Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 2

ALEYARA’S DESCENT arrives, along with a new Patreon story!

Today’s the day! Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories is now on sale in print and e-book form. Hopefully those of you who preordered the e-book have already gotten it, and those who preordered the print book should see it in the mail soon. And if you didn’t preorder, you can get it right away from the following vendors or wherever you purchase books:

Barnes & NobleBooks-a-MillionAmazonKoboBookshop

As a reminder, the discussion page for the stories in the collection is already up, complete with links to all the spoiler annotations.

As a bonus, to commemorate the release of this collection featuring multiple stories that debuted on my Patreon, I’ve finally posted a new short story, “Birth of Knowledge,” on my Patreon’s Fiction level. Well, it’s actually an old story that I wrote in 1997 and never sold. I set it aside with an eye toward trying to rework it, but lost track of it over the years. Looking back at it now, I realized there was little chance of reworking it into a marketable story, as a number of its predictions about the development of the internet are quaint in retrospect. Yet I think it has some ideas that are interesting and relevant to the current debate over so-called artificial intelligence, so I figured it was worth publishing for my Patreon subscribers. Everyone at the $3/month level and above can read the story here:

Fiction: “Birth of Knowledge”

And of course, I also have an annotations page for the story on the $5 level.

X-MEN: WATCHERS ON THE WALLS is finally an e-book!

I’ve just discovered that my 2006 novel X-Men: Watchers on the Walls, the first of my two entries in Pocket Books’ Marvel Comics line, has finally been released as an e-book. (Apparently it came out in February, but nobody told me until now.) I’ve updated my website’s Marvel pages with ordering info, but here it is again:

X-Men: Watchers on the Walls

For years, many have believed that the rise of superpowered mutants represents a threat to the survival of ordinary humans. The uncanny X-Men have dedicated their lives to proving that peaceful coexistence is possible. When a refugee spacecraft crashes on Earth, hounded by a warship bent on its destruction, the X-Men race to the rescue — only to learn that it carries beings of an entirely different order whose very existence may jeopardize life as we know it.

Now, facing a direct threat to all life on Earth, the X-Men grapple with an impossible moral dilemma — to defend the aliens whose only crime is being born different . . . or to embrace the methods of those who have long condemned mutantkind, joining forces with their own greatest persecutors to go hunt down their common enemy and end the evolutionary menace, once and for all.

Ebook:

Order from:

AmazonBarnes & NobleBookshopGoogle PlayKobo

Audiobook:

Order from:

AmazonBarnes & NobleBooks-a-MillionBookshop

Mass-market paperback (out of print):

Order from Amazon

Since my other Marvel novel, Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder, is back in print as part of the Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours omnibus, that means both my Marvel novels are finally easily available in both e-book and audio form, though anyone who wants a print copy of Watchers will have to track down a used one. Unfortunately, I don’t get any royalties from new sales of these books, but I’m proud of the work I did on them and glad that more people will have the chance to experience them.

Annotations for ALEYARA’S DESCENT stories are now up!

I’ve spent most of the past couple of days putting together the guide page for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories and the individual story annotation pages it links to. The main page is here:

Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories

This has been quite an undertaking, since only four of the stories had been professionally published before, so I had to reprint my Patreon annotations for most of the rest and write new annotations for the previously unpublished “Early Warning Systems.” I also had to revise the annotation pages with the page numbers from the print edition, and make other edits as needed.

As it happens, I got my print copies in the mail today as well! We’re still about three and a half weeks from general release, but you can get your preorders in now.

ALEYARA’S DESCENT now available for preorder!

Now that Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories is finally complete and scheduled for publication on July 1, the preorder information has gone out to the major book dealers, including the following:

Barnes & NobleBooks-a-MillionAmazonKoboBookshop

The e-book edition of the collection has already been sent out to our Kickstarter backers, and I have my e-book copy too. Thus, I’ve already gotten started on putting together a dedicated page for the collection here on the site, like the page for Among the Wild Cybers, putting all the story notes and annotation links together in one place. I’ll be reprinting my annotations from the Patreon releases here on Written Worlds, and I’ll amend all the annotations with page numbers for the collection. It might take a few days, since there are 11 stories to wrangle together, and I’m also in the middle of writing a new short story for an open-call anthology.

At long last, ALEYARA’S DESCENT is nearly here!

It’s been almost exactly a year since the start of the Kickstarter campaign that included my story collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, which we’d hoped would come out last July in time for that year’s Shore Leave Convention. But eSpec’s cover artist Mike McPhail wanted to take some extra time to create a suitable cover image of the Biauru characters from the title story. This proved more challenging than we expected, and Mike’s been dealing with illness and other things, so the cover ended up getting delayed quite a bit. Ultimately, we decided to settle for a simpler cover and just get the book out there in time for this year’s Shore Leave, though Mike hopes to revisit the cover art later. The book is now scheduled to release on July 1, 2025, and will debut at Shore Leave on July 11-13.

Cover by Mike McPhail of McP Digital Graphics

Since it’s been a year, I’ll repeat the info from my original introductory post:

Infinite Dimensions. Endless Possibilities. Universal Questions.

Across multiple realities and millennia of past and future history, heroes human and otherwise challenge their limits and brave the unknown in pursuit of the fundamental truths of the universe—and each other.

From bestselling author Christopher L. Bennett comes Aleyara’s Descent, eleven tales portraying the search for understanding, connection, and hope that unites seekers of all species, eras, and realities.

In an alien past, four impetuous youths brave a forbidden realm to discover their world’s true nature.A first contact between a UFO believer and a real alien doesn’t go the way either one expects.Scientists battling a kaiju invasion must overcome the mistrust of the insular enclave they strive to protect.A government agent’s drive to safeguard the future hits a speed bump when she questions a suspected time traveler.The inheritor of a fabled superhero name must prove herself by solving the one mystery her predecessor never could.

These and other diverse tales, many in print for the first time, bring a multiverse of aliens, monsters, time travelers, and heroes to life with plausibility and sensitivity.

Includes the brand-new tale “Nilly’s Choice,” a companion story to the Arachne novels.

Only four of the stories in this collection have been professionally published before, while all but one of the rest come from my Patreon’s Original Fiction tier (index here), which has so few subscribers that they’ll be completely new to most of my readers. They come in a mix of different continuities, breaking down thusly:

Arachne/Troubleshooter Universe:

“Conventional Powers” (Troubleshooters): Analog Sep/Oct 2019“Legacy Hero” (Troubleshooters): Patreon“Nilly’s Choice”: Patreon“Aleyara’s Descent”: Analog, May/June 2023

Braneworlds:

“What Slender Threads”: Patreon“Though Worlds Divide Us”: Amazing Stories (online), April 2023

Standalone stories:

“The Moving Finger Writes”: Patreon“Abductive Reasoning”: Analog Sep/Oct 2017“Early Warning Systems”: Never before published“The Monsters We Make”: Patreon“Growth Industry”: Patreon

I’ve revised most of the stories to offer a little something new. Mostly it’s just a few minor textual edits, but I did a substantial polish on “The Moving Finger Writes,” whose version on Patreon was a little rough. In “Conventional Powers” and “The Monsters We Make,” I restored some material I’d deleted for space, about 300 words’ worth for the former and a paragraph for the latter. In “Growth Industry,” I added a few bits that didn’t occur to me until after the story’s Patreon publication.

And here are links to our previous publicity for the collection:

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT – CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT

eSPEC EXCERPTS – CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT – ALEYARA’S DESCENT

It’s been a long road getting from there to here (no, wait, that’s from something else), but I’m relieved that the book is finally ready to come out, ending my long drought of published works.

Minor bits of good news

I’ve been feeling frustrated waiting for news about a couple of work things, so I decided to go for a long walk on this sunny day, in hopes of improving my mood and hopefully getting some ideas for a story I’m trying to work out. I decided to go to Fairview Park, the overlook park that’s a moderate walk to the west of my apartment, where I’ve sometimes gone to think through story ideas and scenes over the past couple of years. The nearer overlook area and adjacent playground were too crowded for me to get any thinking done, so I decided to keep walking up the long north-to-south drive that goes through the narrow park. I was unsure if I wanted to go all the way to the McMillan Avenue entrance to that drive, though, because I knew from past experience back in my college years that there was only a partial sidewalk on the park’s side of the street, and no stop light or crosswalk on that part of McMillan, which is just past a sharp blind curve, so it’s a dangerous place to cross (and if I recall, a part of the road prone to collisions). I did cross there from time to time back in college, but it always scared me to do so, and in my recent trips to the park I’ve generally avoided going all the way up to McMillan, instead just doubling back and going home the way I came. The one time last year that I did cross there, I saw that there’d been some improvement in the safety of that curve in the road — divider posts along the center line and painted no-drive areas along the sides narrowing the road to one lane of traffic either way. That made it relatively safer to cross there, but I still wasn’t comfortable doing so.

Still, after sitting and thinking for a bit at the other, emptier overlook area today (during which I did make some good progress on my story idea), I decided to go all the way up to McMillan and chance the crossing instead of doubling back. But upon arriving at the corner, I was very pleased to discover that in the time since I’d last been there, the city had put in a full sidewalk along the south side of the road! Just like I’ve always wanted since my college days decades ago, I was finally able to walk all the way back without having to cross that dangerous stretch of road. That was so satisfying that it evaporated my bad mood. It improves my options for walks around the neighborhood going forward, which is good, since I prefer having a variety of different routes to take to keep things fresh. Next time, I’ll have to try it in the other direction.

–

Meanwhile, it’s now been a bit over three weeks since I got my desktop mini-PC back from the shop, and even though they said they didn’t discover what was making it crash and didn’t do anything except clean it, it hasn’t crashed even once since I got it back (though I’m afraid of jinxing it by saying so). Maybe there was some physical problem that cleaning it fixed. Or maybe it was being caused by the unnecessary antivirus program that someone at the shop must have uninstalled even though the guy I talked to insisted he hadn’t.

Unfortunately, the problem of the computer occasionally freezing up on shutdown hasn’t been magically fixed, since that happened once not long after I got the computer back. A couple of times, it’s seemed to happen if I shut down too quickly after closing the open programs, and though it may be a spurious correlation, I’ve been avoiding that and haven’t had another freeze so far.

ANALOG takes “Aleyara’s Flight”

It’s been a couple of years since I last had a story in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, with the cover story “Aleyara’s Descent” in the May/June 2023 issue. But I can now announce that I’ve signed a contract for its sequel, “Aleyara’s Flight.” I’ve been told it’s slated for the September/October 2025 issue, but the contract took longer than expected, so I can’t be sure of that. (Analog has recently come under new ownership and they’re still settling in. Don’t worry, they’re committed to keeping it in print and retaining the same editorial staff.)

“Aleyara’s Descent” cover art by Eldar Zakirov

“Aleyara’s Flight” returns to the lush alien world of the colorful Biauru species, saurian brachiators who evolved in the nearly solid canopy of the vast rainforest that covers 2/3 of the planet Rulenau’s main continent. This time, I expand the story to explore the lands beyond the rainforest, whose distinct culture has been shaped by the struggle to survive amidst the dinosaur-like megafauna who thrive in Rulenau’s hot climate. I examine the impact of Aleyara’s innovation of the scientific method upon the Biauru’s Bronze Age civilization, and elaborate on Biauru society, biology, and spirituality, as well as deepening my exploration of the characters and their relationships. There are also plenty of exotic new settings and creatures and thrilling action sequences.

At nearly 19,900 words, “Aleyara’s Flight” is my first published novella outside of licensed Star Trek fiction, and is my fourteenth contribution to Analog. It’s my first sequel to a previous Analog story since the last of my Hub stories, “Hubstitute Creatures” in 2018, and my seventh Analog story set in the Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe (versus six Hub stories and one standalone), though as a tale set in an alien world’s pre-contact past, it has only an implicit connection to the rest of the universe.

This is one of two sequel stories I wrote back-to-back, and though story #3 took longer to get right than I’d expected, I finally got it sorted out (I hope) and submitted it just last Friday. My hope is to write a fourth story and then collect them all as a fixup novel.

Stay tuned for more Aleyara news!

Computer repair — or not

The repair shop to which I took my mini-PC a couple of weeks ago said to give them 7-10 business days to report back, and this was the 11th business day, so I called for an update, only to find that the repair guy hadn’t been able to make the PC crash and thus couldn’t diagnose the problem. I’d assumed he’d check the reports of past crashes in the reliability history and learn something from them, but he didn’t say anything about it and I didn’t think to ask. He cleaned it and checked the hardware, but couldn’t diagnose anything to repair and thus offered to let me pick it up with no charge. I asked about the periodic freezes, reminding him that it was a separate problem from the crashes (or at least that I didn’t know if it was connected or not), and he suggested waiting another day to try to find out if it would do that, but that seemed pointless to me, so I regretfully resolved to go in and pick it up today.

Once I got there, though, it actually did freeze up while he was shutting it down, and because the laser on his mouse went off when it happened, he figured out that some glitch was shutting down power to all the computer’s ports — he thinks the computer is still on, but none of the peripherals are getting any power and thus it won’t accept any inputs. He figures the fault is either in the Windows installation or in the motherboard, and the only thing he could suggest trying was reinstalling Windows, which was a more drastic solution than I’d hoped, and not guaranteed to work.

So I figured I’d just go back to managing the problem like I’ve been doing for the past year or so — using the screen saver to keep it from sleeping, shutting down completely every night, and just living with the infrequent freezes during shutdown. I’d been hoping not to have to deal with all that anymore, but at least resuming the same status quo doesn’t make things any worse. But with the crashes unexplained, I can’t be sure they won’t recur. I can’t figure out why he couldn’t get it to crash when it had been happening daily before I took it in. He suggested the crashes could be a sign of imminent hard drive failure, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with the drive.

It’s occurred to me that I could just go on using the laptop, which has been working very well as a substitute. (It turns out I was wrong about the cooling-fan platform shutting down when the laptop powers off. It does shut down, but then starts up again moments later, so it keeps my modem cooled overnight.) I still have to set the mini-PC back up to retrieve a couple of files I forgot to back up before taking it in, and I guess I’ll try it out for a while to see if it crashes again. If so, I could just go back to the laptop and keep the mini in reserve as a backup computer if I ever need to take the laptop into the shop or something. Although a computer undergoing unexplained crashes isn’t a great choice for a backup. Still, I’ve gotten by with various laptops set up to my keyboard and monitor for most of the past couple of decades, and in this case the docking station makes it extremely easy to detach the laptop if I need to take it somewhere, since I just have to unplug one connection.

Alternatively, I could buy another desktop PC, a less cheap one this time. The tech guy suggested that if I wanted to replace my mini-PC, I should look into something called an Nvidia Shield. But I looked that up, and it seems to be a streaming media device rather than a PC, so I’m confused.

Naturally, if what I’ve written gives anyone any useful insights into the problem, please let me know in the comments.

Computer substitution

Ever since I got my desktop mini-PC in July 2023, it’s had occasional problems with freezing up when left idle too long, or occasionally during shutdown — it would appear to turn off, but the power light would stay on and there was no way to turn it on again without hitting the reset button or unplugging. I found I could prevent it by turning on the screen saver, so that let me manage the problem, and it just became a rare annoyance. (It also meant I couldn’t hibernate overnight but had to shut down. Computer techs keep telling me hibernation is evil, but I looked into it and apparently the increased wear it causes to SSD drives is only like an additional 1% of their life expectancy depending on the drive, so it’s probably not that big a deal.)

In the past month or so, though, the computer’s started spontaneously crashing, giving me a “Blue Screen of Death” and rebooting. At first it was once in a week or two, and I looked up possible fixes and tried a couple of things in hopes it would solve the problem. Luckily, I have a good laptop now as an alternative, a hand-me-down from my sister. For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing all my writing on the laptop so I wouldn’t risk losing anything to a crash. This has the advantage of letting me write in different places around the apartment, get some variety that might stimulate my process, but the drawback is the smaller screen which forces me to look lower down, which isn’t good for my neck (although my sister sent me an unfolding stand that raises it up somewhat).

But the crashes have continued, and for the past few days they’ve come once a day. So I finally took the computer into the shop this morning. It’s a new shop I haven’t tried before (since I wasn’t entirely happy with the service of the nearer shop I’ve been to in the past), technically in walking distance but down a very steep hill that I know from experience is exhausting to climb, so I drove there instead, but made the mistake of relying on my rusty memory of driving on roads I haven’t been on that often in recent years, so I got a little lost and had to drive a fair distance out of my way to get turned back around. (I forgot that a certain intersection had a no-left-turn sign.) I may decide to go on foot and brave the hill when I go back for it.

Anyway, this finally gave me the chance to try out the laptop docking station my sister also sent, and for which I already bought an adaptor for my monitor’s VGA connector, anticipating this. The station has ports for all the stuff that connects to a desktop, and it attaches to the laptop by the power-cable connection point, so it would be a simple matter to detach the laptop if I wanted. It was easy enough to plug everything in, and small enough that there was room on my cooling-fan platform for both the laptop and my new fiber-optic modem (which runs fairly hot). I mentioned in an earlier post that I was glad the cooling fan ran 24/7 as long as it was plugged into the mini-PC, since that kept the modem cooled full-time. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true with the laptop, but I guess the modem’s still safe enough without the fan going, since it’s on top of a wire rack that I set up years ago to ensure my computer and power strips had good air circulation around them. (Indeed, I originally set it up because the old “small form factor” desktop PC I had then — which was much bigger than my current mini-PC — ran even hotter than the modem does.)

So now I’m sitting at my desk using its keyboard and monitor with the laptop, like I did routinely with my previous 2-3 laptops before I got the mini-desktop. They’re both set up nearly the same, so there are only slight differences from my usual experience, and some slight setting changes I had to make for the desktop keyboard and touchpad.

I’m hoping the shop can identify and fix both the mini-PC’s problems. It’s possible they’re linked; the spontaneous reboots it’s doing now are similar to how it behaved in the early days before it just started freezing up. I’ve long suspected the issue might be with the hardware, and I hope that’s not a difficult or costly fix. I certainly hope they don’t have to reinstall the software from scratch or anything. We’ll see. At least the laptop is working well for me. The redundancy of two computers is nice to have, though (for situations like this one), so I hope I can get the mini-PC back with its problems fixed at last. Although my concern is that the increasingly frequent crashes could be a warning sign of a more catastrophic looming failure, since after all it’s a pretty cheap piece of hardware. Well, I’ll find out when they call.

Now I just have to convince my brain to stop worrying that my computer could crash at any moment.

Thoughts on Toho’s ZONE FIGHTER (1973)

Over a decade ago, in my overview of the Shōwa-era Godzilla movies, I mentioned that Toho produced a short-lived TV series known as Zone Fighter in which Godzilla, King Ghidorah, and Gigan made guest appearances, making it officially part of the Shōwa Godzilla continuity. I didn’t feel inclined to check it out then, but in subsequent years I’ve gotten much more invested in Japanese tokusatsu TV, so I finally got curious enough to check it out and fill in this gap in my Godzilla review series.

Zone Fighter is the English title for the series, whose real name is Ryūsei Ningen Zōn (usually translated as Zone the Meteor Man, although Ryūsei Ningen is used in insert song lyrics as an epithet for all three heroes individually, so I think the title is meant to be collective). It was Toho’s attempt at a knockoff of the popular Ultraman franchise from Tsuburaya Studios, which was founded by Eiji Tsuburaya, the co-creator of Godzilla and the father of the tokusatsu (special-effects) genre. It was also inspired by the popularity of Henshin Hero (Transforming Hero) series such as Kamen Rider, which had debuted two years earlier. Thus, it blended both human-scale and giant superhero action. Most toku series run for an entire year, around 50 episodes give or take, telling a complete story ending with the villains all killed off (or occasionally redeemed) and the heroes resuming a peaceful life. However, Zone Fighter was unsuccessful and was cancelled after 26 episodes, without a proper finale.

The series centers on the Zone Family, actually called that in English, Zōn Famirii instead of kazoku. They’re a family of refugees from the planet Peaceland (also in English, like most of the terminology used here and in similar shows), which was destroyed by the Garoga, an army of ruthless bug-eyed monsters with buckteeth and long floppy antennae, now bent on destroying Earth as well. The Zones have settled on Earth as the Sakimori family, three of whom can call out “Zone Fight Power!” (with a three-step arm move similar to Kamen Riders’ henshin poses) to transform into masked heroes in leotards, silver helmets, and balaclava-like veil-masks: 18-year-old brother Hikaru/Zone Fighter (Kazuya Aoyama as Hikaru, Tatsumi Nikamoto as ZF), 15/16-year-old sister Hotaru/Zone Angel (Kazumi Kitahara), and 7-year-old brother Akira/Zone Junior (Kenji Sato). They’re assisted by their parents Yoichiro/Zone Father (Shoji Nakayama) and Tsukiko/Zone Mother (Sachiko Kouizuki) and their pipe-smoking grandfather Raita/Zone Great (Shiro Amakusa), who don’t transform but assist with the technology in their secret basement — or at least Zone Father and Zone Great do, while Zone Mother is a typical middle-aged housewife. (The family is entirely assimilated into Japanese culture despite being nominally aliens.) There’s a hotheaded human ally introduced in episode 2, Takeru Jou (Hideaki Obara), who deduces the existence of the Garogas and knows the Sakimoris are opposed to them, but somehow doesn’t realize they’re also the Zone heroes. It’s typical of toku in that the heroes’ identities are secret to their allies but fully known to their enemies, which always seems quite backward to me. (The Sakimoris’ home is protected from Garoga attack by a force-field “Photon Barrier.”)

Zone Fighter, uniquely among the family, can also transform into a giant warrior by doing a different henshin pose (genuflecting with arms out to the sides) and calling “Zone Double Fight!” The giant ZF is a blatant Ultraman clone, right down to having a blue light on his body that blinks red when he runs low on power. (His suit actor, Kin’ichi Kusumi, played various Tsuburaya giant heroes including Mirrorman, Redman, and Ultraman Leo’s brother Astra, while the suit actor for the human-sized Zone Fighter, Tatsumi Nikamoto, played Ultraman Leo.) Unlike most Ultras, though, ZF has his family on hand to recharge him. In the first episode and the last half-dozen, Zones Angel and Junior board a flying craft called Smokey (because it’s concealed in a cloud when not in use) and launch a power capsule that ZF swaps out with the one in his helmet crest/horn; in between, it’s simplified to ZA and ZJ firing recharging beams from their own helmet crystals or from Smokey (though the maneuver is still called Zone Marker Change). I think they brought back the capsule version since it creates more suspense when the kaiju run interference to prevent Smokey from getting into range for the swap. In one case, when ZF was in space engaging King Ghidorah, Zone Great teleported the photon crystal that powered their home’s defensive shield to recharge ZF, but it turned out to be a ruse so that the Garoga could take them captive while ZF was away.

It’s never explained what the source of the Zones’ power is, beyond the implication that it’s connected to Peaceland’s advanced technology. In that case, though, it’s unclear why the collective population of Peaceland was unable to save their planet from being destroyed by the Garoga when a single Peacelandian family is able to defeat the Garoga’s schemes against Earth on a weekly basis.

Godzilla shows up four different times over the 26 episodes, assisting ZF when things get tough. The Zones are aware of his presence and occasionally just decide to call him for help, using pocket-sized robots called Zobots that they use to send recorded voice messages like rocket-propelled carrier pigeons, which seems pointless given that they can also be used as radios. Apparently, sometime between Godzilla vs. Gigan and this, Godzilla relocated from Monster Island to a cave near Tokyo (complete with a sliding door in the entrance, somehow), so he can arrive promptly when summoned. As for King Ghidorah and Gigan, they’re simply depicted as part of the Garogas’ contingent of Kyoju (Terror-Beasts), the kaiju that the Garogas keep on hand in their space station and launch to Earth in rocket capsules, even though the other Kyoju are the Garogas’ own creations. This is consistent with how KG and Gigan had been portrayed in the previous several movies, as monsters under the control of one group of invading aliens or another. Zone Fighter’s battle with King Ghidorah in episodes 5-6 ends with the three-headed dragon retreating for good, since he still needs to be alive in Destroy All Monsters, the chronologically last story in the Shōwa continuity. But Gigan meets his final fate at Zone Fighter’s hands (well, first Godzilla’s and then ZF’s, since apparently Gigan has the ninja power of resurrection, so ZF has to kill him more decisively after Godzilla wanders off).

What’s surprising about Godzilla’s first two appearances is how casually they’re treated. The episodes mention him in their titles and previews, but otherwise his appearances aren’t presented with any sense of occasion; he’s simply another weapon in the Zones’ arsenal to be called on when ZF is in a pinch. The third Godzilla episode does better, opening with a training scene between Zone Fighter and Godzilla, and introducing him with more ceremony later on by showing Goji emerging from his cave and running to ZF’s rescue, then coordinating with him in the fight as a full partner.

The original kaiju in the rest of the series are mostly quite freaky and imaginative designs, though a bit crude in construction, as many TV kaiju in the Showa era tended to be. Godzilla and the others seem a bit drab in comparison to their garish weirdness. Otherwise, though, I’m not too impressed by the show’s production values. A number of episodes, including those directed by Jun Fukuda (director of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Son of Godzilla, G vs. Gigan, G vs. Megalon, and G vs. Mechagodzilla), have cluttered, unclear fight scenes on both scales, with clumsy camera work and jerky cuts obscuring the action, and sometimes with dim lighting as well. Fukuda does six episodes in all, including the first two, while eight are directed by Godzilla’s co-creator and original director Ishiro Honda.

Sometimes the show gets pretty weird and silly. The giant battle in episode 13 features a combat move that’s both incredibly dumb and kind of clever at the same time. While battling an electrically charged monster he can’t touch, the giant Zone Fighter tears a tree trunk out of the ground, yells “Ryuusei Static Power!,” and… rubs it back and forth under his armpit for 15-20 seconds to charge it with static electricity, using it to short out the monster’s electric circuitry. So he came up with a creative (yet goofy) improvised attack, but he still felt the need to yell out a title for it (prefaced with “Ryuusei” like all his other giant-mode attacks). Then there was the Honda-directed 2-parter in episodes 18-19 where the Kyoju swallows a highly sensitive super-explosive, so ZF can’t hit it. So he tries to convince the monster to leave with a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors (which he wins handily because the monster’s flippers can only do “paper”), fencing with tree trunks, and a ring toss game, but the monster is a sore loser and refuses to go. In a jarring tonal shift, ZF ultimately defeats the monster quite brutally by blowing off its tail, arms, and head, which somehow doesn’t set off the explosive.

Zone Fighter has cheesy entertainment value if you have a taste for Shōwa-era tokusatsu, but I wouldn’t call it one of the better shows from that era. The best shows of the era sometimes had surprisingly thoughtful or character-driven stories or impressively stylish direction amid the cheesy silliness (particularly in the Ultraman franchise), but Zone Fighter is pretty by-the-numbers action with little character development and frequently mediocre execution. Indeed, the later episodes are often incoherent, with plot points forgotten mid-story and weird moments that seem like they were meant to be arty but just come off as nonsensical. It’s an interesting curiosity, but not much more.