I think Dracula the Undead a worthy sequel to Bram 
Stoker's Dracula - it is thoughtful, well-written and (mostly) congruent 
with the original. Definitely worth reading.

© Alex Cull, 6th January, 2005


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David Whitehouse


David Whitehouse's website: http://www.starlinkuk.co.uk/david/Main_Page.html

The Sun: A Biography


The Sun: A Biography
====================

Written by astronomer David Whitehouse, The Sun is the story of mankind's
observations of our nearest star, from prehistoric times through to the era of 
Galileo and up to the present day.

================================================================================

The Sun has always had pride of place in our little corner of the universe, and
also an almost indescribably important role in our religions, myths and art. In 
recent centuries, scientists have discovered much that is fascinating about the 
Sun but have barely started to understand what makes it behave in the way it 
does.

The Sun: A Biography is a very ambitious book, in which David Whitehouse attempts 
to set down the history of the Sun and our perennial obsession with it. Does he 
succeed? I think he certainly does; The Sun is not a textbook and is written 
for the general reader, but Whitehouse brings the subject marvellously to life 
and in no way dumbs it down for us non-scientists.

Despite the chapters dealing with solid subjects such as radiation, magnetism 
and optics, it is difficult not to feel, after reading this book, that the
gigantic object that dominates the solar system is some sort of gargantuan living 
creature with its quirks, appetites and mysterious moods.

Whitehouse traces the history of solar astronomy back to its prehistoric origins
and places like Sliabh na Caillighe (or the "Hill of the Witch") at Loughcrew in 
Ireland, where an eclipse was recorded in 3340 BC. He brings us up to date with 
the SolarMax and Soho satellites and then takes us into the remote future, when 
our descendants may one day have to deal with the necessity of moving the Earth's 
orbit further out to avoid death by fire as the Sun starts to expand.

Along the way, we meet the people who, over the centuries, have watched the Sun 
and made records and theories of solar phenomena in manuscripts, books and 
treatises. And there are some notable figures, from Newton, who made a reasonable
estimate of the Sun's mass, to Galileo, who observed the Sun directly through a
telescope at sunset and was lucky not to injure his eyesight, to Sir Arthur
Eddington, whose fussy appearance belied a brilliant mind, and whose observations
confirmed Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

My favourite character is the eccentric Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland, 
who in 1906 demonstrated that particles from the Sun cause vast electric currents 
flowing around the Earth and create the aurorae. He was also the inventor of the 
electromagnetic rail-gun and was partial to wearing a fez and pointy red leather 
slippers.

But what this book demonstrates is that no one individual ever solves more than
a fraction of the Sun's riddles. It is always a joint effort, with scientists 
continually building on the knowledge of their peers and of those who went before
them. It is as if the Sun is a vast jigsaw puzzle, with an astronomer finding a
piece here, a physicist finding a piece there, and gradually a big picture taking 
shape.

The puzzle is still incomplete, though, especially in the mysterious area of
sunspots, first depicted in a drawing from 1128 AD, and studied by men whose 
names are still associated with sunspot cycles and grand minima (when sunspots 
have all but vanished from the solar disc) - Schwabe, Sporer, Wolf and Maunder.

We still have a lot to learn about sunspots and are indebted to American solar 
physicist Jack Eddy, who rediscovered Edward Maunder's observations which had 
been neglected and half-forgotten for fifty years. These strange, transient 
phenomena may well hold the key to the way the Sun affects the Earth's great 
climate shifts. 

The book covers vast territories of time and space, touching on many diverse 
and interesting subjects, from solar sails to Stradivarius violins (which may 
owe some of their uniqueness to the quality of maple and spruce wood during the 
Little Ice Age.) Social history is here too, for instance in the story of 
astronomer Annie Jump Cannon who devised the spectral classifications of stars 
that we still use today, but was not formally recognised by the academic 
establishment until just two years before her retirement in 1938. 

There is just so much here to enjoy - physics, history, astronomy, biography, 
poetry by Shelley and Tennyson, plus David Whitehouse's own very accessible prose. 
If you are a non-scientist but, like me, are greatly interested in science and 
the universe around us, I think you will find The Sun: A Biography a wonderful, 
even inspiring read.

And you might just find your attitude towards that great big yellow thing in 
the sky has subtly and forever changed. 

© Alex Cull, 6th June, 2008


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Richard Wollheim

Freud


Freud
=====

Freud, by Richard Wollheim, is the story not of Freud the man but Freud 
the thinker, tracing the evolution of his ideas from the earliest stages right 
up until the end of his life.

================================================================================

Richard Wollheim, who died in November 2003 aged 80, was a philosopher, and his 
way of writing has a certain dense, academic quality which was a little 
challenging for me at times. I needed to be alert and on my toes (mentally 
speaking) when reading this book, so it was definitely not one to attempt last 
thing at night (when my brain is normally well on the way to retiring from the 
demands of the day.) But reading Freud has also been an interesting 
journey for me, and I have gained quite a few insights about the founder of 
psychoanalysis along the way, as well as a renewed respect for the man himself. 

The book is divided into chapters which each tackle one broad area of Freudian 
thought, such as the theory of the mind, sexuality and the neurosis. As well as 
embarking on a thorough exploration of these areas, Wollheim explains how 
Freud's ideas changed and developed throughout his life. I had not previously 
given much thought to the fact that these were not edicts set in stone but were 
living, changing entities, always subject to revision and modification. 

I came away from this book with the sense that if Freud were to be still alive 
and practising psychology today, his ideas would have undergone further dynamic 
changes in the meantime. We would probably have a very different general 
understanding of Freudian thought than we do now.  

An example of the way the popular perception of Freud's thought has become 
fossilised over the years is the notion that, for Freud, sex (and sex only) was 
the driving force behind everything. However, during the course of his career, 
Freud introduced and developed the idea of a "death instinct" (thanatos, 
as opposed to the life instinct eros) which would explain such phenomena 
as aggression and war. Thus the popular perception is inaccurate, and really 
little better than a caricature.

Where Freud's world view differs from mine (or at least the kind of world view I 
vaguely tend to favour) is that Freud was a committed materialist all his life, 
and based his theories on the posited existence of a purely physical basis to all
 human thoughts and feelings. It was fascinating (and a little disturbing) for me 
to read about the model of the human mind, as described in his Project for a 
Scientific Psychology, that Freud constructed and tinkered with for much of 
his life.

I'm imagining Freud in his study, with slide rule and graph paper, working out 
the details of this intricate mechanism, constantly refining and adding to it. 
Or even building a working model in his basement. I can see him monitoring the 
flow of neurones through a maze of Victorian pipework, tapping a valve here, 
glancing at a dial there. I can hear his shout of triumph - "It's alive!" 

Well, that is pure whimsy on my part, I admit. But the model of the human mind 
in Freud's Project does seem like a kind of engine, just as late twentieth 
century models seem like computers. What will the human mind, I wonder, 
resemble in the year 2090? 

It's often very easy to take Freud for granted, and forget the extent that his 
ideas, for better or worse, are embedded in our cultural landscape. But these 
ideas were truly ground-breaking in their time. Who, before Freud, worked so 
productively with the unconscious, with dreams, jokes or slips of the tongue? 
Reading Freud by Richard Wollheim has reminded me that Freud was a giant, a 
true pioneer. I heartily recommend this book to my fellow psychology and 
counselling students. 

© Alex Cull, 16th May 2006


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John Wyndham

Consider Her Ways, and Others
The Day of the Triffids
The Kraken Wakes
Web


Consider Her Ways, and Others
=============================

This is a collection of five short stories by John Wyndham, plus a novella - 
Consider Her Ways - which describes a future where males have become extinct 
and females fill all niches in society.

================================================================================

Around the same time that I re-read Consider Her Ways, I read two other books 
which have this shared theme but are otherwise totally different from one another
- Spiral by Koji Suzuki, and Atomised by Michel Houellebecq. In each of these 
books (all written by men), the next phase of human life promises to be 
exclusively female, and each writer addresses this in his own way. One point upon 
which all three seem to agree is that a completely female society would be static. 
Once the aggressive, adventurous, risk-taking, war-waging, crime-perpetrating male 
element is removed (or so the arguments go) the human race will become far more 
orderly, calm and harmonious, although this static, homogenous condition could 
make the race vulnerable to unexpected changes and would possibly also mean an 
end to technological progress.  

In John Wyndham's version of this scenario (I wonder, was this the first time 
anyone has speculated about an all-female human race in fiction?) men have 
succumbed to an artificial virus and women have, in the meantime, developed an 
efficient parthenogenetic method to reproduce themselves. Society is modelled on 
the ant world and rigidly stratified, with women belonging to separate castes 
defined by their functions. The immobile bloated Mothers are dedicated baby 
factories, there are brawny, amazon-like Workers and scurrying, dwarfish 
Servitors, plus higher echelons who administer and control. Much of the novella 
is taken up by a debate between the narrator and a historian about the value of 
romance, which is something that has been eradicated along with the men. The 
historian argues that society is better off without romance, as it was nothing 
but an illusion through which men could enslave women.

John Wyndham's story is well-written and interesting, in its bleak way. But is 
it plausible? Would an all-woman society be placid, regimented and harmonious? 
There are not many real-life examples to look at, apart from women's prisons 
and boarding schools, but I would hazard an opinion (based on my memories of 
the school playground) that when behaviour that is driven purely by biology is 
discounted (how this would be determined precisely, I have no idea) all-woman 
societies would be roughly as unstable, chaotic and riddled with dominance-games 
as all-men societies, or indeed the ones we have now.  

The other stories in this collection vary a lot in tone and quality. A Long Spoon 
is a humorous story about a deal with the devil. Oh, Where, Now, is Peggy 
MacRafferty? is another comic story, this time about the excesses of 
Hollywood, but is somewhat dated and unfunny. The other three stories - Odd, 
Stitch in Time and Random Quest - are rather clever tales about time travel, 
time paradoxes and alternative worlds. 

These last three stories are enjoyable - which leads me to a question. Why did 
John Wyndham never write a full-length novel about time travel or an alternative 
world? Perhaps one answer is that the short story format is simply more suited 
to Wyndham's treatment of the subject. Or maybe he just had no inclination to 
do so. But it would have been interesting. 

Back to the women-only idea. Am I bothered by the notion that men could become 
obsolete and go the way of the dodo? Not really. It is unlikely that this will 
happen in my lifetime. And if there is reincarnation, and I have to come back 
for another shift here on Earth, and if only women were being born, I'd be one 
anyway and thus wouldn't care. 

© Alex Cull, 17th April 2007


The Day of the Triffids
=======================

First published in 1951, this is a novel about a human and ecological disaster. 
Among its other excellent qualities, this book's claim to fame is that it 
introduced a brand new word into the English language - "triffid."

================================================================================

I first read The Day of the Triffids when I was a teenager, just discovering 
SF, and the book made a great impression on me at the time. Monster plants on the 
loose! The end of civilisation! This was also roughly when I was watching Terry 
Nation's series Survivors on the telly, which had similar themes (with rabid 
dog packs instead of marauding mutated veg.) I have fond memories of curling up 
with a hot chocolate in my family's comfortable living room, planning what I 
would do if Britain ever got transformed into a lawless, depopulated wasteland 
(never for a moment doubting that I would survive the initial disaster.) 

On re-reading this book now in the 21st century, it is clear to me why The Day of 
the Triffids still has its appeal. Wyndham's description of southern England's rapid 
slide into chaos is compelling reading even today, and contradicts the "cosy 
catastrophe" charge often levelled at him. The shattered glass from looted shop 
windows, the misery and terror of those blinded by the green flares, the acts of 
selfishness and desperation and heroism, all this would have been strong stuff in 
1951 and retains much of its power in 2006. 

Some aspects of Wyndham's writing have not aged quite as well. He depicts his 
hopelessly impractical female characters in ways that have probably infuriated 
feminist readers for several decades. They can be plucky but cannot hold a 
shotgun properly or get a generator going, and when in charge, are inflexible 
and dogmatic. Lucky for them that us level-headed and practical chaps are around. 

But it is the eponymous who are the stars of the show. They lurk in the shrubbery, 
drumming their mysterious messages to one another, always ready to lash out at 
unsuspecting humans with their poisonous whip-like stings. What an appropriate 
source of terror for a nation of gardeners. There's probably many an English 
person whose idea of paradise would include a country cottage with roses over 
the door - precisely the sort of locale that triffids thrive in. If an award 
was ever given out for Most Menacing Vegetables in Fiction, triffids would be 
the outright winners, although I'm sure their acceptance speech would be 
appropriately disturbing. In the novel, as humans shakily begin to put 
themselves back on the road to some sort of civilisation, it is the monstrous 
plant life that proves to be the biggest problem. 

In these times of threatened ecological meltdown, when a respectable scientist 
like James Lovelock can publish a book entitled The Revenge of Gaia, The Day 
of the Triffids has lost little of its relevancy - one of its messages, 
surely, is that if we meddle with the natural order too much, one day Nature 
will rise up to bite us on the butt. Or, to borrow a metaphor from one of the 
characters in the story, we will stumble and fall off the tightrope. Equally, 
it could be said that this novel is about human courage and the indomitable will 
to continue - somehow - in the face of overwhelming odds.

And it's also a rattling good read, which is the main thing. 

© Alex Cull, 2nd February 2006


The Kraken Wakes
================

The catastrophe started with mysterious red fireballs. Silently, rapidly they 
crossed the sky from time to time, plunging into the world's oceans, harming 
no-one. The next phase was not so benign...

================================================================================

John Wyndham was one of my earliest favourite SF writers - in my teenage years I 
read and enjoyed all of his novels (except for Chocky, for some reason, 
which I could never find a copy of.) If I had to pick an absolute favourite 
Wyndham novel, it would probably be The Chrysalids, but The Kraken Wakes 
(although lacking the same degree of general acclaim) would not be far behind. 

What I love in this novel is the quietly relentless and stealthy way that the 
catastrophe develops. It is almost imperceptible in the beginning, like the 
first clouds that scud across a peaceful blue sky, heralding the storm to come. 
Wyndham was a master of this understated approach, ramping up the tension by 
degrees, lulling the reader at times, then demolishing all peace of mind with 
some fresh disaster. 

There is a chilly cold-war ambience in The Kraken Wakes (it was published 
in 1953), with the enigmatic Soviets and their capitalistic counterparts trading 
accusations and counter-accusations, as ships start to sink; neither side is 
initially able to think the unthinkable, i.e. that there is an inhuman agency 
at work beneath the waves. In this respect, the novel bears comparison to The 
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, where the human response to alien invaders 
is similarly sluggish and piecemeal. I have no doubt that should xenobaths, 
or some such nasties, decide to take over the planet in reality, governments 
will actually behave like this. Our doom would be pretty much sealed.

Wyndham was also capable of writing passages containing some truly spine-
chilling horror. In the mid-section of the novel, as the visitors start to 
encroach on coastal towns and villages, there are some nightmarish scenes that 
haunt the reader for a long time afterwards. These are conveyed just about 
perfectly, leaving precisely the right amount to the imagination.  

As with The Day of the Triffids, some aspects of John Wyndham's novels have 
dated, somewhat. The two central characters in The Kraken Wakes, radio 
scriptwriters Mike and Phyllis Watson, are frightfully middle class, and their 
constant twittering irritates at times. The whole EBC/BBC thing (you will know 
when you read the novel) gets old rather quickly too. Wyndham's dialogue, to 
the modern ear (well, my ear anyway) can at times seem very stilted, as if lifted 
verbatim from some archaic radio play. 

But, nevertheless, I'm giving this book full marks. I read it at a time when I 
was starting to explore the strange new world of science fiction and The Kraken 
Wakes certainly encouraged me to read more. Cultivated while at secondary school,
my love for SF is undimmed and continues to this day, and a lot of it stems from 
my early enthusiasm for John Wyndham's stories.

One more thing this novel shares with The Day of the Triffids, is that it 
contains much that is still highly relevant. In 2006 we are (if you will pardon 
the expression) practically inundated with speculative articles, both electronic 
and printed, about climate change. Ocean currents shifting, ice caps dwindling, 
sea levels on the rise, these are all familiar themes in our insecure 21st-century 
world. But who would have had the foresight back in 1953 to incorporate these 
ideas in a novel?

Apart from John Wyndham, that is.

© Alex Cull, 15th February 2006



Web
===

A remote tropical island, far from the pressures of the modern world. A brave
community of idealists, eager to begin a fresh new life. The promise of a
harmonious and just society in an unspoilt region of the world. What could go
wrong?

================================================================================

Posthumously published in 1979, Web was, I think, for a long while the last 
known novel of John Wyndham to see the light of day (until the appearance of Plan 
for Chaos in 2003.) It is a short work, novella-length rather than novel-length, 
but would probably have been a fair bit longer had it been fleshed out and 
completed by the author. It's really more like a rough draft (although polished 
just enough to pass muster) and might, had Wyndham lived long enough to revise 
and finish it, have been a pretty decent and disturbing novel to add to his other 
decently disturbing novels, such as The Midwich Cuckoos.  

The story is a simple one - a bunch of well-meaning characters set out across the 
Pacific to start a utopian colony on what they consider to be a suitably remote 
and uninhabited island. However, they run into deadly danger almost immediately. 
I won't spoil the story too much, but the perspicacious reader will have noticed 
that the title is Web and may have already seen that the paperback cover 
features a cobweb-festooned human skull, so it doesn't take a great leap of the 
imagination to figure out what form the danger takes.

Would Web, in its completed incarnation, have been on a par with The Crysalids 
or The Day of the Triffids? I would say probably not, although of course this is 
impossible to completely rule out. It certainly has some of the right themes for 
its time (mid to late 20th century) - modernity versus nature, the vulnerability 
of civilisation and paranoia about all things atomic. I've often considered that 
John Wyndham's works of fiction are like a thinking person's 1950s B-movies, and 
this story, with its native curse/nuclear fallout idea, fits the pattern well.

It's easy to identify Web's shortcomings, as we're not, as far as I know, 
looking at the finished product. The story is unevenly paced, with a great mass 
of exposition piled up in the first chapters and a few bits of decent action 
occurring mostly after the halfway mark. The characters are placeholders and 
talking heads rather than people, and it is difficult to summon much in the 
way of empathy for any of them; even the most memorable of the characters, the 
aptly-named Camilla Cogent, cuts a two-dimensional figure, albeit an intelligent 
and resourceful one.

It is Camilla, as mouthpiece of the author, who voices very cogently (as per her 
surname) the thinking that underlies many of John Wyndham's more famous stories: 

'To begin with, the idea that man can upset what you call the balance of nature 
is a piece of arrogance. It assumes him to be outside the natural processes - the 
"man like god" theme again. Man is a product of nature - its most advanced and 
influential specimen perhaps, but evoked by a natural process. He is part of that 
process. Whatever he does, it must be part of his nature to do - or he could not 
to it. He is not, and cannot be, unnatural. He, with his capacities, is as much 
the product of nature as were the dinosaurs with theirs. He is an instrument of 
natural processes.' 

In other words, man is as vulnerable as the dinosaurs were, to some new and 
efficient species that could overcome and displace him in a geological heartbeat.

In fiction, however, there is a truism that it is generally better to show rather 
than tell. In The Day of the Triffids the author shows us more than he tells us, 
which helps to make that novel as good as it is. In Web, the opposite is the 
case. And that is another reason why, for all its good ideas, this work is more a 
curiosity and a might-have-been than a fully-fledged Wyndham classic.

© Alex Cull, 2nd August 2010


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