I Just Read About That…

The glam rocker premiered his cover of Sparks’ ‘Angst In My Pants’ via FLOOD Magazine earlier today. Art recalls, “Before making my last record I jokingly said to my band, if one more person or media outlet says I sound like Sparks I’m gonna cover them”.

This is a really faithful to the original, including the strained an jocular vocals in the verses.   And the great emphases in the chorus.  It’s modernized with new sounds and production but overall this is faithful and fun cover.  If it introduces fans of one band to the other, then it has done its job.

[READ: June 1, 2021] Colony

After reading Rob Grant’s Red Dwarf books, I discovered that he has written a number of novels in addition.

• Colony (2000), a science fiction story about a colony that has long since lost its way.
• Incompetence (2003), a wry detective story set in the near future where it is illegal to discriminate for any reason, even incompetence.
• Fat (2006), a darkly comic novel about how the media portrays obesity and its effects on today’s society.
• The Quanderhorn Xperimentations (2018) [based on a radio show that Grant wrote].

So Colony was his first.  It’s interesting how much it connects to Red Dwarf without having anything to do with Red Dwarf.  It’s a sci-fi novel, set millions of years in outer space, with the fate of the human race in the balance.

But barring that, it’s really quite different.  In this book the human race is aware that it is on the verge of extinction, and it is planning for it.  They are loading the best people on to a space ship (the Willflower) that will fly them millions of miles away to a habitable planet.  Those people will have offspring on the ship and several generations later the human race will survive on the new planet. 

But the book starts off by following Eddie O’Hare, a man NOT meant to be on this ship.  He is not one of earth’s best and brightest.  In fact, he is one of the unluckiest men around.  A computer glitch has caused him to lose millions of pounds for the company he works for.  The company believes he stole it.  And they have sent a couple of thugs to retrieve it.

In fact, the thugs just came to his room with the intent of throwing him out the window to his death.  But when they mention something that seems incorrect, they realize that they have the wrong man.  Eddie assumes he’s on that list, he’s just not next on the list–that would be the man in the room next door.  The hit men are darkly comic until they become just dark.

So Eddie is at the casino.  If he can win roulette three spins in a row, he can grow the little money he has left and pay off what he owes.  He’s only got to hit the same roulette number three times in a row.  What are the odds?  (Not good).

He doesn’t succeed.  And the way he doesn’t succeed is the most painful part yet–until the really painful stuff starts happening.

He goes into a bar where he meets a man who looks almost exactly like him–the very man who cleaned up at the roulette table.  This man, Charles Gordon, is meant to be on The Willflower.  He is one of the architects of the mission.  But he just won a ton of money and doesn’t want to waste his new fortune aboard a ship that he’ll never be able to leave.  And since Eddie is in a bad way, maybe he’d like to get off the planet?  A trade perhaps?

[Gordon has a plan to make it look like Eddie beat him up and took the money, because as we’ll see, Gordon is a real massive prick].

Eddie agrees and soon enough he is aboard the Willflower and way out of his depth.

Things on the Willflower are crazy.  Particularly the rules that Gordon designed–like that children will do the same duties as their parents and that there are forced sexual partners for the best gene pool mixing.  

But before Eddie can really settle in to any kind of routine, he is knocked unconscious.  He wakes up 9 generations later to find that he is just a head in a jar with a mechanical suit attached to him–a suit he has limited control over–to often humorous effect.

In the intervening years, humanity has gotten really dumb (the inbreeding I guess) and the ship is hurtling to its death.  They resurrected Eddie because they mistook him for a doctor (the labels on the jars were mixed up) and they can’t read anymore anyway.

The descendants of the original crew are even worse than the ones that Eddie knew.  The women are more cruel (not that he’d have any chance with them since he is essentially a robot).  And one of them, a religious fanatical, believes that he is a zombie spawn of Satan.  Delightful.

The men are no better.  Most of the ship is run by clones of the same man.  It’s so easy to make clones, that if one of the gets hurt or dies they just ignore it and make a new one.  The clones have been bred so many times that their intelligence is really low.  Like keep walking into a wall until you pass through it, low. 

And the Captain of the ship is a 12 year old boy who has named the nearby planets Penis, Thrrrppp, Panties and Jockstrap.  He has no idea what’s going on, of course, but neither do any of the science officers.  The ship is heading for a giant planet which was mysteriously removed from any viewfinders.  Is there sabotage aboard the ship? 

Let’s just say that the Priest (the one whom the religious woman worships) is much more interested in his own safety (and his stash of upskirt videos) than any holy message.  Boy, Grant and Naylor do despise religion.

Since Eddie is the only one who can read the ancient hieroglyphs, he is put in charge of trying to fix the ship and save everybody.  Unfortunately there’s someone aboard the ship who is trying to kill everyone.  (It’s not the sabotaging priest–he’s just trying to save his own ass, not violently kill every one else).

The ending is a deus ex machina that actually works and is really quite satisfying.  The explanation of how the story unfolded is even better

I also have Grahts’ Incompetence, and I’m rather looking forward to it