4. Motorcrash (1974)
Few remember Venera’s brief and disastrous attempt to join the car culture of the twentieth century. Renowned for being a pedestrian haven, the archipelagean city-state has never repeated the experiment.
Motorcrash is Jameson’s personal account of those events, which had transpired the year before. The book’s first-person narrative has the ring of authenticity — especially given what is on the public record regarding the period in question. More tragic and affecting than anything to that date in Jameson’s eclectic bibliography, Motorcrash opens with Jameson driving on the newly constructed elevated highways of Venera, his recent bride, Kara Hunger, in the passenger seat.
At the end of the first chapter, which otherwise describes the view of Venera from these new roads, their car collides with another automobile. In the aftermath, both Jameson and Hunger, having suffered only minor bruising, find themselves sexually aroused; every aspect of the process — the collision; the exchange of insurance information with the other driver; going to the garage for repairs — only increases the couple’s sexual tension.
As the repairs cannot be finished that day, their car is kept overnight at the garage. Jameson and Hunger are compelled to break into the garage at night and have sex on the backseat of their damaged automobile, tearing their clothes and drawing blood from each other in the process. Jameson admires the various bodily fluids smearing the interior of his new but already well-worn vehicle.
Afterward, they are accosted outside the garage by Raphael Marcus, the driver who collided with them earlier, and thus begins their journey through the underground world of motorcrashers, a cult worshipping the automobile as the trigger for the next phase in human evolution and the motorcrash as the ultimate form of prayer, the most intense form of communion with the divine force driving human existence.
Jameson and Marcus become inseparable: Jameson refuses to buy into Marcus’ messianic ravings but warms to the madman because of the intensity of their conversations on the effects of the automobile on human consciousness; Marcus, for his part, cannot resist trying to convert this fervent nonbeliever. The sexual tension between the two men is thick.
Although Jameson is never convinced by Marcus’ techno-mysticism, he nevertheless gives himself up totally to car culture. His automobile allows him the most satisfying expression of his sexuality. Jameson’s text fetishistically describes automobiles, sexualizing every aspect of car culture: likening maintenance to prolonged, devoted foreplay; conversations with other drivers to public displays of mutual masturbation; visits to the garage for minor repairs to breast-augmentation mammoplasty; driving to marital relations; hitchhiking to prostitution; car-pooling to orgies; automobile parts to erogenous zones of the human body; and, most dramatically, car crashes to primal, uninhibited animal sex.
The plot comes to focus on a sort of eroticized duel between Marcus and Jameson, each of them espousing different, although not mutually incompatible, visions of automobile worship. Caught in the middle of this conflict of machismo and techno-theology is Jameson’s wife, who finds herself drawn both to Marcus’ cult and to Marcus himself. The motorcrasher messiah welcomes her conversion but rejects her sexual advances.
Eventually, Jameson and Marcus consummate their rivalry in a brutal act of automobile sex: that chapter is written in virtuoso style, the multiple perspectives colliding violently. Meanwhile, Kara, with unbridled religious fervor, engages in a series of reckless car crashes, until her transcendent death-wish is finally realized.
The book itself ends with Jameson learning of Kara’s death. In the real world, following a rash of traffic accidents, Venera dismantled its highways and permanently banned automobiles. The first car in Venera had ignited its engine on 1 March 1973, and the autoroutes closed forever on 1 December of the same year.
5. Icarus Unlimited (1978)
Once again, Jameson is in the cockpit of his solar-powered airplane, previously seen in The Great Disasters. He snorts a line of vermilion, revs up the plane’s engine, and takes off from Venera; thus begins Icarus Unlimited.
It is never stated when, exactly, the book takes place, but presumably the events follow closely on the heels of those related in Motorcrash. Grief-stricken over the death of his wife, Jameson decides to leave Venera behind and fly aimlessly around the world, to wherever the sky and the winds will take him.
The entirety of Icarus Unlimited takes place inside the cockpit of Jameson’s airplane; in fact, the whole narrative is set in his mind. Jameson’s fifth book is a philosophical, stream-of-consciousness meditation on flight, travel, identity, war, mortality, love, sex, masculinity, friendship, and violence, peppered with breathtaking and often surreal descriptions of the view from Jameson’s cockpit.
By the book’s final pages, the vistas Jameson describes are unrecognizable as Earthly, the meditations following an increasingly inscrutable logic. Icarus Unlimited does not conclude so much as simply stop.
6. Skyscraper (1981)
Skyscraper is another rare instance of a Jameson book cover sporting the work of a recognizable artist, this time paperback legend Obama Savage, well-known for his heroic and evocative covers of men’s adventure novels. The cover depicts a muscular man in a ripped shirt standing with his fists clenched (presumably the iteration of Jameson described in the novel); behind him a skyscraper burns. The colors are rich, the intense gaze of the protagonist mesmerizing, the attention to minute detail captivating.
Is Skyscraper another descent into pure fantasy? In the heart of Venera, Jameson, now described as a chiseled, hyper-competent übermensch adventurer of near-limitless resources, inhabits the top five floors of the Venera World Trade Center, a phallic, modernist spire piercing the lush, sensuous shapes of the Veneran skyline. (There was indeed a skyscraper, the only one ever, built in Venera in 1978; it burned down in 1980.)
Joining him is a team of five assistants: the hirsute and muscular biochemist Hank Priest; the dapper lawyer and fencing champion Teddy Cauchon; the ruggedly handsome engineer and retired boxer J.R. “Junior” Fox; the sinuously athletic daredevil and inventor Bobby Long; the bespectacled archeologist and linguist Billy Poderski.
Each chapter describes a densely detailed, fast-paced adventure, each with its own lurid, sensationalistic title: “The Hydra of a Thousand Heads,” “The Menace of the Meteor Men,” “Treasure Hunt at the North Pole,” “Werewolves by Night,” “Oasis of the Lost,” “The Monster-Master,” “Land of Terrors,” “The Mysticals,” “City of Phantoms.” Each adventure follows a strict formula: one of Jameson’s aides bursts into the group’s headquarters accompanied by a person in dire straits; the problem is stated to the group, minus Jameson; Jameson then appears, having heard everything on his security system, and accepts the case; the group then goes into action, taking off aboard their “solar jet gyro” from the launch pad on the roof of the skyscraper; they encounter the menace and defeat it after exactly two of them face near-death challenges.
Only the final chapter, “The Fall of the Tower,” breaks the formula. Returning from an adventure (the otherwise unreported but perhaps aptly named “The Case of the Vanishing Pulpsters”), the adventurers find their headquarters invaded by a group of men in perfectly cut striped gray business suits. With alarming efficiency, the intruders dismantle Jameson’s headquarters. The intruders ignore all questions put to them and, whenever one of Jameson’s band tries to grab one, the man in the business suit manages to evade his would-be assailant’s grasp with snake-like suppleness.
When the power goes out, Jameson and his crew reluctantly descend into the lower floors to investigate. They find the skyscraper’s inhabitants transformed, the office workers’ clothes in tatters, revealing the flabby bodies beneath. The offices have become atavistic temples; desks are now altars where living human flesh is sacrificed to unknown gods. Amid the screams of the sacrificial victims, the skyscraper people ch
ant in a cacophony of alien tongues that even linguist Billy Poderski cannot begin to decipher. One by one, the members of Jameson’s team forget who they are. Jameson struggles to keep the group together, fighting to keep his sense of identity.
The fires from the sacrificial mounds spread to the walls. As the skyscraper burns around him, Jameson takes out his knife and peels off strips of his skin, feeding it to his companions.
7. Hello Venera (1984)
In 1982, Mike Walters, the self-appointed American “Theme Park Emperor,” finally unveiled his secret European project, built on an artificial archipelago in the Mediterranean: Vermilion World, which he claimed was “a near-exact replica of Venera, its facades, its streets, its mysteries.” Being a privately held corporation, WalterWorlds Unlimited never disclosed the cost of developing and constructing this immense luxury attraction. Day passes went for US$1,000, not including transportation, food, or anything besides entrance to the theme park. Hotel stays began at US$2,000 a head per night on top of the entrance fee; vacation rentals started at US$25,000 per week for studio apartments and went as high as US$3,000,000 per week for the most upscale villas, with support-staff fees not included. Within a week of the announcement, the park was already fully booked for the next three months.
With this project, the entrepreneur threatened to lift the veil that surrounded the mysteries of Venera. As Walters had leased French territorial waters for this endeavor, the Veneran government tried and failed to get from the French courts a quick injunction to force Vermilion World to close its doors until the matter could be settled, in or out of court. However, while the firm of Hawk, Murdock, Spencer, and Associates was still figuring out its next move on behalf of Venera, a disaster befell Vermilion World that rendered further legal action moot. The precise details of the incident never reached the press, beyond the fact that, following a number of explosions of such large magnitude they could be heard and seen everywhere along the French Riviera, the theme park sank into the sea.
In Hello Venera, Jameson proposes an unlikely but thrillingly recounted scenario explaining these events. Jameson is now an agent of the Vermilion Eye, Venera’s secret organization of international operatives, i.e., its super-spy agency. Assigned the Vermilion World case, code-named Hello Venera, Jameson gains access to the theme park as a paying guest, with false papers that identify him as Jimmy Flamingo, an American expat living in London.
In short order, Jameson confronts Walters, portrayed here as a madman whose world-domination scheme involves replicating the greatest cities on Earth as theme parks and then destroying the cities themselves, with agents provocateurs arranging for the blame to be shouldered by so-called “terrorist” groups.
Jameson fights Walters’ giant automata, escapes elaborate traps, and finally physically battles Walters after having dispatched hundreds of his goons through a combination of unbelievable luck and even more unlikely prowess. The mad developer falls to his death in a vat of boiling chemicals, setting off a series of explosions that ultimately destroys the theme park, and with it Walters’ megalomaniacal scheme.
To save himself from the conflagration, Jameson snorts a specially prepared vermilion concentrate, chants a mantra, and jumps one month forward into time. Finding himself adrift in the Mediterranean, he swims briefly until a submarine sporting the Vermilion Eye logo on its hull surfaces and takes him aboard.
Mike Walters has not been heard from since the Vermilion World catastrophe. His body has never been recovered, but he is presumed dead. A popular conspiracy theory propounds that Walters is being kept alive in suspended animation in a secret laboratory owned by WalterWorlds Unlimited.
8. Empire of the Self (1987)
At age thirty, in 1984, Veneran filmmaker, pornographer, and iconoclast Tito Bronze was only beginning to have his work recognized. His every movement was not yet subject to the minute scrutiny that would begin in 1989, when his fame and notoriety hit the stratosphere with the scandalous Cannes premiere of his first feature-length film, In primo luogo, esamino il culo.
It is then possible that he embarked on an ill-fated film project with Bram Jameson in 1984, namely Empire of the Self, the story of Jameson’s childhood travails in Nazi-occupied Venera.
The main thrust of the book of the same name is a behind-the-scenes look at the disaster-afflicted production of what could have been Bronze’s first feature. On-set lethal accidents, bankrupt investors, legal entanglements about ownership and authorship of the screenplay, personal betrayals, petty pranks, sabotage by persons unknown, incendiary love affairs, the producer threatening to replace Bronze with a commercial Hollywood director … what didn’t happen to this film project? Ultimately, much of the footage was lost — stolen, misplaced, maliciously destroyed? —and the film cancelled. Interspersed dreamlike into this narrative are Jameson’s memories of life in Venera, circa 1941-45.
Here, Jameson reveals that his father was a Canadian botanist on contract in Venera when the Germans invaded with no warning. The young Bram’s parents were captured and sent to a POW camp in Germany, but their son eluded the Nazis and spent the next four years with no permanent residence, acquiring through necessity a knack for hiding in plain sight and living as a ghost in the besieged city-state. He moved with ease between the resistance and the German invaders, secretly befriending people on either side, other times playing pranks on whomever his fancy or opportunity dictated. Trickster, freedom fighter, collaborator, traitor, thief, squatter, saboteur, informant, spy … the young boy was all of these. After the end of the war, Bram was reunited with his mother and father in northern Manitoba, Canada.
Despite Tito Bronze’s celebrity, this aborted collaboration with Jameson has never been reported on outside of this book. Bronze was explicitly named as a character in three Jameson books (see also Why I Want to Love, above, and Millennium Nights, below), yet Bronze has never publicly mentioned Jameson, let alone the long friendship described in these books.
Bram Jameson: hoax? pseudonym? reality? The enigma persists.
9. Nostalgia of Futures Past (1991)
If Venera ever considered operating its own space program, it’s a well-kept secret. Yet, that is the premise of Jameson’s Nostalgia of Futures Past, which finds Jameson one of six astronauts awaiting the final countdown for the launch of Venera’s first rocket, The Nostalgia, en route to orbit Venus. Much like in Icarus Unlimited, Jameson never leaves the vehicle within the time frame of the narrative.
Whether or not the space program is factual, the majority of Nostalgia of Futures Past is unquestionably fiction. For the bulk of the book, while Jameson waits for the ship to blast off, he daydreams about the future. He imagines his voyage taking much longer than the projected seven-year mission. He skips over any speculation about the mission itself, and instead his thoughts linger on what will happen once he and his crewmates return to Earth.
They find the Terran population in a state of lethargy. Fossil-fuel reserves have dried up. Entertainment conglomerates have all gone bankrupt. Governments have all been dissolved. Pandemics have wiped out hundreds of millions of people. Shopping malls have become post-capitalist ghost towns. In the face of civilization’s collapse, instead of chaos, there is merely resignation. Even Jameson’s beloved Venera seems to have withered, its former luster turned drab, its gardens of vermilion plant overrun with weeds.
Whenever Jameson attempts to communicate with anyone, there is no conversation, no connection. Although they speak in turn, his interlocutors talk in dull tones as though responding to another conversation entirely, lost in the dreariness of their arid inner lives. Jameson’s emotional outbursts are ignored by those around him. Even his former crewmates are eventually infected by this generalized apathy.
Jameson yearns for escape. He decides to return to space. With the help of his solar-powered airplane, he embarks on a worldwide tour of space centers, now all deserted and derelict. He hopes
to find one functional ship to take him back into space. But every vehicle he finds is rusted and in complete disrepair. Besides, there is no fuel left anywhere.
Returning to Venera, he resolves to push his solar-powered airplane beyond its limits and fly it into space — an escape into his own imagination…
As he prepares to take off, the real world interrupts his reverie with the shriek of a loud siren. In his headphones, he hears the phrase “Launch aborted” repeated again and again. Thus ends the book.
10. The Voices of Creation: The Complete Short Fiction of Bram Jameson (2000)
The Voices of Creation: The Complete Short Fiction of Bram Jameson displays a heretofore unrevealed aspect of Jameson’s writing: Venera is never mentioned, the protagonists never bear the author’s name, and, for once, there is no doubt that we are dealing completely with fiction.
All culled from obscure, defunct periodicals such as Brave New Fictions, Gambit’s Fantastic Quarterly, The Pringle Zone, Research and Story, Innerspace Argonaut, and Pulp Wave, these 101 stories highlight Jameson as science-fiction writer, a genre his book-length works often flirt with. Here we find space voyages, mad scientists, adventures to microscopic universes, utopias and dystopias, apocalyptic disasters, bizarre mutations, lost civilizations, and time travel. The earliest story, “Prime Bell,” dates from 1956, and the last, “The Obscure Planet,” from 1997.
Vividly imaginative, composed with elegance and economy, characterized by a careful attention to unusual and troubling images, possessing arresting psychological depth, these stories linger disquietingly in the mind.
11. Millennium Nights (2002)
Millennium Nights, a return of sorts to the epic scale of 1964’s The Great Disasters, is split into three self-contained sections: Vermilion Beach, The Velvet Bronzemine, and Supermall.
Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories Page 28
