Damascene

The wicked great wyrm, the wily death-dealer,

Lay hidden and haughty, in horded gold gleaming.

There came the pauper prince, to prize loose a treasure.

Full-handed, fool-hearted, in his fear never seeing:

That ruby is an eye, that ivory a claw.
That damascene, the dragon.

A stab at writing something in alliterative verse. I haven't been as strict about scheme and meter as the original Norse/Germanic (especially the last two lines), but I like the sound of it. So there.

The Greatest Knight

A thousand lives dripped from the edge of Lancelot’s blade, a thousand more from the point of his lance. The dead tide lapped his thighs with a thousand shadowed hands. 

He stepped, smiling, from the Lake, doffed his helm and bowed to the Queen: the greatest knight that ever lived.

Elegiac

The Elegiac Empress reigns for a year following the death of her Unmade Prince, during which time four new princes are quickened. 

The Rite of Return is held at the end of the year, during which the four are led to the grotto of the Water Singer. 

The survivor becomes the new Prince.

* * *

One of my favorite lines by Iain M Banks was the first line of Consider Phlebas, supposedly the beginning to a character's favorite story: 

The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.

Loved that suggestion of untold worlds, and sprawling strange stories, and this is my attempt to recreate the same feeling. 

Prometheus

I've decided to try writing nanofiction, 50-world-long micro stories, as a way of trying to stay creative and write something new in the timeframes that life makes available to me. The length is arbitrary--fits about one tweet I find--and I might try longer or shorter, see how they feel. Here's the first:

Prometheus clambered down the mountain, the stolen ember in his hand. Revenge served not cold, but hot enough to scald his skin. He heard the harpy cries of the Furies behind him, and smiled, though the wind clutched at him with eagle claws.

Will be using the label 'Nanofiction' to track these.

Dunkirk: We Shall Fight on the Loading Screens

Title: Dunkirk
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by: Christopher Nolan

Finally watched this on my phone’s Netflix app, an experience which would have been improved if the screen didn’t keep going black every 30 seconds. Rewinding for 10 seconds seemed to fix the problem—for the next 30 seconds. Rewind. Repeat. 

So I can say I saw this movie the way Christopher Nolan intended: On a tiny screen, in 30 second installments.

Obviously, this made. Made the whole. Whole experience a. A little bit. Bit choppy to. To watch.

But you know, it was good, I liked it, and this is why I don’t write much about things I like: It’s easier for me to criticize than to praise, for what makes entertainment enjoyable to me seems to be essentially the same in every case, while there are half a million ways things can go wrong. Or else maybe it’s human nature never to be satisfied with the same thing twice, that we grow quickly bored of the good but clutch the memory of the bad to our breast like a talisman.

It may be that the concept of ‘Quality’ is inherently undefinable, that we first experience something subconsciously or instinctively as good or bad and only later rationalize why we felt so, in the way that people who know nothing about iambic pentameter can recognize something powerful in Shakespeare, or who know nothing of storytelling conventions or cinematography (Hello!) can feel the power of a Nolan movie.

Well, you’re not going to fool me this time, grey matter.

Might be this all lives in some pre-linguistic corner of our lizard brains. But let’s try to break it down, even if this amounts to nothing more than rationalization after the fact.

First thing that hits you, even squinting against my glowing five-incher (eyebrow waggle), is how ludicrously good-looking the movie is. Every line and detail is as crisp as Kenneth Branagh’s accent, perhaps thanks to the decision to shoot the movie in larger-than-usual 65mm film. The balletic aerial dogfights in particular amaze as steel angels dart among the cirrus skyscape. Bowler-hat shaped helmets off to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. 

Meanwhile, composer Hans Zimmer chips in by keeping both hands firmly down on the keys in the suspense synth soundtrack.

Plucky desperation has never looked or sounded so good.

That sense of being there is reinforced by the attention to detail. The whole thing just exudes authenticity from every square centimeter of celluloid. The movie was filmed on the beach of Dunkirk at around the same time as the real evacuation, using the actual boats that actually took part in the actual evacuation, actually. It’s that groundedness, I think, that urges you to trust that the movie knows what it’s doing, and opens you up to its message on the real qualities of heroism.

(No doubt some details were missed—the one thing I noticed was the Spitfires in the movie never seem to run out of bullets: Tom Hardy’s pilot shoots down about four or five planes, despite the Spitfire only having ammunition for 10-20 seconds of firing).

All of this in service of a war story that is not about a victory but an evacuation, the point being I think that for the average Tommy, GI, grunt or doughboy, ‘victory’ is not something you, personally, can aim to achieve. Rather, your goal is, first and foremost, not dying. Taking the hill or capturing the bunker or whatever comes second: can’t do any of that if you’re dead. 

So we get that truth distilled to its essence, with a group of soldiers whose only aim is to escape and survive, who fight against the specter of death rather than the enemy. Symbolically, we never see a German soldier at all until the last few seconds of the movie, and even they are blurry and out of focus.

It’s a Nolan movie so of course the plot isn’t as simple as the premise sounds, as we cut back and forth across three stories operating across three different timeframes: three soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and One Direction’s Harry Styles) wait for rescue and have a series of boats blow up from under them (this gets almost comical by the third time it happens), a father and his son (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney) take their pleasure yacht across the channel to help rescue the soldiers, and three RAF pilots (Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden and the voice of Michael Caine) take part in a sortie to provide air cover for the evacuation. Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy as the British commanders provide a kind of play-by-play commentary through the whole thing.

I love this take on the traditional war movie, as a kind of embodiment of one of my favorite Word War 2 quotes, by American correspondent George Biddle: "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." It’s the answer to the mad, Rambo-fantasy of glorious war, our childish wish to be the hero.

There are heroes in Dunkirk, such as Mark Rylance’s yacht owner coming to the rescue, or Tom Hardy’s ace fighter pilot, but they’re grim men, doing a dirty job, and their only reward is the knowledge that they gave it their best.

I mentioned storytelling conventions earlier, and one interesting thing for me, unlearned amateur that I am, that I felt this movie doesn’t really follow the traditional three-act structure. There’s very little setup and zero backstory for any of our characters, acts one and two sort of slosh into one another without any clear twist as the trapped soldiers repeat the cycle of find ship-board ship-lose ship, and while the score treats the appearance of the civilian rescue boats off the beach as the climax, it’s a kind of diffuse one, spread across the three stories and happening at three different times.

But—again, for me at least—that kind of single, sustained note of suspense without letup works in the movie’s favor and supports the theme that the only thing that matters for these characters is returning to England.

Like I say, maybe our sense of Quality is something submerged beneath our intellect, just kind of bobbing to the surface from time to time. That sounds like a capitulation on the part of a writer and reviewer, doesn’t it, an admission that subjective experience is never going to be entirely explainable or applicable. Well, I write mainly for my own solipsistic, onanistic amusement, and if someone out there on the Internet enjoys it too, then so much the better.

Watch Dunkirk. It’s good, says my lizard brain. Sometimes, just making it, making it to the, the end is, is victory enough.

Solo: A Mostly Harmless Story

Title: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Johnathan Kasdan

I was cautiously optimistic going into this movie, and still found it a touch underwhelming.

It was harmless.

Well. Mostly harmless.

THE SHITSHOW THAT WAS PROMISED

Perhaps that counts as something of a minor triumph for the makers of “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, given how relentlessly negative most of the pre- and even post-release narrative has been.

Pre-release, the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were famously fired halfway through the production and the stalwart, staid Ron Howard brought in to reportedly reshoot 70% of the movie. Han Solo actor Alden Ehrenreich was apparently so unimpressive that a coach was hired to put some smug in his smuggler. 

I’ve only just seen this because it was only released here June 29. Frankly, Japan’s decision to delay the release of the movie a full month after the rest of the civilized world (previous Disney movies have come out within a week of the US premier) should have been seen for what it was: a massive vote of no-confidence in the success of this movie. That lack of confidence seems to have been well-founded.

Post-release, the box office results have been less than stellar, as the franchise has been brought firmly down to earth. As I write this, boxofficemojo.com reports that worldwide, the movie has made just shy of $370m, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize it’s about one-third what the next lowest-grossing of the Disney movies, Rogue One, made during its run. Reshoots are reckoned to have blasted the movie’s production budget up to $250m, so when you add in marketing and subtract the theater chains’ take, means the movie will likely lose money on its theatrical run. 

Pundits (well, okay, Internet idiots like me, really) have been quick to suggest reasons for the lack of interest—its release came too hard on the heels of Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, it came too soon after The Last Jedi (TLJ), it didn’t feel ‘necessary’, audiences are rebelling against the controversy of TLJ and boycotting the movie.

Let me offer another possible reason: It isn’t that good.

It isn’t that bad either, but the best I can offer is that it isn’t the utter shitshow that was promised.

OH, STUFF THE LORE

We open on Corellia, a world of Victorian steel mills and Dickensian child labor, where a young Han (Ehrenreich) dreams of escape with his squeeze, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame). The two make a break in a spectacularly dull car chase, and reach the spaceport where they find every memorable moment from the previous Star Wars movies, cut up, stuck in a blender and regurgitated onto the script page at every possible opportunity: Stormtroopers tell people to “Move along,” a recruiting video plays the Imperial March theme, and so on.

Indeed, this movie half feels like an answer to all the obsessives who cried about TLJ’s being unfaithful to the ‘lore’ of Star Wars, designed to stimulate that pathetic need to feel you’re the smartest person in the movie theater. So, so many eye-rolling shout-outs: Tracking devices on the Falcon, the holo-chess table, Teras Kasi from a two decades-old Playstation game, a suit of Mandalorian armor in the background in one scene. Because for too many out there, this seems to now be a substitute for things like engaging characters or an interesting plot.

Ah yes, the plot. Right.

Han escapes Corellia although Qi’ra doesn’t. Han joins the Imperial army, then deserts, joins up with a smuggler and con-man named Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) in a series of escalating heists designed to buy off Crimson Dawn crime syndicate boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Here, he is reunited with Qi’ra, who has become either Vos’s sex-slave (Vos is creepily and physically controlling of her, and her face falls as soon as he enters the room) and/or lieutenant (she’s a deadly martial artist and Vos sends her with Han to ensure he honors his end of the deal), I’m not really clear which—and I suspect the movie isn’t either. It all culminates in the Kessel Run, made famous in the original Star Wars thanks to an offhand remark Harrison Ford’s Han Solo makes to Luke and Obi-wan.

I was struck how this feels like a movie in search of a purpose or goal, kind of flitting from one scene to the next, dutifully ticking off boxes on the back story that we already know about Han Solo—gets a nickname, tick, meets Chewbacca, tick, gets his blaster, tick, does the Kessel Run, tick, wins the Millennium Falcon in a card game, tick. Shoots first, tick.

Any time the movie appears in danger of going in a new or interesting direction and showing you something you’ve never seen in a Star Wars movie before, it’s immediately reigned in and we skip ahead to the next scene. There is a very, very brief sequence, for example, where Han is thrust in the middle of a sort of World War I-style battle, filled with terrifyingly confusing explosions and smoke, and you think, ah now we’ll see how he grows to hate the Empire through this senseless war.

But nope. Next scene he’s plotting mutiny and escaping with Chewie. I think it was always going to be hard to make an interesting Han Solo prequel (or the Boba Fett and Obi-wan prequels which may or may not be in planning), but seeing the Empire from the inside might have been an interesting twist, focusing less on what we already know about Han and more on what we don’t know, or more on the mechanism of evil, and how the free soul rebels against tyranny. 

Sorry fellas. This movie has boxes to tick.

As a result, each scene and plot point feels thin and stretched out, like an idea spread over too much running time:

“We must escape,” says Han. A minute later, they do.

“I should join the Imperial army,” thinks Han. A minute and a brain-hurtlingly stupid nickname later, he does.

I think it’s symptomatic of this kind of approach of stitching plot points mechanically together that two scenes end with characters walking off in some random direction, despite being in the middle of icy/sandy wastes. It’s very meta, as if the characters just decided to literally walk across the pages of the script to the next scene. You ain’t got no spaceship buddy, where the hell you think you’re walking to?

A SMALL MOVIE

The locations, both interior and ex, feel oddly cramped and soundstage-y. The spice mines of Kessel, for example, look like they could comfortably fit into a suburban back yard. The cinematography is very dimly-lit for about the first third, punctuated by Pokemon-seizure inducing blast of brilliant light. There’s little of the visual flair that made TLJ enjoyable despite its potty plotting, save for perhaps the aforementioned battle scene and one more where we follow Han up the ramp and into the Falcon in the middle of a firefight. Should-be-crowd-pleasing sequences like the initial car chase or the flight through the Kessel Run are instead just kind of leaden and lifeless. The music keeps swelling and telling me something dramatic is going on, but I’m not buying it: Chewbacca sitting in the Falcon’s co-pilot seat, for example, is not in and of itself dramatic. It’s a totally unearned moment, that acquires significance only with knowledge of the Star Wars series. Otherwise, it’s just this big furry ape sitting in a chair.

As Han, Ehrenreich is fine, I guess, aside from one scene where he takes the Falcon’s controls and does the I’m-obviously-not-driving-this waggling the steering wheel from side to side bit. There’s one or two scenes where he shows the thin veneer of bravado over someone unsure of themselves, but there’s too little of this. I don’t especially buy him as the future Han Solo we met in the original trilogy, since he seems to lack any hint of selfishness or cynicism.

Clarke similarly lacks the hint of depth and menace her role seems to call for, as someone who has had to be ruthless in order to survive inside a criminal organization run by an unstable, paranoid narcissist. Indeed, the movie seems uninterested in Qi’ra as anything other than a motivator for Han, which makes her climactic betrayal at the end of the movie far less impactful that it might have been otherwise—despite the fact that her arc seems much more interesting than Han’s.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has one enjoyable scene as L3, a navigation droid infatuated with Han’s frenemy Lando (Donald Glover), but her ‘droids’ rights’ shtick humor falls flat, coming off as ill-timed mockery of equal rights movements. Even the stunt casting of Donald Glover as Lando didn’t do much for me—though I know other reviewers loved him—I can’t help but suspect his accolades have more to do with the goodwill he’s already garnered from his music and previous acting than with his performance here.

DIRECTIONLESS

I think the common thread between the sketchy plot and sketchy characters is the lack of a clear goal or direction for the characters.

You could do a movie about plot, but here there are three or four, raised and discarded in quick succession. In the good Star Wars movies, the heroes had something they want to accomplish, a goal, an objective. Steal the plans and blow up the Death Star. Become a Jedi knight. There’s none of that here. Han wants to earn enough money to buy his own ship and return to rescue Qi’ra from Cor—oh no wait, there she is. He wants to do a heist to pay off a gang lord—ah, no, he’s decided not to. There’s nothing left to connect you to the main character, a vague sense he wants a ship and independence, but there’s nothing really established onscreen in the movie.

Alternatively, you could do a movie about character, but the titular loner ends the movie much the same as he began it, and we grow no closer to understanding what makes him tick. He says he’s a selfish guy, others say he’s basically good, but there’s no evidence either way. Han is just kind of blown by the plot, exercising little agency at any stage of the story. His friendship with Chewie is paint-by-numbers and established in a single scene, in keeping with this movie’s impatience to cover all the required ground. Qi’ra is another potentially interesting character, but relegated to the background—this movie could have taken a lesson from Mad Max: Fury Road and realized the viewpoint character doesn’t always have to be the center of the action.

So instead we’re left with a kind of rote retelling of what we already know about Han Solo, with no alarms and no surprises, while the hero himself becomes a kind of muddled blur, his only motivation being to hit the required plot points and move the story forward. If the plot points themselves were more fun, we might not notice the boring characters and haphazard execution. It’s not actively, malevolently bad, it’s just a bit dull, lifeless and predictable, content with doing what is safe and expected rather than challenging the imagination of the audience in any way.

Token Tolkien Talk

I’ve been inspired to write about this from two things I saw posted on Twitter recently, one old and recycled, one new and fresh. The old and recycled one was a quote from a 2014 Rolling Stone interview with “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, in which he criticizes J.R.R. Tolkien for the lack of information in “Lord of the Rings” about King Aragorn’s tax and orc policies. The new and fresh one was by an academic lamenting that the name “Tolkien” is now often used as a euphemism for any generic swords-and-sorcery “high fantasy”, obscuring what is unique to Tolkien.

The two points are intertwined, I feel: what is unique about Tolkien is his self-conscious desire to create a kind of modern myth, a legend in the mold of Beowulf or the Volsunga saga, rather than a realistic depiction of a medieval ruler.

Now, I think George actually likes Tolkien, and quite likely name-dropped him for precisely the reason the academic lamented: Tolkien is the Hitler of fantasy writing—a lazy shorthand for a certain category of writer; you can compare writers to Tolkien and everyone immediately understands who you mean.

In contrasting his own writing with Tolkien’s, George had this to say:

Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy?

It’s such a good quote, let’s admit it, because it strikes just the right note of absurdity. It speaks to that little part of even the most ardent Tolkien fans, who know that there’s a side of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” that is just kind of silly and childish. It’s undeniable-Tolkien did not write gritty, realistic novels. It’s also, and you’d know this if you’d read “Lord of the Rings” (and I’m pretty sure George has), a fatuous, stupid and glib thing to say, and a deliberate misunderstanding of everything Tolkien was trying to accomplish.

TOLKIEN != HIGH FANTASY

I’ll allow that insofar as George speaks to what the word ‘Tolkien’ has come to mean in terms of a certain niche of commercial fantasy fiction, it might be a fair criticism.

This is not an especially new or controversial opinion, but a number of authors have looked at the superficial, surface elements of Tolkien, and dropped them into their own works without any of the world-building, the care and attention that Tolkien lavished on his creation. I won’t name names, except for those of Terry Brooks, Dennis McKiernan (smack you in your Bag End obvious, that one), Raymond Feist and every Dungeons and Dragons novel ever published.

It kind of turns high fantasy novels into tick-box exercises. Tolkien provided a background, a sense of history and culture that lends verisimilitude to the text? Throw in a few references to things outside your tale, tick that box off. Tolkien invented languages, with lexicons, grammar and a sense of linguistic evolution? Make sure your made-up words sound vaguely similar, tick another box off. Elves, dwarves, orcs, wraiths and dragons? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

So if George’s point was that many modern fantasy authors write in formulaic and shallow settings about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys without seriously considering what makes someone good or bad, then fair enough. Even better, if his aim was just to get us thinking about precisely what we as readers define as a good fantasy book, mission accomplished. Here I am, pontificating about Tolkien because of his quote. Good job, George.

But if his point is to berate Tolkien about not being interested on the same literary goals as himself, then he can go fuck himself.

WHAT'S THE POINT?

Writing has a point to it. Not all writing shares the same point. You can write to inform, to entertain, to say something about the world. Even within that subset of writing which seeks to explain or comment on the human condition and our experience, not all focus on the same facet or aspects, nor should we expect them to try to cover every single one of them in every piece of writing.

LotR doesn’t talk about the tax policies of a good king, because at a fundamental level it isn’t about politics, and more importantly, isn’t trying to be a ‘fantasy novel’ in the sense that we use the term now.

It is possible, if you try hard enough, to extract real-world messages and meanings from LotR, both positive and negative, ones perhaps not intended by the author yet which come through in the structure of the story and the way it is written.

There’s less admirable stuff in there, of course. Although there are some powerful women in the tale, like Eowyn and Galadriel, or Luthien in the “Silmarillion”, they are minor characters, and the main stage is pure bratwurst. It’s not terribly sensitive on race relations, with its blond, blue-eyed, Anglo-Saxon heroes fighting off the swarthy hordes of “lesser men” from the South and East.

On the positive side, the writing is imbued with the love of nature and delight in the natural world, and the need to protect that nature from an encroaching human civilization. There’s also the power of the comradery and friendship that sees the characters through to the end of their quest.

If you hunger for a definition of ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ there is a kind of Christian sensibility, in which the ‘wise’ are those who understand and are in harmony with the Plan of the LotR-universe god and his angels, Eru and the Valar, and evil manifests itself in a desire to control and force one’s will upon creation rather than submit to the Plan.

Finally, and for me most importantly, there is a study in the nature of heroism. In the end, the return of the True King wielding a sword out of legend proves to be a sideshow, a useful distraction at best. Evil is only defeated through the courage of plain, boring, ordinary hobbits, little people who just want to go home and have breakfast (and second breakfast, if possible). It is a reminder, to quote Tolkien himself, of “the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men 'at a pinch'.” In other words, the world is saved not by supermen, but by ordinary folkses who don’t really want to be heroes, but realize they cannot sit by and do nothing.

Given the constant stream of raw untreated sewage which news outlets treat us to each day, that is both an empowering and terrifying realization: you can make a difference, but by the same token things are only going to get better if you, the person reading these words, does something about it.

It seems pretty mean-spirited then, with all of that served up on the intellectual buffet table for you to stuff yourself on, to then complain LotR doesn’t address whatever pet peeve or interest you have.

As a realistic portrayal of politics, it leaves a lot to be desired, sure. Okay.

It also says nothing about geology (and yes, you can find articles complaining about how Tolkien’s maps don’t play nice with plate tectonics), nothing about the migratory routes of birds, very little about botany despite naming a slew of trees and flowers, virtually nothing about trade routes, coinage or economics, very little about legal systems, nothing about a whole shitload of human activity, in fact. In one of his letters, Tolkien admits as much: “[Lord of the Rings’] economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy.”

That’s because Lord of the Rings isn’t a book about medieval politics. Or religion, or economics, or modern gender roles, or race relations.

What Lord of the Rings is, first and foremost, is an attempt to write a heroic myth.

TRIFFICLY MYTHICALLY HEROIC

Here’ s Tolkien again:

[A] basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite ... I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.

Where Tolkien found inspiration was in Beowulf, Viking sagas and Finnish myths such as Kullervo (a cheerful little tale about a man whose family is murdered and is then raised by the killers, inadvertently sleeps with his own sister—who then commits suicide—and then kills his adopted parents before killing himself).

It’s that self-conscious desire to create a heroic legend rather than a novel, as well as the kind of grey, overcast, doom-laden Ragnarok sensibility, that both mark Tolkien as unique and answer George’s crack about having a medieval philosophy of kingship. Of course it has a medieval philosophy: Tolkien was absolutely not trying to provide a realistic, modern-day depiction of politics or social human activity, but rather a medieval one—meaning one which a medieval person would have recognized, insofar as such considerations impact the book at all (and mostly, they don’t).

They don’t impact the book because it’s not a book about King Aragorn being a wise king and ruling happily ever after. Aragorn’s rulership is a footnote in an appendix, a happy by-product of the quest rather than its aim.

More to the point, the book isn’t about happy endings at all. There is victory, but it comes at a cost. The main hero, Frodo, fails in his quest and is scarred for life. The home of the hobbits is ravaged and ruined, and will take years to rebuild. Gandalf, Galadriel, and all that is wondrous and magical in the world must fade away. King Aragorn’s reign is not the start of some golden age, it’s a last hurrah before everything goes irretrievably to shit.

Tolkien lived through both World War I and II, fighting and losing his friends in the former, watching his child go off to war in the latter. He knew far better than draft-dodging George about the callous brutality of our world. But, knowing that, he deliberately chose not to write about it. Tolkien says, after trying to write a sequel to “Lord of the Rings”, “It proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good … I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing."

As “Sandman” and “American Gods” author Neil Gaiman observed, the author is not the audience’s bitch. You may not have wanted a heroic fantasy written in the style of a mythic legend, but that’s what Tolkien wanted to write. He found real-world politics depressing, and consciously decided not to write about them. If you reject this mode and tone of storytelling altogether, then there’s really no point in discussing the book at all—you are fighting with the book’s legacy rather than its content, speaking to the book’s fans and their attitudes rather than the book itself, and trying to impose your will on others. You’re basically Tolkien's epitome of evil, folks.

As a heroic legend, it is about the struggle against evil. It is about the courage needed to face and defeat evil. More than that though, it is about the language of legends, the sound of them, the cadence of the words, 'ere' instead of 'until', 'leagues' instead of 'miles', and it is about the imagination-tingling place names like Mirkwood or Moria, Minas Tirith and Mount Doom. It’s about the feeling you get when you read a legend, rather than a New York Times bestseller.

Also, Peter Jackson’s movies were beautifully shot and Weta Workshop’s costume and prop designs were phenomenal, but the script was just awful. Don’t @ me.

Eenie Meenie Miny Mote

Title: The Mote in God’s Eye

Authors: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

I love first contact stories, love the dark and tangled roads of the psyche they take us down. Particularly as a stranger living in a strange land (the very strangest, viz Japan), they have the power to both reassure me and scare me about what it is to be human: Our drive to either hate or mate with the Other (James Tiptree Jr.’s “And I Awoke andFound Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side”), the role of language in shaping consciousness (Ted Chiang’s “The Story of YourLife”), how much of reason is taken on faith (Carl Sagan’s “Contact”) or our fundamental inability to understand the alien, the cosmos or the divine (Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”).

I also like liking things, really I do. I read through this blog and sometimes my own negativity makes even me uncomfortable—uncomfortable with the realization that criticism is more fun than positivity, that it is easier to pull apart than to create, that all too often I substitute cynicism and sarcasm for critical thought or appreciation.

So I like first contact stories, and I like not being an asshole all the time.

With that in mind, I’m going to try to be nice about this book, despite or maybe because of the fact that I don’t think it’s very good.

First, let’s get this out of the way right off the bat, what a great title. Evocative, unique, intriguing, completely misleading as it turns out but shut up, it’s a world-class title, conveying at once both a sense of wonder at the immensity of space and of our own tiny fragility in the face of it all.

Second, let’s acknowledge the critical acclaim. The Mote in God’s Eye was nominated for the Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards, the holy trinity of science fiction awards (though as mentioned in my reviews of both Annihilation and Old Man’s War, these awards seem a better guide to genre fads and trends than actual quality). Genre giant Robert Heinlein has gone on record as calling it “possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written” (the precise quote tends to vary from place to place, so it might be entirely apocryphal, but who knows?) So The Mote in God's Eye is trifficly seminal and iconic and all that.

Just as a for instance, the BattleTech universe of which I’m so inordinately fond essentially plagiarized half its setting and its entire concept of space travel from this book (the other half, from Japanese robot cartoons)—the book is set in the year 3017, BattleTech in 3025, in the book mankind is recovering from the ‘Secession Wars,’ in BT: ‘Succession Wars,’ both feature intergalactic feudal monarchies, human societies essentially fossilized in time and hyperspace drives providing instantaneous transit between two points in space but only at specific ‘jump points’ in each star system.

The protagonist of the story is Captain Roderick Blaine and let’s again take a moment to just bask in that, shall we? Rod. Blaine. Rod. Captain Rod. That’s the whitest fucking name I’ve ever heard, and my skin tone is somewhere between mayonnaise and 2%. It’s glorious, utterly glorious—the glorious Rod.

It’s the 31^st century and the Rodster, the Rodman, Roderino is captain of a warship in a galaxy-spanning empire which has somehow preserved 20^th century Earth culture in amber, so that we still get Scots and Russian stereotypes doing stereotypically Scottish or Russian things, which—I’m trying to be nice here—perhaps didn’t seem quite so loopy back in 1974, when the book was first published, coming as it did hot on the heels of the original Star Trek, which had those exact same stereotypes in Scotty and Chekov.

That datedness might even be the book’s greatest strength now. It’s from an age where the giants of science fiction literature were physicists or computer scientist first, novelists second.

There is a refreshing lack of showiness or literary artifice, an almost Original Series Star Trek-ish innocence to the writing in The Mote in God’s Eye. Third-person, omniscient viewpoint. Told in strict chronological order. Plain simple words happily doing plain simple things on the pages. If you’ve just read a Seth Dickinson or Yoon Ha Lee short story and had the literary equivalent of a Greek dictionary thrown at you, this is the prose for you.

When Captain Rod’s ship is destroyed with the loss of dozens of lives, he is described as being “down in the dumps.” Luckily, all it takes to buck him up is a visit from the novel’s only female character (yes, there’s only one, welcome to the future of the 70’s!), Sally, which is again an absolutely fantastic name. When people get angry, they god damn things all to hell.

Actually, I recommend mentally reading all dialog in William Shatner’s voice, even Sally, though excluding perhaps the engineer, who speaks in phonetic Scots, which is why you really need to bring you’re A-Game James Doohan voice to this book as well. It’s the Trainspotting of the hippie generation.

Anyway, newly-minted Captain Roderiffic is just getting settled on his imperial battleship, when an alien ship from a star located within a dense cosmic cloud—the Mote in God’s Eye of the title—enters the system, and Rod and his crew of Rodlings are sent to investigate. Up until then, mankind has been alone in the Rodiverse and the discovery causes much excitement. Rod and company are dispatched on a scientific-slash-reconnaissance mission to the alien’s homeworld.

The first half of the narrative is then taken up with the mission’s efforts to make contact with and learn about the aliens, dubbed ‘Moties’, and the push-me-pull-you tug of war between the military, which is deeply suspicious of the aliens and sees them as a threat, and a cadre of scientists, who are eager to learn more because characterization is hard and nearly everyone in the book is defined by their job.

There follows a series of sort of rom-com misunderstandings in which Rod gets quite bent out of shape when he learns the aliens have not been entirely forthcoming about their culture, which is rich given that one possible outcome of his mission might be to commit genocide and wipe them out. The threat of which would tend to make one a tad reticent about sharing all the gory details of your past, I would have thought.

Some of the plotting is as lightweight as the writing. The romance, such as it is, is genuinely disturbing, between Sally’s eagerness to hop on the Rod and the sort of upper-class twit courtship the two engage in, with singular lack of wit or romance.

For a warship, Rod’s boat has laughably lax security measures, and two aliens escape quarantine by the fiendishly clever device of slipping out the door when someone opens it. Communication with the aliens proves ridiculously easy, as they learn English (“Anglic,” sorry) in a matter of pages—compare this to “The Story of Your Life” where communication entails a completely new world-view, or “Solaris” where communication is inherently impossible.

But we’re being nice to this book. So. The concept is interesting. Alien invasion stories have been around since forever, and like H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” (1897), usually involve an invasion of Earth. The interesting twist here is that we, the humans, are the ones with the upper hand, the ones with the star-spanning empire and planet-killing weapons, meeting the aliens on their front door step, not ours.

No less of an authority than the late great Stephen Hawking suggested we shouldn’t attempt to contact aliens at all, since they’re almost certainly not going to be helpful or friendly, but rather see us as a threat. In the Mote in God’s Eye, we see that this attitude and concern is shared on the aliens’ side as well, and in that sense the book deserves credit for at least partially showing us a contact-with-aliens story in which we are the titular aliens.

The question of whether to initiate contact goes deeper than space aliens though: It is all around us, every day. Is it better to trust or be suspicious of the Other, of the Stranger? Risk hurt or keep yourself safe at all costs—and damn the stranger, the outsider, anyone who isn’t your friend or family.

In the Mote in God’s Eye, Captain Rod (pointless fact: It looks like the name “Roderick” peaked in popularity in the US just before the book was published, capping out in 1967) is largely released from confronting such a dilemma, because the book lets him of the hook by making it plain that yes, he’s totally right to be fearful and mistrusting, because the Moties are indeed a clear and obvious threat, being a rapidly-breeding race locked in a cycle of population explosion, overcrowding, apocalyptic warfare and recovery.

This idea, this concept, is far, far more troubling to me, for it seems a parallel to arguments against immigration and in favor of apartheid-style societies. The Motie race is violent and breeds quickly, so must be quarantined, the characters conclude. That same terminology gets used against immigration around the world, and as a twice-over immigrant myself, that scares the shit out of me. That someone will conclude ‘those people’, of which I am one, are inherently violent or will crowd out other people, so we’re a fair target for extermination.

I could wish the book came out strongly against this viewpoint. The fact that it is expressed by military officers in an expansionist empire provides a kind of qualifier, but it still seems we’re supposed to feel this reaction is a reasonable one, as the ‘us’ in danger from the rabbit-like ‘other’ in the story is all of us humans, but substitute ‘aliens’ for ‘immigrants’ and the whole mindset becomes at once chillingly familiar and deeply disturbing.

But we're being nice. It's an interesting archeological piece, with a couple of perhaps novel-for-their-time ideas, however abysmally executed. 

Captain Avengers: Age of Civil Wartron

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Directed by: Joss Whedon
Written by: Joss Whedon

Captain America: Civil War
Directed by: Anthony & Joe Russo
Written by: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Finally got around to seeing these two entries into Marvel’s sprawling cinematic universe, long after Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 convinced me that these safe but comfy cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers movies had nothing going for them but photogenic leads, CGI and the occasional quip.

I still think that’s the case, but it feels like the formula’s been improved and refined, so what you end up getting is a kind of junkie hit of pure, uncut, photogenic leads quipping in the middle of CGI action sequences. And let’s admit, that can be a lot of fun, because these photogenic leads are very photogenic, and they do have some very good quips indeed.

You can talk about plot, but really, these movies have kind of ceased to contain anything but the bantering, and are now about the characters we know and like just kind of bouncing off one another and their environment.

I think that’s one reason Marvel movies often get criticized for having weak or uninteresting villains—the bad guys are secondary, useful only as a prop to get our heroes back on their one-linering. Civil War goes a step further and makes the ostensible ‘bad guy’ almost a no-show in his own movie: his only role is to get the superheroes punching each other. (I think maybe this is also why, say, Marvel can get away with 3-4 movies a year while something like Star Wars feels odd having two movies 5 months apart--A Marvel movie is like meeting old friends, while Star Wars is listening to them tell you about their summer vacation). 

None of the paper-thin plots stands up to even the lightest and airiest of dramatic analyses.

In “Ultron,” Iron Man/Tony Stark/Robert Downey Junior creates an AI that goes berserk and tries to kill humanity, so the team’s solution is to hang out at a farm for a bit and then create an AI (Vision/Paul Bettany) that they just kind of hope won’t go berserk and kill humanity.

In “Civil War” (an Avengers movie in all but name), the whole plot revolves around whether or not the superhero team will submit to international oversight, though each character’s opinions on this seem entirely artificial and geared to making an even 50/50 split between the cast. Captain let’s-punch-the-Nazis America says no, because, um, reasons. Tony loose-cannon-I-spent-a-previous-movie-telling-the-government-to-back-off Stark says yes, because he’s the other big name and the two leads need to fight.

In terms of characters, they’re both incredibly overstuffed, but because characters are ALL they have, and they’re all as charming as a Tom Hiddleston wink, you don’t mind. Black Panther, Spider Man and Ant Man are in Civil War, because, well, these movies are just 12-year-old me mashing my G I Joes against the Star Wars action figures for the hell of it.

Marvel absolutely trades on their pop-culture familiarity: we get maybe five minutes of introducing Spider Man, because hey it’s Spider Man, maybe 30 seconds tops with Ant Man because eh, why not, and then we’re on to the next scene.

But for all that, they’re fun. Really, marshmallowy, rot-your-brain fun.

Civil War moreso than Ultron, but even that finds its feet when it isn’t trying to set everyone up on the right trajectories for the next 10 years of Marvel movies—an early party scene where everyone tries to lift Thor’s hammer is delightful, because it’s the distilled essence of Marvel: these dudes just hanging out and shooting the shit with each other (contrast that to when they try to do anything other than quip, like the utterly uncarbonated ‘romance’ between Black Widow and the Hulk).

For sheer Marvel-ness, Marvelosity, Marvelousness, Civil War probably outdoes Ultron, as the latter is so clunky that even the quipping often seems forced. It tries to shoehorn too much plot into movies that, like I say, really aren’t about plot at all. My only other criticism of Civil War (aside from the patently artificial setup) would be the false-gravity somberness of the ending, the movie’s insistence that the heroic infighting we saw was a serious matter which has torn this team apartbecausehahaha,  no of course it hasn’t, don’t be silly, you’ve got 3-4 more movies with these actors, come off it.

So, they’re very fun movies, no denying it, but I don’t really like them, if only when I spend a second or two thinking about them (which, as mentioned, is clearly optional).

Two reasons.

One problem I have is with the whole ‘superhero’ genre (both comics and movies). It’s a moral abdication, it’s giving up in the face of challenges or difficulties and hoping someone else is going to swoop in and solve everything for you. It’s not giving a fuck about the environment or poverty because Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are going to solve everything for everyone and take us all to Mars or whatever—No, they aren’t. They’re lining their pockets and that’s the end of it. It’s up to regular people to fix what’s wrong in our world.

The cops or army you see in every superhero movie screwing things up or running around ineffectually? The civilians screaming and crying and waiting for someone to save them? That’s us. That’s you and me. And if there are no superheroes (and there aren’t, I checked), then those people are all in deep, deep shit.

Particularly in our age of media overload where the world can seem so overwhelming it’s tempting to just shrug and turn your back on the world’s problems, the idea of being saved by heroes seems a dangerous fantasy to indulge in. It’s the cheapest, easiest, most childish form of wish-fulfillment (I’d show them, if only I was magically gifted with laser eyes, instead of making an effort to improve myself…).

Give me Samwise Gamgee, the gardener willing to go into literal hell, give me John McClane the regular cop trying to stop the terrorists, give me the whole cast of Saving Private Ryan, people who actually had to work to become heroes.

That’s point one.

Point two is the gotta-catch-em-all structure in which Marvel tries to get you to watch every movie just so you can keep up with what’s happening in the other movies. None of these movies really have anything interesting to say about our world, the people living in it, or even about the characters that inhabit the fictional universe, they’re empty calories, and Marvel just wants you to keep coming back for more so that you can keep coming back for more. You have to watch the movies so that you can watch the movies.

It’s a bit like modern online-only video games, which generally require you to repetitively play (or ‘grind’) the same content over and over again so that you can be rewarded with some game item which allows you to … play the same content over and over again, but this time with a slightly larger number on the screen.

So I’m entertained by these movies, I enjoyed them, I admire the craft that went into their structure and production. But I do not love them.

Horus Hears a Who

Title: Horus Rising (Horus Heresy Book 1)

Author: Dan Abnett

Publisher: Black Library

When you’re writing about a premise as silly as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (W40K for short), or something equally silly like superheroes or giant robots, I think you’ve got two options: either revel in the silliness, play it with a wink and a smile and dial it up to 40,000, or else commit to it entirely, and really try to work out the realistic implications of the crazy premise so that you can wring some meaning from it.

If I can go on a quick tangent to illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some movies as examples: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Pacific Rim (2013) are very wink-wink we know this is ludicrous but ain’t it fun?, while Watchmen (2009) and Logan (2017) are committed to getting under the skin of either the whole idea of superheroes in the former case, or one superhero in particular in the latter case.

Point is, you can make it work either way, but this novel doesn’t.

THE SILLINESS AT THE CORE

The gonzo, over-the-top conceit of the W40K universe—a tabletop/miniatures wargame first published in 1987—is that in the year 40,000 giant, roided space marines in a pseudo-Roman intergalactic Empire will fight on distant planets against fantasy beasts, like Orks and Eldar (Elves), Ridley Scott Alien-esque Tyranids and other assorted weird creatures.

It’s supposed to be ‘grim’ in the sense that the default human protagonists belong to a bloodthirsty, evangelical crusade, and also in the sense that they have no hope of ever winning against the opposition ranged against them. That grimness, however, doesn’t quite hide the silliness at the core—it’s an over-the-top grimness, yet it’s never squalid or gratuitously shocking, so that grimness can be played for laughs.

So when it came time to build on W40K’s long-running popularity and expand the brand into the field of fiction, I think those two paths were open—go hard or go full ridiculous.

In 2006’s “Horus Rising,” the first of 48 (and counting) volumes in the “Horus Heresy” series, Games Workshop’s fiction imprint, Black Library, opted for serious, but it’s kind of a dull seriousness that never tries to scratch beneath the tropes it presents.

If the intent had been to produce a fun page-turner, then I think they’d have done far better to go the nudge-nudge, wink-wink route. Instead, the whole thing is a bit dour and downbeat, without any insight or innovation that might make such dreariness worth slogging through.

COMMITTED TO THE WRONG THINGS

Dan Abnett—whose career seems more focused on comics such as X-Men, the Punisher or Judge Dredd than novels—brings to the novel the Judge Dredd tone with none of the social commentary. It’s a competent and serviceable book, but really doesn’t have anything going for it beyond the mechanics of plot.

The story of this first book focuses on Space Marine Captain slash post-human superman Garviel Loken, and details how he and his avowedly atheist comrades deal with an encounter with supernatural, seemingly godlike creatures that live in W40K’s equivalent of hyperspace, called the Warp.

During a battle on an alien planet, one of Loken’s men is possessed by something that lives in the Warp, mutating him into a monster. Loken is shaken but reassured there is a scientific explanation, while one of the civilians who witnesses the horror is shocked into joining a secret cult that worships the Emperor (despite the latter’s insistence he is mortal). Meanwhile, Loken’s commander, Horus, is slowly corrupter by agents of the infernal/otherworldly power.

The question of “What happens to religion when humanity gets into space?” is maybe not an obvious choice for a wargame to tackle, and frankly one the book doesn’t spend too much time addressing despite it being the only thing of real interest happening—Abnett is much more focused on the machinations surrounding Horus and foreshadowing his eventual fall from grace. Presumably explored in more detail in the other 47 books in the series.

There’s potential in the idea, for sure. Will the triumph of reason represented by space exploration and colonization lead to the downfall of religions, when we do not find God or Allah or Zeus or whoever out there? Is religion truly just the retreat before the inexplicable, and will new mysteries in the galaxy drive us back into its arms? Interesting questions to ask, but not ones you can really deal with in a series—and oh what a series it is—of books about bloodshed and blowing things up across the galaxy.

MAXIMUM SILLINESS

So, for me at least, it feels committed to the wrong things: it’s committed to its premise, but only the surface details, the who is doing what to who, when and where, rather than the underlying concepts or ideas. I think Abnett could and should have jettisoned all the faux-introspection and just gone for maximum silliness—perhaps had the buffoonish Orks (who’ve always been presented as a kind of parody of the British working class in W40K) as foils to the serious space marines—and had more fun with this. 

Or is that ... HERESY?