Monthly Archives: January 2012

NOT A REVIEW – Unfriendly Persuasion by Steven H. Wilson (With a preview chapter)

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Well, after all, I can’t exactly review my own book, now can I? But what I can do is tell you a bit about the story of my third novel. Two stories, actually, the one in the book, and the one which relates how the book came to be.Unfriendly Persuasion is, as its subtitle states, a tale from the Arbiter Chronicles. I think most of my readers are familiar with the audio Science Fiction series I created a dozen or so years ago, but, just in case, here’s a capsule synopsis:Several centuries in the future, genetic engineering for superior health, ability and longevity has become the norm amongst the majority of the human race. Earth is no longer home to most of us, and is in fact one of the last refuges of the non-engineered. Old Home Terra is no longer a pleasant place to live, and many of its residents will do anything to escape. So Terry Metcalfe and Kevin Carson, two orphans from Virginia, have joined the Navy of the Confederated Worlds and become spacemen. Over the course of nineteen episodes of the series, they’ve found a home amongst engineered humans from various worlds, some of whom have extra-human abilities. Terry, Kevin and their cohorts’ first assignment was aboard the patrol vessel Arbiter, and as a result they took to referring to themselves as “the Arbiters.”

The Arbiter Chronicles has won thousands of listeners (over ten thousand, when last I looked) and received two awards, the Mark Time Silver medal and the Parsec Award; so I think maybe it’s something people enjoy.

My first novel, Taken Liberty, was also a tale from the Arbiter Chronicles. It told the story of Aer’La, a non-human member of the Arbiter’s crew. Aer’La was raised as a slave in the barbaric Varthan culture, and, some years earlier, had escaped and come to join the crew. I actually wrote this novel before I wrote any of the episodes. I waited about eight years to publish it, though, so the first series of eight episodes had been performed at conventions, and some of them had been podcast and even aired on some AM and FM stations around the US, before I released Taken Liberty. When I did release it, I framed it as a bookend to my first series of audio adventures and a lead-in to my second.

It seemed only natural, then, to use Unfriendly Persuasion as a capstone to my second series. In fact, a kernel of the story was already in my head as I wrote the final, two-hour episode of Series Two; and the two stories are really companion pieces. I wrote that two-hour finale, “Contents Under Pressure,” essentially as a movie script. I intentionally used the pacing of a cinematic film, borrowing a lot of inspiration from the pacing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, co-written by the great Harve Bennett. I’ve met Harve several times and interviewed him for my podcast. He’s a talented, gracious man who’s been very encouraging to me. His work directly inspired me to start writing fiction seriously back in high school.

“Contents Under Pressure” tells the tale of a war game gone wrong. Metcalfe, Carson and three of their fellows are being tested for possible promotion, and the final portion of the test is simulated combat. Metcalfe takes command of their immense war ship, the Titan, and everything quickly goes to hell. Alien terrorists catch them in a surprise attack, nigh-crippling the Titan, and leaving the young officers separated from their superiors and responsible for preventing an attack which could wipe out ten billion people. Spoiler! – they save the ten billion; but at a cost. “Contents Under Pressure” leaves Terry Metcalfe a hero to the Confederated Worlds, but wracked with guilt over the blood on his hands.

Unfriendly Persuasion picks up pretty much where “Pressure” left off. Titan is back in operation, Metcalfe is in therapy. Sestus Blaurich, Metcalfe’s spoiled, rich-kid nemesis who personally wet himself during the terrorist incursion, is on a book tour, taking credit for saving the Confederacy with all the power of his family’s P.R. machine behind him. There are still very clearly haves and have-nots in the Arbiters universe. Some of the “haves” are good guys: Metcalfe’s Captain, Jan Atal and his daughter Kayan’na eschew the vapid lifestyle of high society, preferring to explore space and find adventure. Sestus, on the other hand, is every frustrated middle-class person’s idea of the undeserving rich.

As a result of the near-destruction of the seat of Confederate power, the Navy is clamping down everywhere, a la the Patriot Act. (Anyone who thinks this foolishness is unique to the here and now has an overly optimistic understanding of human nature.) The Titan is sent to address an area of concern: a planet near the border of Confederate space, settled by an offshoot of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) long ago. Its inhabitants don’t understand the need for secure borders, and their world is in a strategic location. It could be used to stage another attack.

Worse, living among the pacifist humans on the planet, called Eleusis, are Qraitians. Qraitians? Yeah, Qraitians. Enemy aliens. The Big Bad of the Arbiters universe. (Actually, stupidity and bureaucracy are the Big Bads of the Arbiters universe, but, from a SciFi Action or Comic Book perspective, the Qraitians are the villains. Sorta like how Whiplash is the villain of Iron Man 2, but the real philosophical incarnation of evil was Justin Hammer.) It was some Qraitian extremists who nearly wiped out a big chunk of humanity just recently, and, as we humans are wont to do, the Confederate powers that be assume that most, if not all, Qraitians want to do the same.

The kicker? The pacifists don’t plan to cooperate. See, they think they’ve found God. Literally. God lives on the planet Eleusis, talks to them, works miracles in their presence. And once you’ve found God, you don’t walk away. Well, not unless God hands you some stone tablets and promises to visit again soon. Terry Metcalfe is a devout man of God, so he’s a natural to go and talk to these people.

They introduce him to God. God tells him he’s the Chosen One. Hilarity ensues. “Hilarity” being that Metcalfe announces he wants to stay here with these people, leave the military, join them in their resistance against the Navy.

So, why Quakers again? Didn’t I already have a Quaker as the lead character in my non-Arbiters novel, Peace Lord of the Red Planet? Well, yes, I did, much to the chagrin of the evangelical atheist crowd which has become very vocal in science fiction circles of late. (I have no problem with atheism. It’s a perfectly rational position to take. What I have a problem with is atheists who, like Christian missionaries of old, consider it their place to “civilize the savages” by forcing atheism down the throats of those who don’t believe in disbelief. If your atheism causes you to immediately dislike a religious person simply for being religious, you are not being rational, you are being a bigot.) In creating that hero, Dr. Shepherd Autrey, I did an awful lot of research. Not being a member of the Society of Friends myself, and having only limited opportunities to discuss their beliefs with those Friends I’ve known, I wanted my character to ring true in his actions and beliefs. My research triggered in me a great admiration for the Society of Friends’ members. In a nutshell, I hadn’t said, upon publishing “Peace Lord,” all I had to say about this remarkable belief system.

More, I set out to tell a tale of a man who’s essentially peaceful, yet still pursues a career in the military because it’s his only option. After being confronted with the realities of war, I needed him to come to a place, spiritually and factually, where he could see another way. In Unfriendly Persuasion, Terry Metcalfe meets, for the first time in his life, people who are actually making a practice of peace and good will toward others, as opposed to merely preaching that faith while living a life marked by violence and the use of force. He coincidentally encounters a power which is capable of seeing to it that the people of the planet Eleusis will be left in peace – a sort of cosmic realization of the American Right’s belief in peace through strength.

Really, until this point in his young life (Terry’s about 22 or 23), he hasn’t had the opportunity to think too much about his choices. He spent his orphan childhood trying to stay out of trouble and hoping that he’d get enough food to keep him alive. He fled his homeworld the only way he could – by signing up for military service. As a junior officer, he’s followed orders (mostly) and, while he’s witnessed death, he hasn’t had to be in the position of “kill or be killed.” Until just recently. While he performed well in that situation, it rattled him. Almost immediately following that traumatic encounter, he’s dropped into a world where he doesn’t have to kill or use force, a peaceful, beautiful world where can can stop worrying about how to stay alive and just… live. If you’re familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you might observe that he’s finally had all of his more basic needs met, and now actually has the luxury to consider self-actualization and morality. In a way, Terry finds his own Shangri-La among the stars. That’s not a connection I made while writing the story, but Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon is one of my favorite movies, and a writer can’t help but be influenced by those works of art he admires.

All that probably sounds dry and philosophical, like I just dropped the Arbiters into a remake of “the Razor’s Edge.” I didn’t leave the suspense and drama out of the story, however. I wanted Eleusis to be a world of mystery (hence it takes its name from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greek Myth.) “Mystery” here means not “whodunit?” but a system of secret knowledge, facts and practices unrevealed, the promise of a path to greater enlightenment. I wanted an atmosphere like unto some of the stories I really enjoyed as a kid, where humans discover remnants of ancient civilizations so advanced that they seemed to be magical, and so long-gone that you could never know all there was to know about them. The Robinsons encountered such civilizations a few times during the early episodes of Lost in Space, and the Alphans found the seeds of human civilization on a distant world in an episode of Space: 1999 called “The Testament of Arkadia,” one of my all-time favorite hours of television. Fittingly, Space: 1999 was known (and sometimes ridiculed) for most of its stories involving a “mysterious unknown force” which helped humanity, though it was never encountered or described. Viewers just gathered that it was there. In this novel, I introduced a “mysterious unknown force,” but it doesn’t stay unseen or unknown.

I wanted to re-create for readers how it felt for me to experience those stories. So, throughout the novel, the Arbiters encounter terrifying glimpses of the history of Eleusis – glimpses of unknown origin, making them more troubling. In order to kick-start the story with the right mood in an early chapter, I sent Kayan’na Atal on a vision quest, courtesy of the Pagan knowledge of her shipmate, the hundred-year-old Doctor Celia Faulkner. I understand from early readers that this segment is effective and effectively chilling. I hope that’s true.

I didn’t spare the angst and emotional drama, either. Friendships are put to the test as, in keeping with what 9/11 did to Americans, the Arbiters fall on different sides of the issue of increased security and reduced privacy in response to terrorism. Kevin Carson is alienated from his life-long friend Metcalfe, and that gave me an opportunity to reflect on their past together in some flashback scenes. I think I enjoyed writing those the most of any of the many distinct parts of the story.

Finally, because a novel gives you a much larger canvas than a one-hour or two-hour radio script, I was able at last to develop the bad guys, the Qraitians. On audio, the Qraitians never had to be anything much but voices on the other end of a comm channel. The Arbiters encountered a Qraitian in person once, but he was actually a human who’d had his mind imprinted with the memories of a Qraitian warrior. (And he was voiced on stage by the amazing George Takei! Sorry, there’s no available recording of that live performance.) So, while we assumed that a Qraitian could be made to appear human, I never had to answer the question “what does a Qraitian look / sound / smell like?” Unfriendly Persuasion introduces us to several Qraitians in person, so there was no way to dodge this question any longer.

Following lots of discussions with Dr. Beatrice Kondo, evolutionary biologist and friend of long-standing, I decided the Qraitians were evolved from reptiles. More humanoid probably than Star Trek’s Gorn, but still cold-blooded and completely different from their opponents. These “design an alien” conversations were quite fun. I think my favorite exchange began with “what would be the evolutionary need for an animal to have two sex organs?” She proceeded to explain the need for redundancy in some species, using snakes as an example. I had no idea of this oddity of snake anatomy! I was just looking to make a crass joke in dialogue! But it wasn’t all about middle-school humor, and I did have a chance to flesh out a militarist, collectivist culture which placed low value on individual life and tremendous emphasis on family and family reputation.

Of my three books, this is probably the one which came the closest to kicking the living s___ out of me. That may be because I took the least time to write it of any of my three novels so far, about six months. And I didn’t put it down and come back to it after the first draft, either. I plunged right into revisions immediately. As I did with “Peace Lord,” I found myself unsatisfied by the first ending I wrote. Indeed, for “Persuasion,” the final six chapters were so godawful that I refused to show them to anyone. I sent out the first 75% of the book to my beta readers and completely redevoloped the end while they read. There were diagrams and spreadsheets and lots of pages scrawled in red ink. It was an emotionally and creatively draining process, but, reading the finished product, I at least am satisfied that it paid off. I hope you all agree.

By the way, the book is dedicated to aforementioned Star Trek and Six Million Dollar Man / Bionic Woman producer Harve Bennett, and he already has a copy. I was thrilled to receive a very touching letter from him in return.

My friend Phil Giunta has been kind enough to review Unfriendly Persuasion on his blog, and I also spent a few minutes chatting about it with Scott and Miles from SciFi Diner recently.

Unfriendly Persuasion will be available in late February via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and pretty much any other Internet book outlet. If you’d like to order it from your favorite local bookstore (and you’re lucky enough to still have a local bookstore!) you can tell them it’s available from Ingram. There will also be eBook and audio versions available from Smashwords, Podiobooks.com, Overdrive and EBSCO. If you think of it, please encourage your local library to add it to their collection. Several hundred of them already own Taken Liberty and the downloadable versions of the Arbiter Chronicles audio adventures.

If you’d like to read the first chapter now, it’s available here.

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REVIEW – Friday by Robert A. Heinlein

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I received a copy of Heinlein’s Friday as a Christmas gift my senior year in high school.  It had been out since the previous April, but I guess I wasn’t yet a rabid enough Heinlein fan to have picked it up the day it came out.  Friday was, I believe, the book that changed me into that rabid fan.

It was hailed as Heinlein’s return to his former glory.  On the book jacket of the hardcover edition, Harlan Ellison said “Friday is Heinlein back in control.”  I’ve never polled readers to ask if they agree with this assessment, but the sentiment is understandable.  Friday represents a marked change in tone from Heinlein’s previous “adult” novels.  By “adult” I don’t mean Heinlein was writing porn, though there are some detractors who would make that claim.  After establishing himself in the 1940s as the King of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine, amongst other short fiction venues, Heinlein spent the 1950s as the reigning champion of juvenile (what we now call Young Adult) science fiction novels for Scribner’s.   He wrote fourteen of these, although two, Podkayne of Mars and Starship Troopers, were rejected by Scribner’s juvenile editor, Alice Dalgliesh, and published subsequently by G.P. Putnam.

It wasn’t until these two rejected juveniles were released that Heinlein really came to be considered an author of “adult” science fiction novels.  (Tuck away in the box where you store your little ironies that Heinlein’s juveniles are perfectly respectable adult science fiction stories.  They just don’t speak plainly about sex.  Heinlein consider this the only difference between juvenile and adult literature.  Sixty years later, his juveniles are all still in print, and, I believe, none has ever gone out of print.  Not many juvenile authors can make such a claim.)

I would never call Heinlein’s work formulaic.  His imagination was such that, even were he to have written every book to a strict formula (and he didn’t), each would still represent an astonishingly unique and refreshing work due to the ideas draped on the frame of the formula.  That said, most of his dozen Scribner books share a similar theme, that of a young man finding success and his place in the universe by means of tenacity, intellect and a good understanding of technology; Horatio Alger in space, if you will.  Starship Troopers also carries this theme, but is extremely dark and militaristic.  I’ve read it once, and recognize it as a competent piece of writing and deserving of attention.  I will not read it twice, however.  It represents one of the few times that Heinlein created a world I would not wish to visit.

Podkayne of Mars  took a sharp turn away from this pattern by featuring a (gasp!) young woman as its protagonist.  Narrated by Podkayne herself, it does have quite a different feel than its predecessor novels.  In addition, in the original draft, Podkayne dies at the end of the story.

From here, Heinlein essentially abandoned the “boy meets world(s)” theme.  Puppet Masters depicts spies handling an alien invasion; Double Star tells of an actor who must impersonate a head of state;  Stranger in a Strange Land turns the “boy in space” idea on its ear, by bringing a human boy raised as a Martian to Earth; Glory Road is couched as a fantasy story, its hero not anyone you would call “boy;”  Farnham’s Freehold catapults some members of Country Club Suburbia into a post-nuclear dystopia;  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the story of a war of independence waged by a lunar colony against Earth.  Time Enough for Love is the memoir of a millennia-old man who first appeared in Methuselah’s Children, where he led the escape of his fellow long-lifers from Earth; In I Will Fear No Evil, an old man’s brain is place in the body of a young woman, and, finally, in Number of the Beast, four geniuses narrate the story of their flight from earth as agents unknown try to assassinate them, and their subsequent escape into a nigh-infinite multiverse.

These last two efforts were poorly received by critics and many readers.  Number of the Beast, in particular, is held up even today as strong evidence that Heinlein eventually lost his talent and possibly his mind, and that his work became hopelessly self-indulgent.  News flash:  All writing is self-indulgent.  Authors write either for themselves or their editors.  While in the latter case, it helps to first have the ego surgically removed, one indulges one’s editor only to fill one’s wallet.  The end result is still self-indulgent.

Personally, I loved Number of the Beast.  It was the first of Heinlein’s “adult” novels that I read, and I found myself dropping into the company of the Carter-Burroughs clan as comfortably as one drops into one’s favorite bathrobe.  True, the novel does not have a tight, coherent plot.  What it does have is witty dialogue and memorable characters who at least made me want to spend more time in their presence.  In addition, there were some character beats included which made this then-sixteen-year-old misfit realize that perhaps it was okay for him to be exactly who he was, with no apologies to anyone.

If tight plotting and an odyssey of self-discovery were what readers wanted, however, Friday did represent a “return” to the Heinlein they remembered from decades passed.  Although it lacks a male protagonist – Friday is a genetically engineered female with enhanced reflexes, intellect and strength – it does tell the tale of a young person navigating a strange and wondrous, sometimes hostile future, eventually stumbling over her destiny among the stars.  Like Thorby in Citizen of the Galaxy, Friday is an outcast.  “Artificial Persons” (APs) are not considered human by the unwashed masses.  “My mother was a test tube, my father was a knife,” is their shared phrase of self-identification.  They have no citizenship, no heritage, no party loyalties.  Indeed, it’s legal for them to be owned by “real” humans.  Friday, a trained combat courier working for a mysterious tactician known only as “Boss,” must hide her true nature from nearly everyone she meets.

Like the heroes of Have Space Suit Will Travel and Between Planets, she covers a lot of geography and is introduced to the alien world that is a space ship, a small foreign culture unto itself.  Like all of Heinlein’s travelers, she winds up frequently down on her luck, stranded with few resources, and aided by kind-hearted strangers who ask only that she pay their kindness forward by way of recompense.  And of course she has a mentor, an older man who, while gruff and demanding, nonetheless has her best interests at heart.  Mr. Miyagi-like, Boss sets her to baffling tasks, the relevance of which she learns only long after she has undertaken them.  Ultimately, she succeeds by being clever and resourceful, by learning to look past the face value of things, and by making friends she can count on.  In Heinlein’s world, this makes her firmly “one of the boys.”

And yet she is very female.  Many critics have alleged that Heinlein’s women are all just wish-fulfillment constructs, representing what the author wished women were really like.  Friday, however, is competent – more competent than any of the men she goes up against in the book.  She has dalliances with several men (and a few women), but is not, despite the name, any man’s “gal Friday.”  This is one of only four works of science fiction in which Heinlein used a female narrator to tell the story, the others being the aforementioned “Podkayne” and Number of the Beast, as well as his final novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset.  While I am not female, at no time during many readings of this novel have I ever felt pulled out of the story with a sense of “this is a dude writing the way he thinks a woman would write!”  I should point out as well that Heinlein’s wife Ginny was, apparently, also his ideal of what a woman should be, and she was known to friends and acquaintances as supremely competent.  Indeed, when the couple met, she was Heinlein’s superior officer in the Navy.  A woman who fulfilled the wishes of Robert Heinlein would likely not be an empty-headed, big-chested chippie.

Unlike Heinlein’s boys, Friday is frankly sexual, and her story allows close examination of sexual customs and some possible future marriage scenarios.  At the story’s opening, she is married into a group with seven husbands and co-wives.  This New Zealand-based family is a business in which adult members buy shares.  Its Chief Financial Officer, Anita, at first reminds a Heinlein reader of the no-nonsense Mum in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  Both rule their roosts and have a silent, strong influence over their co-wives and their husbands.  Both seem unflappable.  Both do grandmotherly things like sitting by the fire knitting.  But Anita has a dark side and an obsession with money that Mum, a colonist deportee, could not conceive.  When Friday has a falling out and parts with Anita’s family, all semblance of moral rectitude vanishes.   The event is ugly and painful.  As much as he described marriages, Heinlein didn’t deal often with divorce.  That may be a result of the fact that he’d been through  divorces himself, and chose to wait for time and perspective before he addressed the issue in his work.  When he does relate a story of divorce, however, he does so with tremendous emotional power.

Friday is next welcomed into the home of a woman with two husbands.  She bonds with this woman, Janet, as the mother she never had.  Again, this is a departure from the young Odysseus theme.  Though Odysseus was always seeking his home, he was not looking for anyone with whom to form an emotional attachment.  The boys in the juveniles similarly were not.  While many wound up in love or married, seeking companionship or family ties was not the primary business of any of them.

If you want to introduce readers of mainstream thrillers, be they readers of Dan Brown, John Grisham or Ian Fleming, to science fiction, Friday is an excellent jumping-off point.  I know from my days in libraries that non-SF fans who “had” to read a science fiction book were extremely pleased when I placed this one in their hands, and would make a point of coming back to tell me so.  One strong objection some have to the book – that being Friday’s treatment of a man who rapes her – I will not address.  The theme is a complex one, and will serve to provide the topic for a future column.

Oh, lest I forget, this is another old favorite I listened to over the past couple of weeks.  I’ve long had a two-cassette abridged reading by Samantha Eggar.  She did quite a creditable job, but this is a book which deserves to be heard in its entirety.  Hillary Huber’s unabridged reading for Blackstone Audio was very enjoyable.  Ms. Huber has terrific range for character voices, and a vocal quality much like that of Peri Gilpin of Frasier.  After hearing her reading, it did occur to me that Friday, being Baltimore-born and raised, would probably not have Ms. Eggar’s delightful accent.  Still, if you have a chance to pick up that abridgement, by Listen For Pleasure from back in the eighties, it’s fun.

REVIEW – The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

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“You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”

An odd statement to select from a book that’s about predicting the future, about superior forces controlling the lives and destinies of unsuspecting mortals, about lovers trapped in a contest from which death is the only escape, and happiness together not an option which is offered.  Yet this statement, made to one of several fascinating and sympathetic protagonists at the climax of the tale, is representative of the overall theme of The Night Circus, a fantastic tale of magic, romance and individual determination.

The story opens in 1873, as Hector Bowen, known to the world as the stage magician Prospero the Enchanter, has a “package” delivered to his place of employment.  The package is his five-year-old daughter, Celia.  Her mother, wasting away with unrequited love, has committed suicide and left the child to her estranged father.  His reaction is an understated “Well, f___.”  (This is the only instance of profanity in the story, which otherwise has no content to discourage young adult readers.)  Hector quickly uses the child to his advantage, realizing she has supernatural abilities, training her to be both a true sorcerer and an accomplished illusionist.  He takes her to an old friend known only as Mr. A. H___ and offers her up as a contestant in a game they have apparently played before.  A. H___ quickly finds an orphan boy to train up as her opponent.  His name is Marco, a name he chooses himself, as A. H___ tells him he can’t be bothered with naming him.

The boy and girl grow and are instructed in the ways of magic, Celia having the advantage of real magical power while Marco is trained to do what he’s led to believe any human could do, if only that human would take the time to look beyond the end of his nose.  Celia becomes a performing illusionist, Marco is farmed out as an assistant to an impresario named Chandresh Cristophe LeFevre.

We shift suddenly in time and place, from London and the 1880s to Concord, Massachusetts in 1897.  Here we meet Bailey, who is dared by his sister and friends to break into the Night Circus, a mysterious, traveling show which has been appearing, suddenly and irregularly, in a field near their home for as long as Bailey can remember.  Bailey takes the dare, and our first real glimpse of the Night Circus is in daylight, as an eleven-year-old boy trespasses, looking for something to steal to prove that he carried out his dare.  He is quickly discovered by a red-headed girl his own age.  Rather than reporting him, she helps him escape and gives him one of her own white gloves as a souvenir.

The transition is jarring, but the narrative quickly returns to the 1880s and the story of Celia and Marco.  From there, the book jumps back and forth, from past to future, the two time lines converging as the chapters unfold.  The method works extremely well, showing us the origin of the Night Circus as a playing field for the two young opponents, while also showing us its existence as an established phenomenon which has a profound effect on those whose lives it touches.

In keeping with my subject last week of immortality, The Night Circus gives us characters who stand outside time.  While the book spans 24 years, Celia and Marco and their companions barely age.  Children grow up around them – Bailey becomes a young man, and the twins Poppet and Widget, born at the instant a bonfire is lit to open the Circus, likewise come of age.  Death touches the community here and there as well.  The young opponents stay young, however.

Erin Morgenstern’s narrative rivals that of Ray Bradbury, another lover of Circuses and the landscape of Hallowe’en..  She brings to life the sights, sounds and smells of  the world of the Circus.  It is a world of contrasts, cast almost exclusively in black and white, where the smell of caramel apples and wood smoke drift through the air, where one imagines it is nearly always a crisp, Autumn evening.  It is a world rife with emotion and sensation, where each tent contains an act or exhibit which not only thrills, but causes the circus-goer to touch his own feelings and reach into his own soul.

Through it all, Celia and Marco must discover the rules of their contest.  As they play, they add to the circus, a new tent appearing each time one of them makes a move in the game.  Watching over them are the games-master, Hector and A. H___.  Hector quickly becomes a phantom in an accident of magic, and Celia must tell the world he’s dead.  A. H___, we learn, casts no shadow.  The two become unreal, insubstantial, to their proteges and to the reader.  Mr. A. H___ is alternately known as the man in gray throughout the book.  This is significant, as all the elements of the Circus are either black or white.  A. H___ stands outside the Circus, beyond reality, beyond morality.  His shade of grey suggests that perhaps he is neither good nor evil, but his demeanor suggests he does not care about the fates of his game pieces.  An uncaring god, perhaps.

The Night Circus wrestles and wrestles hard with questions of self-determination.  What do you do when you’re told that the struggle only ends when you destroy the competition?  More, when there is no escape from the struggle?  There is no surrender, no compromise except for death.  There is no goal to be attained, except to act on the plans made by others before you were born.  Celia and Marco are pulled into this contest, the twins Poppet and Widget are born into the thick of it.  The other members of the Circus family are innocents, along for the ride, with no control at all over their destinies.  All four, and the young outsider, Bailey, must find the answers to these questions, not only to protect their own lives and achieve their own happiness, but to prevent collapse and destruction for the others around them.

Ultimately, the key to the story and its resolution is that some of us are alive and embracing life.  Celia and Marco, Poppet and Widget and Bailey, are all young and hopeful and alive.  They revel in what’s around them.  They take active part in it.  In contrast, Mr. A. H___ casts no shadow, and Prospero has no substance.  These two are beyond life, and their only interest is in how they can manipulate the lives of others.  Bailey and the twins are true youths, just coming to understand the world around them.  Celia and Marco are old youths, well into middle age for the time they’re living in, but still looking, feeling and acting young.  Perhaps this suggests that staying in the game, focusing on your own pursuit of happiness with concern for others, as opposed to being incapable of happiness and only wanting to manipulate others, is the path to extended youth and true vitality.

The Night Circus is fantasy.  I don’t usually care for fantasy, and yet I wholeheartedly love this story.  I think what’s different about it is the moral and ethical questions it presents.  I find most of the Tolkein-inspired fantasy (I refer to it, along with the proliferation of alternate history we’ve been deluged with of late, as “dragon porn”) dismisses all concern with what good and evil actually are.  Such works assume we know which is which, that we need never question what thoughts or actions constitute moral behavior, and that, really a good person is good because he’s good, and an evil one evil because he’s evil.  Choice is not an issue.  The extent of free will is the option to answer the call to do good against evil or not, and an old wizard or crone will tell you which is which.  You won’t figure it out for yourself.  And the old wizard/crone has no self-interest, wants nothing for him or herself.  The elder’s sole motivation is to advance the cause of evil or good.

Essentially, going back to the terms defined in A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, most fantasy is, for me, mythology without mythos.  It tells a story which may be exciting and may have the trappings of the mythical – dragons, wizards, elves, orcs… what the hell is an orc, anyway? – but it offers us no insight at all on who we are or where we fit in the universe.  It offers us little example on how we should behave or treat others, other than that we should be courageous and take a sword to evil when we see it.

The Night Circus offers, in addition to enchanting environs and delightful characters, mythos with its myth.  It does address these questions, though not in any heavy-handed way.  In some cases, it only asks them, with answers being left as an exercise for the student.  Yet it asks the questions all the same.  That is mythos, and that is what good fantasy should be.  It is not scientific.  It transcends reason.  It deals in things that have never happened, to our knowledge, and probably never will.  If they did happen, have happened, or will happen, we would not be able to supply evidence that they had, or posit a theory to explain their occurrence.  And yet the story can appeal to, even excite, the rational mind.  It complements reality and the concept of logos, it does not defy either.
Best of all, for those who must cram their reading time into their daily commute, The Night Circus is available on audio, read by the wonderful Jim Dale, narrator of the Harry Potter series.  I have not listened to it yet, but I intend to soon.  The Night Circus is a circus worth visiting and revisiting often.

REFLECTION – Immortality

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So I was thinking about Will Robinson.  Why? you may well ask.  I couldn’t sleep the other night, so I pulled up Hulu Plus on the Blu-Ray and looked for something that would soothe me and which I could fall asleep on without worrying about what I missed.  Episodes of many TV series of the sixties are so ingrained in my mind that they feel more like memories of old times than fiction.  I know my way around the Jupiter Two or the Enterprise as well as I know every inch of the house I grew up in.  So I chose to play a black and white episode of Lost in Space to lull myself to sleep.

As I watched out of increasingly heavy eyes, it occurred to me that Will Robinson, the young hero of Lost in Space, is eternally twelve years old.  Currently, that makes him the age of my youngest son.

Now I realize that Bill Mumy, the real life actor who played the part, is ten years older than I.  I’ve met Bill, his lovely wife, and their very talented daughter.  He’s a real guy who’s aging right along with the rest of us.  It must be even stranger for him to see himself so young, still cavorting amongst the mysterious caves, jungles and infinite blacknesses (read: empty soundstages) of alien worlds.

But Will is, and always will be, twelve.  When I was little, five or six, Will was, in my childish imagination, a big brother with whom I’d never fight, and with whom I could imagine sharing incredible adventures in worlds where kids could be heroes and adults were usually too jaded or too busy to notice the dangers around us and come up with ways to combat them.  I strongly identified with this kid.  Which, of course, was the point of having a kid on the show.  Young viewers would identify with him.  He had an ingenious sister, Penny, with whom young girls could identify.  (Probably there were boys who identified with Penny and girls who identified with Will, but I digress.)

When I was in high school, I still watched Lost in Space.  I kept it a secret, because high school kids were supposed to be sophisticated.  We knew it all, we’d seen it all, we were virgins only in our left ears.  We didn’t watch silly kids shows.  You have no idea what a relief it was to me when my journalism teacher confessed that he, like me, charged home after school to catch Lost in Space reruns.

At that age, I thought it would be cool to have a little brother like Will Robinson: someone brave and incredibly intelligent who would look up to me, and to whom I could give advice.  I was one hell of a wise counselor at age fifteen, I assure you.  It’s a pity I had no younger siblings to benefit from my sage guidance.  The world would be a far happier place if I had.

There weren’t many other kids in the pantheon of heroes of fantasy, science fiction and adventure.  The X-Men were young, certainly.  The Teen Titans were teens; but they were all older teens, or people in their twenties.  They owned cars and had their own apartments or independent living quarters in exotic locations.  Even to a high school student, they seemed like older role models, not peers.  Most of them didn’t even have definite ages.  I rarely thought of them, age-wise, in comparison to myself.  (Except for Power Girl, with whom I fell madly in love beginning around age twelve, and remained so until she grew prehensile breasts capable of smashing a man’s head.)

And then I became a college student and an a adult with a job, a married person, a parent… I was too busy to notice the passing years and really think about the fact that I’d aged past many of my childhood heroes.  The realization didn’t strike me until Dean Cain, an actor younger than I, was cast as Superman.  Superman was younger than me!  Impossible!  You’d think getting a full time job or having kids or owning a house would be the major rites of passage; no, for me, it was realizing I was older than Superman.  That said I must be an adult, even if I didn’t (and still don’t) feel like one.  What I hit the other night was a secondary rite of passage – realizing that I’m not only an adult, I’m now old enough to be the father of my imaginary childhood friend.  I must be, since my youngest child is his age! (And I understand his classmates have started asking, “Dude, how come your parents are so OLD?”)

It’s interesting, reflecting on how our attitudes change towards fictional characters we love as the decades pass.  They stay forever the same, and we change drastically.  When we encounter them again, do we recall lost youth?  Do we feel younger than them again, or the same age?  If you’re only as old as you feel, how is your perceived age affected by those around you, even those fictional characters around you?  (If you don’t consider fictional characters part of your daily life, you’re not engaging your brain enough.  Go back to START and skip three turns.  Read a book.  Come back to me when your imagination reboots.)

Or do we not let our perceptions be affected at all by those forever-young characters?  Do we instead resent them for still being young, or dismiss them as irrelevant?  (Because resentment should be saved for real people, and we’re all grown-up an practical now, after all.)  Worse, do we also resent the real young people in our lives for being young while we no longer are?  If our fictional friends could somehow see us changing over the years, what would they think of us?

Resentment of the immortal has been a common theme in fictional works which addressed immortality.  In Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children, the long-lived (though not yet immortal) Howard families, who achieved long life via a eugenics program, are forced to flee earth because short-lived humans hate and envy them.  The hatred stemmed, supposedly, from the belief that the Howards had a “secret,” some sort of magic elixir.  There was a way that all people could be immortal, and the greedy Howards were just keeping it to themselves.  I always wondered if their tormentors really believed this, or if they were more just driven to violence by the fact that the Howards had something they couldn’t possess.

The Howards were one of the few cases I’ve encountered where immortality simply came to humans, the fulfillment of an unrealized potential within us.  Most immortals in SF and Fantasy have come upon their long lives via some device.  Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter shed his physical body early on in his adventures, and his spirit became flesh.   So he didn’t need to die.  His spiritual brother Tarzan, along with his family, took an elixir to gain immortality, at the end of the novel Tarzan’s Quest.  The elixir was hard-won and a closely guarded secret, something in keeping with the expectations of the masses in Methuselah’s Children.

But Tarzan and John Carter got to be immortal alongside their loved ones.  They didn’t ever really have to reflect on what it was like to watch those they cared for age and die while they remained young and perfect.  Nor did the comparatively young Lazarus Long in Methuselah’s Children.  They were too busy hiding their immortality, running from those who coveted it, or just plain ignoring the short-lived.

Millennia later, though, Lazarus Long was forced to come to terms with the pain of being nigh-immortal, and we were there to live that pain with him.  In “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter,” (from Time Enough for Love) one of the most beautiful and moving stories in all of SF, Lazarus marries his foster child, Dora, upon her coming of age.  He stays with her, has children, watches her grow old, and buries her.  This happens in the blink of an eye to this man who’s almost a thousand years old at the time of the story, but it happens over the course of, for Dora, a long life.  And Dora is the love of Lazarus’s own very long life.  A thousand years later, he still isn’t over her.  He lives on, he loves others, but she never leaves him.  She never for a moment resents the fact that he will outlive him for centuries.  Some might suggest that makes her too perfect to be real.  I prefer to believe Dora is an example of someone who’s very comfortable with exactly who and what she is.

Isaac Asimov gave us a glimpse into the long-lifer-loves-short-lifer scenario from a dual perspective in Robots and Empire, a sequel to his robot detective novels The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, and a prequel to his Foundation Trilogy.  In it, Gladia Delmarre is a “spacer,” a genetically enhanced, long-lived human who once loved an earthman named Elijah Baley, now centuries dead.  Her robot companion, Daneel Olivaw, was once Baley’s partner in investigating crime.  Both had stronger emotional ties to the short-lived Baley than to any other human or robot they’d known.

Generally, mentally healthy characters in fiction are not depicted as expecting their dead loved ones to return, nor are they shown making attempts to bring them back.  That way lies madness, after all.  The bereaved parents in “The Monkey’s Paw” learn this when they wish their dead son out of his grave.  David, the young android hero of A.I., a film based on Brian Aldiss’s “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” sacrifices his own immortality in trade for spending one more day with his lost human mother.

But an immortal character I wrote about last week, Max August, does have expectations that his dead loved one will return, and they seem sane because his creator deals with immortality on two levels.  Max, an alchemist, is physically immortal as a result of his craft. He lost his wife, Valerie, years ago on New Year’s Eve; but Valerie is likewise immortal.  She’s just not physically immortal, she’s spiritually immortal.  For many All Hallows Eves, Valerie contacts Max to let him know she’s still there.  As of Max’s latest adventure, The Plain Man, Max is expecting Val’s return in the flesh, and Val is… well, we’re not sure what Val is.  We think she’s trying to come back, but the forces of evil are doing their damndest to stop her.

Fictional portrayals of immortality, show that, even at its best, immortality can be inconvenient (John Carter had to die to get there), a dark secret (for Tarzan), heart-wrenching (for Lazarus) something we’re not quite sure we’re happy we possess (for Daneel and Gladia), or fraught with peril, as it is for Max.  Indeed, Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek, and Barnabas and Quentin Collins in Dark Shadows were seen to beg to be rid of immortality.

Fiction tells us that immortality is a pain in the ass.

Small wonder then, that people such as I who grow attached to our fictional characters are given pause when we ponder their immortal nature.  Fictional characters are our sounding boards, our mirrors.  They give us a framework within which to figure out how the hell to live our real lives.  In this case, however, they make us uncomfortable, as we realize that they will be here long after we are no longer available to speak to the living and tell them our stories.  We wonder, will we have their power to transcend death as memories, as fictional characters ourselves?

I think, though, that our immortal companions, the fictional ones, the myths, serve a purpose even in this capacity.  They can, if we let them, remind us that youth doesn’t have to go away, that the best in us doesn’t have to age.  Indeed, it can go on forever.  So even though we look at them differently from year to year, I think spending a little time with ageless childhood friends can be healthy.  It allows us to, as Ellen Degeneres said in a stand up routine a few years ago, “play with our inner child.”  She pointed out that, if we didn’t, our inner child could be just as spiteful and vindictive as any other child who’s being ignored.

Then, perhaps, immortality can finally give us perspective, as it did David Bowman and Hal 9000 in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010.

REVIEW – Steve Englehart’s Max August in The Plain Man

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Steve Englehart’s work is special to me.  I discovered him (indirectly) at the tender age of nine at the school book fair.  I went to a small private school with about a dozen other kids in my fourth grade class.  You’d think our book fairs would have been less spectacular than the ones in public school, but they were a hundred times more magical.  Perhaps it was the library, a parlor in an Eighteenth Century mansion and one of my favorite places on earth when I was little.  (I visited recently and saw that it had been gutted and turned into another classroom.  How traumatic to see your childhood refuge come to such a fate!)  Perhaps it was the lack of hovering adults, which my public school book fairs had possessed in abundance, telling me the books I wanted were too old for me, too focused on the sciences, too whatever. Whatever it was, the small, private school book fair was an event to me, and it was there, in 1974, that I found a Marvel Comics calendar featuring pictures of most of their now-iconic characters.  I had just started reading comic books, and I knew none of these colorful personages save Spider-Man, who after all had his own cartoon still running on weekday mornings.   Continue reading →