Gareth L. Powell, Hive Monkey (2014)

[Steve Wright voice-over]: so, pop-pickers, now that the Beeb has excised all the material fronted by Savile, DLT and the other Yewtree disgracees, there's hardly any usable TOTP2 footage left! But I'm still here, have no fear, to talk you through this classic hit. It's the follow up to the BSFA award-winning Ack-Ack Macaque, and as kink-y a tune as you could hope for. The original Ack-Ack Macaque, as you know very well pop-pickers, was an old fashioned SF yarn, a twisty-turny plot written in efficient storytelling prose that never got in its reader's way, full of high adventures and fun and neat spins on classic genre tropes, but all tied-together with the marvellous central creation, the titular simian, cybernetically uplifted from computer-game duties and into Powell's future world. Ack-Ack's genius was his attitude: his overall foul-mouthed, cigar chewing, spitfire-flying, trigger-happy, "monkey fucks given? None" in-your-hairless-face ness. It is a splendid creation: the Hyde to our 21st-century Jekylls. In the afterword to Hive Monkey, Powell references the old PG Tips television ads; and part of Ack-Ack's appeal I think resides in the sense we viewers had that those chimps-in-human-clothes, shifting pianos and grinning idiotically, were secretly really really pissed off at having so demeaningly to cavort for the diversion of homo sapiens. Ack-Ack is one such, but without the need to act nice for the cameras. I assume, too, that Powell at some point in the past has clocked these old Hellboy panels:

... except that Powell's monkey wears clothes. So anyway (and noting, in passing, how little I sound like Steve Wright, I know, I know) Hive Monkey picks up where the first novel stopped, offering its readers more of the same. Some of the shine is inevitably taken off the conceit, now that it's not brand-new any more; and some of this second Ack-Ack story is a little in-his-dinted-steps-he-trod. It's still great fun, though. The ape, now world-famous, is working a low-profile as a zeppelin pilot. Adventure starts when a passenger on the dirigible encounters his own double, bleeding to death, in his cabin. We get a similarly Ack-Ack Macaque front-loading of action, although perhaps a slightly less dense level of cool-ideation; this time the story involves parallel dimensions, a weird religion called the 'Gestalt', Neanderthal assassins, a second cyber-enhanced monkey, a plot to rule the world through mind-control and a high quotient of bang!-bang!-bang! It's not Proust, pop-pickers! But it has no desire to be. The main misstep, I thought, was the inclusion of a rather self-indulgent SF writer character, there in part to enable a series of not-very-amusing in-jokes and genre-mockery-mockeries. And if I, Steve Wright, the in-the-afternoon Steve Wright, not the US comedian, and certainly not the pompous prof who usually reviews here ... if (I say) I felt a touch peeved by the ending, it's perhaps because its knight's-move lurch into oddity seemed to me a naked pitch for Ack-Ack #3. Still, the fans won't mind that, pop-pickers! Wait. Wa-a-ait a minute. 'Pop-pickers' isn't my phrase, at all. That's Alan 'Fuff' Freeman, isn't it?

Shit.

Well, without further ado, pop-pickers, here's the Ack-Ackinks, and "Ape Man".



I think I'm sophisticated
Cos I'm reading my genre like a good lit-e-rary fan
But all around me actual readers are preferring
Something less airy-fairy, man.
Though you might think I'm a rip-off of the side-kick off-of Generator Rex, man
Compared to the other kinds of primate-uplift texts (man)
I am an Ack-Ack.

I'm a bit Dirty Harry and a bit Richard Scarry
And a little bit like Ape-X
But with genre pollination and inflation and apeflation
We're all living in the Matrix.
I don't feel safe in this World Of Powell;
Drinking and shooting and a-practising my scowl;
A face like prosthetics worn by Roddy McDowall --
I am an Ack-Ack.

I'm an Ack-Ack, I'm an Ack-Macaque, I'm an ape man
I'm a Throw Back man, I'm a sweary man
I'm an ape man

Cos compared to the books that aim to be nice
Compared to the stories that anthromorphise
Compared to the space-bugs and malignant AIs
I am an ape man.
I'm an Ack-Ack, I'm an Ack-Macaque, I'm an ape man
I'm a Throw Back man, I'm a sweary man
I'm an ape man.
I look out my window, but I can't see the sky
Cos my own cigar-smoke is a-fucking up my eye
I want to get out of this story alive
And swear like an ape man.
I'm an Ack-Ack, I'm an Ack-Macaque, I'm an ape man
I'm a Throw Back man, I'm a sweary man
I'm an ape man.