Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 62

On My Shelves: Weapon Brown

 

“I’ve got a lot of names, depending on who you ask. I’ll let you call me Chuck.

I kill for a living. There’s a lot of guys in my line of work, and they’re all cheaper than me. If all you want is to put a hole in somebody, you hire one of them.  

But if you want to take out a tank crew of battle-hardened scum and fall asleep knowing they died screaming — you call good ol’ Weapon Brown.”

 

Holy. Crap.

 

There are few things that leave me speechless upon encountering them. WEAPON BROWN is one.

 

I ran into this unique comic online by pure chance one day, and it’s one of the very, VERY few things that I have to say is incredibly awesome even at the same time I’m not entirely sure I *like* it.

 

This is the classic comics page run straight into Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and cranked up to 11. In the postapocalyptic world of Weapon Brown, the Earth is nearly unlivable — a harsh wasteland where few survive and those few must be hardened, lucky, well-armed, or all three. Many of them are no longer truly human.

 

In the center of this is Weapon Brown, aka “Chuck”, the most dangerous mercenary on the planet… he hopes, anyway.

 

You read that right. Little quiet Charlie Brown has been turned into the grim action Anti-hero… and it WORKS. It’s wrong, it’s twisted, it’s bizarre… but it WORKS.

 

“Peanuts” is far from the only comic skewered (or incinerated, blown up, disintegrated, poisoned, mutated, irradiated, etc.) in Weapon Brown; everything from Beetle Bailey to Little Orphan Annie and the Wizard of Id and Blondie shows up in one distorted form or another, and it’s clear fairly early on that Chuck’s eventual nemesis will be this world’s terrifyingly psychotic version of Calvin and Hobbes.

 

Brown takes what seems to be a routine track-and-kill contract, and ends up in the middle of something he doesn’t understand… but it’s connected with the past that made him what he is now, and with the nearly all-powerful Syndicate.

 

The Syndicate itself is one of the eyebrow-twitchingly funny parts of Weapon Brown, as it is of course a reference to the “syndicated comics” from which its characters are primarily ripped and tortured, and includes on its board of directors the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert, Mr. Dithers of Blondie (unfortunately now deceased), the King of Id, and others (I think one of them is Mary Worth!). The Syndicate controls most sources of food remaining in the world… but there are signs of a new source, and “Chuck” may have the only clue to finding it.

 

This is NOT — I repeat, *NOT!!* — something safe for work, or for your kids, and maybe not for YOU, if you have delicate sensibilities or “triggers” on any of the grimness of the world. As I implied earlier, I’m not even sure it’s for ME. Weapon Brown doesn’t shy away from sexual themes and imagery (some of it very triggery indeed), violence and gore galore, or other disturbing imagery. I often found myself simultaneously revolted and fascinated, and sometimes laughing at the same time. Reading Weapon Brown was a very surreal experience for me.

 

The *ARTWORK* in Weapon Brown is amazing — a style perfectly suited to the story, and *DETAILED* in a way I simply did not expect in what is, at its base, a deconstructionist parody of the funny pages.

 

I can’t help but give Weapon Brown 5 stars; it accomplishes what it sets out to do, and does so at a level that can stand proudly next to any other graphic novel published. I’m still not sure that I LIKE it… but it’s brilliant, and that’s a combination that is rare indeed.

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Not) On My Shelves: Neon Genesis Evangelion

 

    In the very early 1980s, a new anime company burst onto the scene, founded by a couple of fans who had determined to go pro: Gainax Studios. First gaining prominence with a fantastic video intro to the Daicon convention in 1981, Gainax gained funding and resources to release four anime which were generally considered classics, each in its own way: Gunbuster: Aim for the Top!, which was a high-powered space opera which combined ludicrous with the realistic in what was both a gentle parody and also a completion of the Giant Robot genre; Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, a Jules Verne-inspired TV series drawn from the same Miyazaki idea which later became Laputa:Castle in the Sky; Wings of Honneamise, a serious and detailed depiction of the birth and development of a space program in a world that wasn’t, but could have been; and Otaku No Video, a simultaneous skewering of and triumphant anthem for the anime fanboys and fangirls, a work which was more than a little autobiographical. (No link for Gunbuster as I find no available copies of the OVA series for less than $115, which is ludicrous)

 

     After these works, there was little of note from Gainax for several years, but finally word came of a new, serious, mecha-focused TV series about to be released, and many of us anticipated this greatly. After all, it was Gainax! This would have to be great!

 

     And so, one day, we sat down to watch what was already gaining a reputation as a stunningly awesome new anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion.

 

     Evangelion started out reasonably (for an anime), with the hapless hero dragged into the main action and eventually forced into becoming the pilot for the eponymous Evangelion, a semi-biological mecha weapon used to combat “Angels”, alien invaders the size of small towns. The general concept is familiar, of course – Pacific Rim did this most recently, and many anime and sentai shows have done it before and since.

 

     But this show was obviously trying to go beyond that; there were more layers beneath the surface, with the apparent goals of NERV (an organization whose name was never explained, as far as I know) hiding something much more complex and sinister than just protecting mankind from this bizarre alien invasion.

 

     In point of fact, underneath the simple setup is a massive set of Xanatos Gambits of multiple groups trying to direct or control the Human Instrumentality Project, whose end result and goal is nothing more or less than gaining the power to reshape the world, perhaps the universe, in literal fact; the “Angels” may be what the literal word implies and the power of creation may be able to be tapped, for good or evil, if things work out just so.

 

     This setup sounds pretty awesome. And in the beginning the show seemed promising. But as time went on, I found myself becoming less impressed, and my wife even less so. By the end of the show, I’d come to the decision that I did not, in fact, like Evangelion at all, and Kathleen hated it. My own antipathy for the show has increased markedly over the years.

 

     Admittedly, some small part of that is due to the absolutely over-the-top success of “Eva”, as it is often called. Neon Genesis Evangelion garnered almost unleavened effusive praise in the anime world, becoming an instant “classic” that people would insist was the best thing since sushi. Even if I only considered it from the point of view of the first few episodes, before it started to bother me, Evangelion simply was not that good. It was … okay. But not anything worth a tenth of the hype.

 

     But there were more, and much more serious, problems with Evangelion. Perhaps paramount, for me, was that Evangelion never actually decided what kind of a show it really wanted to be. If it was meant, as some claimed, to be a deconstruction of the modern super-mecha genre, it took itself far too seriously and spent far too much time justifying itself to make a good deconstruction. If it was meant as a serious mecha show, it had too many moments of deconstruction to be able to take it on its surface. If it was meant to be a complex allegory with multiple philosophical and religious aspects, it took far too long to actually get that part of its plot moving.

 

     As emerged later, a large part of Neon Genesis Evangelion came from writer (and Gainax founder) Hideaki Anno’s own psychological issues; he was apparently advised to work out some of these through his work, and so in essence we got a lot of some guy’s psychological junk dumped on top of us in the guise of a mecha show. Unfortunately, this did not do a service to the show itself. There’s a reason therapy is considered private and getting access to the records of someone else’s therapy is a difficult thing to do: not only do most of us not want our most private and sometimes embarrassing secrets aired in public, but also a lot of those secrets are, from story points of view, trivial, pathetic, and mundane. Perhaps using his art as an outlet helped Anno; dumping it into Evangelion, complete with his personal father issues, did no good for the series as a story.

 

     There are some interesting and clever moments and elements in Neon Genesis Evangelion. For example, Evangelion is one of the only anime I’ve ever seen to recognize and deal with the major problem of such a giant mobile weapon: powering it. The Evas (as the giant weapons are called) are plugged in and thus can draw the energy to function from massive fixed-base generators; without the plug, an Eva can run for maybe five minutes.

 

     The artwork is beautiful – Gainax spared almost no expense in developing and creating Evangelion, and technically Evangelion was inspiring, bringing a clean, sharp, detailed dynamic to the screen that could present light or darkness in equally vivid and impactful ways. Gainax demonstrated they had learned a great deal about animation in the intervening time, and showed us everything they had learned. However…

 

     As a story, Evangelion is something of a mess. Its major storytelling flaw is that the putative protagonist, Shinji Ikari, is quite possibly one of the most ineffectual and spineless characters ever, in live-action or animated form. He spends virtually the entire series pinballing from event to event as others push him; any minor attempts by him to show agency are weak, undirected, and generally fail miserably.

 

     Shinji does, truthfully, have some reason for these issues; his father, Gendo Ikari, is quite possibly the Worst Father EVER in anime, which is going some distance when we remember that this means he’s beating out people like Genma Saotome, father of Ranma, who was a lying, cheating coward willing to literally sell his son for a decent dinner – more than once. Gendo’s one of the primary chessmasters in the multisided game for the destiny of the world, and he’s mostly obsessed with his lost wife and has little-to-no interest in, and perhaps active hostility towards, Shinji.

 

     The really noxious problem with Evangelion, though, is its omnipresent, pervasive, and multifaceted sexism. Anime in general has always had various issues with sexism, but in an anime as suddenly prominent as Evangelion came to be this becomes a greater problem… and Evangelion‘s sexism was both blatant and subtle in particularly poisonous ways.

 

     The blatant is the character who became the symbol, the mascot/icon, and most popular element of Evangelion: Ayanami Rei. Basically manufactured (though we do not find that out for quite a while), Ayanami Rei is a lovely, blank-eyed girl with a nigh-toneless voice, flat affect, and in many settings appears little more than a mobile blow-up doll. What character background she has is shattering (and does explain why she’s so broken), and aside from one sequence which may or may not be a dream towards the end of the show, she exhibits very little ability to indulge in actual human emotion. The person who made her this way? Gendo Ikari. And I haven’t even touched on the… sicker aspects of this character. As mentioned, Rei became by far the most popular character, to the point that she was called “Premium Girl” by marketing types – anything with her on the cover or wrapper sold.

 

     More subtle is the fact that there is not one single female character of note in all of the series who is not seriously messed up by a man or men, and virtually all of their character dynamics are concerned with their relationships to men. The women do nothing to themselves. They often do not even act except as they are ordered. But they are all “damaged goods”: Asuka, the third Eva pilot (along with Shinji and Ayanami), is the typical overcompensating girl desperately trying to prove herself, with a chip on her shoulder a mile wide and a heart full of insecurity (the typical Gainax Girl cranked up to 11); Misato, the woman who first recruits Shinji and with whom he’s supposed to live, tends to drink herself into a stupor and this was at least partially caused by one of the men on base and her relationship with him, a relationship that’s rekindled and ends up causing other problems; Ritsuko Akagi is the second in command at NERV, but her development is mostly defined around her interactions with Gendo, with whom she is having an affair and who ultimately betrays her and drives her to act against NERV towards the end.

 

     The ultimate problem with Evangelion is that all of these characters represent someone else’s (Anno’s) problems made manifest, and Anno was not going through a good time. This means that the problems don’t resolve themselves, and when represented as people aren’t healthy; in fact, they are self-destructive to a huge degree, and they’re directly damaging to the story because they’re hard-to-impossible to believe in the contest of the story.

 

Gendo Ikari one can sort-of believe as being in charge of such a massive project (given his puppeteer skills) but most of the others? This is a military project. All of them have issues that would almost certainly keep them out of any sensitive military areas. The Eva pilots have a bit of an excuse; there’s physical reasons that only they can pilot the Evas and there are no huge numbers of replacements. But this isn’t true of the rest of the staff.

 

The original series doesn’t even have a real ending as such. It becomes a sort of mind-screw which includes a short view into an alternate reality in which Shinji was an ordinary (and vastly more well-adjusted) young man, going to school with Asuka (who is a childhood friend and also much less maladjusted) and encountering Ayanami Rei as the classic “transfer student” who also seems far more normal. There is a ray of hope in some interpretations of that ending, in which Shinji may be the one to choose the rewriting and in the realization of that alternate world, choose to MAKE that world, but it’s very unclear.

 

     Overall, I really, REALLY don’t like Evangelion, and can’t recommend it to anyone. Yes, I know it’s popular and lots of other people think it’s one of the most awesome anime ever, but for me, it’s representative of how something that looks good can actually suck like a black hole connected to a Hoover. One star, and that’s only because it’s very pretty.

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Ghost Rider

 

It’s said that the West was built on legends. Tall tales that help us make sense of things too great or too terrifying to believe.

This is the legend of the Ghost Rider.

 

     Nicholas Cage has done a lot of movies – some good, some pretty bad – over the years. Of all his movies I’ve seen, my favorite remains Ghost Rider.

 

     Part of the first new wave of superhero movies (which was sparked by the success of Spider-Man), Ghost Rider tells the story of Johnny Blaze, a son of a stunt motorcycle driver (and a good stunt driver himself) who signs his soul (not entirely knowingly) over to Mephistopheles in exchange for curing his father’s cancer. His father was indeed cured… but died the very next day performing one of his stunts, an accident that Johnny is certain Mephistopheles caused.

 

Johnny resolves not to serve the demon due to this betrayal, but Mephistopheles warns him that he will come to collect one day… and does, turning him into an agent of vengeance known as the Ghost Rider, a combination of man and demon who rides a hell-steed (or, in Johnny’s case, hell-bike) and punishes the wicked. This happens to serve the interests of Mephistopheles because the demon has a son named Blackheart who intends to move against his father… and has discovered a source of power, an uncollected contract of a thousand corrupt souls, that might let him succeed. Only the Ghost Rider – whose prior incarnation refused to collect the contract – can stop Blackheart from collecting the Contract of San Venganza.

 

     The movie version of Ghost Rider combines aspects of a couple of the comic-book versions of Ghost Rider – the name and general background of Johnny Blaze with some of the powers and other aspects of other incarnations, particularly Daniel Ketch.

 

     What was particularly appealing in this adaptation of Ghost Rider was the heavy Western theme; the movie opens with a narration (by Sam Elliott, quoted above) that sets the tone for the movie. Ghost Rider is a story of choices, mistakes, falls, and redemptions, themes common in many settings and almost omnipresent in Westerns. Johnny Blaze is tricked into selling his soul, and then blames (probably correctly) the demon for tricking him into it… but also blames himself.

 

Johnny leaves everything he cared for behind, pouring himself into stunt driving as an escape and a memorial to his father while otherwise cutting himself off from human contact, afraid of what price Mephistopheles will eventually demand of him. He risks his life in apparently-fatal stunts multiple times, and suspects that part of his apparent luck is that Mephistopheles won’t let him die yet.

 

And as soon as he begins to believe that perhaps he is being paranoid, that maybe he isn’t cursed… that’s when the demon shows up to collect. Again, this fits with the Western theme, transplanted to the modern era; the old sin, the old bad companion, always turns up at the worst possible moment.

 

Yet things are not all bad, and Johnny does have a chance – one given him by his probably-not-at-all-coincidental meeting  with a caretaker of a small church who has unusual insight into Johnny’s problem… and a special secret of his own. In the end, the Ghost Rider must confront Blackheart in the dead ghost town of San Venganza, where a thousand corrupt souls wait in limbo to be claimed or released…

 

Nicholas Cage’s version of Johnny Blaze makes use of Cage’s often understated screen presence, emphasizing that this is a man to whom control is paramount in importance, and that he’s had hard life lessons on just what terrible prices he might pay for momentary indulgences of his own emotions. This works very well for Ghost Rider, and I think Cage was in fact the right choice for this role. The rest of the cast – Sam Elliott as the Caretaker, Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles, Eva Mendes as Roxanne, and others – did their jobs very well, too, but this was Johnny Blaze’s story, and Cage brought a quiet focus, desperation, and determination to the character that gave the weight necessary to make a hell-born hero work.

 

I remain somewhat puzzled by the rather negative reactions to this film. I felt that it was very well done for what it was, with striking visuals, good character development for a superhero film, excellent villains and well choreographed combats, and an absolutely kickass score. Christopher Young’s soundscore for Ghost Rider is simply perfect – dramatic, Western-themed, dark, and powerful.

 

Despite the negative reviews, I think this was a very good superhero movie of the darker persuasion – although light very definitely has a victory – and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys such films!

 

On My Shelves: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

 

 

“Well, ain’t we a pair… raggedy man?”

 

     Back in 1979, a then-little known actor named Mel Gibson did a pretty cheap little action flick,  in which a policeman in an Australia suffering slow social breakdown falls afoul of local motorcycle gangs who, after several encounters, kill his wife and child, thereby sending him on a classic Roaring Rampage of Revenge. The name of this movie was Mad Max.

 

     The movie, with dramatic combat sequences despite low budget, did astoundingly well (making over ninety-nine million Australian dollars on a four hundred thousand dollar budget!), becoming the top-grossing Australian film ever to that point, and a sequel, Mad Max: The Road Warrior, was released in 1981. This one went straight into postapocalyptica and featured Max becoming a reluctant anti-hero, assisting the escape of the relatively peaceful runners of a small refinery from a completely savage gang of maruaders.

 

     Then, in 1985, came Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

 

     This was a far more lavish production than the prior two, and fully embraced the postapocalyptic world, including clear statements of nuclear exchanges that had contaminated large portions of the world and a total collapse of normal civilization. Twenty years after the events of the first movie, Max is ambushed and robbed, left for dead. But he recovers and makes his way to “Bartertown” – a strange assemblage of ramshackle houses and buildings made from wreckage of various sorts, but startling in that it shows signs of functioning technology, including electric lights.

 

     Max spots some of his stolen gear, but quickly realizes he’s not just going to walk in and take it back. He is granted an audience with “Auntie Entity”, the leader of Bartertown. Played magnificently by Tina Turner, Auntie Entity is a strong, intelligent, driven woman who is doing the best she can to rebuild some form of civilization – even if she has to be damned ruthless to do so.

 

She does, however, have a problem: the only person in Bartertown who really has the technological knowledge to build and keep running the generators and other technology on which Bartertown relies is a dwarf genius known only as “Master”, who is protected by a huge warrior named “Blaster”, in combination referred to as “Master-Blaster”. Recognizing the necessity of his knowledge, Master has started to use his power to put pressure on Auntie, and almost certainly will be trying to displace her as ruler of Bartertown.

 

But Auntie Entity has a plan: if someone as experienced and dangerous as Max were to challenge Master-Blaster, they would face off in the arena known as Thunderdome. Thunderdome, where the only law is this: “Two men enter. One man leaves.”  Killing Blaster will leave Master physically at almost anyone’s mercy, and give Auntie Entity control again.

 

Max reluctantly agrees to this, but when he finally succeeds in defeating Blaster, he discovers that the hulking giant is a childlike, mentally handicapped man who has been protecting and serving Master because the dwarf was the only person with the patience to be kind to him. Max refuses to kill Blaster, but that means he is breaking his deal – and breaking a deal in Bartertown is about the worst crime you can commit. Though the fact that Auntie Entity had planned this confrontation nearly causes a riot, she manages to regain control of the crowd by focusing them on this crime (solely by her own tremendously powerful personality), and gets Max sentenced to “Gulag” – exile into the desert.

 

But Auntie is about to learn what a terrible mistake it is to make Max mad…

 

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is one of the most flamboyantly iconic films of the 1980s. Its influence in pop culture extended much farther than might have been thought, and resurfaces in peculiar ways. People of my generation confronted by two squabbling children have been known to mutter “Thunderdome!”  as a possible solution to the problem, for instance.

 

In many ways Beyond Thunderdome and to a lesser extent its predecessor The Road Warrior defined much of the modern vision of the postapocalyptic world, in its desert-brown tones and dusty, corroded glory, with maruading gangs wielding improvised weapons and wearing strange assemblages of leather, cloth, punk spiky collars, and other peculiar accoutrements. The world of Fallout certainly owes a considerable debt to Beyond Thunderdome, and the town of Megaton in Fallout 3 calls Bartertown very strongly to mind every time I enter it. The stark, decaying, dry imagery pervading Beyond Thunderdome is both pathetic and, at times, beautiful in a strange way.

 

But scenery can only take you so far; what made Beyond Thunderdome really WORK was the conflict between Mad Max and Auntie Entity. Gibson proved in many later films that he was an excellent actor, and he used those skills well, often in an understated fashion, in this movie. Against Max’ quiet implacable man is pitted the spectacular and charismatic Auntie Entity, and it is this character that truly makes the film.

 

Tina Turner dominates the screen whenever she is shown, with a magnetic presence that does not shy away from sex appeal – in fact, a presence that insists you notice her — but which is fantastically strong as well. This woman belongs to no one but herself, and is the ruling force over the only trace of modern civilization in the wasteland. She rules her people with law, with charisma, and with indomitable will that never fails her even when it seems she has lost it all. Her power does not come from her body, but from her mind and her clear focus on a future she wants to rebuild from the ashes of the past.

 

Even in defeat, she is not broken. She is a ruthless organizer who knows you must be ruthless to survive and succeed… yet she retains a core of civilization that she refuses to let go. She forgoes the chance to kill Max with the line quoted at the beginning of this review, and walks away, laughing, because she realizes that, in the end, it was a fair fight, a more than fair fight on her side, and she lost, and she accepts it with grace and humor. I think Auntie Entity is one of the great characters of action movie history, and in a way it’s a shame more couldn’t have been done with her. But she served her purpose and more in this film.

 

Tina Turner can also be credited with two iconic songs that were part of the soundtrack: “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Beyond Thunderdome)” and “One of the Living”. Those, plus the actual background music, helped give the supporting musical backdrop that any great movie needs.

 

Beyond Thunderdome is, of course, far from perfect. In a lot of ways it’s a complete schlockfest and much of it does not bear close examination (where are they getting all the food to feed such herds of pigs in the middle of a wasteland? If the kids were left alone at the “Pockyclips” which was 15+ years ago, how’d they survive, let alone have what appears to be a nicely distributed set of other kids there of all ages? And so on), but, as with many action films, that’s rather missing the point, which is to watch Max unleash hell after being betrayed and left for dead yet again, while managing to save a bunch of innocent children and, just possibly, begin the rebirth of a real civilization with their release.

 

     If you’ve never watched Beyond Thunderdome, it might be worth your while to pay Bartertown a visit…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

 

Many years ago – something like 40, I think – my family was visiting the house of couple of my parents’ friends. As I’ve mentioned in other contexts, I was not the most sociable kid; I’d learned to survive very nicely in isolation, but not how to deal with people as such, so “visiting friends” that weren’t my friends (I had two) was, for me, very tense and unpleasant. My best defense was to hide somewhere behind a book, but often I couldn’t bring a book, or I finished the one I had long before it was time to go home, which meant I had to search for something to read in our host’s home.

 

On that particular evening, I was searching for something to read and looked into a smaller side room, a sort of den, with a small “coffee table” in the middle. And sitting on that glass-topped table was a huge book (not surprisingly, of the sort often called a “coffee table book”) with bright colors and comic book figures, and in big letters the words “BUCK ROGERS”. Reaching out, I picked it up – not without some difficulty, for it was indeed a massive tome – and I could see that the actual title was The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.

 

I opened the book and was immediately captivated by one of the oldest space-opera sagas ever written. I actually skipped the written story in the front; it wasn’t until much later that I discovered that the frontmatter included not only an introduction but also the original story, Armageddon 2419, on which Buck Rogers was based. I wanted to get straight to the comics,and I dove headlong into them.

 

I was in a peculiar position with respect to Buck Rogers. I had read some of the science fiction which was contemporary with it (Doc Smith, for example), but I was also reading a lot of material influenced by it, and its contemporaries. I thus came into it with a perspective that was not exactly that of the original readers, but not entirely modern.

 

This meant that while I could – quite easily – see the flaws of the work from a modern perspective (racism, stereotyping, etc., and not in small lots, either, plus of course quite a bit of “science” that wasn’t on solid ground even when it was published), I could also read it for what it was and be carried along.

 

A young soldier, trapped in a strange cave, awakens hundreds of years later to find the world entirely changed… and yet still in need of a smart, tough, skilled soldier. That soldier, “Buck” Rogers, carrying with him the can-do optimism and absolute faith in his American heritage, becomes a focal point and driving force to rally the scattered remnants of America against their advanced enemies, the “Mongols”, who have airships with disintegrator rays, among other impressive weaponry.

 

Undoubtedly one of the major “draws” of Buck Rogers was the gadgetry – the “jump belts” using an anti-gravity substance called “inertron”, the terrible disintegrator rays, fantastic airships, submarines, and later spaceships, all discussed and diagrammed in often surprising detail in the successive strips of the comic. Despite the cavalier treatment of science at the detail level, the tone of the comic was always highly respectful of science and scientists and engineers, encouraging experiment, study, clever thinking, and always dependence on a quick mind at least as much as a strong body.

 

Buck Rogers was often mentioned by scientists, engineers, SF authors, and others in related fields as a major inspiration, and I could see why immediately. At the time the inventions of Buck Rogers were bleeding-edge concepts and their presentation – as tools to help save first America, and later the human race – was perfectly designed to excite the imagination and inspire a reader to see science, engineering, and related disciplines as something worth being a part of.

 

But Buck Rogers did not neglect the human element. Oh, by modern standards it was clumsy and crude, and even in its day must have been clearly melodrama, but it was fun melodrama. Buck’s courtship of Wilma Deering was a rocky one at first, and he ended up with a rival for a while in the person of first-class mustache twirler “Killer” Kane. Kane maintained his status as a thorn in Buck’s side for quite a while before being supplanted by more spectacular enemies, such as invading tiger-men from Mars.

 

The comic did not, however, make the mistake of keeping all things black-and-white (even if most of them were drawn in black and white!). Even the Mongols, depicted at first as almost unadulterated “yellow peril” generic Asians in the “Exotic Orient” mode, turn out to have multiple factions, some of whom are quite reasonable. There are other organizations on the planet which are at first neutral and must be swayed by circumstance or argument to work with Buck and his friends. Sometimes apparent treachery has a more sympathetic explanation, and sometimes enemies and friends must work together against something more dangerous than either is to the other.

 

And the comic also remembered the cardinal rule of story-writing: never make it easy on your hero. Oh, Buck was supernaturally lucky and skilled, but… damn it, he needed to be, because no matter where he went or what he was trying to do, something was going to go wrong – and usually go wrong on a world-threatening scale. A simple kidnapping might send him halfway around the world through six different forms of transportation, invading an enemy base by himself, then escaping after being captured, stealing a ship, and continuing his rescue mission.

 

The art style was at first a little difficult for me to adjust to, but once I did I was fascinated by the detail that was often hidden in the panels – ranging from multiple rivets spaced evenly around portholes to sketched-out objects that turned out to be something important many panels later. The designs used for vehicles were often elaborate and baroque, especially the spaceships which were finned, trimmed, edged in spectacular, if impractical, ways.

 

     It was more than a year before we went back to visit those same friends, and I then found that the book had disappeared; I never learned if that was because they had borrowed it and thus had to return it, or sold it, or simply packed it away. But I never forgot that huge, beautiful book, and when I became an adult, I kept an eye out for it in used bookstores.

 

     But it wasn’t until the advent of Internet shopping that I finally succeeded in locating a copy of it… and found that it was just as awesome now as it had been years before.

 

     My one disappointment was to discover that it was not a complete collection, as my hazy memory had insisted, but a sequence of selected adventures. This was most disappointing with respect to the central colored Sunday editions, which told a separate story which climaxed in an aerial duel between Buck and an expert assassin for hire, and ended with both ships crashed and the assassin fleeing into the hills, pursued by Buck –

 

     And ended right there. How Buck caught up with him, what desperate last-ditch attempts to fight back the assassin, “Pounce”, might have made, I never learned.

 

     Still, this is a magnificent volume, unfortunately long out of print, which preserved a huge amount of the most important contributions of Buck Rogers to science fiction’s history and our cultural mythology. If you happen to come across a copy, it is well worth the time and money to pick up!

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Tiger & Bunny

 

  

     In an alternate world, superbeings, called NEXTs, have emerged from the general population. Generally gifted with one power, the NEXTs were originally feared, but as many have turned their talents towards crimefighting, keeping the peace helping people in times of need, they have become more popular. “Hero TV” is the most popular show on television, following the exploits of the Heroes and ranking them based on their achievements (catching crooks, preventing accidents, saving civilians, etc.).

 

To further increase their profitability, the Heroes are sponsored by various companies and wear their names and logos worked into their costumes with varying degrees of aesthetic success. Despite the commercialism, though, the Heroes still serve a great purpose in the city of Sternbild (a fictional version of New York City in the late 1970s), and a purpose that is about to become more vital than ever.

 

     This is the setup for Tiger & Bunny, an extremely entertaining and relatively recent anime which I have just finished watching. Kotetsu T. Kaburagi, Hero name “Wild Tiger”, is one of the veteran Heroes, with the “Hundred Power” – the ability to suddenly multiply all of his capabilities by a hundred. This is one of the most impressive powers in the series, but has a time limit; he can only maintain it for five minutes before it shuts down, and then some time (it appears roughly an hour) must pass before he can use it again.

 

     Unfortunately, Kotetsu’s rankings have been slipping, partly due to bad luck, partly due to his interest being much more on being a Hero and much less on gaining points, and partly due to him paying little attention to the collateral damage he causes. The fact that he often seems something of a klutz doesn’t help (although later stories make it clear that much of Kotetsu’s apparent clumsiness or cluelessness is an act).

 

Kotetsu is the oldest of the still-active heroes (at about 35 – this is a game for young people), and some are suspecting that he’s just over-the-hill and hasn’t a chance to come back. His corporate sponsors are then taken over and the new owners decide to give him one more chance… make the first official super-team, with Kotetsu gaining a new partner. Adding another unique touch, his partner, Barnaby Brooks Junior, uses no alias, instead going under his real name. Just as unusual, Barnaby possesses the exact same Hundred Power as Kotetsu (something very peculiar, as no other characters exhibit duplicates of anyone else’s powers, and this oddity is never really discussed).

 

Barnaby and Kotetsu… don’t get along, certainly not right away. Kotetsu takes the hero business seriously, but not much else, living life in a carefree manner, and treating the corporate requirements as nuisances to be evaded. Barnaby is a serious – perhaps too serious – employee with his own agenda, interested in being successful as a Hero in order to further his own goals. Being paired with Kotetsu is, in his opinion, an impediment to be barely tolerated because that’s what his sponsor requires.

 

Their interaction isn’t helped by Kotetsu occasionally trying to outdo Barnaby in order to keep from feeling utterly upstaged. You can’t really blame Kotetsu; Barnaby is much younger (24), handsome, wealthy, tremendously intelligent, a trained investigator, athletic, and cool.

 

But at the same time, Barnaby – who Kotetsu nicknames  “Bunny”, after Barnaby’s Hero-suit’s earpieces and his tendency to use long, leaping attacks – is missing something: an understanding of what it means to be a Hero in ones heart. Barnaby is after a personal goal, and the other heroes – who at first seem rivals – still all share the goal of helping people.

 

Kotetsu has something to teach his younger partner.

 

This is an extremely fun series. It’s clear that the writers know and love superhero comics; this is a well-thought out alternate superhero world, which abounds with references and nods to classics of the genre while creating its own very clear mythology. Barnaby Brooks Jr. is, in many ways, Bruce Wayne; his mother and father were killed in front of him (or rather, just before he entered the room they were in) and he is pursuing their killer, turning himself into a super detective to track them down and bring them to justice.

 

The resemblance is emphasized when the major mid-season villains are a crazy older NEXT masterminding the chaotic destruction of Sternbild and his much younger female sidekick who idolizes him; the similarities between them and the Joker and Harley Quinn are obvious and not coincidence.

 

At the same time, Barnaby is very much his own character, not just a knockoff of Batman, and his and Kotetsu’s relationship is at the heart of the story. From disliking each other they have to first gain some respect and cooperation, and finally trust, in each other, because in the end, only trust in each other will get them through the final confrontation with an enemy far worse than anything they imagined.

 

The world of Tiger & Bunny is extremely detailed for something that only has one season to build in, and manages to delve deeply into all the major characters’ personalities – and those personalities play a strong part in their actions, and how they relate to the plot. This is not a story of superpowers clashing; it’s a story of people overcoming obstacles, with some of the obstacles just happening to involve paranormal powers.

 

It’s also a story of heroism and choices – what makes a Hero versus an ordinary human versus a villain, and what choice you could make versus what choices you do make and what choices you should make.

 

As with many of my reviews, I’m avoiding too many spoilers. There are a lot of wonderful events and scenes in this anime, and the plotline is tightly woven – though you don’t really get a hint of what’s going on in the main plot until halfway through. Tiger & Bunny is a very good series, and I highly recommend it!

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The _Alien_ Franchise

 

 

     In the late 1970s, Ridley Scott released what became one of his two most recognizable and famous movies, and inarguably his most successful: Alien.

 

     Alien was and is the quintessential “haunted house” horror movie, transplanted into space and given a coat of SF paint. The crew of the space freighter Nostromo picks up what they believe is a distress call and discover a crashed alien vessel. Within the vessel is a strange room containing what appear to be giant eggs; when a crewman approaches one of these too closely (partly by accident), the egg opens and… something leaps out, somehow penetrating his suit’s faceplate. When the crew manages to retrieve him, the victim is unconscious yet somehow still alive, with that monstrous something affixed to his face.

 

     Unfortunately for the crew of Nostromo, that is just the beginning.

 

     Alien is tremendously atmospheric, and indeed depends on its mostly silent, shadowy atmosphere to maintain the audience’s uncertainty and tension. What music there is in Alien is subtle and understated most of the time. The Nostromo is carefully designed to be a perfect environment for horror; it is a gigantic ship but mostly automated, and with the grungy, dim look of a long-haul freighter that is maintained well enough to run, but not to be presented to company, so to speak. It is a dark, angular maze of passageways and crawlspaces and sometimes larger, dimly-lit storage or engineering areas, and even within its largest reaches seems somehow claustrophobic.

 

     The eponymous Alien, later called a “xenomorph” (which just means “alien shape”), became one of the most famous and influential creatures in all science fiction’s creature-filled history. Designed by H.R. Giger with disturbing techno-organic imagery, the Alien exhibits a life cycle similar to a digger wasp’s with a physique of tremendous power, toughness, and speed. The common fan theory for years was that the Aliens were the result of genetic engineering to design a perfect weapon – engineering that succeeded so well that it killed off the species that created it. Given the thing’s capabilities, that certainly made sense.

 

     The Alien’s speed, its double-jawed head, its clever, murderous stalking, and the techno-organic look, influenced everything from science-fiction movies and TV to slasher horror flicks. Ridley Scott’s direction gave a force to the events of the movie that a lesser director would have made weaker, more pedestrian, less effective. The Alien was almost always kept in shadow, never fully revealed until near the end, building our suspense and fear throughout.

 

     While there were quite a few characters in Alien, played by a number of fairly well known actors including John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, and Harry Dean Stanton, only two are generally remembered: Ellen Ripley, Warrant Officer of the Nostromo, played by Sigourney Weaver in her first major role, and the android Ash, the manipulative agent of the Weyland-Yutani company who is more on the alien’s side than that of the humans, played with chilling precision by Ian Holm.

 

     Weaver’s Ripley was unique for her time. While there had been other female roles in science fiction, even the most action-oriented of them had generally required male assistance at the end. Instead, Ripley is the only survivor to escape the destruction of Nostromo, finally defeating the titular alien creature by first kicking it out the airlock and then blasting it away with her escape pod’s rockets.

 

     Had that been the end of the franchise, it still would be well remembered. Alien is one of the few truly frightening horror movies of its era, and still works to a great extent today. There is no reason to remake or revisit it; it remains as powerful a creator of fear and tension as it was the day it was released, and Ripley would be a wonderful symbol of a strong leading woman.

 

     But a few years later a young James Cameron was given the opportunity to create a sequel, and produced Aliens. Rather than attempt to re-create the atmosphere of the original and thus compete with what was already regarded as a classic of the horror genre, Cameron decided to take the background of Alien and make it a slightly different film – an action-suspense film which still used the claustrophobic and restrictive approaches of its predecessor to imperil and terrify the characters… and the viewers.

 

     Cameron was able to get Sigourney Weaver to reprise her role as Ripley, and in so doing completed the genesis of perhaps the single most important female character of her generation. In Aliens Ripley has a chance to confront her fear, find something to replace what she lost in her long coldsleep, and responds to the challenge beyond anyone’s expectations. Surrounded by trained marines who are suddenly confronting something they never believed possible, it is Ellen Riply who holds the group together, keeps them from panicking, and gives them a chance to survive – although not many of them will, against an entire colony of Aliens.

 

     Sigourney Weaver took Ripley in her second encounter and made her into the absolute epitome of badass – while keeping her completely human. Ellen Ripley became a symbol for at least a generation, maybe two generations, of women looking for an example of a woman who could be as much the action hero as a man and be believable in that role. Ellen Ripley delivers exactly that, able to confront the Queen Alien in her own lair, surrounded by Alien soldiers and eggs, bargaining for survival – and then successfully fighting her way straight out of a scene in Dante’s Inferno when she realizes that the Queen has planned to betray her anyway.

 

     The final confrontation between Ripley and the Alien Queen – epitomized by the soundbite “Get away from her, you bitch!” has itself become one of the most iconic pieces of action filmmaking, Ripley using the cargo powerloader to duel the Queen face-to-face in a primal clash that is fully the equal of any other action film climax.

 

     The later Alien films… were not so good. Alien3 essentially undid all of Ripley’s victories in the second film in order to basically replay the original film, only with less of a positive result, and Alien Resurrection tried its best but was handicapped by having to use Alien3 as background material.

 

     However, the truth is that is rarely given to any franchise – movie, TV, or book – to produce more than one work that becomes iconic. The Alien franchise managed to produce two iconic movies, and within them three iconic symbols: the Alien itself, the Alien Queen… and ultimate badass Ellen Ripley. For that, I can forgive its later stumblings.

 

     If you have never watched the first two movies, I strongly urge you to give them a chance. They’re old now… but they still work.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Shibumi and the Kitemaker

 

     I mentioned this book in my prior review of The Paper Dragon. They share certain similarities, not the least of them being a protagonist faced with an apparently insuperable problem who finds a clever way to address this problem.

 

     Shibumi and the Kitemaker,(no link because, to my surprise and disappointment, it appears to be out of print and only available as ridiculously expensive new copies or used copies of uncertain provenance) by the famous children’s author Mercer Mayer (most well-known for his “Little Critter” books) is, like The Paper Dragon, an invented mythology or folk tale based on Eastern tropes and imagery. It takes place in a country similar to, and obviously based on, pre-modern Japan. A daughter is born to an unnamed Emperor, who names her Shibumi, and declares that she is the most precious thing in the world to him – above all wealth, power, and even the Heavens themselves. Accordingly he does all in his power to keep her safe and happy, walling her off from any contact with the rest of the world and raising her to be innocent, kind, and unafraid.

 

     This backfires, however, when Shibumi discovers by accident that the city beyond her walled garden – a place she imagined must be a wondrous land indeed – turns out to be a sordid, squalid place where many of the people, even children like herself, live filthy, short, hard lives in poverty. But she has wisdom enough to realize that simply speaking to her father will not change anything.

 

     She devises a plan, and begins calling the royal kitemaker to build her ever-larger kites. When one has been made that is large enough to actually carry a man aloft, the kitemaker shows he suspects something behind her new hobby. “For a kite to be true, its purpose must be stated.”

 

     “I wish it would end the suffering in my father’s city.”

 

     “And how will you do that?”

 

     “I cannot tell you.”

 

     “Whatever you ask of me, as long as it is part of what this kite must do, I will do it for you without question.”

 

     “Then I must fly the kite from the highest tower of the castle… and my father will have you put to death because of it.”

 

     Shibumi’s plan is a very childlike, yet powerful one. She ties herself to the kite, and has the kitemaker fly her into the sky, with the requirement that she will not come down until either the city is as beautiful as the castle, or the castle is as squalid as the city.

 

     The Emperor proves that he did not lie when he claimed he valued Shibumi above all things, and calls together his councillors and nobles, ordering them to rebuild the entire city in a night.

 

     The nobles, however, think the Emperor mad. “You cannot change in one night what has taken years to become!”

 

     To address this problem, they decide to eliminate the source; an assassin will kill the kitemaker, causing the kite to spiral out of control and crash. But the kitemaker sees the assassin and takes a desperate chance, leaping from the tower – and a great wind comes and carries him and Shibumi away.

 

     The power of Shibumi and the Kitemaker partly comes from the fact that this is only the first part of the story; the nobles have underestimated the Emperor badly, and he has his treacherous councillors imprisoned, commands that a thousand kites be flown above the city in her memory, and sets about trying to fulfill Shibumi’s wish despite her loss. This ignites a civil war which the Emperor desperately tries to win, but at length he grows too weary to continue and orders the kites taken down.

 

     But a young samurai who remembers how this all began wonders if, by some chance, Shibumi survived that night… and sets out to find her.

 

     This is an absolutely beautiful children’s book. Those familiar only with Mercer Mayer’s “Little Critter” books will be stunned by the delicate beauty of the paintings in Shibumi and the Kitemaker, and the climax of the book can bring a tear to my eye.

 

This is a perfectly told legend of morals, heroism, choices, cleverness, and courage, with the young girl Shibumi dominating the story even during the times she is not visible. At the end, her father dying but satisfied, he tells her “What you started by just flying a kite is so difficult to continue. Promise you will keep trying, in my place.”

 

Shibumi promises, taking her father’s place as ruler (and it is implied, though never stated, perhaps with the young Samurai as her consort). And…

 

That day, one hundred thousand kites flew above the city. To this day, they are still flying. And both the city and the palace are still beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The City and the Stars

 

     It seems appropriate to finish this week’s postings with one on a novel by the third of the classic triad of the Golden Age – Arthur C. Clarke.

 

     The City and the Stars is a revised, expanded version of an earlier Clarke story, Against the Fall of Night. It is one of the most far-future stories told, set one billion years in the future. The story begins in the beautiful and apparently eternal, self-renewing city of Diaspar, a city which has endured for most of that billion years, ever new, ever perfect.

 

     Into Diaspar is … well, not born, because in Diaspar people aren’t born, but given bodies by the great Central Computer; say, perhaps, that into Diaspar comes a young man named Alvin, who discovers that he is, quite literally, unique. The Central Computer stores the minds and experiences of uncounted numbers of human beings, but because of the limited size of Diaspar, only a relative few of these can be active and alive in the City at any one time. Thus, over the thousands and millions of years, each person is given a body, lives out a long (very long) life, and then returns to the Computer, to wait with perfect memory and patience until it is their turn again. Thus, all inhabitants of Diaspar have lived many, many lives.

 

     Except for Alvin. This is his first appearance in Diaspar. Where he comes from, no one is quite sure; perhaps the Computer has a small group of such people that it gradually releases,or perhaps it merely creates a new person by random combinations of those stored within, but in any event he is the first Unique to be seen in at least ten million years. And, alone of all people in Diaspar, he feels an urge to go outside, to explore, to see things beyond Diaspar itself.

 

     I won’t spoiler the rest of the book, at least not directly, though I must touch on other aspects of it in order to discuss some of the most interesting features of The City and the Stars.

 

     Clarke tries very hard – and mostly succeeds – in the creation of a world that is both human, and yet alien, where even the people are not exactly the people we know today; physically they are similar, yet changed – without fingernails or body hair or – as they are replicated as near-adults – even navels. Mentally they are generally equal or superior, but with strange limitations of imagination and drive that would be instantly apparent to any human of our time.

 

The City itself is one of the great images of science fiction, the perfect and incorruptible jewel of a city standing, untouched and untouchable, in the desert ruins of an Earth so old that it is nigh uninhabitable across most of its surface. Diaspar has challenged Eternity and won, a triumph of the ultimate engineer’s adage: “A machine may have no moving parts”. Diaspar is maintained by “eternity circuits” which can in effect create or destroy matter by drawing on the data and patterns stored in the great Central Computer; this is one of the earliest examples of the concepts which are currently used most commonly in Doctor Who under the guise of the “block-transfer computation” manifestation of matter through computation. Diaspar has endured a billion years without flaw; it will endure until there is no more power in the Universe to sustain it.

 

     I recall seeing the movie “Logan’s Run” and thinking that the city there echoed in some aspects the image of Diaspar – a city of endless pleasures, of no dangers, of perfect symmetry and eternal endurance, sustained by some central computer which directed all operations. But Diaspar doesn’t wipe out its people, nor limit them to a mere thirty years. A citizen of Diaspar lives a thousand years and then returns to the storage banks… to live again and regain all his or her memories in a few million years.

 

     One of the most prescient elements of Diaspar, though, are the “sagas” – full-immersion VR games which are so clearly descendants of our own primitive attempts at such things, like World of Warcraft, that it’s almost impossible to believe that Clarke wrote this for the first time before WWII. The one we see comes complete with a dungeon adventure, underground with monsters, and even demonstrates the disruption of a game by a rules-lawyer poking at the boundaries of the game in a way they shouldn’t be poked at. Alvin’s interest in going “beyond” manifests even in his games, so he’s constantly violating the saga’s planned limits.

 

     It should not be too much of a spoiler to say that Alvin does in fact find his way out of Diaspar and discovers many answers – and new questions. There are many incidents and images which have stuck with me for many, many years; the great “polyp”, an alien jellyfish-like colony creature like a gargantuan complex siphonophore, remembering and surviving for a billion years; the journey to an impossible pattern of suns; the chilling legend of the Mad Mind, and the childlike being with the power of a god Vanamonde.

 

     The City and the Stars is a wondrous book. It has relatively little action in the sense of normal action-adventure, and yet I found it very gripping indeed even today, many years after the last time I read it. Alvin is an interesting protagonist, a seeker after truth who eventually finds an answer that is good enough for him, even though many questions remain, and who manages to turn his whole world upside down without destroying it. In the meantime, he has shown us wonders that we could never have imagined.

 

     If you’ve never read it, you should.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Double Star

 

 

     Written by Robert A. Heinlein at the apex of his powers, Double Star is in my view one of his best novels. It takes a fairly well-worn plot – the actor who must, for some vitally important reason, impersonate a famous man well enough to fool that man’s own associates – puts it IN SPAAAACE!, and adds in some of the most vivid characters Heinlein ever drew to produce an absolute masterpiece.

 

     Lorenzo Smythe (“The Great Lorenzo”) is an actor of prodigious skill and talent but, as we can tell by reading between the lines, so insufferably arrogant about his abilities  and so prideful about the way in which he will and will not use them that he has become unemployable; when we meet him, he is literally down to his last coin. Even so, when spaceman Dak Broadbent – mysteriously trying to avoid being recognized as a spaceman – offers Lorenzo a job, Lorenzo recognizes the urgency, negotiates an advance fee, and does so with both an internal monologue indicating what kinds of jobs he believes are beneath him and dialogue which implies he is constantly in demand.

 

     His initial reaction to avoid agreeing to an impersonation job (he feels that acting as a “double” to someone is the equivalent of prostitution, or at least of ghostwriting) and then decision to take the job when he overhears (through lip-reading) his professional capabilities insultingly disparaged, give us a clear indication of his character (and some clues as to just what in his background made him that way.

 

     Then everything goes south when a Martian and a human enter the hotel room Lorenzo and Dak have met in, and a brief, violent fight leaves the Martian, his accomplice, and Dak’s friend Jock dead. Now realizing he is caught up in something far worse than he imagined, Lorenzo also has no choice but to escape with Dak… to do a job that obviously is already worth killing over.

 

     I won’t spoiler the rest of the plot; suffice to say that it’s really well done, including the reason that Lorenzo has to impersonate a particular person (literal worlds may hang in the balance), the arrangements needed to get Lorenzo to be able to play the part well enough, and various edge-of-the-seat moments where we aren’t sure that Lorenzo is going to get out of it alive.

 

     Despite his arrogance, Lorenzo is an engaging protagonist; his voice is clear,droll, measured; I always hear it as a tenor voice, tinged with just a hint of upper-crust English accent, just that little bit world-weary and wise. Whatever his failings, Lorenzo does not in fact overestimate his abilities; he demonstrates multiple times that he has incredibly keen perceptions and a preternatural skill at acting and especially at portraying specific roles to perfection. We can tolerate Lorenzo’s pomposity because he is a wonderful lens to view the world with… and while the lens may color what we see, it is a beautifully transparent lens indeed.

 

     Heinlein had one of the great gifts of an author: the ability to write convincingly of things whether or not the things he was writing about were true. Lorenzo gives us multiple monologues on the precise craft of a true great actor and impressionist. As a decent amateur actor myself, I find a lot of his stuff – looked at in the cold light of day – to be twaddle. But in-universe it’s tremendously convincing and powerful, giving Lorenzo an area of expertise that allows us to excuse some of his behavior and be willing to stick with him through his trials and tribulations.

 

     Lorenzo also develops through the book. Heinlein, at his best, knew very well how to make a hero develop,but Lorenzo is rather unusual in that generally Heinlein started with young people just growing up and learning their place in the world; such characters are easy to show growing up. Lorenzo is a fully adult man with a career who is suddenly thrust into a dangerous game that requires his talents, and this forces him to change in multiple ways.

 

     Other characters, such as Dak Broadbent and Penny Russell, are also well painted, but beside Lorenzo they tend to fade to near-insignificance. That’s a pity, in a way, but it really is Lorenzo’s show, in more ways than one, so I suppose it makes sense. We’re here to watch him put through a wringer and somehow come out of it alive and, maybe, a better man than he was before.

 

     As with many older SF novels, there are plenty of elements that are no longer usable in straight science fiction – native Martians traveling to earth, for instance. The omnipresent smoking of the 1950s is still in full force – even on board spaceships where one would think the air filtration issues alone would prevent it; much of the culture is the same.

 

     At the same time, Heinlein does try to ring in some changes; I was particularly appreciative of his playing around with fashions, so that men wearing ruffled chemises isn’t considered so ridiculous that they’ll get laughed at in a bar, for instance. Lorenzo apparently wears a cape regularly. A number of the classic SF tropes of the 50s are also present – regular interplanetary flights, nuclear disposal units instead of wastebaskets, ray guns of various types, etc.

 

One thing that does stand out is that this isn’t the same universe, or even a particularly related universe, to those of his juveniles or stories such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land; it’s completely its own universe, separate and independent as far as I can tell from any other Heinlein work (except I suppose from his late period work when he was unifying EVERYTHING, unfortunately). 

 

The ending of Double Star is also unique; I consider it a “good” ending, but there are some bittersweet notes to it which give it an unusual flavor for a Heinlein novel.

 

I also have to appreciate the almost Asimovian title; such a double pun doubtless would have amused him immensely.

 

Double Star is one of my favorite Heinlein novels, and despite some inevitable cultural/sexist failings remains a fast-moving, exciting, and intelligent novel today. I strongly recommend it!