Review – The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

I wrote this article during a delightful weekend at Mysticon 2012 in Roanoke, VA.  I’d like to publicly thank the MystiCon committee and staff for allowing me to be part of a fantastic convention.  I was on a handful of panels which were well-attended and generated some fascinating discussion, and I met some great people.  If you have a chance to check this one out in 2013, I’d recommend you do so.  Now on to the review…

“And I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott fight a triffid that spits poison und kills…”

I forget if Janette Scott actually fought triffids, or if she just stood in the lighthouse and screamed as they encroached.  I’ve tried to forget as much as I can about that movie.  Sadly, it’s the movie that caused John Wyndham’s excellent book to be included in the above-quoted song, “Science Fiction Double Feature,” a paean to shlock SciFi of the Fifties and Sixties which serves as the overture to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Double-sadly, it’s that reference which is all a lot of modern audiences know of the triffids.

“Hailed as the greatest science fiction masterpiece of our time,” says the cover of the 1969 Fawcett Crest paperback edition in my personal library.  I don’t know about that, but it is a much better book than I was expecting it to be.  Wyndham, also known for The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed a couple of times as The Village of the Damned, is a fairly minor deity in the science fiction pantheon.  The fact that one of the largest paperback distributors of the time would make that claim, even given the hyperbolic nature of book cover copy, suggests that this book got a few people’s attention.

It would have been nice if it hadn’t gotten the producer of the 1963 film’s attention, but we can’t have everything.  The film probably pulled a few more people to the book.  But the film was so godawful, introducing elements which had nothing to do with the original story, giving plot details which directly contradicted the novel, all in the name of making a monster-of-the-week offering with no heart or soul, that I fear it also causes the novel to be dismissed as just a Sixties monster tale.  It’s anything but.  If you’re a fan of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, in either TV series or graphic novel format, you should give The Day of the Triffids a try.  You’ll find a lot of the roots of the post-apocalyptic tales that currently so enthrall us in the form of Zombie stories.

It begins so blithely that it’s almost ridiculous. “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”  It such an English sentiment, and it seems to belong at the lead of a story about the daughter of a Lord who lives in a boarding school.”  The tongue-in-cheek, pastoral tone doesn’t last.  Like Rick in The Walking Dead and Cillian Murphy’s character in 28 Days Later, Bill Masen awakes in a hospital to find out that the world has ended, at least, he qualifies, the world as he has known it for three decades.  The reason a Wednesday sounds like a Sunday is not the Bill is fanciful and silly, but because Sunday is the only day that the main road outside his hospital is usually empty of noisy traffic.  This, as well as the failure of his nurse to make her morning visit to him precisely at 7:03 as is her unfailing habit, are his first clues that all is not well.

Masen learns that, while he slept Tuesday night, his eyes bandaged, the world went blind.  He happened to be in the hospital because of a work-related injury: Masen is a triffid farmer, or perhaps a triffid keeper.  Triffids, we quickly learn, are a new plant mutation.  They are tall, ambulatory, apparently capable of communicating… and they’re carnivorous.  They use a whip-like appendage to inject venom into their prey and then feast on its dead flesh.  No one knows where they came from.  I always assumed, because I’d seen about five minutes of the 1960s film, that they came from outer space.  This idea is dismissed by Masen, who considers them a product of bioengineering, and possibly even a by-product of Soviet experiments.  Whenceever they came (is “whenceever” a word?  My spell check doesn’t think so, but its vocabulary is limited.  I think it went to public school before No Child Left Behind came along to guarantee quality…), the triffids are ingrained into human society by the time the story begins.  They are “docked” and kept as decorative plants.  They are farmed like cattle on ranches, harvested for the useful oils their bodies produce.

The triffids had nothing to do with the sudden plague of blindness, as far as anyone knows.  It was caused by a striking, green meteor shower of unknown origins.  Its effect of leaving the majority of the population crippled by loss of sight, however, leaves no one to care for the formerly tamed, or at least confined, triffids.  The docked plants, able to regrow their venomous appendages if they are not regularly pruned, together with their no-longer supervised free-range brethren, begin to literally take over the world.  A scenes of Masen and his cohorts, holed up in country houses, fending off attacks by a swarm of the plants, could be neatly dropped into any zombie apocalypse story, and, indeed, probably has been.  Also, like Kirkman’s Walking Dead heroes, they raid abandoned cities for supplies, dodging walking vegetables and desperate, predatory humans all the way.

If all of this sounds a bit like the worst excesses of Lost in Space (and conjures up pictures of poor Stanley Adams in a giant carrot suit), then I’m not doing it justice.  The existence of walking, flesh eating plants as a threat to the protagonists does nothing to make the tone of the story ridiculous, to reduce the horror, or to mitigate Wyndham’s thought provoking depictions of human nature at its worst. He shows humanity descending almost immediately to slavery, as the blind majority kidnaps the sighted, including Masen and the woman he’s met and fallen in love with, and literally chains them to gangs of blind victims.  These captives, like seeing eye dogs, are to lead their charges through the deserted streets of a fallen civilization, finding them food and shelter.

Puritanism is ridiculed, and the ephemeral nature of social mores touched upon.  A sighted leader named Beadley, one of an enclave Masen and his love Joella encounter while searching London, proposes to found a colony of the seeing.  He wants to be self-sustaining, and he wants the women to have as many babies as possible, to build the population.  Consequently, the men will have several wives, which only makes sense if population growth is your goal and men are scarce.  A man doesn’t need nine months to do his part in baby-making, after all.  And Wyndham is careful to establish that there’s no belief that sightless people would have sightless babies.  Only that the few sighted people there are will have an easier time building a colony, and it needs children to have a future.  Of course, there’s a lot of protest against this idea.

“It will not be easy; old prejudices die hard.  The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept; so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.”

This kind of analysis, attack, even, on traditional morality is one of the mainstays of traditional science fiction.  It’s what makes a space opera, a monster story, a shoot-em-up into a thought-provoking work of fiction.  It’s what makes a work that the pedestrian would label “SciFi” into real speculative fiction.  Here I’m talking about written science fiction.  Television has yet to really accomplish this feat.  The most we’ve seen is an attempt to fool the viewer into believing that a kind of cowardly political correctness is a fierce indictment of prejudice or chauvinism.  Television is always years behind print media in addressing issues.  Perhaps that’s because stupid people don’t read, and the stupid are the loudest proponents of ideas and attitude which we need to shed.  Still, how long after Brown v. Board of Education was it before we saw a condemnation of racial discrimination on a popular TV show?  And sure, there are gay characters on TV now, but the almighty Star Trek managed to creep (zombie-like) through five iterations and never made a splash in that pond.  (Or did Enterprise do so?  I gave up when I realized the dog was the smartest character.  I don’t hate Star Trek, BTW.  I just think all those sequels failed to live up to the potential it had as a TV series in the Sixties or a movie series in the Eighties.)

I shan’t ruin your enjoyment of The Day of the Triffids by giving you a complete plot summary.  Those are available out there anyway, if you want one.  But I hope you’ll read or listen to this classic of the genre, and enjoy it as much as I did.  I will point out that, unlike your standard monster-of-the-week story (and unlike the 1963 film) the novel does not resolve the problem of the triffids, nor of the plague of blindness, nor of the subsequent plague which begins killing the population.  It leaves Masen and his comrades doing what we all do – struggling to survive in a world where non-self-aware vegetables want to consume us for sustenance, and our more predatory brethren want to press us into service to meet their needs.

Heh.  You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you?

Reflection: Farpoint 2012

No review this week.  My brain is simply too fried to evaluate.  What I’ll write about instead is the thing that fried my brain, that thing being an event called Farpoint 2012.  Farpoint is a regional science fiction media convention.  “Regional” because it primarily draws its attendance from Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic area, although it occasionally pulls in members from as far away as Texas, California, Canada or even Germany.  It’s not a Dragon*Con or a San Diego ComicCon, which pull heavily from all over the U.S. and even the world.  It’s smaller, more laid back, and built to stay that way.

“Science fiction media” because those attendees come to Farpoint to celebrate the fandom which develops around TV shows and movies rooted in speculative fiction, fantasy and the supernatural.  We used to call them “Star Trek Conventions,” but that’s far too narrow a description for what Farpoint and many gatherings of its kind have become.

This was our nineteenth Farpoint.  I’ve been involved in some capacity for all of them.  This year I was co-operations manager with my wife Renee.  I think we worked a bit harder on the planning and execution that we intended or wanted to, but the result was a successful event that everyone seemed to enjoy.  Our attendance numbers aren’t in, but they hovered somewhere around 700 people.  That’s a good, healthy turnout for this convention.  A lot of well-intentioned friends frequently approach me with sentences that open, “You know, you could pull in a lot more people and make a lot more money if you…”  And I’m sure all the ideas which finish those sentences are wonderful.  The thing is, making more money would be nice, but growing much bigger isn’t really Farpoint’s goal.  Farpoint’s goal is to maximize people’s enjoyment, and part of the way it does it is by not being over-crowded.

It was nice, however, to see the convention reaching its peak attendance earlier.  Friday night the registration desk was mobbed with people picking up their pre-purchased memberships, and our opening ceremonies and Friday social were the best attended they’ve ever been.  I got the impression that people were just more excited to get to the con this year, resulting in them taking time off work and leaving earlier.  It was a nice atmosphere, and it made for an appreciative audience for the evening’s entertainment.  Gentleman Jim made a first-time appearance with us, performing (very well!) a mix of songs, including tributes to our celebrity guests for the weekend.  We presented the Volker-McChesney Award for service to fandom to a dear friend, Melissa James, who’s an integral part of Shore Leave, a summertime event similar to Farpoint.  We auctioned off donated items to raise funds for the Julien Fleming Fund and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and then my own Prometheus Radio Theatre hosted a variety show of music and comedy.

The Boogie Knights, Jonah Knight and Insane Ian provided the music, and I hope I’m not delusional when I say Prometheus provided the comedy.  My friends Renfield and June offered us a short adventure in the lives of two space-based hired guns and their trusty robot, and then we presented an episode of Waste of Space, a sitcom about evil geniuses that my son Ethan and I developed.  Kate Vernon from Battlestar Galactica and Kristen Bauer from True Blood were out special guests.  Sadly, Kate’s onscreen husband, Michael Hogan, missed his connecting flight and couldn’t be in the play, but the audience and the cast still had a blast.  Having your celebrity guest star (Kristen) miss a cue and tell the audience it’s because she’s having such a good time listening to you is not only funny, it’s very good for the egos of part-time actors.  I hope to have that show posted soon on the Prometheus Radio Theatre podcast feed.

While the Pack Ratz oversaw their annual Karaoke event, Vic’s Place, I threw a launch party for my latest book, Unfriendly Persuasion.  I sold a case of books, which doesn’t suck.  I understand our vendors in the dealers room also had a pretty successful evening of sales.  I know at least one said she’d made back the cost of her trip that first night.

Saturday I sat on four panels on New Media and authoring topics.  All were well-attended, which I was happy to see, as I was beginning to fear Farpoint needed to offer less programming.  The most successful panel seemed to be a discussion on self-publishing which included Aaron Rosenberg, Glenn Hauman and Marianne Petrino-Schaad, with some assists by Don Sakers.  We couldn’t possibly give a complete primer on how to self-publish a book in an hour (especially since we’re authors, and mostly want to talk about ourselves!) but we answered a lot of great questions from the audience, and I think we hit the high points.

Michael Hogan had arrived safely late Friday night, so all of our guest Q & A sessions and autographs went as expected.  More and more lately, our Farpoint actor guests are electing to make extra money by signing autographs and selling pictures throughout the day.  That means that there’s no scheduled “autograph session,” and thus no long lines.  It seems to be a pretty good system.
Saturday night’s cornerstone is always the Masquerade, where our costumers put together often screamingly funny presentations to feature their handiwork.  Sometimes there are duds, but not often.  These people are serious about their costuming, and serious about being funny.  I spent the time staffing the Con Hospitality Suite, and I’m told I missed one of the best shows in years.  Fortunately, there’s video.  I must see the Green Lantern entry put together by Don Sakers, Renfield and June and my son Ethan.

At Masqeurade half-time, Marty Gear auctioned off a meet-and-greet session with the lovely Kristen Bauer, again to benefit our charities.  Now Marty is our elder statesman.  His fandom career began in 1953 at WorldCon, where, just fifteen, he was taken under the wing of E.E. “Doc” Smith, and got to watch the Hugo Award ceremony from the balcony with John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Sprague DeCamp and Isass Asimov.  Marty impresses the hell out of all of us.  He also loves vampires, has a very large library of bad vampire jokes, and can’t resist a pretty face.  The fact that Kristen’s pretty face so often is seen complete with fangs made Marty very enthusiastic about this meet and greet opportunity, as did his ceaseless devotion to raising money for our charities.  So Marty opened the bidding at a nice high figure himself, then waited.  Apparently, the audience, probably hit by our still-tough economy, didn’t bite.  So Marty dug into his supply of vampire jokes and decided to outlast them.  A frenzy erupted.  Audience members began passing a box to collect a matching donation.  Rumor has it Peter David threw his platinum card at the stage.  Kristen, meanwhile, made a grand performance, trying to figure out a way to hang herself from the chandelier to end her suffering.  The masquerade stage hands, dressed, traditionally, as ninjas, supplied a ladder.  Marty got his meet and greet, and our charities split over $700 for his and Kristen’s efforts.  (And that was only one of the items sold!)

Saturday ended with a Ten Forward dance, deejayed by the Pack Ratz.  They do a fantastic job picking the music mix, and the dance floor was packed.  I understand my son Christian impressed the crowd with his moves.  He certainly doesn’t get them from me!  Ten Forward is really loud, and I’m not really young anymore.  I spent a good deal of it sitting in another room, talking to Nobilis and Michael Jan Friedman about the merits of various publishing strategies.

Sunday is our most laid back day.  More Q & A, more autographs, more panels.  Attendance is usually a little less.  I was very happy to see more than a dozen podcasters show up for our podcasting roundtable, however.  New to our company were Jay Smith and Keith R.A. DeCandido, and we had some very good discussion about the changes the last year has brought to our endeavors.  Lauretta from Constellation Books was kind enough to add all of the Firebringer Press titles to her selection.  Constellation is an excellent, independent book store in Reisterstown, and Lauretta has begun working the local conventions.

We end every convention with a dead dog party, the name describing the state of the committee.  After the attendees have gone home, the committee, staff and some of the guests gather to eat, (the first time in three days some of us have done that sitting down!) wind down, and deconstruct the con.  There wasn’t actually a lot to deconstruct this year.  We talked about next year’s 20th anniversary event, and Peter David, T.A. Chafin and Bob Greenberger made plans for their next “Mystery Trekkie Theatre,” to be presented at Shore Leave.  I finished the evening chatting with my cousin Dave, Michael Hogan and two very nice young ladies, Alicia and Stephanie, who were big BSG fans and had flown in to see him.  (One also joined our staff, ably assisting with the huge amount of video that must be shot throughout the weekend.)

Not an objective review by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s my event, after all.  It was a weekend well-spent, however, if it did distract me a bit from being able to do an actual review this week.  This coming weekend, I’ll be attending MystiCon in Roanoake as an author/podcaster guest.  They’ve got me scheduled for quite a few panels, and I’m looking forward to it.  Let’s hope I can maintain my energy level for one more weekend of cons!

REVIEW – “The Martian” by Ray Bradbury

MCToday I want to comment on a story from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.  This novel was assembled largely from previously published short stories, and “The Martian” is no exception.  It was published in Super Science Stories in November, 1949, a year before the serial novel in which it was included would be released in the U.S.
SPOILER WARNING! If you haven’t read this story and want to, seek it out now.  It’s a short piece, and my discussion necessitates that I reveal the ending.This tale of a Martian shapeshifter has always had a certain resonance for me.  Particularly as I’m coming to realize that, despite my often very-active social life, I’m really very much an introvert, this story of a creature profoundly influenced and affected by the emotions of those around it strikes a responsive chord.  Introverts, I’ve learned, are not less in tune with the people around them than others.  They’re usually more in tune.  They have stronger empathy, are more easily able to see themselves in someone else’s shoes.  Therein lies the rub.  Introverts are more affected by the emotions of those around them, so they expend more energy on social interaction.  In short, as I believe I’ve seen on a T-Shirt describing what it is to be an introvert, “I don’t hate people.  I just find them exhausting!”But “The Martian” is more than an apt description of what it is to be an introvert; I think it’s also a parable about individual identity, our interdependence upon each other, and the damage that can be done to us by other people forcing their expectations upon us.  I don’t know much about Mr. Bradbury’s politics, nor do I presume to pigeonhole them based on a 63-year-old short story; but I see this story addressing some of the same questions Ayn Rand addressed in her works: “Who owns my life?”  “Do I owe others my time, my talents or my labor?”  “Should I live for others?”

Ray Bradbury, of course, is less controversial than Ayn Rand.  He offers us a short work which teases at these questions and explores some possible consequences of answers to them, whereas the author of Atlas Shrugged has given us several works which not only explore these topic explicitly, but offer her own very detailed answers to the questions above.

Lafe and Anna LaFarge are an elderly couple, by the standards of 1949, and no doubt in the eyes of an author then not yet 30.  He is 55 and she is 60.  They have come to Mars as colonists to retire.  As Anna notes, “We came here to enjoy our old age in peace.”  The LaFarges are happy together, but they have survived a loss: their young son, Tom, died many years ago of Pneumonia.  Lafe still thinks of him and misses visiting his grave every Sunday on Earth, but Anna prefers to let the dead lie and try to move on.  Anna is clearly someone who accepts life as it comes, doesn’t ask too many questions, and finds joy in the moment.

The stMC2ory is set in the far-off year 2005 (2036, according to later re-issues of the book.)  In 2012, it’s hard to imagine that we’re anywhere near building colonies on Mars and allowing private citizens to privately purchase spacecraft and homestead on our nearest neighboring planet.  It’s rather sad to realize that, in 1949, it wasn’t hard to imagine.  Many in the United States had more optimism then about the wonders technology would bring than we do now.  They expected that the decades ahead would bring rapid change and an ever-accelerating race to the stars.  It didn’t happen, and it looks as though it’s a long way off.  Now though, we have some cause for optimism about the changes information technology will bring, perhaps helping to deliver freedom in place on this world where it’s never been enjoyed before.  So perhaps what happened in a half-century is even more wonderful than what space enthusiasts hoped for back then.

Still, the LaFarges are pioneers of a sort, who apparently bought their own transportation: “In the distance, through the window, they saw rain gleaming on the sides of the rocket which had brought them from Earth.”  I don’t imagine the rocket would be sitting in view of their house unless they owned it.  Perhaps Bradbury only meant to imply that they could see the spaceport from their house, and the rocket was on the launch pad, as the Mayflower might have been docked where the Pilgrims could see it.  But I prefer the idea of individually owned rockets, the metaphor of rockets as covered wagons.

In that same rain which casts a sheen on their rocket, Lafe, summoned from his bed by a strange, far-off whistling, sees the figure of a boy in the yard of their canal-side home.  It’s dark.  He can’t see well, but the figure looks like Tom.  He tells Anna, who cries out to the spectral form to go away.  She wants no part of it.  She begs her husband to return to bed and lock the door.  Instead, he calls to the figure that the door will be left open all night, and their visitor is welcome to warm himself by the hearth under fur rugs.

The next morning, Lafe is brought up short by the appearance in his living room of his 14-year-old son, happily carrying in bath water from the canal and commenting on what a glorious day it is.  Lafe’s questions are diverted by the appearance of Anna, who accepts their once-again three-person family unit as if no death had ever occurred.  Indeed, when Lafe questions her, she denies any knowledge of Tom’s illness or death.

Lafe deduces immediately that this person is a Martian, one of a race which was decimated not long ago by Earth-born pathogens accidentally spread by the first exploratory Earth expMC3editions to Mars.  He knows that surviving Martians are rare, and, when they appear, they often appear as humans.  Lafe suggests to the boy that, if he were truly Tom, he would be far older than the fourteen years he claims.  Tom’s reaction speaks to his motivation in coming to the LaFarges: he covers his face with his hands, as though trying to prevent it from changing (my inference) and says “Don’t doubt, please don’t doubt me!”  He wants to be accepted.  He doesn’t want the illusion to shatter.  Pained by the questions his “father” is asking, Tom leaves the house at a run.

When he returns, Tom speaks of almost being trapped and unable to ever return.  He says he can’t explain what happened, doesn’t actually understand it, and won’t talk about it.  Lafe promises him no questions will be asked.  Lafe learns via neighborhood gossip what happened:  Tom came near the tin shack of Nomland, a recluse.  Nomland saw him not as a young boy, but as a man he, Nomland, had murdered on Earth.  Nomland had fled to Mars to escape prosecution.  Desperately frightened by the sudden resurrection of his victim, Nomland sought protection from local police, was refused, and finally committed suicide.

This encounMC4ter demonstrates that the Martian’s “ability” is not an ability at all.  It’s simply a characteristic of his being.  When he comes near, humans see him as whomever it is they have lost and have strong, unresolved emotional attachments to.  It’s not just people they want to see, for it’s evident that Nomland didn’t want to see his victim.  One assumes, however, that a victim is never far from a murderer’s thoughts, if he has anything resembling remorse in him.  It’s also evident that Tom, the Martian, didn’t want to fulfill the role of resurrected victim.  It was thrust on him by accident.  Yet the reader knows he practically courted the LaFarges, for he approached them, and he admits he “sang” to them the night he appeared, in order to make it easier for them to accept him as their son.  Tom’s behavior strongly suggests that he wanted to live among humans, that he picked the LaFarges deliberately, and that he wants to go on being their son.

When Anna proposes a family evening on the town, Tom makes it clear that he doesn’t want to be out in society.  The LaFarges are enough for him.  He’s afraid to be out among people.  Lafe, knowing this is a Martian and already knowing that he can be seen by others as someone other than Tom, tries to shoot down the idea of an outing, but Anna is adamant.  The result of the trip is as expected.  Everyone who sees the Martian sees a lost loved one or a sought-after fugitive: a husband who deserted his wife, an escaped convict, the town mayor.

Lafe reflects on the motives of this strange creature:  “Who is this… in need of love as much as we?  Who is he and what is he that, out of loneliness, comes into the alien camp and assumes the voice and face of memory and stands among us, accepted and happy at last?”  The happiness is not to last.  Separated only briefly from the LaFarges, the Martian is spied by a couple whose daughter recently drowned in the canal.  They bundle the “girl” off to their home.  Lafe hears of this, and goes to retrieve Tom;  but Tom is now Lavinia, and says he’s lost to the LaFarges.  The feelings in this new house are too strong.  When Lafe appeals to the Martian to remember that he was Tom, the poor creature makes perhaps the saddest statement I can imagine anyone making: “I’m not anyone.  I’m just myself.”

Stop and consider identity.  It’s who you are.  It’s all you know.  You can know a lot of people, become familiar with them, accept that they have the same basic emotions and needs that you do, and that you must accord them equal respect.  You can devote your life to serving others and try to make the world a better place after you’ve left it, so strong can be your tie to your fellow humans.  But all you know is you!

MC5Your identity is the filter through which you experience everything.  You can’t be certain, not absolutely certain, that anything you see, hear or feel is objective reality.  You could be dreaming.  You could be hallucinating.  You could be on a table somewhere, drugged out of your mind.  All you really know is that you are you.  To say that that person, the only person you really know, is “no one,” is to relinquish all claim on sanity.

But, whatever this poor creature’s previous history, that’s where he is when he encounters the LaFarges and the other humans.  He seeks to adopt an identity from their memories.  Whatever he – or it – was in the past is no longer important to him.  At least, it’s not important enough for him to hold onto it if the cost of maintaining it is loneliness.

It’s an interesting question: what are we without others?  “No man is an island,” we’re often told.  We are social creatures.  We need others to take care of us when we’re young, to help us when we’re in trouble, to be an audience for the work of performance art that is our life, to – if you’ll pardon the religious sentiment – share with us their own spark of the divine fire.  Without others, our life couldn’t be what it is for us right now; and, I suppose, none of us can know what our loneliness might drive us to if all the others we’d ever known were suddenly gone.

But Bradbury’s story touches on the cost to the individual of trading in his identity to buy some relief from loneliness.  The Martian whom we first met as Tom is finally destroyed, reduced to nothingness as he is overwhelmed by a crowd of humans, all of whom want him to be that person that they seek.  “He was melting wax shaping to their minds,” says Bradbury, and then he is no more.

The demands of others, the roles they want us to play for their benefit, indeed can destroy us.  Often, not understanding what they’re doing or not caring, they overtax us, taking, taking what it is they want, forgetting that we have our own identity, separate from the role they want us to play, and that it may not be able to survive if we abandon ourselves to the part.

Nor is it only in fulfilling the wants of others that we may lose ourselves.  Nomland saw what he was afraid of, not what he directly wanted.   (Unless, perhaps, he secretly wanted an end to guilt and an end to hiding from justice, and so saw the person who could drive him to end his misery.)  There’s a need in many humans to have an enemy, a nemesis; to have someone at whom we can be good and pissed; to have someone to blame when things go wrong.  Sometimes we force someone into that role, though they may have no idea who we are or why we’ve made them our enemy.   We need someone to take the rap for all the evil in our lives.

martian-chroniclesWhen he adapted this story for the 1980 television mini-series, The Martian Chronicles, Richard Matheson took the projection of human fears, desires and need for someone to blame up a level: he had the Martian appear to a Catholic priest as Jesus himself, the crucified Messiah.  Atheist Ayn Rand would have (or might have been, as she was living when it aired) disgusted by the insertion of this religious image, and many Christians were offended.  I must ask, however, what is Jesus but the ultimate scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb?  What more appropriate symbol is there of the cost of taking on the sins, the needs and the problems of others?  Of course, most believers consider Jesus divine, and so he is better equipped to carry such a burden than is a mere human, or Martian.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, a certain green but non-Martian alien once told us.  Imagine what happens when the needs of the many are dropped right on the head of the one.  Bradbury explored this idea, and it didn’t make for a pretty picture.  All those needs, all that weight, crushed the one.  It bears consideration for us all, introvert or extrovert: what are you willing to trade – what are you trading – to enjoy the society of others?

Bradbury_SilverI re-read this story in a UK hardcover edition I happened to find in a now-defunct bookstore in Savage, MD.  In England, the book was called The Silver Locusts.  It includes a story, “The Fire Balloons,” which did not appear in the American edition, but omits “Usher II,” a particular favorite of mine. 

REVIEW – Sensation Comics #1 – The Perfect Golden Age Comic Book

sensationbronzeSo this review seems particularly retro.  It’s one thing to review a book which came out during or right after World War II.  Books tend to stay in print for decades, if they’re deemed worthy.  But a ten-cent comic book from 1942?  70 years after-the-fact may seem a bit late to be telling you how great it was, especially since getting hold of a copy is a little more expensive, comparatively, than securing a copy of The Humanoids or Friday.  Looking on eBay just now, I see that an original copy runs five figures – the bid is up to $11,614 in one auction, and there’s a “buy it now” copy priced at $17,252.  A reprint costs roughly $20 – It’s only been reprinted twice, to my knowledge – or you can pay about $50 and get just the Wonder Woman lead story if you pick up the first volume of the Wonder Woman Archives.  But getting just the Wonder Woman story would be missing the point.  Sensation Comics #1 represents the Golden Age of Super-Hero comics hitting its stride.  It marks the moment when the writers, editors and artists “got it.” and put together a product that absolutely captured the spirit of its time.  A close contender would be All-Star Comics #3, which introduced the Justice Society of America.  But it’s only a close contender.  I shall explain why I think so as I go.
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