It’s an odd idea to write books for people who never read them, but it’s worked for Mr Reilly so far. Ice Station is a brutally fast-moving action thriller novel that seeks to be a movie on paper – probably one directed by Michael Bay.

Like all of Reilly’s work, it barely exists as literature: it’s a screenplay with cover art and an ISBN number. The typical paragraph is one line long. The typical adverb is “suddenly”. Descriptions are sparse and visual. There are comic book sound effects whenever someone has their head blown off, which is often.

The book stars US marine Shane Schofield, whose unit has been dispatched to a remote Antarctic research station (are there any Antarctic research stations that aren’t remote?). A metal object has been discovered in a 100 million year old layer of ice: it could be an alien spacecraft. Since nobody “owns” Antarctica, a number of foreign nations are attempting a snatch and grab mission to seize the discovery.

We get about forty pages of backstory (meaning, Reilly setting up dominoes so they fall in the most destructive way possible), then the action begins and never stops. Schofield ends up fighting French soldiers, British soldiers, his own unit, the environment, killer whales, frostbite, etc,

You could probably build an Antarctic research station from the combined metal of all the ejected bullet casings in this novel. The story’s so addictive and streamlined that it’s hard not to read in one go, in fact, experts say the average person reads at least seven Reilly novels per year in their sleep without realising it.

The obvious movie cliches appear: a nerdy scientist who plays Captain Exposition, a cute little girl with a pet, a traitor on the team, a rushed romantic subplot, etc. Reilly doesn’t know how to write anything except action, but it’s amazing action. A high-speed hovercraft chase and a tense battle in a killer whale infested pool particularly stick in the memory. He also knows the media his audience might be familiar with, and includes nods to Die Hard, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and the X Files in all the right places.

Reilly’s plotting is often cited as incompetent, but it’s actually entirely competent – it’s just geared to something other than making perfect sense. Basically, whenever “cool” clashes against “logically plausible” (or “physicially possible”) cool wins. This is the Rosetta Stone to making sense of Ice Station.

For example: Schofield breaks a rib in this story. In the real world he would have great difficulty accomplishing some of his later feats in the story (such as swimming hundreds of meters), but that’s irrelevant. Reilly is the God of Cool, and sometimes he allows the mortals in his universe to break the laws of physics. Schofield needs to keep doing cool stuff, so he does it with a broken rib.

It would be funny to read a “self aware” hero who knows he’s in a Reilly novel (think Scalzi’s Redshirts). He’d try to stay alive by doing the most outlandish and ridiculous things possible. He’d dash to the nearest pet store and buy a cute dog. In fact, he’d wear body armor made of cute dogs stapled together: nobody would dare shoot a bullet at him. He’d also hire a plastic surgeon to make him look like an A-list Hollywood actor (Schofield’s physical description is a dead-ringer for Tom Cruise).

A realistic depiction of the story’s events would also make an interesting novel. Legally, Antarctica is not an ownerless waste, it’s a condominium – jointly owned by twelve nations. If an alien spacecraft was discovered, nobody would send special forces to capture it. Such a “capture” would be worthless – a huge metal object can’t realistically be transported or removed by twelve guys with guns, and it would stay in Antarctica, no matter who wins the shootout.

In Ice Station a group of bad guys hatch a plan to free the spacecraft (if that’s what it is) by detonating thermonuclear charges, creating a new iceberg with the spacecraft inside it, and steering the iceberg north to their sovereign territory. But then it would be pretty obvious what’s going on, and since the Antarctic treaty forbids the detonation or testing of weapons, you might as well declare war with half the world.

I read Ice Station at fourteen (the correct age), and it remains my favorite of Reilly’s work. It’s efficient, the prose is as tight as the wires in a Hong Kong action movie, and it avoids the goofy GI Joe cartoon feel that spoils some of his later work. It’s obviously nobody’s idea of a literary treat, but you don’t need spaceships to fly, and Ice Station proves it.

The eye sees by transmitting light from the retina to the optic nerve, and then to the brain. The problem is, the optic nerve runs in front of the retina itself, blocking a sliver of light. In order to see, you must have a blind spot.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is my blind spot. It’s the only Bowie album I like and yet don’t “get”. Musically, it has some of his best work. Conceptually, all the stuff about fake rockstars and androgyny and the world ending in five years seems bizarre and unnecessary, like you’ve invited a friend to stay the night and he’s brought along a U-haul full of childhood toys. It must have struck a nerve (optical or otherwise) at the time: Ziggy Stardust launched his career. But in the 21st century, he’s shadowboxing at targets I cannot see.

Not only did Ziggy not need to be a concept album, maybe it wasn’t meant to be one. It’s rock and roll’s dirty secret that most “concept albums” are retroactively branded as such long after the album is finished (the most famous one, Sgt Pepper, has no concept at all that I can detect). It’s true that many (or perhaps most) of Ziggy Stardust‘s songs don’t tie back into the main story, and the ones that do are jumbled out of order. The most persistent through-line is that Bowie likes writing songs with the word “star” in the title.

The album helped put glam rock on the map, but it’s also a preview screening of Young Americans: lots of soul and jazz moments pop up, sometimes improving the album and sometimes detracting from it. “Five Years” and “Soul Love” are a bit too long and musically subdued to work as album openers, particularly in the second case, where the dominant instruments are hi-hats and congas. “Moonage Daydream” is the first legitimately great song, with a bombastic introduction and a hallucinatory chorus. “Starman” is charming and irresistible, and sounds very much like a song left over from the Hunky Dory sessions.

Unlike the front-loaded Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust‘s best moments happen on side B. “Lady Stardust” is an powerful piano ballad, “Hold on to Yourself” an energetic homage to Ed Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else”, and “Ziggy Stardust” sports an instantly memorable main riff, built around a minor 2nd hammer-on with the pinkie finger. Bowie would work with more skilled guitarists than Mick Ronson, but few if any had his taste and discernment. Every note Mick played meant something.

“Suffragette City” is the album’s greatest song, a fierce and pummeling broadside against the Rolling Stones. While “Starman” points to his past, this points to his future: it would have fit anywhere and everywhere on Aladdin Sane. “John, I’m Only Dancing” is a nice curate’s egg if you have the Rykodisc remaster, with a strong chorus and funny queerbaiting lyrics, although I prefer the cut from 1973.

No doubt Bowie-ologists find more in Ziggy Stardust‘s concept than I have, whether it actually exists or not. Take the name “Ziggy”, a strikingly unusual name that would be worth 19 points if it could be played in Scrabble and seems pregnant with meaning. Is it an abbreviation of “syzygy” (a planetary conjunction or apposition, which would reinforce the cosmic theme)? But David eventually admitted that it meant nothing. He just wanted a name that began with Z, and found one in a list of names.

But Bowie was always someone who could turn pewter into gold, and even unremarkable ideas can seem irresistibly clever if sold right, which in the end is the rockstar’s true calling. Ziggy Stardust deserves its place at Bowie’s masked ball, even if that place isn’t quite at the head of the table.

Torture. Moral issues aside, does it work?

You have a man in your care, with a fact in his head. Can you torture it out of him? Maybe. But he hates you, because you’re torturing him, so he might tell you the fact in an incomplete or misleading way. And couldn’t you have gotten the fact from him using another method? Consider Knightian uncertainty: you don’t know what you don’t know, and a well-treated prisoner might divulge additional facts that he didn’t have to. A tortured man never will.

Defenders of torture, of course, have a slam-dunk defense of their art: that it created David Bowie’s Station to Station.

It contains the greatest Bowie song ever (“Station to Station”), the greatest Bowie lyric ever (to be discussed), the greatest Bowie pop song ever (“Golden Years”) and the greatest opening chord on a Bowie song ever (Carlos Alomar’s Am7 on “Wild is the Wind”). I advise listening to this album soon and often. It’s amazing. But do be advised: it was created through torture.

It was created during a horrific period of Bowie’s life, where the drugs begin taking the man. Alone in a mansion in Benedict Canyon, Hollywood, he went insane. It’s all there in the biographies: storing his piss in jars, seeing UFOs, to see his spectral aura, exorcising Satan from his swimming pool, believing that the Rolling Stones were sending him messages in their album covers. Some of these might be myths, or embroideries on the truth. Bowie himself is no help. He says he doesn’t recall making Station to Station at all.

Did he create Station to Station? The album isn’t a pathetic drooling mess of needle injection sites and discarded cocaine twists, as most “druggie” albums. It sounds tight and professional, brightly mixed, with some of his best top melody singing. This is the work of a man at the peak of his power.

The title track is, well, a perfect song. It runs for ten minutes, and you want it to keep going. Train noises are heard, wandering across the stereo field. The train is moving, and we’re not on it. The blurring steel hammer disappears over the horizon, and a loping 2/2 alla breve vamp takes its place. It sounds tight and smouldering on the record, but gigantic live. One of the downsides of the whole Bowie-being-dead business is that he won’t ever play “Station to Station” again. Listeners are free to imagine him in their bedroom, miming to the song while wearing a dress, but somehow it’s not the same for me.

Halfway through, the song erupts, blasting out lyrical and sonic incalescence. “Once there were mountains on mountains!” Cmaj, Dmaj, Emaj, Amaj, Emaj, F#min. The great lyrical moment happen here: “It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine! / I’m thinking that it must be love.” Listen to his difficult, strained delivery, and these two lines crackle with the energy of broken power cables. The world turns beneath him, mountains collapsing to rubble. Just for a moment, David Robert Jones from Brixton is Zeus, hurling thunderbolts. His mind sounds smashed to pieces, reassembled, but somehow stronger and purer than it was before. This signals the final shift in “Station to Station”. The band spins out of control, as if a life-rope’s been cut, and the remaining five minutes are spent in a long vamp built from repeated declamations of “it’s too late”.

Contrary to popular belief, Station to Station has other songs. “Golden Years” is an extremely catchy and well-realised single. The performances aren’t quite as tight as, say, Low (listening to the vocals in isolation reveals that he’s a bit loose with his timing) but the total effect is one of sublime perfection. “TVC15” and “Stay” are similar in tone: jittery, anxious, and funk-driven. “TVC15” is apparently based on a nightmare Iggy Pop had of a TV swallowing his girlfriend. “Stay” is Carlos Alomar earning his paycheck, featuring a jagging main riff with a ninth note thrown in there. The words of the chorus are near incomprehensible word salad: a good evocation of a man who has turned his mind into an MC Escher painting. “Wild is the Wind” ends the album on a plangent note. A jazz ballad, with a wonderful misty and distant feeling.

“He put all of his effort into his art” is a cliche vapid, but it takes on a darker shade: we’re not supposed to put all our effort into one thing. We’re supposed to have lives. We’re supposed to be normal.

I once read a French horror comic (I can’t remember the name) about a race car driver, with a special bond to his vehicle. With his fuel running out, and the great race of his career on the line, the vampiric car sucks his blood out of his veins and burns it, winning the race and hurling a corpse across the finish line. That sums up Station to Station. The stunning artistic heights were achieved at great personal cost to Bowie. It’s a thumbscrew and a rack on a vinyl LP.

Albums cathartic to artists are often dull to listeners, and this is the reverse: another Station to Station might have killed him. After making this album, Bowie fled Los Angeles. As if he himself was the demon in the mansion, and he’d performed his own exorcism.