Top 5 Edward Abbey Books

Anyone reading this blog who has heard of Edward Abbey will probably know him for one thing: he wrote the book The Monkey Wrench Gang and so gave rise to the environmental group Earth First!

However, there's a lot more to Abbey than just the guy who invented monkey wrenching, and a lot more to read by him than just the Monkey Wrench Gang, although that is very much worth reading. In fact, Abbey is not only my favourite author from what we can broadly call the American Right, he's one of my favourite nature authors from the New World. Considering the country has produced Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Grey Owl and Aldo Leopold that's high praise. And, yes, I do know Muir was born in Scotland and that Grey Owl was actually a bloke called Archie from Hastings!

1. The Brave Cowboy (1956)

Abbey's first real novel, and his best. To people who come to Abbey via The Monkey Wrench Gang this novel explains exactly where he is coming from. The book is a 'modern' Western, although the term is a little strange as it was written more than sixty years ago, meaning the novel is set nearer in time to the real Old West than the present day. Abbey is not a part of the environmental movement, but he was intimately connected to what was once the American Frontier, especially the deserts of the southwest.

The hero of the book, John W 'Jack' Burns is a cowboy loner who scrapes a living herding sheep. He lives simply in the desert, cutting fences and refusing to carry any form of identification. When his friend Paul Bondi, a more conventional kind of anarchist, is arrested for refusing the draft, Burns has the cunning plan of getting himself arrested so he can bust them both out of jail. Bondi, quite sensibly, decides this plan is mad, so Burns has to make his escape on his own, pursued by the police and the US Air Force. The mountains are a challenge he and his horse can deal with, but the four-lane freeway is not.

The novel is taunter than The Monkey Wrench Gang. The single protagonist, and the struggle against modernity being reduced to one man and his horse against the system, makes it a better story. I think it's the best thing Abbey ever wrote. It's also the only Abbey book to be mad into a film. Called Lonely Are The Brave it starred Kirk Douglas's chin as Jack Burns, and is apparently one of the actor's favourite movies. Considering what else he's been in that's quite a compliment.

2. Fire On The Mountain (1962)

Abbey is of the American Right. However, whilst the likes of John Wayne saw no contradiction between the Western frontiersman defending his home, and the Green Beret torching those of the Vietnamese, Abbey did. His nearest literary contemporary was the sci-fi writer Bob Heinlein. If The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress had been set in Utah rather than space it could have been an Edward Abbey book. However, for Heinlein, the US government could do no wrong. For Abbey it could, and usually did. Fire on the Mountain is interesting because it is about the confrontation between two American institutions that other Right Wing writers praise equally with no contradiction: the frontier rancher and the US Air Force.

The plot is paper thin, and the ending downbeat, which makes it the weakest novel on this list. It is enhanced slightly by the plot device of the story being told through the eyes of a child, and somewhat more substantially by Abbey's exploration of the issues raised, and his peerless description of the natural beauty of the American southwestern. To most people's eyes the desert where the hero makes his home is a poor place to live, and the city where the USAF wants him to move to is a paradise, but in Abbey's accomplished hands this paradigm is reversed so, although it is the worst book in this list, it is still worth reading.

3. Desert Solitaire (1968)

As you've probably seen by now, Abbey's chief virtue is his ability to write about the desert of the American southwest in mythic terms. He almost doesn't need a plot for his stories. This theorem is proved by his best non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Using incidents in his life whilst working for the National Park Service in the fifties, Abbey describes rivers, deserts, plants, animals and visitors to the Arches National Park where he worked. The result is some of the most beautiful nature writing in American literature, and a warning of the erosion of the wilderness by humans. 

The longest chapter concerns a journey down the Glen Canyon shortly before it was plugged by the Glen Canyon Dam. This monstrosity has a special place in US environmental history. In the early 1950s David Brower and the Sierra Club fought desperately against the construction of dams at Echo Park and Glen Canyon. They won against the battle against the first and thought they'd won a major success, until they actually had a look at Glen Canyon. Brower, who would subsequently found Friends of the Earth, was told "Echo doesn't hold a candle to Glen Canyon", and Abbey would agree. The dam appears in several of his subsequent books and the monkey wrench gang spend some time trying to figure out how to destroy it. Which, of course, brings us onto that book.

4. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

So, this is it, the one people have heard of, the story that gave us 'monkey wrenching' and started Earth First! What's it like as a book?

Well, it's a bit flabby. There's no real plan to what the Gang do, and no real antagonists that they're up against, apart from some fairly lightweight local vigilantes. However, as a guide to how to take radical direct action it's pretty good. A better question though is who the Monkey Wrench Gang are, and they are an odd bunch.

First, you have Doc Sarvis, a surgeon by day, and arsonist by night, who at the start of the story is burning down the billboards that screen the freeway from the desert. His money bankrolls the gang, and he also provides the moral compass, insisting that no-one is killed or injured. Sarvis only just counts as an intellectual, but even so he's an unusual character for an Abbey novel. However, he's no fan of technology either, being unable to even drive.

Next, there's Bonnie Abbzug, who's even less of a typical Abbey creation. Firstly, she's female, and secondly, she's a complete hippy. She's also in a relationship with Doc, even though he's more than two decades older. You suspect there's a bit of wish fulfilment here, but her role in the quartet is to be the foil to the men, who usually ignore what she has to say. You can't really argue Abbey was a feminist.

Then there's Seldom Seen Smith, the only proper local. A 'Jack' Mormon, Seldom Seen is the outdoorsman of the party. His survival skills keep the gang alive, and he is also the one who most often waxes poetic about the beauty of the desert. In this respect he is speaking in the author's voice.

Finally, there's George Washington Hayduke. He not only has a patriotic name, he's done his patriotic duty and served in Vietnam with the Green Berets. It's Hayduke's military skills that the gang use in their sabotage missions, but, he's no John Wayne. Captured by the enemy in Vietnam, Hayduke went native and took their side, an American Viet Cong. Bob Henlein might write about lunar colonists acting like the Viet Cong, but only Abbey wrote about one of America's own becoming one. Hayduke, alone amongst the gang, is based on a real person, Abbey's friend Doug Peacock, a man who, after serving as a special forces medic in Vietnam, turned his back on human beings and took to hanging out in the woods with grizzly bears.

The gang's rampage around the desert is fairly random, and they attack road construction equipment, mining gear and any bulldozer they find. They are helped by the fact that all the plant they come across is unlocked and unguarded. If only real ecotage was so easy! The beauty of the American Southwest is vividly described, of course, but this is no sermon on saving the planet. The book spends a lot more time on how the gang carry out their sabotage than the why. This is even more apparent at the end, when some of the gang are caught and dragged before the authorities. You'd expect some dramatic courtroom showdown, in which the folly of trashing the wilderness is brutally described. Instead, the gang plead the fifth, deny everything, and plea bargain their way to minimum sentences. This is not the Gandhi way.

This novel can be a bit hard to understand then if you are expecting a Walden or a Silent Spring. However, it's more explicable of you see the Robert Crumb illustrations, like the one above. This book is, at heart, a Western, only a Western were the outlaws are the heroes.

5. Hayduke Lives! (1990)

Four years after the Monkey Wrench Gang, a disillusioned former executive of the Sierra Club, called George Forman, broke away from the mainstream environment movement to form the radical environmental group Earth First!. Like the monkey wrench gang, Earth First! would carry out acts of covert ecotage. Like the gang, they would deny everything if caught. In due course Earth First! would evolve and spread around the world, becoming in the process more liberal in its attitudes and broader in its tactics, but in the early days it was very much in Abbey's image. Their official motto was "Back to the Pleistocene". Their unofficial motto was "Rednecks for wilderness".

Abbey was a hero of the group, and a regular at their yearly Rendezvous. However, as his involvement in activism grew, his writing diminished. But he wasn't done yet, either with books or the gang. In 1990 the foursome returned, in the sequel Hayduke Lives!

Sequels to great books are usually disappointments, but surprisingly, Hayduke Lives! isn't. In many ways it's actually better than the original. The plot is a lot tighter, for a start, and unlike the scattergun approach of the first book, there is a single antagonist - the giant drag chain digger called the GEM that is coming to despoil the desert.

Perhaps what's more interesting is the characters that pop up in the book. As well as the return of the gang, an unnamed cowboy turns up to help them, who is almost certainly Burns from Brave Cowboy. There is also an appearance by the real Earth First!, mostly in the form of fictional representatives of the real organisation, although EF! founder Dave Foreman has a cameo. They are peripheral to the main plot, but it's clear from the way they are written that Abbey really loves his children. It's fortunate perhaps that they are so peripheral, as they are so god-like in their beauty and bravery that they would have unbalance the book. There is also, at the very end, a cameo by a real environmentalist. I won't spoil the surprise, but you can probably guess their name. Unfortunately, along the way, Abbey commits the only unpardonable sin of his career.

Amongst the scenes in the book is a visit to an Earth First! Rendezvous. Bernie Mushkin, a blowhard who calls the Earth First!ers fascists, before getting into his car and heading back east. Mushkin was a caricature of Murray Bookchin, whose theory of social ecology connected the destruction of the environment to the oppression of humans. Bookchin could be a pretty combative character, and in criticising some of the more misanthropic aspects of Earth First! Bookchin had called Dave Foreman "a patently anti-humanist and macho mountain man" pedalling "a crude eco-brutalism".

The real Bookchin, though, was nothing like Munchkin, the East Coast corporate environmentalist more at home in committee rooms of Washington DC than the forests of Washington State. He'd grown up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants, and his European family had all been exterminated by the Nazis. He'd first earnt his activist credentials as a union organiser in a car factory. However, despite his urban upbringing, he was a keen trail walker and was almost as at home in the wilderness as Abbey. 

A few months before Hayduke Lives! came out, Bookchin had had a debate with Dave Foreman. It turned out they had more in common with each other than differences, and Bookchin was able to say he stands "shoulder to shoulder with everyone in Earth First! who is trying to save the wilderness". However, by 1990, it was far from clear if Earth First! stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreman and Abbey. The racism and sexism of the 'rednecks for wilderness' was being challenged by younger activists, and the frontier libertarianism was being replaced by proper anarchist thinking. The late Judi Bari, who was being blown up by a bomb planted either by, or with the connivance of, the FBI at about the time the book came out said that Earth First! wasn't just a bunch of monkey wrenchers but "a social change movement". The world had moved on and Abbey had become a bit of a dinosaur.

But then Abbey had never really fitted in to anyone's politics. He was encouraging people to burn their draft cards nearly two decades before the Vietnam War. He would throw beer cans out of his car as he drove along, arguing that the road had already destroyed the wilderness. He said racist things about Mexicans, but suggested that each deported illegal be given a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition, in the hope that they would overthrown the oppressive governments they were fleeing. 

Hayduke Lives! was his last work, published after he'd gone the way of the dinosaurs. By the time it was in the shops his friends had buried his body in the Arizona desert, so he could become part of the wilderness he loved. He was man who loved the vanishing American frontier for what it really was, not what people made it, and he wrote about it in a way few others had managed. 

If you haven't read one of his books yet, then please do so. 

Harry Lies: Propaganda in Shakespeare's Henry V

"Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!"

We live in a post-truth age. Conflicts rage around the world, but nobody can agree on who started them, who's going to end them or even who's actually been killed in them. If only we lived in a simpler age, one in which the who, the why and the how of warfare was much clearer. Shakespeare's age, for example.

Well, maybe not. Shakespeare wrote a lot of Histories, but there wasn't much history in them. Most of them were about Henries: three Henry VIs, two Henry IVs and a Henry V. It was, as Ben Elton put it, a veritable Henry Theatrical Universe. But it was also a fictional, theatrical universe.

In that universe it is Henry V that remains the most well known and well quoted. Like all Shakespeare it's hotly debated what it is all about. Even the question of whether it is pro or anti war is still up for debate. In no small part this is because Shakespeare never wrote with simple themes. The play is both pro and anti war, because that's the way Shakespeare seemed to want it.

However, there does seem to me one theme in Henry V that is quite clear, and I'm surprised how little it is discussed given its relevance to today. It seems to me that whilst it may sit on the fence on the morality of conflict, it is very much a master class on one particular aspect of war: propaganda. Throughout the play the words and actions of the principle characters are often jarringly at odds. What is being said and what is being done are often at ninety degrees to each other. Shakespeare may never have seen a real war, but he clearly knew what the first casualty was.

"Now all the youth of England are on fire"

In case there is any doubt that this is a theme of the play Shakespeare, through the mouth of Chorus, pretty much tells us this right at the start. Apologising for the limitations of the theatre, Chorus says we will only be dealing with "imaginary forces". There will be no actual battles, only words. This point loses it a bit today as most people - including me - have only seen Henry V on screen, where we do actually get very realistic fighting.

The disinformation though starts well before the first battle. The play begins with Chorus asking us to imagine in the theatre:

Are we now confined two mighty monarchs
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts 
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder

However this is immediately followed by the appearance of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, who are discussing Henry's plans to tax the church. In response they plan to distract Henry by having him claim his right to a chunk of France, knowing this will lead to war. The cause of the war is never mentioned again by any of the characters, and is usually forgotten by the audience as well, which I suspect is Shakespeare's point.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more"

And so we fast forward to the action: the siege of Harfleur.

Except that we don't. As Act III begins, with Harry's speech urging his men to death or glory, the attack has already failed. The speech is immediately followed by a cut to the ordinary soldiers Nym, Bandolph and Pistol, who have decided that enough is enough. But this is just the Bard warming up. The real hit comes next. Henry stands before the city gates and gives the following blood-curdling speech.

If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?

The point here is not just that our brave hero is threatening the murder or rape of the civilians of the town, which is in itself a pretty eye-opening thing for a noble hero to be doing. Nor is it that he's blaming the French for it, which is one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book. The real point is that he is threatening something he can't possibly do. The attack has failed, all he has left is bluff.

But it works. The French are in an equally parlous state, and throw in the towel.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers"

But what really shows that Harry has the gift of the gab though is his speech on the battlefield of Agincourt.

It is, of course, quite magnificent, enough to make even the most cowardly pacifist take up a longbow and pot a Frenchie or two. However amongst the flowery rhetoric are some pretty bonkers suggestions. Such as:

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

This is clearly nuts. Following this logic Harry should send the army home and fight the French alone. What's more, even Henry clearly doesn't mean it. He has put every man he has into the battle line, leaving his baggage train guarded by only young boys, and if he had more men he'd have no doubt put them into the field too. His words do not match his actions.

But, once again, it works. His men fight better than the enemy and win the battle.

"Then every soldier kill his prisoners"

And so we come to the most controversial part of the play, so controversial it's usually missed out.

It's Act IV, Scene VI. The battle has been going on for three scenes now and the French army has broken. Hal does not know this yet though, and at the end of the scene the French appear to be attacking again.

But, hark! what new alarum is this same?
The French have reinforced their scatter'd men
Then every soldier kill his prisoners
Give the word through

Yes, brave Harry has just ordered his men to kill unarmed prisoners of war.

However, it is a false alarm, the battle is in fact won. However at the start of Scene VII he comes across the consequences of putting every man into the battle line. The French have sneaked round the back killed the boys who he had left defending the baggage. Surveying their bodies Shakespeare has Henry say

I was not angry since I came to France
Until this instant.
Besides, we'll cut the throats of those we have
And not a man of them that we shall take
Shall taste our mercy.

So Henry has just told his men to massacre the French prisoners again. Why is Hal telling his men to kill people who are already dead?

Here we have Shakespeare using propaganda in a way that echoes all too readily in modern ears. The two armies have each committed what we would today call war crimes, and although they didn't have that term then, in an Age of Chivalry killing prisoners of war and boys was still not considered a terribly good thing. However, Henry now intends to justify his atrocities by pretending the French started it. His order to kill the prisoners, issued rashly out of perceived military necessity, has just been spun to be an understandable response to Gallic frightfulness. 

"They lost France and made his England bleed"

So Hal wins his battle, and then the hand of the fair Kate, daughter of the King of France. But how does Shakespeare's most jingoistic play actually end? With Chorus summing it all up.

He again apologises for the limitations of the theatre, calls England "the world's best garden", then ends with a zinger: "... left his son imperial lord. Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King Of France and England." Henry VI, the subject of Shakespeare's first three histories, was the king whose failures lost France and led to the Wars of the Roses. The entire story of Henry V then meant nothing. It was all just propaganda.

The huge irony about Henry V being a play about propaganda though is that it ended up being used as propaganda. All his Histories were puff-pieces for the Tudors really, but in the years since then it was generally Henry V that was rolled out when a bit of fiery rhetoric was needed. Lawrence Olivier's magnificent 1944 film version was just that, with the French standing in for the Nazis, which was a bit mean as they were on our side in that war.

Actually though this is a bit more than irony. Writing a play about the lies and deceptions that send young men to their deaths in pointless conflicts, that ends up getting used to send young men to their deaths in pointless conflicts is slightly more than just ironic. It's actually an epic fail.

The Artilleryman

Today it's 75 years since Orson Welles' version his namesake's War of the Worlds was broadcast on the radio. Yes, it is today. They broadcast it the day before Halloweeen.

Perhaps this helped to explain the panic the original broadcast cause, which wasn't as bad as the myth suggests.

In Jeff Wayne's musical version it's little David Essex who plays him. He gets a song about his Brave New World. He actually sounds quite a nice chap.

Orson Welles' version by contrast is not in the least bit cuddly.

Welles adapted the book in the dark days between Hitler being appeased at Munich and invading Poland, and this shows in how he adapts the character. He appears at 39:35 in this recording, wandering in the ruins of Newark. Here Wells' strange dreamer he has morphed into a fascist gloating over the death of liberal America, and then fantasizing about getting hold of some Martian weaponry himself.

The original artilleryman was less fascistic, but he was certainly no liberal either. We meet the character for the first time after the Martians have just wiped out the soldiers sent to surround their first cylinder.

In reality the Victorian British Army only ever played away, but in literature they were very busy on home ground. It all started with the 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking, which suggests that Bismark's Germany follows up its defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war with a surprise attack on Blighty. Fiendish Hun technology defeats the Royal Navy and Britain becomes a Kraut colony.

This was followed by The Great War In England (1894), and others, culminating in P G Wodehouse's The Swoop! in 1909 in which no less than eight foreign armies, plus the Swiss Navy, invade whilst the population is more interested in the Test Match score.

The War of the Worlds tapped into this vein of paranoia. Wells being Wells though he also spliced in images of colonial conquest, giving the Martians weapons that were as far beyond what was known at the time as the Maxim gun was beyond the ken of the Zulus it was being turned on in Africa.

Wells' artilleryman is a Working Class bloke who drops his "h"s and doesn't seem too upset that the world he knew has ended. "Life is real again" he says. Nor does he seem to mind much that "There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants."

Then he comes to his great plan. A world underground where he's in charge, everyone obeys orders and nobody wastes any valuable time on stupid arts and stuff. And finally Wells comes to the killer
point. The Artilleryman is actually too lazy to have dug more than a few feet of tunnel.

Now tunnelling is hard, I should know, but I think if a load of blood sucking Martians were after me I'd make a bit of an effort.

So who do we know who likes to talk about the end of the world? Who crows about the end of the big corporations, the death of reality TV, the demise of Z list celebrity; but who can't actually be arsed to do any of the hard work involved in building a better world?

Hmm, let me think.

The Truth About Victorian Sex

Sappho by Charles Mengin

I remember an old Private Eye cartoon where a man was shouting down the telephone after unpacking an inflatable Margaret Thatcher "No, no, no!" he yelled. "I ordered Victoria Principal not Victorian principles!"

(Victoria Principal was in Dallas, in case you forgot or weren't born then.)

It is hard to know what is less likely to get you in the mood, a inflatable Iron Lady or the idea of Victorian sex.

We all know about the Victorians, they are the anti-Viagra. They are to the erotic experience what lung cancer is to the enjoyment of a cigar.

They covered their piano legs lest the curves offend their delicate taste and recoiled at the sight of their wives' naughty bits. Queen Victorian refused to believe in the existence of Lesbians whilst Prince Albert had an unusual adornment to his physiology. They persecuted homosexuals, whilst in secret they corrupted young girls or visited prostitutes. Their literature meanwhile, is as erotic as Ann Widdecombe.

I must admit I would have signed up to most of those opinions until I read Matthew Sweet's Inventing The Victorians, in which I discovered there was a little more to it than that.

Take the story of the piano legs, for example. There is no record of anyone in Britain actually doing this, but they did make jokes about the Americans doing so. The original story appears in A Diary in America by one Captain Marryat in 1839. The Captain was probably telling a tall tale, but it is true in so far that the Americans of the Gilded Era were regarded as being more uptight on bedroom matters than Victorian Brits.

Or what about Ruskin and his wedding night?

We know that his marriage to Effie Gray was a complete disaster and was never consummated. Why that was though is a mystery, even though everyone at the time was discussing the issue. Ruskin's comments were "though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it." He never explained further.

Effie by Thomas Richmond

As the visible bits of Effie appeared to be quite a turn on to most Victorian males, Ruskin's comments made their imagination turn to less public areas. However it's equally possible that she had big feet, or a curly-out belly button, or maybe Ruskin just found her a really annoying person. Certainly when the nonsense poet Edward Lear visited her some years later he found her dreadfully boring and said "her drawling stoniness disgusted me....so that I don't care ever to see her again", although as Lear was gay we can perhaps understand why he was not taken in by Effie's charm.

Or maybe, trapped in the middle of the biggest sex (or lack of sex) scandal of the century, and with the entire literate world discussing his failure to rise to the occasion, he just said the first thing that came into his head.

The theory that, brought up on a diet of classical nudes and before the advent of the shaven-haven, he recoiled at the sight of his wife's short and curlies dates from 1965, somewhat after the event (or non-event).

Ruskin isn't the only one to be mythologised a century or so later, take Prince Albert's Prince Albert for example. 

The idea that the royal member had a little attachment allowing it to be tucked away out of sight dates from the 1970s and the fertile imagination of one Douglas Malloy, the owner of a chain of piercing parlours.

Spot the Prince Albert (he's on the right)

Had the real Prince Consort been so embarrassed by his German sausage he probably wouldn't have worn such tight trousers whilst courting the young Queen, who seems to have been quite enamoured of the royal lunchbox.

However would Albert have been as free to strut his stuff if he hadn't been heterosexual? Had he been gay, would he have suffered the same fate as poor Oscar Wilde?

But was Oscar Wilde actually gay?

It may seem a daft question as he certainly engaged in plenty of man-on-man action (and a fair bit of man-on-boy action, but we'll come to that later), but if you went back in time and asked him whether this was a biological trait or a lifestyle choice he'd have probably just stared at you, and not because he was smashed on absinthe.

Instead the 1890s world he lived in was just as laissez faire sexually as economically. Many of his acolytes appear to have been solidly heterosexual, if they were sexually active at all, yet all shared his taste in art and nude boys. It appears they existed in a demi-monde in which the choice of gender of your sexual partner was no more important than your choice of sexual position, and of considerably less relevance than your opinion of Pre-Raphaelite art.

If society hadn't figured out homosexuality yet, neither had the medical profession. The distinction between being gay and being transsexual wasn't suggested until 1899. The medical books that pathologised homosexuality are a product of the twentieth, not the nineteenth, century.

But if they didn't medicalise being gay, they did criminalise it, but perhaps not in the way most people think.

She is amused.

The downfall of Mr Wilde, a lot of people forget, came about because he tried to sue the Marquess of Queensbury for libel. He lost simply because the codifier of the rules of boxing was telling the truth.

He was subsequently prosecuted and convicted of 'gross indecency' under the 1885 Labrouche Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

This bit of legislation is itself a subject of myth. That it refers only to acts between men was not because Queen Victoria didn't believe in the existence of Lesbians.

Maybe she didn't, but constitutionally it was irrelevant. Parliament could have passed a law against the Tooth Fairy and she'd have had to sign it, that's how the system works.

The Amendment Act itself was primarily involved with outlawing White Slavery. There is a story here, but we haven't time. Basically White Slavery didn't exist, but the press had persuaded the country it did so legislation was passed. The law also provided powers to suppress brothels and protect children from pimps.

Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas

Added almost as an afterthought was the paragraph about Gross Indecency which, crucially, wasn't defined. Labrouche himself was no puritan and a friend of Oscar Wilde. His only comments on the amendment were that he hoped it would be used equally against 'high and low' so maybe he was only concerned with protecting Working Class boys from aristocratic predators, or maybe the maximum sentence of two years was regarded as a progressive improvement on the life sentence for buggery.

If this was the case then by his sloppy wording he produced an act that allowed the full force of the law to be used against anyone transgressing the sexual norms of the time and which convicted Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing and thousands of others. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

But if the Victorians were quick to gaol queers, they turned a blind eye to paedophilia. Or did they?

Rev. Dodgeson with Alice Liddell

Several thousand Twitter users have recently learnt a hard lesson about making accusations without evidence, but posterity still seems to make an exception for the Victorians. Ruskin is one such accused, along with Lewis Carroll and Wilkie Collins.

We can't prove Ruskin wasn't a nonce, or that the Rev. Dodgeson wasn't doing something unmentionable to Alice Liddell by the banks of the Thames, so a certain amount of mud is likely to stick. But for the inventor of the modern detective novel there is a case for the defence.

First the case for the prosecution. Wilkie Collins entered into a long correspondence with an eleven year old girl he called Nannie, and even entertained a mock marriage to her. In his letters he mixed smutty puns such as 'delighted to receive conjugal embrace' and suggestions she adapt to a spell of hot weather by wearing 'a hat and feathers and nothing else.'

Collins; connoisseur of the female derriere

Petty damning evidence. Newsnight would have to put on a specially extended edition if the story broke today, but as I said, not only is there no evidence he touched a hair on Nannie's head - or any other part of her - he has a defence.

Collins, you see, used to order sack loads of heterosexual, adult porn in brown paper parcels from a well know New York photographer. The details of his purchases are on record, along with his correspondence which indicates he was an ass man. All boringly normal I'm afraid.

The only eminent Victorian of whom we can say with any certainty did have sex with minors was the aforementioned Oscar Wilde, although as an honorary Modern he seems to have been forgiven for it.

The bearded novelist's taste for artful smut though brings us to another little known fact about the Victorians. They liked their dirty mags. Indeed, they invented the term 'top shelf magazine'.

Today such titillation is usually associated with newspaper proprietors on the right of the political spectrum, but in Victorian times it was the left that sold sex. Mass market porn was pioneered by, of all people, the Chartists.  Magazines such as Town, Crim. Con. Gazette and Exquisite detailed upper-class sex scandals to raise money for the cause and discredit the Establishment. Perhaps, as Sweet suggests, they should have called them Socialist Wanker.

These days only the Daily Mail publishes those sort of stories. They probably have a different motive, although I have my suspicions.

Pornographer in chief was William Dugdale, who had once been part of the Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate the whole Tory Cabinet. Not something Richard Desmond ever tried.

When Chartism collapsed he became a full time publisher of adult material. Although raided by the Police on numerous occasions, he continued his trade for more than forty years.

Not that Dugdale was unique in putting adult material in print. For the Victorians, it seems, the printed page really was their Internet, and there was sex everywhere. Even the worthy Household Cyclopedia of 1881 includes, amongst the recipes for devilled kidneys, advice for men who can't get it up. You don't find that in Nigella.

Most discussed of all is My Sexual Life. A mammoth tome, it was published in eleven volumes, possibly to make it easier to hold in one hand. It's a tale of  'firkytoodling', 'gamahuching' and visits to the 'dumpling-shop' and is racy stuff, far too explicit for a family blog like this. That the book could be published and distributed freely should be cast iron evidence that the Victorians were anything but prudish about sex.

Instead though it's taken as proof of exactly the opposite. Some academics seem to be under the impression that this story of a thousand visits to prostitutes is actually gospel truth. As the book was written by a globe trotting businessman who had married into a Jewish textile family, it probably wasn't. He didn't have the time.

Instead the book is almost certainly the work of an over-active imagination and is as useful as a historical document as Fifty Shades of Grey. However it has helped to create the myth that the only way a Victorian man could get his end away was with a lady of the night, although to be fair, this was a myth the Victorians did their own bit to help foster.

The Dancing Platform at the Cremorne Gardens by Phebus Levin

Now there certainly was a lively sex trade in London in Victorian times, just as there is now, but quite how widespread it was is open to question. The Cremorne, for example, was a pleasure garden - a sort of Victorian outdoor nightclub - and was supposedly the place to go to purchase a tart, and not the sort Mrs Beeton baked.

William Acton, a medical Doctor, was sent to investigate. He really was a Victorian stereotype as he thought 'self abuse' weakened a man and women were naturally frigid. However in the Cremorne he found men actively seeking an alternative to the former and women who were anything but the latter, and it was all consensual and non-commercial.

So how did the Victorians become victims of such slander?

Virginia Woolf and her circle have a lot to answer for. After Lytton Strachley, whose book Eminent Victorians had demolished the reputation of four prominent Victorians in a humorous, but not always factually accurate manner, had come round for a bit of posh sex talk she claimed "It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation." On another occasion she said fighting Victorian patriarchy was equal to the fight against fascism.

The irony being that whilst the Bloomsbury Group could discuss Victorian sex lives as they were all out in the open, they themselves remained firmly in the closet. Their friend John Maynard Keynes, for example, was never in the closet himself and kept a rather racy diary, but his biographer chose not to mention this even after he was dead.

Woolf's commitment to anti-fascism was also a little suspect. Her friend, and lover, Vita Sackville-West was married to a member of Oswald Mosley's New Party and edited the gardening page of his newspaper.

John William Godward

However everyone needs someone to look down on. If the Bloomsbury Group were neither as open about their sexuality nor as removed from fascism as they would have liked, at least they could claim they weren't as bad as the Victorians.

None of this is to suggest that all Victorians were broad minded libertines. There were plenty of people then who were bigoted, repressed, puritanical and hypocritical, just as there are now, which is the point.

Pornographers like Dugdale were raided even as the Pre-Raphaelites were painting their 'stunners'. Poor old Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol, but Bouton and Park, the most famous transsexual entertainers of the era, were found not guilty of buggery despite being as 'out' as it's possible to be.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Some inappropriate, by modern standards, friendships were struck up with young girls, but to date no Victorian Jimmy Saville has been proved to exist.

They had top shelf magazines and sex manuals for married couples. They devoured racy novels and flirted at night spots.

The point is that they were just like us. In fact they are us.

Modern urban life was invented during the Victorian era and has now spread round the world to become the major mode of human existence. They were the first Metrosexuals.

Looking back at the Victorian era, we see the past really is like a foreign country.

They do things exactly the same there.

Top Five Fictional Road Protestors

The real anti-roads activists were a fairly colourful lot, and I expect the new lot will be just as cosmopolitan, so you wouldn't really think we needed to invent fiction ones, but that's what authors and screenwriters have been doing for the last thirty seven years.

There have been a surprisingly large number of them too.

I'm going to have to disqualify Bob Louis and David Briggs, alias The Detectives, as they were only undercover police pretending to be protestors. I'm also going to disqualify Laura, the heroine of Laura's Way, a middle aged woman disenchanted with her dead marriage and finds love up a tree house, on the grounds it's sub-Mills and Boon style tosh.

Besides, she doesn't practise safe sex in her treehouse. Everyone knows you need to clip on first.

However that still leaves a number of candidates in the running, so here we go for another highly subjective top five.

5. Geoffrey Lester from Gobble by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (TV, 1997)

Lester (played by Geoffrey McGiven - the original Ford Prefect) was the unfortunate Minister for Agriculture who, in order to reassure a public concerned about Mad Turkey Disease, fed his daughter a Turkey sandwich only to have her keel over due to a hereditory heart condition.

He then dropped out of politics and took up residence at a local road protest camp. Pleging to "get this anarchy organised", he endeared himself to the protestors by unmasking one of them as an MI5 informer - who in turn outed another as a Daily Mail journalist.

This TV play by Hislop and Newman (he used to write for Spitting Image) is not particularly funny, but was at least slightly prescient. Not about the spying - everyone knew that was going on - but the real Geoffrey Lester, John Gummer, did turn into an eco-warrior of sorts and whilst he never, as far as I know, squatted a tree, but he did continue to turn up at conferences after the Tories had been booted out of office and on occassion had to sit with the Greenpeace delegates as no-one else would speak to him.

4. Kaz from Joining the Rainbow by Bel Mooney (book, 1997)

I don't know if Kaz, a fourteen year old girl from a nice middle class family who joins the protest against a new road running through Twybury Hill, can really count, as she isn't really fictional.

The book is by the Daily Mail journalist, and former wife of Jonathon Dimbleby, Bel Mooney and is based on her experience of the Batheaston protest.  It features thinly disguised versions of real people from the campaign whilst Kaz herself if Mooney's daughter Kitty.

You wonder what happened to Kaz. Probably not in a squat in Brixton living on cold baked beans and pot. Maybe working for a big environmental NGO like many of her Earth First! pals.

Or, like the real Kitty, married to soldier in a wedding featured her mum's paper and working for an ultra-respectable force's charity. Oh well.

3. Spider Nugent from Coronation Street (TV, 1997 to 2003)

In early 1997 Swampy and co. decended on Manchester to oppose the building of a second runway at its airport. Bizarrely he was a hit with the public and local schoolgirls and so perhaps it wasn't too surprising that there was a carry-over into Manchester's most famous soap, in the form of eco-warrior Spider Nugent, played by Martin Hancock.

Spider though didn't spend much time in the trees and instead moved in with his Aunt. One wonders where they got this idea of crusties hanging out with older ladies from. He did do a spot of protesting, trying to save the local park, but eventually sold out and worked for the Benefits Agency.

Hmm, becoming a bit of a theme here.

2. Blott from Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe (book, 1975 and TV, 1985)

Great though the nineties were, everything we did then had been done before, and often better, in the seventies.

And when it comes to TV protests, Blott makes Spider look like the wimp he is.

A former German POW in the book - an accident Communist defector in the TV series - Blott, played by David Suchet, lives in the gatehouse of Handyman Hall.

The Hall, owned by a corrupt politician Sir Giles Lynchman, sits next to picturesque Cleene Gorge. When Sir Giles supports the building of a road over the gorge so he can claim compensation, Blott takes action.

Defending the countryside of his adopted nation with a passion that inspires the locals, he's not exactly fluffy. Concreting himself into his house is all very well, but when he launches a 'false flag' attack on his own gatehouse with guns and explosives he's gone a little beyond traditional None Violent Direct Action.

1. Arthur Dent from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (radio, 1978; book 1979; TV, 1981; film, 2005)

Blott got his way and Handyman Hall is saved, but our winner had no such luck.

Not only did Arthur Dent get to witness his house being knocked down whilst he popped to the pub with is mate Ford Prefect, he also gets to see his planet being destroyed to make way for a Hyperspace Bypass.

Well, that's how it goes.

Everything I ever tried to stop ended up being built, with the exception of the Mottram-Tintwistkle bypass - and that's expected in 2015.

Bond or bondage?

Details of the rather unconventional private life of MI6 officer Gareth Williams may have come as a bit of a surprise to people brought up on the image of the spy as straight-up-and-down Alpha Male, but I suspect they were less of a revelation to those of us brought up on the James Bond books.

On screen Bond was usually shaken but not stirred by his adventures, in print he was usually tied up, gagged and beaten bloody at least once along the way.

From the infamous carpet-beater-on-the-knackers-whilst-tied-naked-to-a-chair in Casino Royale to being captured by the KGB and brainwashed in The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond spends so much time being tortured you wonder if he really sees it as an occupational hazard or more a perk of the job.

As far as I can remember, in between he was tied up and dragged over a coral reef (Live And Let Die), given a few blasts of a steam hose (Moonraker), given a 'Brooklyn stomping' by gangsters (Diamonds Are Forever), shot and left for dead by a SMERSH assassin (From Russia With Love), made to negotiate a torture-based obstacle course (Dr No), tied up ready to be sliced in two by a circular saw (Goldfinger), stretched on a medical device called 'the rack' (Thunderball) and finally captured by Blofeld and made to take part in a bizarre duel (You Only Live Twice).

You'd think at some point Bond would have either joined a union or demanded his employers conduct better risk assessments, or failing that ask if there were any vacancies in Q Branch, but no, our hero carried on regardless.

Which makes you wonder what exactly was going through Ian Fleming's head when he wrote this.

Although hardly a year goes by without the press digging up some hero of the Second World War and proclaiming he was the real Bond, it's fairly clear that Fleming basically wrote about himself. His last holiday destination was usually the location of the baddies base and at some point Bond will eat a lavish meal accompanied by a gallon of champagne, which is what Fleming spent the profits of the books on.

I know of no rumours that Fleming himself was fond of what was known at the time as 'a bit of slap and tickle', but as a gentleman of the old school I imagine that psychologically he thought that there must be a price to pay for having too much of a good time, so poor old Bond had to get the carpet beater.

That at least one real MI6 officer was similarly inclined is an interesting example of real life imitating art.

Five books that made Glastonbury Avalon

Spring mist under Glastonbury Tor by Tony Armstrong

Anyone who's walked down Glastonbury High Street, otherwise known as Diagon Alley, immediately knows that this is no ordinary English market town.

Apparently when the current King Arthur Pendragon first "came out" and turned up in the town complete with Excalibur to announce his reincarnation he was told he was the second one that day.

Despite being the site of an dissolute monastery, a hill topped with a medieval tower and a natural spring pumping forth reddish water, there was little to suggest the sleepy Somerset town would eventually become "the spaghetti junction of the spiritual journey" (Stone) until late Victorian time.

Then in 1886 efforts were made to restore the Tor and open the Abbey to visitors. At the same time stories that Joseph or Arimathia had hidden the Cup from the Last Supper somewhere nearby started to circulate and the place became popular with Christian mystics.

As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, a certain Dr Goodchild, following a vision, allegedly purchased an antique glass bowl in Italy and buried it in a muddy field near Glastonbury, where it was recovered by fellow mystics six years later (Benham).

After that things developed rapidly. The recovered Chalice took up home at the newly restored chalice well, now owned by the Christian Socialist Alice Buckton, and a community of esoteric people took up residence in the town. Others dropped by for the Glastonbury Festival, which was started in 1914 by the Atheist Socialist Rutland Boughton, took a break for the Great War, and then ran three times a year from 1920.

Supposedly there were long haired bohemians, advocates of free love, spiritualists and vegetarians, who were rumoured to visit the Tor after dark, get their kit off, and engage in idolatrous pagan rituals. Your regular night at the Moot really.

Avalon of the Heart by Dion Fortune (1930)

The chief chronicler of these early days wasn't one of the locals, but a weekender who popped over from London every now and again.

Violet Mary Firth Evans, alias Dion Fortune, said her regular journey from London, past Avebury and Stonehenge, "spans the breadth of England and leads from one world to another".

Her classic book paints a spiritual landscape that dates back to before "the era when the worship of the Son replaced that of the Sun." For Fortune the Abbey was for the Christians and the Chalice Well for the Pagans, with the Tor itself belonging to both.

Lovingly she paints a portrait of the town, a place where the veil is thin and where echoes of an ancient past reverberate in the quiet waters of Chalice Well or the still air atop the Tor.

Possibly because she never lives there, her Avalon is described as a place apart from the mundane world she leaves behind, and the book climaxes with a performance of The Immortal Hour at Boughton's festival.

King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury by Geoffrey Ashe (1957)

Boughton's Glastonbury Festivals came to an end in 1926, and it seemed that with that the sun started to sink on the embryonic New Age scene in the town. However things were starting to stir in the academic realms of Arthurian studies.

Arthur had been going downhill for a century or so, being relegated from a bona fida Welsh hero to a shadowy form haunting the unknown regions of the Dark Ages. In 1936 one Professor Collingham tried to set him up as a Late Roman cavalryman, but the idea foundered on a lack of evidence.

Such problems though did not hold back the Christian mystic Geoffrey Ashe when he set forth his views in this the first of many books on the subject. Hitherto the Welsh had Arthur resident in Caerleon, and the historians tended to have him further north, but Ashe put him squarely where the old monks had had him.

Their story of digging up his bones in 1192 had generally been regarded as bit of English colonial propaganda, stealing Wales's national hero in order to keep down the rebellious Celts across the Bristol Channel.

Ashe though, using the ruse that if it can't be conclusively proven to be false then it must be true, took the story and added to it, setting the whole Matter of Britain more or less within sight of the Tor.

Academics tolerated the book, and when Ashe persuaded renowned archaeologist Leslie Alcock to dig up nearby Cadbury Castle, the resulting finds of a Dark Age fortress further added to the story.

A posse of academics eventually rounded on Ashe and his woolly reasoning and he departed Britain for the more convivial atmosphere of the USA, but for Arthur it didn't matter. He was now back in Avalon.

The View Over Atlantis by John Michell (1969)

Alfred Watkins is generally credited with the discovery, or invention, of Ley Lines. But whilst it's true that his 1921 book, The Old Straight Track, was a minor sensation and had people striding out across the countryside in search of ancient monuments, but there was never anything mystic about Watkins's idea of how ancient Brits got about and it was pretty soon forgotten.

The View Over Atlantis is The Old Straight Track on acid. No longer are Ley Lines there simply to get Bronze Age man home for tea, now they are channels of energy that thread their way around the planet. And at the hub of the radiating orgone energy was Glastonbury.

Visiting Glastonbury last year I struggled to find a second hand copy in the local bookshops, but about half of what they did sell has its origins in this book and Michell can probably claim to rate up there with John Lennon and Jefferson Airplane as someone who helped define what it meant to be a hippy.

That what he actually put in the book is pretty much wrong is really neither here nor there. Michell himself said "like all discoveries at Glastonbury, it came through revelation, which is not a popular medium among the professors" - which may be understating it a little.

People had seen shapes in the landscape before. Doctor John Dee apparently found some sort of Zodiac and Dr Goodchild thought he'd seen the outline of a giant fish, but Michell, by splicing in Aboriginal 'song lines' and Chinese 'dragon lines' along with lashing of sacred geometry, expanded the idea exponentially.

The result was "a poetic rather than a scientific truth", but it was enough to touch off a mystical quest that opened the doors of perception for a lot of people.

Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord (1972)

Two years after Michell's book came out Michael Eavis relaunched the Glastonbury festivals on his farm in Pilton. Fairport Convention, Gong, Hawkwind and Arthur Brown played on the main stage, which was a pyramid built on a ley line based, after a phone consultation with Michell, on the proportions of Stonehenge.

But the tastes of the audience extended well beyond Michell's spiritual engineering and the Bords's book, which came out the next year reflected this smorgasbord of hitherto distinct subjects.

Ley Lines were there, although the Bords noticed that many didn't actually touch the monuments they were actually supposed to be aligned with - which they put down to respect for their sanctity.

Added into the mix though were UFOs, which were so popular at that time that the Glastonbury Fayre had a space set aside for them to land, as well as stone circles and holy wells, ghosts and King Arthur. The Bords also included local customs that had been interpreted rightly or wrongly (usually wrongly) by folklorists as pagan survivals.

Here then is the true Re-enchantment of Britain. UFOs have now mostly been dropped, but the publication of similar books persists - and it seems I own most of them.

Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (1986)

Thanks to Michell and the Bords the seventies saw the New Age arrive in the town in force.

At first the locals were a bit standoffish and "No Hippies" signs adorned many of the B&Bs and hostelries. Gradually though the barriers came down and peaceful coexistence was the order of the day.

The scene was very nearly complete by the end of the decade, and all it required was one great book to bring it all together.

Marion Zimmer Bradley turned out to be the author.

The role of the female in spirituality had been a theme of the developing Glastonbury New Age scene, from the trio of lady occultists that Goodchild put in charge of the Chalice, to the feminists who attended the festival.

Bradley wove this into the Matter of Britain, giving us three strong and complex female characters in Egraine, Guinevere and most of all Morgan Le Fey, contrasted with a weak Arthur, first seen as an incontinent toddler needing his older sister's care.

In Bradley's Avalon, the Christians live in harmony with the deeper mysteries known only to the Priestesses of Avalon, and whilst Merlin drops by occasionally he is at most the equal of the Lady of the Lake.

It had been a long journey from a good Doctor dropping an old cup in a muddy pool. I suspect that Goodchild would not approve of the commercialism of modern Glastonbury, and may wonder where his Christian mysteries are now. But I suspect he would like Mists of Avalon and approve of Bradley, a woman who wrote of the sacred female but who died a Christian, and whose ashes now rest on the Tor.

References

The Avalonians by Patrick Benham (1993).
The Last of the Hippies by C J Stone (1999)
Glastonbury: A Very English Fair by George McKay (2000)
Witches, Druids and King Arthur by Ronald Hutton (2006)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Eighties

The eighties, now this is when I started reading sci-fi, so there are going to be some real favourites here. And it was a pretty good decade to get the sci-fi bug really. As well as new books we also had new sub-genres, which is a sure sign of rude health.

Firstly the graphic novel really came of age during this decade. Perhaps they should have their own category, but personally I'd rate Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1982-5), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-6) and Watchmen (1986-7), and Neil Gaiman's Sandman (1989-96) as up their with the best novels.

Given how visual the graphic novel is it's a bit of a surprise that the film versions have only been mediocre, but I suspect perhaps that's because people underestimate the subtlety of a good graphic novel. They may have pictures, but they still require you to have an imagination, whereas cinema doesn't.

A genuine new sub-genre was Steampunk. It's difficult to say when this began, but the novel that brought it to my attention was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. A menagerie of weird and wacky ideas including sinister stilt walking clowns and an attempt to catch a body-swapping werewolf by opening a hair removal clinic. It really has to be read to be experienced.

Then there was Cyberpunk. I suppose an unbiased list would give this decades award to the book that begins "The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." Not really my genre but still, great book. And those of us who've grown up with the Information Revolution sometimes forget how new ideas like this are. When I were a lad sci-fi computers were, at best, avatars of HAL from 2001. The one in the original Star Trek seems little better than a Sinclair Spectrum. Arthur C Clarke may have said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but it took William Gibson to show us how close we were to that point. This may not have been the first cyberpunk novel, that may have been Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, serialised in New Worlds in 1969, but it in the book that popularised the genre.

Another novelty was in Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts , about a binary planet with shared atmosphere, hence interplanetary travel could be accomplished in a balloon.

Rather more complex was Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. Set in a future where the galaxy has been colonised but the earth has slipped back into medieval barbarism, the titular hero is a Journeyman of the Guild of the Seeker After Truth And Penitence. The layers of deception laid down by the author are Byzantine in their complexity and nobody is as they seem.

Another almost winner is a novel in an unlikely location for a science fiction story; a wood in Kent. This is Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock,a place that is it not only bigger on the inside than the outside, but also a place where myths take physical form.

I read the book whilst living in the woods of Newbury during a record cold winter, which probably increased its effect on me a touch, but it is a magnificent and thoughtful book. Alas I have to admit that although you could make an attempt at explaining all this by means of Relativity and Jungian archetypes, I have to ultimately classify Mythago Wood as fantasy and not sci-fi.

Gosh that's a lot of worthy winners, and I haven't had time to mention Carl Sagan's Contact, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale, Greg Bear's Eon, Frank Herbert's Dune and many others.

Instead I'll skip straight to the winner; Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks, the first of his Culture novels.

It is difficult to describe how much I love these books. Firstly here is top notch space opera, lasers, battles, robots, The Works. Secondly we also have something that has largely disappeared from the silver screen - an optimistic, liberal future.

Banks's Culture is a strange beast. It is not only Post-Scarcity, it's also post-human. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has been ditched in place of the Dictatorship of the Artificial Mind. It clearly works, because Banks says it does, but does beg some interesting questions. Do the controlling Minds really have the best interests of human being at heart?

And what do those humans (and not quite humans) actually do? Banks describes their spaceships in details. Communist from the inside and Anarchist from the outside, they skip merrily about his stories. However as we only ever get to hear about how the Culture interacts with other civilisations we don't learn alot about the daily lives of its less adventurous denizens. Oodles of sex and drugs are clearly on the menu, but its not clear how they avoid the pointless debauchery of Brave New World.

But most of these questions are for the future for in Consider Phlegas we are catapulted into the middle of the best space war since Bob Heinlein passed on as the Culture takes on the Idirans, a bunch of space faring warriors who make the Klingons look like a bunch of boy scouts.

We have not yet seen a film version of any of these books, which is probably fortunate, but thanks to his non-sci-fi output Banks has at least received the critical acclaim he deserves, and which previous writers have been denied. As a book of the decade Consider Phelgas could well mark the high point of the genre.

Winner: Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks (1987)