Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 5

One week until Shore Leave!

Like the title says, there’s only one more week until the annual Shore Leave Convention, now at its new location at the Wyndham Lancaster Resort and Convention Center in Lancaster, PA, about sixty miles north-northeast of its old location near Baltimore. This is the first time in all my years of attending that we’ll be in a new location, and it’s bound to feel strange, but I look forward to discovering what the new hotel has to offer. Hopefully it will have better carpeting at the very least.

I was hoping the new location would be a bit closer to me, but “a bit” in this case is literally just a few miles. It’s actually a couple of dozen miles further from me as the crow flies, but the route is more direct, so it’s very slightly shorter. The main difference is that it won’t be practical for me to stay with my DC-area cousins the night before, but then, they’re out of town that weekend anyway. I’ll just have to stay in a motel overnight both ways, which means I won’t have to drive as long in a single day.

My publisher Danielle McPhail and I were hoping that my new collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories would be ready for release at the convention, like the other books we funded in the recent Kickstarter. However, cover artist Mike McPhail is determined to do justice to the cover and is putting extra care into it, which means it won’t be ready in time. Still, I’ll have other books for sale, including my other eSpec Books titles at their table and several of my recent Star Trek titles from the convention’s main book vendor, as well as my own personal supply at Meet the Pros. (Ideally, bring cash if you want to buy from me directly. I just learned that the old credit card-scanning system I used with my phone was discontinued, and I’ve applied for the replacement system, which will hopefully be up and running for me by next week, but I can’t be sure yet.)

Here’s my schedule of panels for the convention, though I don’t yet have the detailed panel descriptions from the final schedule pamphlet:

Fri 5:00 PM, Cornwall: Sci-Fi for Young People—Where is it?Fri 6:00 PM, New Holland: The MarvelsFri 10:00 PM, Wheatland: Meet the ProsSat 8:00 PM, Cornwall: Action Scenes – Fight Me!Sun 1:00 PM, Cornwall: eSpec Books Presents

I chose the YA panel and the Action Scenes panel as excuses to talk about Tangent Knights, which I’m always eager to promote.

The panels this year are slated at 50 minutes each, 5 minutes shorter than usual, to give people more time to find their way around the new hotel. For my part, I’ve bookmarked the hotel floor plan maps page on my phone’s browser for easy reference. The Wheatland room for Meet the Pros looks surprisingly small on the map, but the hotel’s site says it can hold 50 people in a “U-shape,” which I’m guessing is how our tables will be arranged, and there are only 36 author guests. I think a more compact arrangement will be better than being spread out on the sides of a long hallway, as long as the room is well enough ventilated. (I got my COVID vaccine booster last week, but good indoor ventilation is crucial.)

As far as other preparations go, I bought a new suitcase to replace my old one whose zipper broke, after trying to go without a suitcase last year and realizing how hard it is to have to carry everything instead of having a rolling case. I got a “trip check” for my car yesterday, and it checked out, though they had to replace a brake light. When I scheduled it the day before, the earliest open slots were the day before I had to leave, but I asked them to notify me if there was an earlier cancellation, and fortunately one opened up within hours.

Anyway, if all goes as planned, I’ll see some of you next week in Lancaster!

(Screen) saving grace?

My readers might remember that the desktop mini-PC I bought a while back has a strange tendency to freeze up if I leave it unattended for somewhere between 40-60 minutes — the power light is on, but the screen is dark and it doesn’t respond to keyboard input, pressing the power button does nothing, and the only way to unfreeze it is to unplug it or stick a paper clip in the reset hole. I never got around to taking it into the shop, since then I might be without it for days, and I learned to manage it just by making sure I touched a key or the trackpad periodically, or shut it down if I was going to be out for a significant length of time. (I also had to give up hibernating it, since it sometimes freezes then as well. It boots up fast enough that I don’t really need to hibernate it anyway, although it shuts down a bit too fast so I have to manually close programs first.)

Well, I think I may have found a partial fix, or at least a way to untether me from having to watch the computer so closely. I know that I can play a video for more than an hour without touching the keyboard, because the computer interprets the video stream as activity/input. So it occurred to me to wonder if turning on the screen saver could have the same effect. I wasn’t entirely convinced by my own logic, but I tried it as a Hail-Mary pass, and so far it seems it might actually be working. I’ve let it go nearly an hour on four or five occasions, nearly an hour and a half once, and about 1:45 once, and it hasn’t frozen. I’ve held off on assuming it worked, since I don’t think it freezes every time, but six or seven times without a freeze is enough to make me guardedly confident.

If this holds up, I’ll be able to spend more time reading or watching DVDs on my TV without having to come over and nudge the computer, and to take longer walks without having to keep an eye on my watch. And the screen saver image I chose (the one called “Mystify,” with colored line segments swooping around the screen and leaving trails) is rather pretty. (I’m surprised Windows 12 doesn’t include the classic “warp stars” animation as a screen-saver option.)

One acid test remains, though I hope it won’t come to pass anytime soon. There have been two occasions since buying the computer when the internet has gone down due to my building’s antiquated phone lines, and I discovered the second time that the PC seems to freeze sooner when there’s no internet connection, though I don’t understand why. So just in case, I’ve set the screen saver to kick in at 35 minutes. It may not work, but hopefully it won’t have to in the foreseeable future.

–

In other news, I decided to drive way up to that store that I was told might be able to laser-weld my cracked blue/UV-blocking sunglasses. And it turned out I should’ve called first, since the guy took one look at them and said “I can’t weld those, they’re plastic.” The only help he could offer was to suggest trying superglue, but that wasn’t something he did there, so the whole long drive was wasted. Except I stopped at the grocery store on the way back and bought some superglue, and so far it seems to be holding.

Although I decided to use those sunglasses as my backup pair, keeping them in the car in case they’re needed. I wasn’t too satisfied with the replacement pair of blue-block sunglasses I bought, since they didn’t fit well over my regular glasses and I didn’t think they worked quite as well as the old pair. I decided one day to try the backup pair I had in the car, a wraparound visor type designed to go over glasses, and I found it was a newer, better pair than I thought it was, a replacement I must have gotten at one point for the ones I thought I still had, though I have no memory of when I got it. Anyway, its lenses aren’t amber, just gray, but it seems to block glare about as well as the old blue-blockers, or at least better than the new pair, and it fits much better over my glasses than either of the blue-blockers. So I returned the new pair and have gone on using the wraparounds. Which means I can finally see the blue sky again, not to mention the blue LED on my car’s solar trickle charger.

Though next weekend is the annual Shore Leave Convention, so I’ll see how well those sunglasses work on a long, long drive…

Success! All Kickstarter goals met!

The eSpec Books “Something for Everyone” Kickstarter campaign is now over, and we came in just over the $6500 level that unlocked the final stretch goal, limited-edition Kickstarter-exclusive autographed hardcovers of all seven books plus two more (the ones that two of the books are sequels to), as pledge rewards and add-ons for our backers.

I think this is the first Kickstarter campaign I’ve been involved in that didn’t have any unmet stretch goals left at the end. It was looking iffy there as late as yesterday, but as usual, we got a surge of pledges in the final hours and came in just over the top.

(EDIT: The campaign is set up for Late Pledging, so it’s not too late to become a backer if you want the hardcovers or any of the other goodies!)

Unfortunately, cover artist Mike McPhail didn’t manage to get the cover for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories done before the campaign ended, since he had a lot of other covers to get done. But that will happen soon, and hopefully it won’t be long before I can reveal the cover.

Thanks so much to all our Kickstarter backers!

eSpec excerpt: “Though Worlds Divide Us”

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

Today, as our Kickstarter enters its final hours, eSpec Books has posted an excerpt from Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, which is my complete flash-fiction piece “Though Worlds Divide Us,” originally published online in Amazing Stories.

“Aleyara’s Descent” author reading now up!

We’re into the final 36 hours of eSpec Books’s Kickstarter campaign, and as a taste of what we have to offer, eSpec has posted my author reading of the first scene of “Aleyara’s Descent” on their YouTube page:

“Aleyara’s Descent” author reading

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the video/audio sync and Danielle had to make it audio-only, which is strange, because the original video works fine for me. It’s a shame, since this was my first recording on my new, higher-definition webcam, so you could’ve finally seen me clearly.

Anyway, I had a great deal of fun recording this one, and I hope it comes through in the audio.

I literally just saw the pledge amount jump up as I watched on the Kickstarter page:

At this point, we’re only about a thousand dollars away from unlocking the limited-edition hardcovers! Can we make it by tomorrow evening? You can make it happen!

“They Also Serve” unlocked! Into the home stretch!

The eSpec 10th-anniversary Kickstarter campaign has surpassed $5000, which means my Troubleshooter short story “They Also Serve” has now been unlocked as a bonus for all backers donating $7 and above, along with Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel Guilt in Innocence (both as digital copies).

With four days left, there are still several more stretch goal bonuses we hope to reach, including special autographed hardcover editions of all seven books in the campaign, including my own Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories. We’re only about $1300 away from unlocking that bonus as of this writing! Can we make it by Wednesday evening? With your support, we can!

EDIT: Adding this clarification from my editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail, courtesy of Facebook: “The hardcovers will only be available through this campaign, and they will include bonus content not found anywhere else, but we only have four days to make it happen and $1300 to go. To let you know how limited edition these are, we generally only produce between 30 or 40 copies of these campaign exclusives.”

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 2

Continuing my reviews of the BBC’s complete (or nearly complete) 1978-85 series of performances of William Shakespeare’s plays, we reach the second season, aired from 1979-80. This season ended with the Derek Jacobi/Patrick Stewart Hamlet which I covered here back in 2010, so I’ll skip that one here.

Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2

This duology, regarded as one of the highlights of Shakespeare’s career, is a direct sequel to Richard II, which was performed in season 1. There are a few characters returning from that play, but only Jon Finch was available to reprise the role of Henry Bolingbroke/King Henry IV. Bruce Purchase, a big-voiced performer who was the Captain of “The Pirate Planet” in Doctor Who and the chieftain Gola in Blake’s 7: “The Keeper,” replaces David Swift as the Earl of Northumberland, an ally of Henry’s in R2 who rebels against him in H4. Northumberland’s son Henry “Hotspur” Percy, a minor role in R2 but one of the leads in H4 Part 1, was played in R2 by Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett’s original suit performer), who was terrible in the role, so it’s fortunate that he’s replaced here by Tim Pigott-Smith (seen last season as Angelo in Measure for Measure), who’s a standout as the hotheaded but sympathetic Hotspur.

Unfortunately, Finch is much worse this time as Henry. In R2, Henry seemed like a nobler figure than the weak and selfish king he deposed, yet here, Finch plays him like a melodrama villain who’s constantly wringing or washing his hands, and gives a very bad performance, matching the stereotype of a Shakespearean ham actor bellowing his lines bombastically rather than putting any honest emotion in them. Even when he’s supposed to be feeble and on the verge of death in Part II, Finch is declaiming to the rafters and chewing the scenery. It’s an odd change. Finch’s performance aside, though, the play itself justifies the character change. I’d been puzzled in R2 that Henry claimed he was only rebelling to get his lands back but then ended up deposing Richard. Here, that’s actually the root cause of the rebellion led by his former allies, who feel betrayed that his humble pretense turned out to be just a ploy to win sympathy and support for his true goal of usurping the throne — though he still maintains in Part II that that’s not the case. But it fits with the big speech Henry gives his son Prince Hal (David Gwillim) in Part I, where he talks about how best to present oneself as a king to win people’s admiration, showing that he’s very concerned with reputation and manipulating public opinion.

Hal, the future Henry V, is best known for his friendship with Sir John Falstaff, the dissolute, drunken knight who’s perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous comedic character. Falstaff is played here by Anthony Quayle (Lawrence of Arabia), a prominent Shakespearean actor who was known for his Falstaff on stage. His version is more doddering and less jolly than I tend to envision the character, and he takes some liberties with the exact wording of Falstaff’s lines, but he’s very effective in the role — especially at the end when, after two plays’ worth of disreputable antics, he gets put in his place by the new-minted King Henry V. Interestingly, Falstaff is the only character in H4 who delivers his soliloquies directly to the camera, putting him in the class of those comedy characters who can break the fourth wall. (At least in modern terms; in the original performances, I believe, Shakespearean soliloquies and asides were routinely directed to the audience.) One of those soliloquies, I’d forgotten, is the source of the maxim “The better part of valor is discretion,” as Falstaff’s rationalization for running from battle.

Honestly, I find the structure of this duology less than ideal. It basically alternates between scenes of royals dealing with politics, war, and succession and scenes of Falstaff engaged in debauchery or low comedy, both with and without Prince Hal. Falstaff’s scenes, particularly in Part II (which seems to have piled them on even more heavily in response to the character’s popularity in Part I), are so long and self-indulgent that it eats into what should be the central plot of Henry IV worrying whether his dissolute son can mature into a worthy heir. Father and son only get one big scene together in each part. Also, most of the Hal/Falstaff material is in Part I, and they only share one scene early in Part II before they go their separate ways, which diminishes the impact of the final scene where Falstaff tries to ply on his old friendship with the new king and gets snubbed. It’s unknown how far apart the plays premiered, but audiences for Part II would have to remember Part I pretty well for the ending to have its full impact.

Aside from Pigott-Smith and Purchase, there are several Doctor Who veterans in this one. Clive Swift, who plays Hotspur’s uncle Thomas Percy (the instigator of the rebellion), appeared in both the classic series (“Revelation of the Daleks”) and the modern one (“Voyage of the Damned”). There are two veterans of “The Robots of Death” — Rob Edwards (Henry’s younger son Prince John) and David Bailie (the “Second Carrier” in Part II). Brenda Bruce (Mistress Quickly the tavern-keeper) was Tilda in “Paradise Towers.” Gordon Gostelow (Bardolph) was the leader of “The Space Pirates.” In Part II, another “Pirate Planet” veteran, Ralph Michael, plays the Lord Chief Justice.

One bit I was curious about: There’s a scene in Part I where Mortimer (Robert Morris) converses with and is sung to by his wife (Sharon Morgan), who speaks only in Welsh, which her husband doesn’t speak a word of (how does that work?). Shakespeare’s text only gives stage directions like “The Lady speaks again in Welsh” and “Here the lady sings a Welsh song” without specifying the words. So I wondered what the production’s source was for the Welsh dialogue spoken here, and how other productions handled it. Looking into it, I found this article about the texts the RSC has used for the Welsh lines and song. Apparently there isn’t a standard text and various ones have been used. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BBC used the RSC translation, though.

Henry V

This play is probably much better-known than its predecessors, with multiple famous speeches like “Once more unto the breach” and “We few, we mighty few, we band of brothers.” But it’s very much a sequel to the previous two, even three history plays, since it’s largely the story of Henry trying to transcend his reputation as a juvenile wastrel and prove himself a capable king. Yet it’s hard, to modern eyes, to see Henry as sympathetic when he’s the aggressor in the war against France, invading it and slaughtering thousands of its people merely because he feels he’s entitled to rule it by hereditary claim. His soliloquies about bearing the heavy responsibility of war and lamenting the need to send so many brave men to their deaths are hard to swallow when he’s the one who chose to throw their lives away for his own power and pride, and when he nobly and valiantly bullies and terrorizes the French into surrendering and handing their princess over to him in marriage. Essentially, he’s no better than his father, using force to seize power. (Granted, the French denied his family’s claim to the throne based on sexism, since it descended through a daughter in the absence of a son, but that doesn’t make it any better to assert the claim through armed conquest.)

Henry is an ambiguous figure, too. Sometimes he’s painted as a thoughtful and compassionate king, at other times self-entitled and capricious, with hints of Falstaff’s old drinking buddy peeking through. In one famous scene (perhaps most famous to my blog’s audience through Captain Picard and Data’s holodeck performance of it at the start of TNG: “The Defector”), Henry goes among his soldiers in disguise to connect with them, yet when one of them questions the king’s choice to sacrifice their lives for him, Henry gets all defensive about how a king doesn’t have to answer to his subjects, and then he plays a mean trick on the soldier who dissed him. Overall, the play is known for its rousing patriotism and celebration of England’s martial glory, but it’s apparently an open question among critics whether Shakespeare was being sincere or satirical. I’m inclined to suspect the latter, but that could be my biases talking.

This production leans toward the sincere side, with David Gwillim playing Henry V far less bombastically than Finch’s Henry IV, with much more nuance, humor, and self-deprecation. Interestingly, “Once more unto the breach” is staged less as a rousing battle cry and more as an attempt to convince a weary band of soldiers to give it one more try.

Falstaff is present in the play, but not in the flesh; his one action here is dying offstage, with his friends (most returning from H4) declaring that it was Hal’s rejection of him that killed him, another bit of ambiguity that makes Shakespeare’s Henry V less than perfectly heroic. Falstaff’s shadow continues to loom over the other characters, though the comedy role is largely taken over by his associate Pistol (Bryan Pringle) and a Welsh captain named Fluellen (Tim Wylton), an uneducated man who fancies himself an expert on military history, among others, though none of them are as effective as Anthony Quayle’s Falstaff.

This play is heavily driven by narration, as a Chorus (Alec McCowen) apologizes to the audience for the inability of a stage play to capture the grandeur of historic battles and sea voyages and pleads with them to use their imaginations to fill in the scenes he describes. (I’m envisioning the Globe Theatre’s audience for previous plays yelling out the equivalent of modern social-media commentary about inadequate visual effects, prompting these pleas in response.) Partly for that reason, this production abandons the realism the series strove for up to now in favor of a more stylized production, with the Chorus interacting with the players to bring about continuous, almost Monty-Pythonesque transitions between one scene and the next. Aside from the Chorus, several characters face the camera and address the audience this time, including Pistol and his “Boy” (John Fowler), a squire who makes some wry observations about his master and the soldiers from a low-level perspective, and is then unceremoniously killed off-camera.

In addition to returning characters from H4, there are a number of Doctor Who vets in this one. Trevor Baxter, beloved as Professor Litefoot in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” and its Jago & Litefoot audio-drama spinoff, plays the Archbishop of Canterbury in the first act, opposite the Bishop of Ely played by John Abineri, who was in four different Who serials and a Blake’s 7 episode as well as playing the mystical Herne the Hunter in the 1984-6 Robin Hood series Robin of Sherwood. Julian Glover, whom we saw last season in Henry VIII, is back as the Constable of France. Robert Ashby (the stage name of Rashid Suhrawardy), the Borad in DW: “Timelash,” is the Earl of Salisbury. There’s also Keith Drinkel (“Time-Flight”) as the horse-obsessed Dauphin of France, John Bryans (“The Creature from the Pit”) as the Duke of Bourbon, and Carl Forgione (“Planet of the Spiders,” “Ghost Light”) as Rambures. Representing Star Wars, we’ve got Biggs Darklighter himself, Garrick Hagon (who was also in DW: “The Mutants” and was the mugging victim in the opening scenes of Tim Burton’s Batman), as the Herald sent by the French army to speak with Henry in two or three scenes.

Whereas H4 had a scene partly in unspecified Welsh (which may just have been Welsh-sounding gibberish originally), Henry V has multiple scenes of scripted French dialogue, though not necessarily good French — notably a scene where Princess Katherine (the luminous Jocelyne Boisseau) tries to learn English from her attendant Alice (Anna Quayle, no relation to Anthony), delivered almost entirely in French except for the few English words she and Alice mangle, with the punchline being that Katherine is scandalized that the words “foot” and “count” (meaning gown) are near-homophones for obscene words in French (you can probably guess). There’s also a scene of Pistol trying to exact a ransom to spare a French-speaking prisoner, and the climactic scene where Henry clumsily woos Katherine through the language barrier. The BritBox subtitles unfortunately just say “[speaking foreign language]” at these points, though fortunately my Riverside has the translations in its footnotes. It’s interesting that Shakespeare wrote nearly an entire scene in French, given that I’ve always thought of him as the quintessential English playwright who played a key role in inventing Modern English. I wonder how well his original audience could’ve followed the “language lesson” scene. Although the greater oddity is that all the other French characters in this production deliver their dialogue with flawless English accents.

Twelfth Night

This is one case where I can be certain I did see this production before, since my college papers contain a 1990 essay I wrote for Shakespeare class in which I discuss it specifically. But that was so long ago that I remember no specifics.

This is another of Shakespeare’s gender-bending comedies where a woman dresses as a boy and gets involved in a romantic triangle that reads as really gay to modern eyes. Viola (Felicity Kendal) is shipwrecked, believing her twin brother Sebastian (Michael Thomas) dead, while he’s washed up separately believing the reverse. The play mostly follows her as, for vague reasons, she impersonates a boy named Cesario to get employed in the court of Duke Orsino (Clive Arrindell) and ends up being sent to woo Olivia (Sinéad Cusack) on his behalf even though Viola is secretly in love with Orsino, only for Olivia to fall in love with Viola-as-Cesario. Then Sebastian shows up separately and mistaken identities ensue because the siblings are supposedly near-identical (even though they obviously aren’t in this production), and Viola bizarrely doesn’t realize her brother’s alive even after his rescuer Antonio (Maurice Roëves) mistakes her for him and calls her Sebastian. It makes even less sense than usual for Shakespeare’s gender-bending mistaken-identity comedies.

Meanwhile, Olivia’s drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch (Robert Hardy), sort of an off-brand Falstaff, conspires with her maid Maria (Annette Crosbie) and others to play a mean prank on Olivia’s puritanical, pompous steward Malvolio (Alec McCowen, whom we just saw as the Chorus in Henry V), tricking him into thinking Olivia’s in love with him and getting him thrown in a cell as a madman, which seems rather vicious. There’s also a fool named Feste (Trevor Peacock, who will be seen at the very end of this series as the title character in Titus Andronicus), who interacts with the various characters making witty commentary and singing songs.

It’s all kind of random, which may have been the intention of naming the play after the Twelfth Night festival, which was a rowdy event in Shakespeare’s time. What stands out is Felicity Kendal’s terrific, lively performance as Viola, who carries the majority of the story and is quite fun to watch even though she’s not remotely convincing as a boy. (She initially says she’ll impersonate a eunuch, but others later talk to “Cesario” as if they expect “him” to grow up and acquire masculine attributes. Sometimes I think the Bard needed more rewriting to catch these inconsistencies. Or maybe the texts we have are assembled from different drafts.) She’s certainly much better than Arrindell, who’s never all that convincing at playing Orsino’s lovelorn melancholy. Interestingly, she plays her wooing of Olivia as if she’s actually falling for her, but maybe that was just Viola’s performance on her master’s behalf, since Viola’s affections remain firmly on Orsino — who expresses strong attachment to “Cesario” and praises “his” very feminine features, the same features that Olivia falls in love with, and do you see what I mean about how gay this all seems? The characters in these plays always talk a good game about observing strict heterosexual relationship norms, but their attractions and interplay suggest otherwise. Especially when you’ve got Antonio talking about how much he loves Sebastian, in a way that seems deeper than the usual talk of manly love that was common in these plays.

In my college paper, I compared McCowen’s performance as Malvolio to Donald Sinden’s interpretation of the role in a 1969 RSC production that Sinden wrote about in the book Players of Shakespeare, a set of essays by various Shakespearean actors discussing their interpretations of different characters. (I was drawn to the book in the university library because it included an essay by Patrick Stewart discussing playing Shylock.) While Sinden described playing Malvolio as a humorless ex-military martinet and described the ways he derived humor from the character’s cold rigidity, McCowen plays him as more prissy and vain; at times, he reminded me a little of Robert Llewellyn as Kryten in Red Dwarf. In my 1990 essay, I was very unimpressed with McCowen and found his take less well-developed. Now, it seems adequate for what it is, although it does seem that McCowen doesn’t do enough to establish why Malvolio (whose name literally means “ill will”) is so unpleasant a person as to invite the retribution Sir Toby inflicts, making him seem more like an innocent victim of arbitrary cruelty.

In the SF/fantasy veterans’ tally, we’ve got Robert Hardy, who played Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies. Felicity Kendal and Annette Crosbie have both been in the modern Doctor Who, the former in “The Unicorn and the Wasp” and the latter in “The Eleventh Hour.” Maurice Roëves was the mercenary Stotz in Doctor Who‘s classic “The Caves of Androzani” and the Romulan captain in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “The Chase,” opposite Patrick Stewart, who’d appear in Hamlet two episodes after this.

The Tempest

This is probably the Shakespeare play that most qualifies as a genre work in its own right, with Prospero being an outright wizard using his magical staff and robes to control the elements, summon spirits, manipulate minds, and otherwise engineer the events of the play, as he, the exiled Duke of Milan, brings the enemies who deposed him to the island where he has lived for the past dozen years and uses his manipulations and illusions to obtain justice, albeit a more forgiving justice than many of Shakespeare’s protagonists would settle for — and at the same time marries off his daughter Miranda, whom he’s raised on the island since she was three and who’s never met another human. Of course, the play is well-known as the inspiration for Forbidden Planet, adding to its genre cred.

Prospero is played by Michael Hordern, who was Lord Capulet in Romeo and Juliet last season. As I mentioned then, I knew him as the voice of Gandalf in the BBC’s 1981 radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings, so he’s a fitting choice to play the wizard Prospero. He does a good job playing Prospero as a basically benevolent figure, though I think he downplays the character’s manipulativeness and the moral ambiguity of how he treats his slaves Ariel and Caliban.

Prospero’s daughter Miranda is played by Pippa Guest (whose only genre credit is a guest role in one episode of Gerry Anderson’s Space Precinct), and her love interest Ferdinand is played by her cousin Christopher Guard, who was in Doctor Who‘s “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” as well as playing Frodo in a different Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi’s animated feature version. Both Guards are blandly pleasant but unremarkable in their roles. (I guess you could say the Guards didn’t seize me. They should’ve recast them — it would’ve been a changing of the Guards. Though if they’d put on this performance at Buckingham Palace… okay, I’ll stop now.) Compared to Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet, Pippa Guest’s Miranda is quite sexless even in her wide-eyed admiration for Ferdinand’s beauty. Then again, the dialogue establishes that Miranda is only 15, so I guess that’s okay (though Guard was 26 at the time).

Prospero’s sprite Ariel is played by David Dixon, who was Ford Prefect in the BBC’s live-action TV miniseries adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and who does have an unnerving, elfin quality about him. Director John Gorrie chooses to have Dixon spend the entire play wearing nothing but a tiny loincloth and golden body paint, an… interesting choice. In the scene where Ariel’s subordinate spirits bring an illusory banquet to the shipwreck survivors, even though the dialogue describes them as “of monstrous shape,” they’re played by a troupe of male dancers as nearly naked as Ariel and dancing rather sensually. (I can only assume Miranda has never seen them, or she wouldn’t have found the fully clothed Ferdinand so unprecedentedly intriguing.) The female spirits that show up for Prospero’s pageant later are, unfortunately, wearing substantially more. I hate a double standard…

The production uses a fair amount of visual effects to depict Ariel’s antics and the other spirits’ appearances and disappearances, though they’re pretty basic dissolves, split-screens, and video double exposures to make the “invisible” Ariel translucent. There’s one scene where Ariel is singing (his “Full fathom five” song, IIRC) and his superimposed image is out of sync with his voice, so one or the other must have been either prerecorded or added in post-production.

The monstrous Caliban, also appropriately, is played by Warren Clarke, who was “Dim,” one of Alex’s droogs, in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. He’s made up as a hairy beast-man with a ridged spine (concealing the zipper, I guess), even though some of the other characters’ dialogue descriptions of Caliban imply a fishlike appearance. Clarke does a pretty good job playing Caliban, a complex character who’s sympathetic in some ways but villainous in others (for instance, I’d forgotten that apparently the reason Prospero hates Caliban is because the latter once tried to rape Miranda). Some aspects of Caliban come off as racist in conception, since the play was inspired by an account of a shipwreck in Bermuda and his name is somewhat derived from “Carib.” The island is an ambiguous mix of Mediterranean and Caribbean elements, but Caliban, despite being nominally the offspring of a witch and Satan, is also portrayed somewhat like a native islander, monstrous to European eyes because of his race. It’s kind of disquieting, but it’s tempered by the ambiguity of Caliban’s portrayal, the most striking aspect being that Shakespeare gives him one of the most beautiful speeches he ever wrote (“Be not afear’d, the isle is full of noises”).

Stephano, the drunken butler that Caliban mistakes for a god, is played by Nigel Hawthorne, a noted stage actor whose main genre role was in a movie he detested, as Dr. Cocteau in Demolition Man. Here, he only has to play a comedy drunk, and is fine at it. His sidekick, the jester Trinculo, is Andrew Sachs, who’s best known as Manuel from Fawlty Towers, so he certainly has the credentials for a comedy part. Sachs also voiced the villain Skagra in the 2003 animated webcast remake of the incomplete Doctor Who serial “Shada” by Douglas Adams, as well as the professor character from the radio adaptation of Adams’s novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was partly a reworking of “Shada.”

The play’s other plot involves the villain Antonio (Derek Godfrey), Prospero’s brother who usurped his dukedom and exiled him, conniving with Sebastian (Alan Rowe, who was in four different Doctor Who serials from 1967 to 1980) to assassinate his own brother, King Alonso of Naples (David Waller) — a plot that Ariel foils quite easily, so there’s no real suspense. Alonso and the conspirators don’t make much impression, nor does Alonso’s benevolent advisor and Prospero’s old friend Gonzalo (John Nettleton, who was in Who: “Ghost Light”), despite Gonzalo getting a big and somewhat random soliloquy about the kind of paradise he’d create if he were king.

Prospero’s “revenge” on his enemies is rather vague, just giving them the runaround with a few illusions, exposing their ill intent, forgiving them, and then getting his kingdom back — giving up his magic and manumitting his supernatural slaves at the end, since I guess the use of sorcery even a benevolent character was seen as morally ambiguous at best. It could be justified, perhaps, as the only way he could have survived and raised his daughter on an otherwise uninhabited island, and to bring his enemies to where their crimes could be exposed and justice done, but afterward, it was necessary for him to renounce such ungodly powers before returning to civilized society. Still, the epilogue Prospero delivers to the audience (or to the camera, here) is essentially asking them to pardon his crimes and set him free to return to Naples (though on another level it’s the lead actor asking for a round of applause from the audience). It furthers my sense that this production may have made Prospero too kindly and benevolent, that it might have been better to play him with more ambiguity. Really, most of the performances here could’ve been deeper or more nuanced.

–

Since I already covered Hamlet on this blog, that wraps up season 2. Season 3 would get a new producer and be heavier on comedies, but would feature a number of returning actors as well as a few new notable faces, including a Watson, a Skywalker, and a Python.

Kickstarter — one week left!

We’re in the final week of eSpec Books’ Kickstarter for seven new titles by seven authors, including my collection Aleyara’s Decent and Other Stories:

As I write this, we’ve surpassed the 100-backers milestone and the bonuses that unlocked, and we’re less than $400 away from unlocking our next stretch goal, at which point all backers pledging $7 or more will receive a digital copy of my Troubleshooter vignette “They Also Serve” and a digital copy of Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel Guilt in Innocence! Even so, that will bring us less than halfway through the list of stretch goals, including both reprints and original stories, and hardcover editions of a couple of the books if we hit our maximum target. In my past experience, Kickstarter campaigns slow down in the middle but can pick up speed considerably in the final week, so I’m still hopeful that we’ll make some major gains before the campaign ends. Keep in mind that the more funding we get, the more the writers will get paid, aside from all the goodies the contributors get.

As a taste of what we have to offer, the eSpec Books Author Reading Series has posted a video of Keith R.A. DeCandido reading an excerpt from his new book The Adventures of Bram Gold: Feat of Clay. I’ve also recorded a video for the series, reading the opening scene of my collection’s title story “Aleyara’s Descent,” which I had enormous fun doing, and which I recorded on my new webcam that actually has decent resolution. Hopefully you’ll get to see that one soon.

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In the continuing saga of my robot vacuum cleaner and its difficulty getting back onto my living room carpet once it’s gone into the hallway, I decided this week to try blocking the vacuum with a large poster tube I have that’s just about exactly as wide as the hallway threshold, using my shoes to wedge it from behind so the vacuum doesn’t push it out (which also gets my shoes out of its way for vacuuming). It worked pretty well, but after 20-odd minutes when I decided to take the tube away and let the vacuum move into the rest of the apartment, wouldn’t you know it, it couldn’t find its way out of the living room! I eventually had to nudge it in the right direction with my feet.

I could’ve just taken manual control with the phone app or remote, but I guess I wanted to leave it in auto mode so the app could time how long it lasted. It seemed like the battery was draining faster than it did at first, but it ended up running for a whole hour, which is a little less than before but still pretty close. I wonder if maybe letting it run all the way down below 10 percent is bad for battery life. I gather that with modern batteries, it’s generally best not to let them fall below 20 percent.

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Meanwhile, I seem to be adjusting to my new glasses, though it took a few days to get the hang of how best to position them and for my eyes to adjust to their focus. I’m still thinking of driving up to that place that can repair my old sunglasses, but I won’t be doing so this week, since Cincinnati is having a heat wave with temperatures in the 90s all week. Which is a good incentive to stay inside and refocus on the story I’m writing.

Author Spotlight interview from eSpec Books

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT – CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT

Of books, robots, and new stuff

The eSpec Kickstarter is now less than $100 away from unlocking the next stretch goal, but it’s slowed down lately.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/e-specbooks/something-for-everyone?ref=card

In my limited experience, they do usually slow down after the first few days and then pick up toward the end, but there’s still so much cool stuff you can unlock! Also, the larger the total sum, the more we authors get paid after publisher expenses are met. Since it’ll be split among seven of us, we’re naturally hoping for a sizeable amount.

Right now, I’m in the middle of proofreading the galleys for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories. It’s surprising how quickly it’s all coming together, thanks to the hard work of our editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail. Meanwhile, Mike McPhail is hard at work on the covers, so I’m still waiting to see mine.

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My first time letting my robot vacuum run automatically on schedule worked fairly well, though I did have to take manual control once when it balked at re-entering the living room again — clearly, trying to darken the metal carpet-edge strip with a Sharpie did not stop it from seeing it as an obstacle. It’s still sweeping up an impressive amount of hair and dust, though. I think next time I’m going to stop it after half an hour and see how full the receptacle is. If it gets full too fast, that might reduce its efficacy later in its run, in which case it might not be worth letting it run the full 60-70 minutes each time.

Incidentally, this time I did let it find its way back to the charger on its own when it entered recharge mode, and it did the same as before, just crawling blindly around the edges until it got within range to spot the charger. I’d been wondering if the metal bookcase was blocking a radio signal or something, but it just struck me that it may be an infrared signal needing line of sight.

Oddly, I got two very similarly phrased letters in the physical mail today, both claiming to be from the vacuum manufacturer’s customer service but from two different addresses, one in Texas and one in California. They both offered me a free pack of replacement brushes and filters as well as an opportunity to test a new mopping robot for free (useless for me, given that I have less than 100 square feet of tile floor). They give two different e-mail addresses too, both with the same weirdly generic numerical domain, though a web search shows said domain to be valid. The most suspicious thing is that one letter says the brushes and HEPA filter should be replaced “once two month” [sic] and the other says once every month. Not only do they disagree, but the vacuum’s phone app sets the brushes’ and filter’s life expectancy at 150 hours, which would only translate to 2 months if you ran it all the way down twice a day, seven days a week. As for one month, given that it runs a maximum of some 70 minutes on a charge and takes at least 4 hours to recharge (per its specs), you could get a theoretical maximum of 144 hours in 31 days if you continually restarted it immediately after it fully recharged.

So I’m thinking this is probably some kind of scam, the result of some bot tracking my Amazon activity or something. I’m not sure what scammers would get out of it, though, unless the offer to send me free stuff is just a hook to get something else out of me. I might have been less suspicious if they’d only sent me one letter, so thank goodness for whatever glitch in the system led to me getting two at the same time.

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My new glasses finally came in early this past week. The prescription seems fine — not that different from my old pair, it seems, but with more intact lens coatings — but the frame wasn’t well-adjusted at first, since I wasn’t good at communicating what I needed to the person in the store, and it took a while wearing them to figure out what was wrong. Yesterday, I had occasion to go to a mall where another of their stores was located, and I got them readjusted there. I had the idea to show them my old glasses as a guide for how to adjust the new ones — which may not have been a perfect idea, since the old ones hadn’t been adjusted in a while, but it’s still better than it was. I think they’ll work out okay. I’ve decided to keep the old glasses in my car as an emergency backup, replacing the older, monofocal pair that had previously filled the role.

Meanwhile, the UV/blue-blocking sunglasses I’ve had for nearly four decades, since my melanoma treatment in high school that made me hypersensitive to UV for a time, have developed a crack in one of the temple hinges. When I ordered my new glasses last week, I asked if they could fix the sunglasses, and they recommended a place at a more distant mall that can laser-weld cracked frames while you wait. I decided instead to buy a replacement pair online, but the replacements don’t fit as well over my regular glasses. Maybe I should’ve looked into some visor type of thing meant to go over glasses instead. Still, given how long the old sunglasses have been with me (although there was a span of some years when I didn’t use them because my eyeglass frames at the time were too big), I kind of feel it’s worth trying to repair them. Looking into it, it seems there are some mail-in eyeglass repair services, so I might look into one of those.

Anyway, the reason I went to that mall yesterday was to return the poorly fitting shoes I bought three weeks before and get a replacement pair. I tried tightening the shoelaces as much as possible to deal with the toe-chafing problem, but I noticed my ankles and shins got sore when I walked, and I realized these shoes had much less heel support than I’m used to and weren’t very good for walking in. So I resolved to return them, if I could. The store’s website said you couldn’t get a full refund for shoes that had been worn, but was ambiguous about whether you could get a partial refund. I asked their customer service and was told their might be exceptions to the no-return policy and that I should get a manager to inspect them and make an assessment.

I cleaned the dirt off the soles the night before and took the shoes back in, expecting that at best, I’d get partial credit off the price of the replacement shoes I bought. Indeed, the manager said they normally don’t take back shoes that have been worn, but after I mentioned my e-mail exchange with customer service, she said she’d take them back this one time only and gave me credit on a store gift card. To my surprise, she refunded the full amount — and the replacement pair I ended up buying cost exactly the same, so it was a one-for-one exchange. So that turned out even better than I hoped.

This time, I asked a store clerk to recommend good walking shoes, and she directed me toward the same brand I’ve usually worn for the past couple of decades, which I guess makes sense. The pair I got definitely has much better heel support, and I’m satisfied with them so far, though I’m concerned they may be a tiny bit snug around the toes. They’re a fairly unflamboyant black and gray, and the brand name is not as prominently displayed as it was on the more expensive models. (Seriously, if companies want you to display their brand name on your clothes, shouldn’t they pay you for the service, instead of the other way around?)

So now I have new glasses, new sunglasses, and new (again) shoes. I also bought a new umbrella at the same time as the sunglasses, and on the trip where I ordered the glasses and bought my new mini-vacuum, I also got a new suitcase to replace the one whose zipper broke. So I’ve got a lot of new stuff.

And since I’ve been spending so much money (he said, bringing it back full circle), I hope you, Gentle Readers, will consider pitching in to our Kickstarter so I, and six other authors, can get a better payday!