Welcome to 2021! And, Review: The Infinite and the Divine

Welcome to 2021! And we are definitely off to a running start, at least here in the USA. Granted, the “running” has included Congress running from a mob, our president running from responsibility, and our nation running from the consequences of its actions; but, here we are!

But let’s put that aside for a second. This isn’t a political blog. I do occasionally make reference to what’s going on in the political sphere, but not as a topic of my posts. (Don’t hold me too tightly to that; I may have made a political post before–I’m not going back to check. It’s not my general plan, though.) We’re here, as always, to talk writing, reading, and books!

So, how did 2020 end for you? I mentioned a few weeks ago that I didn’t make my own goals for the year. I suppose, with the Coronavirus pandemic turning all our lives upside down, not many of us did. Or maybe you found the time to meet one, but everything else fell by the wayside. That’s okay. Hard times are, by definition, hard; and if you simply survived to this point, you did it. You made it through (as much as we are through, anyway). That’s all the victory we require right now–everything else is grace.

Personally, I didn’t make my writing goal for the year. It was a nebulous goal, I admit; I wanted to make significant progress on a few projects. I fell short of that goal–I finished a few chapters of The Courier’s Tale, wrote one short story (Doctor Who-themed, not posted here), and did a fair bit of behind-the-scenes work. That ain’t “nothin'”, so to speak, but it’s not nearly where I planned to be. Given the circumstances, I’ll take it. This year, I’m refining that goal a little, but it’s still fairly nebulous; I still want to make considerable progress on The Courier’s Tale, and I’m working toward another project that I’ve had on the back burner for awhile. We’ll see if any of it pans out, given that we’re not out of the woods yet with regard to the pandemic and our bizarre political situation. We’re still in “go easy on yourself” mode here!

Nor did I make my reading goal. I set my initial goal last year at a rather ambitious 100 books for the year; halfway through the year, I knew the situation was hopeless, and reduced it to the 52 books that I had set as the previous year’s goal. I fell short, at 38 of 52. I’ve been tracking long enough now to notice a pattern; I seem to succeed at my goal every other year. Here’s hoping that’s good news for 2021! Having learned my lesson, I’m starting out with a goal of 52 for this year again. I also know that I tend to slack off in the busy fall and early winter–that is, the last quarter of the year–and so I’m trying to front load the year by knocking out as many books as possible here in January and February. We’re almost two weeks into the year as I type this, and so far I’ve finished four books (Goodreads tells me that puts me three books ahead of schedule).

This year I’m doing a new thing for me: Adding in audiobooks. I’ve never been much of an audiobook reader; most of my reading has been in ebook form the past several years, with occasional print books thrown in. I’ve warmed up to the idea, though; and it’s an easy way to have two books going at once. Time that I can devote solely to reading will go to print or ebooks, and I can listen to audiobooks while driving, cooking, etc. I realize this is nothing revolutionary for most people, but it’s new territory for me.

I also want to review what I read this year. I’ve always posted reviews of some of the books I read. Generally I post according to certain series or lists I’ve tried to finish–over here I’m working through The Great Reddit Reading List, and the Star Wars Expanded Universe (aka Star Wars Legends), and over on The Time Lord Archives I review various Doctor Who novels. So this goal isn’t revolutionary either; the only difference is that I want to pick up the books I read that don’t fall into those categories. I believe this will help me stick to my goal, and may push you to stick to yours as well. The reviews may not be in-depth or long (ha, who am I kidding??), but I hope to include them all here.

To that end, here’s my initial review, of Robert Rath’s Warhammer 40000 Necrons novel, The Infinite and the Divine, my first read of the year!

I have not been a Warhammer 40000 fan for long. I had been seeing incidental Reddit posts about this fictional universe for some time before, in 2019, I finally built up enough interest to join one of the discussion subreddits about it. Finally, in March 2019 (which, in terms of my reading, really isn’t long ago at all), I picked up my first novel, Guy Haley’s *Death of Integrity*. I can’t recommend that book enough for 40K noobs like me; it’s a great intro to the Space Marines, the general setting, and even the deeper lore and history, and it’s as action-packed as one could ever want. I was quickly distracted, though, by what is arguably THE set piece of the 40K universe: the Horus Heresy. This historical series actually takes place in what is informally termed “Warhammer 30K”, ten thousand years prior to the “present day” of the series; it paints a far different world from the grimdark setting we all knew and loved–and then smashes it up and grinds it to powder, and uses the powder to paint said grimdark setting. It’s all very dramatic, very exciting, and deadly serious (well, serious for Warhammer anyway–a series which is notorious for practically parodying itself). That’s where I’ve been since then; I’m several books into the Heresy, and it will likely show up again this year.

And THEN, there’s *The Infinite and the Divine*.

Have I mentioned everything so far has been serious? Well, throw that out, because *The Infinite and the Divine* is hilarious. It’s the first (and only, so far) 40K novel I’ve seen that is deliberately comedic. Necrons, for the unaware, are a race in 40K that, many millennia ago, made a Faustian bargain for immortality, trading their physical forms for replaceable robotic bodies, but in the process losing their souls. The bulk of the race remains in hibernation, but are on the verge of waking up and crusading to reclaim their place in the universe from the other major races. “Verge” is a relative term when you’re millions of years old; accordingly, this book takes place over more than ten thousand years.

It’s the story of two rival Necrons: the archivist Trazyn the Infinite, and the chronomancer Orikan the Diviner. Over the centuries, these two powerful Necrons fight a private war for the fate of an artifact called the Astrarium Mysterios, which proves to lead to an even greater–and much more dangerous–piece of history. I won’t spoil it; the end of the quest has great implications for the Necrons and their place in the 40K universe.

But the details of the plot are not the selling point here. The rivalry between the two protagonists–one can hardly call either the antagonist; they’re equally good and bad–is the key. Trazyn and Orikan spend literal centuries sniping at each other, taking more potshots at each other’s egos than at their bodies. Since starting the book, I’ve often said they are the Statler and Waldorf of 40K; they insult each other constantly, but absolutely deserve each other as well (I’d be tempted to call them soulmates, if Necrons had souls). Together, they create a wonderfully funny commentary on, well, everything else in 40K, from the Aeldari to the C’Tan to the upstart Imperium of Mankind. It’s entertaining to imagine these strong, immortal bodies, housing the essence of two old men who just can’t let things go; the book even goes so far as to say that, were they still in their mortal bodies, their physical combat would be laughable. When the Necron leaders are finally forced to step in and moderate their fight, the duo just double down; rather than shooting at each other, they make obscene gestures across the courtroom (made funnier by the fact that they haven’t had context for such gestures in millions of years) and conspire to hide their rivalry from their watchers while still stabbing each other in the back.

The book pokes fun at everything. There’s a Necron play that lasts for literal years, poking fun at their long lives and slow paces. There’s Trazyn’s collection of, well, everything, including living samples of other societies (where else would you find a space marine in a museum display??). There’s Orikan’s habit of winding back time to make the courtroom drama play out in his favor–with hilariously disastrous results.

In the end, there are no winners and no losers here…except us, the audience. I love Warhammer for what it is–grimdark (it literally coined the term, I believe), serious, overpowered, action-packed. But it’s wonderful to take a step back, get a little perspective, and just laugh at the absurdity of it all. It is absurd, after all–how could a universe like this be anything but? It’s a credit to the authors that they can take it seriously as they do; but it’s a credit to Robert Rath to round things out with this great comedy. If you’re a 40K fan, and looking for some levity, you should check it out.

Happy reading!

TGRRL: Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

“How did we get here?”

The question is, perhaps, the most common question in all of the human experience, right up there with “Who am I?” and “Where am I going?” It sounds simple enough on the surface: We want to know what led us to this point in history and in our own lives. We ask it out of curiosity, and out of self-interest, and sometimes even out of self-preservation–that is, we want to learn from the past so that we aren’t doomed to repeat it. As one of my favorite video games (Fallout: New Vegas, which you can find featured elsewhere on this site!) puts it, “Who are you, that do not know your own history?”

First edition cover, as far as I can tell (confirmation seems to be in short supply). Interestingly, this cover features the original subtitle of the book, A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years. Later editions would change the subtitle.

But, these days it’s become something of a loaded question. We live in an era which has rightly begun to focus heavily on the traditional injustices of our societies; and that means that asking “how did we get here?” means facing some uncomfortable truths. It’s those truths–on the level of the interactions between ethnic groups and nations–that Jared Diamond, UCLA professor of geography and physiology, attempts to tackle in his 1997 nonfiction work, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Most of the works on the Great Reddit Reading List are fiction; among the entries we’ve already covered, only one other has been non-fiction. That’s more a testament to the types of reading that people do for fun, than to the worthiness of the subject matter. Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I will hereafter abbreviate as GGS for convenience) is not a fun read; but it is compelling, and therefore earned its place on the list. It’s also fairly modern as the entries on the list go; older contributions far outweigh newer (which makes sense, as they’ve had more time to be deemed classics). This book was published in 1997, just twenty-three years ago (and, coincidentally, the year I graduated high school).

In this book, Jared Diamond narrows the question, and inquires as to why it is that Eurasian and North African nations have, historically, been the conquerors and empire-builders. Why is it that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Australia, and the islands, have historically been viewed as more primitive, and have historically had far less success at building empires and conquering their neighbors? There are copious volumes of work in existence about the motivations that have driven the traditional conquerors to, well, conquer, and to oppress those they regard as beneath them; but Diamond takes a different tack, and looks at the mechanism rather than the motivation; put another way, it’s less why would they and more why could they. His answer is summarized well in the title: Guns, referring to superior weaponry; Germs, referring to diseases of Eurasian origin that wreaked havoc on unprepared populations, making them easily subjugated; and Steel, referring to advanced forms of transportation. He then establishes that this is not a product of any inherent superiority in the Eurasian races, but is rather a result of opportunity and necessity, chiefly embodied in agriculture.

The book is well structured and scholarly, and does an excellent job of defending its arguments. It takes the concept out of the theoretical, going so far as to establish how the geographical peculiarities of each landmass influenced its agriculture and other subsequent developments–and how this worked to the advantage of Eurasians over other groups. At the same time, though, the book is scholarly (if not quite formal), and thus it may come across as dry and a bit repetitive. It is by no means a light read, and takes some time to work through; I put it down for a break more than once during my readthrough.

Later cover, with the second subtitle, The Fates of Human Societies.

Diamond’s points sound eminently sensible when he spells them out the way he does. At the same time, I had never thought of these issues in this way. While I acknowledged that history has followed the course he lays out, I had not given much thought to the factors that made it possible. Like most people of in recent decades–and I say that because I only read the book in the last few years, not at its time of publication–I had invested most of my energy for the topic on the motivations of those involved, and the responsibilities we have today in light of the past.

And that, in the end, is why I’ve come to think of the book as somewhat irrelevant. Or, no, perhaps “irrelevant” is the wrong word; I in no way mean to insult the book or the author, as I did enjoy it. Let’s say, instead, that it’s academic. It’s most definitely of interest from the perspective of history and historical accuracy; but those things may not carry much interest in the world of today, where the more urgent and relevant questions of motivation and responsibility are at the forefront. I’m not suggesting it should be that way; but I’m suggesting that that is the situation in which we find ourselves, and we have to live it out. Few people care, in a practical sense, about how a genocide was carried out, when faced with the question of why–and of what do we do now?

And yet, with all that said, I do recommend the book. I find that it’s valuable for disarming a few arguments–namely, the argument that white people (or Eurasian, to use the book’s preferred term) are inherently superior in some way. This argument should have gone out with American slavery, but it keeps rearing its head, and even more so in the past few years. I won’t call the truths in this book frontline weapons in the many-fronted war on bigotry and racism, but it does serve to combat a certain element in those forces. And that, I think, more than justifies its acceptance and inclusion in anyone’s experience. So, check it out; it’ll be an investment, but a worthwhile one.

Happy reading!

How’s 2020 treating you? Have you set a reading goal for the year? You can join me on Goodreads, where I’m working toward a goal of 100 books for the year; and you can also join in the fun on Reddit over at /r/52book. So far, I’ve completed 17 of 100 books for the year. Come and join in!

Previous

Next

It’s January Again!

Well. This is awkward.

I said to myself “Here we are, January again, and I should get back to blogging!” After all, it’s been awhile. I type in the address in my browser’s address bar; and here I get my first warning of how badly I’ve fallen down on the job, when the address doesn’t autocomplete. So I load up the page, and… oh.

“July 17, 2019”. Well, that’s not good.

Right! So, my last post was six months ago. Well, all I can say in my defense is that it’s been a heck of a year. The last six months have been extraordinarily busy and full of turmoil. Good turmoil, that is; but still, even good things take time and attention. For what it’s worth, I’ve found it difficult to devote time to my Doctor Who blog as well, so, at least you fine folks are in good company!

But, here we are. And there’s no time like the present to get back on track! 2019 has given way to 2020, and whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s a fresh new year, and we can make of it what we like. This blog, for example: Its purpose all along has been primarily to talk about writing issues, and projects that I have in the works, with other topics that are subsidiary to–but at least a little connected to–those uber-topics. That hasn’t changed; but I will admit that I’ve been very slow in the writing department lately. As a consequence, more of the content here has been related to reading rather than writing. That still falls under the umbrella, though; reading and writing are inextricably intertwined, and so as a result we’ll continue to feature reading as a major theme here. I also hope to pick up the pace on the writing a bit; I have some short stories in mind, and a longer serialized piece that I’ve begun working on. But more on that in future posts.

Let’s start with a look back. When last I left you, I posted in my reread of the Star Wars EU with the second X-Wing Novel, titled Wedge’s Gambit. I’m continuing that project, and we’ll see more of it this year; but, despite having read quite a bit in the second half of 2019, I did deliberately put off continuing with Star Wars at the time. I want to be able to review those books as I read them afresh, and so I wasn’t willing to read them if I knew I didn’t have time to post about them. That’s good for anyone following that series! Right now I have in mind to pick it up again in March, if not sooner.

Reading challenge: Last year I committed first to reading 30 books in 2019; then later, when I discovered the great community over at Reddit’s 52book subreddit, I increased it to 52. I invited everyone to join me and share their own reading challenges and progress; and we followed along (until, that is, I fell down on posting…). I ended the year with a total of 60 books. How about you? How did it go for you? Feel free to share in the comments!

Some highlights for me from last year’s books (since, at my last post, I was only 27 books in…):

• I started the year with Ian Watson’s The Very Slow Time Machine. I ran across this in a Reddit thread, and it sounded incredibly trippy, so I had to check it out. It didn’t disappoint; it’s a collection of bizarre and brutal short science fiction stories, none of which ever play out in quite the way I expected. As it turns out, Ian Watson is a bit better known than I realized; notably for me, he’s also written a bit in the Warhammer 40,000 (or as I usually abbreviate it, “40K”) universe, and as I understand it it’s a crazy bit of writing. I may possibly pick that one up this year…we’ll see.
• I started my Star Wars EU (“Expanded Universe”, also known these days as “Legends”, aka the pre-Disney expanded canon of Star Wars material) reread early in the year, with Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. (Technically I started the previous year, with The Truce at Bakura, but only got one book under my belt at the time; for all practical purposes, we started in 2019.) I’m reading chiefly the post-Return of the Jedi novels and teen novels; I’m excluding only a few things, especially the books for very young readers such as the Jedi Prince series. I didn’t make it far–an error I intend to correct–but the six or so books I finished were easily as good as I remember from years gone by. More to come!
• The Postman, by David Brin: Post-apocalyptic fiction is a favorite of mine. Sadly, it’s not the most plentiful topic in literature; it’s mostly the purview of movies, TV, and video games. The Postman is one of the grandfathers of the genre, as it were, and it had been on my To Be Read (TBR, going forward) list for some time. These books stick with you; you can’t help but think often of how you might survive their scenarios, where civilization as we know it comes to an end, but people must go on. (Side note: I’ve never seen the Mel Gibson film based on this book, and so I was fortunate to go into it mostly blind.)
• A People’s History of the United States: This one comes from the list of Reddit’s 200+ Favorite Books, which I have styled on this site as “The Great Reddit Reading List“. It’s about a dozen books out from where we left off, but hopefully I’ll get there in the review series sometime soon. It’s eye-opening with regard to both history and politics; even if you don’t come to agree with Howard Zinn’s stance on issues, you’ll be challenged by his propositions.
• Death of Integrity, Guy Haley. I’ve talked before about the previously-mentioned 40K universe; in the past year or so, I’ve become a bit of a fan, though I’ve barely scratched the surface of the mountains of material out there. This excellent book was my introduction to the novels, and it was a great place to jump on. It stands alone as opposed to being vitally connected to a series; if you like it, fantastic, and if you don’t, you can drop it. If grimdark action is your thing, check it out!
• The Rediscovery of Man: This massive collection is the complete short fiction of Cordwainer Smith, the pen name of Paul Linebarger. The man himself is a topic about which we could fill pages and pages; but he’s notable especially for his science fiction. All stories are set in a single universe, but spread over thousands of years of human history, much like the Dune universe. I find Smith’s universe to be more hopeful, though, than Herbert’s. At any rate, it has to be experienced to be appreciated–though I admit, it took me a long time to get through it!

I could go on–there were plenty of interesting reads–and perhaps we’ll revisit some more in later posts. For now, let’s look ahead!

Going forward, this year I’ve decided to be a bit more ambitious about my reading, and set a goal of 100 books. That is in no way intended to be an example or a challenge to anyone but myself; as always, your challenge is your own, and you should set a goal that will leave you satisfied with yourself. I’ve also opted to try something I’ve never tried before: I made a “To Be Read in 2020” list of books. (I have a general TBR list all the time, in that there’s a rather nebulous list of books I’d like to read at some point, but it’s not on paper anywhere, and things no doubt get dropped and forgotten from time to time.) It’s not quite complete; I have some slots left unfilled, totaling about a fifth of the list; but it comes out to about eight books per month. I’ve pulled from various ongoing projects and lists, including The Great Reddit Reading List; my Star Wars EU Reread; the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winners; Star Trek: New Frontier; and various Doctor Who novel ranges, including the New Adventures (Seventh Doctor), Eighth Doctor Adventures (Eighth Doctor), and Missing Adventures (Doctors 1-6). You can find my list here.

As always, I invite you to read along–not necessarily with my list (although help yourself if you like!), but with your own choices as we work through the year. Comments are always welcome! I am active in the 52book subreddit; you can get involved there if you like. Also, I can be found on Goodreads; if you’d like to connect over there, click here!

So…how about you? Ready for another year? I hope it will be a good one for all of us. Thanks for coming along.

Happy Reading!

The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Warhammer 40,000: On Literary Universes

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first: THERE WILL BE NO AVENGERS: ENDGAME SPOILERS HERE! I haven’t seen it yet anyway, and actually still need to see Captain Marvel as well.

---

 

Here we are at last: The end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Eleven years; three filming phases; twenty-two movies; eleven television series (plus two unreleased); three short films; two web series; various tie-in comics; and the usual glut of video games, theme park rides, and other media. All leading up to the glorious finale that is Avengers: Endgame! We made it! WOOOOOOO!

Except, it’s not the end, is it? Ha, no, of course it’s not! If I may let my cynical side show for a moment, Disney (Marvel’s parent company these days) has never been one to slaughter its cash cows; and indeed, even this year there will be at least one more post-Endgame film, Spider-man: Far From Home (which, let’s be honest, was the biggest spoiler of all, since Spider-man died in Avengers: Infinity War). Certainly there will be more ahead!

By the same token, we recently got the first teaser trailer for the long-awaited (by me anyway) ninth episode of Star Wars, mysteriously titled The Rise of Skywalker. This time, the producers had the audacity to actually bill it as “The Saga Comes To An End”. I couldn’t help thinking Thor might have something to say about that…

Spoiler: It doesn’t.

That’s the thing about a popular fictional universe: It’s the gift that keeps on giving. With some of our favorite franchises, we’ve reached the point that it’s generational: My parents watched Star Trek in their childhoods in the 1960s, and last week I was watching recent episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, more than fifty years later. I had my son watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when I came to the shocking realization that that film premiered the same year that I did, 1979.

I’ve talked before about my belief that all good things really SHOULD come to an end; and I don’t want to sound repetitive. Let’s look at it from another angle: Can a series become overwhelming? More to the point, can it lose its impact through an abundance of material?

It seems that the easy answer would be “yes”. You can have too much of a good thing. The problem isn’t in identifying the issue; it’s in knowing how much is too much. How many Marvel movies are too many? How many Skywalkers? How much Star Trek is too much?

The problem here–and this is also the reason that just creating an ending, as I’ve suggested before, won’t work–is that the limit is highly subjective. Not only is each person’s level of tolerance different, but also, each person enters at a different point, with a different background. All of this conspires to say that there’s no simple way to say “enough is enough!”

Recently I’ve gotten into the Warhammer 40,000 fictional universe (hereafter abbreviated as 40k for short). For those who aren’t familiar, here’s a brief rundown. This science-fantasy series takes place in and around the year 40,000, or 38,000 years in our future. It features a galaxy in constant war as humans fight to preserve their empire (or “Imperium”) against various aliens, spiritual entities roughly equivalent to demons, and traitors from within humanity itself. The Imperium is nominally ruled by the Emperor (no name ever given as far as I know), a superhuman immortal who set out to abolish all religion and faith in order to prevent them from being used against humanity by demons, only to become an object of worship himself. After a major betrayal (the Horus Heresy) ten thousand years earlier, the Emperor is essentially on life support, throwing all of his psychic power at keeping Earth from being overrun by demons, which would in turn tear the Imperium to shreds. Meanwhile the demons inhabit a place called the Warp, which is the realm through which faster-than-light travel occurs…you can imagine how well that goes. Overall it’s an incredibly grim and dark universe (hence the popular term grimdark–not sure if it originated here, but I wouldn’t be surprised), full of constant war and bloodshed.

The 40k fictional universe is perhaps the best example of both “too much of a good thing” and “too much is personal”. The series is built on the tabletop game of the same name, which has been in existence since 1987; and as such it has changed a lot over the years, with the constant retcons that are common in tabletop gaming. One doesn’t have to play the game, though; there are plenty of books and other materials out there. Depending on how one counts, there are nearly five hundred and fifty books, including novellas and audiobook originals. As well, there are comics, YouTube videos, and a movie. There is, in short, no way I (at least) will ever get through it all–and it’s still being published regularly, on several fronts. It’s enough material that I found it a bit daunting just getting started; and even now, there’s still a lot I don’t know. I sometimes browse some of the 40k subreddits, and every time I find myself in over my head. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong; but it’s a truly insane amount of material to check out.

And yet, diehard 40k fans don’t seem to be disillusioned. What’s too much for them? How do they handle this absolute wealth of material? How do they not become overwhelmed? The answer seems to be: They pick and choose. They don’t try to do it all. They find what they enjoy, and they let the rest go.

That sounds so simple on the surface, but it’s hard to do in practicality. I want everything! I want to collect it all! I want to read every 40k novel, every Star Wars novel (hence my in-progress EU reread), every Star Trek novel. And it’s not just reading; I want to see every episode! Every movie! Every YouTube video! I want to be a COMPLETIONIST, dammit!

Really grimdark!

I can’t do it all.

Some days I feel like I can barely do any.

When I was a kid, I felt like I had all the time in the world. Oh, I was always at least a little aware of my mortality; I remember thinking about it even then. I was a morbid kid, what can I say. But on a day-to-day scale, I thought I had all the time in the world. Now, media wasn’t as easy to accumulate then as it is now; but there was time. Time to read this entire series (and I did, on several occasions). Time to watch every movie in a series. Time to play all the video games I liked, even if they took fifty hours each.

Now I’m an adult, and I know better. It’s painfully ironic to me that as access has gotten easier, time has gotten harder.  Twelve-year-old me would have killed to be able to go on the internet and download an obscure book and be reading it within seconds. He would have accumulated all the books! Forty-year-old me knows that sometimes, that way lies madness, because I just don’t have the time for all the books. Forty-year-old me has to pick and choose.

And he does. He’s not always happy with it. But he does it, because he isn’t willing to lose his mind over completionism anymore. It’s better to have a few great memories than a million rushed, mediocre ones (coupled with a sense of disappointment at just not getting there).

You two have a LOT to answer for

Frankly, fictional universes–as opposed to a great standalone story–are my downfall. I blame He-Man and She-Ra. Those characters constituted the first shared fictional universe I can remember encountering–the first time I realized it could be more than a single story, that you could have multiple parts to a greater whole. It’s all been downhill from there; the next thing you know, I’m reading up on crossovers between Indiana Jones and Star Wars; then it’s the Tommy Westphall Universe Theory (I won’t get into that here; check the link); and suddenly I’m hip-deep in 40k, and I could use a rescue mission. (Did I mention that both Event Horizon and Hellraiser have been theorized to be prequels to 40k? Oh, yes, this vein runs deep!) I love continuity-heavy stories, and love finding connections between them.

Again, that way lies madness, at least sometimes. If I can’t get all the episodes of, say, my old friend Doctor Who, what makes me think I can see all of the 419 television shows connected to Tommy Westphall (really, go check it out)? (Full disclosure: I have seen all the episodes of Doctor Who; it’s the books and comics that continue to thwart me. Madness!)

Thus it becomes a lesson in letting go. And this, I have to say, has been the hardest lesson for me. I don’t want to let go; I love my completionism. It won’t work, though; and letting go is good for me. One can try so hard to get everything in, that one doesn’t enjoy any of it. I don’t want that. I won’t live forever; I know that. It was a little difficult to accept that at forty, there’s a good chance my life is more than half over. I don’t want to spend the years I have obsessing, when I could be enjoying them instead. One of the great lies of the Internet age is that we can, at last, have it all…no. No, you can’t. I can’t. And moreover, you shouldn’t, and neither should I. We’ll just be miserable if we try. Moreover, I don’t want to pass that mindset on to my children, who are always watching. I want them to learn to enjoy things, and that’s a hard enough task without this particular obstacle.

The Tommy Westphall Universe. Did you think I was kidding?

I could draw an example from physical collection. My father collected model cars. He loved to build them, at least until his hands got too shaky to use an exacto knife. He could easily have been overwhelmed with them, had he not chosen to back off and just pick a few that he really loved. Or, my ex-wife–when we were together, she loved to collect penguins. She made the mistake of letting people know; and so, naturally, everyone gave her penguin collectibles as gifts. We were drowning in penguins! But, no matter what you collect, be it cars or birds, what is going to happen to those things? They’re going to gather dust while you’re alive (if you’re anything like me); and they’re going to be disposed of when you’re gone. Yesterday I read a “life pro tip” that said “Sell your valuable knick-knacks and collectibles while you’re still alive. You’ll gain some value from them that way, and your family is only going to sell them when you’re gone.” Or, worse, throw them out.

In my case, I chose not to collect them in the first place. I used to collect lighthouses; now I’m down to three at home–two of which were handmade by my dad and my uncle–and one small crystal lighthouse on the desk at which I’m typing this. They were gathering dust instead of memories, and that seemed to be a crime to me. I got rid of some, and stopped collecting more.

It’s harder for me to stop collecting stories. Stories are intangible, and easy. They aren’t easy to process, though; books or television or movies or audio dramas, they all take time. I only have so much of that.  I’m still struggling with this lesson; every time a Humble Book Bundle comes along, I forget this lesson as if I was Dory from Finding Nemo. But, no one is going to read my ebook collection when I’m gone; I don’t even know how to pass it on. If I don’t have time for it now, I shouldn’t be collecting it at all.

One day, maybe I’ll learn that lesson for good.

How’s your reading this year? I’m working through the 52 Book Challenge via the subreddit of the same name, and you can join us here! So far I’ve completed 24 books, putting me a little ahead of schedule. You can join me on Goodreads, and post your own challenge!

Happy Reading!

 

Book Review: The Postman, by David Brin

I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic fiction. I blame Stephen King. I read his opus The Stand at entirely too young an age—I was maybe twelve, and the Complete & Uncut Edition had only recently come out—and it always stuck with me. (I suppose you can argue that it’s apocalyptic fiction, not post-apocalyptic, but you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.) As a result I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the years A) thinking about how I’d try to survive in such a scenario, and B) seeking out more such stories.

That brings us to the Fallout series of video games, which (I think) I’ve referenced before on this blog. The games take place over the course of the next two to three hundred years, in an alternate timeline where a series of wars culminated in a short but devastating nuclear attack. Many of the survivors were mutated; many others survived by living in underground vaults, which turned out to be less humanitarian shelters and more terrifying social experiments. Not relevant, but notable: the most recent entry, Fallout 76, takes place in my home state of West Virginia, with many landmarks that are close to my hometown. It’s a great series of games, and if you’re into that sort of thing, you should check it out.

I browse a few communities dedicated to discussion of—and recommendations for—books. Several times I’ve seen threads come up asking for books similar to the Fallout series, books which—surprisingly to me—seem to be in short supply. There’s plenty of post-apocalyptic literature out there, but not much that captures the foraging, survivalist, devastated vibe of the game series. And It’s really no wonder; this seems to be an issue with post-apocalyptic movies, as well. (I’d recommend The Book of Eli for a starter, if you’re interested; it’s perhaps the most Fallout-esque movie I’ve seen.) One book, however, comes up again and again in these threads; that book is David Brin’s 1985 novel, The Postman.

First Edition Cover

Let me go ahead and say it up front: This is the book that was adapted into the 1997 Kevin Costner movie of the same name. But I can’t comment on that; I haven’t seen the movie. Frankly, from what I’ve read about it, I’m glad to have read the book first; I’d rather not judge the book by the movie. It’s easier for me to make comparisons with Fallout; and indeed, I’ve read suggestions that this novel was an inspiration for the Fallout series. That may be true or may not, but regardless, there are definite similarities. At any rate, when I saw this book get recommended so often, I knew I had to check it out.

The Postman is the story of Gordon Krantz, a 34-year-old survivor of the Doomwar, the nuclear war that led to the downfall of modern civilization, sixteen years earlier. Gordon has been wandering and surviving for years, searching for some place with a measure of civilization remaining, so that he can settle down; but it isn’t meant to be. He is ambushed and robbed as the story begins. Left with no belongings, and lacking even decent clothes, he stumbles upon an ancient postal service jeep with a mummified corpse inside. He takes the corpse’s uniform, simply for warmth; and for his own amusement, he takes the dead postman’s satchel and letters. However, he gets more than he bargained for when he discovers that, with a little nudging, other survivors are in awe of the trappings of the old world; and so he crafts a series of lies regarding the “Restored United States of America”, of which he claims to be a representative. At first he does so only to obtain food and shelter; but the lie—and its unexpected power—spirals beyond his control, as real postal routes are established in his wake, tying the scattered settlements together. Still, he feels nothing but guilt—until the fledgling alliance of towns is attacked by a force they aren’t equipped to handle, and it falls to Gordon Krantz to save them all.

I mentioned similarities to Fallout, and they are definitely present. In both works, most of the infrastructure of civilization lies in ruins; there are bunkers and military fortifications littering the landscape; survivalists and doomsday preppers are, not surprisingly, salted liberally among the survivors (and specifically the antagonists). There are talking supercomputers, a pretender to the name of the United States, a courier system, augmented human supersoldiers, fatal diseases, resource conflicts, raiders, drug problems, laser-bearing satellites, deceptive scientists, lots and lots of guns…I could go on. Notably missing are the underground vaults that form so much of Fallout’s infrastructure and plot; that innovation didn’t come from the novel, though it’s a natural extension of a nuclear apocalyptic scenario, with some real-world analogues.

The other noteworthy difference is in the means by which the apocalypse occurred. Brin goes to great lengths to establish that humanity was by no means in a vulnerable position when the Doomwar broke out; rather, it seemed to be on the cusp of a golden age. The only exception were certain regressive elements composed of survivalists and doomsday preppers, which—under the leadership of the tyrannical Nathan Holn—metamorphosed into something similar to a heavily armed Neo-Nazi movement. Unlike Fallout, the bombs and related breakdowns didn’t cripple humanity—in fact, humanity was well positioned to recover from the war itself. Rather, it was the Holnists and others like them who brought about the downfall of civilization, by destabilizing the world in the wake of the war. As a result, even feuding postwar communities will band together to wipe out Holnist enclaves; and it is a large army of Holnists—practically a nation in their own right—who are the principal antagonists of the story. Gordon Krantz, then, finds himself forging together a free nation in the wilds of Oregon, leading them against a far superior force of Holnists. After all, there are no more bombs available; but the Holnists didn’t really need the bombs the first time, and they can certainly destroy civilization again without it.

Thus, the book becomes something more than a battle between survivors…it’s a battle between ideals. Is civilization, here in its second chance, going to be founded on freedom and equality and community, or is it going to be founded on power and oppression and selfishness? I’ll let you read the book for yourself to determine the outcome.

I was impressed with the way Gordon’s own ethical dilemma was handled. Like many other post-apocalyptic protagonists, Gordon is a bit of a relic of the old world—an idealist among pragmatists. His internal struggle is certainly one of idealism vs. pragmatism—is it better to tell the truth (that the old US is well and truly dead) or to use the lie to live another day? But, as the story progresses, and Gordon becomes more bound to the lie, it becomes less about him and more about those around him. He is faced with the question of “who will take responsibility for these people?” The book never actively condones the lie; but as Gordon grapples with responsibility, it says to him, “This is what you’ve done—now what are you going to do with it? How will you bring good out of this lie?” Ultimately that’s what he does—his lie, though never right, is turned toward the goal of forging a better future for the people in his care. He never excuses himself, but he chooses the hard path of seeing it through and making something good. That’s a hero worth following, in my opinion.

Not sure I would have gone with an endorsement from Whitley Streiber, whose books scared the hell out of me as an impressionable kid…but that’s a topic for another time.

Of course, it brings us to the same question. Why wait for the post-apocalypse, when we face the same dilemma every day: Who will take responsibility? I won’t call it an epidemic, but there are certainly many people in our world today who refuse to ever take responsibility—for themselves, for their families, for anyone else in their orbit. That’s not even getting to the matter of taking responsibility for the world—the world is too big to consider at every occasion. Its size becomes an excuse for us; we can say we’re concerned, but there’s very little we can do to show it. However, when it comes to our own lives, and our own actions, and our own families and friends, we really have no excuse.  At some point each of us is called upon to step up, do the hard thing, stay the course, and take responsibility.  We can take that lesson from Gordon Krantz, and be the one who follows through.

Heavier material than I expected from a mid-eighties sci-fi novel, I admit. I think that’s good enough for today.

Happy reading!

It’s a new year, and a new reading challenge! What are you reading this year? With a good month under my belt, I’ve decided to increase my reading goal to 52 books for the year, or one per week on average; you can do the same, and check out the 52 book challenge community over at Reddit. So far I’ve completed ten books. You can join me on Goodreads, and post your own challenge!

TGRRL: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

When I was in high school—which feels like a very long time ago now, but really is just over twenty years ago—there were books that it was expected one would read before graduation. Certain classics are just part of the junior high and high school experience, in much the same way that the Newberry award winners are a part of the elementary school experience—here in America, at least. Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451… I read many of these, some of which will appear on this list before it’s over. (After all, they’re classics for a reason, right?) There’s one, however, that I managed to miss completely: 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.

First Edition cover.  By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1709640

Catcher (as I’ll abbreviate for convenience here) is one of the quintessential teenage novels. Now, with that said, I’ll try to avoid the five-dollar words for the rest of this, and not slip into English-teacher mode. The book has been included in numerous best novel lists, and is hotly debated every time it comes up. Since the early 1960s it has repeatedly faced challenges and censorship, even to the point that at one time it was accused of being part of a communist plot (seriously! Check its Wikipedia entry). It’s also been linked to several shootings, including the famous assassination attempt on president Reagan, and the murder of John Lennon. It’s controversial as a youth novel for its seeming promotion of rebellion and opposition to moral values; but as always, the actual viewpoints of the main character aren’t so cut-and-dry. Wikipedia has this to say about it:

The challenges generally begin with Holden’s frequent use of vulgar language, with other reasons including sexual references, blasphemy, undermining of family values and moral codes, encouragement of rebellion, and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, promiscuity, and sexual abuse. Often the challengers have been unfamiliar with the plot itself.

Looking back through the lens of present-day society, it seems strange to me that these things are so controversial in a work of fiction; I was reading Stephen King’s vulgar, inflammatory portrayal of Detta Walker (The Drawing of the Three) in sixth grade, and no one said a word. (They would have probably said something if I read it out loud, I suppose, but that’s a different matter. No one ever limited their criticism of The Catcher in the Rye to verbal readings.) Perception of morality in society is a funny thing sometimes; I suspect that many of the challenges stem from the fact that teachers, librarians, and other authority figures don’t want to be seen as endorsing the concepts in the book, rather than from a desire to protect children from those concepts. We know that morally suspect ideas exist; we just don’t want to be seen supporting them, even if we’re secretly okay with their existence. The hypocrisy of that statement would have made Catcher protagonist Holden Caulfield furious, or possibly just made him laugh.

I was not young when I finally got to this book. I was thirty-six at the time, which is most definitely not the target audience for the book. Perhaps that’s why I don’t “get” the book the way that high schoolers often do; or perhaps it’s my age, coupled with parts of my background. I was romantically angsty as a teenager, and even angsty with regard to my purpose in life, but never with the level of despair and disillusionment that Holden Caulfield experiences. I knew it was likely to be this way when I started the book; and I had to fight the temptation to just dismiss the book out of hand. Reading it as an adult, my first was reaction was to yell at Holden for his childishness. He’s a boarding school student who gets expelled on the day the story begins; he spends the duration of the story putting off going home and facing his parents, meanwhile engaging in various other activities mostly involving a love interest named Sally Hayes. He also meets up with his sister Phoebe, and plots to run away, but ultimately relents. The story is framed by Holden’s later experiences in some sort of institution (it’s not specified whether this is for mental health, medical care, or correction, but I have seen suggestions that it may have been for tuberculosis). Throughout the story, Holden talks about his feelings of alienation, and his disgust at the hypocrisy he sees in the world and the adults in it.  He also focuses on the idea of innocence in children, most notably in his sister; it’s her happiness that in the end convinces him not to run away.

Holden’s issues are a teenager’s issues; I freely admit that I don’t feel the same things at this point in my life. However, it’s that fact that ultimately persuaded me to continue the book. While his circumstances are perhaps a little extreme (for dramatic purposes, of course), the things he feels are things that every teenager experiences. It may not be mature, but it’s valid. Holden is definitely no hero—there’s no evidence that he’s changed for the better at the end—but he’s certainly a sympathetic character to those who are where he is in life. It was eye-opening to me as a father; I have a twelve-year-old daughter (nine at the time I read the book) who is beginning to feel some of what Holden Caulfield felt. It wouldn’t do me any good to treat her as though her feelings are unimportant just because they’re not adult yet. We all have to pass through this age to get to adulthood; if you doubt the importance of that passage, just look back at how strong your own memories are of your teenage years. Sometimes we need someone outside ourselves to mirror the things that are inside us, so that we can understand those things better. That’s what Holden Caulfield is—at least to people his age—and I’m grateful to him for that.

The Great Reddit Reading List

Previous

Next

Poll: Should Readers Care About Characters?

I had an interesting encounter on Reddit’s /r/books subreddit this week. The topic of discussion was Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (which, incidentally, we’ll eventually be covering in the Great Reddit Reading List). This book famously–or perhaps infamously–saw publication in two different forms; in the UK, it was published complete, but the American version omitted the final chapter. That chapter (21, if we’re keeping track) represents a crucial difference, because it is in that chapter that protagonist Alex chooses redemption from his previously terrible ways. The well-known Stanley Kubrick film adaptation follows the American version, leaving Alex unrepentant and unchanged after his experiences. (This issue is famously divisive; even Burgess himself was on record as saying that he wished he had not written the book, largely because of the version that made it to film.)

 

In the comments, the issue was raised of whether it’s possible to care about Alex if he experiences no growth, no change. This quickly devolved into an argument as to whether a character–and for our purposes, we’ll specify the protagonist–should be cared about. One individual made the claim that characters aren’t there for us to care about:

The ‘point’ of a character is not necessarily to be ‘cared about’.

Or, put another way:

The point of literature as a “whole” is not to produce sympathetic characters for you.

This makes for an interesting question, and I’m curious what you, as readers, think. I think it’s a given that not every character–not even every protagonist–is or should be sympathetic; the history of film, for example, is littered with protagonists that are evil and despicable (though, perversely, they seem to gain sympathy as they become more iconic–think Norman Bates, for example–but that’s a topic for another time). But it’s not a question of whether they are sympathetic, so much as a question of whether we should care about what happens to them. Darth Vader was intended to be a dark, evil, and merciless villain, but we cared very much about what happened to him, even back to his first appearances in A New Hope. (He’s since received a redemption scene, of course, and also benefits from a history of badassery, but my point predates all of that.)

I think we can agree that the production of characters we care about is not the ‘point’ of literature; but is that care necessary? My argument is that care, in this sense, is a necessary part of interest in the character. If we don’t care what happens to this person, why are we reading about/watching/playing him or her?

I’m tempted to look at this from the perspective of a writer; but this isn’t about me as a writer, it’s about us as readers. Therefore, I’m doing something I haven’t done on this blog before: I’m posting a poll. Cast your votes below! Should protagonist characters be someone we can care about, or does it not matter at all?

Thanks for voting, and as always, thanks for reading!

TGRRL: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

When I was a teenager, I was introduced by way of school assignments to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which we’ve already covered. This terrifying little novel–terrifying to me, anyway; there may have been novels–is certainly the most well-known dystopian novel; but it’s hardly the only one, or even the first. It’s a bit debatable which dystopian novel is the first of its kind, but certainly one of the most influential is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

First edition, as far as I can establish. Not mine.

 

(In fact, the novel has been noted to have directly influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four; making it even more interesting is the fact that Orwell had been, some years early, a pupil of Huxley at Eton, though not in any political or writing-related subject, but rather, in French. The historical connection, however, seems to have little to do with the writings; one novel influenced the other, without much regard for the past history of the authors, as far as anyone can tell from their commentary on the subject.)

It is unfortunate that Brave New World, today, is usually discussed only in the context of comparison to Orwell’s novel. And yet, that comparison does provide the easiest way to understand the book; it’s easier to define what it isn’t than what it is. I find myself wishing I had read Brave New World first, so that I could have appreciated it solely for itself.  Nevertheless, I expect I’m inevitably going to find myself pointing out comparisons as we look at the novel here. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

From this point forward, expect spoilers; although, the book is nearly ninety years old, so perhaps it’s not even fair to call them spoilers.

Here we have the story of a world where most human problems have been resolved. That’s what we’re reaching for, isn’t it? Health, happiness, peace, prosperity? Of course we are. Brave New World supplies those things; its people have every need met through a very efficient system of production. Workloads are light and easy. Happiness is practically ensured through use of a consequence-free drug called soma (why is it conventional to italicize non-traditional words like this? I’m doing so here for emphasis, but I’ll drop it henceforward).  This focus on happiness, however, has required the upending of certain social conventions: marriage and monogamy no longer exist; childbirth is mostly nonexistent, having been replaced by birth control and birthing centers with artificial wombs; crime is mostly eliminated–certainly a good thing–by way of a rigid caste system–not so good. However, no one feels the loss of these things, due to conditioning and the effects of soma. Our initial protagonist, Bernard Marx, doesn’t quite fit in; but he is mostly a catalyst for the story rather than a major character. His situation introduces us to the true protagonist, a man named John. John is the illicit offspring of two rather normal and compliant citizens, but through a twist of fate he is raised on a “savage reservation”, a place where the conventions of society are not in effect, and people live as they have lived for years prior to the new order–though admittedly impoverished by their isolation. John is then brought back to civilization, but he is unable to cope or adapt; and in the end, he hangs himself.

This matter of absolute happiness–but at a hidden cost–is common enough in dystopias today. It was unheard of when Huxley wrote; utopian novels were common enough, and indeed he started this project as a parody of utopian novels of his day. The idea that happiness could be obtained, but that it would in turn cost us something fundamental, was new and disturbing. It’s not new anymore, but it is still disturbing, and rightly so. The desire for happiness is deeply ingrained in us, possibly even as a part of our survival instinct. Dystopias like Brave New World acknowledge that, but then counter with a more frightening idea: the idea that we need challenge, pain, difficulty, in order to really be human. If we truly get what we’re chasing, we’ll become less instead of more.

This is a radically different form of dystopia from Orwell’s vision (and here we go!). Orwell predicted a dystopia of fear–one in which the government’s power becomes so absolute as to crush all resistance, inspiring obedience by fear. The problem with that kind of oppression is that it requires endless vigilance; and endless vigilance translates into endless resources. Just how many people does it take to monitor a population of billions twenty-four hours a day, I wonder? How much infrastructure? And that’s on top of the apparatus required for punishing infractions, providing for needs, and other aspects of government. Huxley’s version is much simpler, because it makes every individual complicit in their own oppression. As John’s mother Linda graphically illustrates, people want to be compliant; they don’t have to be pushed to it. After all, they’re endlessly happy; they don’t feel the loss of less tangible things such as challenge or morality. They only feel the soothing of soma.

It’s popular to make comparisons to modern society, and try to decide what kind of dystopia we live in. I’ll be blunt: We don’t, at least not yet. However, I think that if we were trying to make projections about the real world, both versions would be too simplistic. A real-world dystopia would more likely be a blending of the two; it would have some form of enticement for the public, combined with some form of invasive monitoring and enforcement. Carrot and stick, if you will. While I don’t believe our society is at dystopian levels yet, I will say that we have elements of both in place already. We’ve had enough issues with governmental elimination of privacy over the years, and especially with the proliferation of technology and the internet; and we have the same internet serving as our soma, to some degree. (And here I am, posting on the internet! Irony, much?)

But that’s just it: we’re not there yet, and in a purely Huxleyan sense, I don’t think we ever will be. The challenges we face as a species are too great for that. Death is always going to be a thing. Suffering is maddeningly hard to eliminate. Poverty has a way of returning over and over again. Diseases adapt to accommodate our treatments. A Huxleyan dystopia requires that all of these challenges be overcome; we’ve made great strides, but I doubt we’ll ever have the kind of success required for his vision to be true. Nevertheless, we should keep trying. We should work at overcoming those challenges. We exist in a strange space, where we can’t win this fight, but neither is our striving pointless, because we can still improve–even if we never reach the end of the improvement.

This is the second dystopia we’ve examined, and I want to point out something that, in my opinion, distinguishes classical dystopias from the young-adult dystopias that are so popular today. (Not that I’m disparaging those stories; they may be common, but they’re not bad, or at least not by definition.) The YA dystopias usually result in a happy ending for most; the ruling party is overthrown, chaos reigns briefly, then something better takes its place. I think that’s a wonderfully optimistic outlook, but it’s very different from the classics, where the protagonists inevitably lose. A classic dystopia will grind the rebellious protagonists down, and keep on moving without breaking stride. In the end, nothing changes. I find this strange; with the political and social climates we face today, I’d have expected it to be the other way around.

Still, Brave New World is the more hopeful of the two. While one protagonist dies, the others don’t; nor are they greatly changed in outlook–they’re simply sidelined. And in the meantime, millions aren’t being ground down; they remain obliviously happy, but they remain. It may not be much of a chance; but perhaps that’s better than much chance at all. As Huxley never wrote a true sequel (Brave New World Revisited is a non-fiction critique), it’s open to conjecture.

How’s your reading goal coming along? I’ve set a goal of 50 books in 2018 via Goodreads; you can join me here! So far I’ve finished three books: Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, and Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer. You can see my to-read list here.

The Great Reddit Reading List

Previous

Next

Is Enough Ever Enough?

Years ago, Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song about Yoda. Yes, the diminutive, green Jedi master with the Fozzie-Bear voice. If you’re familiar with Weird Al, this shouldn’t surprise you; this is the same guy that wrote a song accurately predicting the plot of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace months before it was released, in a day when Internet leaks weren’t a thing yet. At any rate, it’s a fun song, set to the tune of The Kinks’ Lola, about Luke Skywalker’s training relationship with Yoda. I bring it up because of a line in the last verse; when Luke is preparing to go to Bespin and rescue his friends (as in The Empire Strikes Back), he says:

But I know that I’ll be coming back someday; I’ll be playing this part ‘til I’m old and grey.

The long-term contract I had to sign says I’ll be making these movies ‘til the end of time,

with my Yoda.

Well, as it turns out…

Couldn’t find a single screenshot from The Last Jedi that included both of them. Use your imagination.

Yeah. Nailed it!

This post is not about Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, from which those screenshots come. I find it necessary to bring it up here at the beginning, because the controversy surrounding this movie sets up nicely for the question I want to ask. That question is: When is enough, enough? Specifically, when should we say “enough is enough” to our favorite fictional franchises? It’s a simple question, but the answer is anything but simple.

My early years of fandom—not just with regard to Star Wars, but with regard to any franchise—could be summed up with three words: I want more. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing! I loved these characters, and the worlds they inhabited. I wanted the further adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo. I wanted to know what happened to E.T. after he went home. I wanted to know the backstory of He-Man and Eternia (I’m an ‘80s kid, if you hadn’t noticed yet)! WHAT HAPPENED WHEN REN GOT ALL THIRTEEN TREASURES OF RULE?! WHAT ABOUT—

I loved this show way too much.

Okay, we were getting a little obscure there, sorry. (That last reference was to a cartoon called The Pirates of Dark Water, which ended before its premise could be fulfilled, and I’m still a little bitter about it.) At any rate, it wasn’t unusual to want to know more. That’s the motivation for all the sequels and prequels of the original Star Wars trilogy. It’s the reason She-Ra exists, and is getting a reboot in 2018. It led to the release of E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, which sadly never even made it to an animated film. And it has led thousands of fans, myself included, to write fanfiction over the years. Why, though?

When fiction is well-written, the characters and settings become real to us. We read, or watch, or play (yes, video games count), or listen, and we get to live for awhile in another person’s world, and even in their shoes. Like family or friends, we want to know those individuals personally. When the story is enjoyable, we want more of the same. Sometimes we even get it, though sequels are commonly known for a dip in quality. This is all perfectly legitimate.

This really was a thing, and it was exactly as trippy as the cover would have you believe.

Still, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Now, from this point on, what I’m saying is my own view, and I’m NOT trying to pass it off as a rule of any kind. Everyone’s threshold of tolerance is their own. You may read this and think “well, that isn’t me at all!” That’s fine. I was you for a long time, and I was happy that way. I’m also happy where I am now. You can love what you love, and you can show that love however you like! That’s the beauty of living in a world with so much variety.

Using Star Wars as an example again: For many years, Star Wars fans had what we referred to as the Expanded Universe (sometimes rendered as “Extended”), or EU. This was anything beyond the original movie trilogy and, later, the prequel trilogy. It’s a little unclear exactly where it started; early novels include Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (considered the first EU novel, and dating all the way back to 1978!) and Brian Daley’s Han Solo Adventures (1979 and following). I can also remember comics or early graphic novels dating to at least 1986, and possibly earlier, though I haven’t researched it. The EU really took off in 1991 with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and its sequels, and the twenty-plus years afterward were packed with novels, comics, video games, and—later—cartoons. If the original trilogy was the stuff of my childhood, this was the stuff of my teens and twenties, and I absorbed it as fast as I could lay hands on it. I loved every minute, including the controversial New Jedi Order novels. All of that came crashing to a halt, though, in late October 2012, when Lucasfilm was purchased by Disney; shortly thereafter, Disney announced that it would be continuing from the end of Return of the Jedi with its own canon stories, not related to the existing EU. The EU stories were redubbed as “Star Wars Legends”, and new Legends material ceased to be produced. That’s what brings us to today, with The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, and various novels and comics in the new continuity.

The original EU novel. Worth noting: Luke and Leia had not yet been revealed to be siblings. Hindsight makes this book a little uncomfortable, which is too bad; it’s a great story.

Fans, being fans, did not go quietly. Up to and including The Last Jedi—which has raked in the money anyway, of course—there has been constant debate and controversy. We’re fans; that’s what we do. I, for one, have watched all three new movies, though I haven’t read any of the books or comics; I think they’re a fair take on the series, but I’m curious to see where they go. I don’t hate them; I don’t love them, either, not the way I loved the original trilogy. Perhaps my kids will; certainly the studio has taken pains to make these movies appeal to a new generation, and that’s not a bad thing.

Still, this change in continuity has given me time to look back at the EU and think. What I’ve found in the interim is that—to my surprise, and if I may be honest, dismay—I was kind of tired of it already. You see, the EU has covered nearly every possible time period, if not place, in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s exhaustively catalogued the lives of our original heroes, both before and after the movies, and in some cases including their deaths, although writers are understandably hesitant to kill off a major character. (Actually, it’s not just the authors; the EU always had considerable oversight, and such a decision would have to be approved. Lucasfilm wasn’t fond of killing off its cash cows, and that’s no surprise.) It shows us their descendants. It explores the galaxy, and gives us side stories. It looks deeply and exhaustively into the past, back to the very origins of the Jedi and Sith and beyond.  There may be stories yet to be told, but there isn’t a lot of room left to tell them! That’s why, at the end, the EU was delving further into the future; but in science fiction, that’s always a risky proposition. The further you get from your baseline date—in this case, the original movie trilogy—the more conjecture is required, whereas when delving into the past, you have a predefined period with which to work. It was at this point that I started to get tired of things, in large part because the series began to recycle its original plots again. After so much investment into eliminating the Empire and the Sith, and changing up the characters’ understanding of the Force, and expanding the character roster beyond the Skywalker-Solo family, we ended up with an evil Empire, led by a Sith lord from the Skywalker-Solo bloodline, with an underground rebellion involving another Skywalker. Sound familiar? It did to me, as well.

This is what a sigh looks like in print.

There comes a time in every long-lived franchise where you begin to think that the creators are being less creative and more money-oriented. That accusation gets tossed around a lot, and I don’t want to use it lightly. Still, recycling of plots seems to me to be a good indicator that this sort of thing is happening. I have no problem with giving money to a franchise that is earning it; but simple quantity of effort isn’t enough to earn it, if that effort is not coming from a desire to do the job well. Money may be an effective motivator, but it’s not a good one; it will always tend toward the minimum necessary effort, toward quantity over quality. And, as I’ve hinted, you can drown in quantity.

Let’s look at a more literary example. Frank Herbert’s Dune is widely regarded as one of the finest masterpieces in science fiction history. Its early sequels, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, are regarded nearly as highly; the next three books in the series are also well loved, though less so. Unfortunately, Frank Herbert was in the midst of writing the final volume when he died, and we never got a proper ending to the Dune series. Enter his son, Brian, and established sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson (who, perhaps not coincidentally, had already written for the Star Wars EU). This duo set out, allegedly, to finish the series, working from Frank Herbert’s notes and unfinished work, much as Brandon Sanderson would later do for Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time fantasy series. If that was all they had done, it would have been fine; but they didn’t begin there. Instead, they started with a political-intrigue prequel trilogy, and then wrote a distant-past trilogy based on the nearly-mythical Butlerian Jihad. That event had been mentioned in the original series as the reason why humans were so heavily against artificial intelligence, or “thinking machines”, but it had never been properly described. Only after completing those six volumes did they write the conclusion to Dune, which itself was split into two volumes (and thus two sales). In the end, their conclusion had much more in common with their Butlerian Jihad series than with the original Dune series—a turn of events that I find hard to imagine having been in Frank Herbert’s plans. We may never know; but we DO know that Brian and Kevin have gone on to write more Dune novels—a total of thirteen as of 2016, which is more than twice the number written by Frank Herbert.

Pictured: Too Much

We’ll leave the question of whether a fictional universe belongs to its original creator for another post; but I want to point out that Brian and Kevin’s books are almost universally regarded to be inferior to the original series. (Personally, I greatly enjoyed the Butlerian Jihad books, but they are very different from the originals; and the other entries have been mediocre at best, including the two concluding volumes.) So, was it just a money-grab? Maybe. I suspect that Brian Herbert originally wanted to do justice to his father’s legacy; but in the end, the money was just too attractive, and they couldn’t stop.

Maybe they should have. Maybe we, fans, should have, as well (though it’s more the burden of the authors than the fans, I think; we vote with our dollars, as it were, but only after the fact). Maybe, in the end, we only need so much of a good thing; and anything else becomes too much. There’s nothing wrong with wrapping up an unfinished tale; on that note, mystery writer Sue Grafton recently died, with only one volume left in her Kinsey Millhone/Alphabet Mystery series (Z is for Zero would have been the title), and I’d be thrilled if her family would let that last volume be ghostwritten. (They aren’t.) I would hate to have invested countless hours in The Wheel of Time’s twelve (at that time) volumes, and never get the conclusion Brandon Sanderson gave us later. But beyond that, there’s nothing wrong with letting a masterpiece stand on its own. The original Dune series (aside from the question of a conclusion) was a masterpiece. So was the original Star Wars trilogy. We don’t need every gap filled in, every era examined, every character’s every moment written out.  We don’t—heaven help us—an Episode X, XI, or XII. Too much cheapens the original, and dilutes its impact. Sometimes, enough is really enough.

This is how you continue another author’s work.

 

(I feel I should say, in passing, that there are some very rare series that have built-in safeguards against this very phenomenon. The best example I have is Doctor Who, of which I am a lifelong fan; those who have followed this blog for a while already know that, and for those that are new, you can find much more of my material about that series at my companion blog, The Time Lord Archives. That series has built-in mechanisms for constantly renewing itself; it has no single monolithic era, and has always been a sort of shared universe, with a multitude of contributors and a horde of characters and settings. It was designed that way, and has proved surprisingly resilient over five and a half decades. But, this sort of situation is rare; that format doesn’t lend itself well to most series. And even with a series like Doctor Who, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or burned out, just based on the volume of material.)

That’s where I am in my own life as a fan. I’ll always love Star Wars and Dune and The Wheel of Time and many other franchises; but I’ll love them with the fondness of memory, rather than the fanaticism of the future. If I do watch or read or play any future installments—and I will; I watched The Last Jedi, and Lord willing I will watch Episode IX when it’s released—I’ll try to appreciate them for what they are, but I won’t chase them the way I did in my teens. And if I miss them, that’s okay as well. It’s been a good exercise for me, this form of letting go; it has let me enjoy these things without the burden of comparing them to what’s gone before, and therefore prevented me from hating things that don’t merit that level of investment. In the course of doing that, it’s saved me from the trap of trying to get my children to be as invested in these things as I was at their age; they’re not me, and I don’t want them to be me. They deserve their own memories, even as they learn to appreciate a few of mine. After all, there’s only so much time, and there’s a lot to experience in it. We short ourselves when we expend all our effort on one beloved franchise—and life is too short for that.

But if they ever go back and write an ending for The Pirates of Dark Water, I’m in! Just kidding. Mostly.

 

TGRRL: Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

Whenever a recommendation post–and they are fairly common–appears on Reddit’s book-oriented communities, certain books inevitably float to the top. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in comment threads discussing science-fiction and fantasy recommendations. I’m being completely anecdotal here–I haven’t tracked it in any formal sense–but my observation is that today’s book, Orson Scott Card’s famous Ender’s Game, is likely one of the top three science-fiction novels recommended, at least in the past few years. (The others would be Dune, which we’ve already covered, and Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut, Ready Player One. I’ve been hearing about that book since I joined Reddit in 2013, but have yet to read it. Certainly to beat out so many classics of the genre, it must have something going for it; and it’s definitely on my to-read list. It is also on the extended portion of the Great Reddit Reading List–that is, the entries after #200; I suspect it only missed being on the original list by virtue of being very new while compilation was taking place.)

Ender’s Game, first edition. Not mine, unfortunately.

 

The problem with being such a highly-recommended book is that its reputation begins to supplant the actual book. I would not be surprised to learn that there are many science-fiction readers who know the basic premise of Ender’s Game without having read the book. The 2013 film certainly helped in that regard, but I suspect this was already true prior to the film’s release. I was one such reader; I was loosely familiar with the book long before my friend Cyndera persuaded me to read it (she had recently participated in one of Card’s writing workshops, and was a bit of a Card enthusiast at the time, so I can’t blame her). What I found when I did read it, was not what I expected.

The Ender series, as well as its companion Shadow series (Ender’s Shadow and its sequels), are far less concerned with the science-fiction conventions they portray, and far more concerned with the effect those conventions have on the characters. Many of us–most, even–know by now that Ender’s Game is the story of children fighting a war when they believe they are simply playing a war game. Ender Wiggin’s tactical genius is impressive, but he believes he is only using it for games and training, when in fact he is commanding real fleets in a very real war. That’s clever, and makes for a great twist at the end; but the euphoria of discovering that twist lasts about ten seconds. That’s about how long it takes for the reader to realize that this child has been exploited and nearly destroyed by all the adults in his life, and can never have a normal life in any meaningful sense. Meanwhile, the Shadow series follows Ender’s right-hand man (boy?), Bean, who is a product of genetic engineering. That engineering gives him an amazing and ever-increasing mental capacity, which in the end causes him to far surpass Ender’s accomplishments–but it also condemns him to a painful and early death, as his body continues to grow in pace with his mind. No one gets off easy in this series, and everyone pays the price for their advancements.

I have wondered what Card meant to say in this series. It seems to me that, at least in the first few novels of each series, his goal was to expose the horrors of war by taking them to absurd extremes (there’s little more extreme than child soldiers, after all, whether in the real world or in fiction). The message that comes across, however, is a bit different: It’s a statement of the dangers in rushing into technology, into the future, without looking and counting the cost first. Card doesn’t make the argument that these things are bad by definition; his ships, his weapons, his ansible (a communication device borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World, and a contraction of the word “answerable”), his gene tech, are all legitimate technologies, but they are used recklessly and without thought for what they will do to those in their sphere of influence.

With all that said, it’s still a good book. It’s a sort of coming-of-age story, though certainly different from most; it’s a good sci-fi war novel; and it does portray a future that is as fascinating as it is frightening. Reading Ender’s Game is a coming-of-age ritual of its own for sci-fi fans, despite the fact that I was nearly thirty when I read it. I would simply recommend reading it for yourself before getting too involved in its reputation–and that, I think, is good advice for any book and any reader.

How’s your reading goal coming along? I’ve set a goal of 50 books in 2018 via Goodreads; you can join me here! So far I’ve finished Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, and have begun reading Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer. You can see my to-read list here.

The Great Reddit Reading List

Previous

Next