One

As a fan of grim dystopias and world-goes-to-hell narratives, I was intrigued by a post at The Age of Uncertainty two years ago about a writer and a book that was completely new to me. The writer was David Karp, and the book was One.

Now Westholme Publishing have resurrected One, and deservedly so. It is a fascinating, deeply unsettling book. What little there is to be found online about the book draws the obvious comparison with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which came out a couple of years earlier. But that comparison isn't to One's discredit: it is a remarkable book. As an investigation into power, the State, the costs of utopianism, and the manipulation of language, it is a powerful and provoking novel. The fact that the opening seems to reveal a comfortable, suburban world far removed from Airstrip One's constant war and brutality only stengthens the blow that comes when you find out what the state will do to preserve itself.

It has also made me copy The Age of Uncertainty, and start hunting down Karp's other books, like the satisfyingly 'Mad Men'-ish Leave Me Alone.

Here is the Westholme edition of One:

I like the cover, but I wonder how well it will work for people who aren't me. The reason it works for me is that it uses a detail from a poster advertising Fritz Lang's great dystopian-utopian movie 'Metropolis', a copy of which I had hanging in my office for several years, so the image and its resonances are very familiar to me. If you didn't know the poster or film, though, does it carry much meaning?

By an odd coincidence, this is the second novel I've read in the past month that uses a 'Metropolis' promotional poster for its cover. Ernst Jünger's Aladdin's Problem, a strange novella about a German man who decides to start a business running a vast necropolis in the Turkish desert--a huge underground city for the eternal storage of the dead, uses this montage by Boris Bilinsky, made up of frames from the film.

For more on 'Metropolis' and book covers, see here.

With many thanks to Steerforth, who gave me my copy of One.

Metropolitan

In honour of the recent rediscovery of the full version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and inspired by this great series of illustrations (of which more below), here's a look at some of the covers which have graced Thea von Harbou's original novel.

Von Harbou was, for a time, Fritz Lang's wife: they wrote the scripts for M and Metropolis together. The marriage seems to have fallen apart, understandably enough, when Von Harbou joined the Nazis. Lang, an ardent anti-Nazi, seems to have fled Germany after his films began to be banned.

The only copy of Metropolis which I own is an electronic version, with the same workmanlike translation used in most of those editions shown below. The one I wish I owned, though, is the limited Donning edition of 1988, illustrated profusely by comics artist Michael Kaluta. Again, the images from this edition have been pinched from 'Golden Age Comic Book Stories'. Here we have the dustjacket, the front endpapers, and four internal illustrations. 'Golden Age...' has many, many more.








Here's the original German first edition: it's currently selling for around Aus$20,000.



This is the first English-language edition, from Reader's Library, with a nice film-inspired painted cover by Aubrey Hammond.



Here's an Ace paperback, which is unusual in being determinedly not inspired directly by the film.



Then there's this 2001 edition which contains the book alongside a number of images from the film and its promotional material: images widely panned in the various reviews as looking like badly reproduced photocopies.



Finally, this is the print-on-demand Wildside Press edition, which also features their usual extraordinarily vile typography.