Remember I told you that I'd been downloading some really promising looking free e-books off the Internet?
Well, now I can report back to you that I've actually started reading them.
The Floating Island Of Madness made an ideal companion on the Intercity journey from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston - not least because it is a classic example of total sci-fi schlock and roll.
It recounts the exciting and vital tale of an American secret service agent who gets together with his counterparts from the British and French secret services to investigate the mysterious disappearances of a number of people in the vicinity of Constantinople (note that the book seems to be set in the present-day of the period at which it was written, the Thirties, yet the author still refers to the city as 'Constantinople').
As this is meant to be a premier slice of riproaring techno-adventure, writer Jason Kirby prefers to cut straight to the chase, so he doesn't bother wasting any of his valuable narrative time and energy with any poncey niceties of more mainstream literature, such as characterisation and motivation.
Instead, the three agents simply climb into a plane and zoom off in the direction of the Arabian Desert (er, how close is this to Istanbul 'not Constantinople', exactly? Will have to get round to looking it up, but can't imagine it being exactly next door or anything).
After flying around all day attempting to catch up with the elusive gliders that have apparently been spiriting people away from the city rooftops, at sunset they reluctantly decide to turn back and head for the airport.
However, this sensible plan fails to come to fruition - because their plane has now been caught by one of the mysterious tractor beams emanating from the floating island of madness.
Helpless, but not hopeless (if they were, then there would be no basis for a story), they are dragged miles and miles off-course, right up to the notorious island itself.
Despite the fact that this island is several acres in diameter and floats two thousand feet above the Arabian Desert, the mad scientist that runs the joint is convinced that nobody back down on the ground has the slightest idea what he's up to!
Yes, this place has been created by a classic barmy boffin.
Although he is named Fraser and looks more like Hercule Poirot than Albert Einstein, this delightful individual is indeed a classic example of the genre. With a mind the equal of someone like Stephen Hawking, he originally came to prominence via some fascinating discoveries connected with 'light'. What these were precisely we are never told, quite possibly because Jason Kirby himself knew five fifths of bugger-all about science, and doubted his target audience would care, either.
Anyway, Fraser then lost no time in going nuts, so he was promptly consigned to one of the best bins in the business.
Everybody thought that would be the last of him - until he very conveniently escaped.
The men in white coats wielding the massive butterfly nets failed to catch him, and he was thus registered as a missing person.
Of course, Fraser is one of those barking mad scientists who believe in giving full value for money. Therefore he indulges himself to the max explaining all his fiendish and unspeakably evil plans to his three prisoners in almost mind-boggling detail.
According to his own incredibly self-indulgent monologues, the floating island of madness owes its very existence to that world-beating combination of raving genius and what Ben Goldacre from The Guardian would call Seriously Bad Science.
Defying the very laws of physics, Fraser has invented an almost weightless new element called 'fleolite' (sic). This you can pour into moulds and let set like concrete. The entire island has been constructed from it, and the only reason it doesn't float right off the planet altogether and up into space is because there are enough people and vehicles living on it to weigh it down a bit.
Now, at this point the reader, very much like the three secret agents themselves, may be wondering just how Fraser managed to persuade all his many and varied personnel to come and work for him on such a ricketty, out-of-the-way structure.
Time to introduce technical innovation number two. Fraser's strange discoveries about light inevitably led him to develop the tractor beam - several centuries before the characters in Star Trek thought up the idea.
But that's not all this amazing boffin keeps up his sleeve ...
To ensure that his unwilling guests don't cause any more trouble once he's brought them there, he gets every last one of them injected as soon as possible with a secret serum that he developed on his day off.
This unlikely substance is what sends you mad. Your intellect keeps working as per normal, but all your emotions are permanently switched off.
Fraser went teapot quite naturally, but everybody else who works for him has been treated with this horrible drug (wonder how he persuaded the first one of them to take it, then? Now THAT would be an interesting story and a half ... ).
The three agents are next on the list for conversion - until they manage to trip Fraser's looney doctor assistant up, causing the contents of the syringe to spill out onto the floor. They then fill it back up again with harmless water.
This is as far as I've got at the moment, but I'll be sure to keep you posted on subsequent developments (assuming the rest of the book lives up to this early promise. If not, then I probably won't be arsed and will just talk about something completely different instead).
Still, it's nice to know that the stock literary figure of the Mad Scientist was not only alive and well, but cooking on gas at such a relatively early date.
I'm sure someone somewhere must have bothered to study the phenomenon in relentless and bum-numbing detail, so I'm off now to look up their work and see what it says.
In the meantime, what continues to perplex me is the issue of who precisely would have read this stuff when it first came out. Presumably people who knew so little about real science and technology that they were easily overawed by Kirby's crap theorising and so took it on face value.
Yet in his classic study New Maps Of Hell, veteran sci-fi aficionado Kingsley Amis states quite clearly and unequivocally that many of the readers of the genre from the late Twenties on actually were trained in some sort of scientific or technological based discipline as part of their jobs or careers, so you'd reckon that they would have been able to recognise that Fraser's inventions were total and utter bollocks.
And back in the late nineteenth century, no less a writer than Jules Verne himself declared that there is no point in writing science fiction unless you make quite sure to get the science bit right.
Maybe it was easily over-impressed teenagers, then ...
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