books, page 138 of 140

Persian Fire is the history of the legendary clash between the Persian Empire and the various states that made up Ancient Greece in the 5th Century BC, a clash most well-known for the incredible defence of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans held back the immense Persian army long enough to give their countrymen time to observe an important religious holiday. (The film 300, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, which comes out soon, is a fictional treatment of this event.)

I’d read Tom Holland’s previous book, Rubicon, about the end of the Roman Republic, and liked his approach to history. He really works at bringing the cultures, people, and events alive for the reader, and makes no apologies at taking a “narrative” approach to history, where he allows himself informed speculations where necessary. But where Rubicon was about a single culture, Persian Fire is about an archetypal clash between cultures: the immense, powerful empire of the Middle East, whose emperor ruled by (self-declared) divine right; and the tiny, squabbling city-states of the Greeks, with their peculiar experiments in political science (the new-founded democracy of Athens, for instance, and the almost communistic war-machine mentality of Sparta). In his introduction, Holland points out how this historic “first battle for the west” has taken on a new importance in light of current tensions between Middle-East and West, but thankfully the bulk of the book is free from any attempt at pointing out parallels between then and now, as there’s really not much of a lesson to be learned from comparing the two times, other than to say that human beings were wily, greedy, sneaky and violent back then, and not much has changed.

Far more interesting for me is that sense of how real the past feels when you start getting into the details. There’s the inevitable myth-breaking, as we learn that the modern Marathon race isn’t named after a 26-mile run by the celebrated Philippides who, after declaring the battle of Marathan won supposedly dropped dead, because in fact Philippides had just completed a two-day, 140-mile run to Sparta and back, and lived to tell the tale. In fact, the 26 miles was run by fully-armoured Athenian Hoplites who, having just seen off an attack from Persian forces on one side of the Athenian peninsula, had to dash to the other side to see off another. There are also snippets that just must be useful if you ever find yourself (you never know) in armed combat against a Persian army: the super-disciplined Spartans had a trick of pretending to break and run from the front, an act they kept up till their opponents started cheering and chasing after them, whereupon the Spartans would snap back into perfect formation and spear their suddenly demoralised foes. Throughout the book, the Spartan Hoplites come across as the closest the Ancient world had to a modern tank.

Most affecting of all, though, is the moment the Greeks finally rout the Persian army and walk, victorious, into their abandoned camp. The Spartan general, Pausanias, seats himself in the Emperor Xerxes’ immense palatial tent and orders the Persian cooks to prepare him the sort of meal the Emperor would have eaten while on campaign. When all the luxruious foods are laid out before him, he sets beside them a single bowl of black Spartan broth of the sort he and his fellow soldiers eat even while at home. “Men of Greece,” he says, “I have invited you so that you could appreciate for yourselves the irrational character of the Mede [i.e., the Persians], who has a lifestyle such as you see here laid out before you, and yet who came here to our country to rob us of our wretched poverty.”

Moving back in time from the DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore, comes The Complete Future Shocks, recently released, whose first shock is — it’s not complete! Alright, so the two missing stories, “The Dating Game” and “The Killer In The Cab” were not Tharg’s Future Shocks or Time Twisters, being Ro-Jaws’ Robo-Tales, but as this volume does contain other one-off strips Moore did for 2000A.D., it’s a pity to have them missed out, as they’re unlikely to find a home in any other sort of collection. (But they are available online, at the 4ColorHeroes Alan Moore for Free page.)

The first thing that struck me about this nicely-put together volume was how some of the panels had stuck in my memory from when I read them originally in 2000A.D., even though the stories hadn’t. The one pictured above, for instance (from “They Sweep The Spaceways”, first published in July 1981). As soon as I saw it, I remembered coming across it for the first time and feeling vaguely disturbed at the thought of a lollipop getting stuck in someone’s beard. Well, I was ten years old at the time, so perhaps the idea of a lollipop getting stuck in a beard was important to me back then.

It’s interesting to trawl these short strips that mark Alan Moore’s first real steps in the comics world for signs of what was to come. The strip “Bounty Hunters!”, for instance, includes the idea that the shape-changing creature the titular bounty hunters are after may have transformed himself into the very planet they’re searching for him on. It turns out he hasn’t, but Moore went on to use that idea in the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” — though the earlier tale used the idea in a more knowing way. Another early appearance of an idea later used when writing for DC is the story “Bad Timing”, which is basically a joke on Superman’s origins without actually being able to use the Superman character (Krypton becomes Klakton, etc.) The idea of “Superman’s” father being wrong about the destruction of his home planet is here a joke, but Moore later used it to serious effect in the Superman Annual story “For The Man Who Has Everything”. The idea of a life being lived backwards is used in “The Reversible Man” (a story that apparently had some of the secretaries at 2000A.D.‘s offices in tears when it first came out), and of course would be used again in 1995’s The Birth Caul.

I’m always interested in finding themes that permeate or emerge throughout a creator’s work. Moore’s oevure is incredibly diverse, which makes it hard to find such repeated themes (though the image of the transformed man emerging from flames, often naked but increased in power, occurs a lot in Moore’s more serious superhero work). Another theme I can see starting to develop in these early stories is super-intelligence, often going wrong. Moore has written a number of super-intelligent characters (Ozymandias in Watchmen is perhaps the apotheosis of this idea, a man whose cold rationality brings peace to the world at a price no merely feeling human being would ever countenance), but here we see super-intelligent characters who are rather too clever, and who get a corresponding comeuppance, such as Abelard Snazz, whose genius always lands him in trouble, and the Squonge-wearing humans in “Mister, Could You Use A Squonge?”, whose enhanced intelligence is plain faulty. Jack B Quick from the Tomorrow Stories comics is a later example from Moore’s work of over-cleverness leading to trouble.

Best tale of the bunch, for me, has to be “Eureka”, about how a mere idea can become a form of almost unstoppable alien invasion. The power and communicability of potentially transformative ideas, of course, could well be used to describe another of Moore’s interests that would develop later in his career — magic.

The narrator of William Gibson’s story “The Gernsback Continuum” is a photographer who, commissioned to snap examples of the sort of futuristic architecture America produced in the thirties and forties, finds himself slipping into a reality where that future actually happened, as he sees an enormous propeller-driven, boomerang-shaped aircraft gliding impossibly against a cityscape of “zeppelin docks and mad neon spires” (something similar to the one brought to life in 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, perhaps).

It’s fitting Gibson should touch on that thirties/forties dream, because it was the only even vaguely optimistic future the 20th Century produced — till Gibson’s came along in the eighties, that is. By that time we’d long since ceased to believe in the sort of technological utopia promised by those hover-cars and jetpacks of the early SF pulps, but Gibson’s future had the advantage of not being limited by the possibilities of the real world. His idea, cyberspace (which he also referred to as the Matrix), was another reality altogether, a world we could jack ourselves directly into, a landscape of computer data turned into geometric shapes in “Bright primaries, impossibly bright in that transparent void”. A world curiously reminiscent of Disney’s wonderful 1982 film Tron, in fact.

It’s now more than twenty years since Gibson’s cyberspace made its first appearance (in “Burning Chrome”, 1982), and we don’t look much closer to achieving it. Excel might be able to produce nice looking pie-charts of your expense accounts, but it comes nowhere near the “electronic consensus hallucination” of Gibson’s computer reality where we’d exist as bodiless intelligences in a world of pure data.

Gibson’s fiction still feels relevant, though. Not because cyberspace is a possible future (I’m sure jacking your brain directly into a computer is as far off today as it was when Neuromancer first came out). Cyberspace wasn’t really a re-imagining of the future, it was a re-imagining of the imagination itself. It is once-upon-a-time land updated in neon colours, with data instead of gold and computer programs instead of magic spells. It’s just as full of angels, demons, ghosts, animal helpers and monsters as the world of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.

One image that has really stuck in my head from my (very) early reading was a double-page spread in The Usborne Book of the Future. It had two views presenting two possible futures. One was all dark skies and people in gas-masks, the other was bright sunshine and people with wristwatch TVs. I remember staring at those two images for hours, hoping with all my might that the future I’d live in would be, if not the wristwatch TV one, at least not the dark skies and gas-masks one. Outside of cyberspace, Gibson’s rundown, citified future is much more reminiscent of the darker of those two alternatives, though in this he’s generally acknowledged to have borrowed from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, another powerful exploration of how the future might be, partly inspired by Philip K Dick, but more derived from Scott’s encounters with massive industrial processing plants in contemporary England.

I know this seems to be reducing Gibson’s future to the influence of two films — Blade Runner and Tron — but I love his work too much to leave it at that. His real strength lies not in prediction, but in writing about how people deal with a changing technological culture. In a potentially de-personalising world of mega-corporations (a dystopian nightmare prevalent in late seventies and early-eighties SF films like Rollerball, Alien and Blade Runner), Gibson’s characters use technology to emphasise, not erode, their individuality. He’s often at his best when writing about people whose (usually artistic) talents are only really released by technology, as in, from his story “The Winter Market”: “…you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in…” His future is a digital bohemia our iPod-equipped world is coming more and more to resemble, even if we don’t get to actually jack into it via cyberspace. (Do white earplugs count?)