Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 61

On My Shelves: Bastard!!

 

 

“Several hundred years after the fall of human civilization, ’twas a lawless period, a time without order; only blood, flesh, bone, and iron. It was also a time of sorcery. Having been terrorized by demonic creatures their entire lives, human beings were miserably inadequate, and forced to subsist in a barren, hostile environment.”

 

     (Yes, that’s a quote directly from the opening of the anime. Painful, isn’t it?)

 

     Bastard!! (no link; looks to be out of print) is a somewhat twisted D&Dish fantasy manga by Kazushi Hagiwara, adapted into a short OVA series. I’ve never seen any of the manga, so this review’s based on the anime.

 

     In brief outline, the basic plot driver of the anime is that about 15 years ago, the incredibly powerful wizard Dark Schneider nearly conquered the world, only defeated by a confrontation with the most powerful surviving priest of the country Metallicana. The priest, Soto, couldn’t kill Schneider, so he instead sealed his spirit inside the body of an innocent (and possibly somewhat dimwitted) baby named Luche. As with all such seals, it has a way of being released – a kiss from a completely chaste (i.e., virgin) girl.

 

Soto keeps this a secret and expects to never have to reveal it, but naturally a powerful wizard appears, leading an army which threatens the city to the point that finally they cross the Godzilla Threshold and figure there is no way that even releasing Dark Schneider could make things worse. Soto’s daughter, Yoko, releases Schneider from Luche’s spiritual bonds.

 

Schneider does, indeed, save the city, and – somewhat to everyone’s surprise, including his own – doesn’t quite go on an unstoppable rampage of rape and slaughter as his reputation would imply. It turns out that living for 15 years in the body of a complete innocent has had some effect on him; Luche and Schneider are, by now, merging, and as Luche has a very deep affection for and loyalty to Yoko, Schneider also shares this affection (with, of course, additional more base interests).

 

The joke turns out to be on Dark Schneider, though, because when he goes to steal a kiss from Yoko he discovers that a second kiss from the chaste maiden reactivates the seal.

 

Later OVA episodes develop a deeper plot, with some very nasty people trying to basically awaken the goddess of destruction and unleash it upon the world.

 

Dark Schneider himself (referred to by those who are his friends as “Darshu”) is the titular Bastard!! of the title. By the time things get rolling, it’s obvious he’s not the utterly evil monster the original stories implied, but he can be a massive jerk, with an ego the size of a planet. Darshu can get away with this because his power is the equal of his ego and he has a lot of style, being by far the coolest being on his planet. How powerful and cool is he? He manages to kill a Balrog (or something as near as makes no difference) with a fire spell. His fire’s so powerful that even the fire-demon can’t handle it.

 

Bastard!! is filled with in-jokes and wordplay focused mostly around heavy metal bands of the era in which it was made (the late 80s). People, cities, and spells will be named after classic “Hair metal” bands: Dark Schneider himself is named either after Udo Dirkschneider of the band Accept, or after Dee Schneider from Twisted Sister (or, possibly, inspired by both); the city central to the story is Metallicana (need I elaborate?), one of the knights is Sir Bon Jovina, the dark goddess is named Anthrax, and the powerful spells include Venom, Halloween, and Megadeth. It should be noted that the American translators were somewhat leery of being sued, so they mangled the names a bit, quite deliberately (so we have “Meta-Ricana” as the city, and so on).

 

There is some excellent background music for Bastard!!, some of which I have in my collection. There’s a strong, almost Germanic component to it that gives it an epic feel.

 

Despite its D&D plus Heavy Metal origins, there are some very powerful and touching scenes in the anime – the best focused around Arshes Nei, a Dark Elf woman who was raised by Darshu since she was orphaned, who fell in love with him, and is then cursed to go after him and kill him, with a spell that will kill HER if she does not bathe her hand in his heart’s blood. In this sequence we get to see Schneider as both more human and more awesome than in any prior sequences.

 

That all being said, Bastard!! is not without many flaws. It is filled with sexism and more fanservice than you can shake a box of brassieres at. Yoko is written as a fairly typical anime heroine of the period – a sort of screamy tsundere who only slowly improves, although it is to the show’s credit that she does improve some over the course of the OVAs. And while it’s true that Darshu’s super-powered wizardry is one of the points of the series, it can also become somewhat tiresome to see him beaten down only to pull some ludicrously powerful spell out of nowhere to finish off his enemy in one shot. The late-80s, early –90s of anime are pretty well distilled into Bastard!!, and the distillation isn’t always to its benefit.

 

     Still, if you’re in the right frame of mind, Bastard!! can be a fun watch, and if you’re not too triggered/bothered by the above tropes, it’s well worth a look.

     

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Myth Adventures by Robert Asprin and Phil Foglio

 

     Robert Asprin wrote quite a number of books and was well-known as an editor on others, and a co-creator of the fairly successful Thieves’ World shared-world setting, which I may write about in another entry. But what he may have been best known for was his comedic fantasy entry Another Fine Myth and the subsequent long-running series of novels based on the adventures and misadventures of young failed thief and would-be wizard Skeeve, scaly, blustering, and devious “demon” Aahz (“Oz?”  “No relation.”), and a diverse cast of characters spanning multiple countries and dimensions.

 

     The first of these novels, Another Fine Myth, was later adapted into graphic novel format under the title “Myth Adventures” by none other than the great Phil Foglio, himself best known for his work on Girl Genius (and among geeky gamers for his “What’s New?” strip in Dragon magazine). Foglio’s detailed, expansive, exaggerated, and lush style was perfectly suited to this tale, which moves from the pathetic to the comedic to the epic by turns, and often combines all three.

 

     What makes this graphic novel version of Myth Adventures darn near unique is that it is actually superior to the original book in almost every way. That’s somewhere between rare and unheard of in adaptations, and especially comic-book adaptations which often have to delete large swaths of prose in order to get the story told in reasonable time and space.

 

SPOILERS will abound in the following discussion, so if you don’t want any, I’ll just say that it’s a really awesome story and you should go read it if you want some lighter fare that’s really well done.

 

 

Spoilers…

 

 

Spoilers…

 

 

Spoilers…

 

 

 

Here!

 

 

 

     The basic idea driving the story is that Skeeve was a not-very-successful young (I’m not sure of his exact age, but I don’t think he starts the book at more than 20, and maybe considerably younger) thief who got caught trying to rob a reclusive wizard’s hut. The wizard, named Garkin, saw something in Skeeve that others hadn’t, and instead of punishing him took the near-starved boy in as an apprentice.

 

     Just as Skeeve has succeeded at his first real feat of magic – lighting a candle with his mind alone – Garkin decides to celebrate by showing Skeeve what a fully advanced wizard can do, and summons a demon.

 

     Garkin is shot dead by an assassin just as the summoning completes, although Garkin’s final spell kills the assassin as well. The demon, however, is still present, and Garkin’s death unbound the wards that held it.

 

     However, the joke’s on Skeeve; “demon” is actually short for “dimensional traveler”, and the “demon” that Garkin summoned, while fearsome looking, is actually a colleague of Garkin’s; the two of them have a bargain that allows them to summon each other as the “demon” to scare their respective apprentices. They also tend to play jokes on each other when doing the summons.

 

     Unfortunately, Garkin’s death poses a problem for both of them, as it turns out Garkin’s last joke was to douse the demon, Aahz, in a powder that removes his magical powers. It’s easily curable under the right circumstances… but with Garkin dead,it becomes much harder. And there is the looming question of who wanted Garkin dead… and what that means for Skeeve’s continued survival.

 

     This forces Aahz to team up with Skeeve; Skeeve may be untrained but he can, at least, do magic, while Aahz may not be able to do the magic but he knows a lot about it, and can teach Skeeve. They quickly discover that behind the assassination is an old enemy of both Garkin and Aahz: a very powerful and amoral wizard named Isstvan.

 

     This is one of the areas in which the adapted version is far superior to the original. In the original, Isstvan was, while crazy, in many ways a fairly generic Evil Wizard Guy. In the adapted version, he’s an old enemy of Aahz, Garkin,and a number of other characters we meet along the way, who was in fact responsible for Garkin – a very powerful and skilled wizard –living in a hut in the woods of a backwater dimension. Isstvan had put a curse on Garkin that made him able to drain magic from anything in his environment and use it to power his spells.

 

This made Garkin potentially inconceivably powerful. Unfortunately, doing this was like using a drug, filled with pleasure, hideously addictive, and ultimately leading to Garkin turning into a rampaging magic-drunk force of destruction, consuming all the magic in range in order to gain the power to consume MORE magic and cast more spells. In order to keep from being a monster, Garkin had to give up magic almost entirely. It says a great deal about what Garkin saw in Skeeve that Garkin was willing to risk getting involved in magic again to teach Skeeve.

 

Myth Adventures continues in this vein, introducing standard fantasy tropes and then torquing them around anywhere from just a tiny bit “off” to a full 180-degree turn, and occasionally a complete 360, spinning the trope so far that it comes back to meet itself in the middle. While the book itself was highly entertaining, I again must emphasize that the combination of Asprin and Foglio is considerably superior – especially in the final denoument which is resolved with far more dramatic and comedic effectiveness, as well as clarifying what Isstvan’s motives were for the entire sequence of events.

 

I won’t spoiler the novel further; either the comic or the original are well worth reading, and the series continued for quite some volumes. I think the later ones became somewhat weaker, but at least the first three or four were very good and follow Skeeve’s development into a competent wizard and perhaps more, while constantly becoming involved with various threats ranging from the personally annoying (getting paid for doing work) to the world-threatening.  I very much recommend the series!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convention Report: Guest of Honor at Lunacon 2014

 

     ”Guest of Honor”: three words I honestly never expected to hear applied to myself, and I frequently remarked on that during Lunacon. But invited as GoH I was, and so last weekend (the 14th through 16th) I was at Lunacon in Rye Brook, NY. 

 

Note: in the following piece I’ll try to link to the people or places mentioned, but in some cases I can’t find or am not sure of an appropriate link.

 

     I posed some problems at the last minute to the con staff, who rose to the occasion magnificently. The people who had been expected to watch the house, and our kids, during my absence were suddenly unable to make it, so I was confronted by the problem of having to bring down four more people than I had expected to. With trepidation I mentioned this to Lunacon, and honestly expected to be told that this was going to be my problem. Instead, they informed me they could get another room adjoining ours for the kids, since I had planned to only stay two nights rather than their budgeted 4. In addition, they helped out with feeding rather more mouths than were planned.

 

     The only actual convention-related glitch was in providing the badges, which actually weren’t ready until around noon on Saturday; the joke was made that as a GoH I should have a huge hat like Gilgamesh Wulfenbach in Girl Genius, which would have served as identification. Other than that, nothing con-related was an issue (that I encountered) and I have NOTHING but praise for the wonderful convention staff who made my first GoH experience pretty much undiluted fun.

 

     The hotel had two false fire alarms – one in my first panel, the other early on Saturday morning – but fortunately nothing else significant.

 

     Once we arrived and got settled in, I had one other personal priority to deal with: my daughter Victoria’s birthday. March 14th was her birthday, and so we had to mark that. Kathleen had brought a homemade cake, and despite some issues with the food (warning: the Chinese takeout nearby? NO.), the birthday was a success, with presents including a lot of Spider-Man stuff (Vicky’s heavily into Spider-Man these days), a beautiful knitted Wonder Woman doll, and others.

 

     Because of the birthday (and because it was Friday) I only had two events on Friday: the “Meet the Pros” party and “The Biggest Writing Mistakes New Authors Make” panel. The latter was briefly interrupted by the fire alarm, but that was only a minor glitch and the panel, helmed ably by Michael Ventrella, was lively and I would like to think produced some useful insights for anyone attending. The other panel members were the well-known Ian Randal Strock, April Grey, and Ken Altabef. Michael was also wise enough to immediately point out that there were two significant categories of “writing mistakes” – those of the actual craft of writing, and those of the business of writing – and discussion touched on both aspects.

 

     I’m not really good at the “mingling” business, so I didn’t succeed in “Meeting the Pros” much; I spent most of my time at Michael’s table. I wish I’d checked around the room a bit more; there was one guest I **REALLY** wanted to meet, and never did – Walt Simonson. (Or, possibly, I met him and didn’t REALIZE I’d met him; he doesn’t in fact look like a Norse god with lightning crackling around him but actually looks like, well, one of us ORDINARY people!)

 

     Saturday was a whole different ball game. My schedule was packed on Saturday, with no less than eight events, in between which I had to grab food, etc. The ConCom had been careful in their scheduling, though, so I did in fact have intervals where I could do that in reasonable time.

 

     The first panel of the day was “Amazing Women”, with a well assorted panel including Esther Friesner (currently working her “Princesses of Myth” series but best known to me for her role in the Chicks in Chainmail series, to which I have a submission), Sara Grasberg (media expert with a concentration in gender studies, if I recall correctly), and a reader and thus representative more of the audience than the usual pros named Stephanie Gangone. This, too, was a lively panel with a lot of discussion of what makes female characters “amazing”. My attitude’s always been that, well, they should be amazing people and the rest takes care of itself. 

 

     Next up was “History Repeats: Revisiting Old Skool Games”. Technically I was moderator on this, but aside from making sure the panelists (myself, Debra Lieven, Chris Adams, and Joshua Kronengold) introduced ourselves, this one ended up simply being an unbridled reminiscence-fest, discussing old games (classic RPGs) from the late 70s and early 80s and then delving into what made them interesting or unusual – what kinds of games worked best for what reasons, and so on and so forth. I suspect this one could have run for hours, though I’m not sure we’d have gotten a clear POINT out of it!

 

     Then… a Guest of Honor speech. By ME.

 

     I had originally started to write out a long, detailed speech, and then I realized that I would never be able to memorize it – so I’d be trying to read it while standing on a podium. That’s a sucky way to address an audience. So I finally decided to simply memorize some points I wanted to touch upon, and do it all ad-hoc. I was helped by having three gorgeous posters with me that Baen had provided – one of the cover of Spheres of Influence, one for Portal, and one of the just-completed cover painting for Paradigms Lost, showing Jason Wood confronting the Maelkodan; these provided anchors to remind me of my three main “universe” talking points, and I could do the rest myself. As this was my first attempt at a GoH speech I made the speech mainly about my journey to becoming an author, and hopefully did so in a reasonably entertaining way. Following that was an autographing session which actually did include people asking for my autograph, so it was a success!

 

Then, at 5:00, the panel I’d created: “If I am Ever the…” Critiquing. The concept of this panel was to take one of the “If I am ever” lists (Evil Overlord, Hero, Sidekick, etc.) and have each of the panelists take the persona of one of their own characters of that category and then go down the list, critiquing it. I did Ugu the Unbowed (one of the villains from Polychrome), Michael Ventrella did his vampiric politician villain from his new novel Bloodsuckers, Esther Friesner did the Dread Lord Cthulhu, Chuck Rothman his nigh-omnipotent supercomputer villain, and Susan de Guardiola a version of (I hope I recall correctly) Morgan La Fey, seductive sorceress supreme. Much fun was had by all both agreeing with, and heckling, the recommendations of the list.

 

The Game Designing Meet-Up was the least… productive, from my point of view. It wasn’t nearly as clearly organized and while there were some fun discussions, I don’t know that anything got accomplished (at least in the subgroup I was in).

 

The True Malevolence panel, with Catt Kingsgrave, Terry Carney, Gary Frank, and William Freedman, was very focused and a lot of fun. Catt brought a personal perspective from experience of human evil, and there was a lot of spirited discussion on what makes true malevolence work – and not work – in a written context, as well as exactly what malevolence and evil really are, and whether they differ in a written setting versus the real world. A great panel.

 

After this, I got to experience a convention tradition which I had previously only heard of: an Eye of Argon reading. For those few unfamiliar with The Eye of Argon, it is a Conanesque pastiche of the work of Robert E. Howard (as I am currently reading the Conan stories to my son Gabriel, I am actually struck by how closely it comes to Howard’s prose in some ways) which is noteworthy due to an incredible concatenation of errors of typography, word choice, and grammar that render the whole a trainwreck of lurid delerium-like intensity. It was written by a 16 year old named Jim Theiss, so its quality, or lack thereof, is hardly surprising; I think it’s something of a shame that poor Jim had to see his early work become a byword for mockery, as some of the text actually seems to indicate some potential that could easily have been brought out under the right circumstances.

 

Still, readings of The Eye of Argon have become a tradition at many SF conventions. At Lunacon, the rules are thus: the panelists take turns reading the manuscript. Each reads until they either make a mistake (and “mistakes” in this context definitely include “correcting one of the miswritten words”) or laugh aloud. You get two turns; once you fail the second time, you must stand in front of the audience and start acting out the story.

 

This was great fun. I had thought I could do much better than I did, but my tendency to imagine things betrayed me; when I reached one of the (many) points at which the story mixed up (via grammatical error) who was doing what, I suddenly envisioned the ludicrousness in full force, and nearly laughed myself unconscious. My second turn lasted perhaps a paragraph before I found myself unable to pronounce something. I then spent my time being either a nubile maiden or mighty Grignr the barbarian as our adventures were narrated by the remaining panelists and, finally, members of the audience.

 

My last panel, on Sunday, featured myself, Paul Levinson, and Felicia Herman on “How Much Do We Have to Pay for Free Speech”; this was a very interesting, and relevant, panel which also touched frequently on exactly what is “free speech” – and on the fact that real “free speech” is a right and a responsibility. This was an active and effective panel.

 

Finally, I did my reading; as I had an hour, I read both from Polychrome, as the Kickstarter had just started that weekend, and from my unpublished work Demons of the Past. There was a pretty good turnout and, I hope, most people found the stories interesting.

 

Overall, as I said, I very much enjoyed my first GoH stint, and Lunacon was a lot of fun. I hope I’ll have a chance to go back again!

 

 

 

Posting will resume soon…

 

Unfortunately, this weekend I’ ve been hit with some kind of eye infection (going to the doc this morning) so I couldn’t finish writing anything for the site.

 

Once I recover, we’ll be back to the usual M-W-F schedule of new updates!

 

 

On My Shelves: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever

 

     1977, as I have mentioned before, was something of a banner year in my fandom experiences for me. Star Wars was released in that year; I first encountered roleplaying games, in the form of Dungeons and Dragons, in 1977; The Sword of Shannara was published in that year.

 

     And so was Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever – a series which was first a trilogy, then two trilogies, and now a total of ten books with the addition of a final tetralogy. I have not read this final tetralogy; I’m unsure whether I want to, given my feelings on the two trilogies that preceded it, so this review will discuss only those two trilogies.

 

     The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant may well be the most-reviled work of fantasy to have also achieved high acclaim, and is certainly one of the most polarizing. I would say that about ninety percent of those who begin the first book and do not complete the first trilogy stop at the exact same point – and understandably so; I nearly stopped there as well (more on that later). Those who stop are virtually universal in their understandable detestation; of those who complete the first trilogy, there’s still quite a division of “I finished it and feel that this is an achievement of pain and fortitude” and those who actually enjoyed reading it.

 

     The first novel, Lord Foul’s Bane, introduces us to Covenant – possibly the most non-heroic central character ever in an epic fantasy. Covenant is a man who once “had it all”; wealth from a wildly successful bestselling novel, a wife Joan he loved very much, and a young son named Roger.

 

     Then out of the blue he contracted leprosy, resulting in the loss of two of the fingers on his left hand and the departure of his wife and child because his wife fears that prolonged exposure to Covenant could infect Roger as well.

 

     This is only part of the problem for Covenant; he is also given six months counseling as to how to deal with his leprosy (which destroys nerves and eliminates sensations, meaning that even an unattended scratch may turn, unnoticed, into a gangrenous wound). This “counseling” includes, basically, terror tactics, showing Covenant what could happen to him if he ignores his condition and ever, EVER believes, for even a single moment, that he could EVER be cured. It is emphasized again, and again, and again that his imagination and fantasies will be his deadly enemies, that his mind may attempt to trick him into believing he can live a normal life, and if he ever falls into that trap, he could end up a freakish, distorted remnant of humanity.

 

     This is … not at all in line with the way things are today with respect to leprosy, and is a hideously bad course of psychological treatment even taking into account that this was written in the 1970s. Adding to that the nearly medieval attitudes of Covenant’s neighbors in the small town he lives in and other interesting peculiarities, I have always considered that Covenant’s story does not actually begin in this universe but one somewhat similar, in which a cure for leprosy was never found and attitudes lag behind our modern ones in a number of areas.

 

     In any event, this reduces Covenant to a grim, isolated man with barely any human contact. When he finally resolves to at least not be completely isolated and leaves his home to go into town, he encounters a strange beggar who refuses all offers of his help – including his white gold wedding ring – and leaves him with an admonishment to “be true”.

 

     Then Covenant is hit by a police car, and when he awakens, finds himself in a place called simply The Land – a fantasy realm which is in some ways a distillation of all fantastic tropes, and in other ways very different. After an initial terrifying encounter with his monstrous summoner, a being called “Drool Rockworm” wielding a powerful magical artifact, and that summoner’s superior, the true villain of the piece who is simply called Lord Foul, the Despiser, Covenant is transported to an isolated location called Kevin’s Watch and discovered by a young girl named Lena, who leads him to the nearby village. There he finds that the residents consider him the reincarnation of one of their greatest heroes, Berek Half-Hand (due to Covenant’s missing two fingers), and the holder of the mystically vital “white gold”, which is said to unlock the Wild Magic, something beyond the power of any who live within the world.

 

     Well, seeing the brainwashing his “counselors” gave him (I cannot call it anything less vile; brainwashing it clearly was, especially if you read the details in the book) earlier, one can probably guess where this is going. Covenant – knowing that the last thing that he remembers from the real world is that he was struck by a police car – refuses to believe any of this is real; it’s obviously a dream, a fantasy cooked up by his subconscious. He knows that if he accepts this fantasy as true he is likely dooming himself to a terrible death or a possibly even worse half-life on a hospital bed for decades. So he refuses belief in anything having to do with the Land.

 

     From this perspective, of course, the Land is an insidious and horrific trap, a desperate attempt by Covenant’s own mind to break him, convince him that instead of being a powerless, isolated man who has lost everything, he’s a great hero, powerful, in a place where everyone will respect and admire him.

 

     He has to deny this, or he’s dooming himself. The conditioning he has accepted gives him no latitude; indulging fantasy is tantamount to suicide, and despite his far reduced circumstances Thomas Covenant has no desire to die.

 

     But the Land continues its (apparent) assaults on his sanity, culminating in the application  by Lena of something called “hurtloam”, a magical mud that uses the power of the Land itself to undo all damage to a person.

 

     It cures Covenant’s leprosy… and even brings back the nerves, full sensation to every part of Covenant’s body.

 

     This is the final straw, the clear “frontal assault” on his sanity, the absolute proof that this must be a delusion. There is no cure for leprosy, and even if there was a cure, it could not bring back nerves that had been dead for a year or more. Dead nerves are dead.

 

     Covenant breaks at that point, and from my reading of the book, what happens then is that his panicked, conditioned mind suddenly has a twisted yet, in some ways, brilliant insight. If the point of this fantasy is to escape, to give Covenant some refuge where everyone loves him instead of avoids him, where he’s a good guy and hero instead of outcast and isolate avoided by everyone, then there’s a simple solution: make everyone here hate, fear, and revile him too! Then he has no more reason to stay here!

 

 

     TRIGGER WARNING. If you have specific triggery issues with sexual events I you should stop now. And probably never even attempt to read these books, even though there is, in fact, only one significant event in that category in the trilogy that I can recall. Still, I say stop if you have any triggers in that area.

 

 

 

Separation…

 

 

 

Separation…

 

 

Separation…

 

 

Separation…

 

 

 

Okay, continuing…

 

     This combines with the fact that one set of regenerated nerves also cures his impotence (which began when he was first diagnosed), and Covenant rapes Lena.

 

     THIS is of course the point at which a vast number of people take the book and throw it against the wall, never to continue, or even read anything by Donaldson again. And I can’t blame them for it. I nearly did that myself, and only continued because I was interested in The Land itself.

 

     But from a psychological point of view, the action makes a twisted sort of sense. Such an act is unforgiveable – by Covenant’s own standards. But since (as he then believes) this is merely a delusion in his mind, he’s not actually committing the act, and it will make everyone hate him and the fantasy will reject him, forcing him back to the real world.

 

     But the Land does not, in fact, reject him. And while many people are horrified by what he has done and unable to comprehend it (and, indeed, Covenant can’t really understand it either, at least not for a long time), they abide by their sacred Oath of Peace, and by the need to get the message he carries to the rulers of the Land, and send him unharmed on his way.

 

     The subsequent parts of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are constantly affected by this single event. Covenant accepts that what he did in that moment was a heinous, unforgiveable act, and spends the remainder of his time attempting to atone for it – and always accepts that there really is no way to fully make up for what he has done. He does not attempt to justify it in any significant way, and is constantly followed by the shadow of that choice – and constantly confronted by the consequences thereof, in multiple ways.

 

     Beyond this, though, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant give us a huge, complex world and plot driven by moral choices, lies and truths, courage and despair, a world that, for me, made it more than worth the time to continue. Many of the secondary characters – especially Saltheart Foamfollower, the laughing Giant, Lord Mhoram of Revelstone, and Bannor of the Bloodguard – made the journeys to the Land worthwhile for me. And it was filled with moments of awesome as well as tragedy and vileness; to this day, I cannot read the words “Lord Mhoram’s Victory” without a chill of triumph and awe down my spine, nor think of Saltheart Foamfollower’s laugh without a similar, sadder sensation.

 

     Covenant himself … I hated his guts for 2.8+ of the first 3 books. He spends huge amounts of energy trying to evade any responsibility handed to him (because, after all, accepting the responsibility to DO something is, itself, a concession to the reality of the Land), and has a constant internal monologue of self-loathing which colors every interaction he has; even when other people don’t SEE him that way, he assumes they will. He remains, for most of the trilogy, a grim, self-despising man afraid of any human contact. Covenant, at least in the first trilogy, is not a hero in any real sense of the term except, possibly, for one.

 

However, I came to actually grudgingly like him at the end, when he finally found the key to being the Unbeliever, and the key to saving the Land: that it did not matter if the Land was real. His choices to protect it – to deny Despite – were either very real defenses against a malevolent being of godlike power, or were his own choice to live and not to destroy himself regardless of his mistakes or flaws, a battle against his worst self in the form of Lord Foul. Either way, there was something worth fighting for, and thus he had to neither believe in the Land, nor NOT believe in it – to balance in the UnBelief, and find the key to that power, the Wild White Magic Gold.

 

     In the second Chronicles, Thomas Covenant is joined by another traveler from the “real world”, Doctor Linden Avery, who has her own tortured secrets in her psyche. In this trilogy, Covenant gained huge cred from me from his initial response to Lord Foul, having summoned him to the Land once more, gloating over him, telling him that he has no hope and “you are mine”: “I don’t believe it. You can’t be STUPID enough to try this AGAIN.”

 

     The second Chronicles also introduce more things of horror and wonder, from the hideousness of the nature-warping Sunbane to the beauty of the Elohim and the implacable, unstoppable power of a Sandgorgon, and multiple more events of sorrow, heroism, evil, and love. The trilogy climaxes, however, with Thomas Covenant pulling off one of the most brilliant Xanatos Gambits I have ever seen, finally defeating Lord Foul in a manner that left me simultaneously crying and laughing so hard that I could barely finish the book.

 

     It is that ending that makes me extremely reluctant to pick up the final four books. Undoing that triumph… is there anything worth doing that? Can the final four novels manage to conclude Covenant’s legacy in a manner that is that good or better? I’m doubtful.

 

     How do I rate the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? Rrrrgh. That’s a hard one. That One Event is enough to knock it down pegs. Yet… that one event is also the driving force of the novel in many ways, the single hideous choice that affects, distorts, and pushes ever single other thing that Covenant does or must do, and reveals the one truly heroic trait he has: absolute willingness to face himself and hold to who he is regardless of the pressures and temptations to do otherwise. Donaldson is also very well known for stylistic quirks that have been used as SF convention party games (“Clench racing”, where you pick up a Covenant book and open it at random, with the winner being the first to find the word “Clench” somewhere in the text); he often seems to use his thesaurus as a shotgun, targeting a concept but not being precise about what he hits.

 

     At the same time, that strange choice of language, with bizarre, often outmoded word choices, lends a dreamlike intensity to the Land which would be lost with more conventional writing. I have to accept that for his purposes, that writing actually works far better than a style which would be technically better and more accurate.

 

     I guess I have to say that these were good books, well worth my time (I’ve read them more than once), but not ones I would approach casually. Of Donaldson’s works, I think his Mordant’s Need dualogy (which I’ll probably review later) was considerably superior, but the Thomas Covenant books are certainly worthy volumes in and of themselves.

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Pirates of the Caribbean

 

 

“You’re forgetting one thing, mate: I’m Captain Jack Sparrow.”

       Once upon a time there was a rather cheesy amusement park ride called “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Disney had constructed this ride to capitalize on the image of pirates that it had, itself, helped to create, swashbuckling rogues who were perhaps not quite as blackhearted as they would like you to think, and certainly not very much like the real thing. This was certainly a slight foundation on which to build a movie, and I myself have never seen the ride (never having actually been to a Disney theme park at all). My only prior exposure to it, in fact, had been a sequence in the Clive Cussler novel Iceberg in which Pitt chases down the villains of the novel through the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

 

     So one can imagine that I was doubtful, to say the least, when I heard that Disney had produced a movie based on the theme park ride, doubly so because pirate films had been dead for years, with Cutthroat Island putting a final bullet in the genre’s head (I am one of the few, apparently, who not only saw the movie but liked it, because it lost titanic amounts of money) and I didn’t see what was likely to revive it.

 

     In a sense, I was right; the pirate movie genre still seems to be basically dead.

 

     Otherwise, I was dead wrong.

 

     Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the most successful, and fun, movie franchises since the original Star Wars trilogy. The runaway success of the first movie took everyone, including Disney, by surprise, so the peculiar mythology built up in the second and third movies requires a bit of mental shoehorning to work really well with the first, but this, and other offenses against common sense, are made up for by the exuberant energy with which the movies are infused. When I had watched Cutthroat Island I had felt there was one obvious element missing that would have catapulted it from a decent pirate movie to something awesome, and I figured out what was missing at the point where the heroes… (rot-13 encoded in case anyone’s planning on watching Cutthroat Island and doesn’t want to be spoiled; to decode, cut-and-paste the gibberish into the window available at www.rot13.com and click “cypher”)

 

     …svanyyl ernpu gur snoyrq gernfher naq qvfpbire vg’f nf infg nf ehzberq, yvggrerq jvgu gur fxryrgbaf bs gur qrnq. Ng gung cbvag V npghnyyl rkcrpgrq, va zl thg, gur fxryrgbaf gb trg hc naq hf gb unir n ybiryl zbqreavmrq irefvba bs gur vzcbffvoyr fjbeq onggyrf va zbivrf yvxr Wnfba naq gur Netbanhgf be Gur Tbyqra Iblntr bs Fvaonq. Gur cvengr zbivr, V sryg, arrqrq n gbhpu bs gur fhcreangheny, be cbffvoyl zber guna whfg n gbhpu.

 

     That is, of course, exactly what Pirates of the Caribbean did, and the resulting movie was hugely successful (over $600 million on a $140 million budget).

 

     A vast portion of this, of course, comes from Johnny Depp’s signature performance as the more-than-half-mad pirate named Jack Sparrow. (“That’s Captain! CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow!”) Depp was originally expected to play his role much more straight, but instead chose to play him over-the-top and ’round the bend in a manner apparently inspired by Keith Richards; this was directly referenced later, when Richards himself played Jack Sparrow’s father.

 

     Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the great characters of cinema, period. A conflicted, contradictory man, Jack Sparrow is nigh-unpredictable, driving towards his goal (to regain command of his ship, the Black Pearl) on an erratic and sometimes incomprehensible course, through actions that at first will make sense only to him.

 

Yet he is neither entirely mad, nor entirely ruthless. Sparrow’s great weakness, really, is that he is not a pirate at heart – not the sort of pirate that Barbossa and many others are, anyway. He doesn’t really want to hunt down other ships and pillage and plunder his way across the seven seas; it’s made clear that what he wants to do, really, is “go thataway” – move freely and unhindered throughout the world, going as and when he likes. The Black Pearl is a symbol of that freedom, the fastest ship in the world and one of the most formidable; no one can catch her and damned few can outfight her.

 

This does cause Sparrow problems, because he actually doesn’t like killing people for no reason, and turns out to have some twisted sympathy for others. He’s certainly ruthless at times, but his choices often seem to have a long-term effect very different from their short-term purpose. In the end, he’s shown to make the right choice even when this doesn’t ostensibly suit his goals.

 

Does he intend everything that happens? Well, that’s one of the major questions of the series, asked in-universe more than once: “Do you think he … plans it all out, or is he just making it up as he goes along?” Jack Sparrow is indeed more than a bit off-kilter and hard to predict… but he seems perfectly aware of this and of its implications to the genre he’s in. “You’re insane!” “Good thing, too, or this would never work.”

 

Jack Sparrow, of course, would not be able to be so amusing a character if there weren’t others around to be effective straight men and foils, and for any of them to be remembered at all on screen with Sparrow their actors needed to be pretty formidable as well.

 

Fortunately, a number of other actors were selected who could rise to the occasion. The main villain of the first film and one of the primary characters in the third, Captain Barbossa, is played with scenery-chewing relish by Geoffrey Rush. Barbossa is a pirate, more than willing to rape, kill, and plunder his way across the sea at first (he mellows just a tad over the series), and this ruthlessness gave him the edge over Sparrow, allowing him to take the Pearl away from its former master.

 

Kiera Knightley puts in a stellar performance as Elizabeth Swann, cloistered but courageous and capable daughter of the Governor of Port Royal who ends up in the middle of supernatural piratical doings through no real fault of her own. Swann’s character is allowed to develop and strengthen throughout all three of the original films, and Knightley’s ability to project her character with less bombast but more presence allowed her to remain onscreen with Depp and Rush gnawing on the cardboard everywhere and still be remembered.

 

Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner is the straight man and hero to counter the villainous Barbossa and serve as foil and occasional prod of conscience to Jack Sparrow. The actor better known as Legolas was, fortunately, also up to the challenge of being onscreen with Depp at his most manic, and Will Turner’s earnestness provided a much-needed relief from the headlong lunacy of Jack Sparrow.

 

These movies are pure excitement, pretty much from start to finish, with just enough pauses in between to let you catch your breath. They’re some of my favorite films – I’ve watched each one of them several times and all three (I haven’t seen the fourth) have Crowning Moments of Awesome as well as Crowning Moments of Funny, sometimes managing to do both at the same time.

 

I cannot praise these three films highly enough. This is the kind of entertainment I want to see when I pay to go to a theater, and the kind of entertainment I so rarely get. 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The Witch Family

 

     Written by children’s author Eleanor Estes (best known for her “Moffat Family” books and “Ginger Pye”), The Witch Family is probably my favorite of her works. It tells the story of Old Witch, the oldest, most evil, and most powerful of all the witches, and how she was “banquished” to the great bare bleak glass hill for her wickedness by Amy, an ordinary mortal girl living in Garden Lane in Washington, DC.

 

     The action of most chapters is an interspersion of Amy and her best friend Clarissa talking about Old Witch and her adventures and drawing them, and Old Witch and, later, the Little Witch Girl, Hannah, as they actually experience the adventures.

 

     Old Witch is banished and vanquished simultaneously (thus “banquished”) by Amy when Amy decides that Old Witch’s deeds have become to wicked to permit any more (except, of course, on Halloween, when the true, real, regular old wicked Old Witch must run free) and decrees that she must henceforth live atop a bare, bleak glass hill and be good all her days – save that one, of course. This is shown from both Old Witch’s point of view and Amy’s, with Amy narrating it and drawing it and Old Witch experiencing it. It’s not clear what’s supposed to give Amy the power to do the banquishing, and indeed it often seems that Amy’s power must come purely from the fact that she’s just imagining this – she’s a storyteller inside the story Estes is writing, and Old Witch and all the other characters are just figments of her imagination. But at other times, it’s not so clear…

 

     This is one of the most clever elements of The Witch Family; it is left very ambiguous throughout most of the book as to whether there really are any such things as the witches that Amy and Clarissa talk and draw about. Certainly the fact that whatever the girls are drawing or talking about is exactly what happens to the Witches would argue that this is just the play of two little girls; at the same time there are strange elements – a thunderstorm out of a clear sky, the disappearance of a bumblebee, a red cardinal who serves as a messenger – that make this assumption less certain.

 

Only towards the end, during Halloween, do we ever get to see Hannah and Amy in the same place at the same time, proving that Hannah really does exist separately from Amy’s imagination. And even that has some doubt thrown upon it by having other children claim to identify the Little Witch Girl as someone from a nearby neighborhood… and then has doubt thrown on that by clear implications that the other children actually have no idea who she really is, only that she has to be the person they guess because there’s no other alternative… is there?

 

The story, also, parallels things in Amy’s life. Amy’s mother first told her the stories of Old Witch, something that Amy now continues. Little Witch Girl wishes to have a baby sister – something Amy also very much wants – so Amy delivers one to Little Witch Girl, just as she has directed that Little Witch Girl be delivered to Old Witch to keep her from being lonely. Amy and Hannah have the same hair and identical size, though Hannah has more of a traditional Halloween witch’s face. Amy has a best friend Clarissa, and soon Hannah has a best friend in Lurie the Mermaid, living inside the glass hill. And both love the beautiful and enormous bumblebee, Malachi, who is gifted with magic and becomes the conscience and watchdog of Old Witch.

 

There is still some genuine conflict and tension in the book – especially when Old Witch, fed up with Being Good, defies the banquisher’s orders and attempts to raid the Easter-Bunnies’ painting field – to eat up rabbits, eggs, and all! The occasional intersections of the Witch and Real worlds can also be disquieting, especially when Amy and Clarissa find themselves temporarily atop the Glass Hill and surrounded by witches… including Old Witch herself, who has no reason at all to wish Amy well…

 

This is really a very charming little book, and much more complex than I had remembered. Upon completing my re-read of it to my daughter, I really had to review it. This is a very good book, and one especially good for young girls, encouraging their imagination and adventurous spirit and leaving a bit of mystery twined throughout even the most mundane of lives. Highly recommended!

 

 

 

 

 

What is an Editor Good For?

 

     A lot of people who are not published authors don’t have a clear idea of exactly what an editor does, or why they’re needed by an author. In addition, there’s a lot of stories out there about horrible things editors do or have done to people and their stories. This is becoming a VASTLY more important issue because so many people are going the self-published route and really, honestly don’t understand why they might need an editor at all.

    

     I want to talk about my own experiences and views of editing, garnered over the past ten years of being a published author. Admittedly, that’s not that long – there’s people in the business who’ve been published for thirty, forty, fifty years (and then there was Jack Williamson, who was a published and still actively writing science-fiction author for seventy-eight years) – but it’s long enough, I think, to have gained some insight into the process, and its necessity.

 

     And it is a necessity, let me say that up front. There is no author, anywhere, who doesn’t need an editor. Any author who says they don’t need one… either doesn’t understand what editors do and why they do it, has run into really bad editors, or, well, has gotten rather too full of themselves. Hopefully I’ll remember that if ever I become hugely successful, rather than embarrassing myself by ignoring my own warnings.

 

     So what does an editor (well, a good editor) do? In short, an editor tries to find ways in which you can tell your story better than you have told it, while leaving it still clearly yours. A good editor is not going to (nor would they want to) rewrite your story their way. While in some settings and times an editor may well change text on their own, a good editor will rarely do this in a substantiative fashion.

 

     If an editor wants something changed, they will instead ask you, the author, to do it. And – again if you’re dealing with a good editor – this will almost always indeed be “asking”. It is of course an unwise course for an author to play the prima donna and refuse too many requests by the editor, but in general the editor is making suggestions, not commandments from on high. There are some exceptions, but usually an editor will make those crystal clear (for example, “we can’t publish this if it goes over 140,000 words. You have to cut it below that point”).

 

A good editor also doesn’t want to deliver too many ultimatums like that to authors. We authors tend to be defensive, cantankerous creatures and being given too many orders gets our backs up; we may just pack up our pages and leave in high dudgeon if pushed too hard.

 

To clarify what I mean about an editor making your work better, I’m going to use some examples from my own work.

 

My very first published novel, Digital Knight, was originally submitted to Baen as the three stories called “Gone in a Flash”, “Photo Finish”, and “Viewed in a Harsh Light”. Baen liked it, but it was too short as it stood for publication. Jim Baen also pointed out that he really wanted something in the book that explicitly told us that Verne had exited the drug business, and possibly why, as Jim Baen (understandably) didn’t want a sympathetic secondary character in the book who was also a drug lord.

 

That particular request – which I now can see as a classic “editorial” comment, though I didn’t think of it as such then – made me think in more detail about that change in Verne’s character and how he and Jason interacted; this produced the section of the book called “Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies”, and I think made the characters and the book far stronger (leaving aside the fact that it also helped me expand the book to publication length, along with the other “bridge” section “Live and Let Spy” and the fourth adventure “Mirror Image”.

 

Grand Central Arena‘s original draft started with all of the human characters assembled aboard the Holy Grail and about to make the jump. I’d done this because I didn’t want to wait too long before getting Our Heroes into Arenaspace and the real wonder of the book.

 

But,as Toni Weisskopf pointed out to me, I’d gone too far in that direction. That first chapter had a ton of infodumping/”as you know, Bob” commentary just to set the stage for the jump, and you still knew almost nothing about most of the characters. She asked that I give us some more background, a few chapters that let us get to know the main players so that we’d really feel more of the IMPACT when the rules of their lives completely changed.

 

Well, it ended up being more than just a few chapters, but overall I think she was completely right; I needed to establish who these people were, why they were working together, what was different about the world they lived in from the one we live in and what was the same, and ultimately give us a chance to care what happens to at least a couple of them so that when the disaster happens, it grabs us as readers.

 

Ironically, the opposite happened with Spheres of Influence. I originally started Spheres with the crew of the Holy Grail in a meeting, concluding their briefing of the CSF and SSC on the events of Grand Central Arena. There were several other chapters before we got to the one that currently starts the book, and a number of other pieces of writing which were – as Tony Daniel pointed out – actually slowing the book down. They weren’t bad, but they were keeping us from getting back to The Arena, which was after all where the readers are likely to want us to be doing.

 

It was Phoenix Rising, though, where editorial advice clearly went far beyond the more obvious (“you need to tell us more about these people”, “you’re taking too long to get to the point”) and really ended up improving the book beyond the (deceptively) simple matter of pacing and character description.

 

In the original draft, there were a number of significant differences from the final, published version. The most obvious differences(to those who had the opportunity to read both versions, of course) were these:

 

1)    In the original, Thornfalcon is not the one who killed Rion; he is a more “loose cannon” than a careful plotter and while he is still terribly formidable, killing him is only a step along a longer path.

2)    Xavier Ross is only seen for a short time – basically in the chapter when he reveals himself and the immediately following one or two of conversation. He’s there mainly to provide impetus for a couple of specific conversations and a few pieces of information,and in more general terms to establish clearly that there is more than one group of heroes, solving more than one set of problems, active in the world.

3)    The beginning of the book (aside from the opening prologue) followed Kyri from the age of roughly 12-14 onward through several chapters before the one that currently opens the main book.

4)    We do not see the details of Kyri’s journey alone that takes her to the region of the Spiritsmith.

5)    The battle with Thornfalcon ended the conflict in that book – there was no secondary battle.

6)    There were several sections which were from the point of view of the unknown being who was running the false Justiciars.

7)    Instead of confronting the remaining Justiciars at the Temple and revealing the truth, the party follows a different path; the book ends at a point that currently is shown early in Book 2.

 

These changes were all driven by a few remarks: first, that the book had to have something that could be considered an ending – some closure, not a cliffhanger. Second, that a character could not be given prominence and active presence in only a couple of chapters and then disappear forever (i.e., Xavier); third, that part of the closure had to be a an actual achievement by Kyri, if no one else, something that would be a victory for her personally.

 

Thinking on these requirements and a few other comments showed me that I had, simply put, made some mistakes. I had skipped over certain events and elements because I was in a rush to get to certain other ones; I had therefore not allowed Tobimar and Poplock to really “connect” with Xavier, and deprived both the reader of a chance to see the strange intersection of worlds, and the characters of potential contacts and allies.

 

I had mentioned that the Mysterious Mage was doing a whole bunch of things, but missed out on the perfect chance to actually show him in action; and all I needed to do to give Kyri a victory was let Thornfalcon be a better villain than he had been, more advanced, more resourceful, and more powerful, so that he could be the actual killer of Rion – and thus Kyri would be achieving one of her real goals by killing him (not that Thornfalcon didn’t deserve a lot of killing anyway). Doing this also allowed me to give Thornfalcon rather than someone else the direct connection to Moonshade Hollow which provides the lead-in and goal for the second book.

 

The resulting book is, I think, vastly better now than it was in that first draft, and that’s entirely due to Tony Daniel’s editorial comments.

 

I’m not saying that all editors are good (they’re not) or that they don’t ask you for things that aren’t nearly as helpful, even if they’re good editors. There are a few minor things I’ve had to do with my books that annoyed me a bit, most prominently the fact that I had to change a bunch of names and titles in Phoenix Rising (and the title itself!) simply because Baen felt that I should avoid words that were associated with religion.

 

On the surface that may not seem like much, but when you’ve had the names and titles in your head for a decade or more, it’s a bit jolting to have to change them all around like that.

 

Still, the editorial commentary and assistance I have gotten have, overall, made my books vastly, vastly better than they would have been without such assistance… and they’re still quite completely my books, in style, in concept, and in execution. I’m preparing to do a Kickstarter for one of my unpublished books, Polychrome, and one of the key things that the Kickstarter will provide is the money for me to pay a real editor to go over the book and make sure it’s as good as it can be.

 

Because, in the end, that is what a good editor does. Takes your book… and helps you make it better.

 

 

Under the Influence: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”

 

     My last post reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted anything about the original — an oversight that I now rectify!

 

     Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man of wide experience and education – a doctor who served on both a Greenland whaler and a steamship on a voyage to western Africa, a scientist with a keen sense of justice, a man fascinated with the unknown and unknowable. Though he had many notable achievements in his life, he is best known today – as he was for much of his life – as the creator of the quintessential investigator, the “world’s first consulting detective”, Sherlock Holmes.

 

     Anyone who writes mysteries cannot possibly escape the titanic shadow of Doyle’s most famous creation. While Sherlock Holmes was not the first fictional detective, he codified many of the tropes of the genre, and established many methods and approaches of detection which laid the foundation not merely for fictional detectives, but real-life forensic investigators. Sherlock Holmes was not merely a man with a keen eye and a sense for right and wrong; he was a scientific investigator, who solved crimes utterly without regard for what his society expected, but purely based on what the facts laid before him said: the type of ash found on a carpet, the length of stride and characteristics of boot-prints, the prints of fingers on glass, the chemical characteristics of blood or other substances, these were his witnesses, and they did not lie when human beings did.

 

     Many of my stories have elements of mysteries, and I am always, always conscious of Holmes’ precedents when I write those portions of my stories. This is true even when I’m writing stories influenced more by other authors (such as Rex Stout), simply because those authors were, themselves, influenced by Sir Arthur’s creation as well.

 

     Sherlock Holmes’ adventures invented, or codified, tropes other than the merely investigative; the now-classic combination of a genius investigator paired with a less-capable chronicler who serves as assistant and sounding-board has roots going back to Classical times, but was codified forever by the relationship of Holmes and Watson and echoed since by many other authors, including those of equal note among the mystery field such as Christie (Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings) and Stout (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin).

 

     The idea of a true criminal mastermind is another trope that, if not original to Conan Doyle in its entirety, was solidified and codified by him in Professor James Moriarty. It is in fact a tribute to the power of the concept that Moriarty has dominated the imagination of those who have done follow-on work in Holmes-based fiction, despite the fact that he appears in precisely two canonical Holmes stories (The Final Problem and, more indirectly, The Valley of Fear) and is of significance in the background of only one other (The Adventure of the Empty House) although he’s mentioned in a few others.

 

     Holmes is also one of the earliest, if not the earliest, examples of a franchise refusing to die. Feeling that Holmes stories were absorbing too much of his time and attention, time and attention which could be turned to pursuits he found more interesting, Conan Doyle decided to end the series by killing Holmes off in The Final Problem. This… did not work out quite as planned. There was a tremendous outcry and demand for more Holmes stories which did not die down as Conan Doyle must have hoped it would; after eight years he finally gave in, producing what some consider the greatest Sherlock Holmes mystery of them all, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and then shortly thereafter bringing Holmes officially back to life with The Adventure of the Empty House.

 

     Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did write other stories, of course, and those of one other character were also influential: the adventures of the fiery-tempered, oversized, red-bearded Professor Challenger. Not as well remembered as Holmes, Challenger still casts a considerable shadow over the literary landscape, having the original Lost World to his credit (a land separated from the ordinary and having survivors from ancient times thereon, such as dinosaurs) and the concept of a series of adventures driven by far-out scientific investigations. 

 

Challenger and Holmes shared some traits but were polar opposites in others. Most particularly, Challenger was more open-minded on many subjects and especially on those bordering the fringes of science in his day, while Holmes was a complete and strict materialist and rationalist; this served him well in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, when he utterly ignores any implications of the supernatural to cut through the mystery and find the mundane explanation.

 

Despite this, many writers seem to take joy in placing Holmes in supernatural situations and pitting his purely mundane yet superior intellect against powers beyond ordinary science; most such writers have Holmes emerge the victor, though not always a complete victor. One of my favorite pastiches of this sort is Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File, featuring Saberhagen’s own version of Dracula (which influenced my design of Verne Domingo) meeting up with Holmes – who just happens to look rather remarkably like Dracula. This similarity is used to good advantage by both.

 

Holmes’ ultimate influence on me – and on others – is the faith in a rational, thinking person being able to solve any problem and resolve any mystery. I think this shows most clearly in my Jason Wood stories. While Jason is more Archie Goodwin than Sherlock Holmes, his rational, analytical approach to even the most outrageous mysteries, combined with quick thinking and action in tight spots, is certainly informed and influenced by Holmes.

 

I’ve read the stories many times – for myself, and to my two oldest children thus far. They never fail to entertain, and sometimes to chill; the image of The Hound of the Baskervilles remains a fearsome one indeed, and despite the dry Victorian prose many of Holmes’ other cases have elements of horror and tragedy that strike hard, though in most the long arm of the law – guided by Holmes – reaches the perpetrators and brings justice. I also have a complete collection of the Challenger stories, and those are also well worth reading – although, due to Science Marching On, they have not survived quite so unscathed.

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy remains one of my most powerful influences, and I thank him for it, even though I, like Holmes, rather doubt there’s any way for him to hear those thanks.

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Young Sherlock Holmes

 

 

     The power of speculative fiction – and, indeed, of many other works of fiction – rests on the simple phrase “what if…?” What if we could reach the moon? What if you could predict the course of civilization and saw its collapse? What if the Greek Myths were real?

 

     This is of course also the foundation of much fanfic – what if the story continued, what if these people had a different relationship than shown in canon, etc.

 

     What if someone wrote a marvelous Sherlock Holmes fanfic and got it filmed? And the principle of that fanfic would be… “what if Holmes and Watson had first met many years before the canonical beginning…and become involved in a mystery?”

 

     Well, then, what you’d get is the absolutely magnificent movie Young Sherlock Holmes.

 

     Opening with lovely titles in a snowy Victorian London, Young Sherlock Holmes brings us straight into the mystery by having a respectable Englishman suddenly suffer bizarre (and quite horrific) hallucinations that lead him to kill himself in desperation, and then immediately switching us to the narration of the adult Watson of the young Watson’s entry to a new boarding school, at which he encounters a peculiar fellow student by the name of Sherlock Holmes.

 

     The Holmes of this imagining is clearly a teenage boy, much less the obsessed, nigh-unapproachable  man of Doyle’s stories, but no less brilliant, focused, and sometimes clueless of the way the world around him works. Played to perfection by Nicholas Rowe, the young Holmes seems on his way to great things, despite his oddities – solving a mystery presented to him by other students clearly intending to humilate him, learning swordsmanship from one of the school’s finest instructors, and to Watson’s surprise even occasionally assisting a young Inspector Lestrade with deductions on difficult-to-solve cases.

 

     But things take a much more serious turn when Holmes’ mentor, the eccentric Professor Waxflatter, suffers his own death due to horrifying hallucinations. Holmes and his new friend Watson must discover the cause of these events and the reason for such vicious and terrifying murders of a group of apparently unrelated men… and in doing so will be putting themselves in mortal danger as well.

 

     The key to this movie is the dynamic between the charismatic but often insufferable Holmes and Alan Cox’ portrayal of the young, unsure, yet utterly inoffensive Watson. At first, Watson appears to be the bumbling and often incompetent man shown in some movie versions of the Holmes mythos, but as time goes on his hesitance lessens and he gains some confidence – and has a few moments of genuine brilliance and heroism.

 

     Holmes, sad to say, must take a harder route to development. This version is given a love interest, the ward of Professor Waxflatter, Elizabeth Hardy – a girl with a brilliant mind of her own and perhaps an equal of Holmes in some ways, certainly more than capable of being a full companion to him in a way that few people could be. It is perhaps not too much of a spoiler to say that something terrible happens to her which will ensure that Holmes withdraws, perhaps forever, from that part of association with humanity. 

 

     The movie is very much in tune with the sensibilities of the era of Holmes, including typical prejudices against class and race, and with – like many  of Holmes’ actual cases – a motivation for the series of murders that lies with the damage caused by British imperialism and looting of “foreigner”‘s treasures.

 

     The soundscore is also excellent, one which I spend considerable time and energy to track down; it includes several excellent pieces, one of which – “Waxing Elizabeth” – I use when writing some of my nastiest villains, including Virigar, as a mood-setter.

 

     Young Sherlock Holmes also is one of the first movies I recall to include something which has become quite common, if not entirely omnipresent, today: an important “tag” event taking place after the major credits. It was clearly a setup either for an actual sequel, or for a lead-in to the “real” Sherlock Holmes adventures.

 

     Of course, I always wondered what THOSE might be like in that universe, since the dynamic of that meeting – “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive” – would be drastically different if it were the reunion of two young men who had gone through such a stunning adventure years before, and that Watson – grown up now, into his courage as a soldier and field surgeon – would be a different man than Holmes remembered in many ways.

 

     There was not, of course, a sequel – although there have been rumors off and on recently that someone would remake the movie. In my view, that would be a mistake; Young Sherlock Holmes needs no updating, as far as I can tell, and holds up well even today. The movie even featured one of the first full-CGI interacting characters – a menacing knight made of stained glass – and I really don’t see that there would be much to be gained by remaking it.

 

     This is one of my favorite movies, and I recommend it to anyone who can swallow the simple “What-If…” that makes it possible.