Squid Ink Incorporated

I have a confession to make; I collect science fiction novels.

My obsession began around five years ago when my friend demanded I read Philip K Dick’s ‘Time out of Joint’. From then on I was well and truly hooked, my conscious floating deep somewhere within the universes of Messer’s Banks, Harrison and Lem. A constantly changing SF Masterworks cover had appeared where my face once was.

Sci-fi itself was nothing new to me; my childhood memories are punctuated by ‘2000AD’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Logan’s Run’, and Disney’s ‘Black Hole’. But my lifelong fascination was polarized when, after moving house aged 10, I inherited a left behind copy of ‘Spacewreck’. A glossy hard cover of crashed space ship illustrations, each image suggesting a wealth of untold narrative, which is forever etched onto my imagination.

It is perhaps due to the hours spent endlessly thumbing through my copy of ‘Spacewreck’ that I have always enjoyed eagerly browsing the crates of sci-fi novels that sat outside the second hand bookshops in Charing Cross. Each book preceded by the sometimes surreal – sometimes cheesy images, which suggest a narrative often more engaging than that which lay beyond the cover.

The Amazon sponsored credit card bill that had resulted from my new fiction addiction, had now given me a legitimate excuse for taking home a handful of these dog-eared curios.

Like all good acquisitive hobbies, my sci-fi novel collection has mutated into a fairly un-healthy obsession. Now the second hand bookshop is a mandatory part of each and every excursion, shopping trip and even holiday.

I have developed a set of terminal collector’s symptoms, cold sweats, racing pulse and excessive salivation now occurs on contact with the second hand book emporium. I have even worked up a system for my crate rifling. First running through the author’s names to pick out any of the highly prized items – the endless back catalogues of Pohl and Harrison or anything by the Strugatsky Brothers (my current holy grail). Then picking books by age, publisher and finally randomly browsing the selection by grabbing a handful at a time and shuffling through them like a deck of cards.

Ideally there should be a fusion of both intriguing story and fantastic cover. But the ‘cover is king’ and quite often just a wild image and back cover synopsis to suit is enough for it to become part of my home dominating library.

Recently I was lucky enough to go for a holiday in Vancouver, where my
understanding girlfriend, (herself partial to the odd Harrison or Wyndham), allowed me to hijack a few days of our precious holiday in search of second hand bookshops.

Oh, and I found some. This is a shot of the sci-fi section of ‘pulp fiction books‘ in
Vancouver, just one of a number of the number of treasure troves I found while I was there.

You will have to excuse the shaky focus, that’s me quaking with excitement.

Cutting to the chase, here are some of the books I picked up both in Vancouver and in my more recent bank holiday trip to (the slightly less exotic) Kent Coast, which have got my heart pounding. These covers and tag lines also tie in quite neatly with some of my current sf writing obsessions…

‘Joymakers’ by James Gunn

Pleasure was the hedonists business. Hedonics Inc., started small. All you had to do was dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. Then everybody wanted it.

‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursula Le Guin

George must dream and dream again, forever seeking utopia, until the fabric of the existence must itself collapse…

Skylark of Space by E.E. Doc Smith

With his cold intelligence and the backing of a giant industrial combine, DeQuense and three others – two of them women – were marooned, countless light years from Earth, with only one chance in a million of ever returning…

Fourth Mansions by R.A Rafferty

a weird over-view of reality, in a story of:

Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity;

A laughing man living alone on a mountaintop, guarding the world;

The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century;

A dog – ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of an eye.

Spending my waking life in front of a computer combined with being a habitual mistake-ist made the undo button my best friend, no, my lover, no, my soulmate. No, undo.

I could not comprehend my existence without the ability to instantly rectify disastrous computing errors via the click of a mouse or the punch of two simultaneous keys.

Ctrl+Z.

I lived and died by the undo function, it saved my life more times than… undo.

So prolific was my use of the curly blue arrow, I found myself reaching for it in physical and social situations. My fingers floundering to find the invisible shortcut icon, to take back that bad choice, fix that broken plate. To be able to physically revert back to the moment prior to my mistake, to have looked after I leap.

I trawled the web like a furtive scholar in a gothic fiction, a sweaty Lovecraftian protagonist in a tireless search of secret knowledge. A search to obtain the power to undo. Google became my ancient leather bound library of alchemy, spells and science. After many sleepless nights I found what I sought, mystical circuit diagrams for machines to enable entry into parallel universes. Access to simultaneous existences where infinite possibilities of choice become corporeal.

The commissioning of my machine could not have come at a better time. One too many drinks after work and harboured secrets gushed out of my drunken mouth before conscious thought could kick in.

With one click of my virtual Ctrl+Z I was spared a night of sleepless paranoia.

The next day, my hangover inspired orgy of error, which would have otherwise caused a major professional malfunction…. soon null and void thanks to the my possibility flexing friend.

Undo

So reliable was my radionics powered undo engine, that I felt comfortable enough to purposely commit gross faux pas. I spoke my mind to figures of authority, spilt drinks on people who bored me and generally committed random acts of wanton negligence. It became a sport for me, I pushed new boundaries in the art of error.

Undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo.

Have you ever made a series of computational entries only to realise that they were in error? Felt the need to retrace your steps back, back, back until suddenly you can go no further? I have done this many times, experienced that sinking feeling, the point of no return, so many steps back until suddenly being unable to go no further. That terrifying moment, desperately clicking my mouse, sending toolbars into chaos and disarray. Sadly for me, such moments I had forgotten when designing my machine.

By replicating the exact conditions of the function, limitations and all, I soon found myself repeatedly hitting my virtual blue arrow until my machine froze and finally crashed.

Now each of my anti-social, business wrecking, intentional mistakes act out their unstoppable repercussions.

Desperately I flounder, reaching for that blue arrow, only to find it greyed out, an error message repeatedly flashing – can’t undo.

We hadn’t heard from Adam for weeks. I know he gets caught up with work, they like to keep him busy. But he’s almost always up for a beer at least one night a week.

We know he had a new phone that he was moaning about not being able to use, that’s probably why he never replied to my texts. He usually answers his emails though, maybe he forgot his password again, they’re all about a thousand letters long.

The thing that really worried us was his tweet ‘really not happy with the way things are, can’t carry on this way’.

We made a load of pissed phone calls to him from the pub that night to try and force him to come down the pub. When he didn’t answer Dave came up with the idea of breaking into his flat, we were convinced that he was going to top himself or something.

The back window was open, so we gave Dave a bunk-up, when he got inside he let us in the front door.

At this point we realised that if we had broken in while he was in bed with his girlfriend or something we’d all feel pretty stupid. But he’d do the same for us if he was worried right? As it was, there was no-one in.

Looking around we found a stack of stuff lying on his desk. In our heads we’d geared ourselves up to find a suicide note or maybe a plane ticket to Mongolia or something, instead we found these:

A copy of a book called The Joymakers by James E. Gunn
A print of some dodgy web article – freaky-physics-proves-parallel-universes
A print of a wikipedia page about a cosmonaut called Sergei Avdeyev
Another print out off the web for something called the ‘Etheric Portal Plus Supreme’
A receipt from a fancy dress store with ‘astronaut’ written on it,
A post-it with ‘initiated by sunlight’ written in red biro.

We took the stuff we found home and made some strong coffee, we sat going trying to make sense of it until the sun came up. Then we went for a walk along the Romford beaches, the weather was proper nice, really sunny but with a breeze coming in off the sea.

It wasn’t till midday that Me, Dave and Karen realised that not only had none of us remembered to go to work, but none of us had got any shitty phone calls asking us why we hadn’t turned up.

We went to the little cafe on the beachfront, we had a decent fry-up and they forgot to charge us for it, touch! After that we went for a swim and slept all afternoon.

It was pretty weird of Adam to disappear like that and we were all well vexed about all that funny shit we found on his desk.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember there being any beaches in Romford yesterday.