James L. Cambias's Blog, page 11

Mysteries of the Bride

Last week a much-reduced Crack Team of moviegoers went to the endearingly ramshackle Greenfield Garden Cinema to watch a special showing of the original The Bride of Frankenstein. It's still my favorite of all the classic Universal black-and-white monster movies. Maybe The Invisible Man is in the same league, but the rest of the pack is well behind them both.

Two things struck me while watching this showing. The first is how rushed the movie seems. There's no slow buildup, no rising tension, no mysteries to be resolved. It almost feels like James Whale wanted to blow past all the boring townsfolk-with-pitchforks parts and get to the big Animating the Bride set piece at the end as quickly as he could. Despite this, the beginning scenes of the movie are a little boring, especially since Una Merkel isn't as funny as James Whale apparently thought she was. But once Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius shows up, the movie rolls right ahead on rails and is a joy to watch.

The second thing which struck me is when the movie is supposed to take place. We begin with a frame story of Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester, who of course is also the titular Bride), telling her story to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron (played by Gavin Gordon hamming it up to the nth degree). Now, we know that this literary evening took place in 1816, and the actual novel Mary wrote is set some time in the previous century.

But the movie . . . isn't. It's hard to pin down when it's happening. The police have revolvers (post 1850s), there are recognizable electric filament bulbs in Frankenstein's laboratory (post 1870s), and the one date mentioned is the plaque on a coffin from the 1890s. But it's not 1935, nor is it any time during or after World War I. There are no telephones (except for an experimental device Pretorius uses to keep in touch with the Monster), no motor vehicles, no battling gangs of veterans. I'll tentatively place it in the Edwardian era, maybe 1910 or so. 

So how is Mary Shelley in 1816 telling a story which takes place a century later? Well, she's not called the First Science Fiction Writer for nothing. I don't know if this was a deliberate choice by the moviemakers or a happy accident, but the film The Bride of Frankenstein is literally a movie about a science fiction story. This even means any anachronisms can be explained away as Mary Shelley's fault, since she couldn't predict the dawn of the 20th century with perfect accuracy. 

Anyway, it's a cracking good movie, perfect to watch on Halloween. Highly recommended.

 

 

Auction Action!

Today the Friends of Deerfield are launching an online auction to raise funds for Deerfield's 350th anniversary celebration in 2023. Items for sale include antiques, sports memorabilia, gift cards, and artworks. But my readers may be especially interested in the books.

We've got signed collections of first editions by Western Massachusetts SF and fantasy authors: Elizabeth Bear, me, John Crowley, Paul Park, and Allen Steele. If any of you are collectors, this is a gold mine. Note that all of the authors have asked to not be told how much their books fetch at auction. (I probably won't be able to avoid seeing it myself.)

The auction ends November 15, so keep checking the page to see how the bidding is going. I've heard that the last few hours can get really exciting. Here's the link again.

Let the bidding begin!

The Day of Gold

Fall in New England is famous for its beauty. People come here from all over the country to go "leaf-peeping" in the countryside. In Deerfield we're ready for them with scented candles, artisanal baked goods, microbrews, maple candy, fossils, crafts, and restaurants.

But when does Fall begin? On September 22 I heard a radio host announcing the "official" beginning of Fall, as that day is the autumnal equinox ��� the time when the Earth's tilted axis is side-on to the Sun, so that all over the world the days and nights are of equal length. In the northern hemisphere the nights are going to get longer, in the southern hemisphere they're going to get shorter, but in late September we all have the same amount of daylight. It's the start of astronomical autumn, which lasts until the winter solstice in late December.

However, that's only one definition. Other dates for the start of autumn are the beginning of the grain harvest season, which in pre-modern Europe was August 1; or Labor Day, when summer vacation ends and well-dressed people switch to winter styles. In warm climates, where Fall is a fairly abstract concept anyway, the season is simply the months of September through November.

For me, Fall in New England starts with the Day of Gold, which isn't marked on any calendar. It's the day that the ferns and the birch trees on my land have lost their summer green, but haven't yet withered to brown. For just a little while, everything is golden wherever I look. Then I know that Fall has really arrived.

Captain Opposite

I've noticed an interesting approach to writing genre characters, one which also applies to roleplaying games and other media as well: take an iconic character and make up someone who is as opposite to that character as possible.

When Michael Moorcock wanted to write a "sword and sorcery" epic, he didn't make his main character a clone of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian. Instead he made up Elric of Melnibone, who is Conan's opposite in almost every way. Where Conan is a barbarian, Elric is the scion of his world's most advanced and decadent civilization. Where Conan is a warrior who enjoys a good fight, Elric is skilled in magic and intrigue as much as swordplay. Conan fights his way to the throne of Aquilonia, while Elric begins as a hereditary Emperor and ultimately abandons his throne and kingdom.

When Patrick O'Brian began writing a series of Napoleonic-era sea stories based on the life of Thomas Cochrane, he didn't make his main character a clone of C.S. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower. Instead he made up Jack Aubrey. Where Hornblower is a progressive Whig with suspiciously 20th-Century attitudes, Aubrey is a reactionary Tory. Where Hornblower is tone-deaf, Aubrey is a skilled musician. Where Hornblower is diffident and shy with women (mostly), Aubrey is an enthusiastic womanizer. And where Hornblower is isolated and lonely in command, Aubrey has the constant friendship of Stephen Maturin.

Some authors even do it to themselves. L. Frank Baum's first Oz novel centered on Dorothy, a girl from Kansas swept off to Oz by a tornado and trying desperately to return home. His second centered on Tip, a boy native to Oz who is running away from home. With the help of magic, Dorothy gets back to Kansas and resumes her old life. Tip is transformed into Ozma and begins an entirely new existence as a Lovely Girl Ruler. 

One of my mottoes is "Constraints inspire creativity," and I think this is a perfect example. Using the "Captain Opposite" method one gets two sets of constraints, and their intersection can generate wonderful creativity. The first constraint is of course making the character the opposite of an iconic genre character. But it goes beyond simple negation. The second constraint is that Captain Opposite still has to work as a genre character himself. 

After all, making a sea captain who isn't Horatio Hornblower should be pretty easy: make him incompetent, cowardly, arrogant, and ultimately a failure. (And in fact George MacDonald Fraser did just that with his Harry Flashman.) But what makes Aubrey a classic character in his own right is that he is Hornblower's foil ��� but also his equal. He works as the anti-Hornblower but still gets to do all the Cochrane-inspired exploits. (In fact, my personal opinion is that by stripping away Hornblower's anachronistic ideas about personal hygiene and democracy, O'Brian makes Aubrey a more realistic and vivid character.)

Similarly, Moorcock's Elric still works as a Sword 'n Sorcery hero, despite being the kind of person Conan routinely beheaded in his own climactic battles. Howard famously made Conan the sort of person whose first instinct is to fight his way out of a situation, which was perfect for the pulp action stories Howard wanted to tell. Moorcock's Elric, by contrast, hates the vampiric magical sword which keeps him alive. His efforts to avoid fighting get him into more and more trouble ��� and build the reader's anticipation for the inevitable moment when he does finally pull out Stormbringer and start swinging.

So, here's an exercise for the next time you're writing in a genre with iconic characters: try to create a Captain Opposite. An anti-Sherlock Holmes who still solves baffling crimes, an anti- James Bond who still thwarts Britain's secret foes, maybe even an anti-Batman who still battles supervillains. If you can think of other examples I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

 

AlbaCon 2021!

It takes more than an endemic to keep Albany's long-running SF convention down. AlbaCon 2021 is going on tonight and through this weekend, but only in virtual form.

I'll be there, participating in four events:

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday the 18th I'll be part of a panel discussing "No One Goes to Space Anymore." Given that we just watched four private passengers launch into orbit, I'm going to be questioning the premises of that topic.

At 11:00 a.m. I'll be talking about "Why the DCU and the MCU Are So Different."

After a short break for lunch I'm doing a reading from The Godel Operation at 1:30. 

And then from 2-6 p.m. I'm running an online Weird War 1 game, "The Black Khan."

Afterward, drinks in the hotel bar. First round's on me.

 

Food Bragging: Harvest Edition

When you belong to a farm share, you get the vegetables in season, and you get as many as the farmers have produced. This means one must learn to deal with huge waves of vegetables, often more than can be eaten in a week. We're just past peak sweet corn season, so we're still getting half a dozen ears a week. Skip a day or two and it starts to accumulate.

I discovered a nice way to burn up accumulated fresh corn, especially the ears which have been sitting for a few days: make a pie. Tonight's dinner was corn pie and a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh lettuce.

How do you make a corn pie? Not hard. It's your favorite savory pie crust, with a large onion, some celery, half a dozen ears of corn cut off the cobs, a couple of sliced hard-boiled eggs, and parsley. To thicken the filling, one recipe I found suggested making a puree of some of the corn and mixing it with another egg to help it set. 

Not especially difficult to make, though what with preparing the filling, making the crust, assembling the pie, and then baking it, this is not at all quick. Save it for a weekend if you're pressed for time.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with a peck of hot peppers. Any ideas?

The Zydeco Operation

The Godel Operation comes to Acadiana! On Wednesday, September 22, I'll be doing a reading and signing at southwestern Louisiana's premier book shop, Beausoleil Books of Lafayette, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome.

Come on down and hear some of the adventures of Daslakh and Zee in the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium! I'll answer any questions and sign whatever is put in front of me. 

Did I mention this bookstore has a wine bar? That's the hallmark of a truly advanced civilization.  

A Chilling Analysis

This article, "The Good Death ��� Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture," by Christopher Van Eecke takes a look at the phenomenon of online Twitter mobs and their fetish for destroying lives and inflicting public humiliation on people. He finds a useful ��� and disturbing ��� parallel in the public torture and executions of past centuries. The fact that the worst excesses of "cancel culture" come from people who loudly praise themselves for their empathy and compassion is particularly grotesque.

Bari Weiss has a personal account by academic Peter Boghossian of his experiences as the target of a Twitter mob. What's particularly awful in his story is the way he was abandoned by his institution and his colleagues. I don't know if it's cowardice or malice, but this will only end when people running large institutions like academia, government, and corporations stop going along with these witch-hunts and lynch mobs.

It must end soon, because our society will not survive if it doesn't.

The Endemic

Note: I haven't put up any new blog posts for several weeks, and this one is the reason. I've been thinking about this piece for a while, but was reluctant to post it because I didn't want to feed the endless anger. Nevertheless, I think it's important, so here we go.

The definition of an epidemic is "An outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time."

A pandemic is "An outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area . . . and typically affects a significant proportion of the population."

These two word have become excessively familiar to all of us over the past couple of years, but I'm afraid we need to get accustomed to a third term: endemic means "Characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment."

During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a sense among people ��� both the general public and those in charge of making policies to deal with the disease ��� that it is temporary. That if we can just get enough people vaccinated, or lock down gatherings, or seal the borders, or get everyone masked up all the time, then it will go away and everything will return to normal.

I'm afraid that's not going to happen. The COVID-19 virus isn't going away. It will never go away, not completely. This is no brushfire pandemic that sweeps the world and then vanishes. No, this disease is now endemic to the entire world. It will be with us for decades, possibly forever.

Some diseases, like smallpox, are transmitted only from human to human, and can't reinfect people who are immune. We were able to literally drive smallpox to extinction. Polio is spread by contaminated food and water, and also only affects humans. By vaccinating and improving sanitation, we have gotten the number of cases down to just a few dozen worldwide. AIDS is spread by sharing body fluids, and even though there is no vaccine, education about safe sex practices and the development of antiviral drugs has drastically reduced the number of cases.

But COVID-19 isn't like those diseases. It isn't easy to stop and it will never be eliminated.

First of all, it has already spread throughout the entire world. It can't be confined to a "hot zone" where it will burn itself out. The Chinese government failed to do that, and denied there was a problem until it was far too late to prevent COVID-19 from breaking out of Wuhan and spanning the globe. No sub-group is more at risk of catching it than anyone else. No simple measures will prevent its spread.

Second, vaccination isn't the "firewall" for COVID-19 that it is for, say, smallpox. Even after vaccination, people can catch it. Their cases tend to be much less severe, which is very good ��� but by the same token that implies a large number of vaccinated people can have mild or asymptomatic cases without realizing it. This means that even if everyone is vaccinated, the virus will survive. And if it survives it can continue to mutate, brewing up new variant strains. It's likely that some of those variants will slip past the antibodies of vaccinated individuals, setting off new rounds of infection and transmission. We can't exterminate this virus.

Third, we're pretty sure the original virus came from an animal host, most likely bats. There are a lot of bats in the world. A lot of them live in and around human-occupied structures, so that people get exposed to their urine and feces. We don't know about other possible animal reservoirs. Other primates might be susceptible, too. All this means that the COVID-19 virus and its variants have a reservoir apart from the human population, where the virus can survive and mutate. We can't eradicate bats (nor would we wish to), so there's no way to get rid of COVID-19 in the wild.

It's not going away. It's never going away. We will never reach zero cases.

Am I just counseling despair, here? No. Quite the reverse, in fact. I think we should stop treating COVID-19 as a crisis. It's an ongoing, endemic problem, part of the world from now on, and we must face it on those terms.

Treatment should become the focus of medical research and public policy. If we're not going to be able to stop people from catching it, then we should be working to stop them from dying from it. Instead of tracking case numbers we should be watching the death rate. We should be working on antiviral drugs with the same fervor we developed vaccines, and investigating ways to mitigate or prevent the lingering side effects of the virus.

Another useful step would be to tone down the social division and anger. This disease isn't going away, which means that there's no point in scapegoating the unvaccinated. They'll get the shot, or get the disease, and they'll either live or die. The virus will remain. Screaming at people and moral posturing won't change that.

Finally, the crisis must end. Arbitrary and contradictory rules, economic damage and travel restrictions, censorship and scapegoating all need to stop. They're making us all insane. Nobody wants those things to go on indefinitely, they aren't going to make the disease disappear, so end them. Reduce the stress, reduce the panic, reduce the anger, reduce the fear.

I expect getting each year's COVID variant vaccine will become as routine and uninteresting as getting a flu shot. We'll probably adopt the habit of wearing masks if you think you're contagious. People will get sick from the disease and recover, just as they do with the flu, mono, walking pneumonia, shingles, and other endemic diseases. And as with those diseases, some of the infected will die. Nobody can prevent that.

The good news is that diseases mellow out over time. The strains that kill their victims don't survive as well as the milder ones. Combine that with better treatment, better medicines, and the immune response boost from vaccinations, and in a few years nobody will worry. We've gone through far more deadly epidemics. It's going to be all right.

For more on this subject, check out these articles from The Atlantic (sorry about the paywall).

Ed Yong on the Pandemic Endgame.

Sarah Zhang: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever.

More Food Bragging

Turned 20 lbs. of tomatoes (from the farm stand, not our garden) into 6 quarts of sauce, put up in jars for winter. Had the excess sauce with some garlic and basil over homemade linguine.

It was very good.