A HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization by Jonathan Kirsch, is a look at The Book of Revelation—the circumstances of its creation, it’s deviation from the Gospels’ theology (Jesus forgives, John of Patmos looks forward to everyone burning), its influence on Christianity over the centuries and finally on American Christianity with its concerns about the Rapture and the Antichrist. Kirsch argues that rather than the allegory of Nero’s tyranny it’s often held to be, Revelation is John’ rant against accommodationist Hellenized Jews (in which group he includes Christians) selling out their culture to the Roman establishment (so the Mark of the Beast, for instance is a reference to those who handle Roman coins). Worth the read for the early sections, but the impact on America is something When Time Shall Be No More covered in more depth (however if I hadn’t read that, I imagined I’d be very pleased with the later parts).
JOHN CARTER OF MARS was the final entry in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels, and actually consists of two unrelated novellas packaged together (cover by Michael Whelan, rights with current holder). “John Carter and the Giant of Mars” was originally written as a kids’ book (a sequel to Synthetic Men of Mars), then reworked for the grown-up SF market. However the story had several continuity errors and the for-kids style feels very “off” compared to Burroughs’ usual, so for years fans believed it was a fake (in the edition I have, Burroughs expert Richard Lupoff goes into the details in the forward).
“Skeleton Men of Jupiter” was a novella that Burroughs would normally have expanded into a full book a la Llana of Gathol, but war and age forestalled him. The story has the warlike Jovian natives kidnap John Carter in the belief they can force information out of him that will enable them to capture Helium and then all Barsoom. In practice, this proves more difficult (of course) and we end the book with Carter seeking Dejah Thoris across Jupiter (she gets kidnapped too, as usual). When I first read this, I was inclined to agree with fans that it’s a small tragedy we never got the rest of this interplanetary war; however, while Jupiter certainly makes for a different setting, I’m not sure it’s all that different. And there’s a lot of padding in John Carter lecturing us on how scientists obviously don’t know as much about the impossibility of life in the solar system as they think. Still it does show why the Barsoomian novels hold up better than many of Tarzan’s lost race stories, which almost never got this colorful.
ATOMIC ROBO: The Ghost of Station X by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener was a disappointment given I enjoyed my previous reading in the series. It starts off well as a mysterious conspiracy targets Atomic Robo and Tesladyne Industries for destruction, but falls apart when we learn the Big Bad is an evil AI, because even an AI created by Alan Turing is still indistinguishable from every other evil computer in SF history. And at my age, I’ve seen a lot of those. I’ll be reading more in the series, but this was not a high point.
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Book reviews: Mars, robots and Revelation (#SFWApro)
Once again, movies that only sound like time travel (#SFWApro)
THE I INSIDE (2003) has Ryan Phillippe suddenly switching from his hospital bed in 2002 to two years early and trying to piece together the web of backstory and backstabbing that surrounds his life, dead brother Stephen Rea and spouse Piper Perabo. This has some clever revelations as we and Philippe learn about his past, but it’s another one where everything turns out to be All In His Head (his life literally flashing before his eyes as he dies). “It’s like a dream—you think you hear a siren but when you wake, it’s only your alarm.”
ME AGAIN (2012) has a burned-out preacher (also burned out as a husband and father) ask God for a different life, and getting his wish. Despite referencing It’s a Wonderful Life, he doesn’t get a change in history, but instead body jumps into various people to gain greater understanding of the human condition and his own heart. Bland and schmaltzy but it says a lot about the growth of Christian media that this is one of several explicitly Christian films I’ll be watching. “Did you have a recent encounter with a genie or a leprechaun?”
THE BROKEN (2008) is one I suspected wouldn’t qualify but couldn’t be sure, as it involves Sinister Doubles emerging from a mirror and replacing their real counterparts, including Leann Headley. However as the film never identifies them as parallel worlders, leaving them as unexplained mirror monsters, it doesn’t qualify. In its own right, routine—I’ve seen lots of “pod people” movies (I wrote the book on them, after all) and this doesn’t rise above middle of the pack. “Why would he have a photograph of her?”
Filed under Movies, Now and Then We Time Travel
Time travel reviews (#SFWApro)
AUSTIN POWERS: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) was the second in the series, wherein Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) sends himself back in time to steal super-spy Austin Powers sexual potency, thereby giving birth to his son Seth Green and leaving Austin unable to satisfy superspy Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham). The kind of movie that satirizes just about everything, it’s very funny in spots but there are too many spots where I don’t find it funny at all. Time-travel wise, this has Michael York warning us not to take any paradoxes seriously and the usual time-travel malapropisms (“That’s from Jerry Maguire.”) “It’s remarkable how England in no way looks like Southern California.”
XMEN: Days of Future Past (2014) adapts the 1980s comics storyline in which the mutants try to avert Mystique from a killing that leads to a dystopian, Sentinel-ruled future where mutants are hunted like rats (the original is an example of inherent strength, as future history keeps coming back to some version of that timeline). This does a very good job and harmonizes the First Class setting with the original trilogy; I do wish, though, that they’d used the Silver Age model Sentinels at some point (I don’t think Trask’s initial models are that much cooler looking). With Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman and other familiar faces. “Mutants provide us, for the first time in human history, with a common enemy.”
TIME TRAVELLER – The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2010) is a live-action quasi-sequel to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (a very popular Japanese novel which has been adapted multiple times) focusing on the daughter (Riisa Naka, who also voiced the lead in the anime version) of the original protagonist. When her mom gets critically injured, she sends her daughter back to 1972 (only by mistake she lands in 1974) looking for the time traveler Mom once loved. I’m curious what the Japanese reaction to this was—as the story is much more familiar there, I suspect they’d have picked up on what’s going on much quicker than I did. I still found it charming though. “My memory might disappear but my heart will remember the promise.”
Tenchi Muyo was a popular 1990s anime based around the often-used theme of a totally ordinary boy who ends up with a beautiful harem of devoted girlfriends. TENCHI MUYO IN LOVE (1996) has Tenchi (who discovered in the series he descends from galactic royalty) fading away after a time-traveling enemy of the imperial house assassinates his mother in the past. The solution, of course, is for Tenchi and his women to head back and stop Kaine, which also gives Tenchi a chance to get to know his long-dead mother. I’m inclined to agree with The Anime Encyclopedia that squeezing in the entire series cast bogs this down, but as it moves to the climax and focuses more on Tenchi and his mother, it works a lot better. “Only one thing is standing between you and total oblivion.”
Filed under Movies, Now and Then We Time Travel
Ending May in good spirits (#SFWApro)
For a variety of reasons, I think I’m ending this month on a high note.
First off, in contrast to April, I actually made money. The various projects I was working on have me in the black for the month, so yay. And Demand Media is soliciting more articles. Not as many article options as I’d like (the more choices, the easier to find a topic I can write well), but I know I’ll be making at least some money next month.
Still, this does drive home how lucky I’ve been since moving up here and not having to worry much about the usual uncertainties of the freelance life. Being confident that money’s coming in feels good. It’s much more unnerving when, like this month, it’s coming in but you aren’t certain you can keep it up. So I intend to keep scrounging other gigs if I can find them, because the more customers you have, the less of a problem it is if one of them stops for a while.
Second, I finished Draft Three of Southern Discomforts today. It’s a vast improvement over the last draft, though only 76,000 words—next draft I want it above 80,000.
A bigger problem: Finishing it up, I realize Maria is still not a strong enough protagonist. Every time I develop her character one way, I lose something else I need. Plus the plot really got confused toward the end. But these are fixable things, I hope. However, it’s going to take longer than I wanted before I actually get another draft done (hopefully by September’s end).
And I’m making steady progress on Time Travel on Screen. While I don’t see a problem with watching everything on my list in time to write it up, finding space may be a challenge. It looks like I’ll have maybe 200 words per film/TV show if I treat them all equally and that’s not much. But I can work around it: I can write tight, and some movies deserve more space than others. After I write up 1947’s Repeat Performance, for instance, I don’t need to spend much space on its 1989 remake, Turn Back the Clock, as the plot is almost identical.
June will be a challenge. As I spend more time on the Demand Media stuff to pay my bills, I’ll have to work like a dog to get both my fiction and my movie viewing done. But I can’t pass up dinero, can’t slow up on the book and I don’t want to skip fiction, so I’ll have to manage it.
New And columns
On why the Confederacy isn’t the shining symbol of freedom some right-wingers would like it to be.
Filed under Politics
Parallel Worlds and Inherent Strength (#SFWApro)
My friend Ross coined the term “inherent strength” to refer to the probability of history changing. As he put it, it’s quite plausible to imagine an alternative Marvel Universe where Steve Rogers did not become Captain America. It’s not at all plausible that there’s any divergence in which he becomes a contract killer for the mob or slaps around little old lady. It’s just not in him.
For a real historical example, look at the Confederacy. Reading Battle Cry of Freedom it struck me that the best bet to preserve slavery might be rather than helping the South win, someone could negotiate peace and reunion early on, before emancipation became government policy. It was a controversial, radical step for a lot of people and Lincoln took a big risk; if the South returned to the fold, it might never have happened (which is not to say slavery would have endured forever, but it wouldn’t have ended by 1965).
The trouble is, reading the book also convinces me it’s very unlikely that would ever have happened. The South didn’t want to reunite, and it was convinced it could win. The inherent strength lies, I think, with the CSA lasting until it was beaten in the field.
Or consider the Captain Confederacy comic book series, set in a world where the South won. In one issue, it was mentioned in passing that General McClellan won the election of 1864 and after negotiating peace, freed the Union’s slaves. Again, I’m not sure this could have won against the “inherent strength” of history—McClellan’s Democratic Party was solidly against emancipation and from all accounts so was he.
For a third example, I’ve read many stories where the Protestant Reformation dies in its cradle for one reason or another. As a result, the Catholic Church continues as an unbreakable theocracy to this day (or in one variation, Cromwell’s Puritan theocracy in England has the same effect). I honestly find this idea implausible: the fractures and issues in the church were so substantial, I think schism and reformation have inherent strength on their side. Sooner or later, they’d have happened.
That said, I’m not suggesting this is a magic bullet for rating all alternative histories. If you have a universe in which history is utterly fixed, it’s a moot point, for instance. No matter how probable or unlikely our history (and a lot of outcomes have hinged on pure luck), it’s fixed and never going to change.
Then there’s the idea that every single thing that can go differently does, creating a multiverse in which ever possible event plays out every possible way (as in Crisis on Two Earths). In that case, if it’s all purely random, maybe there’s a world where Steve Rogers is in fact a hitman. No matter how implausible, everything that can happen will happen.
There are also stories which present just a complete bizarro-history, like Star Trek’s mirror universe where Spock, Kirk and the Federation are all evil. Or a Bentley Little short story in which George Washington survives Valley Forge by turning cannibal.
“Inherent strength” stories fall somewhere in the middle. A middle where history isn’t fixed, but human decisions aren’t utterly meaningless. Parallel time streams may exist but they don’t include every single possible alternative history, maybe only the probable ones. It’s implicit, I think, that human decisions and free will matter. Which is the case in most time travel and alternative history stories, I think.
It’s not an absolute standard for judging divergence, but I think it’s a useful one.
Filed under Now and Then We Time Travel, Writing
Catching up with the BPRD (#SFWApro)
Continuing my rereading of the Hellboy mythos (this represents the past month or so’s reading, and they’ve all been added to the Hellboy Chronology)
BPRD: The Black Flame by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Guy Davis as a Nazi-loving CEO assume the identity of the title Nazi agent in order to lead the Oghdru Jahad’s transformed frog people against humanity—unaware he’s only a player in a much bigger game. This is something of a turning point for the series as we shift from the BPRD struggling but managing to keep a lid on things to the destructive power of the monsters overwhelming the world, culminating in the current Hell on Earth nightmare situation.
BPRD: War on Frogs by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and multiple artists, has the BPRD waging war against the frog creatures spreading across America in a series of one-shot stories. This overlaps with the above volume, so I read them both together. Decent, but not first rate.
BPRD: The Universal Machine by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Guy Davis is a very good one. In the A-plot, Kate investigates a lot occult text that may be able to restore Roger the Homunculus to life; in the B-Plot, the regular BPRD members share stories from their past, giving us the first glimpse at Captain Daimio’s backstory (and making me appreciate that contrary to stereotypes, he’s not at all defined by his scarred face). A great showcase for Kate and a good read, though it does make me wish the current BPRD team had personalities as strong as we see here.
Comic Book TPBs (#SFWApro)
Continuing to clean out my backlog of reading reivews …
UNWRITTEN: Orpheus in the Underworld by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (cover by Yuko Shimizu, rights with current holder) has Tommy descend into the Underworld in the hopes of rescuing Lizzie Hexam. However with Leviathan dying, even our stories of the underworld have become corrupted, plus there are a lot of people down there who know Tommy and don’t like him … Good as usual, and I really liked learning the urban legends about the vampire Savoy (“You’ve been conclusively traced back to the 17th century!”).
KILL SHAKESPEARE vol. 2 has Hamlet continue his quest for Shakespeare, the mysterious demiurge shaping the lives of England’s people, with the melancholy Dane accompanied by Juliet, Falstaff and Iago, while Richard III and Lady Macbeth plot to exploit Shakespeare’s power for their own ends. Better than the first volume, actually, so I hope they get Vol. 3 kickstarted.
MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Ant-Man/Giant-Man vol. 2 by Stan Lee and Don Heck shows why Hank Pym’s size-changing super-hero was never A-list (as witness the “Ant-Man’s getting a movie?” eye-rolls across the Internet when that was announced). His battles with Egghead, Porcupine, Madame Macabre and the Human Top (plus Spidey and the Hulk) never click the way Thor and Spider-Man did, and sometimes they’re a complete mess—the final two-parter (before the series was dropped in favor of Sub-Mariner) has Hank lose his size-shrinking powers, only to get them back at the end without explanation. The character core is the relationship between Hank and the Wasp, but Lee messes this up too: Whenever Hank declares his love, the next issue has Jan wondering why he never declares his love.
MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Sgt. Fury Vol. 2 by Stan Lee and Dick Ayers is my first encounter with Fury in his WW II “Howling Commandos” era (other than one issue in childhood) and it doesn’t look like I missed much. Lee and Ayers recycle lots of WW II genre cliches: The multi-ethnic squad (Southerner, New York Jew, handsome Italian-American, etc.—though with the addition of a black man), Nazis who alternate buffoonery (sometimes they’re one step away from “Heil myself!”) with quasi-laughable arrogance (repeated reminders they’re The Master Race) and the Howlers effortlessly defeating all opposition (and being called away from their European base for jobs as far off as Burma or Africa—it frequently seems like they’re all the Commandos the Allies have. Though Commander Benson (whose blog is down so I can’t link to it) says the series improved a lot later, and I trust his judgment, it’s not on display here.
DOMINIC FORTUNE: It Can Happen Here and Now is a graphic novel starring Howard Chaykin’s 1930s soldier-of-fortune, here assigned to bodyguard three drunken over-the-hill stars and keep them from too much trouble. Only it turns out they’re also tangled up in a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR … A lot of Chaykin’s recent work hasn’t grabbed me much, but I really enjoyed this; some good backup reprints too.
THE SIXTH GUN: Cold Dead Fingers by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt is the first collection in the series (I read Vol. 2 a while back) wherein a former Confederate and a preacher’s daughter find themselves pursued by an undead Confederate general seeking a magic weapon the preacher’s daughter now carries, one of six guns the general needs to bring about the apocalypse. Fast-moving, eerie and effective—I look forward to reading more. (Cover by Hurtt, all rights to current holder)
One book out of three I liked (#SFWApro)
But such is the life of the obsessive reader … PARADISE LUST: Searching for the Garden of Eden by Brook Wilensky-Lanford starts off on the wrong foot by squeezing all the centuries of pre-19th century searching into a couple of pages, focusing on the last couple of hundred years instead. Not that there aren’t some amusingly absurd theories (Eden is in Ohio! China! Apalachicola Florida! The North Pole!) but I’d have preferred a more global approach. And chapters on modern creationists and a visit to the Creation Museum felt like padding—the fact Creationists believe in a literal Garden of Eden isn’t the same as searching for it (and as Wilensky-Lanford notes, they don’t). Then there’s a discussion of a theory she likes which is that the whole story is an allegory for the first clash of Mesopotamian farmers and hunter-gatherers—sorry, once you get into that sort of metaphor, you’re not searching for a “real” Eden, just a metaphorical one (not the same, IMHO). Plus the theory didn’t dazzle me anywhere near as much as it did the author. A disappointing one.
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age by DJ Taylor is more a case of a mismatch than a bad book: I’d assumed this would be an overview of 1920s London and its “Bright Young Things” as they were known, but Taylor’s looking specifically at a small in-crowd of debutantes, celebrities, authors and nouveau riches including authors Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, the Mitford sisters and other less famed figures. This made it a collection of biographical sketches of people I wasn’t really interested in, but if I had been, I think I’d have given it a thumbs up. The book also made me realize that just through fiction (PG Wodehouse, for example), I’m more familiar with the images and style of the era than I’d have thought.
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM: The Civil War Era is the week’s winner, James McPherson’s exhaustive 800-page look look at the Civil War era, starting with the previous decade to show how politics, economics and America’s westward expansion all combined to make slavery an increasingly contentious issue (spreading west raised the question of whether the west would be Slave or Free for instance), then plunges into the war itself and the complex tangle of diplomacy, technological breakthroughs (the development of ironclads showing the traditional wooden fleet was now obsolete), politics and military maneuvers that kept it going and often threatened to end it prematurely. As this focuses on specific er, arcs (Southern economics, military campaigns, Lincoln’s re-election),rather than event-by-event, the procession of events is harder to follow, but the analysis makes up for it. I can see, for instance, why figuring out Lincoln’s views on the post-war fate of black America is such a headscratcher, as he expressed multiple different viewpoints over the years, and had to shape some of his statements to fit a country that wasn’t ready to embrace equality. Very good.
Filed under Reading
