mewsings in February 2011, page 1 of 2

They’re not typos, they’s scanspellos — errors that come not from someone mistyping something and failing to check it, but from someone scanning something in, running a quick OCR and spellcheck, then thinking that’s enough work on that one and publishing the damn thing. And I’m not talking about people putting stuff up on the web, I’m talking about supposedly professionally produced books available through Amazon. And this plague of scanspellos is set to get a lot worse as ebooks gain in popularity.

It’s not an issue limited to ebooks. The old Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks had their fair share of typos, for instance — enough to make me want to replace them with a higher quality edition if I ever wanted to re-read them, but never so many that it made me give up reading them to start with. I first read A Voyage to Arcturus in its Ballantine edition, and although the typos were mildly annoying, they never got in the way of my understanding — and in fact being bowled over by — the book. It was always obvious they were typos. The trouble with scanspellos (a horrible word for a horrible phenomenon) is, because they involve a careless run through a spellchecker, they’re that much less obvious. The first book that really got my readerly goat as far as scanspellos are concerned was, in fact, another edition of A Voyage to Arcturus, in this case one produced by a university press — Bison Press, who are associated with the University of Nebraska. In a supposedly “commemmorative” edition (that’s one “m” too many, they even managed to introduce an error on the cover), the text was so garbled I actually fired an email off to the publisher (and never got a reply of course). Although it was full of silly little obvious errors, including number 1’s for letter l’s (hardly an important error, but irritating enough to act as a constant distraction from pure reading), some of the words, and therefore the meaning, had actually been changed. At one point, for instance, the text said, “The short stranger turned and comforted the party”. Any reader new to Arcturus would read that and take it at face value, but I, having read the novel a fair few times and knowing that the very essence of the “short stranger”, Krag, is discomfort — he is a supernatural being who has another name in our world, and it is Pain — checked that sentence in another edition and found it was supposed to read “The short stranger turned and confronted the party” — an entirely different meaning.

I’ve recently been reading Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, a bumper volume of Algernon Blackwood stories. This is from House of Stratus, a publisher who has issued a lot of Blackwood in affordable paperback form. A while ago I bought their edition of his novel, The Human Chord, and it was a well-produced paperback. I thought Tales would be up to the same standard. In fact it was scanspelloed to the hilt. “Her” constantly replaced “for”, “ox” replaced “or”, “axe” replaced “are”, “lie” replaced “he”, among many, many others. Worst of all was its constant replacement of long dashes with hyphens. This might sound like a minor annoyance on a par with number 1’s for letter l’s, but it was actually the thing that most interrupted my reading. There’s a constantly disruptive effect in reading a sentence like:

“The Club-it crossed his tortured mind for a second-was impossible.”

The worst thing was, once I’d been reading the book for a while, I found myself looking at hyphenated words I came across elsewhere, wondering if they were supposed to have a dash or a hyphen between them, and tentatively re-reading them each way before continuing.

Neither of these examples are of ebooks. I recently read Treasure Island on my Kindle, in the free edition offered by Amazon. That actually had very few scanspellos, but had plenty of examples of the other fault that irritates me about ebooks — poor design. I hate books that use html-style paragraphing (a double line-space between paragraphs rather than a single line break and an indent). The free edition of Treasure Island didn’t do that, fortunately, but quite frequently had line breaks within paragraphs, though aside from that — and the poor formatting of chapter headings — it was generally readable. But bad enough to persuade me to pay for a book I want to read in future.

None of this is because of the rise of ebooks, or of print-on-demand technology (the House of Stratus book was POD, the Bison Press wasn’t), but it is an effect of the ease with which old, often out-of-print, books can be brought into production nowadays. On the one hand, I applaud publishers for bringing hard-to-find works back into print once more — particularly the Algernon Blackwood novels and stories. But the very thing that makes it viable for them to do so is that they can put so little effort into it — just scan them, OCR & spellcheck them, and release them to the public without a proper (human) proofread. And the trouble is that once these cheap editions are out there, it makes it so much less likely that a proper publisher — one who will actually check what they publish — will bring out a better edition to replace it, one which will necessarily be more expensive, and so sell less.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered a better way of reading out-of-print books. I download them as PDFs from archive.org. Kindles are generally pretty bad for reading PDFs because they either shrink them too small to read in order to fit on the screen, or you have to constantly pan right and left to read them; but books of a certain age are just the right size to fit on a Kindle screen and remain readable. And they’ve got a good selection of Algernon Blackwoods at archive.org.

I’ve been reading a bit of Algernon Blackwood recently, so I thought I’d post what is one of my favourite fantasy illustrations, Matt Fox’s two-page spread for Blackwood’s excellent weird story, “The Wendigo”:

It would have originally been divided by inner page margins, hence the fact that the two halves don’t fit together.

It originally appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in June 1944 (Blackwood’s tale was first published in 1910), but the above scan comes courtesy of Peter Haining’s wonderful Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines, a 1976 book chock-full of classic (and not-so-classic) pictures from the pulps and penny dreadfuls.

When I first saw this illustration, I was initially put off by its unrealistic style, but I kept coming back to it, and eventually it won me over. Nowadays, I’ve come to prefer illustration which is as much design as realistic representation, and, particularly in fantastic art where an air of make-believe is so necessary, I always find art which is only realistic — however perfect — just doesn’t do it for me as much as stuff which is plainly artificial, and so obviously the product of a human imagination.

If you want some more Matt Fox, here’s a pretty thorough gallery of his Weird Tales covers, illustrations, and some comic work, over at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Borag Thung, Earthlets! Sometime in the early, early eighties, the BBC showed what seemed like an endless rerun of the original Star Trek series. I watched every episode (they seemed to be on each weekday, at an appropriately post-school hour), but if you’d asked me at the time whether I liked Star Trek, I’d have replied with a definite no.

Why? Because I was a Doctor Who fan, of course! In my near-teens, it was a question of Catholic/Protestant proportions. If nothing else, Star Trek was US, Doctor Who was Brit. (And there was a general US invasion of British TV at the time, most of it rubbish — probably slightly better rubbish than our rubbish, but that wasn’t the point.) On a more practical level, BBC2 were showing whole weekdays-worth of original Star Trek, but no Doctor Who! And this was at a time when, thanks to collecting the Target novelisations and faithfully buying every issue of Doctor Who Weekly (then Monthly), I was desperate to see some of the old Doctor Who’s that I’d read so much about, and seen so many tantalising photos of — actually, in those pre-video days, I’d have been just as happy to see repeats of stories I’d already seen. Anything for more Doctor Who! Instead, what I got was endless Star Trek.

But, really, I enjoyed them, and it only occurred to me a few weeks ago that I’d never seen any of the original Star Trek episodes since those early eighties repeats — and certainly I’d never watched any of them while actually allowing myself to like them. So I bought the first season on DVD, and have started watching it. (I never got into the spinoffs. They seemed a bit too self-conscious of the weight of the tradition they were following; they lacked the sheer wackiness and innocence of the original series. Perhaps TV SF will never be as free again, simply because it’s become successful.)

I was at first disappointed to find that, as well as being remastered, the original show had had as many effects shots as possible replaced by computer-generated digital sequences. I was prepared to be outraged. But, having watched a few — and though I do miss those endless shots of the Enterprise orbiting a different-coloured but otherwise identical swirly-atmosphered planet each episode — I have to admit the new effects don’t at all stand out like the fistful of sore thumbs I was expecting. They fit right in. (The important thing is that those studio-bound planet sets are still there — so much a part of the feel of the original series, just as the studio-bound alien landscapes of Doctor Who’s like “The Brain of Morbius” or “Planet of Evil” are. I don’t care about their lack of realism, I even quite like their obvious theatricality.)

It’s been strange seeing the show after a gap of — eek! — almost thirty years. No doubt because of the age I was when I first watched it, I remembered the show begin quite different. I thought it was all action and sci-fi fantasy, but now I’m seeing a lot more character stuff than I ever was aware of at ten or eleven. Also, genuine SF-style ideas! Not every episode, but the one I’ve just watched (“The Enemy Within”) does present its theory of what makes a hero a hero, a captain a captain, with its story of Kirk’s tussle with his darker side. (An episode written by Richard Matheson, I note. That’s one thing I was never aware of when I saw the series originally: the fact that there were some big SF names involved. But then again, I’d never heard of Harlan Ellison or Richard Matheson when I saw Star Trek the first time.)

One question I had to answer was what order to watch the episodes. There seem to be so many options — by stardate (internal chronology), by production date, or by original broadcast date. I went with original broadcast date, and my initial reaction, on watching the first, “The Man Trap”, was to wonder how anyone watching it could have understood it. There was no effort at introducing the characters, let alone the SF ideas — transporters, phasers — that the show relied on. But obviously it worked.

The next thing that struck me was how every one of the five episodes I’ve watched so far — the first five to be broadcast — were about some sort of enemy within, or an enemy masquerading as a human. The Enterprise may have had its mission to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, but its first five stories are really all about the invasion of the Enterprise itself. (Well, as Nietzsche said, “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”.) We have a shape-changing alien, two lots of humans transformed into monsters by the acquisition of super powers, and then two lots of strange influences that cause the crew of the Enterprise to become a danger to itself. Just when I thought this had to end, episode five was entitled “The Enemy Within”! Was this all post-McCarthy communist witch-hunt aftershocks? Or pre-shocks of the coming flower-power revolution? (The show seems to have one foot planted in the fifties — in Forbidden Planet rocket-power and spaceward-ho optimism — and another in sixties introspection, self-exploration and far-out-ness. The episode “Charlie X”, for instance, gives us a teen very much in the bryl-haired fifties mould, still innocent enough at the age of 17 to have some respect for authority, while the crew’s women are, generally, very much of the hive-hairdoed, cone-bra’d fifties type; while “The Naked Time” seems almost explicitly to be about the coming drop-out generation’s “let it all hang out” philosophy — and its use of LSD — alongside fears of society’s fragmentation as a result. The Enterprise is on a five-year trip, man.)

One obvious difference between Star Trek and Doctor Who is that the main characters in Star Trek all wear uniforms. They’re integrated parts of an established (and admirably inclusive) society. The Doctor, on the other hand, is not just an individual, he’s an outcast, an outsider, one who has rejected his originating society. This isn’t by any means a criticism of Star Trek, but it is something that makes these “enemy within” style stories possible, perhaps even necessary. Doctor Who has done something similar (right near the beginning, with the TARDIS-bound paranoia-fest, “The Edge of Destruction”), but certainly not on the scale of Star Trek. Star Trek is about a society venturing into space, facing the unknown; Doctor Who is about an individual (or a small, disparate gang) bumming around, turning up at random, doing good on principle rather than by mandate. Star Trek, which really seems more rooted in Forbidden Planet than merely its use of Commander John J Adam and crew’s mission to other planets, is much more about facing “the Monster from the Id”, and that whole Freudian idea that man can never truly live as himself in a well-ordered society, but must suppress his wilder, weirder, more alien, impulses. Doctor Who (which, if it has a single story-seed, would of course be The Time Machine, with the Thals and Daleks as its Eloi and Morlocks), though it has of course battled with its own “Monsters from the Id” (in “Planet of Evil”, it’s own Forbidden Planet rip-off), is less Freudian and perhaps more Jungian, with the Doctor’s impulse to explore the universe more along the lines of the sort of quest for individuation Jung saw as the prime psychological motive for us doing what we do.

But enough amateur psychology, I’m off to enjoy another episode.

Live long and prosper!

(Oh, and talking of Forbidden Planet, I’m really looking forward to this coming out.)