Swine FeverAndrew Cartmel
Black Flame paperback, 244 pages, £5.99
Review by David Clark (2005)
I’ve flicked through, and sometimes more substantially partaken of 2000 AD, the British weekly anthology comic in which Judge Dredd’s graphic novels are serialised, intermittently over the years. I’ve even read the Judge Dredd strip now and then, though frequently I pass over and keep my peace. I’m more Dreadzone than Dredd, myself. However, books like this (spinoffs written by good writers) don’t get enough attention, and when this turned up at Edge Towers (I swear, sometimes I’d almost rather it were Alton Towers) I sagely decreed that it required a review. I'm not really familiar enough with the Judge Dredd character and mythos, but it transpired that no-one else was either, so I’ve had to volunteer.
That declaration of disinterest made, I’ll say that the set-up is, as I’ve had occasion to mention in these halcyon pages before, basically: Dredd lives in post nuclear war, 22nd century Mega-City One, a city state surrounded by desert, so full of crime that mob rule would be the order of the day but for the Judges, hard case cops who apprehend, judge and sentence criminals. Dredd is the hardest hard man cop of all (or thinks he is), an authority figure with the famous line, ‛I am the law’. He’s popular mostly with fanboys of all ages, from clear-skinned 5 year olds through 14 year old spotty virgins to unimaginative students and SF fans of indeterminate antiquity (frequently also spotty virgins). However, if you’re looking for that scarce thing, good SF, you usually need to look elsewhere. The Dredd strips can in fact be amusing in small doses but are mostly very much alike.
Swine Fever is a novel by Andrew Cartmel, author of The Wise (good) and various Doctor Who novels for Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures series (also good, believe it or not), erstwhile script editor of Casualty and Doctor Who (the old series, right at the end; the scripts improved greatly when Cartmel was charge of them, and in fact removed the traditional sexism of the Doctor-assistant relationship long before Russell T Davies), writer of comic strips for 2000 AD spin-off Judge Dredd Megazine* and other comics, film studies expert, one-time editor of Starburst, and whatever else. So he knows his stuff where TV and graphic novel licensed characters are concerned.
Swine Fever is by way of doing something different with the franchise. There’s a Judge Carver (new in this novel?) and a Psi-Judge with the even more hapless name of Zandonella (if that name is supposed to sound exotic, it doesn’t quite work for me; if it’s supposed to sound odd, it does). This pair (of well-written, rounded characters) are working with (same old) Dredd and an intelligent pig to bring down Mac the Meat Man. Mac is dealing in pork. It’s black market health hazard pork from mutant porkers. There follows – well, it’s all a bit of a muddle, really, and I know how much fanboys hate spoilers, so I won't give you too many. Basically Mac’s operation is shut down, then political policy changes, pork becomes a legit biz, porkmania infects the city and everyone starts stuffing themselves. The dolphin ambassador butts in to protect the pigs’ porcine rights. Pig sex and cable TV are in the mix, as are fart jokes to too great a degree. And the ending surprised me, which made a refreshing change.
The behaviour of the Judges isn’t typical in this book (frankly I began to wonder if Dredd himself would turn out to have a liking for wearing women’s clothes when alone), and I suspect that other background details are wrong. So Swine Fever is presumably a non-canonical Dredd book, perhaps to the point where it may even be a deliberate parody. That’s unless, of course, this entire series of novels is following its own continuity. I haven’t read any of them, or anything by most of the authors, though David Bishop at least is capable of turning in a decent paperback.
Maybe you’d be better off with a Dredd fan reviewing this. But it seems to me that, while Swine Fever isn’t The Cursed Earth (a Dredd classic), it isn’t bad, either. I’ll go so far as to hazard a guess that it’s probably entertaining enough for readers of these books to be a worthwhile entry in the series, no matter how far this departs from the norm for Dredd. After all, some of the Doctor Who New Adventures weren’t exactly typical of the original Doctor Who series (I wouldn’t have liked a third or so of them if they were). Perhaps that lack of typicality holds true for this series too. Swine Fever may not be the only one I read.