Cat Rambo's Blog, page 35

Cussin’ in Secondary Worlds

Cussin’ in Secondary Worlds

Saturday, June 10, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Cursewords, expletives, and more – those things your characters say when nothing else will do – tells you more about the world (including issues of class, cultural taboos, and more) than you might imagine. How cussing and worldbuilding interrelate. AKA the class where we say F*ck a lot.

Join Norton Award winning author Fran Wilde, author of Updraft, Cloudbound, and The Jewel and Her Lapidary for a workshop that will leave you ready to swear magnificently.

Classes are taught online via Google hangouts and require reliable Internet connection, although in the past participants have logged on from coffee shops, cafes, and even an airplane; a webcam is suggested but not required.

To register for this class, mail me with the following details:

The email address associated with your Google account
Which class or classes and the dates
Remind me if you have already taken a class with me so you can get the former student rate ($79). Otherwise the cost is $99.
Whether you would prefer to pay via Paypal, check, or some other means.

Upon receiving that, I will send you an invoice.

Important! Remember every class has at least one Plunkett scholarship for students who could not otherwise afford the cost. To apply for a Plunkett, mail me and tell me why you want to take the class in 100 words or less.

Guest Post from Carrie Patel: Whose Story Is This, Anyway? – Character Craft for Novels and Games

Growing up, two of my favorite things were books and video games. If you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d grow up to write both, I probably would have choked on my Mountain Dew.

But over the past few years, I’ve been doing exactly that. I’ve written the Recoletta series, a science fantasy trilogy published by Angry Robot, and I’ve worked as a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment for three and a half years now, writing for the Pillars of Eternity games and expansions.

In both media, the principles of good storytelling—establishing a strong story arc; building a vivid, believable world; and populating it with complex, memorable characters—are the same.

But the user experience differs, and understanding that is key to knowing how to satisfy both audiences.

Readers generally pick up novels to immerse themselves in stories that they experience through the eyes of another character. Players generally sit down with games to immerse themselves in stories that they discover and define through their own actions.

A large chunk of storytelling in both media comes down to understanding the role your characters play and how to make them real.

Characters bring a fictional world to life. Their problems and dilemmas create the oft-sought tension and “stakes,” and their choices and conflicts drive the story. Most readers and gamers would be hard-pressed to discuss their favorite stories without also talking about the characters who populate it. We connect emotionally with the people in stories rather than the ideas and philosophies.

But who are those characters?

In a novel, the most important character is typically the protagonist. It’s not just because the action (mostly) follows her. It’s also because we experience the story through her perspective. We see what she sees and know what she feels, even if we don’t always agree with it. First-person and close third-person stories have become immensely popular because of the intimacy of the perspective they offer.

For the protagonist’s story to be engaging, she has to have challenges to overcome. Strengths and vulnerabilities that add variation to her journey. A deeply personal investment in the events of the plot. Writing a protagonist who meets these criteria is often a matter of architecture in the planning stages—figuring out who this person is and what it is about her that generates interest and tension—as well as retrofitting in the revision stages—finding ways to connect her more deeply to other characters and events and building momentum over the successes and setbacks she faces.

When it comes to games, protagonists may be a lot more varied. For the sake of simplicity (ha!), I’m mostly talking about Western-style RPGs, which are often characterized by protagonists who are defined by the player in some significant way and whose stories are often discovered over the course of (fairly) open-ended gameplay.

The degree to which players define their characters differs widely between games. In some games, you have a protagonist with an established identity and established personality whose significant choices are defined by the player. That includes Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher.

In other games, you have a character whose overall identity is set, but whose personality and outlook is determined by the player. For example, Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect series is always a human operative intent on saving the galaxy, but the player can cast her as an idealistic savior or a ruthless maverick.

Finally, there are other games, such as Pillars of Eternity, in which nearly everything about the protagonist, including personality, backstory, and race, is player-determined.

In these types of games, the task of the writer is to build everything around the player character as much as—or more than—defining the player character on his or her own. You develop a story that is just loose enough to fit whatever way the player might choose to define the protagonist according to the options you have given them. You create a world with enough freedom for the player to make choices and enough context to give meaning to those choices. You write side characters who establish the world as a living place and who frame the stakes for the player.

It’s a delicate balance, and it’s one that places a much greater burden on the writing that establishes the world around the protagonist.

That’s because you’re defining this character—or, to some extent, allowing your player to—through negative space rather than positive space. You’re creating a stage that will allow the player to shape a personal story, and one that doesn’t feel at odds with the choices you’ve given them.

Heroes of their own stories

And yet, protagonists aren’t the only characters on the page (or screen). A common piece of writing advice is to write villains as though they were the heroes of their own stories. It’s good advice, and it holds true for all characters—sidekicks, love interests, mentors, and spear carriers.

In many books, the most memorable and beloved characters are often secondary characters. Written well, they are typically less encumbered by the constraints of following the plot. Writers may feel freer to embody them with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that help them stand out. And the foil they frequently provide for the main character—whether as comic relief or as someone who pushes and challenges the protagonist—can create entertaining humor, conflict, and character development.

Put simply, these characters work because they have goals and interests that do not always line up with those of the protagonist.

Games may contain even more secondary characters—often called NPCs (non-player characters). Of course, if every character is the hero of her own story, you’ve still got to make them good stories. And “bring me five puffleberries” and “get my cat out of this tree” don’t quite cut it. We don’t like busywork in real life, so why does anyone assume we’d do it for fun? Yet “fetch quests”—formulaic tasks in which the player character is sent to handle a routine errand for someone else—are everywhere.

The problem isn’t just that they usually make for dull content. It’s also that they suggest a world in which other characters’ concerns go no deeper than grocery runs. In which they only exist to provide some degree of involvement for the player. And in which the protagonist only relates to them as an errand boy.

Every quest need not be epic. But it should mean something or reveal something, both with respect to the protagonist and the other characters involved.

In both games and novels, we rely on good characters to develop our stories and to hold our audience’s interest in them. Novelists and game writers merely need to understand how their readers and players will relate to them in order to deploy them most effectively.

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Bio: Carrie Patel is a novelist and a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment. She is the author of the Recoletta trilogy, which is published by Angry Robot. The final book in the series, The Song of the Dead, comes out on May 2. She works at Obsidian Entertainment as a narrative designer and writer. She has worked on the award-winning Pillars of Eternity and its expansions, The White March Parts I and II. She is currently working on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. You can find her on Twitter as @Carrie_Patel as well as at http://www.electronicinkblog.com/.

Reading Doc Savage: Land of Always-Night

In packing for a trip, I discovered I’d somehow bypassed some of the earlier Doc Savages, so we backtrack now to book 13: Land of Always-Night. On the cover, Doc, wearing torn shirt and steampunk goggles, looks back and away from a grove of giant mushrooms, not noticing the several odd figures vaguely resembling the Monarch from The Venture Brothers menacing him with raised hands.

This one has to be my favorite beginning yet:

It is somewhat ridiculous to say that a human hand can resemble a butterfly. Yet this particular hand did attain that similarity. Probably it was the way it moved, hovered, moved again, with something about it that was remindful of a slow-motion picture being shown on a screen.

The color had something to do with the impression. The hand was white, unnatural; it might have been fashioned of mother of pearl. There was something serpentine, hideous, about the way it strayed and hovered, yet was never still. It made one think of a venomous white moth.

It made Beery Hosmer think of death. Only the expression on Beery Hosmer’s face told that, for he was not saying anything. But he was trying to. His lips shaped word syllables and the muscle strings in his scrawny throat jerked, but no sounds came out.

The horrible white hand floated up toward Beery Hosmer’s face. The side street was gloomy, deserted except for Beery Hosmer and the man with the uncanny hand. The hand stood out in the Merck almost as if it were a thing of white paper with a light inside.

The man menacing poor Beery, who Beery calls Ool, is odd in many ways, including being skeleton thin and having enormous, pale eyes. He wants something back, something Beery has stolen to take to Doc Savage and is currently carrying on a money belt around his waist

Beery is standing in front of a candy store; when the inevitable happens, he reels back and smashes into the plate glass. After a struggle, he dies, “becoming as inert as the chocolate creams crushed beneath him.”

Ool takes his possession back from Beery, which turns out to be a peculiar pair of goggles with black glass lenses. He tastes one of the scattered chocolates, smacks his lips, and gathers is many chocolates As he can into his hat. As he departs, “he ate the candy avidly, as if it were some exquisite delicacy with which he had just become acquainted.”

In the next chapter, we are introduced to one Earl Maurice “Watches” Bowen. This sort of nickname usually signals a crook, and Watches, who gets his name from his obsession with timepieces, is no exception. He’s in his New York penthouse, conferring with Ool. Ool tells him he killed Beery because the man was about to involve Doc Savage. Being a criminal, Watches is shaken by the news, but reassured to find Beery never reached the man of bronze.

Changing the subject, Ool asks how their plans are progressing. Not so well, it turns out:

“I’ve canvassed all of the big airplane factories,” Watches explained. “They can build us a true gyroplane, sure. This true gyro will rise straight up and hover. It can be controlled fairly well. But here’s the rub. The darn things won’t carry more than two men, and they won’t lift hardly any fuel at all. The things are still in the experimental stage.”

I’ve got a plan, Ool says. “We will make use of this Doc Savage.” Watches is understandably dubious, but off Ool goes to Doc’s warehouse, where he is captured on the roof by Ham and Monk. As they square off, he threatens Monk with his empty right hand. After they subdue him, they examine his hand and find nothing in it. At the sight of the goggles that Monk has just pulled from his pocket, though, he reacts oddly:

Ool stared blankly, but his right hand, held high above his head, started wavering like a butterfly’s feeble fluttering when it feels the first warm rays of the morning sun on its wings.

Monk and Ham take their captive to a specific skyscraper, a building “taller and finer than all the rest, and astounding mass of polished granite and stainless steel towering nearly a hundred stories into the sky, a structure that is possibly man’s proudest building triumph.” Up on the 86th floor are Doc’s headquarters.

As they enter, they overhear a news story on the radio involving an escaped prisoner, Demeter Daikoff. Doc enters; Monk and Ham tell him what’s happened so far and give him the goggles. When he asks the captive what they are, Ool says “just a toy.” He goes on to explain that he wanted to get caught, figuring it was the easiest way to contact Doc. He tells Doc his name is Gray Forestay, but that, “In Mongolia my name, as nearly as can be translated, was Lleigh Foor Saith.” The flakes of gold in Doc’s eyes swirl a trifle faster, but otherwise he does not react.

Ool, who says he is part Mongolian, explains:

“You have heard of the Lenderthorn Expedition, lost in the pack ice north of Canada? I, Gray Forestay, was the only member of the expedition to escape. In recent months, as perhaps you have read in the news, I headed a rescue expedition to search for the lost men. We found that airships were utterly impractical in that region. We could not effect a landing upon the rough ice. But where an airship has failed, a dirigible would succeed.”

So what, an unknown interlocutor asks. Doc has not just a dirigible, but “what is perhaps the most superior aggregation of brains and brawn in the world,” Ool explains, and goes on to reveal that the expedition was not lost through natural causes, but an encounter with mysterious “things” that carried off the expedition members, one by one.

After making this revelation, Ool pauses to observe what effect his words have had on Doc and his men, but just then the radio in the background puts out a pickup order for the murderer of Beery Hosmer, providing enough detail to make everyone in the room pay much more attention to that than the mysterious things. Doc raps out a few words in “a softly musical, but unintelligible jargon.” It’s ancient Mayan (I had forgotten about this ongoing detail), and he’s warning his pals to hold their breaths while he sets off a sleep gas bomb, which knocks Ool out.

Time out for a Ham/Monk interchange as they look at Ool’s “prostrate form”:

Ham remarked in a voice that was heavily with disbelief: “Yes, sir, he’s even uglier than you are, Monk. I don’t know how it’s possible, but he is!”

“You clothesrack!” Monk growled. “You don’t know masculine beauty when you see some. I exude virility, I do! I’m an example of the dominant male.”

Unfortunately, before they can begin making out in a corner, Ool proves to be awake, the first man to ever resist the power of Doc’s sleeping gas. Doc orders his men into the other room, throwing the goggles in with them and locking the door.

They hear the sounds of a fight and then “a chilling sound, unnamable, a dry clacking more than anything else.” They realize it’s Ool’s laughter as he departs.

Cut to a new chapter and Ool prowling Sixth Avenue by night “with his characteristic animal prowl, gaunt head hunched far forward, spidery limbs dangling. He enters “Bill Noonan’s Tavern” and has this exchange:

A fat Negro, his head seemingly a ball perched on his multiplicity of chins, dozed on a stool near the cash register. He opened one red-rimmed eye as Ool approached.

“Are you Ham-hock Piney?” Ool questioned.

The Negro betrayed no surprise at Ool’s appearance or voice.

“Dat’s right, boss,” he said. “Ham-hock Piney, dat’s me.”

“I want to see Watches Bowen,” Ool stated.

The Negro yawned cavernously, said nothing.

“Did you understand me?” Ool snapped.

“Cou’se I understan’,” the Negro grinned. “What you want me to do about it — put a fly in your beer?”

Ool expressed quick anger. As though propelled without volition, his right hand started drifting about.

The Negro laughed sleepily, said softly, “All right. Ah see yo’ knows de pass sign. Yo’ can go on up. Take dat door in de back. Go up de only steps yo’ll see.”

Ool goes up to see Watches, who’s guarded by several men, including Honey Hamilton, who “can shoot fly specks off a hundred-watt bulb.” Ool tells him about the visit to Doc Savage and declares “emphatically” that Savage is dead. They begin to bicker about various things, when a buzzer sounds. Watches is alarmed; it’s a button that Ham-hock can press with his toe in an emergency and this is the first time it’s ever sounded.

It’s John Laws, aka the coppers, speaking in strong Irish voices. The men seek various escape avenues, finding themselves thwarted at every turn. Then an opportunity presents itself:

Across the thirty-foot space between the two buildings, a window was open. A man leaned from that window. He was a dark-skinned man, very big, smooth-shaven, with very dark eyes, black hair, and a scar which started at the lobe of his right ear and slanted down across his neck. His appearance was utterly villainous.

In his hands*, the man held a coil of fire hose of the type often affixed to reels inside office buildings.

They escape via the hose, even the wounded Honey Hamilton, who the newcomer fetches:

It was a remarkable feat, for the dark man held Honey gripped in his legs, suspended in the air above the alley. The hose sagged and groaned as, hand over hand, the dark man pitted his gigantic strength against the swaying. But slowly, like a cable car over a quarry, he finally made the other side with his wounded burden.

They make their way to another of Watches’ hangouts, “a fifty-foot cabin cruiser tied up at a City Island dock.” The mysterious dark is the infamous Dimiter Daikoff:

…the man stood up. He held his head proudly. His black eyes flashed with an almost fanatical glitter. The light from the overhead electric bulb glowed on the smooth skin covering his high cheek bones. Like many of his race, this man’s cheek bones were so prominent that his cheeks looked hollow. They were thrown into shadow.

“I am no murderer!” he proclaimed tragically. “I simply liquidate one who was traitor to our party. I, Dimiter Daikoff, am no criminal. In my country, I would be honored, receive a medal. But here, they hunt me like animal.”

Watches invites the handy Daikoff to hang around. He’ll regret this later, we know, and our suspicions are confirmed when Daikoff retrieves “a small compact dictograph device” that he’s been using to listen to whispered conversations.

Back to Doc’s men, who are in his headquarters. They’re standing “in the early morning sun which streamed through the ‘health glass’** windows of Doc Savage’s eighty-sixth floor headquarters.” All five are there, and Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny are giving Monk and Ham crap for not escaping.

The passage which has my vote for most awkward of the book occurs:

Suddenly, from somewhere outside the reception room door, came a burst of scuffling. Then a long-drawn screech of terror reached them. There was something about the screech which put a strange feeling around the roots of their hair.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” exploded big-worded Johnny.

“Holy cow!” echoed Renny.

Each had used his pet exclamation for moments of great excitement.

Investigation finds a man fleeing up the stairs toward them:

The fleeing man had no hat. His thick gray hair flopped over his forehead. He had a close-cropped gray mustache, and was wearing smoked glasses.

A fight ensues, and the attackers get the drop on Doc’s men. Then Doc arrives, “a bronze cyclone,” and men go “down like shingles wind-whipped from a barn.” Only the threat that Monk will be shot stops our cyclone; the criminals get away, and Doc stops his men when they want to give pursuit.

Wondering where that gray-haired man went during all of this? So does Doc, and they find him in Doc’s workshop-laboratory, looking at Ool’s goggles, which Doc takes from him in order to display the depth of his biological knowledge.

“Were you interested in these?” he asked.

“Yes — no!” the man stammered.

“You will notice that they are unusual,” Doc went on. “The lenses are fully two inches in thickness, and black — so black that no light penetrates them.”

“I — I picked them up by mistake,” the man said. a little hoarsely. “My own smoked glasses fell off. I don’t see well without them. The light hurts my eyes — snow blindness. I picked these of yours up by mistake. For a minute I thought they were mine.”

Doc turned the black-lensed goggles over in his great sensitive hand.

“This flexible material in which the lenses are imbedded — can you identify it?” he asked the stranger.

“I don’t know anything about them,” the man declared. “I picked them up by mistake –”

“The material seems to be fish skin,” Doc said. “It somewhat resembles the skin of a species of deep-sea fish with a habitat in the Arctic Ocean.”

The man identifies himself as Gray Forestay and says that he would like to use Doc’s dirigible. Very well, Doc says and invites him to lunch at “eleven o’clock in the Cafe Oriental downstairs.” Sorry, can’t make it, the second Mr. Forestay says and decamps.

But I don’t like chop suey, Monk complains. “I doubt that we will do much eating,” Doc says in his usual obscure fashion.

A brief scene shows us Watches and his men huddled and planning the next day. All the while:

Dimiter Daikoff, easing around unobtrusively, filling glasses, emptying ash trays, heard much.

Two hours later, “a hard-lipped, ferret-eyed young man” stands outside the Café Oriental, making an unobtrusive hand signal to the black sedan full of men rolling by on the street. They park and enter the skyscraper holding Doc’s headquarters, making their way up to the 86th floor. Just in case they’re still worried Doc is there, there’s a note pinned to the door reading, “Lunching downstairs in the Cafe Oriental.” Doc has signed his name to the note to make it perfectly clear it’s from him. Much like the reader, the criminals suspect a trap, particularly when they find the door unlocked, but Ham-hock growls out a particularly grating bit of dialogue: “We come heah to get dem black goggles, an’ we gwine get ’em.”

They enter and find a glass case containing the goggles:

They stopped in front of the case. Ham-hock, with a gloating in his eyes, sent a sepia paw toward the goggles which lay unprotected on a glass shelf.

His hand passed through the goggles. Through them, as though they were air. His clawing finger nails scored the glass of the shelf.

Ham-hock jerked his hand back as if it had touched flame.

As if that’s not enough, more supernatural shenanigans ensue:

Directly in front of them, beside the door and barring their path to it, a weird blue flame, pencil thin, had leaped from a shiny plate embedded in one wall, across the door opening to another plate.

The flame remained suspended, a lance of crackling, hissing blue. It rippled up and down. Other blue lances zigzagged like chain lightning until there was a whole pattern of blue flame leaping and rattling, barring an exit from the door.

Doc and his men appear and take them prisoner, threatening to tie one in a chair and put them in the path of the blue flame in order to electrocute them. They pick Squirrel Dorgan as their victim. He resists at first, but a sheet of blue flame right in front of his face convinces him.

Doc questions him, but Squirrel really doesn’t know that much. He says Ool can kill a man by touching him and that their second visitor was Watches Bowen himself. But he and Ool want Savage’s dirigible. Monk’s about to take the men away post-questioning, but Ham-hock makes a desperate effort and he and the rest of the men flee. Monk wants to pursue, but Doc dissuades him. Johnny and Monk ask why, and we get a very very Doc Savage reply, “It is a rather long story and, unfortunately, there is not time for it right now.”

Ham-hock and Squirrel decide not to reveal everything about their failure to Watches and Bowen, who pick them up in a car. They head back to Watches’ yacht lair, where Ool and Watches huddle in a corner, unaware that Dimiter Daikoff is reading their lips.

By now, even the slowest reader should be aware that Dimiter is Doc, and it’s fun to imagine the backstage shenanigans, much like a bad sitcom where someone’s invited two people to the same prom, as Doc races back and forth between the two roles. Once he’s done lipreading, he races back to his office, where an Irish cop, one Lieutenant O’Malley, has dropped by to mack on Doc a bit:

O’Malley’s eyes held open admiration as they rested upon the bronze giant.

“Brother,” he said, hesitating as if doubtful of the propriety of the term of address, but unable to resist its honest expression,” I’m sure feel safe with a man like you walking the beat with me.”

O’Malley’s come to investigate a report of the sighting of Ool. He starts to depart, then turns back:

“Say,” he grinned, “mind if I use your telephone to call my wife? She’s got corned beef and cabbage cooking tonight. It looks like I’m going to be late. I want her to keep it hot.”

Doc waved at the desk phone. “Help yourself.”

O’Malley spun the dial and got a number. He talked briefly regarding the conservation of corned beef and cabbage.

After he had spoken, he listened. He listened a much longer time than he had spoken. The sound of a high-pitched, querulous voice could be heard from the receiver. O’Malley squirmed, looked sheepish. His free hand went into his side pants pocket and out again.

Finally, he banged the receiver in a show of temper. The receiver missed the prongs, struck the phone, rocked it on the desk top. His right hand reached out to steady the instrument. With the right hand gripping the inside of the mouthpiece, he hooked the receiver on the fork and stepped back.

After he departs, Doc tells Monk to follow him. Monk does so and is surprised to find out it’s actually one of Watches’ men in disguise. Watches holds Monk at gun point in order to deliver some exposition: the man has smeared poison on the telephone and when Doc answers it, it’ll be his last minute on earth.

The phone call is made; Monk tries to warn Doc but is knocked out before he can do so. At the other end of the line, they hear Doc Savage collapse, then:

…excited shouts coming over the wire, the noise of men moving about rapidly in Doc Savage’s office. Finally, there was a cry, hoarse and filled with horror.

“He’s dead!” A voice shrieked. “Doc Savage is dead!”

Back at the yacht, though, Dimiter is in evidence, despite this conversation:

“I know my poisons,” Ool said flatly.”This one, in my land, is known is ssll-yto-mng.*** That name means ‘the poison that cannot fail.'”

“He’s dead, all right,” said O’Malley. “I heard his men howling that he had croaked.”

Another crook enters to say Doc is actually alive and sending radiograms. Watches sends him back out to get copies of the radiograms. Ool talks more about his culture’s poisons:

Ool’s voice crashed flatly. “There is another poison from my land, a sister poison to this one which has failed. We call these poisons the ‘twin sisters.’ The one which has failed is volatilized by moisture. The other one is turned into a deadly gas by the application of heat. I shall prepare the heat poison.”

Early that evening, Squirrel returns with the radiograms:

One of the radiograms was addressed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment at Aklavik, at the head of the Mackenzie River on the Arctic coast. The other three were addressed to United States government authorities and settlements on the mainland of Alaska and on the Aleutian Islands. The text of all four radiograms was the same:

PLEASE SEND AVAILABLE INFORMATION REGARDING GRAY FORESTAY EXPEDITION OR ANY OTHER EXPEDITION OPERATING THROUGH YOUR TERRITORY WITHIN LAST SIX MONTHS STOP HAVE YOU ANY RECORD SHRUNKEN-FACED ABNORMALLY WHITE-SKINNED MAN FINE GOLDEN HAIR TALL BONY REMARKABLY STRONG FLAT UNNATURAL VOICE WHEN SPEAKING ENGLISH KNOWN PERHAPS AS OOL STOP THIS INFORMATION OF UTMOST URGENCY.[sic]

A bit later, “shortly before ten o’clock that night” Doc and his men get a phone call telling them to “go to that warehouse thing owned by the Hidalgo Tradin’ Company down on the Hudson River water front.” Despite the fact they know it’s a trap, they head on down, only to be drawn on a chase with a green coupe holding the white-skinned figure of Ool. A high-speed chase leads to an almost wreck accompanied by sundry dialog:

“Holy cow!” Renny gasped.

Long-winded Johnny blinked his eyes. “I vouchsafe a kindred articulation!”

Turns out it’s not Ool in the car but someone with their face chalked up. Cue almost car crash, then Doc stops the car and enacts one of those moments that his team must bitch about amongst themselves:

What he did then was a surprise.

“Slide over here in the driver’s seat, Ham,” he directed. “Take the car back to town. You will hear from me at the office.”

He opens the door, swung out, glided across the road and disappeared in the shadow of a high hedge.

Ham hesitated, then drove away, caring with him a puzzled and disgusted Long Tom, Johnny, and Renny.

Savage investigates and falls into the trap involving the second poison:

Doc bent close to the light while sorting over the papers. So intent was he upon the documents that he did not see the faint vapor which crept out from the frosted bulb as it warmed.

He did notice it, finally. His arm slashed out. He smashed the bulb in his bare hands. But the vapor was already in the air.

The bronze man took two staggering steps, then keeled over, to lie inert on the floor.

Watches and Ool investigate to gloat over the corpse, which surprises them by coming to life and knocking them both out. He takes them back to the headquarters and reads through the answers to his radiograms. It turns out Watches is indeed Lenderthorn, the leader of the only expedition to leave the Arctic-American coast in recent months.

As to Ool, the radiogram from Point Barrow has some extra information:

The weirdly white-skinned man, so the radiogram informed, had arrived mysteriously into the settlement some months ago.

Ool had carried a strange pair of black goggles. He had been acting strangely seeming to have not the slightest idea of what modern life was like, and being unable to speak any intelligible language. But during the short time he had remained there, he had learned language and customs with amazing rapidity.

He had refused to divulge much information about himself except to infer vaguely that he had come from off the Arctic ice pack, which was obviously a lie, it being regarded as an impossibility. He had disappeared from the settlement as mysteriously as he had come.

Several strange deaths among the Eskimo population had been credited by them to Ool, but this was thought to be superstitious fancy on their part, since no direct evidence of Ool’s guilt could be obtained and the fatalities in each case having been attended by severe local inflammation and swelling, and no autopsies having been performed, death had been credited by settlement authorities to pernicious infection, or simple blood poisoning.

While they’re reading the radiograms, Ool rouses and grabs Ham by the ankle, threatening to kill him. With Ham as a hostage, he makes his escape, leaving Ham behind.

Doc somehow manages to beat Ool back to the yacht in time to become Dimiter again, pressing 80-year-old brandy and cigars on the entering pair. Despite this pleasant hospitality, they grow suspicious and decide to kill Dimiter by shaking hands. The attempt is made and Dimiter’s true identity is disclosed:

Watches worked his jaw spasmodically, trying to talk. When he wrenched words out, they came in a horse rasp.

“It’s Doc Savage!” he choked.

“Yes,” came the tragic-voiced patriot’s affirmation. “It is Doc Savage.”

In the ensuing struggle, we find that Watches has derived his name not just from his love of the object:

The watch was one of Bowen’s weapons. The mechanism had been removed from the case and a quantity of molten lead inserted. Bowen could hurl the watch as accurately as he could aim a revolver.

The leaded watch plummeted toward Monk with the speed of a projectile. Monk ducked as the missile struck his chair. The watch splintered entirely through the thin wcker of the boat chair and struck Monk lightly on the chest.

The criminals escape in a speedboat. Soon after, they take off in a plane, headed northwest. Doc and his men lend pursuit in their dirigible, resulting in a sentence that starts off lovely then lumbers into infodumpland: “Like a moonbeam caught, congealed, and set adrift again, a cruising dirigible, a silver sliver against the bleak, sub-Arctic sky, drove over the Canadian Northwest at a rate of speed highly unusual for such ships.”

Monk has Habeas Corpus along as well. As they zip along, he tickles his pig with a toe and asks Doc how they know where they’re going. Doc explains that in his role as Dimiter, he discovered bills for a device that monitors for static disturbances and has created his own. They land in Point Barrow and confer briefly with an old Scotch trader who sheltered Ool when he first arrived. He confirms that Ool was unfamiliar with the trappings of civilization, including fire, which he tried to catch “as though it were a bird.”

Back on their journey, they listen to the static on the radio****.

A hodge-podge of noises, conventional static disturbances, came through the loud-speaker. There were buzzes and burrs and whines and crackles. But they could have been duplicated at almost any point on the earth.

Suddenly, the dirigible filled with a soft low note which throbbed and ran high up the musical scale and back again; the sound was not new static disturbance, but Doc Savage’s trilling, that weird sound, so unconsciously a part of him, which he made in moments of surprise or puzzlement.

The bronze man’s inordinately sensitive ears, conditioned by intensive training to catch sounds above and below the usual range considered possible for human reception, had identified a peculiar static sound coming from the finder.

Guided by static, they head in a more westerly direction. As they go farther, the static becomes perceptible to everyone’s ears: “a high, rhythmic thrumming, each note being throttled off in an entirely unearthly manner, only to swell again in a fashion even more unearthly.”

Monk, fiddling with the black goggles, puts them on and discovers something even stranger, only visible when wearing them: a writhing column of apparent fire erupting from a spot on the ice.

At closer range, the thing which seemed to be fire took on more detail. There seemed to be a living, liquid, white-hot core swelling out smoothly in a golden blush, tinged with flashes of opalescence — glazed yellows, purples, red, greens, and blues. The predominating tone, however, was golden; not so much the gold of solid flame, but a thick fog in which every separate particle of moisture was a floating globule of gold.

At about the hundred-foot level, the writhing pillar, in a thinning golden haze, blurred into nothingness.

They descend, investigating further, when a plane from nowhere attacks them, forcing them to land: “As softly as a leaf falling through a golden autumn haze, the dirigible came to rest on the crevice floor.”

Above them, Watches’ plane circles, occasionally dipping out of sight. Doc and his men try to make a break for it during one such moment. Before they get to their objective, the plane spots them and machine bullets fly. They duck for cover and the criminals land, intent on mayhem. Outnumbered, Doc and company fall back into the crevice, which widens into a place of such solemnity that Monk and Ham must immediately start bantering:

Stalactites and stalagmites looked like massive ivory columns. There were whole domes of crystalline formation which glittered like massed diamonds under the prying glare of the flashlight beams. Some of the rooms were cathedral arched, and so high that the white pencil paths of light from the hand flashes could not delineate them.

Monk craned his bull neck in rapt admiration.

“King Solomon’s temple must of been like this,” he said, and turned to call to Habeas Corpus, who was lagging behind. “Yeah,” he continued soulfully, “this sure would be a swell set up for a harem.”

“You would think of that,” Ham said dryly, aware of Monk’s weakness for women, singly or in numbers.

They stop to gawk too long; Watches and his gang come up from behind and trap them in a tunnel, using a grenade gun to create an avalanche sealing the tunnel’s mouth. Ool guides them through the Stygian gloom, tossing back sundry remarks over his shoulder:

“These particular caverns,” Ool said enigmatically, “are known as the Land of the Lost*****. No man penetrates them far and comes out alive.”

They find footprints, apparently made by someone wearing “skintight moccasins.” This turns out to be a girl:

She had long flowing hair, gold in hue, and she was clothed in some sort of gossamery stuff which clung close, moulding lithesome curves as she ran. She wore goggles with enormously thick lenses.

They capture her. When Ool identifies her as Sona, a princess in this land, they realize she’ll make a valuable hostage. At this point “the hooting sounds of Doc Savage’s submachine pistols” can be heard in the distance. Doc and his men enter, having escaped the tunnel trap, and rescue the girl, who turns out not to speak any language they know, but clings to Doc “with the instinctive trust of a child.”

Something begins knocking their flashlights from their hands and then attacking them in the darkness. Sona is torn from Doc’s grasp by an invisible force.

There, in the cavern of unknown terror, something soft and slimy enveloped them, an odious material at which they tore helplessly, accomplishing nothing by their most desperate efforts. They could not use the machine pistols.

The material, whatever it was, pressed closer and closer to their faces with a softly insidious force which burned their eyes, seared their throats, and imparted weakness to their limbs.

One by one, they fell to the floor of the cavern, tumbling down and squirming grotesquely to grow weaker and weaker and eventually became slack.

They revive to find themselves “on a smooth, hard floor in utter darkness.” Only Doc has some idea of where they are: “Judging from the pressure against my drums, and from the change in the temperature, we are a great deal farther down in the earth than when we were captured.” Most of their belongings have been stripped away, but Habeas remains.

Though they can’t see anything, someone can:

From all sides their clothing was plucked as though by tiny pinchers, and tiny, hammerlike blows rained on their faces and bodies. New sounds broke through the blackness, strange, unintelligible sounds – squeaks, hushed whistlings, harsh clackings.

They manage to find their way to a door and get outside, where they find themselves in the middle of a dark mushroom forest. The invisible thing attacks them again; this time Doc is prepared with a pair of goggles:

Instantly, to his gaze, the air became filled with a weird, golden yellow haze. The blackness vanished! In its place there was the fantastic golden aura, shot through and through with a faint opalescence.

After the first moment or two, Doc began to identify objects in the uncanny light. He saw the ghost-stuff which his aides were fighting. He recognized it for what it was — a gigantic species of the fungus growth which dangles like soft moss from decaying overhead timbers in coal mines. This fungus, Doc knew, thrives on a total absence of light.

This particular growth, revealed to Doc through the black goggles, had obviously been cultivated in the exotic cavern, and had attained gigantic proportions, reaching tensile strength.

The black things turn out to be man shaped; a multitude of them overwhelms Doc. They stop their attack at “The sound of a compelling voice of pleasing musical quality”: it’s Princess Sona.

She stood there like a fairy book figure seen through a golden autumn haze. The curves of her youthful body were alluring, revealed by a clinging robe. Her golden hair, silken heaps of it, fell down to her waist and seemed a part of her diaphanous garb.

Her lips were perfect, her features exquisitely chiseled. Her appearance was marred only by the presence of a pair of the grotesque goggles.

In pardonable feminine vanity she removed the goggles For a moment while she flipped imaginary dust from their thick lenses. The effect to the battery of admiring masculine eyes was annihilating.

“Holy cow!” Renny breathed.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” Johnny intoned.

“I’m in love!” Monk advised.

Doc explains the scientific phenomenon which produces the glow. He tries to speak to the girl, but they do not share a language. She leads them into another roomWhere they find her two bodyguards resemble Ool. Sona orders a feast of mushrooms and shows them around the underground city.

On all sides, bathed in the soft golden haze, smooth walls towered. They were white, and shimmered in the golden atmosphere. Just as inside the room they had left everything was laid out in strict geometrical conformity — here straight lines and broad sweeping curves were beautiful in their gaunt simplicity.

“It’s — It’s plenty modernistic!” Monk stammered.

“The most striking example of functional architecture I have ever seen,” Renny, the civil engineer, said in admiration.

Doc said,” “They had to build within the limited confines of this underground cavern. Also, being cramped as to quantity of building materials, they have abandoned all frills and false fronts. In every instance, they have used the least amount of material possible for the purpose.”

They continue to explore the futuristic city, when they are interrupted by the sound of machine guns. They race to the source of the sound, an attack on the Central Mechanical Plant. Only a few paragraphs earlier, this sentence has occurred: “This was called in the local language, they learned later, the equivalent of “Central Mechanical Plant.” How Doc knows the correct name right now is anybody’s guess. You’ll also notice that goggles have become somewhat optional despite the existence on their importance earlier.

Doc proposes his usual sort of plan: he’ll slip away while his men hold the fort, then glides****** away before they can protest. Ool appears and manages to turn every person in the caverns against Doc’s men by claiming they’re allied with Bowen and his gang. Out come more fluttering, menacing hands than you’ll ever see this side of a convention of close-up magicians.

Dog sneaks up on Watches and his men by climbing a wall that, Dent says, would’ve defeated a professional human fly. Everything’s well until someone spots him:

A cavern dweller, looking out, sighted the bronze man. The observer was a woman, a housewifely sort of person who looked as if her life might be devoted to the care of her man and her children. The spectacle of the great bronze man mounting******* the side of the building unnerved her, and she clutched her children closely and screamed shrilly and repeatedly. This occurred only a few stories from the top of the building.

Everything goes dark unexpectedly and Watches curses the fact that he hasn’t had a chance yet to use his brand new watch, specially designed for this occasion, down to having Doc Savage’s name engraved on it. In the dark and silence, poison darts are flung at them, knocking some unconscious. After some time, they realize they’re being suffocated; the cave dwellers control the ventilation system and are using it against them.

As they make their way downward, Watches is unnerved for a moment when he thinks he counts an extra gang member. It’s Doc, of course. But they make it to safety, whereupon one of the gang members requests an infodump: what are they doing there? They’re after the secret to the cold light science, Watches explains. When someone spots Savage in the shadows, Ool sets a trap for him.

For once, Doc falls into the trap. He grabs Ool only to find himself surrounded by twenty other men. Doc is taken prisoner and finds himself locked up with his men. We’re nearing the end of the book, which means things are about to be wrapped up in a frenetic and somewhat sketchy fashion. While they sit in their cell, Ool’s off delivering exposition in a section that suggests Dent had leanings towards an SF novel:

…Ool faced the dictator, Anos.

Anos, father of the girl Sona, wore a red cape as mark of high position. The girl, Sona, had acquired her name by a simple reversal of the letters of the male parent’s namey, a custom in all father-and-daughter relationships in the cavern metropolis.

Anos, the dictator, occupied a low, thronelike affair which stood near a design on the throne room floor, a mammoth fourteen-pointed star inlaid with an opalescent substance. Around the points of the store were arrayed the chairs of the government council, the Nonverid, the members of which wore slightly less gaudy capes.

We find out that Ool was exiled for attempting to take over the government. He says he has repented, adding, “And I have proved it by bringing you the giant man and the other five, and the strange insect with fur upon it which they call a ‘hog.'”

In return he asks for the forumla for cold light. Nope. says Anos. How about the deaths of Doc Savage and his men, then, Ool counters. Maybe, Anos says, but it depends on what the council decides. Ool swears “a good mule-skinner oath” and stalks off.

Sona shows up to free Doc and his men, mysteriously giving him the same powers on his right hand that Ool bears. They use it to escape, making their way back to the Central Mechanical Plant. In the process, Habeas is struck with a poison dart. They make their way inside to the cavern dwellers laboratories and somehow revive Habeas (the exact mechanism by which this occurs is somewhat unclear.)

Meanwhile outside the cavern dwellers lay siege. Doc directs his men to direct a liquid he’s concocted before they surrender to the crowd. They’re led off to be judged by the council. Sona tries to intervene and is thwarted. Judgement is passed and each falls to the touch of one of the poison darts.

No longer worried about being thwarted by Savage, Ool, Watches, and the rest break out their machine guns and begin cutting people down. They take over, but are surprised to find the bodies of Savage and his men have disappeared.

The myserious liquid has in fact saved them from the poison’s effects, and they pop up again. Finally, Watches says, he’ll get a chance to deliver his special watch:

The timepiece which Watches Bowen brought out was the one which he had repeatedly assured members of his gang was a special gift destined for Doc Savage. The watch was unusually large. Bowen drew back an arm to throw it.

Doc Savage saw the move.

“Don’t!” His remarkable voice was a crash of sound.

“Sure!” Watches yelled. “I’ll do that.”

With a quick twist of thumb and forefinger, the mob chief turned the stem of the watch as if he were winding it. There started a faintly audible whir. His arm arched back, and he prepared to throw.

It was doubtful if Watches Bowen ever fully comprehend what happened next. Ool, apparently sensing Watche’s intention, clawed out desperately to stop the throw. Their arms collided.

The grenade watch sets off an explosion that causes liquid air to envelop the crinimals in a wave of unearthly cold.

Things wrap up pretty quickly, as usually happens. We do find out the secrets of the death hands:

The secret of Ool’s handwaving death was a bit complicated, but simply understood. It was a tiny pneumatic cylinder, discharging a dart, and this, being a color almost identical with his hands, would escape ordinary eyes. It was held in place by a particularly strong adhesive which did not harden, and thus being quickly detachable, could be removed and hidden quickly.

Sadly, it turns out the cool light only works under arctic conditions. The cavern dwellers decide not to leave their fungal utopia, and ask Doc not to reveal their location to anyone.

Sona requests a souvenir of the bronze man. Ham gives her Habeas, but the pig is reclaimed by an indignant Monk.

Thoughts: Dent plays fast and loose with what Doc knows and doesn’t know at times, but it’s worth it for the mental spectacle of him as first a morose Russian patriot, then racing across town to put his torn shirt and jeans back on. The civilization here is sketchily drawn, but very reminiscent of Golden Age SF. The totally unnecessary Sona/Anos thing is a little weird and I wished we’d seen her speak at least once. But so it goes.

Next one will be sooner! I know I took a long time with this one.

* As opposed to in his feet. Sometimes Dent is a lesson in how to pad sentences.

** Google was unilluminating on the nature of “health glass,” or at least yielded no results.

*** No pronunciation guide is supplied.

**** Sorry, I just really like this song.

***** Disappointingly, there is no overlap whatsoever with the children’s TV series by that name.

****** This is the actual verb used.

******* Heh. “Mounting.”

Playlist for Female Leaders

Women in leadership positions face a lot of unwonted and unwanted bullshit. Self care’s important, both physically and mentally. Here, for your weekend, is some music. This is some of the playlist I listen to when walking.

Nattering Social Justice Cook: Time to Fix the Missing Stair

The following is my personal opinion and unconnected to any SFWA activity. I am speaking as a member of the speculative fiction community, one that has been involved in it for a decade and a half now, and one that has watched its internal workings with interest.

I met Monica Valentinelli in 2016 at GenCon. I don’t know her well, but I’m proud to count her as a friend and she is one of the people I have consulted with about issues gamewriters face and the gamewriting community overall. She has been a valued bridge-builder and I trust her judgment. For those who don’t know about the recent events prompting this essay, here is her account of the event as well as some reactions.

Monica is currently being punished for speaking out, with vitriol, suggested boycotts, and more, all for going public about her decision. Forces with an interest in women not speaking out have decided to make her a cautionary tale, particularly since she’s dared to lead to other people, including men, to follow her example.

One manifestation of that is a brief statement asking why she hates women, declaring that her example will make conventions reluctant to invite any women in the future. Let’s unpack that one a little because the underpinnings seem ill-constructed to me.

There are many kinds of humans in the world. That means there’re also many kinds of women. The logic of the above statement says two things: 1) that it is wrong for people speak out about conditions that are uncomfortable, unprofessional, or sometimes even dangerous and 2) that only people with the strength to survive a gauntlet that can include being groped onstage, being mocked publicly, having their work denigrated for no reason other than having been produced by a woman, and a multitude of other forms of harassment deserve careers and the rest are out of luck. Does that really need to be demanded for someone to have a career? Writers are notoriously unstable mentally as it is. Serial harassment is a professional matter.

This was underscored for me on a Norwescon (a con that does a great job with selecting programming and volunteers and understands the issues) panel that I moderated last Friday, Standing Up to the Mob, with panelists Minim Calibre, Arinn Dembo, Mickey Schulz, and Torrey Stenmark. The description was:

How do you support female creators who are being harassed online by the ravening hordes of the unenlightened? Tips for voicing your support in ways that mean something.

Here are Arinn Dembo’s excellent notes on the panel overall.

Harassment is not confined to female creators: anyone who is “othered” is particularly at risk for storms of online harassment. But women are more subject, on the average, to gender-specific slurs, accusations of sexual activity/inactivity (slut/frigid), and rape-threats. And, as with Monica and countless other women, it bleeds over into physical space with intimidation, unwelcome advances, stalkers, or attacks from random men just because they were the closest woman.

I can tell you from personal experience that women get made uncomfortable at conventions on a regular basis, that I have heard literally dozens of these stories, and read dozens more online. That online threats spill over into real life intimidation and more threats, sometimes outright attempts, to harm our health, our finances, and our loved ones — often children. The issue is real. It is time to stop pretending it is not.

What follows is an attempt to collect some notes from that panel and use them to explain why I think what Monica did was brave and inspiring, and why it should be a kick in the butt to do something.

The panel was specifically about online harassment. If you’re reading this online, you are part of that world as well, and you may have noticed instances of online harassment before. If you haven’t, I can assure you they’re there. The harassers’ agenda is to overwhelm the victim, to cut their productivity, and to punish them for some perceived slight while at the same time making an example of them so other creators will hesitate before speaking out.

How can you support an online creator that is under attack? Some methods listed during the panel:

Buy their stuff. Spread word of it to other people that would enjoy it. Support them financially, particularly at a time when they’re worrying about being hit there.
Believe them when they say, “This has been my experience.”
Let them know you’re supporting them. Drop them a nice note, send them kitten pictures, do whatever you can to show you have their back. Provide something that counteracts the scores of nastygrams, death/rape threats, and other harassing messages they’re getting.
Draw fire away, not towards. Untag them in conversations that are going to get heated. They’re catching plenty of it as ise. Don’t just fan flames and make things worse for them.
If they want to take a break, encourage it. Facilitate it even. Offer to moderate their social media if they want to move away from it.
Figure out what rewards the troll and try to remove it. Often the reward is attention or any kind of reaction.
Hold people accountable for their toxic fans, particularly when they’re egging them on.

Our community should protect its own and behave like a healthy immune system, coming to the aid of parts under attack. But it is not enough to rely on the goodwill of individuals. That moves me to the metaphor of the missing stair, which came up frequently in the panel.

If you’re not familiar with it, the analogy deals with a serial harasser in a community. Everyone in the community knows about them, and the way its deal with is to warn people privately: Don’t get caught in an elevator alone with X, don’t accept invitations from Y. Watch out for Z, they pinched my butt so hard it left a bruise. It’s like a staircase with a missing stair, which everyone knows not to step on. Over and over, despite the fact that people keep tripping. Keep getting hurt: physically, mentally, economically.

It’s time to stop pretending the missing stair doesn’t need to be fixed. Relying on word-of-mouth means that the people who are new, who are just entering, are the ones most at risk of trying to step on it. Some conventions have tried to deal with it in one way or another; others plead ignorance, saying that each convention is organized by different people, so how can this knowledge be passed along? In my opinion the situation is unacceptable.

Monica has done the most important thing people can do against harassment: speak up. Odysseycon failed to do the second most important: believe someone when they say, “this is my experience.”

How can we repair the missing stairs so no one is hurt by them again? In my opinion, there needs to be some sort of way for conventions, conferences, and other organizations to compare notes in a systematic way, perhaps a database where, each time there is an incident, it gets documented. So a convention organizer could check: is the person I am considering using at my convention someone who has harassed people in the past? Because con organizers need to know what they are taking on.They need all the information there and findable so they cannot ignore it.

Such a system would depend on people coming forward and on people not being punished for speaking up. One objection that gets raised to such a system is: what if it gets used unfairly? What if someone targets a person and uses the system against them?

It is a valid question, though perhaps not quite as strong a possibility as some people might paint. However, having the database would let the convention organizer look at the incidents. Are they all coming from one person? Then they may want to investigate further. Are they coming from multiple people? Then there is a problem. A serial “blamer,” someone intent on weaponizing the system, would in fact be exposed by it.

One reason this idea of tracking incidents sometimes creates unease is the idea of a formal blacklist to replace the current web of gossip and tips passed along among con organizers, authors, and other publishing professionals. That is not the point. The point is to allow con organizers to be informed when making their decisions. If harassment is something they don’t want to worry about, they don’t need to consult the database. But for the ones who want to make sure every guest feels welcome, this would be a valuable source of information. And it would be more objective than that web of gossip, and let people know that they’re not the victim of some background campaigns that they don’t. Indeed, this system would act to prevent mislabelings.

The inevitable question, “Why doesn’t SFWA do it?” will be raised. The answer is this: This effort must come from a coalition of the people organizing conventions. They know best how something like this should be structured and administered, and it is not my place to tell them how to do it. SFWA has provided some useful resources for conventions; both the Accessibility Checklist for SFWA Spaces and the Policy and Procedure on Harassment in SFWA Venues statement are available online.

This is what I know. The missing stair is tripping up newcomers to our community. People are being hurt by it, even the ones who know how to navigate it well, by efforts to pretend it doesn’t exist. The fact that we, the fantasy and science fiction community at large, tacitly allow this situation – the enabling of serial harassers in a way that drives out new writers, fans, and publishing professionals — absolutely infuriates me. We need to start talking seriously about how something like this should be implemented in a way that is both as fair and is effective as possible. For Pete’s sake, people.

I welcome conversation here, particularly between people with actual experience organizing and running cons. Mine consists of going to a lot of conventions over the past decade or so and watching the SFWA events team put on an amazing conference each year without my assistance, while congratulating myself on having avoided all the work while being to reap the benefit of their hard work. However, I do have plenty of experience with comments, which will be moderated for obvious reasons.

Nattering Social Justice Cook: Supporting The Next Generation

Ancient village with modern kids and bubbles.

If you don’t know about DonorsChoose, it’s a great program that lets you support individual classroom projects. I sponsored one in honor of my aunt Nona. Here’s the lovely thank you note I just got.

Dear Cat Rambo,

Thank you so much for your donation to my classroom. Having copies of Persepolis: The Story Of A Childhood has had a dramatic impact on my students as they finish their eighth grade year.

When the students received copies of a book that they were actually interested in, they felt like they were the ones in charge of their learning experience. The decision to design a unit around Persepolis was student driven. Earlier this year I noticed that students were coming to class regularly asking questions about the Middle East and Islam. In student interest surveys, the class overwhelmingly expressed a desire to learn more about these topics. So when students got copies of Persepolis, they felt as if their voices were being heard. When I started the unit, I noticed a big increase in student engagement. “I felt lucky!” Eighth grader De’jean Williams said when the class received the books. “Adults hardly ever listen to us- it’s nice when they finally do.”

The Persepolis books have provided students with a window into life in the Middle East. Students are beginning to understand the complexity of the forces shaping the region. They are deeply engaging with questions about the role of government, culture and religion influencing a society. Middle school is the time when students are first beginning to shape their world-view. Reading Persepolis is helping students in this process. As the United States gets more and more involved in the region, I am so glad that my students understanding of the region is growing.

Thanks again for your generous donation! You are truly making a difference in the lives of young people!!

With gratitude,

Ms. Founds

Want to see students reading diverse, interesting, informative reading that features protagonists like them? Find programs doing just that and help them.

Upping the Number of Plunkett Slots

Something I’m trying to do this year is pay things forward as much as possible. Recent technological upgrades means I can now fit more than 8-9 people in a class (can now handle up to twice that many, which is more suited to some classes than others), so I figured one way to do that is to make more class slots available to people who couldn’t otherwise afford the class.

So, each class now has three Plunkett scholarship slots, the third of which is specifically reserved for QUILTBAG and POC applicants. Everyone is encouraged to apply, but I want to make sure it’s getting to a diverse range. The only qualification for a Plunkett is this: you would not be able to afford the class otherwise. Just mail me with the name/date of the class and 1-3 sentences about why you want to take it.

I have had several classes lately with no Plunkett apps, so I want to stress this: please take advantage of them if you’re a writer working on your craft. You will be helping me by ensuring that I have interested people to teach to.

That said, here’s upcoming classes if you want to look them over:

Classes Offered April-June 2017

Creating an Online Presence for Writers, Saturday, June 3, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time
Description and Delivering Information, Wednesday, April 26, 4-6 PM Pacific Time
Fantastic Worldbuilding with Fran Wilde, Saturday, April 8, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time
Literary Techniques for Genre Writers I, Saturday, April 22, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time
Flash Fiction Workshop, Wednesday, April 12, 7-9 PM Pacific Time
Moving from Idea to Draft, Saturday, May 6, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time
How to Rewrite, Edit, and Polish Your Fiction, Wednesday, May 3, 4-6 PM
How to Write Steampunk and Weird Western, Saturday, May 13, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time
Story Fundamentals, Wednesday, April 19 4-6 PM Pacific Time OR Saturday, May 27

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time OR Wednesday May 31 7-9 PM Pacific Time
Writing Your Way Into Your Novel, Saturday, April 29, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Where I’ll Be: Norwescon 2017

Thursday

What is a Story?

3:00pm – 4:00pm @ Cascade 9

Marta Murvosh (M), Cat Rambo, Curtis C. Chen, Nancy Kress, James C. Glass

SFWA: What is it, Where is it Going, and Why Should You Care?

6:00pm – 7:00pm @ Cascade 3&4

Cat Rambo (M), Django Wexler, Adam Rakunas, John Walters, Rachel Swirsky

Friday

Reading: Cat Rambo

2:00pm – 2:30pm @ Cascade 2

Cat Rambo (M)

Standing Up to the Mob

4:00pm – 5:00pm @ Cascade 3&4

Cat Rambo (M), Torrey Stenmark, Minim Calibre, Arinn Dembo, Mickey Schulz

Saturday

SFWA Meeting

10:00am – 11:00am @ Pro Suite

Cat Rambo (M)

You do not need to be a member to attend! Come find out what SFWA is up to.

Koffee Klatsch: Cat Rambo

11:00am – 12:00pm @ Pro Suite

Cat Rambo (M)

Kookie Klatsch with Cat Rambo

2:00pm – 2:30pm @ Olympic 1

AmélieMantchev (M), Cat Rambo, Eric Snyder

Autograph Session 2

3:00pm – 4:00pm @ Grand 2

Catska Ench, Cory Ench, Ethan Siegel, Ian McDonald, Marc Gascoigne, Mike Underwood, Nancy Kress, Alexander James Adams, Cat Rambo, Dale Ivan Smith, Erik Scott de Bie, Evan J. Peterson, Jeremy Zimmerman, John (J.A.) Pitts, Jude-Marie Green, Kristi Charish, Laura Anne Gilman, Liz Argall, Django Wexler, Frog Jones, Raven J. Demers, Spencer Ellsworth, Susan R. Matthews, Morgue Anne, Brenda Cooper, Lisa Mantchev, Bella la Blanc, Mark Teppo, Claudia Casper, Susan diRende, Kristy Acevedo

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading

8:00pm – 10:00pm @ Cascade 3&4

Marta Murvosh (M), Brenda Carre, Carol Berg, Jude-Marie Green, Cat Rambo

Sunday

How I Fen

1:00pm – 2:00pm @ Cascade 3&4

Cat Rambo (M), AmélieMantchev, Alita Quinn, Gabe Marier

Live Classes for April through June 2017

Being able to trust your revision process frees you to write whatever you like.

Here’s the latest roster of live classes for the Rambo Academy of Wayward Writers, with links to descriptions. Info that you may want to know:



Logistics: Classes are taught online. You need internet connectivity and a microphone at a minimum; a webcam is preferred but not crucial.

Costs: Cost is $99 per class; $79 for former students. Newsletter and Patreon subscribers should identify themselves for the special discount rate that’s happening this quarter.

Scholarships: I am upping the number of Plunkett slots in each class to 2 or 3. A Plunkett scholarship is based on economic need. If the cost is preventing you from taking the class, you should apply by mailing me the name of the class and why you want to take it. I strongly encourage QUILTBAG and PoC applications. If you want to sponsor a Plunkett slot, drop me a line.

Wednesday, April 5

4-6 PM Pacific time

Character Building Workshop

Learn how to create interesting, rounded characters that your readers can identify with, whether hero or villain. We’ll cover how to write convincing interesting dialogue as well as how to flesh out a character so they come alive and help you move the story along. A combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class writing exercises will help you apply new technique immediately to your own stories.

Saturday, April 8

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Fantastic Worldbuilding with Fran Wilde

Learn how to build worlds that bedazzle and entertain — but that are still logically consistent and believable. Join Norton Award winning author Fran Wilde, author of Updraft, Cloudbound, and The Jewel and Her Lapidary for a workshop that will leave you ready to make magnificent worlds of your own.

Wednesday, April 12

7-9 PM Pacific Time

Flash Fiction Workshop

This workshop focuses on flash fiction, also known as short short stories. The workshop consists of a mixture of lecture, in-class writing exercises, discussion of how to turn fragments into flash, and an overview of flash fiction markets. Come prepared to write! By the end of the class you will have 3-4 “word lumps” and the knowledge required to turn them into actual flash fiction pieces.

Wednesday, April 19

4-6 PM Pacific Time

Story Fundamentals

This workshop focuses on the basics of creating short stories: plot, characters, setting, worldbuilding, raising tension, creating satisfying endings, and more. You should emerge from the class with a greater command of story basics as well as a hearty dose of encouragement for creating new stories.

Saturday, April 22

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Writers

This class combines lecture, discussion and in-class writing exercises designed to introduce a number of techniques to use in your own writing such as foreshadowing, alliteration, rhythmic device, allusion, etc, and ways to test them out in short fiction as well as discussion of when and where to use them. We look at several existing pieces to see how and why they work, and discuss why the author chose the techniques that they employed. The class concludes with a discussion of markets open to literary genre work and how to submit to them.

Wednesday, April 26

4-6 PM Pacific Time

Description and Delivering Information

How do you give the reader the evocative and interesting descriptions and information they need without boring them or making the story drag? How do you give them information without cluing them in that it’s important? Fine-tune your descriptive skills through lecture, writing exercises, and discussion.

Saturday, April 29

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Writing Your Way Into Your Novel

The process of novel-writing varies greatly, but one thing is always true: a butt must go into a chair and the words must be written. Come find out how to get past sticking points through a combination of lecture and writing exercises that will help you map out your course for navigating the sea of words and build a daily writing practice that will get you to the end of the book.

Wednesday, May 3

4-6 PM Pacific Time

Editing 101

Students have found that learning to trust their editing skills has made them more productive when producing early drafts. This class combines lecture, discussion, and in class exercise to help you develop a rewriting practice tailored to your own particular strengths and weaknesses as well as one that lets you know when a story is ready for submission. Topics include how to edit at both the sentence and story/book level, working well with writers, theory of ToCs, electronic publishing, copyright, and making a living as an editor

Saturday, May 6

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Moving From Idea to Draft

The question isn’t how to tell a good idea from a bad one; it’s how to learn to turn any idea into a story. Come with a story idea, no matter how vague. We’ll discuss multiple ways of plotting a story based on its unique inspiration, as well as engaging in class exercises designed to hone your plotting skills. Learn how to build a roadmap for your story that will help you complete it in a class that combines discussion, lecture, and in-class writing exercises.

Saturday, May 13

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Writing Steampunk and Weird Westerns

How to Write Steampunk & Weird Western will cover gathering and using historical details, ethical implications of both genres, basic mechanical concepts, economic underpinnings, creating texture, dialogue considerations, and more. Plus we’ll do some fun writing exercises. A combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class writing exercises will help you apply new technique immediately to your own work.

Saturday, May 27

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Story Fundamentals

See description for April 22 class.

Wednesday May 31

7-9 PM Pacific Time

Story Fundamentals

See description for April 22 class.

Saturday, June 3

9:30-11:30 AM Pacific Time

Creating an Online Presence for Writers

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. Learn how to create an online presence that lets readers find you while not disclosing private information or spending all your time tweeting. Lecture, in-class exercises, and discussion all help you make the most of the Internet without becoming its thrall. You will receive a electronic copy of the second edition of Creating an Online Presence as part of the class.

Reading Doc Savage: The Sargasso Ogre

Our cover is mainly green, depicting Doc poling a log in what have to be anti-gravity boots because there is no way he would maintain his balance otherwise, towards an abandoned ship. As always, his shirt is artfully torn and his footwear worthy of a J. Peterman catalog.

In this read, book eighteen of the series, we finally get to see another of Doc’s men, electrical engineer Long Tom. I do want to begin with a caveat that this book starts in Alexandria and initially features an Islamic villain, Pasha Bey; while I will call out some specific instances, this is the first of these where the racism is oozing all over the page and betrays so many things about the American popular conception of the Middle East. I just want to get that out of the way up front, because it is a big ol’ problem in the beginning of this text.

We begin, therefore, with the incredibly problematic Pasha Bey:

An American man of letters once said that, if a man build a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to his door.

Pasha Bey was like that. His output was not mouse traps, but it was the best of its kind. Being modern, Pasha Bey had become president of a vast organization which specialized in his product. The fame of Pasha Bey was great. From all of Egypt, men beat a path to his door, which was likely to be anywhere in Alexandria. They came to buy this product, of course.

Pasha Bey’s product was murder!

Pasha is directed by an unseen man to give a note to Long Tom, in order to lure him off and kill him, for the sum of around $200 American dollars. Whether this accurately reflects the 1933 Egyptian murder market is anybody’s guess; it’s around $3700 in contemporary dollars. En route, he encounters the man of bronze.

One look at the big, metallic American scared Pasha Bey. There was something terrible about the giant Yankee.

Pasha Bey turned to watch the bronze man across the lobby. He was not alone in his staring; almost everyone else was doing the same thing. Alexandria was a city of strange men, but never had it seen such a personage as this.

The American was huge, yet so perfectly proportioned that his great size was apparent only when he was near other men to whose stature he might be compared. They seemed to shrink to pygmies alongside him. Tendons like big metal bands wrapped the bronze man’s hands and neck, giving a hint of the tremendous strength which must be harbored in his mighty body.

But it was the eyes that got Pasha Bey. They were weird orbs, like glittering pools of flake gold. In one casual glance, they seemed to turn Pasha Bey’s unholy soul inside out, see all its evil, and promise full punishment. The effect was most unnerving.

Pasha Bey heads on up and we are introduced to Long Tom Roberts, one of Doc’s five right-hand men who we haven’t happened to hit yet. He is described thusly:

The man who soon opened the door was rather undersized, pale of hair and eyes, and somewhat pale of complexion. In fact, he did not look at all robust. He did, however, have a very alert manner.

Long Tom was always my least favorite of the group. He’s very money driven and Pasha Bey plays on this with the note he gives him from one “Leland Smith.”

Long Tom showed pronounced interest. It was true that he had never heard of Leland Smith. But he had himself perfected a device for killing insects. The thing would be a boon to farmers, and Long Tom expected to make a fortune out of it. If some other inventor was likely to cut in on the profits, Long Tom wanted to know about it.

Long Tom hurries off, but leaves a note for Doc and the others. Pasha Bey sends a hireling named Homar to get the note and meanwhile Long Tom gets in the car and settles “luxuriously on the cushions, entirely unaware he was riding to a death trap.”

Homar gets the note, but is followed by Doc, who’s noticed him picking the lock to Long Tom’s room. Off they go to Pompey’s Pillar, a part of Alexandria holding ancient catacombs. Doc’s surprised enough by the sight of Long Tom’s bloody handprint that he makes his usual sound: “a low, trilling, mellow note, which might have been the sound of some weird bird of the jungle, or a wind filtering through the piled stone of ancient ruins around about.”

The surroundings are appropriately gruesome:

…there were many casket-shaped niches cut in the rock, and in these were stacked arm and leg bones, spinal columns, ribs. It was a macabre, hideous place. Compared to these catacombs, a walk through a graveyard at midnight was no more awesome than a stroll through a town park.

Doc finds Pasha Bey, who is swearing first by Allah’s left eye, then by both eyes, that if Long Tom signs over his travellers chequesm, he’ll be set free. Long Tom is understandably dubious. He makes an escape attempt, and in the chaos Doc enters, “a mighty genie of bronze,” and subdues everyone. Terrified, the criminals flee, swinging a rock slab shut to trap Doc and Tom, along with all of the criminals Doc has knocked out.

Doc and Tom compare notes and question Homar, who had been knocked out by Doc earlier. Doc hypnotizes him and finds out a meeting has been arranged for later that day. They escape the vault, using the explosives Doc has hidden about his person in two back molars.

Generally the stuff in Alexandria is clearly drawn from a guidebook that included a number of Arabic phrases, which are scattered through the text like malformed lumps of seasoning salt. Accompanied by piquant phrases like “Wallah” and “Imshi bil’ aga”, Pasha Bey’s conversation turns to betraying the man who has hired them. Off they go to report to him first.

The man, in characteristic Dent fashion, is not shown, thus letting us know we will be surprised by his identity later on. He is described as having a powerful, ringing voice and “capable of speaking good English,” an ability which is not precisely showcased:

An explosive curse blasted through the bars.

“I’m not after any diamonds! I don’t know anything about the gems, except the talk that’s been going around this stinkin’ burg. I ain’t after ice!”

which is followed by a passage I have underlined in red in my copy for reasons which I believe are fairly apparent.

“You do not speak with a forked tongue?” Pasha Bey muttered suspiciously. He thought he detected a falsehood.

He has little time to think about this, though, because he and his remaining men are killed after finding out they were hired to keep Doc and his men from boarding the ship Cameronic that night. Doc and Long Tom arrive only in time to find the corpses, including Pasha Bey clutching an object torn from an attacker:

Doc picked up the belt and inspected it. The thing was perhaps three inches wide, and made of soft leather. Upon the leather was sewed, side by side, more than a score of circular, braided insignia. Each of these bore an embroidered name.

Doc glanced over some of the names.

Sea Sylph, Henryetta, U.S.S. Voyager, Queen Neptune, Gotham Belle, Axtella Marie.

Long Tom and Doc ready to board the Cameronic with the rest of the men: Renny, Monk, Ham, and Johnny. They also learn that an American bank clerk involved in transferring Doc’s diamonds to the Cameronic has been murdered.

On the Cameronic, they find Monk and Ham pursuing “three fleeing brown villains,” who have been meddling with Doc’s luggage. The criminals leap overboard and swim away “briskly.” There’s the obligatory round of insults exchanged by Monk and Ham and Doc hastily heads off hours of verbal fun by suggesting they go check in on the others and Doc’s diamonds, which are destined to fund hospitals and philanthropic projects.

Down below, Renny and Johnny say a suspicious character has been hanging around, a man with a flowing white beard who looked like Santa Claus (presumably not an early incarnation of Mike Glyer). They loiter in the vicinity waiting for him to reappear, but he does not, and the ship launches. Doc sends a radiogram addressed Chief Inspector, Scotland Yard, asking about the name on the belt. The ship plows silently on through the night, accompanied only by a strained metaphor: “Somehow, it had the aspect of a shiny, new coffin fitted with lights.”

Early the next morning, Doc goes above deck to do his exercises, clad only in a disappointingly undescribed bathing suit.

These exercises were the explanation of Doc’s amazing physical and mental powers. They lasted a full two hours. Every second of that time he was working out at full speed. He had done this sort of thing daily from childhood.

He made his mighty muscles tug, one against the other, until all of his mighty bronze body glistened under a film of perspiration. He juggled a number of more than a dozen figures in his head, multiplying, dividing, extracting square and cube roots…

He employed an apparatus which created sound waves of frequencies above and below those audible to the normal ear. Thanks to his lifetime of practice, Doc was able to hear many of these sounds. His hearing was unbelievably keen.

While exercising, Doc spots a fellow gymnast, the aforementioned man with a white beard:

The stranger was balancing expertly on his hands and raising and lowering himself. This was no mean feat, but he was doing it easily. And he did it innumerable times.

He had a regulation exercise of spring cables. Five such cables were all an ordinary man could handle Yet there were more than fifteen strands on this apparatus. After working out with that a while, the man turned a score or more of handsprings, flinging himself high into the air.

Doc hails the man, who immediately leaps to another deck, leaving behind only his false beard, whose adhesive has apparently been loosened by sweat. Puzzled, Doc takes the beard and then takes a dip in the swimming pool to remove that film of perspiration. Returning to his cabin, he finds it’s been ransacked. Only one thing is gone: the curious belt of cap insignias. We discover at dinner discussion that the thief didn’t get the decoy note originally sent to Long Tom:

“He missed it by about half the length of the ship,” Doc replied, and showed where he had been carrying the message, inclosed [sic] in a waterproof, flat box, secured under his bathing suit with a strip of adhesive tape.

(Here, for reference purposes, is what men’s bathing suits looked like in the 1930s.) Johnny offers to bet that the mysterious Santa Claus was the searcher; no one takes him up on it since he’s known to never bet except on sure things.

Checking the writing on the note against the ship’s register, they match it to a name: Jacob Black Bruze. Bruze occupies Cabin 17 on B deck, but investigation finds nothing there, not even fingerprints. Doc visits the skipper of the Cameronic, one Ned Stanhope, at this point in order to get his cooperation, implying they’re been breaking into people’s cabins previously without it.

Captain Ned Stanhope, his name was. He was a little old grandma of a man. His hands were roped with blue veins, and shook at intervals from some nervous affliction. He looked less like a doughty sea captain than any of the species Doc had ever seen.

Captain Stanhope did have the whopping voice of a windjammer master, however. He was very affable.

A reply from Scotland Yard confirms that the names of the ships are all ones lost at sea in the last fifteen years, each having vanished in the Atlantic ocean. Doc and his men scrutinize and search, noticing something off about the first-class passengers.

“Have you noticed what a bunch of mugs are booked in the first-class cabins?” Monk grunted.

“I’ll say!” agreed Long Tom. “First-class passengers are usually prosperous business men and their families. But not these eggs! There’s thirty or forty who look like they had been jerked out of some penitentiary!”

That night they find the belt back in their cabin. An insignia from the Cameronic has been added to it. A little later, a missing life boat leads Monk to declare Bruze has fled the ship; Doc is not so sure.

The journey continues; the ship, passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, encounters soupy fog. Monk, as well as many of the passengers, are admiring a “very comely” young woman dancer, and not noticing the hardboiled mugs casually slipping out of the room. Our omniscient viewpoint, however, does notice, and follows them to the room where all fifty have gathered in order to plot. Bruze is there, and boasting that he can defeat Doc Savage “with my bare hands” while flexing. Nonetheless, he resorts to other means, giving his men six glass bottles, one for each of Doc and his men, and the meeting is adjourned.

Doc, returning to his cabin post-cabaret, pours out a glass of water from his room carafe but upon sipping it, finds it too cold: “His vast knowledge of the human physique had taught him it was unnecessary, if not unwise, to shock the system by drinking excessively cold water.” He pours out the water, but it encounters a chemical already in the sink, and “foul, brownish vapor” fills the room “with ugly speed.” Doc exits, and rushes to Monk’s cabin, then the rest of the men. Monk and Ham are dead; killed by the vapor:

Doc grasped Monk’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. And as he felt, a strange cold fixedness of expression came upon his face. The metal of his mighty body seemed to freeze in a wintry blast of horror.

Monk was dead!

But this is Doc Savage, after all. His remaining men watch with “a sort of incredulous hope”.

There on the corridor floor, under the none-too-bright ship lights, they were witnessing one of the miracles of modern surgical skill.

The hearts of both Monk and Ham had stopped, Respiration had ceased. To all appearances, they were lifeless.

The thing Doc Savage was doing had been accomplished before by other great surgeons. But probably never under such conditions! To the three watchers, who knew but little of such things, what happened smacked of the touch of a supernatural being.

For Doc Savage, introducing adrenalin and other stimulants with a long hypodermic needle, which actually reached the hearts of the two men, caused the pulse to start once more. With a respiratory pump he cleared the residue of the poisonous vapor out of their lungs, and got breathing under way.

An hour, he worked! Two! three!

Revived, Monk and Ham immediately begin quarreling again. Armed with their compact machine guns and their somewhat contradictory vow not to take human life, the group readies themselves.

It turns out other things have developed during the night. The ship’s radio operator has smashed the radio, then killed himself and the other operator. Upon investigation, Doc realizes it’s not a case of suicide…but murder. Doc apprehends the two first class passengers who committed it, and goes to tell the captain. Stanhope also seems to have gone crazy; he orders Doc out of his cabin at gunpoint, saying that the man of bronze has caused all the trouble. The two murderers mysteriously disappear; all evidence points to them having been killed and thrown overboard.

The ship sails on, with most of the passengers somehow able to avoid thinking about the multiple murders, mayhem, or the fact that the ship has no way of communicating with the outside world. This continues for seven days: “Seven years, it seemed! Seven ages in a fantastic world where there was only a dark, sinister sea and clouds and rain.”

Something’s clearly going on with the skipper and his officers, who are holed up in their cabins and refuse to talk to Doc or his men. A brief moment of sunlight allows Doc to figure out where they are, which turns out to be thousands of miles off course. They decide it’s time to take over the ship.

This involves gun battle, while the other passengers who’ve been oblivious to the plot action flee in terror. Doc enters Stanhope’s cabin and finds his mysterious behavior’s explanation: he’s been captive all this time. The captain finally tries to break free and is killed by gunfire in the process.

The criminals break out submachine guns of their own; gun battles rage across the Cameronic. Doc and his men free the other officers but are unable to prevent an explosion that disables the ship’s engines. Luckily Doc is able to quench the fires and prevent further damage.

Above decks, they find themselves in a fantastic setting:

“Blast it — look!” Monk leveled a furry arm at the sea.

Or was it a sea? Certainly, the flat waste which stretched to the horizon had none of the aspects of an ordinary ocean. It looked more like a vast, dead prairie of strange, sapphire hue. Here and there weird, whitish spots lent a mottled appearance.

There were no waves. Instead, the expanse seemed to bend with the swell, not unlike a flexible mirror*.

The Cameronic still moved, for the engines had not been stopped long. In her wake was a short lane of intense indigo. Farther back, this wake was slowly filling with the jaundiced substance which colored the sea in all directions.

This can’t be the real Sargasso Sea, Renny declares, having sailed through it previously. Doc points out this could be the true source of the Sargasso Sea legends: “a great weed bed to which derelict ships are carried, to be entrapped and float through the ages. The actual location of the Sargasso might vary from time to time, as the weed bed is moved by the ocean current.”

Johnny offers to bet it’s the real Sargasso Sea; in case the reader has forgotten, Dent reminds us Johnny only bets on sure things.

Bruze and his men have barricaded themselves in the rear of the ship; negotiations with them proves fruitless. They’ve got a dozen hostages, and if Doc and his men don’t surrender within two hours, the killing will begin.

Up on deck, all is chaos:

The wild confusion among the passengers was increasing instead of abating. White-faced tourists, looking over the rail at the dead, hideous expanse of weed-filled sea, became even more pallid.

Every individual who had the slightest informaiton on the Sargasso Sea was broadcasting it at the top of his** voice. Every book on the subject had already been taken from the library.

Other passengers are trying to escape in lifeboats or insisting this is all part of the shipboard entertainment. Doc gathers everyone for a meeting on the forward sun deck and explains things “in a powerful but unexcited voice.”

Monk and Renny assist Doc in his plan; they’ve created a fake bomb, which turns out to be a ruse furthermore involving fake gas. Bruze and his men agree to release the hostages if they’re given the lifeboats. Post negotiation, they free their captives and head off in the lifeboats, which turn out to work pretty well in the sea due to equipment that the criminals have brought with them. It turns out Bruze has set a fire before leaving, but it’s quenched. Monk reveals he filled the water kegs on the boats with salt water.

Bruze and his men come to a stop, “just out of range of a high-powered rifle” and make themselves comfortable: “They were like birds of carrion, hovering within sight of the helpless hulk of the Cameronic as if waiting for it to die.”

The passengers debate and decide to ask Doc “to serve as dictator for the duration of our present difficulties.” Doc gives various facts “calculated to allay fear” about the state of the ship’s supplies and directs the orchestra to play, since he’s “well aware of the cheering effects of music.”

Time passes, described as “Monotonous days followed.” Doc states they are being carried to the center of the sea. Morale efforts continue, mostly involving that orchestra. A rain shower provides Bruze and his men with water, much to Monk’s disgust.

Doc and Renny construct boats and cutting machinery similar to Bruze’s. They chase Bruze. Bruze retaliates by starting to take long distance rifle shots at night, only to be repelled by the “reasonably efficient muzzle-loading cannon” that Doc and his men cast out of engine parts.

Days drag into weeks and then “one sun-gloried morning,” Doc (who has apparently skipped his exercise routine that day) is awakened by “the hysterical screaming of a woman passenger”. The cause of alarm is a wreck, covered with weed. When they explore it, it turns out to be the Sea Sylph, which has clearly been robbed, its safe blown open. No survivors are aboard.

Soon afterward, they arrive at the center:

Ships were before them. An amazing fleet! they seemed to date from all ages. Some were comparatively spic and span, craft which had been here only a matter of weeks or months. Others were older. Centuries older, if their strange construction was a guide.

Many of the craft floated high in the water. More were half-hull deep. Not a few were water-logged and practically submerged — little more than mounds in the repellent, yellow weed. Some were canted on their sides. Here and there, one had capsized completely.

Monk started counting, but speedily gave it up. The number of the derelicts was bewildering. Their masts were like a naked jungle on the horizon.

The hulks had been brought together by the push of ocean currents from all sides Nor was the strange forest composed of ships alone. There was everything that would float — sticks, planks, hatches, logs, bottles, metal barrels, and wooden barrels! Every conceivable kind of trash!

Bruze and his men disappear into the jungle of wreckage and are not seen again that day. Doc decides to find out where they’ve gone, taking one of the small boats “shortly after darkness fell like a dank, black blanket.” Picking his way slowly through the morass of the “yellowed, dying sea,” he hears someone sending signals upon a “giant Oriental gong.” Following the sound, he finds two ancient barges lashed together and turned into a floating fortress.

Uncharacteristically, Doc trips an alarm and is plainly revealed by “a full dozen searchlights.” Shots are fired, and Doc flees. He lands on a battleship that Bruze and his men apparently fear and will not follow him onto. They depart; Doc investigates the ship, where he is encountered and attacked by someone’s pet monkey and then snared by unknown attackers:

An avalanche of forms struck Doc. Clutching hands gripped at his arms, his neck. They were puny, these hands, compared to the bronze man’s great strength. By striking about, he could no doubt have escaped.

But he made no effort to do so.

These were women! The sharp cry had told him that.

Doc allows himself to be captured by “several pairs of soft feminine hands.” The crowd of women seems to be made of many nationalities. A lantern is lit, revealing the crew of Amazons.

The women were of all ages, races, and varying degrees of beauty. Several of them were pretty enough to be considered entirely entrancing. All were strangely clad, with no two ensembles alike.

The most striking of the lot was their leader — she who spoke so many languages.

She was a redhead. In height, she would have topped Doc’s shoulder a but. Her eyes were a dreamy South Seas blue; her nose was small, with a suspicion of snubness; her lips were an inviting bow. Altogether her features could hardly have been improved upon.

The women appear angry, but that emotion is swiftly quelled by Doc’s charms. The leader identifies herself as Kina la Forge and demands his story. They exchange information; it turns out Bruze has been capturing ships for six years now. Doc asks to be turned loose, but Kina doesn’t want to do it. One of Bruze’s men, it turns out, infiltrated years ago and slew all their men. Kina tells Doc she has lived there all her life and that Bruze, who she calls the Sargasso Ogre, is a recent arrival. The sea had actually hosted a small civilization, which Bruze has done its best to destroy. It’s revealed at this point that the battleship holds six or seven million in treasure. Doc asks to be freed again; Kina says no and has some women start to drag him away. Doc escapes, saving Kina’s life from one of Bruze’s men in the process and starts making his way back to the Cameronic, which he finds in the process of being attacked.

Doc joins the fray, noticing that his righthand men are not there. Bruze rushes him and there is an epic battle between “two leviathans of bone and flesh.” The fight is fierce: “so terrific was their clutch that when their fingers slipped, skin came away as if scalded.” Bruze and his men are repelled; Doc finds his own men have been lured away to a nearby caravel, where there’s supposed to be a treasure chest.

Bruze gets on the boat with the treasure chest and is disappointed to note that his trap has apparently been unsuccessful: the chest is rigged to explode when opened. They leave, Doc appears, and of course immediately begins to open the chest, it being the last sentence of the scene. Fade to mysterious black.

Why did Doc’s men not fall for the trap? They overheard the shots from elsewhere and have gone to investigate and discovered the warship/fortress. If the criminals are watching it, there must be someone they fear on board, Doc’s men decide, and over the protests of the others, Monk moves to board it:

Before there could be more argument, Monk bounded forward. His simian physique was just right for this sort o thing. He simply doubled over, using his hands to help maintain a balance, and hopped from one piece of floating wreckage to another.

He reached the warship — and was temporarily baffled. There was no climbing those sheer steel plates. Monk carried no silken line and grapple, such as Doc had employed.

He wandered along the hull, hoping to find a dangling line. He made a complete circuit of the vessel without looking one.

Then, in a spot where he thought certainly that he had looked on the first trip, he saw an inviting Manila hawser***.

It is, of course, a trap. Monk is nearly captured by the Amazons but after gawping at them a bit, he escapes by jumping back overboard. Ham mocks him for the escapade, but the banter is cut short when more shooting begins, initiated by Bruze’s men. Monk and the others contemplate seeking refuge by going back to the fortress; a well-aimed bullet from Kina dissuades them and moments later, there’s another distraction: the caravel. They realize Doc has set off the trap. Searching for his body, they cannot find it and assume him dead, which would seem to imply less knowledge on their part than the reader, who’s pretty sure he’s not. They set siege to Bruze and his men, only to realize that he’s summoned aid. They begin working their way back to the Cameronic, and en route they are surprised to find Doc, “a mighty bronze statue in the moonlight”.

He explains how he escaped the trap. In the course of the conversation, Renny realizes Doc probably could have taken Bruze and asks what’s up. Doc explains that Bruze is the only person who seems to know the way out of the Sargasso Sea. They go back to the Cameronic, while Doc heads to Bruze’s hideout. There, listening, he realizes Bruze has launched some new trap.

They’ve also destroyed his boat, he discovers when he tries to leave. He’s forced to swim back to the Cameronic. After a long nightmarish trip, he finds the Cameronic, which has been taken by Bruze and his men and is now vacant:

Doc moved from spot to spot, inspecting the scene. Huge and expressionless, he might have been a robot man of tempered metal. Tendrils of seaweed dangled like strings from his form. At intervals, he popped, between thumb and forefinger, one of the tiny bulbs which, air-filled, gave the sargassum buoyancy.****

Searching the boat, he locates an undamaged boat and stocks it with supplies. While he’s going back for a second load of supplies, the lurking Bruze sabotages his boat and machine gun, and lets his gang know that Doc’s boat will break the first time he tries to speed. Doc plunges underwater again and makes his way laboriously through the sargassum. He tries to get back to the Amazons and finally encounters a foe he cannot deql with: Kina.

Doc studied the charming picture she presented. Along with his other training for his perilous career of hunting trouble, he had taken a course in feminine psychology. Sometimes he wondered if he had learned anything after all. The intricacies of the feminine mind were beyond any psychologist.

He boards despite her saying she’ll shoot him. She does not. “Her only objections, it dawned on him, had been feminine contrariness only.” Bruze appears and tells Kina l Forge he’ll kill the three hundred hostages from the Cameronic. Bruze threatens to do it in front of Kina; she tells him to go for it. Bruze departs; Doc stays with the women where he tells “them all the latest news, including the newest in feminine styles. When he saw how pathetically eager they were, he used crayons, which someone produced, and sketched the summer dress models from Paris and New York.”

The women, including Kina, begin mashing on the man of bronze pretty early on:

She did not know it yet, but she would have done well to save her gentle wiles. Doc was woman-proof. In his life, with its constant peril and violence, there was no place for the fairer sex.

Consequently he disregarded them.

Kina resigns herself to Doc’s a-romantic nature and gives him more information about the Sargasso Sea, including the fact that the western side is heavily guarded by Bruze. Doc surmises that the way out must be located somewhere there. Doc decides to go see if he can locate the hostages. Making his way to Bruze’s boat, he witnesses a disturbing sight:

Bruze sat crosslegged on rich cushions. Before him was a case, the lid pried off. Into this, the hawk-faced, over-muscled man dipped his hands. His little eyes were sticking out of his head like glass marbles, and he was so gripped by hysterical delight that he was sweating.

For he was handling Doc’s uncut diamonds. A wealth untold!

About the room was stacked other treasure — gold bullion, gold coin in sacks, trays of jewelry, and cheaper trinkets in mounds on the floor. Loot from the ships named on the scalp belt! Ransom of a score of kings!

And in the midst of it sat Bruze, a gloating fiend, with thews and sinews draping his great body like coiled snakes.

The Sargasso Ogre! At the moment, no other name could have fitted him more aptly.

Doc uses ventriloquism to lure Bruze out, making the sound of a distant motor starting up. He trails Bruze to a freighter where Bruze upbraids the occupants for starting the motors and possibly alerting Doc Savage to their existence. The criminals rightfully insist they haven’t been doing so; Bruze goes in to touch the engines and see if they’re warm. Doc searches the freighter and discovers the hold is steel-plated and he can’t get in.

Bruze calls his men inside, telling them not to mind watching the door. Doc suspects it’s another trick but enters, only to find gunmen. The following fight has the sort of weird poetry that Dent sometimes achieves:

Close to his right ear hung a rust scale as large as a spelling book. There were many others like it. Too, the hull flared in such a fashion as to make it difficult for the men to lean out of the side hatches at bow and stern — they could not sight him. In the murk, his bronze skin blended with the rust somewhat.

One of the men started to shoot, regardless. The other, thus encouraged, did likewise.

Rust scales fell like big snowflakes. Timbers in the raft splintered, split, and jarred as if invisible horses were galloping upon them.

Doc emerges unscathed but finds himself in a tiny room furnished with loophles for people to shoot into it. Doc employs a smoke bomb and disappears, much to the frustration of Bruze. He sends off his men; he plans to make a final effort and finish Doc off once and for all.

There are seventeen pages left to the book at this point and Pasha Bey — or someone very like him, now nicknamed “Big Sheik” — reappears.

Seven evil-looking men now appeared in a group. They were chuckling at the expense of one of their number. This fellow was very fat, judging from the flabby bulges which stuffed his garments. If his appearance was any criterion, he would weigh at least three hundred pounds.

His skin was a brownish color. He wore a flowing burnoose of fine silk, and had curly black hair. He was a half-caste white.

His face was swathed partially in bandages. He carried one arm in a sling.

“Wallah!” he gritted with a strong Arabic accent. “By the beard of my father, I will stick a knife into the next man who makes what he calls the wisecrack!”

The varied group assembles. Bruze tells them he believes Doc is hiding up on the warship with the women, and he wants to get rid of the latter group once and for all, even if it means loosing the treasure the women are guarding. Off they go, but Big Shiek lags behind. In case it’s not apparent, he is Doc Savage in a disguise, which he swiftly doffs once out of eyesight. Making it to the warship before Bruze and his gang, he manages to repel their attack.

Bruze reveals his last-ditch plan: he’s got a tanker full of gasoline, which he plans to dump into the ocean around the women’s ship and set on fire. They begin to put this plan in place, unaware Doc’s already moved everyone on the warship somewhere safer.

Kina and her women appear at the criminals fortress, offering to surrender and saying they’re tired of fighting. The criminals shepherd the ladies into a small enclosed space, where the women release gas that Doc has provided them with, concealed within the masses of their hair, knocking the others out. They free the hostages. Doc reappears, says good job, and takes all of his men except Monk back to the fight. Monk, who’s been told to stay behind and defend the freighter, is indignant until he realizes this means time with Kina.

Bruze’s plan is his undoing; when he and his men shoot at the oncoming Doc and his men, they set off the gasoline all around themselves. In the aftermath, Doc and his men find the seaplanes that Bruze and his men have been using to get in and out of the Sargasso Sea.

The ending is abrupt enough to make you wonder if a chapter got left off: They fell to examining the craft.

Notes and afterthoughts: this book feels initially scattered in a way that some of the others don’t, and I have a strong suspicion Dent started it intending to put it all in Alexandria, and then found he just wasn’t able to sustain that atmosphere. Once we get to the Sargasso Sea, things feel a lot more coherent, but boy that ending is so fast it leaves the reader reeling.

* ‘Not unlike x’ is a construction I find peculiarly charming; look for it to be heavily used in an upcoming work of fiction.

** I like to pretend Dent is deliberately using a gendered pronoun here and making a sly comment on mansplaining. This is undoubtedly not actually the case.

*** Google search informs me this is a thick rope used in shipping.

**** Not unlike a primitive form of bubblewrap.