The Realm of Ryan

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 3: The Warlord of Mars

2012-01-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Although there are still eight more books to go in the Mars series, with The Warlord of Mars I can bring to a conclusion Phase #1 of the saga: this completes the “John Carter Trilogy,” and the books that follow it take different paths with new heroes. John Carter will not return to the protagonist role until the eighth book, The Swords of Mars, published in 1935.

At the end of the thrill-ride of The Gods of Mars, John Carter lost his love Dejah Thoris in the Chamber of the Sun within the Temple of Issus. A whole year must pass before the slow rotation of the chamber will allow Dejah Thoris to escape. She may not even be alive, since the last moments that John Carter witnessed, the jealous thern woman Phaidor was ready to stab Carter’s love. Did she kill Dejah Thoris? Or did the noble Thuvia take the blow instead?

Readers hung on through the middle of 1913 until Burroughs brought a conclusion to the John Carter epic at the end of the year and made his hero into The Warlord of Mars.

Our Saga: The adventures of earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Warlord of Mars (1913–14)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913)

Secret Origin

With a cliffhanger ending to The Gods of Mars, Burroughs was ready to roll with the conclusion. It was a ferociously busy time in his life: All-Story rejected his second Tarzan novel—one of the most comically blockheaded decisions in the history of magazine fiction; he quit his day job and became a full-time author; his third son John Coleman Burroughs was born; days later, his father George Tyler Burroughs died. In the middle of all this, ERB plunged back to working on Mars. He never developed an outline for the trilogy, and so he took the wrap-up of John Carter’s story as it came, daydreaming down on paper.

Burroughs submitted the completed book as Prince of Helium to Thomas Newell Metcalf at Munsey’s Magazines on 6 June 1913. Burroughs apparently had trouble settling on a title the book, since he at various times suggested Yellow Men of Barsoom, The Fighting Prince of Mars, and Across Savage Mars. I especially like that last one. At 60,000 words, it was the shortest of Martian novels so far. (Gods of Mars came in at 86,000 words, and A Princess of Mars at 72,000 words.)

The serialized version in All-Story December 1913–March 1913, appeared under the title of Warlord of Mars, no definite article. A. C. McClurg published it in hardback 1919 with the definite article at the front.

The Argument

Since the story comes straight from a cliffhanger ending, there is no framing device with the fictional Edgar Rice Burroughs as with the previous books. John Carter is already on Mars, and his love Dejah Thoris is trapped for a year within the slow-rotation of the Temple of the Sun. Six months have passed since the armies of Helium and Thark destroyed the power of the First Born and the Holy Therns, and John Carter’s son Carthoris sits on the throne of Helium while Carter travels around the south polar region near to where his beloved Dejah Thoris is imprisoned with the murderous Phaidor, daughter of the Father of the Therns, Matai Shang. Another six months must pass before the rotating chamber will release Dejah Thoris and Thuvia of Ptarth—if Phaidor did not kill them.

John Carter is rowing on the river Iss with his faithful calot Woola when he overhears plotting between his First Born guide, Thurid, and Matai Shang against him. John Carter discovers from their plans that a secret passage exists into the Temple of the Sun. He finds his way inside, but Thurid and Matai Shang beat him there and escape with Thuvia and Dejah Thoris as their prisoners.

John Carter enters Matai Shang’s hideout in the Otz Mountains to rescue the kidnapped women. When Matai Shang escapes with his hostages on a flier, John pursues in a commandeered vehicle. A lucky shot from Thurid’s pistol blows out the buoyancy tanks on Carter and Woola’s ship, and they make a forced landing in the equatorial forests of Kaol.

Carter tries to enter the city of the Jed of Kaol, Kulan Tith, since he believes that Matai Shang has sought refuge there with his prisoners. Carter helps the red men of the city defeat an ambush of green men, and receives an invitation into the city from Kulan Tith. He finds that Matai Shang is indeed there, with Dejah Thoris and Thuvia still captive. When the visiting Jeddak of Ptarth, Thuvia’s father Thuvan Dihn, joins John Carter to demand Matai Shang handover his two prisoners, the Holy Thern and his First Born ally make an escape on a flier toward the north. John Carter, along with Thuvan Dihn and Woola, chase after them, but crash their craft before the ice walls around the northern pole.

With Woola dispatched to Helium with a message to Carthoris, John Carter and Thuvan Dihn pass through the Carrion Caves under the ice walls and find the land of Okar, abode of the fabled yellow men—the fourth of the four dominate races on the planet. John Carter suspects that not only are Dejah Thoris and Thuvia somewhere in the cities of Okar, but the missing Jeddak of Helium and his son (both vanished since before the events of The Gods of Mars) may also be here. Rescuing them will lead to the restoration of Helium’s power over the planet, with John Carter taking the special title on the cover of the book.

The Upside

Yeah, Woola is back! Let’s hear it for faithful Martian dog(-like) companions!

The Gods of Mars saw Barsoom ripped apart as the nation of Helium turned against two false religious groups, and concluded with the power of the cults destroyed. The Warlord of Mars tells the important follow-up story of the rebuilding in the wake of the destruction of the mendacious rulers. John Carter helped smash apart one order, and here he helps create the new one. (With him at the top, of course.) Thus the three first novels form a thematically complete trilogy, and even though Burroughs liked to write with little planning and go with his gut instincts, The Warlord of Mars feels like the right conclusion to John Carter’s story. And Barsoom’s as well . . . although that only for a brief time.

The glory at the conclusion of the novel, especially after its satisfying action finale, is a moving one. Through these three books, we’ve witnessed not only the triumph of John Carter as a hero in a new world, but the triumph of Mars:

Twenty-two years before I had been cast, naked and a stranger, into this strange and savage world. The hand of every race and nation was raised in continual strife and warring against the men of every other land and color. Today, by the might of my sword and the loyalty of the friends my sword had made for me, black man and white, red man and green rubbed shoulders in peace and good-fellowship. All the nations of Barsoom were not yet as one, but a great stride forward toward that goal had been taken, and now if I could but cement the fierce yellow race into this sodality of nations I should feel that I had rounded out a great lifework, and repaid to Mars at least a portion of the immense debt of gratitude I owed her for having given me my Dejah Thoris.

I am a total sucker for a speech like this. Yes, John Carter used the sword to bring nations together, and that isn’t quite the lesson I would teach about world peace, but this a pulp epic about Mars and I can’t help but feel a bit overwhelmed at the close of this story, satisfied that a great good has been achieved on a dying and fractious world.

Stepping back from the grand themes presented in the conclusion: This is the most linear and easy to follow plot yet in the Martian books, and it makes the novel easy to zip through—it’s an even faster read than The Gods of Mars, which has a larger cast and overlapping plot strands. Burroughs shows no sign of running out of creative obstacles to hurl at his hero either.

Matai Shang, the leader of the Holy Therns, is the main adversary throughout, with his First Born stooge Thurid constantly with him. The previous two books did not have a consistent personal villain guiding the whole story, and although neither required one, The Warlord of Mars benefits from these developed baddies keeping the momentum going.

Although The Warlord of Mars lacks the frenzied action pace of its predecessor, it does have sequences that show Burroughs trying new way to generate tension aside from writing another pitched battle scene. Carter uses his brain to figure out the radium light code that allows him to access the secret passageway into the Temple of the Sun, and the time spent on this sequence is worthwhile because it gives the hero a different kind of challenge.

Another excellent use of suspense is John Carter and Thuvan Dihn trying to cross through a herd of sleeping apts in the Carrion Caves. Another massive fight between Carter and legions of foes would be tedious, so the selection of stealth is a good change-up in pace. Also interesting is the Pity of Plenty into which Salensus Oll, Jeddak of Okar, drops Carter. The boilerplate villain tactic in an ERB story is putting the hero into an arena battle, or trapping him with a vicious beast; but the Pity of Plenty is psychological torment that uses a Tantalus scheme of driving a prisoner mad with visions of food and water. (Salensus Oll does eventually lower an apt into the pit, but Carter is already on his way out at the point. Gotta move faster than that, Oll.)

The best duel in the series so far occurs when John Carter faces Solan, the yellow Martian who guards a lever that controls the magnet that will disable the incoming ships of Helium. The details of the fight make it a nail-biter, especially since Carter expected that the elderly Solan would fall fast to his sword. Solan ends up knowing the science of the blade as well as John Carter. This is the best example in the book of how Burroughs was still evolving as an action writer.

The finale in Kadabra, the capital of Okar, is fantastic. There is no way to outdo the scope of the end of the previous book, so Burroughs wrote a slimmed down battle that wisely focuses on John Carter’s individual heroics trying to get Dejah Thoris away from Thurid. The character twist that happens in the climatic moment is a great device: satisfying, tragic, and completely in step with the developments in The Gods of Mars.

Dejah Thoris gets a chance to rescue her lover for a change: she uses a special whistling call to stop a pack of banths from killing Carter inside Matai Shang’s hideout. It’s a short moment in a novel where she otherwise spends 98% of her time as an abductee, but it stands out.

The Downside

Following up the epic and relentless excitement of The Gods of Mars is asking a lot from any writer, and Burroughs was not completely up to task. Perhaps the crowding of events in his life wore him down. The Warlord of Mars is a fine science-fantasy adventure, but there is a touch of exhaustion to it. A reader who comes to it directly after reading The Gods of Mars may feel a bit exhausted as well. The glorious insanity has taken a vacation, and solid adventure is filling in.

The narrative is back to “pursue the princess,” soon to be Burroughs’s business-as-usual. The uniting of the planet only emerges at the end, and until then the plot is John Carter chasing after Matai Shang and his two prisoners, losing them, and then managing to pick the exact right place to search for them again.

This is the first Martian novel to take place entirely on Mars, without even a prologue from the point of view of the pseudo-ERB. This may sound like a trivial detail, but I’ve always found these framing devices have a powerful effect on the story, giving a sense of tale-telling and a sheen of veracity to them. The cold opening of The Warlord of Mars, with no re-introduction to John Carter, is a touch disappointing.

Okar, the country of the yellow Martians, is anticlimatic after the gonzo eccentricity of the Valley of Dor and the Sea of Omean. ERB makes it the locale of great action, but the place itself isn’t at all noteworthy, and psychologically the yellow Martians aren’t much different from the red Martians.

The forested land around Kaol is the first piece of Martian topography that doesn’t feel right. The bizarre splendors of the Valley of Dor made sense as a region locked away behind giant polar mountains, but a lush wooded region in the center of a planet that is otherwise dry lands reeks of variety for its own sake.

I’m glad Burroughs chose to end John Carter’s epic here and find new heroes for the next four novels, because Carter finally reaches an apex of pomposity that threatens to undermine him. John Carter is the greatest warrior on two worlds, John Carter can take down anybody, John Carter can best hordes without getting a single scratch, John Carter is the most heroic person in the entire universe. Yeah, John, thanks. You’re totally awesome. Now shut up and get back to work.

And what does Carter mean when he claims he’s the greatest fighter of “two worlds”? Maybe the best on Mars, because he has the benefit of its lesser gravity. But how impressive was he on Earth? All evidence points to him having a standard career in the Confederate Army. He certainly didn’t take down hundreds of enemies at once.

Finally, it is simply slipshod civic planning to build a lever that will destroy your entire city with one pull. Whose idea was that civic improvement?

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: See below.

Best Moment of Heroic Arrogance: For all his reckless charges against hundreds of opponents, John Carter reaches the pinnacle of braggadocio with this statement: “If I sometimes seem to take too great pride in my fighting ability, it must be remembered that fighting is my vocation. If your vocation is shoeing horses, or painting pictures, and you can do one or the other better than your fellows, then you are a fool if you are not proud of your ability. And so I am very proud that upon two planets no greater fighter has ever lived than John Carter, Prince of Helium.”

Times a “Princess” (Female Lead) Gets Kidnapped: 3 (6 if we count Thuvia, who is always with Dejah Thoris)

Best Creature: The apt, a snow beast with six legs, a head like a hippopotamus, great tusks, and multifaceted eyes.

Most Imaginative Idea: The Pit of Plenty

Sometimes the Costume Wears You: John Carter paints his skin yellow and wears a false bushy beard and mustache to pass for a man of Okar, but is heartbroken that Dejah Thoris doesn’t recognize him from across the room, and believes this is a sign of rejection. Carter loses some bragging rights because of this.

Should ERB Have Continued the Series? The tale of John Carter is over, but with a whole world to play with, why not?

Next Up: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

I would like to acknowledge John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (1976) and Richard A. Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965) for aiding in the research for these articles.

Roman Empire Falls, But Amazon Makes It Rise

2012-01-23T20:30:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago, I was reading in the late evening, propped up comfortably on my couch with two pillows behind my back, listening for the sound of rain that was supposed to start falling that night. My kindle was in my hand, and I was reading Thuvia, Maid of Mars from its Project Gutenberg version (free!) in preparation for my review of it for Black Gate as part of my “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars” series. I decided to take a break, and switched off my Kindle.

An advertisement popped up on the screen for the shutdown mode. I almost never pay attention to these ads, since for some reason Kindle ads rarely target readers. They sell flowers and shoes. I don’t understand the profitability of this, but Amazon rakes in the money and is gradually devouring the world, so the strategy must be working.

However, this time the ad was for a book, and it caught my attention. A 2006 history volume titled The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather was going to go on sale at the Kindle store at midnight for $1.99. For the first time, I pressed the button to get more info: I’m fascinated with Roman history and Late Antiquity, and the books on the subject rarely go down to that sort of price. I received an email that repeated the information about the sale starting at midnight and provided a link.

I fiddled around on my computer for a few minutes until midnight arrived. Then I slid over to Amazon, slapped the “One Click” button, and received The Fall of the Roman Empire for two bucks.

Before I went to bed that evening, I checked Amazon’s Top 100 Kindle sellers. I had no suspicion that “Farewell to Tyrn” might have jumped up there (I’ve stopped checking my sales rank numbers every two minutes), but I was curious to see if The Hunger Games still had its tenacious grip on the #1 slot.

It did. But two spots below it, at #3, having only entered the charts an hour ago, was The Fall of the Roman Empire.

“Now that is power, barbarian!” to quote Thulsa Doom.

I have no idea how the deal came about that Amazon would publicize a five-year-old Roman history book on the front of Kindles everywhere. No idea. It doesn’t sound like the type of book they would push. It doesn’t sound like best-seller material. But Amazon promoted it, and immediately it turned into one of their top selling items.

What does this mean? Amazon has the tools to make almost anything into a success; if you somehow get access to them, you can move books faster than any method so far in history.

Ah, but how to get to Amazon’s toolkit? I’m already rummaging through it, but I haven’t found the power saw yet.

Addendum: The book is now back to list price of $9.99—but as of this writing it is ranked #5 on Kindle sales. It’s still selling, and at its premium price. Success for whomever planned it.

What I Learned My First Week of E-Publishing

2012-01-22T23:01:00.000-08:00

A week has passed since the official release of my novelette “Farewell to Tyrn” as an e-book. (Purchase it for Kindle here, all other e-readers here.) This is my first venture into the e-publishing world; indeed, my first time self-publishing anything. It was, to put it mildly, a crazy week for me. Crazy out of proportion to reality, because although the sales of “Farewell to Tyrn” have pleased me, it hasn’t emerged as The Next Big Thing or tranmutated me into an overnight sales and marketing guru. Nor did I expect it to. The “crazy” comes from jumping into a new world filled with tools that I’ve either never touched before or only picked up briefly to use for different purposes. Entering into e-publishing is like grabbing a megaphone to give a speech to a massive crowd, when previously you only used a megaphone to shout over the fence at your neighbor to tell him to please turn down the damn TV.

Question: What have I learned from this first week in the e-pubbing universe?

Answer: That I can’t learn anything definite in only a week.

But . . . I can make a few guesses, and a few observations. For anyone else debating releasing an ebook, some of these first-timer experiences may help you out.

Realistic Expectations

You’ve heard the lavish success stories. You’ve heard about Amanda Hocking and John Locke (the e-book seller, not the Enlightenment philosopher). I’ve heard about them, too. (I’ve heard about the Enlightenment philosopher, but he doesn’t otherwise affect this conversation.) And I did not for a moment pretend that kind of success was going to happen to me right from the starting blocks, if ever. Instead I established a modest goal: sell fifty copies of “Farewell to Tyrn” in a month.

A week later, I’m more than three-fifths of the way to that goal. Victory! Aim modestly to keep your spirits high.

Research! Research!

I didn’t leap into e-publishing “Farewell to Tyrn” and hustle it out in a week. I made the choice to go this route in October of last year, and more than three months passed before I was able to post on Facebook the link to its Amazon page, thus making it public for the first time. Between those dates, I devoured as much information available on e-publishing as I could uncover. And that’s a lot of information. ‘Cause Internet and stuff; a wild place where everyone has advice.

The most helpful resources I found are two books by Mark Coker, owner of Smashwords, Smashwords Style Guide and Smashwords Book Marketing Guide; and Stephanie Zia’s How to Publish an Ebook on a Budget. The two Smashwords e-books are free, and I can’t think of a better place to start for any author. Coker explains formatting for Smashwords in detail, but this formatting will help make an effective e-book for Kindle as well. Zia’s book takes off from there, explaining how to take the Smashwords document and turn it into a perfect Kindle document, as well as all the other steps necessary to get a work prepped and ready to go. These two books were all I needed to make “Farewell to Tyrn” ready for battle and get it up on both sites.

However, those books don’t cover the marketing aspects of e-pubbing, which is where the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide comes into play. Formatting “Farewell to Tyrn” was the easiest part of all this; it took time, but it only involved following simple steps. The next e-book I publish will require only half the amount of time I spent on this one. The tricky part was figuring out how to promote the book once it was on sale. Again, I prepared myself before publication with extensive research.

Aside from the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, another work I found useful is How to Really Sell EBooks by John F. Merz. It costs $2.99 on Kindle and is quite short, but Merz packs in the information, wasting no time with anecdotes or bragging. It was just what I needed to start navigating self-promotion: straightforward tactics and tips in condensed, easily accessed form.

Perhaps I don’t need to mention Joe Konrath’s blog, since many writers found their way to e-publishing through him, but here it is anyway. Konrath’s attitudes can chafe with many readers, and I don’t find myself in agreement with all of his positions, but there is so much information on his vast blog that any writer will find some useful tactics to pull from it, plus good coaching to keep your morale high. I like that Konrath doesn’t take a “get-rich-quick” poise, and admits it took him many years to get to his level of success. In this business I don’t need marketing gurus to pitch to me, I need someone who’s fought long and hard to get to success. It isn’t magic, it’s work.

A Great Cover Does Help

“If you’re going to spend any money upfront on your e-book, the cover is where to spend it.” This is a paraphrase of advice I’ve seen on almost every blog about electronic self-publishing. When I decided that “Farewell to Tyrn” was going to go the e-book route, the first action I took was to contact Fred Jordan, the artist who illustrated “An Acolyte of Black Spires” for Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII. I loved the work Fred did for that story, so I wanted his same touch applied to “Farewell to Tyrn.” Fred agreed to it, and produced a stunning work of art to act as the avatar for my story.

Has the cover helped sell copies? I can’t yet quantify something that subjective, but I’ve received comments from viewers on forums and on Facebook who thought it was the best cover they had seen on an e-book. That’s enough to assure me that the cover is doing what it should be doing, and will help keep “Farewell to Tyrn” visible.

How much did the cover cost me? Fred wasn’t inexpensive, nor should he be considering his talents. But in this arena I was fortunate: the cover cost me nothing. Having a supportive family is one of the great gifts a writer can have, because my relatives pooled together to purchase the cover for me as a holiday gift.

But what about the next book? I can’t depend on family charity every single time, and now I’m attached to getting an amazing cover for each new work I publish. This is one of the reasons my mind was a maelstrom during this week. I’ll figure it out somehow.

Amazon’s Sales Ranks Are Addictive

. . . and I must wean myself from them.

The moment that “Farewell to Tyrn” sold its first copy on Amazon, it gained a sales rank number: where it stood among all the “Paid Kindle” books on the site. The number changed each hour, reflecting new sales, and the moment I saw the rank start dropping lower (meaning it was selling better) I turned into a Sales Rank Junkie. In one day, I watched my ranking go from drop almost twenty-thousands ranks. I flipped out, flush with a sense of best-seller success, and researched all the Top 100 lists I might break into, checking on the #100 book on each list to see what its sales rank was. If I could get lower than that, I was golden!

Then my sales ranks started to fluctuate up and down, going on wild swings—and I went casually mad.

I recovered, and once the straitjacket straps were loosened, I took away this lesson: ranks change fast, and so far they do not indicate a pattern. I was wasting too much time watching the movement of my sales ranks as if it were a race at Aqueduct. I’ve eased back to checking only once a day and putting my energy elsewhere.

Tweet Responsibly

I got a Twitter account two years ago, then let it lie fallow. In October, the same day I declared, “As Zeus is my witness, I will publish this story as an ebook!” I finally started to use it. For three months I have cultivated followers and formed relationships with them. I worked to get more quality followers, not the numerous spammers sold on eBay for $5.99 a thousand. I made the effort to connect with people on Twitter and not turn into an infomercial.

It’s paid off: using the website bitly.com to create trackable links for Twitter, I know a good amount of my sales have come from my tweets. The people I’ve befriended and retweeted are generous in retweeting my links. And I keep gathering more quality followers, averaging thirty a day. The best part is that I discovered I enjoy using Twitter and meeting people through it.

Michael R. Hicks has some great advice on Twitter use for authors.

A Forum Post Worked Better Than Expected

A common bit of e-publishing advice: have a presence on forums where people who might want to read your work hang out.

So far, my post about “Farewell to Tyrn” on the Kindle Boards hasn’t seemed to have a great impact on my sales, although I did get a compliment about the cover. But I haven’t interacted much on the rest of the site yet, so I’m not a known commodity over there. Time will tell.

However, a post on another forum ended up benefitting me enormously—through merely one sale. I posted about “Farewell to Tyrn” on the Writers of the Future forums, where I’m known because I am a contest winner and some of the other posters have met me in person. A forum reader—someone I did not know personally—saw my book listed, bought a copy, and then put up a five-star review at Amazon. If that’s the only sale that comes out of posting on the WotF forums, it was worth it. A review like that is a confidence booster, for me and for readers.

E-Publishing Inspires

The best gift I’ve received from this first week in the e-book world has nothing to do with sales, or with marketing experiences. It’s the inspiration it gave me to write more. Within days of releasing “Farewell to Tyrn,” I started planning a new e-book project based on one of my novellas. I sketched out two more novellas to match with it to create a full volume, and immediately began to write the first one.

I didn’t stop dead after publishing an e-book (sales rank checking excepted). I started running ahead with more energy than before.

So it turns out I wasn’t telling the truth when I wrote at the top of this post that I learned nothing definite from this first week. I learned that e-publishing inspires me to get working at the greatest job anybody can ever have: inventing stories to tell to others.

Notes on E-Publishing for the First Time

2012-01-17T01:15:00.000-08:00

I’m taking a one-week break from Mars to do some shameless self-promotion, which I promise will be over quickly so I can regale you with a personal story. The Warlord of Mars next week, I promise.

As I announced on Sunday, I entered the realm of e-book publishing this week with my novelette “Farewell to Tyrn.” It is available for 99¢ at Amazon.com for the Kindle, and at Smashwords for all other e-reader formats (including vanilla plain text, which I find cool in a low-tech way).

I’ve done the whole promotional spiel that I did on Sunday over at Black Gate, but I’ll cut out that material and skip to the part where I talk about how I decided to give e-publishing a try.

The changing of the publishing industry in the face of the surge of ebooks and e-readers was the dominant conversation last year in the literary world. I sometimes thought I might drown under the flood of data and the (often violently) conflicting opinions that were winging around the Interwebs. There are now more blogs dedicated to self-publishing than there are blogs dedicated to LOLcats; a terrifying number.

At the Writers of the Future Workshop last year, I saw the conflict before my eyes. One instructor would stand in front of us and preach the power of self-publishing and the destruction of the middle men. Then the next instructor would stand in front of us and say, “Forget what you just heard; here’s the reality.”

I was very tempted to curl up in a ball and wish the conversation away.

But . . . I finally bought a Kindle after years of resistance (dammit, I am a book lover! I shall not surrender my adoration of paper for something I can’t dog ear without electrocuting myself!) and discovered that I really enjoyed the damn thing. The great appeal was that I could get ahold of reams of classic pulp literature for only a few bucks. I bought all the Tarzan novels—even Tarzan and the Castaways, which is an uncommon entry in the series—for $3.99. I bought all of Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories for the same amount. And anything in the public domain—bang! Free.

In the midst of this new Kindle owner madness, I thought I might give this whole new-fangled ebook publishing thingy a try.

Two things pushed me to from “might try” to “will try.” The first was a good friend of mine who charged into e-publishing with every weapon known to him firing. He set up a new and elaborate website, made an expensive book trailer, released a slew of short stories along with a full novel, got blurbs from a major writers (and me) for his promotional kit. He was making an assault. Some of his energy rubbed off onto me. But didn’t want to release a full novel, since I have an agent and a book making the rounds at traditional publishing houses and I still wish to see how it develops.

That’s where the second factor came in. I was having trouble finding markets for “Farewell to Tyrn” because of its length. Most magazines won’t look at stories above 7,500 words. Novelettes and novellas are tough sales. But . . . an ebook seemed like the perfect place to publish a novella. Priced at 99¢, a short work might reach more readers than a small magazine. And even if I only made 35¢ per copy (Kindle books have to be priced at $2.99 or above in order to receive 70% royalties), if I managed to sell over an extended period of time, the story would generate more money than a sale to a semi-pro market. Hell, if I sold one copy, it was more money than a “For the Love” market. I had no illusions about getting rich doing this, despite the stories of some of the more successful self-published authors pulling in six figures in a year. I just wanted to get one of my favorite of my own stories out where people could read it, and perhaps get a few dollars for the effort.

The first step I took was to contact Fred Jordan, the artist who did the illustration for “An Acolyte of Black Spires” in Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII, and asked if I could hire him to create the cover art for “Farewell to Tyrn.” Once he said “yes,” I was committed to doing the project. Getting good cover was crucial—I learned this much from the deluge of information about self-publishing that washed over me during 2011.

It took two months for me to have “Farewell to Tyrn” ready to go. Most of that time wasn’t spent formatting; it was doing research on the ebook market and figuring out how to do promotion. I developed my Twitter following (I had done almost nothing on Twitter until now, even though I created an account two years before), re-did my website, signed up on forums, looked for reviewers, and read and re-read all the guides I could get ahold of. Mark Coker’s Smashwords Book Marketing Guide was the best source information; although Coker deals specifically with Smashwords, the marketing tools he offers apply to any format.

Fred finished the artwork—which stunned me when I saw it—and then a friend did the cover design for free. After a week of driving myself crazy with the fear that I had forgotten some important step and the whole enterprise would crash down in a flurry of 404 Error Pages, I got “Farewell to Tyrn” uploaded onto Amazon and Smashwords, along with blurbs and links. Yesterday, I went “live” with announcements on my website, Twitter, and Facebook. I then spent the whole day in a daze as I drifted around the Internet seeing if anything was happening.

Here I am, a day later and five bucks richer. And still with no clue where this will lead to. Except that I’m already planning to publish an ebook collection of stories based on another novella I wrote that has no market.

Maybe the moral of all this is that the novella is alive once more, thanks to ebooks. That’s good news for me, since writing stories under 10,000 words is something I can rarely achieve. (The last novel I wrote started as a short story with a word-count goal of 5,000 words. The novel is currently 112,000 words.)

“Farewell to Tyrn” Is Now Available

2012-01-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

My first original ebook, the novelette Farewell to Tyrn, is now on sale. This is a new story of Ahn-Tarqa, a “sister story” for my Writers of the Future-winning “An Acolyte of Black Spires.”

Purchase it for Kindle at Amazon.com

Purchase it for other formats at Smashwords

If you don’t have an e-reader, Smashwords has it available in a PDF and for on-screen reading.

From the Product Description:

“Harvey conjures his fantastic settings with sparkling, evocative prose narrated at a crackling pace. Watch this guy.” —Howard Andrew Jones, author of Desert of Souls

On the continent of Ahn-Tarqa, where science and magic are one, and humans share the land with great saurians, all races have in common a dreadful ailment: the disease known as “The Sorrow.” A lingering hopelessness with no cure. A fear of life itself.

But for twelve-year-old Belde, her days in the city of Tyrn, playing in the streets with her whip-smart dinosaur pet Rint, seem far removed from the Sorrow she sees in others. Then, one burning summer day, cruel sorcerers from the masked race known as "The Shapers" slither from their black towers into Tyrn and knock on the door of the workshop of Belde's father.

Belde is about to drop into a nightmare that will carry her and Rint across the city, fleeing from the Shapers' twisted killers, and into the glaring light of the truth about her life—a truth that echoes over all Ahn-Tarqa with the sound of the word “Sorrowless.”

Ryan Harvey, winner of the Writers of the Future Award, continues the adventure in the science-fantasy setting of his story “An Acolyte of Black Spires” with this new novelette of action, heartbreak, and discovery.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 2: The Gods of Mars

2012-01-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I played a bit rough with A Princess of Mars last week in my first installment of this eleven part mega-series on the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That book knocked me out when I first read it as a junior high school kid, but it was also the first ERB book I ever picked up. Now that I’ve read most of Burroughs’s canon, the flaws of his first book seem more obvious. For all that is wonderful about A Princess of Mars, it looks like a runt compared to the book I knew was snapping at its heels: The Gods of Mars. Also known as: “Edgar Rice Burroughs gets the knack.”

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other visitors, on the planet Mars. A dry and slowly dying world, the planet known to its inhabitants as “Barsoom” contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with eleven books: nine novels, a book of linked novellas, and a volume collecting two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Gods of Mars (1913)

Previous Installment: A Princess of Mars (1912)

Secret Origin

In his original proposal to editor Thomas Newell Metcalf at Munsey’s Magazines regarding a novel of Martian adventure, Edgar Rice Burroughs suggested he could write three books from the concept. But he apparently wasn’t certain about the content of the second and third volumes to follow A Princess of Mars, since it was Metcalf who gave him the idea of where to start the next book. After Metcalf rejected Burroughs’s second novel, Outlaw of Torn, he urged the author to return to Mars and send John Carter into the Valley of Dor, the mysterious paradise mentioned a number of times in the first book. Burroughs ran with the concept, and finished the novel in the beginning of October 1912.

The serialized version appeared in All-Story in January-May 1913 and was an even greater success than A Princess of Mars. It helped that Burroughs’s fame had skyrocketed from the popularity of something called Tarzan of the Apes published in October 1912, and his name on the cover of a magazine was a money-printing press. A. C. McClurg published the first hardback of The Gods of Mars in 1918.

By the way, I own a 1924 hardback edition from Grossett & Dunlap. The dust jacket is in horrendous shape, but it’s still a prize among my collectible classics and the oldest copy of any Burroughs book in my extensive library of his work. Re-reading the novel for this review, I read primarily from this edition, which gave the book an extra pulp punch.

The Argument

In the prologue, the fictional version of Edgar Rice Burroughs visits John Carter’s tomb and recalls his uncle’s previous adventures on Mars (for the benefit of those who came in late). But then he receives a summons to meet with the man supposedly entombed there. John Carter, looking no older than when ERB last saw him, delivers a manuscript about the remainder of his Martian odyssey before vanishing into his “tomb,” never to be seen on Earth again.

The manuscript opens in 1886, twenty years after John Carter first traveled to the Red Planet, and ten after his forced return. While dreaming of Mars and raising his hands to the red spot in the night sky, Carter teleported (?) to the planet once more . . . although he ends up in a dangerous part of it.

The story proper can be divided in three “acts.” Act I takes place in the Valley of Dor, the supposed paradise of Mars that its inhabitants seek at the end of their lives. When John Carter materalized there, he finds it is anything but a paradise. The valley is a nightmare of murderous plant men, white apes, and the tyrants known as the therns, white-skinned men who rule the valley and eat the flesh of the pilgrims who follow the lie that the valley is Heaven. The greatest among them, the Holy Therns, perpetuate the false promise of the valley. Carter vows to escape and bring the truth of the horrors of the Valley of Dor to the rest of the planet—even if other Martians try to kill him for blasphemy.

Carter finds his old ally, the green Martian Tars Tarkas, searching the valley for him. The two fight together against the grotesques of the valley and rescue a red Martian woman, Thuvia, from the prisons of the Holy Therns.

In Act II, John Carter is a prisoner aboard a pirate vessels of the First Born, the black Martians who are at war with the Therns. As the therns dupe the rest of Mars with their religion, so do the First Born dupe the therns with theirs. The pirates take Carter and Phaidor, the beautiful and cruel daughter of the Leader of the Holy Therns, to the underground Ocean of Omean. There rules Issus, a shriveled crone who pretends to be a beautiful goddess. Issus condemns John Carter to a prison isle, along with Xodar, a black warrior John Carter defeated and humiliated. Among the other red Martian prisoners, Carter finds a brave young warrior with incredible physical prowess much like his own, and discovers the boy is his son, Carthoris.

Act III covers John Carter returning to the more familiar wastelands of Mars to expose the Valley of Dor and the goddess Issus. This leads to a massive invasion force heading to attack the First Born and John Carter in a battle to save Dejah Thoris from the clutches of the wicked false goddess.

And then . . . nope, you don’t get to find out! The book concludes with cliffhanger that must have driven readers crazy in 1913. Fortunately, in 2012 we can just pick up the next book, The Warlord of Mars, and drive onward.

The Upside

I’ve read all the Barsoom saga before, but a few of them I haven’t returned to in years. Because I’m writing this series as I read through the books in publication order, it’s difficult to make overall statements of where a single book stands in the scale of quality. I can use some blurry memories for judgments, but I’m not yet comfortable making any definite statements about a “best” or “worst” installment in the series. That will have to wait until Part 11, when I close the cover on John Carter of Mars.

That said, if I don’t declare The Gods of Mars the best book in the series in the final wrap-up for these reviews, I for one will be extremely surprised. The Gods of Mars is Edgar Rice Burroughs at his most imaginative and exciting. It is a quintessential work of pulp, a textbook definition of the style of the story magazines, and has the bonus of satire and weird subtexts that are astonishing for the time. This is great stuff.

I plan to do a blog-through of Tarzan of the Apes later this year, tackling two chapters per post to get to grips with a complex work. While reading The Gods of Mars I realized I could easily have given it the same treatment; there is so much going on here that is begging for discussion that I need to force restraint on myself to prevent this review from turning into something as long as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The first chapter shows how much Burroughs evolved as a writer over only a year: the Valley of Dor comes to life in vivid prose, and the description of John Carter’s first encounter with a plant man as it walks past his hiding place is filled with sickening details that vault off the page and engage all the senses. When the action starts, the tension and rhythm are superior to anything that happened in A Princess of Mars. On every level, Burroughs displays a new confidence as a storyteller and stylist.

And he keeps it up through the rest of the book. Right at the quarter mark, where it feels as if the story will have to run out of energy because of the frantic pace, the Black Pirates of Barsoom sweep down and ignite a battle with the therns. Bam! The action goes up another notch, and a fresh conflict appears within an already intricate situation. Adventure storytelling at its best. And it never flags. New ideas come at a steady pace, so that every few chapters the stakes increase, and new characters and dangers pull the reader deeper into the story. There is no better example of the phrase “never a dull moment.”

The finale doesn’t let down reader expectations, with a four-way epic sky war between two different factions of red Martians, the therns, and the First Born, with the green Martians taking up a ground offensive. In comparison, the action in A Princess of Mars feels, well, kind of puny.

Burroughs avoids repeating himself with the setting. Instead of the desert wastelands of the previous book, the story pulls a major switch and occurs in the phantasmagoria of the Valley of Dor and then the underworld of the Ocean of Omean. These new locations fit with the Barsoomian whole, but give the action imaginative new avenues. The Gods of Mars is the perfect way to do a sequel: up the ante of the first, enhance its mythology, offer enough differences without wrecking the formula. This is exactly how a follow-up to A Princess of Mars should have gone, and it’s amazing that we got it.

Critics who dismiss Burroughs as a teller of simplistic, juvenile adventure stories miss how layered he could be. A Princess of Mars is a straightforward tale, but in The Gods of Mars Burroughs begins to show a talent for weaving subtext and satire into the action. Religion is one of the main themes of the novel, and ERB’s view of it—at least here—is far from a favorable one, to put it mildly. He includes not one, but two fake cults that are oppressing the planet with their lies, and sets up his heroes as people willing to risk everything to destroy the “Gods” of the title.

Burroughs pulls no punches, putting some startling statements in the mouths of the characters: “[Y]ou have seen today with what pitiful futility man yearns toward a material hereafter,” John Carter tells Tar Tarkas. “There is no hope, there is no hope; the dead return not, the dead return not; nor is there any resurrection,” shouts a priest of Issus. The biggest moment comes from the warrior Xodar as he ponders that the goddess Issus is not a deity, but only an aged cannibal:

The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

There’s plenty more where that came from, but I don’t want to suggest that Burroughs does nothing but harp on superstition and religion as “opiates of the masses” the whole time. (Oh, Burroughs might come back from the dead and pound me for bringing a Karl Marx paraphrase in as a comparison! Plus, ERB doesn’t portray religion as an “opiate” here: it is a means to get the masses served as a main course at a cannibal feast.) The Gods of Mars isn’t a tract or a nonfiction book, and this use of religion comes in the service of crafting a grand adventure tale; it never threatens to derail the momentum of the story with dull anti-sermonizing. The horrors of the Valley of Dor and the cruelty of the Holy Therns give John Carter a larger goal, one that expands beyond simply rescuing Dejah Thoris, the drive of the previous book. A Princess of Mars only introduced a total Martian threat in its penultimate chapter; The Gods of Mars has one laid out in Chapter IV, and John Carter and his companions are ready to fight to save the planet from the tyranny of the therns, to which they later add the tyranny of Issus:

Our own mortal senses will not be offended if we succeed, for we know that the fabled life of love and peace in the blessed Valley of Dor is a rank and wicked deception. We know that the valley is not sacred; we know that the Holy Therns are not holy; that they are a race of cruel and heartless mortals, knowing no more of the real life to come than we do.

Not only is it our right to bend every effort to escape—it is a solemn duty which we should not shirk even though we knew that we should be revile and tortured by our own people when we returned to them.

After a novel where almost half the length was spent on set-up, this is a huge change: The Gods of Mars opens on action, and then grabs the reader with huge stakes for its hero and its world.

(If you wish to read an academic look into ERB’s use of religion in his fiction, as well as his personal views, I recommend this superb article from Dr. Robert B. Zeuschner.)

Parallel to the religious satire is the positive theme about the cooperation of races. More of Mars’s biologic history is revealed. The planet originally had three human races of different colors: white, black, and yellow. (The yellow men have not shown up in the series yet, but they’re on the way.) Out of the intermingling of the three arose the red Martians, who became the strongest race. Yes, the story views the mixing of races as a beneficial development—something uncommon in 1913.

The racial harmony theme is made explicit during the last third of the book, when John Carter’s assembled party of heroes is fleeing from the Warhoons and racing to get to Helium. This group consists of a white Earthman (Carter), a male green Martian (Tars Tarkas), a female red Martian (Thuvia), a male black Martian (Xodar), and a biracial male from a marriage of a white Earthman and a red Martian woman (Carthoris). “In that little party there was no one who would desert another;” John Carter said, “yet we were of different countries, different colors, different races, different religions—and one of us was of a different world.”

The therns are intriguing for pulp villains: a race of white-skinned murderers who wear blond wigs to recall a time when they were even more “beautiful.” No positive thern character appears in the book; they are thoroughly despicable. Carter has a greater admiration for the black First Born, whom he repeatedly calls “beautiful” and “handsome,” and Xodar becomes his closest ally in the story, even more so than Tar Tarkas. There’s an entire book to be written about the strange nature of race in this novel, which veers between standard pulp stereotypes and the flat-out subversive. How much of this did Burroughs intend, aside from making clear the theme of racial cooperation, and how much of it arose naturally from how he constructed Barsoom? I don’t know, and I’ve mentioned before that ERB is a tricky man to understand; perhaps it’s better to avoid going to deep looking into what an author “intended” and instead stick with what I took away from his words.

The supporting cast is great. Dejah Thoris only appears in a single chapter, and the two female leads who step in, Thuvia and Phaidor, are fantastic. Phaidor is the most memorable new character, a mixture of naivety and femme fatale who expresses the villainy of the therns and their arrogance. Carthoris and Xodar are both excellent as secondary heroes, with Carthoris adding to Carter’s own drama and Xodar giving depth to the First Born.

Although this has nothing to do with Burroughs’s writing, the Michael Whelan cover for this book is one of my favorite illustrations ever for any ERB novel. Perfect plant men!

The Downside

The problems of The Gods of Mars are the standard problems of most ERB books: simple chase mechanics, some clunky language, outlandish plot coincidences. Readers who don’t like Edgar Rice Burroughs won’t have a change of mind from reading this. For everybody else, these problems hardly seem worth the effort to mention. Of course a princess will need rescuing. Of course John Carter will hack through ludicrous numbers of enemies. Of course outrageous coincidences sometimes push the plot along. The book’s primary flaw is that it’s an exemplum of its author’s style. If you don’t like his style, you won’t like it when it is at its purest.

By the way, those telepathic powers that John Carter used occasionally in A Princess of Mars? Gone. Never mentioned here.

Let’s see, what else? The method of getting John Carter back to Mars is not that inventive; it only repeats what the first novel did. Sometimes Carter’s bragging gets overwrought. The attempt to disguise Carthoris’s identity for a big reveal is clumsy. The action scenes at places feel a bit too big, too outrageous. There’s some lag in the middle of the Act III.

But none of this matters much. I needed to fill out this section and pretend to have some objectivity. Seriously, I got nothing else. I love this damn book.

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: “The plant man was well muscled, heavy, and powerful, but my earthly sinews and greater agility, in conjunction with the deathly strangle hold I had upon him, would have given me, I think, an eventual victory had we had time to discuss the merits of our relative prowess uninterrupted.”

Best Moment of Heroic Arrogance: John Carter and Carthoris fight side by side to cut down hundreds of First Born and white apes in an arena.

Times a “Princess” (Female Lead) Gets Kidnapped: 6 (counting the cliffhanger)

Best Creature: The plant men, one of the most hideous of Burroughs’s creations.

Most Imaginative Idea: A tie between the culture of the Valley of Dor and the culture of the Sea of Omean. Both could carry an entire book on their own.

Who’s Missing? Woola! What happened to Woola?

Should ERB Have Continued the Series? Absolutely. This is great, and it ends on a cliffhanger.

Next Up: The Warlord of Mars

I would like to acknowledge John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (1976) and Richard A. Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965) for aiding in the research for these articles.

Comments on Race in A Princess of Mars

2012-01-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

It came as a surprise to me that my review of A Princess of Mars provoked some debate in its comment thread over at Black Gate. Although I get decent hits on my posts, they usually only get a few comments and don’t develop much discussion aside from, “Yeah, I love/hate that book/movie as well.”

Never underestimate the power of Edgar Rice Burroughs to create discussion.

The early comment that caused the debate was one suggesting that the racist material in A Princess of Mars put it on the same level as the racist ideology of D. W. Griffith’s notorious film The Birth of a Nation. After some back-and-forth in the comments, I decided I needed to address my thoughts on this, and how I deal with racism in pulp stories. What follows is a somewhat edited (for context) version of my lengthy comments, which should have a spot here on my website.

When writing about pulp, in which racist assumptions are almost always prevalent, I’ve made the decision to address racism in the work if it is one of the primary reasons for the existence of the work, or if the author gets up on a soapbox to preach racist ideology. “Pigeons from Hell” is a good example of the former; that story is entirely linked to race issues, and it is impossible to discuss the story without it. In fact, the race issues of Howard’s horror tale is one of it’s most intriguing aspects. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Lost on Venus is an example of the latter; Burroughs halts the story to give an obnoxious lecture on eugenics that is thoroughly loathsome and reflects the author’s own views on the topic. It also kills the pacing in what is otherwise the best book in the underwhelming Venus series.

In the case of A Princess of Mars, the overt racism is mostly directed at Native Americans, specifically the Apaches who appear in the first chapter. Burroughs participated in Apache hunting during his military career, so he brought his own racist attitudes to John Carter in this section. (Carter refers to the Apache as “vicious marauders.”) This transfers onto Mars, which is in many ways a pseudo-Western setting, with certain Martian groups serving the part of the “savage tribes,” such as the green men, although it is definitely not a one-to-one analogy, and Burroughs uses the Western inspiration in a free-floating way. The Barsoomian cultural landscape is an intricate place.

A Princess of Mars uses a standard trope, most recently discussed regarding the movie Avatar, of the white man who joins another culture and then becomes its most powerful member. What makes A Princess of Mars different from many stories that follow this archetype is that John Carter doesn’t side exclusively either with the green Martians or the red Martians. He sides with the Tharks among the green Martians, but opposes the Warhoons. He sides with the red Martians of Helium against the red Martians of Zodanga. His principle drive is Dejah Thoris.

It’s intriguing that the “red men” of Barsoom tend to be the heroes, and the “white Southern gentleman” hero falls in love with a “red woman.” This was probably not an intentional statement on Burroughs’s part—in fact, I’m certain it isn’t given what else I know about the author’s opinions—but it reads subversive today. I’ve tried to find contemporary opinions on A Princess of Mars to see if anybody had a fit about a white hero in a love with a person of a different skin color, but perhaps because Dejah Thoris is an alien people didn’t think about it. Which is probably why ERB wasn’t thinking about it much either.

As for the Civil War: The film The Birth of a Nation is a racist screed, through and through. It’s director D. W. Griffith on a soapbox preaching the Southern Myth of Reconstruction that turned into the main narrative in the late 1870s that tried to rewrite why the Civil War was fought. Griffith used the medium of film to make the myth more widespread, and there is no doubt that the pushing of this racist ideology was the main point on its agenda.

A Princess of Mars is not preaching about the race assumptions in it; they are there as a part of the the assumptions of the author and the period. The book is one of the less “message-themed” of the Burroughs canon. (Next year’s The Gods of Mars gets into a satire about religion, so we do not need to travel far before Burroughs started overtly projecting.)

Specifically regarding the Civil War in A Princess of Mars: the novel deals with the conflict briefly, and has little to say about it aside from getting the story going in the first chapter. Based on Burroughs’s family background (which I’ll go into in more detail below), I do not believe that ERB bought into the Southern Myth of Reconstruction, except in the general way that it was permeating culture. The novel isn’t interested in preaching about the Southern view of the Civil War, and John Carter hardly mentions the war once he gets to Mars. A Princess of Mars contains racist views; but it is not a racist polemic, which The Birth of a Nation most certainly is.

For the record, here are the racially-tinged quotes in the prologue (narrated by “fictional ERB”) and Chapter I that refer to the Civil War. (Emphasis mine.)

We all loved him [John Carter], and our slaves fairly worshiped the ground he trod.

He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip. . . . His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.

The prologue has little more to say about the Civil War, and since it comes from the point of view of the fictional ERB, it does not address whether John Carter himself owned slaves. In fact, this is the only place in the book that slavery in the American South is mentioned. The story now skips ahead to Carter as a miner and his mysterious decade-long disappearance.

The real Edgar Rice Burroughs, as opposed to the fictional version in the prologue, not only wasn’t born before the Civil War, but was not a southerner at all, nor was his family. They were firmly on the Union side. Burroughs was born in Chicago to a Civil War veteran from Massachusetts who served in the Union Army. In fact, Major George Tyler Burroughs left his lucrative job in a large New York import firm to enlist because he believed in the cause, despite his employers begging him to stay.

What to make of Burroughs, no Confederate sympathizer, creating a fictional version of himself from the South who lived on a slave-owning plantation? It may just be that ERB thought a Virginian on the losing side of the war might make an interesting hero, or he bought into the image of the "southern gentleman" as a knightly figure. I don’t know; Burroughs is often a difficult man to know, and I’ve read almost all his work as well as extensive biographical material and still find him frequently baffling. Often, the mysterious nature adds to the enjoyment of his work—even when I disagree with what he is saying, as in Lost on Venus.

(Side note: Burroughs’s mother wrote an interesting memoir about being a Northern “War Bride.” It can be read here.)

John Carter’s statement on his Civil War service:

My name is John Carter; I am better known as Captain Jack Carter of Virginia. At the close of the Civil War I found myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain’s commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South. Masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting, gone, I determined to work my way to the southwest and attempt to retrieve my fallen fortunes in a search for gold.

Carter has nothing more to say about his service. He never mentions it when he returns to Earth. When telling his history to Dejah Thoris in Chapter XI, he mentions that he is a “gentleman of Virginia,” but says nothing about the Civil War. (In fact, he tells Dejah Thoris only a barest outlines of his past history before she leaps in and tells all that she knows about Earth already.) Aside from this “southern gentleman swagger”—which will become crazy arrogance in the later books—John Carter has zero interest in his past once he reaches Barsoom. This may be because, as Burroughs’s family history indicates, he didn’t care about the Confederacy at all except as a backdrop for his character.

In fact, it would be bizarre if John Carter said anything pro-North; I wouldn’t believe a wealthy white Southerner in 1866 having a Northern view about the war’s outcome. In fact, Carter is surprisingly reticent to be pro-Southern. I think this is Burroughs’s Yankee background coming through.

But I think C Foxessa [earlier commentator] has a point when she singles out this thematic idea: “The solution to all problems of other people is a white man, preferably one who is either Brit or American, or even, if a creator is particularly acrobatically skilled, one who is both!” This is a very common assumption from not only literature of the period, but books and movies today. I do not think A Princess of Mars is preaching about the Civil War in the way of Birth of a Nation. But the Southern Myth of Reconstruction was something many writers, even a Yankee one like Edgar Rice Burroughs, took for granted in 1912, and this comes across in aspects of Carter’s character.

[In response to another comment that argued against the book having racial overtones] I don’t think it has racist overtones. I think it has racist undertones that come from the time and ERB’s background. Compared to some of Burroughs’s later novels, A Princess of Mars is subdued in the extreme in regards of race.

And by the way, that Burroughs still provokes these kind of discussions a century later is one of the reasons I find the man and his work endlessly fascinating. As Jackson [another commentator] said, “Layers.” ERB’s work is filled with differing interpretations and ideologies that belie the simple adventure plots that would seem to drive them, whether issues of race or politics or science. I seriously never get tired of looking into the man’s work—even with some of his poor novels.

One day I must write about his two novels concerning the Apaches. Amazing material there.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 1: A Princess of Mars

2012-01-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

The year 2012 C.E. is the centenary of the Reader Revolution. Two novels published in pulp magazines that year, A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, re-shaped popular fiction, helped change the United States into a nation of readers, and created the professional fiction writer. One man wrote both books: Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In celebration of this anniversary, and in anticipation of the upcoming Andrew Stanton film John Carter based on A Princess of Mars, I will tackle all eleven of ERB’s Martian/Barsoom novels in reviews for Black Gate. I also have something special in store for Tarzan of the Apes. This endeavor sounds a touch insane, but come on, but this is the centennial of the series! When else am I going to do it?

Let us turn back the calendar a hundred years to the beginning of all things. . . .

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other visitors, on the planet Mars. A dry and slowly dying world, the planet known to its inhabitants as “Barsoom” contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with eleven books: nine novels, a book of linked novellas, and a volume collecting two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: A Princess of Mars (1912)

Secret Origin

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs was thirty-five years old and selling pencil sharpeners out of an office in Chicago. His post-military service career was so far a series of undistinguished jobs that kept him and his family barely above poverty: an associate in a mining company in Idaho, a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, a manager of a stenography department, an owner of a stationery store, and a partner in an advertising agency. No position lasted longer than two years.

Burroughs spent part of his time at the pencil sharpener office scanning the company’s ads in the pulp magazines. In a moment of frustration with his whole life, Burroughs decided to write a better story than the drivel running in the rough paper pages. He started writing down a daydream on the backs of old letterheads during breaks at the office. He finished the book, an adventure on Mars inspired by the popular theories of astronomer Percival Lowell, while at his next job, working in a stationery manufacturing company. He sent the first part of the manuscript to editor Thomas Newell Metcalf at Frank A. Munsey’s Company, and after re-writing and negotiating, he received $400 to have it serialized under the pseudonym “Norman Bean.” (Originally “Normal Bean,” but a copyeditor caught the “mistake” and fixed it.)

This first novel appeared in serial form as Under the Moons of Mars (a name often used for the “John Carter Trilogy” that fills the first three books) in Munsey’s All-Story, February-July 1912. When A. C. McClurg published it in hardcover in 1917, the name changed to A Princess of Mars, and thus do we know it today.

The public loved it. A career was born, and science fiction (a term not even in existence yet) took a leap into grandiose, outrageous adventure. At the end of the year, All-Story ran Tarzan of the Apes complete in one issue, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, impoverished stationery salesman and failed miner, suddenly emerged as the most popular living American writer.

The Argument

This novel inaugurates the tradition of opening with a prologue featuring a fictional version of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who states he was five years old before the start of the Civil War. (The real Burroughs was born in 1875.) Pseudo-ERB explains how he came upon the incredible manuscript which follows: it was the property of his uncle John Carter of Virginia, who disappeared for a decade but came back seemingly un-aged. After Carter was found lying dead in the snow, ERB took possession of the manuscript, but only now—twenty years after its author’s death—can he at last release John Carter’s personal account of his astonishing adventure. . . .

After the conclusion of the Civil War, Captain John Carter of Virginia seeks his fortune in a gold hunt in the hills of Arizona. After a run-in with Apaches, he takes shelter in a cave. Through an unknown property of the cave, Carter leaves his corporeal body and is able to project himself to the bright red mark of Mars in the night sky. (Astrally? Magically? Teleportation? Yes?)

Carter discovers the lower gravity of the planet gives him immense leaping prowess and relatively increased strength. He also possesses a telepathic power allowing him to catch other telepathic messages, while remaining unreadable to others.

Soon after his arrival, Carter falls into the clutches of the green Martians, fierce fifteen-foot multi-limbed warriors. When attempting an escape, Carter slays two of the giant white apes of Mars and earns the loyalty of his “watchdog” Woola, a creature called a calot. Under the kind care of the female Sola, the captive earthman begins to learn the language of the Tharks, the tribe of green Martians who captured him.

Carter encounters another Martian race, humans with a coppery skin color known as the red men, when the Tharks down one of their floating skiffs. Carter gets his first glimpse at the lovely Dejah Thoris, Princess of the city of Helium (who is also completely naked, to the delight of adolescent boys in 1912). When Carter strikes down a Thark who attacks Dejah Thoris in the plaza before an audience, he earns the respect of the other Tharks, particularly vice-chieftain Tars Tarkas, and gains rank among them. But John Carter is already planning his escape with Dejah Thoris.

Carter recognizes he is in love with the Martian woman, but through the “communication errors” that would become a Burroughs’s trademark, she at first resists him. When the tribe marches to the city of Thark, where the cruel Tal Hajus is jeddak (emperor), Carter must hatch a quick scheme to escape before the jeddak executes him and Dejah Thoris. He receives the help of Sola, whose mother died at Tal Hajus’s hands because she would not reveal her secret lover. Sola tells John Carter that her father is none other than Tar Tarkas, something the Thark warrior does not even know.

John Carter and the two women manage to escape the city, but he valiantly lets the green men recapture him so Dejah Thoris and Sola may slip away. But Carter’s captives are not Tharks, but another tribe called the Warhoons. They put Carter into the first Arena Battle™ in the ERB canon. He fakes his death in the final round with the help of his new ally, Kantos Kan of Helium, and sneaks out of the arena to freedom.

He eventually reaches Zodanga, a city of the red Martians at war with Dejah Thoris’s city of Helium. John Carter learns that the princess is a captive of the jeddak of Zodanga. The plot, already moving at a sprinter’s pace, goes to ballistic speed, and John Carter ends up leading an army of Tharks along with Tars Tarkas to rescue Helium from the Zodangan besiegers and stop Dejah Thoris’s forced wedding to the jed of Zodanga, Sab Than.

However, neither John Carter, his beloved Dejah Thors, nor Barsoom are destined for “Happily Ever After” when the planet’s decay at last reaches maximum. John Carter must go on a sacrificial final mission that may separate him forever from his love and his unborn son.

The Upside

Much of what I’ll say about this book, both positive and negative, is of zero importance; I am a speck of dust in the cosmos that Edgar Rice Burroughs built. A Princess of Mars is one of the most influential and important novels of its century, and science fiction as the world understands it today would not exist without it. If Burroughs didn’t write it, somebody else would have to, otherwise the imagination of the human race would turn stagnant.

These are facts, not opinions. I’ll move on to opinions now.

A Princess of Mars is a monument to the power of imagination. The tidal wave of wild concepts crashing against the reader begs the question: why was Edgar Rice Burroughs wasting the first half of his life in mundane jobs? His head should have exploded from all the crazy notions caroming around inside with no outlet. Thank the Muses he found his true talent, and spent the second half of his life gushing out amazing tales. (And a few clunkers.)

The opening of John Carter’s narration is filled with the magic of great tale-spinning. Whatever other pitfalls the author experienced writing this first book, his need to express something grand and greater than the life he led before explodes in this magnificent first page. The rest of the novel delivers this promise of an astonishing story. ERB molds his experience in the American West into the canvas of an alien world, where fights between cavalry and Apaches and horse chases turn into duels with radium guns between giant green Martians and aerial pursuits in gravity-defying ships. This is the essence of escapism as art.

Starting with the framing device opening, the novel has a compulsive readability that a century has not lessened an ounce. I’ve read this books perhaps three times before, and even with this previous knowledge, I had to force myself to put the book down in order to write notes on it. It’s astonishing that a novel filled with as many plotting errors and structural problems as this can maintain constant momentum, but Burroughs’s enthusiasm pulls off the magic of hiding his neophyte bungling. The last third is a frenzy of action, warfare, and resolutions—handled with the surety of a kindergarten teacher on her first day working with a class of ADD students—but the tsunami cannot be held back.

John Carter is a Hero deserving of the capital letter H. He has a tendency toward arrogance, which will increase in the next two books, but for sheer foolhardy bravery there are few action heroes in literature who can match him for carrying along a story at a reckless pace. In the first chapter, Carter describes his core quality:

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes. However that may be, I have never regretted that cowardice is not optional with me.

So he’s not a hero; he’s simply so straightforward brave that he looks like a hero. This is actually John Carter in a modest mood.

It sounds laughable, looking at ERB’s Barsoom from a distance, to think of “scientific accuracy” in a story of an inhabited Mars with fifteen-foot-tall green men, multi-armed apes, and mysterious “rays” that negate gravity; but Burroughs used much of the known science of the day (many thanks to Precival Lowell) to help create the backdrop. Earlier authors of expeditions to other planets focused on pure fantasy. Burroughs grounded his many marvels in kernels of fact: the lighter gravity, the proximity of the two moons, the desolate landscape, the lack of water. For 1912, this Mars seemed like a possible place, even if the inhabitants were exaggerated; and those inhabitants received detailed biologies and cultures that made sense within the greater scheme of Barsoom. It is nothing like the actual Mars, but it feels like a genuine planet.

The subgenre of “Dying Earth” finds early precedent here, although this is not Earth. Mars has a green and lush glory in its past, but now suffers as a dry and deprived world. The legend of a great progenitor race would find echoes throughout science fiction and fantasy that came after. Leigh Brackett’s classic The Sword of Rhiannon, also a tale of Mars, takes Burroughs’s concept of the mythic past of the planet and makes it the focus of its epic.

This Mars is also seeded with future possibilities: talk of the River of Iss that leads to the Valley of Dor, from which no inhabitant of Mars has ever returned, creates a sense of a grander setting and a deeper history. In the next novel, Burroughs sends his hero into those mysteries, but even here where they are only an illusion of depth they serve the purpose of making a believable world.

The supporting cast is wonderful. Sola’s tragic history provides a good parallel to John Carter’s adventure that doesn’t need to weigh him down with excess psychological baggage, although Burroughs ties it up too fast. Woola is a delight, one of the best animal sidekicks in fiction. Tars Tarkas is the best ally character Burroughs ever created, but his best days are ahead of him. Tal Hajus is a despicable villain, who unfortunately comes to a rapid, disappointing conclusion.

The finale with the malfunction of the atmosphere station comes roaring out of the clear Martian sky, but it’s a gutsy downer of a wrap-up. This would seem to be the end of the Mars saga, with Carter returned to Earth to live out the remainder of his life, unsure if any living thing on Mars survived. However, ERB left himself an out with Carter’s mysterious tomb that opens from the inside. The adventure is only beginning. . . .

The Downside

It’s the first Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, it started his most consistent high-quality series, it’s an established genre milestone . . . but A Princess of Mars has many shaky sections that show ERB’s inexperience as a novelist. As a whole, the book comes up short compared to the best novels in the series that will follow in short order. A Princess of Mars contains many great parts, but Burroughs had yet to figure out how best to fit them together, and we end up with an energetic but sloppy story.

Burroughs needed a touch more practice before he perfected his action formula. (Not much, since after writing Outlaw of Torn, his next novel, Tarzan of the Apes, shows a writer practicing his craft at near perfection.) There are large chunks of Martian data dropped for the readers’ benefit in the first half, and most of it doesn’t come from Carter uncovering it; he transports what he will eventually learns and sticks it into the present. This doesn’t hurt the pacing, even during a chapter exclusively dedicated to describing the Thark’s method of child-rearing, but it does make the story feel cluttered and takes away some of the wonder of revelation. It also prevents the narrative from getting to the actual adventure story until after Carter escapes from the city of Thark.

The story should ramp up right after Carter finds Dejah Thoris, a beautiful woman in need of rescue. But after a fast dispatch of one Thark that threatens her, Carter settles in for a calm chat with her about Martian customs, then dithers about with his new household staff. Carter and Dejah Thoris next spend a long chapter in a bonding conversation to set up their love and arbitrary conflict, but it’s all static dialogue with no other action occurring, something that Burroughs rarely let happen again. The story remains in this holding pattern (Sola’s backstory is another static pause, and it fails to develop later in the book) until the escape attempt in Thark. ERB had yet to pick up the skill to grab a potential conflict and dash like mad with it, perhaps because he still needed the confidence of a developed setting to make him feel at ease letting the story fire ahead. The meld of world-building and story plotting will become second nature to him very soon, but it’s terribly uneven in A Princess of Mars.

And Burroughs had trouble with the world-building this first time out as well. The problem isn’t with the ideas, but how Burroughs introduces them to his audience. He often uses Barsoomian terms as if the readers were already familiar with them, and then clumsily remembers to explain them later: He first uses jed and jeddak without any indication that they are titles. John Carter makes the strange assumption that Dejah Thoris and the red men of Mars also hatched from eggs, like the green men, even though he has no reason to know this. At one point, Burroughs has to cram in an explanation as to what a calot is within brackets. Burroughs had wonderful concepts this early in his career, but didn’t exactly know how to unveil them or make necessary editorial tweaks to fix the problem. This is another skill he would rapidly master, but A Princess of Mars often has a wobbly first draft feeling, perhaps because it was all a “daydream” that Burroughs scribbled onto the backs of scrap paper.

The wobbly plotting continues through to the finale, which rockets along far too fast. Carter runs from captivity among the Tharks, to captivity among the Whoorans, to a stop at the atmosphere station, then to Zodanga where he becomes a pilot, and joins the jeddak’s bodyguard, and finally races across Barsoom to rally the Tharks to join Helium in the battle against Zodanga—all in the space of a few dense chapters. The pace gets so frenzied that Burroughs skips over moments that should carry more impact, such as an important duel between two major characters that he discards in a mere sentence.

The action moves in spurts and starts: a strong build-up, a sudden ending; or vice versa. The first battle in an arena in an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel disappoints; having Carter easily fake his death and then walk out of captivity is cruelly unsatisfying. The Arena Battle™ would become one of ERB’s specialties, and feature as the centerpiece of The Chessmen of Mars. But here, he doesn’t know how to milk the possibilities.

Foreshadowing a problem that plagued Carson Napier in the Venus novels, John Carter has telepathic powers that he rarely uses, and for long stretches forgets he possesses them—probably because the author forgot as well or found them inconvenient. The telepathic powers should have been dispensed with entirely as they add little to the story except some plot-convenient short cuts.

The witty and satirical Edgar Rice Burroughs hasn’t arrived yet, aside from a wisecrack about lawyers (see below). A Princess of Mars unfolds with only a few sparks of humor and almost nothing in the way of the barbed shots at civilization that make the author’s mature work so lively even when the action isn’t pulsing.

I don’t know if this counts as something that doesn’t work for the book, but Barsoomian technology sure is bonkers. Radium guns, anti-gravity floating skiffs, atmosphere-producing station . . . but no advanced communication technology, and people still pull out swords and rely on draft animals.

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: ERB packs in the new words: “They did not molest us, and so Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, and John Carter, gentleman of Virginia, followed by the faithful Woola, passed through utter silence from the audience chamber of Lorquas Ptomel, Jed among the Tharks of Barsoom.”

Best Moment of Heroic Arrogance: John Carter faces down a thousand advancing Tharks with one radium rifle.

Times a “Princess” (Female Lead) Needs Rescuing: 3

Best Creature: By Ares, take your pick! This is a smorgasbord of awesomeness. I’ll go with the white apes, which grabbed my imagination when I first read the novel twenty years ago.

Most Imaginative Idea: The whole damn thing.

The Real Author Shows His Hand: “In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.”

Should ERB Have Continued the Series? Of course! This Mars is too amazing a place to leave it at one-and-done. The calots are loose now, there’s no stopping the revolution!

Next Up: The Gods of Mars

I would like to acknowledge John Flint Roy’s A Guide to Barsoom (1976) and Richard A. Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965) for aiding in the research for these articles.

Book Review: The Natural History of Unicorns

2011-12-27T12:28:00.001-08:00

The Natural History of Unicorns (2009)
By Chris Lavers

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Some book titles can grab you across a room and demand your money. Such was the case with The Natural History of Unicorns, which I discovered not in a bookstore, but in a curio shop in San Francisco specializing in . . . actually, I have no idea what the store was really selling, except that it was next to the Pirate Supply Store (no joke, this exists, although principally to fund a writing workshop in the back) and the excellent science-fiction and fantasy bookstore Borderlands. A bit of both stores rubbed off onto this one, and so in the midst of taxidermy snakes was this book promising to tell me the Natural History of a fantasy animal. Immediate sell.

Well, almost immediate. I did check to see that the book was not crazy pseudo-science making the claim that the fantasy version of the unicorn was real and scientists were refusing to admit the truth. But the book appeared to be exactly what I wanted: a multi-discipline exploration of the development and evolution of the unicorn legend.

On the surface, the unicorn is the simplest of fantastic creatures: a horse with a single horn jutting from its forehead. Of course something like that might exist! There are plenty of horned hoofed animals, a unicorn isn’t much of a stretch.

But the unicorn carries a trainload of baggage behind it: a symbol of spirituality and Christianity, emblem of British royalty, symbol of virgin purity, a creature in roleplaying games, icon of New Age thinking, and decoration on a third-grade girl’s wall. The unicorn is indeed, as legend has often claimed, tough to hunt and harder catch.

Chris Lavers, a lecturer in natural history at the University of Nottingham, writes in a friendly, humorous style that feels like an Oxford professor during the off-hours entertaining guests around the fire with brandy in ample supply. In places, Lavers seems to channel Avram Davidson and his Adventures in Unhistory, although not quite as obtusely or wittily. (Davidson’s book has a chapter on unicorns, by the by.) The book makes for fast nonfiction reading, although Lavers does go off on a dull detour from his topic in the center of the book, occasionally relies too heavily on long quotations, and fails to explore an important avenue of unicorn history that I hoped to learn more about.

Chapter I, “A One-Horned Ass,” begins at the beginning: the first physical description of a “unicorn” in a work of nonfiction. The one-horned beast appears in the writings of a fourth century BCE physician, Ctesias of Cnidus. Ctesias served the Persian Emperor (probably as a privileged captive of war) and wrote extensively about his new home as a recorded stories from India, which was a fantasy world to him. In the surviving portions of his work Indica, Ctesias collects travelers’ tales and mixed them with some of his own medical knowledge to create a bizarre picture of the subcontinent. Lavers uses this chapter to tackle both Ctesias’s description of a “one-horned wild ass” and Odell Shepherd’s 1930 analysis of it, which is the twentieth-century’s most detailed book on unicorn possibilities. Shepherd concluded that Ctesias mixed the India rhino, the Tibetan antelope (also called the chiru), and a Persian ass (also called an onager). Lavers comes to a different chimerical mix for Ctesias’s beast: the Tibetan yak, the chiru, and a small and speedy equine called the kiang. Lavers makes a strong case that Ctesias knew much more what he was talking about than other historians have credited him; the Greek was not strictly a “fabulist,” and therefore the origin of the unicorn tale comes from a biological reality, but one limited because of the lack of first-hand observation. The question Lavers poses going into the rest of the book is how much of the subsequent writing about unicorns comes from pure fantastical imagining and how much from returning to actual biology?

The text flashes forward to the Romans in Chapter II, “Where Unicorns Roam.” Both Aristotle and Pliny kept Ctesias’s one-horned ass alive, and a second century BCE author, Aelian, added more details that Lavers asserts lockdowns the chiru and a number of other animals of the Himalayan plateau as the progenitor of the unicorn. Since only a few changes appear in Aelian’s “cartazon” from Ctesias’s unicorn, Lavers believes this shows nature, not fabulism, still dominated the unicorn: “The one-horned ass might have ended up 10 m tall with a polka-dot hide and a horn made of gold; it might have come to share its landscape with dragons and satyrs. But in 600 years nothing outrageous was added to the myth.”

Chapter III, “The Judeo-Christian Unicorn,” address the question: “So what’s the business with the different ‘unicorn’ references in the Bible?” Before I read through Lavers’s chapter, I made the assumption of “translation error” for the unicorn showing up in the Old Testament. And that appears to be the case. The Greek translators of the Hebrew original did not know what to make of the animal called a re’em. Based on context, they made a guess, and reached for Aristotle and therefore grabbed onto Ctesias’s one-horned ass. The Greek word for “one-horn”: monoceros. The Latin word: unicornus. So we arrive at the name of the beast.

(So, what was a re’em, in truth? An answer came in the nineteenth century after the deciphering of cuneiform: an extinct ox, known in Europe as an auroch. Lavers points out that the Biblical texts make much more sense with a powerful two-horned ox instead of the fanciful unicorn.)

The unicorn is now loose in European culture via the Bible, and Chapter IV, “The Iconic Unicorn,” delves into how the scholars of the Middle Ages explored this creature with a prominent role in their sacred texts. This is where we see the familiar unicorn emerging. The Physiologus, a collection an animal allegories, created the recognizable portrait of the fantastic beast and introduced its interaction with the virgin maid. This chapter may turn off the more casual reader because it deals with the tangle of medieval theology and symbolism, and here Lavers ventures into more interpretative territory, particularly when examining the centerpiece of unicorn art, the Vertueil Tapestries. He does make an interesting apology for this:

The deconstruction of such a work, isolating and explaining its contexts and elements one by one, is a very modern way of trying to understand, but one suspects that the tapestries’ designer would be horrified to witness the systematic unraveling of his work in such a way. So let us halt the interpretation game and appreciate the Vertueil Tapestries for their mastery, their quite exquisite beauty, and for their remaining symbolic mysteries.

On to the emergence of the secular unicorn in Chapter 5, “Beneficent Unicorns.” Say hello to the narwhal; the cetacean did not create the unicorn myth (something I was told was a fact when I was a child) but it provides the “alicorn,” the much-sought horn of the beast containing alexipharmical properties. But where did the concept of the healing powers of the alicorn arise? The chapter presents something of web of connections, but eventually a single strand emerges in the Muslim medical world, attached to a create called the “khutu.”

And what is a khutu? The longest chapter in the book, “Hunting the Khutu,” tries to answer this, and takes a long, dull detour. This is the only place where Lavers gets too off-track from the creature of the book, and even he acknowledges this at the beginning of the next chapter: “Having got thoroughly lost in Asia, let us return to the West and pick up the unicorn’s story where we left it.” Yes, let’s.

Chapters 7 and 8, “A Great Way Off!” and “Darkest Africa,” present modern Europe going on the unicorn hunt. Rationalism at first dismisses the creature, but then Romanticism revives it. But the unicorn always remains elusively removed in “distant lands” (at least from the view of European searchers). The story of Harry Hamilton Johnston, a British diplomat who thought that Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s mention of a creature called the “atti” in the Congo might be a unicorn, is one of the book’s best sections. It also brings the unicorn quest to its end. Johnston led the last unicorn hunt in 1901, although he believed the atti could also be an unknown species of jungle horse. Johnston’s expedition did lead to the European discovery of the okapi, a short-necked giraffe—not far from what Johnston thought he might find, but not a unicorn, alas.

Lavers teases in the introduction that “unicorns did exist. There are photos.” Chapter 9, “The Scientist’s Unicorn,” unveils what this book-opening lure is: a genetically altered bull. After researching African tribes’ manipulation of herd animals’ horns, biologist W. Franklin Dove experiment on a bull calf in 1936. He manages to achieve a “unicorn bull,” but if PETA existed then, they would have nailed him to a wall. Lavers suggests the possibility that early tribes may have managed the same feat with their herd animals as Dove did, and thus contributed to unicorn lore.

The book closes with a chapter that leaps backwards, well past Ctesias. Although the Greek physician introduced to the western world the concept of a one-horned horse as a real animal, single-horned creatures appeared in the art and legends of more ancient civilizations. This chapter travels through Mesopotamia, early Iran, and the Indus River Valley hunting down the titular “Ancestral Unicorns,” as well as myths that might have contributed to the legend of the unicorn laying its head in a virgin’s lap. One suggestion comes from The Epic of Gilgamesh. Possibly, the melting pot of Alexandria provided all these ideas to early Christian writers, and they leaped in the Physiologus and translations of the Bible, where they mixed with Muslim medicine and the narwhal, and—presto! The utterly confused beast we now have. Of course, there is no simple solution to the unicorn, and I’m glad Lavers avoids forcing one.

Aside from the dull and mostly unnecessary trip with the khutu, Lavers one other mistake in the book is his failure to at least make a short walk down an important road of inquiry. At the beginning of the last chapter, he remarks: “We have reached 1936. Up ahead is the unicorn of New Age mystics and advertising executives. We must turn back.” What? Why? Isn’t the unicorn of the next seventy years worth examining? Those years made some of the most important contributions to unicorn legendry: not only New Age thinking, but also role-playing games, fantasy novels, and She-Ra. The unicorn as a modern phenomenon deserves much more than a two-sentence brush-off. Perhaps Lavers thought it would take up too much time and space. If so, I’d suggest chopping down the Khutu chapter, or maybe using fewer quotes.

Lavers concludes that the multitudinous sources for the unicorn account for the multifaceted modern views of it:

If your unicorn tends towards a meek and diminutive goat, Christianity is probably strong with you. If your unicorn is large and horselike, heraldry and its secular offshoots are probably to blame. If your unicorn hovers uncomfortably between a goat and a horse, you may at least take comfort from being in the majority. If your unicorn shifts disconcertingly between a goat, a horse, a rhinoceros, a marine mammal from the North Atlantic, assorted Tibetan ungulates and a six-eyes ass whose ears will terrify, the work of this book is almost done.

To which I would add: If your unicorn looks like the most beautiful white horse in the world and runs along rainbows and among smiling stars, then you have a daughter under age eleven.

By the way, my unicorn was created by Peter S. Beagle and sounds like Mia Farrow.

“Farewell to Tyrn” Coming January 15th

2011-12-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

Update: “Farewell to Tyrn” is now available for Kindle at Amazon.com, and for other formats at Smashwords.com.

And now, an official announcement regarding my first publication of 2012:

My novelette “Farewell to Tyrn” will be available as a 99¢ ebook in all e-reader formats on January 16. You will be able to purchase it from Amazon for the Kindle, and from Smashwords for all other e-readers.

Feast your eyes on the cover art, from the magnificently talented Fred Jordan, who also illustrated my story “An Acolyte of Black Spires” for Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII.

“Farewell to Tyrn” is a new science-fantasy story set in the continent of Ahn-Tarqa, and is linked to “An Acolyte of Black Spires,” although not a direct sequel to it. It also serves as the prologue to my upcoming novel Turn over the Moon.

This tale of city-set adventure pits twelve-year-old Belde, a girl who makes a startling discovery about her life, and her dinosaur companion Rint against the soldiers and creations of the vile Shapers, the masked sorcerers of Ahn-Tarqa. “Farewell to Tyrn” combines tragedy, action, weird science, and dinosaurs in a thrilling story that further explores the mystery of Ahn-Tarqa and prepares Belde for an even greater adventure.

Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

My last summer in Tyrn, when the Shapers came for me, was the hottest I could remember. Father often told me stories about a summer when he was a boy that was so boiling fishermen could fill a pot from the Glosser River and use it to brew tea without a fire. I used to think Father was teasing me, but that Month of the Sun taught me the truth.

But I didn’t mind the scorching weather. The Month of the Sun was my favorite time of the year because I could play outside with Rint and my friends as much as I wanted, and my parents never remembered what time it was to call me in for supper. When the sun is always in the sky, people don’t think about “dinnertime” or “bedtime.”

I never imagined anything horrible could happen on bright days like that. . . .

Wrath of the Titans Trailer Gives Me a Chimera, But Little Hope

2011-12-19T21:42:00.000-08:00

Cross posted to Black Gate.

If you were talking about movie trailers yesterday or over the weekend, chances are the subject was The Dark Knight Rises. The most anticipated film of 2012 revealed its first full-length trailer (after a teaser during the summer) on selected theater screens with Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. The IMAX six-minute prologue to the film also appeared before 70 mm screenings of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. I saw the prologue yesterday in the glorious IMAX presentation, and yes, The Dark Knight Rises is going to be something amazing. (By the way, Ghost Protocol is the best of the “Mission: Impossible” films, and delivers everything you want from a big-budget action movie. Here’s to Brad Bird having a great career in live-action films.)

In the middle of mad speculation and analysis from the new Bat-info Warner Bros. and Legendary Films poured on us, the studio and production company also sneake out the trailer for another of their 2012 releases: Wrath of the Titans, the sequel to the 2010 re-make of Ray Harryhusen’s Clash of the Titans.

From a domestic perspective, a sequel to Clash ’10 feels like a weird choice. The movie had only middling box-office success, and audience reaction was lukewarm to say the best. I reviewed the movie when it premiered and gave a cautiously positive take of it. I would like to retract most of that review now. One of the difficulties of doing reviews of new movies or books is that reviewers’ tastes frequently change on a second visit. Some movies I shrugged off when they first came out I now love. Other films that seemed enjoyable in the theaters end up as lifeless on repeat viewings. In the case of Clash of the Titans ’10, when I returned to the movie on home video, it seemed almost unwatchable. It’s a dead fish, an inert bore. There is no imagination or joy in this thing. I didn’t want a sequel, and I can’t imagine anyone else wanted one either.

But these days, international box office makes all the difference. Clash ’10 pulled in enormous coin outside of the U.S., doing 66% of its worldwide business in foreign markets for a total gross of just a Nemean Lion’s whisker under $500 million—the eleventh highest grossing movie of the year. And that equals “sequel.”

Here’s the trailer from iTunes. Even though star Sam Worthington stated in an interview that he thinks the new film is more “weighty,” this trailer does little to raise my hopes.

The preview shows more of the same from the last movie, plus alarming similarities to the awful Immortals that I recently loathed. Perseus has better hair this time around than the Full Metal Jacket cut of Clash, and it looks a ton of monsters will rampage across the screen. There’s nothing in the world wrong with big monsters in movies—in fact, one of the few things right in the world is that filmmakers often put big monsters in their movies—but poorly done CGI beasts are among the most lifeless variety of the species. I would prefer a man in a suit over lazy CGI.

Is there any Greek mythology here? I can’t make it out. Hades is a bad guy again. (Groan. Hades is not the equivalent of Satan!) I think I see a Chimera blowing fire around. Early synopses describe Perseus going to the underworld to rescue a kidnapped Zeus. Wha—? Maybe nobody on the movie realized that Greek mythology already has a perfectly good “person kidnapped to the underworld” story. Why not use Persephone? True, she doesn’t fit with the Perseus story, but the original Clash of the Titans did some mash-ups and still managed to feel faithful to the Greeks myths.

The Marilyn Manson cover of “Sweet Dreams” that slathers the trailer is perhaps the worst indication of what is to come. This is a terrible choice from the marketing team, and shows that nobody cares about Greek mythology. No surprise, honestly, but could they have shouted “We don’t care!” a bit softer?

However, there’s a moment where it looks like the filmmakers are doing an homage to Harryhausen’s multi-armed Kali from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Cannot find fault with that. Nor can I complain about the appearance of the wonderful Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day, Pride and Prejudice) in a major role as a warrior queen. That sounds fun.

And maybe the Chimera will be cool. Fine, I’ll try to keep my hopes up. Rosamund Pike, Chimera. Rosamund Pike, Chimera. Rosamund Pike, Chimera. . . .

One thing you can know for certain about Wrath of the Titans: when it comes out in March, I will see it opening weekend and deliver a review to you. That’s what I’m here for.

The YouTube version of the trailer:

Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on Blu-Ray

2011-12-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

Mysterious Island (1961)
Directed by Cy Enfield. Starring Michael Craig, Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson, Beth Rogan.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I have no qualms admitting I enjoyed the 2007 Walden Media adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It surprised me how much of Verne’s novel made it onto the screen in a contemporary setting. However, the prospect of a sequel, riffing slightly (at least from what I can detect from the first trailer) on Verne’s 1874 classic The Mysterious Island, does nothing for me other than as a reminder to read that recent translation of the novel from the Modern Library that’s been sitting on the “to read” stack for over a year. The new film is called Journey 2: Mysterious Island, which explains exactly what the filmmakers intend: the same thing as the last film. Maybe some younger viewers will go find the book after watching the movie, although the novel is less child-appealing than some of Verne’s other works, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, which children should read first anyway because Mysterious Island is a sequel to it. Will Captain Nemo show up in the new film? Who cares.

However, the marketing for Journey 2 coincides with the Blu-ray release of an earlier adaptation, the Ray Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer 1961 Mysterious Island. A number of Harryhausen’s classics have reached Blu-ray already, but Mysterious Island makes its high definition debut in a limited edition from a small direct distributor, Twilight Time, which specializes in film soundtrack albums. This concerns me for the release of other of Harryhausen titles. Mysterious Island is a Columbia film, and Sony Home Video released The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts to Blu-ray. Apparently they preferred to farm out Mysterious Island to an independent—and on the film’s fiftieth anniversary! I might not have found out about the Mysterious Island Blu-ray if I wasn’t a soundtrack collector on mailing lists for numerous small CD labels. (If you want to buy the Mysterious Island Blu-ray, go here. It’s limited to 3,000 unit, and I have no idea how fast they’ll sell.)

Mysterious Island is the third of Ray Harryhausen’s and producer Charles H. Schneer’s color films. It followed the global success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and the tepid The 3 Worlds of Gulliver. Like Gulliver, it goes to the well of classic public domain literature, but Verne is better suited for Harryhausen’s animated antics than Swiftian satire is.

Jules Verne was hot property in the late ‘50s because of Disney’s spectacular smash with 20 000 Leagues under the Sea and Michael Todd’s enormous 70 mm roadshow of Around the World in Eighty Days, which featured every actor alive at the time. George Pal scored a hit in 1959 with Journey to the Center of the Earth (despite terrible-looking lizards with fins glued to their backs). For Harryhausen and Schneer, picking up Mysterious Island was a no-brainer.

Columbia originally commissioned Crane Wilbur to write a script in 1957. After calculating the cost, the studio found it too expense to produce, and gave it over to Schneer and Harryhausen at Morningside Productions to see if they might bring it in on a tighter budget. Since the original novel isn’t the best source for Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation style—it is principally a survival story with a few science-fiction elements reserved for the finale—the script needed work to fit with Dynamation, Harryhausen’s patented stop-motion technique. Schneer hired Kenneth Kolb, who wrote the screenplay for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, to work on the script to include more fantasy elements, but Kolb’s ideas never gelled—except the decision to get rid of the dog sidekick. Good call.

Eventually John Prebble, Daniel Ullman, and Raphael Hayes re-wrote the script to Schneer and Harryhausen’s satisfaction. Final screenplay credit was given to Wilbur, Ullman, and Prebble. I don’t known whom Hayes ticked off.

The re-tooled story adds giant animals to the titular island for the stop-motion marvels: an enlarged crab, a prehistoric bird, enormous bees, and a monster cephalopod. Other effects sequences dropped in and out during pre-production, such as a man-eating plant and Captain Nemo operating a robot-digging machine.

Mysterious Island falls in the middle of the Harryhausen canon as far as quality and excitement. There isn’t enough stop-motion action, and none of the sequences come anywhere near classic status. But the direction and pacing keep the story alive; it’s one of the better constructed screenplays of the Harryhausen films, and doesn’t rely on a standard “quest” narrative, but instead focuses on characters working together in a single location to overcome threats. It’s a good piece of adventure storytelling, but not the imaginative thrill-ride of the first two Sinbad movies or Jason and Argonauts. The film seems better when approached as a general adventure film, rather than as a “Harryhausen” film.

The plot follows the outline of the novel, with a group of Union captives escaping from a Confederate prison in Richmond using an observation balloon. Leading the captives is Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig). He’s accompanied by Herbert Brown (Michael Callan), Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), described in the novel as an ex-slave and Harding’s “manservant,” and Philadelphia war correspondent Gideon Spillit (Gary Merrill). They pick up an accidental passenger, Confederate balloonist Sgt. Pencroft (Percy Herbert), who is the only man who can handle the balloon as it flies off into “the greatest storm in history.”

The balloon eventually drops them at an island in the Pacific. Yes, that was a big storm. The men band together to survive in the tropical wilderness. They encounter strange-sized beasts and plants, help two more castaways, Lady Mary Fairchild (Joan Greenwood) and Herbert’s love interest, Elena Fairchild (Beth Rogan), and discover that an unseen benefactor is aiding them in their survival.

The identity of the mystery helper might be considered a spoiler—except the beginning credits proclaim in big letters: “And HERBERT LOM as CAPTAIN NEMO.” So there you go: it’s Captain Nemo. His damaged Nautilis is docked in caverns beneath the island, and the captain has done experiments on the local flora and fauna to enlarge them as part of a plan to increase the world’s food supply. Unfortunate side-effect: attacks by killer crabs and bees and big bird thingies, but then Nemo wasn’t expecting company.

Except for a bit of grousing about who will lead the balloon-wrecked crew at the beginning of the film, and young Herbert wondering if he has fortitude, there is little conflict between the castaways. The film’s conflict is external: survive. The harmony between the characters highlights that people can endure harsh conditions through teamwork, cooperation, and ingenuity—the opposite of how a movie today would deal with the same situation. It’s the anti-Survivor. Nemo, one of the greatest misanthropes in literary history, deems these people worthy of his aid because they work together for the common good.

Although thematically intentional, the harmony still comes across as too pat at times. This was the first time watching the movie that I noticed how many places the script passes up opportunities for conflict. The Southern Sgt. Pencroft falls in fast with Northerners, and everyone forgets about the Civil War in a hurry. Neb is black, but the script ignores this completely except for the subtle indications that the others think he’s inferior. (He also gets nothing important to do in the film, unfortunately a common situation for black supporting actors of the day.) Herbert romance Elena for one scene, and snap! They’re in love without a hint of trouble. As a writer, I find this pretty weird, and can’t help imagining the “missing” scenes. The harmony theme is a good one, but more adversity at the beginning would make the theme even stronger. This means altering Verne’s story, but the movie already added a prehistoric giant chicken-parrot-ostrich whatchamacallit; Verne could handle a few more tweaks.

Considering the lack of character-driven drama, it’s amazing Mysterious Island works as well as it does. The constant dangers, the mystery of who is providing help (even if the credits give it away to audience), and the cleverness of the castaways’ plans carry the film along. The story constantly moves, even if the people never face trouble among themselves.

It helps to have a good cast and director. Most of the characters have colorful personalities, which prevents the missing intra-personal drama from damaging the film too much. Michael Craig is adequate as heroic lead Captain Harding; the ensemble doesn’t need to lean on one person’s heroics. The standouts are the vibrant characters of Pencroft (English actor Percy Herbert does an impeccable thick southern U.S. accent), comic Spillit, and the fussy and overwhelmingly English Lady Fairchild.

Herbert Lom is the only “name” in the cast, playing Jules Verne’s most famous creation. Lom has the unenviable task of comparison to James Mason’s monumentally great portrayal of Nemo in Disney’s 20 000 Leagues under the Sea, but few other actors at the time seem more right for the part than Lom. He’s commanding, classy, arrogant . . . Nemo, dead-on. It’s a pleasure to watch him even if he is not James Mason.

Nemo’s other half, the Nautilis, fares far worse. 20 000 Leagues under the Sea cost approximately half a bazillion dollars and would have bankrupted Walt Disney Studios if it flopped. Mysterious Island cost less than a tenth of that, and it shows most in the Natuilis interior, which looks like a communit theater set compared to the Disney movie. The lush outdoor location photography in Spain makes Mysterious Island feel more expansive than it is, so the Nautilis is an unfortunate reminder of budget realities.

Much of what works with Mysterious Island away from the visual effects can be attributed to director Cy Enfield, a rare case of an acclaimed director working on a Ray Harryhausen film. American-born but based in England because of blacklisting, Enfield helmed the classic crime film The Underworld Story, and three years after Mysterious Island directed one of the greatest British war films, Zulu. He’s at home with the adventure and scope of Mysterious Island and gets a lot out of characters who don’t have much conflict between each other.

On to our featured entertainment: Ray Harryhausen’s special effects.

There are four “Dynamation” scenes: a large crab, a prehistoric bird, huge bees, and a giant cephalopod. Harryhausen’s technical work is his usual high quality, but nothing leaps out as a classic. There’s no “skeleton duel” or “Medusa” or “Kali” moment: that particular magic sequence that elevates the entire movie.

One reason for this is that, except for the prehistoric bird, all the creature in the film are based on existing animals and lack the fantasy quality of the dinosaurs and mythological beasts that populate Harryhausen’s other work. The crab, for example, is a real crab: Harryhausen constructed it using a crab’s exoskeleton and fitting the armature inside it.

It’s no surprise that the prehistoric bird, referred to in the script as a “phororhacos,” is the best of the Dynamation creatures. It’s a weird-looking thing, silly in design (nooooo! a giant chicken!) but fierce on the attack, resulting in an off-kilter scene in an otherwise serious tale. Harryhausen never intended it to play as humorous, but composer Bernard Herrmann latched onto the inherent absurdity of the bird and gave it a plucky-yet-menacing dance jig for accompaniment. The mix of terror and humor makes for the most memorable scene in the film. The finest bit of Harryhausen’s slight-of-hand occurs here, where he makes a seamless transition from the model of Herbert attacking the phororhacos to the actual actor as the bird collapses. I had to watch it one frame at a time to catch the moment with Harryhausen switches to the actor from the model.

The bees (or bee, since only one model was built) have the most detailed design; they look astonishingly real. Unfortunately, they don’t have much to do, and it seems a larger sequence could have been worked around them. The bee sealing up Herbert and Elena with wax is clever piece of animation, however.

The crab, although uninteresting itself, gets a decent fight that takes up just the right length of time on screen. It never rises to greatness however, because the staid choreography keeps the actors in the same place most of the time. Full-scale prop claws and legs used on location help the actors interact with the monster crustacean, but the fight needs greater movement and energy.

The cephalopod is a creature audiences often forget is even in the movie. It’s attack on the underwater team trying to repair a sunken pirate ship is a bore. The model moves very little, and a watery distortion effect obscures it. The humans stuck moving in slow motion don’t help pick up the scene. Thankfully, it only lasts a minute on screen.

Apart from the four Dynamation sequences, Mysterious Island is packed with other visual effects: optical and matte painting work of the island’s volcano and an underwater city; a model of a sinking pirate ship; and a miniature grotto where the crippled Nautilis lies. Harryhausen has expressed dislike for some of the matte paintings, but the scene of the men crossing a fallen tree over a chasm against a backdrop of a jungle waterfall is gorgeous and an obvious homage to the log scene from King Kong.

The film opens and closes two with immense VFX scenes. The escape from the Richmond prison in the balloon is perhaps the best effects work Harryhausen did outside of stop-motion, and Enfield’s handling of the drama during the break-out and later crash-landing make this a wild ride and an explosive way to get the film started. The finale has the island’s volcano blowing up while the castaways race to repair and raise a sunken pirate ship to escape. Harryhausen relies on some volcano stock footage, but the model work of the collapse of the island is great.

The Blu-ray has three audio options: the original theatrical mono, a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 mix, and an isolated music track for Bernard Herrmann’s score. This last track is probably the reason Twilight Time picked up the movie in the first place, since Herrmann is unanimously hailed among score collectors as the greatest film composer in the medium. I prefer Jerry Goldsmith, but I can’t argue with Herrmann’s overwhelming influence and talent, and his scores for Harryhausen were among the first movie soundtracks I fell in love with.

The picture quality on the Blu-ray Mysterious Island is solid. Keep in mind the source material is a mid-budget film half-a-century old that makes extensive use of optical effects; only the distorting use of heavy DNR could make it as pristine as a 2011 movie, and that wouldn’t look anything like Mysterious Island. The grain is extensive but natural, and the film has never looked this good since it was first on theater screens fifty years ago.

The hi-def clarity enhances the effects scenes, even though it would seem the opposite would happen. Flaws in the opticals are noticeable, principally the difference in quality between the elements in shots with matte painting and mismatches between the stop-motion models and the live-action footage (this is most noticeable in the crab fight, where the sand the crab stands on looks nothing like the beach the humans are on), but this doesn’t diminish the work at all. It actually makes it more interesting to watch and gives the film a human quality you never get with slick CGI.

The 5.1 audio is problematic. Re-purposing a mono film, especially one so old, presents difficulties. The mix on Mysterious Island uses distracting surround effects that aren’t organic to the soundscape. The reason the track exists is to showcase the score, which does sound spectacular: crank up the booming “storm theme” over the main credits, then switch over to the more natural mono track for the best listening experience.

And speaking of the score . . . AWE-SOME! Herrmann kills it with a brass and percussion sound that just about steamrollers the listener. The clashing “storm theme” that plays over the credits and the escape from the Confederate jail is one of the best main titles the composer wrote for its sheer energizing power. The crab music is clever, giving the sense of the multiple limbs moving on their own with each instrument acting independently. The phororhacos get a musical joke: Herrmann told Harryhausen before the scoring session that he was going to use “Turkey in the Straw” for the scene. He wasn’t far off.

The “isolated score” track isn’t purely isolated. Sound effects sometimes appear in the quieter cues, although all the dialogue is gone. Twilight Time likely only had access to the actual soundtrack on the film, and not the master tracks from the recording sessions.

The chapter stops aren’t scene specific, just plunked down every ten minutes. Not surprising for an independent label, but nothing that annoys me too much. That I got the disc at all, and with good picture quality, compensates.

Sony Home Video needs to get on that Blu-ray of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. There has to be a decent demand for that.

Movie Review: Destroy All Monsters Blu-ray

2011-12-06T02:08:00.001-08:00

Destroy All Monsters (1968)
Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Yukiko Kobayahsi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kyoko Ai, Kenji Sahara, Yoshifumi Tajima, Andrew Hughes, Haruo Nakajima.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Last month, the second Godzilla film to reach Blu-ray in North America made its thundering, skyline-flattening debut, courtesy of Media Blasters: the 1968 science-fiction monster mash Destroy All Monsters (Japanese title: Kaiju Soshingeki, “Charge of the Monsters” or “Monster Invasion”). The only Godzilla movie to beat it onto Blu-ray is the 1954 original, which will get a re-release as part of the Criterion Collection in January 2012. (The Criterion Collection! Godzilla has gained a well-deserved highbrow victory and sits on the same shelf with Kubrick and Bergman!) Later this month will see the third Godzilla Blu-ray release, 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon. This is arguably the worst movie of the long series, but I welcome it onto Hi-Def nonetheless: three cheers for glittering mediocrity!

But Destroy All Monsters is anything but mediocre: like Universal’s House of Frankenstein over twenty years before, it pulls together all the science-fiction candycorn goodness available to give audiences a mad monster party for the ages. The plot is simplistic, the characters even more so, but the movie pops with color and spectacle of a bygone age of entertainment without irony. It isn’t the best of the Godzilla series, but until 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, no monster movie could boast a larger monster cast. Eleven of Toho Studio’s stable of big beasts crowd into its hundred minutes, and the result is a giddy confection no ten-year-old or ten-year-old at heart can resist. If geekdom has a defining film, here it is.

Destroy All Monsters was one of the first of Japan’s giant monster films to reach DVD in North America. At the time it seemed like a miracle to have a Godzilla film available in a letterboxed edition. However, the 1999 disc from ADV Films is the textbook example of a barebones release: the only language option is the inferior of the two English dubs (I’ll explain the dubbing situation later), the picture isn’t enhanced for widescreen TVs, and the disc doesn’t even have a menu. As better quality Godzilla DVDs came out in the 2000s, Destroy All Monsters became a black hole on collectors’ movie shelves. ADV re-released the movie to DVD in 2004 packaged with a soundtrack album as part of Godzilla’s Fiftieth Anniversary, but the movie disc was exactly the same.

The Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock Blu-ray fixes all these problems: not only is the film in glorious Toho Scope 1080p, but the disc contains both English dubs, the original Japanese mono soundtrack, a 5.1 lossless re-mix, and commentary from two Japanese fantasy film scholars, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, who have done informed and lively commentaries for previous Godzilla DVD releases.

By 1968, the Japanese film industry had entered a decline from its halcyon days. Theater attendance was dropping because of the influence of television. TV especially injured special effects (tokusatsu) movies and their most profitable subgenre, the giant monster (daikaiju) movie. A wave of superhero shows, such as Ultraman, competed for young viewers’ attention. Toho’s front office decided it was the right time to close up the Godzilla series, and they lavished a budget of USD $550,000 on a big blow-out bringing together almost a dozen monsters—plus alien invaders and super-tech!

Destroy All Monsters did not conclude the Godzilla series as Toho intended, but it was the final great glory of the classic series before the low-budgets of the 1970s. For one last time, the four “Godzilla-fathers” who brought the monster to screen in 1954 worked together: director Ishiro Honda, visual effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, and composer Ishiro Honda.

Screenwriter Takeshi Kimura was one of the two writers who tackled most tokusatsu writing duties at Toho. The other author, Shinichi Sekizawa, took great joy in penning science-fiction and fantasy scripts, while Kimura had a more dour approach and tended toward pessimistic, bleak pieces, such as the superb 1963 horror movie Matango (released in the U.S. under the dopey title Attack of the Mushroom People). Destroy All Monsters is Kimura’s biggest contribution to the Godzilla series, and it departs from his darker style.

The screenplay for Destroy All Monsters is openly utopian, more in keeping with the humanist themes so dear to director Ishiro Honda, who shares script credit with Kimura. The story takes place in the futuristic late twentieth century, a peaceful time of world cooperation, jackets without lapels, and video monitor phones. All the globe’s monsters are kept in “Monsterland,” a part of Ogasawara Island and its research center. The film opens with a tour of the island; the narrator introduces most of the big name kaiju and shows how security keeps them restrained on the island without harming them.

But the world’s peace suddenly faces a dangerous threat: the invasion of the Kilaaks! These living metal aliens follow the playbook from 1965’s Invasion of Astro-Monster (released in the U.S. as Monster Zero) and seize control of Earth’s monsters, turning them loose on the great cities of the world. The nations of Earth band together in large control rooms with enormous monitors and many blinking lights to respond in Astro-Monster fashion: they regain control of the monsters and turn them on the Kilaaks and their space-beast, King Ghidorah, culminating in a massive monster showdown.

That’s the entire plot. It holds together a group of big money scenes involving city destruction, military assaults on looming rubber beasts, and spaceship adventure, with a few character moments involving the Kilaaks controlling humans tossed in so director Ishiro Honda has more to work with. Like another of Honda’s classic science-fiction epics, 1959’s Battle in Outer Space, there isn’t much characterization to Destroy All Monsters. This puts it below the quality of many of Honda’s other tokusatsu movies, but its massive scope and “wow” factor keep it entertaining for the imaginative child in all of us.

Although the characters don’t have much depth on paper, they benefit from the ensemble of actors that director Honda worked with numerous times: Jun Tazaki, Akira Kubo, Yoshi Tajima, Ikia Sawamura, and Yoshio Tsuchiya. They all nail the stock parts they played in previous films, such as Tazaki as a stalwart top government official so similar to the one he played in Invasion of Astro-Monster that it might as well be the same character. Yoshio Tsuchiya gets the best part as a doctor from Monsterland Control Center who falls under Kilaak hypnotic command. Tsuchiya is a famously eccentric performer who relished playing aliens (Invasion of Astro-Monster, The Mysterians) or men under alien control (Battle in Outer Space), and usually got the juiciest parts in science-fiction films. Tsuchiya is a magnetic presence on screen even when he isn’t speaking, and his best scene in Destroy All Monsters unfurls without a word of dialogue. Unfortunately, Tsuchiya’s Dr. Otani doesn’t make it through the halfway point of the film, and no character can replace him in the personality department.

Akira Kubo, who played a nerdy scientist in Invasion of Astro-Monster and an enthusiastic reporter in Son of Godzilla, gets the heroic leading man part: Katsuo Yamabe, captain of the Moonlight SY-3, a groovy spaceship that powers most of the human action. Kubo is stern and commanding, but Katsuo doesn’t have anything like a character arc or any conflict aside from “Let’s beat these Kilaak bastards.”

Even though Destroy All Monsters doesn’t offer its characters much drama, it provides them plenty of action scenes, creative futuristic locations, and snappy gizmos and vehicles to keep audiences flying along until the next giant beast pops to smash stuff. Monster battles run up the budget fast, so laser-gunfights and alien base infiltrations fill in. The only place where the movie drags is when the crew of SY-3 tries to shut down the Kilaaks’ monster-control machine in their lunar underground headquarters. Katsuo blasts a laser into the device’s base while frenetic music plays on the soundtrack, and it seems to go on forever. Thankfully, once this is done, the film leaps right into the monster-crammed finale.

Of course, we showed up to see the rubber monster beating the hell out of each other and miniature tanks, plane, and buildings. The film structures their action scenes toward two epic set-pieces: First, the mid-movie mass-destruction of Tokyo, with Godzilla, Rodan, Manda, and Mothra laying waste to the city while the UN forces hammer them with the most spectacular assault of missiles seen in the classic Toho films. Second, a climatic clash between the ten monsters under human control against the alien’s champion, King Ghidorah. (Two of the monsters do almost nothing in the big fight, however, as I’ll talk about below.) Before and between these spectacles, the monsters pop up to harass the heroes and destroy monuments across the world.

Since the monsters got us to pay our nickel for this train ride, each one deserves individual attention. I’ll use the order posted on the back of the Blu-ray, which lines up the stars with their circular trademark badges:

Godzilla: Since Destroy All Monsters belongs to the Godzilla series, Toho’s tallest star gets the best treatment. The effects department built a new Godzilla suit for the film, and it improves over the awkward frog-like outfit from the previous film, Son of Godzilla. This new suit would have the longest run of any Godzilla costume, appearing in the next three films. By its final appearance, Godzilla vs. Gigan, the suit was flaking apart in front of the camera, but it looks superb here. Godzilla still has a shorter snout and a more friendly look than the earlier outfits, but it’s a personable design that lets suit performer Haruo Nakijima give a genuine performance.

Godzilla has plenty on his plate, and appears in most scenes involving the monsters. He attacks New York and blows up the UN building—the only time in the Japanese Godzilla series that the monster attacked the U.S. The New York miniature is a bit sketchy, but it’s Godzilla in frackin’ New York, so I’m not going to complain. Godzilla leads attack in the finale, which completes the character’s transformation from force of destruction to superhero. Godzilla would remain in this role through the 1970s until the end of the classic series.

Mothra: After Godzilla, this giant moth/Island god is the most popular Toho monster in Japan. Unfortunately, Mothra remains in its less interesting larval stage for the whole movie. The winged puppet (last spotted in Ebirah, the Horror of the Deep in 1966) was in poor condition, apparently. Mothra still keeps busy, taking part in the Tokyo assault, derailing a train near Beijing, and using its silk webbing to restrain King Ghidorah.

King Ghidorah: Godzilla’s most famous adversary, the awesome three-headed golden space dragon, makes its third appearance as the principle kaiju villain. King Ghidorah is the only monster in the film not kept on Ogasawara Island; the Kilaaks use it as a back-up plan when the crew of the Moonlight SY-3 destroy their control over the Earth. Why the aliens thought King Ghidorah could beat ten earth monsters when it already received sound thrashings from far fewer in its last two movies remains a bit of a mystery. Overconfidence is also the downfall of Toho alien invaders, it seems. The movie re-uses the costume from King Ghidorah’s earlier appearances, but with stiffer wing fabric.

Rodan: This Pteranodon-inspired flying monster debuted in its own film in 1956, but has never looked as magnificent since that first outing. (I love that movie.) The Rodan suit used for Ghidorah, The Three-Head Monster (1964) and Invasion of Astro-Monster gets reused with some modifications, but the smaller flying model looks far superior. Rodan’s best moments have it demolishing Moscow from the air, chasing the SY-3, and taking to the skies in the attack on Tokyo. On the ground in the final battle, the winged monster looks awkward.

Gorosaurus: For an obscure monster with only two appearances to its credit, Gorosaurus receives featured guest star treatment in Destroy All Monsters. The Allosaur-like dinosaur debuted in King Kong Escapes the previous year, so the suit was almost new, which explains why the VFX crew makes so much use of it. Gorosaurus wrecks Paris in a part originally meant for Baragon, and gets into the heart of the fight with King Ghidorah, where it floors the evil dragon with a “kangaroo kick” maneuver guaranteed to bring cheers from audiences.

Anguirus: This kaiju is the biggest callback of the cast. The quadruped with the spiky carapace (often called “Angilas” in U.S. dubbing and promotional material) is the first monster Godzilla ever battled, back in Godzilla Raids Again (1955). It appears here in a new costume that is the best of the suits constructed specifically for the movie. Anguirus prominently joins Godzilla to defend a Kilaak base from a UN force attack. In the finale, Anguirus shows incredible/foolhardy bravery and charges King Ghidorah on its own—and then gets viciously trounced in one of the best monster moments in the film. Anguirus became a fan-favorite because of its feistiness against overwhelming odds, and would appear in two more of the 1970s Godzilla films. Having a new suit helps your job prospects, even if you’re a monster.

Kumonga: The giant spider, called “Spiga” in the AIP dub, that appeared the year before in Son of Godzilla joins with Mothra to web-up King Ghidorah in the big fight, but that’s all. The puppet from the earlier film was in excellent shape and is used as-is.

Manda: A new head was put on the body of the serpentine water dragon from the super-submarine movie Atragon (1963). The new head lacks the horns and frills that gave Manda its “Chinese Dragon” appearance in Atragon, but the refurbished kaiju is one of the surprises of Destroy All Monsters. Manda takes part in the four-way demolition of Tokyo, during which its wraps its body around an elevated train track and crushes it in its coils, one of the film’s most memorable images. A filmed but deleted scene had Manda tangle with Godzilla during the middle of the Tokyo mayhem. Manda only appears as a miniature puppet during the big final battle, however.

Minira: A.k.a. Minya, Minilla, Baby Godzilla, the Infant Michelin Man. It seems that Godzilla’s species ages very slowly, since his “son” is still the same size it was in Son of Godzilla, which takes place thirty years earlier in this timeline. Minira mostly provides reaction shots during the final fight, but gets to deliver the insulting coup de grâce against King Ghidorah with a radioactive smoke ring.

Baragon: This puppy-dog-eared tunneling reptile faced off against a giant Frankenstein Monster in 1966’s Frankenstein vs. Baragon (original U.S. title: Frankenstein Conquers the World). Although the Baragon suit was a recent fabrication, it was in rotten shape because it hit the guest-circuit hard in the TV shows Ultra Q and Ultraman, where the VFX crew modified it to appear as multiple different monsters. Baragon therefore only pops up in the final battle as a puppet on the fringe of the action (a single shot) and then in full costume in the coda (also a single shot). He was supposed to have a bigger role as the destroyer of Paris, but Gorosaurus was substituted—nonsensically, since Gorosaurus doesn’t burrow. The newsman’s dialogue, in English and in Japanese, still identifies Baragon as the Parisian attacker.

Varan: The title monster of the dull Varan the Unbelievable (1958), my least favorite of Ishiro Honda’s many tokusatsu films, appears only as a flying puppet in two short moments, one at the start of the big battle, and the other in the Monsterland wrap-up. The monster has never appeared in any movie since. He couldn’t land a spot in Godzilla: Final Wars, and even the lame Roland Emmerich version of Godzilla, renamed Zilla, is in that!

Special effects wizard Eiji Tsubaraya died less than two years after the release of Destroy All Monsters, but he was already withdrawing from his work with the Toho Special Effects Department that he headed to concentrate on television work. (He produced Ultraman, and the company he founded continues to make hit television special effects shows in Japan to this day.) On Destroy All Monsters, Eiji Tusbaraya served as a “Visual Effects Supervisor,” and left the hands-on work to his assistant Teisho Arikawa. Arikawa executes some spectacular scenes on a tight budget, although nothing matches the beauty of the sequences in some of Tsubaraya’s previous classics like Invasion of Astro Monster, Gorath, Mothra vs. Godzilla, or Battle in Outer Space. Some of the optical work is sloppy, wrinkles appear on some of the sky backdrops, and the models of foreign cities look much weaker than the extensive design of Japan for the big smash-up.

But the VFX for the action with the Moonlight SY-3 on the lunar surface and especially for the final kaiju smackdown at the foot of Mt. Fuji provide amazing fun. The effects aren’t “realistic,” but nobody goes into Japanese fantasy looking for realism; that would be boring. Even with these expectations, some of what occurs in the big monster battle is awe-inspiring. The monsters fight across a sprawling miniature on Toho’s enormous Stage 11 before a cyclorama painting of Mt. Fuji that looks photo-realistic in some shots. The amount of work that went into choreographing the action with multiple suit performers and wired props controlled from the rafters makes this one of the most impressive monster battles ever put on film. To push it over the edge, a TV announcer provides an enthusiatic play-by-play to give the scene the feeling of the ultimate boxing match. Which it sort of is.

Composer Akira Ifukube re-uses his themes from earlier Godzilla films, creating something of a “Greatest Hits” for a movie that certainly calls for it. The Godzilla “horror theme,” the soaring trumpet-powered Rodan motif, and the booming bass for King Ghidorah appear to drive the monster action with appropriate furioso. A new march plays over the credits and for military attacks, and the Kilaaks receive appropriately eerie tones that will remind many viewers of the scores for Star Trek: The Original Series. However, the mad-piano that plays over the endless scene of shutting down the Kilaak control device isn’t something you’ll want to hear often.

The two previous Godzilla movies, Ebriah, the Horror of the Deep (first released in the U.S. as Godzilla versus the Sea Monster) and Son of Godzilla, skipped theatrical release in the U.S. and went direct to television. Fortunately, American International Pictures snatched up Destroy All Monsters and did a quick turnaround to get it onto American screens less than a year after its Japanese release. AIP created a superb promotional campaign (“Destroy All Monsters: The Battle-Cry That Could Save the World!”) and did brisk business with the movie. It then played in syndication on U.S. television until the early 1980s, when AIP’s rights evaporated and the movie vanished into the ether.

When Destroy All Monsters reappeared in 1996 on the Sci-Fi Channel and then on VHS and DVD, it contained a dub unfamiliar to American viewers who grew up on the original television broadcasts. This English language track was not “new,” however; Toho commissioned it in 1968 to send sell the film to English language markets. AIP did their own dub with Titra Sound in New York, which explains why there are two English audio options on the Blu-ray.

Dueling English dubs are nothing unusual in Japanese fantasy movies. Toho prepared their “International dubs” from Hong Kong, usually with a company called Frontier Enterprises, and offered them to all English territory. U.S. distributors often found these dubs inferior and created their own. The Media Blasters Blu-ray is the first home video release of a Toho monster film with both the international and domestic dubs included. Listeners can hear exactly why AIP wanted to scrap what Toho handed them. The international dub on audio track 1 has superior sound quality, but dull performances from voice actors who were probably amateurs taken from local businesses. The AIP dub on audio track 2 suffers from age deterioration, but the script and actors are vastly superior, with nostalgic voices familiar to anyone who watched episodes of Speed Racer and Ultraman as a child. The syncing with the lip movements is also improved; Titra Sound always produced excellent dubs. If you watch Destroy All Monsters with children who don’t want to read subtitles, go with the second track and try to ignore the occasional pops and distortions.

The 5.1 Japanese DTS-HD re-mix spreads the sound field without taking a revisionist approach, keeping the dialogue and sound effects on the front three speakers and expanding for Ifukube’s music. The original Japanese 2.0 mono, however, is the most vibrant of the audio options, and viewers should stick to this and crank it up when the missiles start flying.

The picture quality of the Blu-ray won’t dazzle anyone who has seen The Lord of the Rings box set, but considering the source material it more than satisfies. The image is a touch soft, but there is almost no damage or noticeable DNR distracting from the viewing experience. Destroy All Monsters has never looked better, and the Blu-ray promises more fine releases of kaiju films in the future.

My vote for the Godzilla film that most urgently needs the Blu-ray treatment: King Kong vs. Godzilla. The original Japanese cut has never gotten an official U.S. release, and the Universal-International hack-job version and the Japanese one can easily sit together on one disc. I’m starting a hopeless petition to see this happen.

Small LOSCON 38 Panel Change

2011-11-24T15:46:00.001-08:00

A last minute change to the panels I will be sitting on at LOSCON 38: the “Urban Fantasy’s Celtic Origins” panel is shifting forward from 1:30 pm to 12:00 pm tomorrow. I don’t know which room it will be in; please check with programming tomorrow if you are coming.

Here’s the schedule again.

Hope to see blog and Twitter friends tomorrow!

My Three-Year, 150th Post Black Gate Anniversary

2011-11-22T00:31:00.001-08:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate. (Obviously)

Three years ago this week I posted my fist official article on the new Black Gate blog. I was one the original seven bloggers who answered John O’Neill’s call to make Black Gate online a place people wanted to visit again and again.

Yes, seriously: there were only seven bloggers at the start, one for each day. At one point, we may have dipped down to three. Those were strange days.

And I’m still here after all those years, at the Tuesday spot. And not only is it my three-year anniversary this week, but this post is my one hundred and fiftieth. No, I didn’t plan these two anniversaries to coincide. In fact, if you do the math, this means that over the past three years I failed to meet the weekly Tuesday post five times. I’m sorry, but some things just happen—like giant monster attacks. (Well, I wish; I tried that as an excuse at my old day job, but it didn’t work.)

I wasn’t a newcomer to Black Gate’s website when I started the weekly spot. Before the site became a blog with a rotating team, I wrote a few articles on request for John O’Neill. I finished a series on Clark Ashton Smith that I started on another website, and those articles still get good hits: (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.) I also penned a long analysis of the two version of Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, a piece I’m still proud of.

But it was my 25 November 2008 review of Conan the Raider that marked that marked my first “Tuesday Blog Post.” This apparently unambitious start was actually a tip of the hat to the series that got me noticed as a blogger in the first place: reviews of Conan pastiches.

The short version: I started putting up long reviews of the Tor Conan novels at the forums on the official Conan website. This attracted the attention of the esteemed Mr. John C. Hocking, author of one of the better Conan novels from Tor, Conan and the Emerald Lotus. He in turn brought me to the attention of Howard Adrew Jones, and when Howard moved over to join the Black Gate crew as Managing Editor, he asked me to come along to write for the website. Things then snowballed. Now Howard and I have the same agent. And this happened because I was screwing around on a Conan website in 2003 while bored out of my mind at my commodities brokerage job.

It’s been a tremendous trip. I’ve gone from a fan blogger to a published professional writer in that time. I’ve met amazing people and found the link into the world of fantasy and science-fiction writing that before was only a dream of a kid who read too much. And I also discovered that the phrase “Hercules vs. the Giant Robots” is search engine gold.

I still have no idea why my review of the awful Lou Ferrigno Hercules movie has become one of the mainstays of the website, getting in the top ten most popular posts list every month since I put it up in August 2009. Writing it was a lark, but I imagined it would get attention for a few weeks and then sink. It’s sort of embarrassing that it still beats everything else I post here.

Looking back at that review, however, it was a turning point for me at Black Gate. Soon after my Hercules experience, I posted a lengthy overview of the first season of The Twilight Zone for the show’s Fiftieth Anniversary. That also turned into a big success for me. I suddenly started to see that I was more a media reviewer than a fantasy history writer, which is what I first thought would be my niche on the site. Now, instead of the academic author, I’m the movie review joker who likes musing over the mistakes of bad Robin Hood movies, rejoicing geekily over the greatest Dracula flick ever, telling you how much he loves Captain America, and loves beating up terrible remakes of John Carpenter films. Hey, somebody has to do it.

To conclude this bit of self-endorsement —and amazement that I’ve stuck to this position longer than most day jobs I’ve held —I’ll tell you which is my favorite of all my Black Gate posts . . . one that still gets a decent amount of hits. It’s my overview of the 1980 TV movie The Return of the King. This is an article that says everything that I wanted it to say, and it’s the most in-depth treatment of this unusual movie that I’ve seen anywhere. I’m proud of that. Where there’s a whip there’s a way.

(I also like my 1977 Hobbit follow-up. The film isn’t as weird and grandly fun to write about, however—even if it is a much better movie.)

Okay, let’s get moving on the next three years.

My Schedule for LOSCON 38

2011-11-16T17:27:00.001-08:00

My schedule for LOSCON 38, the yearly convention of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, is all set. I will appear on four panels over the three days at the LAX Marriott. If you’re attending the con, please drop by and say “hello.” I will be the guy in the hat who talks too much.

Friday, November 25
Urban Fantasy’s Celtic Origins 12:00 pm–1:00 pm in the Boston Room. [Note: This is a last-minute change from 1:30 pm–2:30 pm]. Also on the panel: Michelle Pincus (moderator), Valerie Frankel, Nick Smith. I’m not sure why I was selected for this panel, but considering the book I’m writing now, I shall have plenty to contribute.

Middles and Endings: How to Generate Story Ideas 3:00–4:00 pm in the Houston Room. Also on the panel: Laurie Tom, Brennan Harvey, Robin “Graves” Walton, Leslie Anne Moore (moderator).

Saturday, November 26
The Writers and Illustrators of the Future Experience 4:00–5:00 pm in the Chicago Room. Also on the panel: Tim Powers, Laura Brodian Freas (moderator), Laurie Tom, Brennan Harvey, Cliff Neilson, and James Glass.

Sunday, November 27
Talking to an Agent 10:00–11:00 am in the Houston Room. Also on the panel: Denise Dumars, James Glass, Will Morton, Dean Wells. (No one is yet listed as moderator.)

Movie Review: Immortals

2011-11-15T12:21:00.001-08:00

Immortals (2011)
Directed by Tarsem Singh. Starring Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Relativity Media and Rogue Pictures should be thankful that they released Immortals the same week as Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill, which has turned into the One-Stop Shopping place for hilariously negative reviews. The Adam Sandler beat-up took the attention away from Immortals’s poor reviews, and likely helped push the film to its #1 spot at the box office for the weekend. I can imagine the scene at the multiplexes:

“So, honey, what do you want to see?”

“Anything but Jack and Jill.”

“Okay, how about that thing that looks like Clash of the Titans?”

But even though watching Immortals meant that I wasn’t watching Jack and Jill and therefore helping the betterment of global society, I ain’t letting Immortals off the hook for a moment. Except to praise the wacky headgear.

In a development so startling it may upset the balance between Law and Chaos, Immortals manages to be a worse fantasy movie than the recent Conan the Barbarian. If you understand how much I loathe the Marcus Nispel Conan fiasco, you know that I do not make that statement lightly.

Why does the international movie world (this is far from being just a “Hollywood” issue) hate Greek Mythology so much? Why do they feel they can pilfer a few elements from these stories that form the basis of Western culture, and give the finger to what actually makes them work? Using characters like Theseus and Perseus, but robbing them entirely of their mythic context and what makes them fascinating is . . . well, stupid. Except from the pure cash perspective (Clash of the Titans cleaned up internationally, and Immortals is top of the charts and will have huge international as well), the only thing that matters.

Sigh. I argue in a void. But I believe that trying to really work with Greek myth could produce a film both visually exciting and dramatically and thematically compelling. Something that Immortals fails at entirely. It’s overdone visual garbage and a narrative disaster.

The main character of the movie is named “Theseus” (Henry Cavill), and although there are some hand-waving gestures to pretend he has some connection to famous hero of Athens, this is just an impostor created for a new, bland story. The king of Crete (Mickey Rourke), named Hyperion for some reason, and leading a group called the Heraklions, for some reason, is looting made-up holy places in Greece so he can obtain the Epirus Bow and release the imprisoned Titans so they may bring down the Olympians. The Heraklions kill Theseus’s mother, and with some prompting from a disguised Zeus (John Hurt) and an oracle (Frieda Pinto), he sets out to do the required heroic things shown in the trailer.

After about fifteen minutes, there is no point in paying attention to the story. The film has no interesting in telling it to you. Events crowd onto the screen, scenes fall next to each without any sense that one connects to the other except for chronological proximity, and the feeling is that the plot is treading water and trying to disguise it by occasionally throwing bloody chum around to attract sharks. But sharks won’t eat characters this lacking in flavor, so they never arrive.

One of the worst crimes that a film (or book) can commit is to force the audience to ask every few minutes, “So what?” and have no answer. Looking at the story from a distance, such as writing the above plot synopsis, the stakes appear obvious. But never in the film do they feel this way. The story and characters are walking in a circle, achieving nothing. The heroes wander about on the same three sets for most of the film, interrupted with scenes of Mickey Rourke interrogating and then killing someone. This goes on and on until the ludicrous final battle.

So it is a terribly story, told terribly. That double-tap will kill any movie. But I want to combat one of the few items of praise other critics have given the movie even as they shred it. Immortals is not a gorgeous film. It’s an ugly, overburdened mess with no sense of a consistent culture to it. Director Tarsem Singh claimed he wanted to reference Renaissance art in the film’s look, to create, and I quote: “Caravaggio meets Fight Club.” I think he meant he wanted a complicated backdrop with shirtless guys hitting each other in the foreground. He did achieve that it, and it looks awful.

What makes the film’s crazy-quilt design extra grating is that it is supposed to be historical. In a self-defeating move, a title card announces in the second scene that it is “1228 B.C.” Really? You want to be that specific for your outrageous, unreal fantasy flick? Why not tell me if that’s Wednesday as well? If the film announces that kind of date, putting us in the late Bronze Age palace society of Mycenaen Greece, it better try to look something like it. But I saw one—count ‘em, one—location in the movie that reminded me of Mycenaean architecture. And it’s a small room that appears for a few minutes.

There is also nothing in the movie that relates to anything real in late Mycenaean Greece. Instead, there are a bunch of lame faux-Greek names like “Hellenics” and “Herklions” and a ream of fake cities. It is asinine to ignore that treasure trove of the time period, both in visuals and story-telling possibilities, and instead make a connect-the-dot generic fantasy rip-off of 300 and the Clash of the Titans re-make. It is flat-out lazy, lazy filmmaking.

Immortals is extremely violent, earning the “R” with numerous decapitations, throat-slashings, and other side-effects of swinging around sharp pointy objects in a crowd of near-naked people. It’s boring violence as well, carrying no impact because the stylizations of the fight scenes reduces them to “who cares who kill who?” levels. Besides, I’ve seen the 2007 Rambo, and that raised the bar impossibly high for gore in a mainstream action film. (Villains who bayonet babies! Nobody will beat that. Nobody should try.)

Considering the epic nature of the story, the action scenes feel weirdly constricted. The final battle takes place packed inside a hall, making it seem that a war broke out between class bells. The characters spend most of their time in the same three or four locations, and the geography of the movie is so poor that it feels the story is taking place entirely on one soundstage. (Which is probably was, but you don’t want the audience thinking that.) I don’t think “cramped” was what the filmmakers were going for in making a fantasy epic, but that’s what they got.

Oh, and there’s no Minotaur. Seriously! In a wild supernatural fantasy film about Theseus, where the gods and the titans are real and people fight with magic weapons, somebody thought that the Minotaur had to be “realistic.” There’s a burly guy wearing a wire bull helmet, looking for all the world like he got lost from the set of an leather fetish version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but no real Minotaur. This isn’t a Mary Renault novel! Give me a damn human-bull hybrid monster!

The movie does contain two minor “pros”. First is the regatta of hilarious headgear. The Olympians apparently rummaged through the cast-offs from the wardrobe of a Lady Gaga video for their helmets. Poor Mickey Rourke gets stuck in a helmet that makes it look like someone should grab his legs and start using him to trim the topiary animals. I can’t imagine the costume crew wasn’t doubling over with laughter each time they presented these ludicrous designs and director Tarsem Singh approved them. (“What an idiot! He fell for it!” I bet that’s on the crew T-shirts.)

The second “pro” is Athena (Isabel Lucas) slicing open a bunch of people. The goddess is poorly cast in the “fashion model” style and lacks any trace of the Athena’s fabled wisdom, but she’s my favorite god from any religion in any time period, so it’s a pleasure watching her bust heads.

Lead man Henry Cavill is our upcoming Superman, and I feel confident he’ll do well as the Man of Steel. But that’s because I’ve seen him in other movies; based on Immortals alone, I would lose all hope for the upcoming Superman epic. Like some of the other performers in the movie, Freida Pinto in particular, these are fine actors stuck with a nothing script and flat-line direction. They all seem to be trying—except for Mickey Rourke, who appears to labor under the effects heavy pain medication because of the weight of his silly helmet. The Vicodin bills on the budget sheet must have dwarfed the cost of craft service by a figure of ten.

And did John Hurt need a paycheck that much? John, if you need some money, I’m sure people all over the world will gladly give you the $7–$10 admission price and skip the film.

I cannot recommend Immortals on any level. There is nothing non-ironic to enjoy here except as an example of the worst trends in fantasy filmmaking that have developed over the last five years.

In closing, I would like to draw attention to two twentieth-century novels about Theseus that explore the myth in fascinating ways, both of which are worthy of big-screen adaptations: The King Must Die by Mary Renault and Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson.

National Novel Writing Month—Whether You Like It or Not

2011-11-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I’ve discussed National Novel Writing Month many times before, and if you want the lowdown on this annual global community creative writing project to kick people to a 50,000-word novel in thirty days, you can read about it here. Today I come to you as a scarred old warrior observing the changes that can happen after a few consecutive years of participation. Not changes to me, but changes to the world that NaNoWriMo has created.

I have now been on the battlefront of NaNoWriMo for four years, which makes me a “veteran.” I’ve also “won” three years running, and with a current total of 22,000 words as of Day 7, it looks like I’ll rack up another victory this year, walking away with a PNG badge. And a finished manuscript, the best reward possible.

After the third year of participation, I discovered something, and that in turn has brought me a realization this year: the actual “rules” of NaNoWriMo are irrelevant. You no longer need to try to “write a new novel, starting from zero words, and reach 50,000 before the end of the month.” Since National Novel Writing Month isn’t a contest offering a prize, you can’t “do it wrong.” You can “cheat” on your word count on the official site—many do, I’m sure, since I’ve seen some impossible word counts—but that achieves nothing. There are other, creative ways to break the rules. You can choose to start writing a screenplay instead, or tackle short stories one after the other (as I did last year), or use the time to finish a novel you’ve already started (as I am doing this year). NaNoWriMo’s official term for anyone who does this is “Rebel.” It isn’t a pejorative term, but the welcome umbrella for anyone who wants to use November to kick their writing machines’ engine back to sputtering life. Every year, I find more people joining the ranks of the Rebel Alliance; it’s usually folks who have succeeded writing new novels in the previous years.

So arose the epiphany I had this first week of NaNoWriMo 2011: National Novel Writing Month has transformed the month of November for all writers. I would go so far as to say that even people who have never heard of it have been affected. The weave of the fabric of creative endeavor has changed.

The far-reaching affects of a global creative writing project that touches every corner of the Social Media universe has made November into a writing productivity powerhouse, regardless of whether someone participates or not. If you write, you almost certainly know about NaNoWriMo, and you have friends who are taking part in it. News of word-count successes and painful procrastinations bleed over Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts. It isn’t necessary to sign up on the official website to take part in this energy. Professionals to teenager fanfic writers now exist in the same bubble of communication concerning mutual writing. The collective consciousness of writing expands to envelope all during the eleventh month.

This is the first year that I have felt this all-encompassing phenomenon. November is a different place than it was ten years ago—at least for authors. I can see myself eventually not participating in any official way—no word-count updates on the site, no forum posts, no write-ins or Kick-Off parties. But I cannot see myself ever spending an unproductive November again. I cannot escape NaNoWriMo. If you writer, neither can you. And you should give thanks.

Okay, back to work. I want to get to 25k, the halfway point, today. (It makes the end of the month easier, and I’m tied up at LOSCON.)

NaNoWriMo '11 Begins—What Am I Doing?

2011-11-01T16:32:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. It is now November. This is normally a sad statement because it means that it is no longer October, the most joyful month of the year. However, for a writer, it means that National Novel Writing Month has officially started, and it’s time to start pounding the brass keys. (In my case, the plastic-covered keys. If you don’t have a plastic cover for your desktop or laptop computer keyboard, invest in one now. Not only have I saved myself from buying three new keyboards due to evil coffee spills, but all the grime and grit and the thousands natural shocks that keyboards are heir to get transferred to this plastic shield wall.)

I write every day, so the idea of NaNoWriMo should not seem like much of a change for me. Yet, every year, it makes me crank up my ambitions, even when I am a “rebel,” someone who isn’t trying to write 50,000 words of a new novel starting on November 1st. The first two years I did the standard NaNo practice and wrote new books, one of which is my personal favorite of all the books I have written. Last year, I rebelled and decided to write 50,000 words of different short stories instead. This was much harder to achieve, but I wanted practice with the short form.

This year, it’s back to novels—and I feel at this point I may drop doing short fiction for a stretch. However, I’m still a NaNo rebel. I planned to do something unusual. This morning, as I started to work, a bizarre event occurred, and my rebellion got weirder.

Short version: I am writing two novels at once. I have never tried this before, and I thought it impossible. It may still be; the first day isn’t even over yet.

Long version: I started writing a new novel this spring, and got about 80,000 words into it, and estimated I had 20,000 remaining before typing “The End.” But I stopped. I can’t say for certain why I did this. Never in my serious novel-writing have I stopped and left something unfinished. But I did, and I soon feared I would never complete the novel. I started to think the book was no good, and it was a waste of time to return.

Two months later, I changed my mind. But I was deep into writing short stories and had trouble motivating myself to sit down and figure out what I had to do to finish the book. As NaNoWriMo approached, I decided that finishing this book and revising it would be my goal.

After doing NaNoWriMo three times, I noticed that it has turned into a tool for whatever needs to get done at the time. As a motivator, it works marvels. The community aspect is also a great catalyst. So “rebel” tag be damned, I choose to make November a month to finish up a work that I have long delayed.

Except when I got up this morning to start work, I started typing a new novel. What the—?

An idea exploded in my mind a few days earlier that a novella I wrote last year might work better as a full-length adventure. A publisher expressed interest in the idea. Okay, I would start working on that once I finished up this other book for NaNoWriMo.

But I started working on the expanded novella immediately. This is the hypnotism of NaNoWriMo at work. This is why I love this event.

The energy from writing the opening of a new book threw me into my incomplete one, and I polished off 2,000 new words in it. And I still plan another two hours of writing today. I’m wading into foreign territory here, writing two different books in different genres at once, but I feel excited about it rather than intimidated. The “fright factor” (What am I doing? will certainly arrive one of these days, but I shall prevail!)

It does help that the books are in different stages of their plots. If I were starting both from the beginning chapter, I can’t imagine it would work.

Book Review: The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

2011-11-01T00:42:00.000-07:00

The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906)
By Algernon Blackwood

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I’d say “Happy Halloween,” but by the time you read this it is probably already All-Saints Day, also known as “The Start of National Novel Writing Month.” Ah, whatever: Happy Halloween!

In celebration, I’ll turn to my favorite author of the “weird tale”: Algernon Blackwood. I’ve written about Mr. Blackwood before. Actually, I’ve written a lot about him: I gave him has his own blog label. That shows my commitment.

I’ll now turn the clock back to one of his earliest original collections, a volume that is a bit more on the ordinary side but still contains fine treasures.

Blackwood first emerged into supernatural fiction with The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories in 1906. Although the term “ghost story” would literally haunt Blackwood all of his career, much of his finest supernatural work has little to do with specters and the unquiet dead. The Empty House is the exception that proves the rule: at this early stage of fiction writing, Blackwood was interested in standard ghost tales, but showed signs that he wanted to go a different direction from the style of M. R. James that was popular at the time. The classics “The Wendigo” and the “Willows” were only another bend around the river.

The book features a continuing character named Jim Shorthouse. He features in four of the stories, but his behavior is inconsistent. Most of his appearances show an average young man who is also a magnet for weirdness: “Certain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim’s life would never have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his ‘messes’ and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as meat attracts flies, and jam wasps.” However, one of the stories has Shorthouse as the “Wise Man” figure, perhaps his maturation after so many odd adventures.

This older Shorthouse appears in “With Intent to Steal,” the finest piece in the book. Shorthouse invites an unnamed narrator to spend a night in a barn that was once the headquarters of a black magician. The magician’s malignant spirit still dwells there, with the “intent to steal” anyone who stays in the barn. The narrator experiences the full effect of this lingering power—and to the surprise of both he and the reader, Shorthouse is not the strong-willed person he seems to be. Blackwood pushes against the borders of the ghost story, and shows the potential that he would soon realize in his next collection.

Jim Shorthouse’s other appearances are “A Case of Eavesdropping,” “The Strange Adventure of a Private Secretary in New York,” and the title story. “The Empty House” is the most anthologized story in the volume. Appropriately, it’s archetypal haunted house yarn. “[T]here is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumor with the memories of evil and violent histories.” So does Blackwood present the concept of the genius loci, the building as a “psychic battery” that stores evil, similar to how Stephen King describes the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. In its genre, “The Empty House” offers nothing remarkable: Shorthouse and his Aunt Julia pay a visit to an abandoned home that has driven out all its previous tenants. The two interlopers discover that the house lives up to its reputation. The author’s skill using the numinous to create fright is already apparent: Shorthouse and his aunt get a few glimpses of possibly human ghosts, but the fear comes through inner sensations. The most remarkable moment, one that points toward the transformative horror and fantasy to come from the author’s pen, is Shorthouse’s sudden perception of a physical change in his aunt that is part wonder and part terror.

“A Case of Eavesdropping” is average for the collection, putting poor Jim Shorthouse in a haunted New York City boarding house. Blackwood drew on his own experience working as a reporter in New York to add some comic flair to this otherwise standard piece.

On the other hand, the lengthy “The Strange Adventure of a Private Secretary in New York,” is bizarrely unclassifiable as a horror tale. It combines suspense with baffling oddities and outright grotesque moments. Shorthouse now works as a secretary for Mr. Sidebotham, who dispatches him on an errand to a Mr. Garvey, a former business partner. The errand is delicate—with the hint that Garvey is blackmailing his old partner—and Shorthouse plans to finish it as soon as possible. This turns out to be difficult: Mr. Garvey lives in a spooky mansion with a creepy private servant, and the man reveals he has, uhm, bestial habits. Jim Shorthouse gets stuck in the awful mansion for the night, awaiting some horror that must be inevitable from all this insanity. Unfortunately, many of the story’s positives suffer in a frustrating ending that explains almost nothing. The heaps of anti-Semitism don’t help either.

As for the non-Shorthouse stories, the best is “A Haunted Island,” which uses a wilderness setting that hints at both “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.” The story’s narrator moves into an isolated island cabin on a Canadian lake to study for his law exams. He begins to feel uneasy about a room in the cabin. Then he sees Indians in a canoe circling the island. The tension build is superb and the final twist provides a good gut punch, but the highlight is the emphasis on psychic danger over physical danger. This is one of Blackwood’s major contributions to the weird tale, the blurring of the border of psyche and reality.

“Keeping His Promise” and “Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House” both take place at the University of Edinburgh. “Keeping His Promise” is a simple but serviceable ghost story, while “Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House” is about the telling of ghost stories. Unfortunately, the delivery is pedestrian despite the interesting use of Qabbalistic elements.

Blackwood’s pantheistic leanings emerge in “The Wood of the Dead.” The title calls forth shudders, but this is actually a fable about the gentle dead. Beauty triumphs over fear, and the Algernon Blackwood who would defy classification with his fantasies starts to emerge. The writing here is often breathtaking as its protagonist finds ecstasy in the woods of the title, where he goes at the urging of an old man he later learns is the village ghost.

Finally, there is the only work in the collection without even a hint of the supernatural: “A Suspicious Gift.” Blackwood did show an occasional flair for crime/suspense tales, such as his later novelette “Max Hensig—Bacteriologist and Murderer.” “A Suspicious Gift” is nowhere near that level of excellence, with a letdown ending that uses a cliché that was already hoary in 1906. The level of blood that flows elsewhere is a genuine shock, however, and makes up for the predictable close.

The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories is not the prime to start for newcomers to Algernon Blackwood; the author is still in a embryonic stage. A “Best of” collection will snare fresh readers, and they can save this to fill out the corners of a Blackwood library and see where the master started.

Anonymous: FAIL

2011-10-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

My feelings about the anti-Stratfordian position that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare can be summed up in this note that Anonymous director Roland Emmerich’s teacher wrote on his report: (Click to see it larger)

Oh, Godzilla fans give you an “F” as well, but you knew that. Sorry, you’ll have to repeat eighth grade—again.

A Defense of the Red Skull and HYDRA in Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-10-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

The package arrived in my mail yesterday, one day earlier than expected: the Blu-ray of my favorite movie of the summer, Captain America: The First Avenger. Since I had a Halloween party to go to that night where I was dressing up as Captain America’s nemesis, the Red Skull, I immediately fired up the film on my player and watched it again, soaking in all its comic-book goodness.

I’ve gushed about this film plenty already, and its hero has a major place on this website. You know my bias on this topic, and I won’t pretend that everyone will get the same thrill from the movie that a Cap-fan like me does. As a long-time nut about the character, the film delivers everything that I want. There are flaws, but the more I watch the film the less I care about them. Captain America: The First Avenger is the perfect old-fashioned comic book movie, with grandiose thrills and colorful heroes and villains, archetypal Good vs. Evil, and the right amount of pathos mixed with heroic optimism.

But I wish to address the villains now—the Red Skull and HYDRA—because some of the higher criticism aimed at the film has taken it to task for “whitewashing” World War II by reducing the role of the Nazis. Hitler and his gang of murderers are in the background (Hitler does appear as a character in a USO show). Johann Schmidt, alias the Red Skull, leads Hitler’s science division, HYRDA, but early on in the story he starts to separate from the Nazi ranks. He breaks completely from them around forty-five minutes into the running time when he disintegrates the generals sent to shut down his organization for “lack of results.” HYDRA wages its own war against the Allies, using its super-technology so that the Red Skull can conquer the world for himself.

When Captain America premiered, I encounter a number of reviews and blog posts unhappy that the movie had “taken the Nazis out of World War II” and the character of the Red Skull. I understand these concerns, and I would like to counter them and provide an explanation for why it happened this way—and why I prefer it this way.

There were obvious business reasons for keeping the Nazis and their iconography out of a movie meant for all ages. Increasingly in film, Nazis only work in serious or dark stories. Nobody wants their kids playing with toys that have Swastikas on them. But this isn’t the prime reason for making the Red Skull his own master running a fictional villainous organization.

The rationale for this approach is that the character of the Red Skull, as portrayed in comics since his revival and retcon in the 1960s, believes he is beyond the Nazis, Hitler, Fascism, et al. He sees the Third Reich as a failed experiment because it did not go far enough. “I am bigger than fascism,” the Skull tells the Captain at one point in the comics. He followed Hitler’s orders during the War because he was as much a lover of cruelty as der Führer, but when Nazism died with the Allied victory in the war, the Red Skull marched on as his own force—one that was “freed” because it did not have to follow anyone’s ideology other than its own.

The Red Skull caused the stock market crash. The Red Skull created SARS. The Red Skull embezzles money from charities for disabled children to buy crack to sell to Girl Scouts. The Red Skull broke up the Beatles. The Red Skull ran over your cat. If you don’t own a cat, the Red Skull will steal money from you, buy you a cat, and then run over it. This is not a nice man.

The Red Skull we see in Captain America: The First Avenger is this same megalomaniac of the comic book pages: he thinks the Nazis are doomed and he is too superhuman, too “godlike,” for the likes of them. Hell with the goose-steppers: he can commit genocide all on his own, dammit.

The non-Nazi Red Skull of the 2000s

This is why the Red Skull is such an awesome villain, and why I love watching Captain America take him down. His ruthless cruelty, his complete lack of a mote of sympathy, are essential to the Skull’s power as one of the greatest comic book baddies ever created. There are many great villains from the superhero world who have elements of tragedy and pathos: Magneto, Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, Doctor Octopus, the Green Goblin, Galactus, Ra’s al Ghul, Two Face. In each of these characters, there is something about them that readers can “get,” if not condone. But the Red Skull is through-and-through evil; there is no time I have felt any empathy for him. Even when he talks about his pathetic orphaned street urchin days, you get the sense that he isn’t upset that he was poor; he’s upset that he didn’t learn his lesson from his terrible childhood and start killing people sooner. (For the record, the Red Skull’s first homicide was as a teenager when he murdered a young Jewish girl who tried to resist him raping her. Yeah, what I said before.)

I appreciate multi-dimensional villains, but there’s a place for those you just love to hate. If any superhero needs this kind of blackheart as an adversary, it’s Captain America, who is as decent and good a hero as possible. The two men are binary opposites.

(Digression: Although the Red Skull has led HYDRA at a number of different times, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented the organization as an enemy for the 1960s James Bond-style revision of Nick Fury. This explains why HYDRA is capitalized, even though it is not an acronym: it imitates SPECTRE and all the other spy organizations acronym names of the time. HYDRA’s original leader was the “Imperial Hydra,” later retconned as Baron Strucker with the support of the Red Skull.)

The Red Skull isn’t totally de-Nazified in the film. The flashback with Dr. Erskine shows that Johann Schmidt was a fanatic believer in Aryan Occultism and the quest to find “the superior being”—obviously a white Germanic man. But when Schmidt gains the superhuman power from Erskine’s experiment and loses his human face at the same time, he moves into territory far past that of Nazi ideology. He decides he is a god and has “left humanity behind.” When he takes hold of the Cosmic Cube, he sees the power to change the world, not just change the War as Arnim Zola suggests. Why waste this power on an effort that is failing? The Skull wants his own movement, he wants to be the God.

Tommy Lee Jones’s character sums it up: “Johann Schmidt belongs in a bughouse. He thinks he’s a god, and he’s willing to blow up half the world to prove it, starting with the USA.”

Here’s an example of the Red Skull’s dialogue that shows how well the screen version matches the modern comic book:

RED SKULL: Hitler talks of a Thousand-Year Reich, but he cannot feed his armies for a month. His troops spill their blood across every field in Europe, but still he is no closer to achieving his goals.

GENERAL: And I supposed you still aim to win this war through magic?

RED SKULL: Science. But I understand your confusion. Great power has always baffled primitive men. HYDRA is assembling an arsenal to destroy my enemies in one stroke, wherever they are, regardless of how many forces they possess, all in a matter of hours.

GENERAL: Your enemies?

RED SKULL: My weapons contain enough destructive power to decimate every hostile capital on Earth. Quite simply, gentlemen, I have harnessed the power of the gods.

GENERAL: [Looking at map of hostile cities.] Berlin is on this map!

RED SKULL: So it is.

Berlin stands as much in the way of the Skull’s glory as any other large capital. He then fries the three Nazi “superiors” who have come to chastise him, and wraps up with a bit of dialogue to the cowardly Dr. Arnim Zola:

My apologies, Doctor, but we both knew HYRDA could grow no further in Hitler’s shadow. Hail HYDRA.

His words to Captain America at their first meeting:

You are deluded, Captain. You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality, you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind. Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. Without fear!

The Red Skull feels that he is now the Master Race. Who needs nations and flags when you know you are have the power of the gods?

I can’t resist quoting the Red Skull’s final speech to his fanatic followers. Nazi war power has failed, but HYRDA is going to win the war themselves:

Tomorrow, HYDRA will stand master of the world, born to victory on the wings of the Valkyrie. Our enemies’ weapons will be powerless against us. If they shoot down one plane, hundreds more will rain fire upon them! If they cut off one head, two more shall take its place. Hail HYDRA.

This is a pulp story, and this is a pulp villain. The megalomania comes with the territory.

The HYDRA Red Skull

The movie presents an ideal interpretation of the Red Skull. His break from Nazism was inevitable to make the character work in this fantasy version of the Second World War. And the HYDRA aesthetic—their guns, tanks, goggle-eyed suits, weird planes—is so damn cool looking. Because HYRDA is fictional, we don’t have to feel bad for thinking it is so damn cool looking.

When you come right down to it, we have a villain who is more evil than Hitler. That is the kind of bad guy you want in your World War II comic book story!

Is this “whitewashing” World War II? Only if Captain America: The First Avenger is meant to be an honest take on World War II, which it isn’t and doesn’t pretend to be. If people expect their children to learn about World War II from a summer comic book movie, they need to rethink their educational approach. This is a fantasy about World War II—look at all the gizmos!—and the lessons it teaches come from its hero. Captain America tells viewers about the role of America and its Allies in World War II. It teaches lessons about heroism and standing up against the bullies of the world, no matter who they are. It’s a good message and the film gets it across. It isn’t offering a treatise on Nazi atrocities. Children need to learn about that part of history in school, from books, from their teachers and from their parents.

From the standpoint of telling a tale of Captain America, the movie does its job. The Red Skull doesn’t need Nazis to be the ultimate adversary for Captain America. He’s scarier without them. Here’s one mass-murderer who can never argue that he “was only following orders.”

Not as if the Red Skull would apologize for anything, ever.

Now, go get ‘em, Cap!

Another Halloween Top 13: My Favorite “Devils and Demons” Movie

2011-10-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

Another year, another Halloween, and that means another of The Lightning Bugg’s Lair Halloween Top 13 lists. T. L. Bugg has annually run a movie countdown in the thirteen days leading to the most glorious of holidays, and I have been privileged to have contributed a guest list to each one.

This year’s theme is “The Devil Made Me Do It,” a countdown of films featuring devils and demons. My list is up today, accompanying Bugg’s review of Prince of Darkness, one of the films that also made my list.

Without further ado, here are my top thirteen devils n’ demons flicks: (Links to my full reviews if I got ‘em.)

13. Amityville II: The Possession (Damiano Damiani, 1982)
The only movie of this series worth watching. The first half of the movie is just grandly crazy, and the second half is a hilarious Exorcist rip-off. Yeah, I know that’s not much of a recommendation, but I like the damn thing. Director Damiani is principally a figure of Italian political cinema, and directed one of the best Italian Westerns, A Bullet for the General, so he’s got my respect.

12. Exorcist: The Beginning (Renny Harlin, 2004) / Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (Paul Schrader 2005)
I am counting these two as a single film, because on their own both are terrible. Seen together, they make each other incredibly interesting, since they use the same story and many of the same actors to create two completely different styles. Each movie fails completely in an area where the other succeeds. One of the strangest occurrences in the history of film.

11. Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998)
A mostly forgotten film for which I have a strange affection. Basically a body-hopping possession story with a demon (a fallen angel), it features a terrific, bleak twist ending. And John Goodman.

10. Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter, 1987)
This is the poorest of Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” (the others are The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, the latter one of Carpenter’s most underappreciated film) but it’s damn fun and packed with some whacked pseudo-science explanations for Satan, the Anti-Christ, and the Catholic Church.

9. Deconstructing Harry (Woody Allen, 1997)
An unhappy writer imagines himself going to Hell, where Satan is played by Billy Crystal! Satan’s best bit of philosophy: “Did you ever f**k a blind girl? Oh, they’re so grateful.”

8. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
If I didn’t put this film on my list, somebody would want to know why not. I’m not dealing with that sort of hell.

7. Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987)
Although this film always makes me wonder, “What is so damn valuable about this guy’s soul?”, it’s a great mash-up of noir and horror, with a wonderfully creepy view of NOLA, plus Bob DeNiro as Lucifer. Love that endless elevator descent to the bottom floor!

6. The Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski, 2001)
Sometimes I think I am the only fan of this movie, which uses book hunters as its backdrop and mixes in Satan and detective work. My own obsession with old books must have something to do with it. All around fantastic characters, with a scene-stealing Frank Langella as the Satanic power-obsessed tycoon who has had it with the stupid hood-wearing coven silliness. “Boo!”

5. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
If I list The Ninth Gate, I have to include Rosemary’s Baby. Building from Night of the Demon eleven years before, this is another quintessential contemporary-set fright flick, with the nightmare of a Satanic-impregnation dropped into a Manhattan apartment complex with really really annoying neighbors! Showing that humor and horror were co-habiting quite well before An American Werewolf in London.

4. The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941)
This is not a horror film, but it is a great portrayal of the Devil as an icon of American folklore—a peculiar variation on the figure that is unique to the U.S. A famous lawyer clashes in court with the Devil for the soul of man; can’t get more iconic than that. But it’s Walter Huston’s great performance as the Devil that puts this over the top. His is, far and away, my favorite on-screen portrayal of Satan as a character. Every list I’ve seen of “Top 10 Actors to Play the Devil” fails to mention him. Memories are too short.

3. The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968)
One of the finest Hammer Horror films, this one makes Christopher Lee into the hero (bold move) pitted against a Satanic coven in the quiet English countryside. A fiercely directed movie, even if it has a quaint feel to its setting, and the assault of horrors against the heroes inside a magical circle is still shiveringly brilliant. (Read my review of the novel as well.)

2. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
Also known as Curse of the Demon for its shortened U.S. release, this is one of the founding movies of both the Anglo Horror cycle and the turn toward contemporary-set horror movies. The demon itself, designed by future James Bond and Stanley Kubrick visual master Ken Adam, is one of the greatest looking monsters in history—the quintessential “demon.”

1. The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)
When I think of “devil movies,” this is the one that immediately pops to mind, even though no devil makes a physical appearance. His son does, however. I think it’s composer Jerry Goldsmith who really plays Old Scratch here, with perhaps the scariest film score ever. A stylish and smart thriller that still packs a wallop all these years later. Ave Satani!

Yes, I Am on Twitter

2011-10-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

I believe that I created a Twitter profile over a year ago. I then put up a few tweets . . . and dropped it entirely and stayed with Facebook. I was under the delusion that a person needs to use only one social networking tool, and that was it. After all, once Facebook emerged, MySpace accounts started dying in heaps like victims of the Black Death and nobody’s social connections suffered for it.

I was an ill man.

So as of this week, I am back to posting regular Tweets on my profile, @RHarveyWriter. I am moving into ebook publishing in the next few months (I’ll post more about that later), so follow me for more short breaking news about that, plus writing links and tips on movie reviews and other goodies.

[End shameless social network promotion.]

Movie Review: The Thing from Another World

2011-10-24T23:19:00.000-07:00

The Thing from Another World (1951)
Directed by Christian Nyby and (uncredited) Howard Hawks. Starring Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, James Young, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols, William Self, James Arness.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” has now produced three film adaptations: two classics and a footnote. After recovering from reviewing the footnote, it occurred to me that The Thing 2011 has two positives I failed to mention: it makes viewers appreciate how great John Carpenter’s 1982 version is, and how great Howard Hawks’s 1951 version is.

More than enough ink and bandwidth has covered The Thing ’82, and as much as I adore that movie, I have nothing new to contribute to the discussion of it beyond the comparisons I made in last week’s review. However, the 1951 film, The Thing from Another World, hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves in the current collective bashing of the new movie. If I’m going to point out how poor The Thing ’11 is, it’s only fair that I smash it with the Howard Hawks film as well. Why should John Carpenter have all the fun?

The Thing from Another World is a great film in its own way. When John Carpenter set out to re-make it, he made the intelligent decision not to duplicate its style and instead return to the source material and create something new. The result was two Things that can stand side-by-side, each adding to the other.

I don’t need to tell you that The Thing from Another World is an important film. The U.S. government has officially declared it to be one when it entered it into the National Film Registry in 2001, placing it in the same group with Citizen Kane, Chinatown, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Airplane! Expect the 1982 film to eventually end up in registry as well. (Wow, isn’t it great that Airplane! is now in the National Film Registry? It was entered in 2010.)

As beloved as Carpenter’s film has become, Hawks’s The Thing from Another World has had more influence on science fiction and horror. It arrived in the pivotal early 1950s and turned into one of the foundation stones of the “Atomic Horror” genre that would dominate science-fiction and horror for the rest of the decade. The release the same year of the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still marked the opening of a new frontier in SF filmmaking. The Thing ’51 is not only one of the earliest movies to establish the groundwork of Atomic Horror, it is also one of the best, featuring crackling dialogue, archetypal performances, sly humor, weighty themes of science vs. survival, and razor-sharp suspense direction. It can still make audiences today jump at its scares and make them tighten their stomaches in knots as the climax approaches.

Re-watching the film for this review, I was impressed at how tense the movie still is. Young children should probably avoid it; Roger Ebert has a vivid memory of watching it as a youngster: “I saw the 1951 film with my mother in a movie theater in West Point, NY, where we were attending my cousin Tommy's graduation from the military academy. It was the most terrifying experience I have ever had in a movie theater.”

The Thing from Another World is packed with the elements that would become standards for ‘50s SF. The square-jawed, heroic military officers. The feisty attractive female secretary. The go-getting reporter. The misguided scientist who wants to save the monster from the military wiping it out. Touches of Red Scare paranoia. And it concludes with the single most defining line of dialogue for the decade: Keep watching the skies!

Yes, The Thing from Another World is still flat-out awesome. It’s a time capsule about genre, and a great example of that genre. Plus, it is such damn fun.

The screenplay makes many changes to Campbell’s novella, many of which John Carpenter would restore in his version. The most notable alteration is to the Thing. The special-effects technology of 1951 had no way of economically or believably replicating the assimilation and imitation abilities of Campbell’s monster. Hawks’s film instead creates an alien made of vegetable matter in a humanoid form that needs blood to survive. It can’t imitate other creatures, but it is almost invulnerable to injury and can rapidly reproduce itself. It poses the same potential global threat if it gets loose as in Campbell’s novella and the 1982 film, but in a different way.

And it works . . . at least within the movie established around it. The Thing is still scary, even though it is a hulking humanoid monster instead of a furtive shape-shifter. When the Thing attacks in the film, it does it with a fury that pops off the screen. The carnage it commits takes place off screen (a few scientists gutted and hung up like cattle), but we hear enough about it to make it terrifying.

Another change to Campbell’s novella is the shift in location. All other versions of the story occur in Antarctica, the most remote spot in the planet. The Thing from Another World moves to the Arctic in order to better explain the military presence and tap into fear of the Soviet Union. This change to the Arctic doesn’t do much damage to the story — it is still a dangerous and isolated place — but Antarctica is so much more Romantic and distant.

Christian Nyby is credited as director, but much the same way that Poltergeist feels like the product of its producer, Steven Spielberg, more than its director, Tobe Hooper, The Thing from Another World feels exactly like a Howard Hawks movie. It is customary for people to forget Nyby’s name is on the picture and refer to it as Howard Hawks’s The Thing. Nyby has admitted that Hawks was the principle creative talent behind the movie, but actor James Arness — the Thing itself — reports that Nyby was on the set the entire time and that Hawks didn’t simply take over from him. But star Kenneth Tobey claimed it was Hawks who did most of the direction. So yeah, we’ve got a Poltergeist situation here: Who really did direct The Thing from Another World? At the end of the day, does it matter that much? Whatever the amount of Nyby’s contribution, the film belongs to Howard Hawks. Quite literally: he made the film under his own production company, Winchester Pictures Corporation, with RKO handling distribution. Winchester Pictures made only one other film, the 1952 Western The Big Sky, which Hawks directed.

Charles Lederer has the on-screen credit as scriptwriter, but both Ben Hecht and Howard Hawks worked on it as well — and it shows in the crisp, sharp dialogue and crackling sense of humor. Hawks was exceptional at showing professional men in action bristling with competence, and The Thing from Another World is brimming over with this attitude. Each scene is packed with information presented in tight dialogue with dashes of humor. The love story subplot between the hero “Pat” Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Nikki (top-billed Margaret Sheridan), assistant to the film’s deluded scientist, would kill the pacing in other films, but the Hawks touch makes it an indispensable part of a whole.

The performances are mannered, as they should be for this type of film. No one performs a “realistic” character, because Howard Hawks doesn’t need those type of characters. He needs crackerjack professionals and fast-talkers and zinger throwers, and that’s what he has in this movie. It is such a joy listening to reporter Scotty (Douglas Spencer) keep shouting “Holy cats!” at every bizarre moment; or Cap. “Pat” Hendry exchanging sexy “why don’t you marry me?” banter with Nikki; or the deranged Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) demanding that everybody in the base should willingly die for the sake of knowledge. This is all fantastic stuff, and if anybody complains that it feels “silly” or “starchy,” I’m getting out the flame-thrower. If you need a naturalistic counterpart to this film, it already exists and it’s called The Thing. We can have both. (Wait, there was a third Thing, right? I seem to recall . . . oh, never mind.)

If there’s one element I can complain about with The Thing from Another World, it is the design of the title beast. The Thing looks like Universal’s Frankenstein Monster in a Star Trek uniform; it simply lacks majesty. Arness (who would later star in another ‘50s SF classic, Them!) invests the Thing with tremendous energy to compensate, and the camera keeps the creature off screen most of the time, so the bland look doesn’t damage the film much. The first time audiences get a clear look at it comes in an explosive moment that is guaranteed to make people rocket out of their seats.

The movie has one of the few on-screen appearances of the Master of the Voice Over, Paul Frees. If one of the actors at the base sounds as if he’s being dubbed, that’s because Paul Frees is playing him and he dubbed just about everybody. Aside from a million jobs as a voice artist, Frees was the ubiquitous “radio announcer” in many ‘50s SF films. Whenever a character has to tune into a plot-specific news station in one of these movies (“Authorities now recommend that all citizens stay in doors until the giant aphid attack has passed.”) it’s Paul Frees at the mic.

Another piece of trivia: actor William Self, who plays the poor sap who unfreezes the Thing with an electric blanket, would go on to produce the pilot for something called The Twilight Zone eight years later.

The Thing from Another World is worth revisiting if you’ve just taken in John Carpenter’s movie as tonic for the re-make. It is a window into the birth of a genre that still delivers the basic goods: fun scares and sharp characters. The film has “dated” only in the sense that we are more aware of the politics of its making and the way it set the rules for other films. As entertainment, there isn’t anything dated about it at all. It sits comfortably beside The Thing ’82 as a classic of science-fiction horror.

And, it goes without saying. . . .

“Foolish Mortals” Now Up at Every Day Fiction

2011-10-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

My flash fiction fantasy tale, “Foolish Mortals,” is now online at Every Day Fiction.

It’s a short piece, so head on over to read it, and please leave a rating when you are done. Feel free to recommend it on Facebook and Tweet it. Link it to infinity!

Read my previous post where I discussed the origin of this story.

Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

2011-10-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

The Thing (2011)
Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

A dialogue that occurs in the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing, as scientist Blair (Wilford Brimley) explains the nature of the twisted dog-mass corpse on his operating table:

BLAIR: See what were talking about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own cells to imitate them. This, for instance . . . [points to bone] That’s not dog. It’s imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish.

NORRIS: Finish what?

BLAIR: Finish imitating these dog.

Now imagine this conversation repurposed slightly:

BLAIR: See what were talking about here is a movie that imitates a popular movie with enormous name-recognition, and imitates it outwardly perfectly, while inwardly lacking its essential qualities. When it attacked John Carpenter’s The Thing it tried to digest it, and in the process shape its screenplay to imitate it while masquerading as a prequel. This, for instance . . . [points to film on screen] That’s not The Thing or a prequel to it. It’s a cosmetic imitation. We didn’t get to it before it finished.

NORRIS: Finished what?

BLAIR: Finished re-making The Thing while pretending that it wasn’t.

And so my review is finished.

But, if you want some further details, there is a bit more after the jump.

Oh, you’re still here? Yes, the new Thing is a flat-out re-make of John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing. It plays the prequel game so it won’t seem as if it is treading across sacrosanct territory. However, the title gives away the filmmakers’ true intentions: instead of a more appropriate title like The Thing: Planet Fall or The Thing Awakes or The Thing: From Spaceship to Husky in Less Than Two Hours, the studio has gone with, well, the title of the film it’s supposedly setting up. The new movie may take place in 1982 at the Norwegian base that features prominently in the opening of the earlier film, but it’s only a trick to get audiences to watch an inferior CGI re-do.

I am obligated to point out that Carpenter’s film was also a re-make. But The Thing ’82 is substantially different from The Thing from Another World, the 1951 Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby Cold War SF flick. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster went back to the source material, John W. Campbell’s 1939 novella written under the Don Stuart pseudonym, “Who Goes There?” The ’51 film did not have the effects technology to achieve the amorphous alien beast of the novella, and went for a more standard man-in-a-suit creature (played by Gunsmoke’s James Arness). Both the ’51 and ’82 films are excellent, and because of the difference between them they can stand side-by-side as fascinating different approaches to the same material.

But The Thing ’11 is just The Thing ’82 repeated, beat for beat, scene for scene, only with CGI effects, a female lead, and malaise instead of tension. Even the font of the credits is identical. To use Mystery Science Theater 3000’s most infamous chronic put-down: “This movie reminds me a lot of The Thing. Except it’s not very good.”

And by “not very good” I want to emphasize that the film isn’t worthless or a disaster. It is simply “not very good.” Nothing more than a standard 2000s FX-monster-on-the-loose flick. Viewers who have never seen the 1982 version, mostly younger ones to whom this movie is catering, may find adequate enjoyment here, but they should instead go seek out Carpenter’s film. Fans of The Thing ’82 will find this iteration boring; they’ll be connecting the dots of scenes in their heads, always staying a few dots ahead of the movie.

The story takes place in the few days before the infiltration of Outpost 31. Explorers from a Norwegian base discover an enormous space ship trapped beneath the Antarctic ice, and its “passenger” frozen a short distance from it. Because an all-Norwegian-speaking cast won’t work for a U.S. mainstream film, scientist Dr. Sander Halversen (Ulrich Thomsen) brings in American paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to the base to help investigate the discovery. To add to the English-speaking cast, The Thing packs in Dr. Halversen’s American assistant (Eric Christian Olsen), two American pilots (Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), plus some British guy (Jonathan Lloyd Walker).

That’s already a dense cast of alien-fodder, and we haven’t even got to the Swedes. (“They’re Norwegian, Mac.”) Don’t fret though; the film doesn’t expect you to know who any of these people are.

Once the ice slab containing the spaceship’s occupant gets taken back to the base, the Thing breaks free and starts a campaign of assimilation and impersonation. Kate, saddled with the exposition, figures out the alien’s M.O. and tries to corral the rest of the base into ferreting out the intruders among them. Most of this consists in her using Bill Lancaster’s script from the ’82 film to move things along as predictably as possible.

The cast is almost entirely dispensable. It gears up the carnage and the interchangeable Norwegians/Americans (strangely, nationality is no help in telling the characters apart) start dying fast before the genuine paranoia sets in. Throughout the film, I had to keep asking myself, “Wait, who’s dead now? Which guy is missing?” Although the characters of The Thing ’82 have no backstory provided to them, the casting and direction gives them immense personality, and the terror of them getting winnowed down one-by-one in the hunt for the Thing remains potent even after multiple viewings. I didn’t give a damn who lived or who died in the new movie.

As an audience identification character, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a wash, playing her part as a monotone scientific explainer. She has no charisma to take over when things get crazy, and no shades of gray to make her intriguing. In other words, she’s no Kurt Russell.

A friend who saw the new film with me made an interesting observation about the difference between the leads of the two movies: Kurt Russell’s Macready emerges as the lead character due to the escalating circumstances, while Winstead’s Kate is simply declared as the lead character from her first scene. Why is she the hero? Her name is first in the credits, that’s why.

The only supporting cast member who sticks out is a Norwegian researcher I thought of as “Redbeard” while watching the movie because of the massive rhododendron bush growing across his chin. The credits tell me his name is actually Jonas as is played by Kristofer Hivju, but I’m fine with “Redbeard.” He has a boisterous attitude and a sense of a sweet persona hidden beneath his incredibly Viking exterior. Redbeard is the closest the new movie comes to the quirks of the cast of the older one. Someone needs to cast Kirstofer Hivju in a sword-and-sorcery epic film right now.

The new Thing does attempt to knit itself to Carpenter’s to justify the “prequel” title. Want to know why that axe was left jammed in the door? (No.) Well, here’s how it happened! Want an explanation for that double-faced toasted Thing-body found out in the snow? (Maybe.) Well, here’s how that happened as well. There are many other places where the movie goes out of its way to match details with the The Thing ’82, especially in the production design. But it’s selective about details: some of the most interesting questions that the earlier film leaves open are wasted here in toss-off moments. I was curious to know what had made the frozen man whom Kurt Russell discovered graphically slit his wrists and gouge his throat. That must have been a tense, incredible moment. But nobody involved in making this film apparently thought so.

Plot holes. It has more than a few. It was the first topic my friend and I got into after the film finished: we started swapping all the nonsensical inconsistencies and lazily dangling ends, and found out we had a mega-sized popcorn bucket full of them. These aren’t fun, ambiguous mysteries; they’re just gaping story chasms that cause irritation. The strange events of The Thing ’82 still ignite spirited debate among viewers thirty years later. Nobody will be investigating the plot holes in this movie more than an hour after it’s over.

Time to get into the CGI. Digital effects were obviously going to replace the practical effects of Rob Bottin, and I can’t fault the movie simply because it took this route. As much as I love Bottin’s work, which still entrances today because of its creativity and the effort that went into it, CGI was inevitable for the new version. It’s good CGI as well: the execution and designs are actually alien and creative. The Thing’s multiple forms and its transformations as it bursts apart its human shapes are much better than I expected.

But . . . where the CGI damages the film is that it deprives the Thing of its stealth. This alien nasty no longer wants to hide as long as it can; it bursts out into major transmogrifications with little provocation. Then it maintains these grotesque forms for extended periods so it can chase and stalk people in standard horror movie fashion. Watching the bizarre CGI alien lunging around hallways and smashing through walls robs the sinister aspect of it as a hidden creature, and this takes away the fear that made the ’82 film such a nail-biter. This Thing is basically a wild alien beast that occasionally changes shape.

The Thing ’11 knows that it has to play the paranoia game of “who among us is not human?” but it only holds onto this for a stretch in the middle. Since the characters are difficult to distinguish (which whiskery guy are you?) there isn’t much tension when the film tries to play the suspense. The replacement for the legendary “blood test” scene from Carpenter’s movie is silly (it involves bad dental hygiene) and fails to pay off.

As The Thing wrapped up its underwhelming double climax—one of which plays during the end credits—I realized that I never actually wanted to know what happened at the Norwegian base before the husky and the helicopter opening of The Thing ’82. This isn’t a story that needed telling, except as an excuse to re-make a classic. The Thing ’82 has made a reputation from the way it continues to provoke questions and analysis from its mysteries. Having some of these questions answered isn’t satisfying. Casual viewers will forget the new film, and fans of Carpenter’s film will shrug this off as non-canon. Two men in a helicopter trying to shoot down a husky fleeing across the Antarctic snow . . . let’s start there.

By the way, the movie isn’t scary. I thought I should mention that.

And speaking of places to start, there is no reason not to watch the Howard Hawks movie first. It isn’t as great as Carpenter’s closer version of Campbell’s novella, but it remains a quintessential 1950s SF thriller. Of course, if you can find a copy of Campbell’s novella, that’s an even better place to get your Thing going.

An Interview about “The Shredded Tapestry”

2011-10-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Innsmouth Free Press, the publishers of Candle in the Attic Window (have you bought your copy?) have posted an interview with me regarding my contribution to the collection, “The Shredded Tapestry.” I talk a bit about the Regensburg connection and the influence of Algernon Blackwood on the piece, as well as what “Gothic” means to me when it comes to literature.

Once more, here’s a picture of that amazing Bavarian bridge that started me thinking about using it in a Gothic tale of terror. More about my trip to Regensburg here.

Movie Review: TrollHunter

2011-10-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

TrollHunter (2011)
Directed by André Øvredal. Starring Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Hans Morten Hansen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Urmilla Berg Domaas.

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I love any review that gives me an excuse to use “ø.” Next I will have to find an Icelandic movie so I can write a review using “þ” and “ð.”

In the recent glut of “found footage” films that followed the successes of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, the Norwegian film TrollHunter (Trolljegeren) is a true gleaming piece of uncovered dwarf’s gold. It ditches the gloom that hangs over the other movies in this subgenre and lets the audience have a good time along with its light scares. And while most found footage films are horror movies, this one is a fantasy. A fantasy with dark thrills, but nonetheless a fantasy.

TrollHunter first screened in the U.S. at Fantastic Fest 2010, where Magnet Distribution picked it up for release in Summer 2011. (Magnet has picked up some terrific small films and done simultaneous VOD and limited theatrical release patterns for them, including Hobo with a Shotgun and Centurion. Anything that Magnet picks up catches my interest now.) The film is currently available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix streaming, and anyone who gets a high from fairy-tale fantasy or Norse myth should give this film a look despite the overused faux-documentary trappings.

TrollHunter obeys the framing rules of the found footage genre and begins with title cards explaining that what follows is video from a set of tapes that were sent anonymously to a TV station. The station edited the footage into a shorter movie, which experts have determined is authentic and not a hoax.

The footage is the work of three college students (Tosterud, Mørck, and Larsen) who started shooting a documentary about a local series of bear killings. Their documentary takes an unusual turn when the students discover a secretive man named Hans (Jespersen) whom the hunters working for the Wildlife Service suspect is poaching bears. After pursuing Hans for an interview, without success, the filmmakers push after him into a forest at night. Then a twenty-foot tall, three-headed troll crashes through the trees and. . . .

It turns out that Hans is a legally sanctioned hunter for the Norwegian government. But he doesn’t answer to the Wildlife Service. His boss is the Troll Security Service (TSS), a body responsible for controlling rogue troll activity and hiding the monsters’ existence from the general population. Hans decides to let the students come with him on his current assignment because he has finally gotten fed up with the lonely hassles of troll hunting and wants someone to document the work he does so the public will know about it.
But this winter Hans has a tougher job ahead of him than he has ever had to face: an unusual number of trolls have started to push into populated lands, and Hans not only has to stop them, but also find out what has made the monsters so agitated. The answer is unexpected and startling for how mundane and deadly it is.

The performances from the leads are decent-to-good, but the trolls are the real stars, and boy do they deliver. The first time one of the title monsters lumbered out from the forest, towering almost the height of the pines and sporting two extra heads, I thought the film might be headed for trouble. I had expected a realistic take on the monsters as animals, but this first troll looked like something Brain Froud painted or a picture from Wil Huygen’s The Secret Life of Gnomes. Everything about it felt like a fairy-tale creation, which ran against the grain of the naturalistic style the movie had already established.

Minutes later, I realized this was exactly the effect that the filmmakers wanted. The weird fantasy troll made the situation even stranger; folklore and magic suddenly invaded a realistic documentary. After this, TrollHunter moves into the crazy/funny zone. It’s when the monsters appear, the main menace of the film, that everything turns lighthearted. The film never lets their danger disappear, but balances it with a sense of wonder and exploration.

The trolls come in a variety of sizes and forms, all of them beautifully designed. The basics of troll activity that Hans lays out for the students mixes myth with some dashes of science. These trolls turn to stone in the sunlight, but Hans has special UV floods to petrify them during the night. They behave bestially and cannot speak. They can smell the blood of a Christian, so only non-Christians can go on troll hunts. The movie puts this interesting aspect to great dramatic use later. It also leads to the funniest line, which Hans says while setting up a lure on a bridge: “Better stand back. I’m going to spill the blood of a Christian man.” (Where did he get a bucket of that? Do I really want to know?)
Jespersen gives the best performance in the film as Hans. Jespersen is known in his native country as a comedian with a hard satirical edge. There are flashes of humor to his portrayal of the title character, such as the way he has Hans lumber about in absurd anti-troll armor that makes him look like he just missed the auditions for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For the most part, Jespersen plays Hans as capable but worn down. It’s a joy watching him execute strange troll-hunting tactics and improvise coolly in the middle of nightmare situations, but you also wonder when he might just give up on this business and let the trolls munch on the ungrateful people he’s been protecting for years.

A few other popular Norwegian comedians appear in the cast. The most notable is Hans Morten Hansen, who plays Finn, the irritable bureaucrat responsible for overseeing this messy troll business. Director André Øvredal must have wanted to cue audiences to take a light approach to this material with this type of cast.

Most found footage movies look ugly by their nature. TrollHunter, however, is visually stunning—and not only because of the tolls. The students’ camera (supervised by photographer Hallvard Bræin) captures great icy mountain vistas of Western Norway. The chase finale across a rocky plain in the trollss territory opens up the movie into something epic that this type of “shaky cam” filmmaking rarely achieves.

TrollHunter obliquely hints at a fascinating mythology lying beyond the borders of modern Norway. If trolls exist and appear similar to their fairy-tale and Viking roots, than what else from the mists of Norwegian lore might also hide in the wilderness? That the trolls have an intense hatred for Christians (or is it simply that they can smell Christian blood and don’t like it?) suggests that the Norse pantheon of gods might be real and possibly exist parallel with the Christian god. That opens some crazy ideas worth exploring. What other weirdness is the Norwegian government covering up? And what other nations might have similar programs keeping in check the fantastic monsters of their ancient cultures? TrollHunter offers a tantalizing point to graft on new stories. I don’t want to see a movie sequel, but tie-in comics or novels would definitely get my money. (I’d pay in Norwegian krone, or maybe trade some oxen and one goat.)

The movie unfortunately trips in the same place that many found footage films do: it doesn’t know how to end satisfactorily while maintaining the documentary conceit. It attempts to go for something dark and nihilistic after the fantasy tone—and it doesn’t fully work. But the end isn’t horrifying enough to skew the enjoyment of the film, and there’s a priceless stinger with the Norwegian Prime Minister before the credits. But I did leave the film wondering if it might have worked even more done in a more traditional narrative style. Alas, the budget probably couldn’t handle it.

TrollHunter may be headed for a U.S.-remake. The day the film opened in the U.S., Chris Columbus’s company 1492 and CJ Entertainment Media purchased the rights for the re-make, and I’m afraid they are going to go ahead and do it. A U.S. re-make is preposterous. The trolls are too ingrained in Scandinavian myth and culture to make sense in North America. Another folklore creature would need to be used instead, which negates the purpose of re-making TrollHunter in the first place. They could set the movie in Norway with an American crew looking for trolls, but . . . oh, screw it, they’re going to do the re-make no matter how many reasons I point out for them not to do it.

This all makes me wonder if the government of Greece has a special Chimera squad, a branch of the Hydra and Nemean Lion Regulation Service.

Animal lovers, take note: the end title crawl assures viewers that “No trolls were harmed during the making of this movie.” Killed a few dwarf stuntmen, however.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 5: “The Wizard of Venus”

2011-10-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

The Venus series ends not with a novel, but a novella. Consequently, this will be the shortest entry in my survey of Burroughs’s last series, but I have appended a wrap-up with my final thoughts on the Venus books as a whole.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938), Escape on Venus (1941).

Today’s Installment: “The Wizard of Venus” (1964)

Secret Origin

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s experiment of writing the previous Venus book as four linked novellas succeeded—commercially, at least—so he forged ahead with a new story in 1941 to start a second quartet. But no magazine purchased “The Wizard of Venus.” ERB moved on to the second story, which he started on 2 December 1941 in his home in Hawaii.

You can see where this is headed.

Burroughs was an eyewitness to the attack on Pearl Harbo on 7 December 1941: he and his son Hulbert saw the events unfold from the tennis court of their home, at first believing it was a military exercise. Six days later, Burroughs joined the Allied effort as a war correspondent. He would eventually return home to Hawaii, but he would never return to Venus.

“The Wizard of Venus” first saw print in 1964, fourteen years after its author’s death, in the omnibus Tales of Three Planets. In 1970, the novella was paired with a short novel found in the author’s files, a contemporary adventure with a eugenics sub-theme titled Pirate Blood, for its Ace publication. All editions since have used this same pairing, sometimes under the title The Wizard of Venus and Pirate Blood, which sounds like one weird school of magic.

The Argument

Carson Napier is at last back in his favorite country of Korva, where he is a prince (tanjong). He and his friend Ero Shan build a new flying machine (anotar) and go exploring. However, weather forces them down in a kingdom under the control of a “wizard” named Morgas. Morgas keeps the locals in fear with his power to turn their kidnapped relatives into zaldars (the Amotrian version of pigs). Carson deduces that this is only a trick; if Morgas can convince people that their loved ones might be hidden among their own zaldars, they won’t eat them and Morgas can seize their abandoned livestock while protecting his own.

The two heroes set out to rescue a woman named Vanaja from Morgas so they can retrieve the anotar and their weapons from her family, who seized them when they landed. They reach Morgas’s castle and discover the man is a charlatan who uses simple stage magic and hypnotism to convince people he has sorcerous powers. Carson fights back with his own mental abilities to rescue not only Vanaja, but all the people who live in fear of the false wizard.

The Upside

This short piece is a galactic-sized improvement over Escape on Venus. If Burroughs had completed the other novellas in this intended book with the same flair, this might have been one of the high points of the Amtor adventures. The writing and pacing are strong, the situations fun, and the flashes of satire effective without excess.

Best of all, the funny Edgar Rice Burroughs has returned! From the first pages, the witty style and sly sarcasm that added an extra pinch of enjoyment to many of ERB’s early adventure stories roars back. It starts in the first paragraph of the story proper (after the standard introduction from the fictional Burroughs), where Carson calls himself “the prize incompetent of two worlds,” and it hums through the rest of the story. It’s wonderful to see ERB hurling out gems like this:

At that, Noola laughed: I think a writer of horror stories would have called it a hollow laugh. I don’t know what a hollow laugh is. I have never known. I should describe Noola’s laugh as a graveyard laugh; which doesn’t make much more sense than the other, but is more shivery.

There some clever dialogue exchanges as well, particularly one where Carson repeatedly calls Morgas a “jackass,” then makes some snide comment about jackasses in high places in his world, and finally apologize to all jackasses everywhere because they actually are intelligent animals and the same can’t be said about Morgas.

Carson Napier finally achieves the right balance as a hero: he still can’t fight off hordes of enemies, but he displays exceptional cleverness and ingenuity in dealing with Morgas and saving the people the false wizard has enslaved. Carson engages in sharp banter with his adversaries, and not in the smug jerk fashion of Escape on Venus. He seems like a real hero at last when he seizes the initiative with old-fashioned chivalry. (He makes the direct comparison between he and Ero Shan and Arthurian knights.)

Carson at last uses of his telepathic abilities within a story. These powers have been mentioned since Pirates of Venus as Carson’s method of communicating his adventures back to Earth, but he never used them in this adventuring. This failure to use a major power for any reason except sending the fictional Edgar Rice Burroughs information for a new book has always rankled with me. But at last, Carson pulls out the mind mojo where it counts: saving his life and the lives of others.

Morgas is a fun villain for a novella. He could never stretch out for a full book—he isn’t powerful enough—but in this short space he gives the right combination of danger and silliness. The powerless villains of Escape on Venus were just blowhards, but Morgas is a funny blowhard, and well written, and that makes all the difference.

Ero San has a good buddy relationship with Carson. He doesn’t do much, but he helps out with Carson’s turn toward the humorous side. It’s no Butch and Sundance pairing, but it keeps the story breezing along.

The Downside

No, not another anotar! Not another forced landing in a strange new country suffering under a tyranny!

Although it’s good to see Carson’s mind powers put to use, it does come screaming out of nowhere and leaves the reader wondering why he didn’t do this any time before.

Carson’s “Jedi mind tricks” point toward the only serious flaw in “The Wizard of Venus”: there isn’t much action, and Carson never seems in serious danger. He uses his mental power to facilely manipulate events until he has saved everyone. It is impressive, however, how much ERB covers up this deficiency with plenty of amusing writing and strong characterizations.

Oh, that extra novel Pirate Blood included in the volume? Don’t bother. Really, do not bother.

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: “How much an optimist I am, you may readily judge when I admit that I have been hopefully waiting for years for seven spades, vulnerable, doubled, and redoubled. I might also add that at such a time my partner and I have one game to our opponents’ none, we having previously set them nineteen hundred; and are playing for a cent a point—notwithstanding the fact that I never play for more than a tenth. That, my friends, is optimism.”

Most Triumphantly Stupid Carson Napier Moment: Forgetting he had telepathic powers during all his time on Venus until this story.

Best Monster: Nothing new here except for the zaldar.

Most Uncomfortable Moment for the Modern Reader: The moment the anotar has to make a forced landing, everyone will think, “Not this again!”

Casrson Napier, Political Satirist: Remarking on the robotic response of viewers to one of Morgas’s feats of “magic”: “It was as spontaneous and unrehearsed as a drafting of a president for a third term.”

Should ERB have continued the series? Yeah, why not? This is a promising beginning, even if it seems that the next three novellas would have repeated the same “anotar crashes in a new place” pattern. However, we shall never know.

Series Wrap-Up

Perhaps somewhere in ERB fandom are people who think that the Venus series is not the worst one that the author wrote. They are entitled to their opinion, even though it is wrong. (Kidding, kidding.)

But I will concede that, having read the whole series in a short period of time, it isn’t as horrible as it is often made out to be. Lost on Venus and Carson of Venus deliver some surprises, and any ERB reader should give them a try. “The Wizard of Venus” is a surprising upswing at the end, when it looked as if the series was depleted.

However, when the Venus series is bad, it is truly awful. That one of the worst books, the plotless slog of Pirates of Venus, starts it off means that few readers will ever want to go any farther. Although the next two books have strong elements to them, neither is great: Lost on Venus is sometimes downright uncomfortable, although the eugenics aspects will interest readers who take the historical view of it; and Escape on Venus is almost unreadable and close to its author’s worst.

The Venus books lack a “big picture” to hold them together, and that damages it the most as an overall series. Carson Napier is the only through-line, and he’s a weak and passive hero burdened with limitations and a boring love interest. The ideas that ERB cultivates about the planet at the beginning—the Thorists and the battle for Vepaja’s freedom—vanish after only one book, and each subsequent book conjured a new civilization and adventure that adds nothing to Venus as coherent location. It is easy to forget that the stories are taking place on Venus. Barsoom is a real place in the Mars novels; Amtor is just a bunch a cities where a powered glider keeps crashing.

If Burroughs had moved the focus away from Carson Napier in the later books, the same way he changed protagonists in the Barsoom series, it might have freed him up and stop the damning repetition. Carson isn’t a fellow who can sustain four novels; the amusement of him as screw-up wears out fast. It isn’t until “The Wizard of Venus” that Burroughs discovers the balance to make him both funny and appealing as a hero. The rest of the time, he feels like the comic relief instead of the lead (except in Escape on Venus where he’s just a jerk.)

Burroughs was in a writing slump during most of the time that he wrote these novels, and it shows. The prose often feels loggy or bored. Only “The Wizard of Venus” feels like it has his zip of the ‘teens, and it still has little action in it. Burroughs still has his satire, but he’s shooting all over the horizon with different ideas and never nails anything. The Zani-Nazi of Carson of Venus are the strongest piece of satire, but they don’t turn out to be effective villains in the long run, which hurts the comparison to the Nazis.

The Venus novel progression captures all of Burroughs’s late-period writing in miniature. In the early 1930s he seems stuck in the same mode, repeating early concepts but without much passion. As the decade moves on, he tries a few new concepts, tosses in some particularly barbed personal ideas he probably should have left alone, but still struggles to make it work. At the end of the decade, desperate to keep selling, he stumbles into a low point. And then, finally, at the end of his career, he experiences a sudden revival. “The Wizard of Venus” along with Burroughs’s last few novels, Tarzan and the “Foreign Legion” and I Am a Barbarian, show the old man still had it in him.

The Venus books are only for the most serious Burroughs enthusiasts. Casual readers may wish to check out Lost on Venus for the standard adventure material and the eugenics craziness—they’ve been warned about that—but they won’t get much else from Amtor. I am as hardcore a ERB lover as you will find, and getting through all these stories in a two-month period was a test even for me.

But we’ll always have Havatoo and its, ahem, perfect society.

My ranking of the series, from best to worst:

Lost on Venus
“The Wizard of Venus”
Carson of Venus
Pirates of Venus
Escape on Venus

“Foolish Mortals” Publication Date: October 19

2011-10-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to the alarm sound of “Danse Macabre,” the National Anthem of the Month of October. It is now officially The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. (Songwriters Eddie Pola and George Wyle got confused while writing the lyrics for their October celebration song for Andy Williams and referred to December for some reason. December? Do they know how cold it is in December? Andy Williams should have caught that and made them re-write the song.)

I will also have my first October-released work of fiction, since Every Day Fiction has slated my story “Foolish Mortals” to appear on the site on October 19. Nineteen days from purchase to publication . . . I like that sort of speed.

Happy October, everyone. May all your pumpkins turn out ghoulish, and may your Universal Horror Movie parties all be drunken successes with as few young girls tossed in the lake as possible. (At least one is acceptable, however.)

“Foolish Mortals” to appear at Every Day Fiction

2011-09-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

Some good news this morning: the popular and influential flash fiction site Every Day Fiction has purchased my story “Foolish Mortals.” The date that it will go up on the site hasn’t been announced yet, but it will either be in October or November. (The monthly Table of Contents are usually put up on the last day of the month, so if “Foolish Mortals” is going to appear in October, I should know by today.)

Update: It is now slated for October 19.
Every Day Fiction is run by Jordan Lapp, a Writers of the Future winner whom I got to know at this year’s workshop, where he helped out the new winners feel more at home around a pack of famous writers. Jordan is a great guy, and was very helpful in getting me to overcome the shyness I felt toward approaching legendary authors (some of whom I was reading in junior high school!) while at the workshop. I even mentioned him in my acceptance speech. So it’s a great privilege to be selected to appear in the online magazine that he founded and which has become one the top spots for flash fiction.

I should probably explain the term “flash fiction” for some of my readers who might be new to it. Flash fiction is the contemporary name for the “short short story,” a complete work of fiction that takes place over only a few pages. Although there is no set parameters for how long or short flash fiction has to be, the most common upper limit is a thousand words, with a lower limit of two hundred and fifty. However, I’ve read some flash that was only fifty words long. Every Day Fiction has no lower limit (unless you want to get technical and say a story must be more than zero words long) and an upper limit of a thousand. “Foolish Mortals” is just a few words under a thousand—even when writing short, I still tend to write long.

“Foolish Mortals” is the only flash fiction pieces I have written so far that I intended to try to sell. I’ve written innumerable short sketches that might be considered flash fiction, but “Foolish Mortals” was written and re-written with the aim to be a professional piece.

Here’s the strange thing about the story, and perhaps other writers can take something away from this: “Foolish Mortals” started life as a four thousand-word piece. I originally wrote it as a standard short story. But I did not like it, and thought about dropping it in the “retired” file. But after thinking about it, I realized that the reason it didn’t work was that it really wanted to be a flash fiction piece; there was a far more abstract but interesting story in the middle of a lot of “business.” So I laid the long version in front of me, opened up a word processing file, and started to write out the smaller tale that was within. The flash version ended up a better story, in fact a more descriptive story, than the one that was four times the length!

I’ll say only this much about the story, since it’s a fast read and you’ll soon be able to experience it yourself: it tells a fantasy tale about a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and stems from a warm personal memory I have about playing a part in the play when I was an eighth-grader. (I was Tom Snout the Tinker, a.k.a. The Wall, and I had a crazy crush on the seventh-grade girl who played Moth, one of Titania’s fairy attendants.)

The image above inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the work of the great Arthur Rackham, one of the finest of all fantasy illustrators.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 4: Escape on Venus

2011-09-27T11:05:00.001-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

I love Edgar Rice Burroughs. His novels have had an enormous influence on me as a writer and as a pulp fan. But, I must admit, sometimes he wrote . . . this kind of thing. . . .

Oh, let’s just leap into this and get it over with.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938).

Today’s Installment: Escape on Venus (1942)

Secret Origin

At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs decided to try an experiment with three of his properties, all of which had sailed into creative doldrums: Mars/Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Venus/Amtor. The previous Barsoom novel, Synthetic Men of Mars (1939), is one of the few stains on that otherwise superlative series. The Pellucidar novels went into a tailspin with 1937’s Back to the Stone Age (a depressingly accurate title) and Land of Terror, which Burroughs failed to sell to any magazine when he wrote it in 1938 and waited to publish it on his own in 1944. Carson of Venus has some positives, but the Venus novels are already much lower on the quality scale of Burroughs’s work. Something wasn’t going right, and the failure to sell Land of Terror must have worried ERB.

It wasn’t just that Burroughs’s writing was in a slump—although it was—that was causing problems, but also the economic realities that were starting to kill the pulp magazines. Comic books exploded at the end of the 1930s and competed for the same young male audience that read the pulps. The magazine companies started cutting back their titles and publishing schedules; this led to reducing the number of serials they ran. Serials work well for a weekly magazine; for a monthly, not so much. Readers wanted their stories complete in each issue, and the publishers couldn’t afford to argue.

Burroughs was a savvy businessman, one the first great author-businessmen, and he chose to write a series of connected novellas in the three settings. Each of the stories could stand on its own, and then they could be strung together into a book for hardcover publication.

Burroughs planned four novellas each for the three settings, and wrote them in rotation for variety. The Barsoom group published in 1941 became Llana of Gathol (book edition 1948) and the Pellucidar set published in 1942 became Savage Pellucidar (book edition 1963).

The four stories that comprise Escape on Venus were originally published in Fantastic Adventures: “Slaves of the Fish Men” (March 1941), “Goddess of Fire” (July 1941), “The Living Dead” (Nov. 1941), and “War on Venus” (March 1942). The hardcover arrived faster than the other two collections, published in 1946 from ERB Inc.

Savage Pellucidar and Llana of Gathol are steps up from the low points of their respective series. Can the same be said about Escape on Venus? [Spoiler: No.]

The Argument

From the Foreword:

This is the fourth story of the adventures of Carson of Venus on the Shepherd’s Star, as narrated by him telepathically to Edgar Rice Burroughs at Lanikai on the island of Oahu. It is a story complete in itself. It is not necessary even to read this foreword, unless you happen to be curious to learn how Carson navigated interplanetary space and something of the strange lands he has visited, the vast, deserted oceans he has navigated, the savage beasts he has encountered, the friends and enemies he has made, and the girl whom he won over apparently insuperable obstacles.

In other words, the story isn’t complete in itself and it is necessary to read this foreword.

Catch-up business complete, on to the first novella: “Slaves of the Fish Men.” Carson and Duare fly back toward the nation of Korva in the flying machine anotar when a rift in the cloud layer allows the Sun to break through, creating wild weather conditions. The anotar is hurled to a strange country of people with gills and webbed toes and feet. They capture the two adventurers to take them to the city of Mypos, where they are enslaved. Carson finds an ally in another human slave, Kandar. Both of them are sold as galley slaves while Duare ends up in the harem of the king, Tyros. Carson brandishes his deadly r-ray pistol enough to scare his masters into sending him straight to Tyros’s palace, where he eventually escapes with Duare in water tunnels to get back to the anotar.

In “The Goddess of Fire” Carson flies to Kandar’s country of Japal. After Carson helps repulse an attack from the Myposans on Japal, a new enemy, the Brokols, seize him. They take him to their country and their ruling “goddess,” Loto-El-Ho-Ganja. Carson finds that this goddess, who prefers the shortened name “Loto,” is a human, and possibly has some connection to Earth. Carson gets separated from Loto when the king of the Brokols declares that she is no longer a goddess. Carson has to fight his way out of an arena, and Duare arrives just in time with the anotar to fly him away.

Once more, Carson and Duare start the next novella (“The Living Dead”) in their flying machine headed toward Korva. They almost immediately lose the propeller and crash. The Vooyorgan people of the nearby city of Voo-ad give them a glowing reception, but it is only a disguise. The king, Vik-vik-vik, paralyzes them with poison in their food and then hangs them up as displays in a gallery. Ero Shan of Hoovato, not seen since Lost on Venus, is also a living display in this museum. A Vooyorgan infatuated with Duare releases her, and Duare fast turns the tables on him. She returns with the anotar to rescue Carson and Ero Shan right as they escape from captivity.

The last novella, “War on Venus,” begins with . . . the exact same thing the others started with. Lost again (if someone on Venus had invented the compass, there wouldn’t have been a book series), Carson, Duare, and Ero Shan get shot out of the sky by the guns of a great army. The heroes are in the middle of a conflict between the nations of Pangan and Falsa over grazing land, and the wars are waged with massive land dreadnoughts. Duare vanishes again, etc. Will they ever get back to Korva?

The Upside

The most interesting aspect of the four novellas is the huge personality shift in Carson Napier from the earlier novels. He feels like an almost entirely new character. From a confessed incompetent, he swells into a boaster and swaggerer who is willing to violently cut down his enemies. He still admits that he’s a touch deficient in the planning department, but he is at least a more energetic hero.

Duare pulls a great stunt in the anotar, flipping it upside down to hurl out the man trying to keep her hostage from the back seat. This is the best moment for Duare in the entire series, and it teaches an important lesson about why you should always wear your seatbelt on a plane.

The rhythm of having four distinct “acts” in the story gives readers easy places to put the book aside. In other words, an upside of this book is that if you want to stop reading it, it’s easy to do.

The Downside

Escape on Venus is one of ERB’s worst books, in a tight competition with Tarzan and the Leopard Man and Land of Terror. Even parts that seem to work end up falling to pieces as a tide of boredom overwhelms everything. A better title for the novel is Really Really Really Lost on Venus. This is a mess, making the plotless Pirates of Venus feel like a fast, exciting read. At least that book gives the illusion of forward momentum and doesn’t run in circles telling the same story four times.

The book can’t be enjoyed as either individual novellas or a four-part episodic novel: most of it is boring, piling on variety only for the sake of variety and never making anything of its science-fiction concepts. Each episode repeats the same pattern over and over, and none of the potentially interesting ideas thrown at the reader hang around long enough to stick. The entire books feels as if Burroughs was making it up as he went along, and at the end got so bored he dashed out a finale just to be done with it.

The whole “argument” listed above is almost perfunctory. I can sum up the whole plot in two sentences: “Carson and Duare try to get to Korva, but continually land or crash their anotar in the middle of dangerous civilizations. After some action, they escape and repeat the process.”

Escape on Venus is just “a bunch of stuff”; each bit of “stuff” shows up, performs a function without any sense of excitement or tension, and then disappears down the memory hole. The Myposan fish men begin as major enemies, then pop up in the second novella as if to continue that role, only to vanish when the Brokols show up with no warning at all in the middle of the episode. The Brokols last a few chapters, and then Carson makes a tensionless escape, and the anotar crashes in front of another weird city with a strange civilization, et cetera.

The last novella promises a “war,” but where Burroughs could have taken this great concept of land dreadnoughts and put them in the context of some established civilizations (why not have a Vepaja vs. Thora showdown, fulfilling the promise of the first novel?) he instead invents a pack of new cultures and it is impossible to care about any of the action. At this point, the repetitive storyline will have forced all but readers who have to write a review of Escape on Venus to throw the book aside and get some ironing done. The conclusion is literally the characters just walking home.

Carson retains a maddening inaction from his older characterization; he still lacks the important qualities of a protagonist. He bluffs, he kills, he brags, but still makes few efforts to do anything. Instead of trying to bash his way through the fish men when they enslave him, he’s content to disintegrate a few with his r-ray gun and remain a slave. Come on, Carson! If you’ve got the power to beat these jerks, use it! It’s like he wants to act like John Carter, without acting on John Carter’s attitude.

Above all, Carson is a jerk throughout. He sees each adversary as a mindless inferior, and his retorts to his enemies make him sound like a petulant bully, not a hero. When placed in an arena fight—a classic ERB situation—Carson simply blasts everybody away with his r-ray, resulting in the most boring arena battle in the author’s canon.

Continuing on a theme, a coherent Venusian environment gets junked for new nations and races that have no connection with anything seen before. The fish men of Mypos and the tree-growing Brokols might have occurred in any story, not specifically a Venusian one. The fish men might as well have no connection to fish, since Burroughs does nothing remarkable with them as an aquatic race. They swim better than humans, have gills and webbing, and their children start as fish in pools, but nothing else distinguishes them from humans. The fish-spawn idea comes across as patently ludicrous, since the adults are still ninety-percent human. The Brokols make no sense as an arboreally grown species; they act like standard pulp barbarians. The Vooyorgans are the best of the new races, but the idea of them asexually reproducing through splitting down the middle is a bit far-out for something as short as a novella. The Pangans and Falsans are just humans with big tanks who get in Carson’s way for a few chapters.

The supporting cast is enormous . . . and utterly disposable. Carson rips through a series of allies with similar-sounding names, and they drop in and out of the story while having zero impact. Characters from the past books show up, as if ERB thought this might tie all the series together, but they get the same perfunctory treatment. The goddess Loto and her mysterious Earth-link is the only figure who registers at all, and the mystery around her connection to Earth is disposed of without consequences.

Damn, but I got sick of the anotar at this point in the series. No matter where Carson lands his homemade plane, nobody disturbs it, damages it, or steals it, so he can locate it again and fly off to the next scheduled adventure. This has gone on since the end of Lost on Venus and I wish Burroughs had come up with a new invention and a different way to move Carson and Duare from location to location. Why duck the drama of having an enemy either break it or steal it? At the point Carson and Duare finally decide they aren’t going to land and get in yet more trouble, the propeller promptly breaks and forces them to do they whole shtick over again. (I did, however, laugh out loud of the absurdity of the timing of this.)

In a bizarre move, the POV switches abruptly from first person from Carson’s perspective to third person from Duare’s in the middle of “The Living Dead.” This reads like a quick fix for a storytelling problem, but since the whole series to this point has been in first person, it’s disconcerting and throws off the entire novella. You have to develop this kind of POV swap, not throw it out because you can’t solve a plot problem.

The big collective downside from all of this is the cardinal sin no fiction writer should commit: Boredom. If Escape on Venus was the first Edgar Rice Burroughs book you chose to read (although I can’t see a situation where that would happen) you would never want to read anything else from him again.

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: “You don’t think I’m familiar with California; you don’t think I’ve ever been to California. So! You don’t think I’ve ever been to California, when I say I have. What do you mean, coming here and looking for trouble!” The book needs more of this prose weirdness.

Most Triumphantly Stupid Carson Napier Moment: Killing everything in sight with his r-ray pistol, but still not using the weapon to escape.

Best Monster: The bird-creature guypals—only because of their hilarious name.

Most Uncomfortable Moment for the Modern Reader: No modern reader will get through this unless he’s named “Ryan Harvey” and promised on a website to read and review all the ERB Venus novels.

Carson Summarizes the Book in One Sentence Using Semicolons: “The Myposans were not pleasant people,” I said; “neither were the Brokols, nor the Vooyotgans; but I lived through captivity with them, and I escaped.”

Should ERB have continued the series? Are you kidding? Enough of this.

Next Up: “The Wizard of Venus”

Candle in the Attic Window is here!

2011-09-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

My newest published short story, Gothic horror tale “The Shredded Tapestry,” is now on sale in the anthology Candle in the Attic Window. It’s available in print and in a Kindle edition from Amazon.

“The Shredded Tapestry” takes place in early nineteenth-century Bavaria, and pays homage to the great weird tale author Algernon Blackwood with its story of a cursed monastery, a lone English traveler and seeker of curiosities, a dark secret in the catacombs, and a stalking supernatural feline.

Here is a sample from the story:

Richard did not recall that he had knocked, so he twitched as the door started to creak open. Although he felt foolish after his panic, he was relieved to see someone inhabited the grey place.

Warm light spilled from the crack. “Yes? What do you want?”

“If you please,” Richard said in his proficient boarding school German, “I’ve just been robbed. If you wouldn’t mind—”

The voice, which had a peculiar accent, interrupted: “You are out of breath. Are the thieves still near?”

“Uh, no—” Again, he felt a fool, as if he were still walking about with his hands stuck in the air. “I thought there was a large animal after me.”

The light spilled out onto the porch. “Inside! Inside now!” A hand grabbed Richard’s arm and tugged him between the doors. It happened so fast that he might have left his boots on the porch.

As he entered the vestibule, Richard felt a peculiar sensation around his legs. It was as if a fur shawl were rubbing between his ankles, slipping through the door crack and past him. But there was nothing to see after the man slammed shut the heavy doors and dropped down the bar.

“Pardon me, young man,” his abrupt host said, “but the highwaymen here are a vicious class and it’s best if they don’t spy you looking for help.”

Richard was about to mention that the man had reacted, not to news of robbers, but news of the stalking animal. However, the warmth of the inside and the chance for hospitality made him stay quiet. His natural curiosity, which thrived when his life was not in immediate danger of ending, was coming alive again.

Today’s Post Brought to You by Every Letter Except “E”

2011-09-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

The English alphabet contains twenty-six letters. They all have their uses. Some more than others. The letter “E” gets the most use: how could we live without it?

Not easily. But it can be done.

The French Oulipo group advocates experiments that purposely limit the tools in a writer’s toolkits. Most famous of these experiments is the “lipogram,” which excludes some letters of the alphabet. Of all lipogram experiments, the excision of the letter “E” has caught the most attention. Georges Parec’s 1969 novel La Disparition contains no letter “E” outside of its author’s name. Perhaps more astonishing is that the English translation of the novel, A Void by Gilbert Adair, also contains no occurrence of the letter “E.” Another example, predating the Oulipo group by twenty years, is Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel Gadsby (1939).

So it can be done. But why do it? Shouldn’t writers make use of every object available in their arsenal to tell a story, make a point, or convey information?

I think so. That’s one reason I’ve defended the semicolon from detractors who want it exiled from fiction. It’s also why I think “e-prime,” writing without the verb “to be,” should not be pushed as a replacement for writing with the verb.

However . . . I love writing exercises. I write every day, and since I’m not always in the middle of a novel or a short story, exercises fill in the gaps. They keep the writing muscles of the brain tones, inspire new ideas, and show writers different paths to expressing themselves.

This weekend, I tackled writing sans the letter “E” for the first time, thinking I would never get far with it. However, I managed to write a 1700-word story—one with a comprehensible plot—in the space of two hours. I present the complete text of “A Ghost’s Claim” below.

I’ll admit that I don’t think this is a “good” story (the concluding ideas are a bit wonky) or an example of my prose at its best. The lack of “E” controlled many of my choices, and caused shifts in the rhythms that I prefer in my writing. But those are two good reasons for trying this experiment in the first place: diction becomes paramount, synonymous are life-savers, and a story decision can rest on something as simple as the being unable to use any number between six and thirty.

There are more skilled examples of this kind of writing than what you’ll read below, such as the novels mentioned previously. However, for a first try, I think it will intrigue some folks and encourage them to try it. I like what it taught me.

A Ghost’s Claim
Today is May First. It was only last Christmas, not so long past, that I saw Malcolm Radisson. Malcolm sat in my drawing room for a short two hours that holiday night. My old war companion has a soft spot for spicy candy, so I had laid out on a gold tray at his chair an array of tasty bits of spun sugar to add to his joy.

“Malcolm,” I said, “I’m glad to host you, any day and on pat midnight. But, I’m curious. Why tonight? It’s Christmas, and right now my kids knock around toys upstairs, and Sarah is busy cooking flank cuts with turnips and onions for us. It’s a joyous night, not for worrying. So what is it that must land in your hands right now that can’t wait until tomorrow? I’m saying this as your old pal, and not a rich cad who wants to kick you out.”

It was a gag, and I thought Malcolm would laugh. I am a rich cad, and Malcolm always thought it humorous that I got to such a lofty post in this Cornish town from so low a start. But on that night I saw Malcolm had alarming thoughts burrowing through his brain.

What a look did wash across him! Malcolm was afraid. How could I think of such a fantastic condition in this man, a pal from childhood and through bloody horrors of war and into our adulthoods? Malcolm Radisson, acting as a coward about anything wasn’t a truth I could grasp. No man who took up arms in that ghastly conflict our nation fought did it with as much gusto and machismo as Captain Malcolm Raddison. Without that valor of his, I would now lay in a crypt with my Sarah a widow in dour black.

But—in his twitchy sight I saw horror. I did not doubt that Malcolm was panicky.

“Karl, you know I trust you. On your honor, on Sarah’s honor, on your young girl’s chastity, vow that what I say now will stay in this room.”

I did vow to him, although I thought all this a silly prank of sorts, and would soon know his trick.

Malcolm sat back in his cushions. “A ghost has laid claim on my soul.”

I saw a sick pallor drop across his body. It hurt my sight. Malcolm was ill: I could now admit it, having only caught a hint of it in days past.

“A ghost? What, out of a child’s spook book? Malcolm, I know you as a calm man, not a brandy-swilling sot who can’t stop his hallucinations. Talk normal, man!”

“I am talking normal!”

What a shout that was! Our roof shook, and Sarah sought us out. I told my lady that this ruckus was not a bomb or a madman, only silly Malcolm. Sarah put on a bit of a grin and got back to cooking. Again it was only Malcolm and I sitting in my lush drawing room.

“Go on, old pal,” I said.

His hands had a twitch, but Malcolm did at last gasp out: “I think this ghost is from my cousin’s past. Do you know much about his dad’s family?”

“A Durstan, right?”

“Right. An old family. I am last of my clan with Durstan blood, for my cousin’s passing with no child cut off that branch. This ghost said at night, at my window, that I must summon Durstan Drummond soul, worst of all that crumbling family, from its tomb.”

“Why should a ghost want that?”

“To put Durstan Drummond’s soul in my body!” Again, this almost was a shout. “An usurpation of my skin and my mind. Oh, Karl, can I count on your aid in this?”

I saw that Malcolm thought this was all truthful. I still thought it insanity. But, a pal is a pal, through good or bad. “What can I do for you?”

“In your library sits a copy of Agrippa’s Book of Black Arts, right?”

“Did I say that to you?”

“No. And I can’t say how I know it. It would—hurt—a woman you and I both worship. No, it isn’t Sarah.”

So it was Tara. In our two paths, only this lady had struck us both with amour. Tara! Lost to us long past in a fall from Cornwall’s cliff. I had almost put this girl from my thoughts. Now, this man’s story had brought Tara back, and it stung. I almost stood up to ask Malcolm to go, but I could not pry my jaws apart to say it or will my body to stand.

Malcolm said, “Agrippa’s Book of Black Arts is a way to stop this ghost and its awful magic. Put Agrippa in my hands, and that is all you must do. It’s a small thing, Karl.”

“All right,” I spat. I was angry at him for hurting our family’s Christmas. But, I would bring him Agrippa’s Book of Black Arts, a book of foul magic that no man should try to skim through, or try to. . . .

No. I had said my vow. I would do it.

Two hours into that Christmas night, Malcolm had Agrippa’s Book of Black Arts in his shaking palms, and I had my solitary mansion and dark ruminations.

* * *
Today is May First, and I know that Malcolm will not walk to my manor’s stoop again. My companion of war lost not to a gun, but to a ghost. What did occur, I think I shall not know. But still, I wait. It might play out that Malcolm won, and in victory took a dash from Cornwall to find vitality in a world apart. That is my will’s foolish but fond wish.

Now on my mansion’s rock path walks a woman. How long ago did this lady show up? Who is it?

But—I know who it is. What it is. I know, although it still walks toward my porch and I cannot know by sight until it is in my vicinity.

“You!” I cry out. “This is my manor ground. You cannot walk through it. Halt as you stand!”

Grass and my courtyard wall show through its body. It walks as if no ground contacts its rough boots.

I look at this wraith’s mask: a young girl. Tara, as I did spy from far away. But is that an apparition of guilt, wrath, or sorrow on this girl’s mask? I cannot know from how it walks toward my front porch.

Now it stops and waits. It allows Karl, that man who in days long past did hurl his soul on any ground on which that living lady did trod, to talk first.

“So, you took Malcolm’s soul. You said you would put Drummond’s in his body, but that was a fabrication. How did you trick him? Did you claim that it was not Tara, but a spirit of an unknown who stood at his window at midnight and sought this favor?”

Only now did a sound waft from it: “Why should I trick him? For sumptuous Tara, Malcolm Radisson would do anything. So would you, Karl Chapman.”

I would, and I told it so with no guilt. “But that story of Durstan Drummond,” I said, “that was a fiction all along, right?”

“If I had a trick against Malcolm, that story was it,” this ghost of Tara said. “A fool, but a kind fool. If I told him that only losing his soul would bring my body back, why should Malcolm do anything? That man wants my body, living and not a spirit. So I spun a story that Malcolm would still walk, and inhabit a solitary body with Drustan Drummond in with him. And still, Malcolm would own darling Tara—as a human woman, and not an apparition.”

“But a ghost of Tara stands in front of my porch, right now.”

“And that is my trick. Poor Malcolm, a sorrowful and foolish man. During all our months as a trio that you two fought for my lust and my body, only to stop with a girl’s fall from a cliff into a briny bay, did you or Malcolm ask who it was for whom I had passion? No, you thought it was your will to pick, and not that of a young girl without a mind to know good from bad.

“But . . . I had my own will, and my own mind, and I did pick you, Karl Chapman. I still do. Now Malcolm stands apart; that man cannot stop our passion now.”

And Tara’s ghost hurls out a laugh and holds out ghostly arms to grasp a man on a mansion porch. A man who now has no will of his own, and soon will own no soul—for how can a man spurn a ghost that did kill his boon companion from through crypt walls, all for a lust that living did not allow this woman to avow?

* * *
To walk as a ghost in my own manor is no harsh thing. My son Adam will soon not know his dad, and tiny Cynthia has lost a dim vision of a man who would only play a day or two in that colossal room built in his mansion’s attic for childish joys. It is worst to watch Sarah in widow’s black. But as a ghost in misty gray, solid black has a gray wash to it as I look at it. And Tara, a woman of shadow for whom I would throw away all and did throw away all, blocks my sorrow as it crawl upon my thoughts. A ghost cannot cry, and so to walk as a ghost is no pain at all, no thing of horror or gloom.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 3: Carson of Venus

2011-09-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Five years have passed since Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Lost on Venus, and the world has undergone a startling and disturbing metamorphosis. Something sinister and confusing is taking place in Europe, and across the Atlantic waters the people of the United States are growing concerned at the saber-rattling of Nazi Germany. The poverty-crippled period in which ERB wrote the previous Venus books has given way to a time of escalating fear of a second great war.

Does this have anything to do with the next novel of the Venus saga, 1938’s Carson of Venus? Of course not. That the villains of the book are called “the Zanis,” and that they rule through a tyrannical personality-cult dictatorship complete with ritualized salutes, concentration camps, and rampant murder of political undesirables is mere coincidence.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. Carson finds time during his adventuring in the various warring countries of the planet to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and a final orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933)

Today’s Installment: Carson of Venus (1938)

Secret Origin

Edgar Rice Burroughs was in a creative slump at the close of the 1930s. The success of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films at MGM and the creation of his own publishing company meant a steady flow of revenue, but the famous author found his new fiction getting rejected from the regular magazine markets that had featured him for more than twenty years. Even Tarzan was no longer dependable. Burroughs was not young man any more, and the magazine rejections seemed to hint that his best writing years were behind him. At least he could always publish the books through his own company, but the publicity from magazine serialization was an important way to boost sales.

It was during this turbulent time that ERB tried a few experiments. After leaving the Venus series alone for five years, he returned to it with a spy story reflecting the political tensions of the day.

Burroughs must have had high hopes for Carson of Venus, because he submitted it to the major “slick” magazines of the time before turning to the pulps. Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal all rejected the story. I can’t imagine a scenario where any of them would purchase this sort of science-fiction adventure, even if it were one of the author’s finest. (It isn’t.) The slicks didn’t have any use for this sort of genre literature.

Eventually, Burroughs sold the 68,000-word novel—the longest of the series—to the same magazine where he placed the other Venus adventures: Argosy. The magazine paid him $3,000 for it, and it ran in six issues from January 8 to February 12 at the start of 1938. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. published the hardcover in January 1939.

The Argument

The novel opens with the obligatory prelude from the fictional ERB explaining that Carson’s telepathic powers, which the man never seems to use in his actual adventures, has permitted him to transmit to his amanuensis the latest chapter of saga on the second planet.

We switch to Carson and Duare in the handcrafted aeroplane (an anotar, as Duare calls it) over Venus’s seas. Carson lands the anotar on a continent to hunt game, and immediately a tribe of woman batter him unconscious and kidnap Duare. Here we go again. . . .

After an interlude with the Samary people, a culture where powerful women dominate subservient men, Carson and Duare escape and again take to the skies. Eventually, they arrive in the nation of Korva in the land of Anlap. They land the anotar in the city of Sanara, which is under siege by a group called the Zani. Under their leader, Mephis, this militaristic cult has seized all of Korva. Sanara is the only city that hasn’t fallen to the Zani, but its jong (king), Kord, is Mephis’s prisoner. Sanara is currently under the rule of Kord’s unpopular nephew, Muso. Muso asks Carson to go on a secret mission to the Zani capital of Amlot

While undercover inside the enemy city, Carson meets the beautiful noble woman Zerka, who tells him that there is another jong imprisoned in the city. He came seeking his kidnapped daughter; Carson suspects the prisoner may be Duare’s father, Mintep.

Carson engages in further spy-adventures in Amlot, even going so far as to infiltrate the Zani. Among their ranks, he makes one firm friend, his trainer Mantar. He learns that Zerka is a rebel against the Zani, leading a secret force to overthrow them. Carson finds Duare’s father Mintep in the vaults, and events converge so Carson must escape from Amlot as soon as possible to deliver evidence to Sanara that Muso has been scheming all along with Mephis to betray his city to the Zani. Worse—at least for Carson personally—the traitorous Muso plans to force Duare to marry him.

The Zani at last fall, thanks to the scheming of Zerka’s counterrevolutionaries and the death of the main enemy leaders. But before Carson can return to Sanara, Mintep seizes Duare and flies away with her in the anotar; he would rather his daughter face the death penalty in Vepaja than have her end up with Carson. Although Carson wants to stay in Sanara as a hero, he must sail north to pursue Duare to Vepaja. Reunited, the lovers escape in the flying machine before her death sentence is carried out and fly back toward Korva.

The Upside

A major shift in style takes place in the third Venus/Amtor novel. Abandoning the standard pursuit-and-escape format, Burroughs makes Carson of Venus an espionage and war story. The action inside the city of Amlot, where Carson does undercover work among the Zani while learning about a conspiracy between the Hitler stand-in Mephis (“Maltu Mephis!” is the required public cry for all Zanis) and the Mussolini stand-in Muso to betray Sanara, is pure spy thriller material far removed from wilderness adventuring. In the last quarter of the book, the action shifts to a full war between Zani and the free city of Sanara.

The Nazi-Zani link is glaring and obvious, but ERB has a good time with it, far more than with the Thorists-Communists of Pirates of Venus, who are now totally forgotten. Although this abandoning of a through-line is part of the overall problem with the Venus books, the loss of the Thorists is forgivable here since ERB found superior villains. The Zani are the best adversaries in the series: not only are they competent and ruthless, but they are also the source of ridicule and satire. Burroughs goes to great lengths to make their fascist rituals and bombast look ridiculous, such as having citizens stand on their heads while shouting out the “Maltu Memphis” chant, or having the chant begin and end every sentence of the conversation of some of the more brainwashed.

Burroughs’s imitation of a fascist European culture is often unnervingly accurate. Mephis is portrayed as a short man with a massive inferiority complex that has turned him into a murderous tyrant and megalomaniac. He forces all the theaters in Amlot to show installments of a hundred-episode play about his life, and attendance is mandatory of all citizens. People can get arrested for trivial or invented offenses. Scholars and intellectuals are despised—as is anyone whom the Zani fear might be superior to them. Carson offers many sarcastic observations on Zani pomposity: “I wondered at the time how Mephis could listen to such forced acclaim without feeling like the ass he was; but I suppose an ass doesn’t mind being as ass, or doesn’t realize it.” This is the same kind of vicious farce that Warner Bros. cartoons and Disney’s “Der Fuehrer’s Face” would unleash on the Nazis after the U.S. entered World War II. Burroughs was a bit ahead of the curve, and bravo to him for using the true real-world villains as his targets. It makes me feel better about the eugenics insanity of Lost on Venus. Plus, it’s good to see Burroughs using his stinging humor after its absence in the first two Venus novels.

Zerka is another supporting female character who upstages Duare. Since Duare has settled into the role of Carson’s unswerving love, there is little drama to her now except as the target of kidnappings. Zerka is the best character in all of the Venus novels, a wonderful combination of femme fatale and courageous freedom fighter/avenger. The mystery around her is wonderful: she’s a charming aristocrat in the middle of the spy game who may be playing Carson for her own ends. She also provides real pathos. In a candid moment with Carson, she speaks about her past, and ERB finds an emotional point in a series that hasn’t had many:

“It is not a waste of time to make new friends. I really have very few, you know. The war and the revolution took most of them the war took my man.” She said ooljagan—loveman. “I have lived alone ever since—rather a useless life, I am afraid.”

Zerka also gets the best “hero” line: “Goodbye, Carson of Venus. . . . I hope that you do come back and bomb hell out of the Zanis.” Come on, Carson, this is the woman you should be in love with.

To be fair, Duare rises up in this novel and takes a more active role: she flies the anotar to bomb the Zani into submission in the climatic war scenes. Duare has shown a tough side to her before, and now she gets to use it.

Although the conclusion of the book is lazy and dull, this is the first of the Venus novels to have a definitive ending and a sense of closure. If Burroughs intended a trilogy from the beginning, he achieved the right amount of finality here—even if he had to rush at the end to get it.

The Downside

The middle stretch of Carson of Venus is solid, but the opening with the Samary people is terrible and the ending trip to Vepaja is an anticlimax made of two rushed and tacked-on chapters. In the larger structural picture, it is as much a failure as the non-plot of Pirates of Venus. At least the heart of the book is enjoyable.

Burroughs created many inventive cultures in his novels, but the gender role-swap Samary people are nothing more than a one-line gag that show the writer on auto-pilot. I think a younger ERB might have gotten more satiric humor displaying men as the chattels of women, but the whole episode feels trite and a bit embarrassing. See, the men have “funny female names” like Lula, Emmie, and Vyla! And they chatter and gossip and are scared of everything! I can’t tell if Burroughs is satirizing the portrayal of women in pulp adventures, or if he thought stereotypical ideas of female behavior would sound hysterical coming out of men’s mouths. Either way, it’s neither funny nor interesting. It is also only a short flash at the beginning of the novel. Carson makes a tensionless getaway, once again avoiding anything applause-worthy, and the Samary never enter the story again. They kidnap Duare, Carson frees her, they escape—all without even short-term consequences. Why did ERB even include this?

But the plot sloppiness continues: after leaving the Samary, Carson and Duare at last get back to Vepaja, their goal since the end of Pirates of Venus, only to immediately decide, “Ah, never mind,” and fly off to any random place they can find.

The betrayal of the promise of the middle of the book in the last chapters is the most frustrating aspect of Carson of Venus, although it is marginally better than the awful opening with the Samary. Entering the final stretch, ERB jettisons the Zani and dashes into an entirely new plot based on—you guessed it—a kidnapped princess. The fall of the Zani is so simple that it undermines their original threat, and it happens almost entirely out of Carson’s point-of-view. Burroughs then goes two chapters too far. Instead of leaving the story on a good cliffhanger possibility, where Carson is a nobleman of Korva but knows he must return to Vepaja and save Duare, the story plunges into two hasty-yet-boring chapters where Carson runs into pirates and then easily strides in and out of the Vepajan city of Kooad with Duare in tow.

Ye gods, Carson Napier, but are you ever going to do something proactive? The character’s passivity in Carson of Venus starts to get maddening. Perhaps it’s prudent to bide time within the enemy city of Amlot for the right time to act; but in an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure, heroes should be bombastic and risk-taking, not sitting around knitting until it is almost too late. The satiric punches made at the pseudo-Nazis are funny, but I would rather see the hero make actual punches at them. Also, considering the level of intelligence Carson has shown before, he is the last person anyone would trust on a spy mission.

A city-bound thriller plot isn’t the sort of narrative that Burroughs was adept with. Add to this a main character who needs things to happen to him more than anything else results in a middle stretch filled with plot strands that don’t tie together and finally just drop when Carson loses his cover and has to flee Amlot. It’s refreshing to see a spy story in place of ERB’s standard business, but it isn’t the most thrilling spy story.

Carson Napier acts so magnificently stupid in this book that the other characters needle him about it. He looks like an idiot from the first chapter, when he lands the anotar and instantly lets Duare get kidnapped and himself knocked unconscious. Carson actually considers not reading the secret message that Muso gives him to deliver to a spy in Amlot, even though Muso made it clear that the only reason he wanted Carson to carry the message was he believed that the earthman couldn’t read Amtorian. Carson later challenges Muso to a duel, which should be the novel’s action highlight; instead, Carson loses the fight and has to have a little girl shoot and kill villain to save him. It isn’t as funny as it sounds.

Carson’s crowning moment of idiocy is botching his escape from Amlot because he wants to drop in to pay a visit to Zerka for no reason at all. In response to this, Mephis asks him a reasonable question: “Don’t you think that was a little unwise, a little stupid?” Carson does have a good single-line take on his own character and why he isn’t cut out for intelligence work: “Alas, what stupid things one does!” No debate here.

At this point in the Venus series, the planet itself hardly matters. It has lost any sense of a coherent background. Burroughs’s Mars had many wonders, but they fit together in whole that felt like a real world. The early Pellucidar novels had the same sense of unity. But the promise that a Venusian epic of some sort might piece together from ideas introduced in the first two books sputters out here. Carson of Venus is the most epic installment of the series, but has the least connection to the overall “Venus epic.” Compare the first three Venus novels with the first three Mars novels, which form a complete trilogy, and the Venus series looks even wobblier.

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: “Right then I would have given a lot for a rear-sight mirror; for I wanted to see what was going on behind us, but didn’t dare look back for fear of suggesting that we were doing something we shouldn’t be—it was a [sic] ease of nonchalance or nothing, and not even a cigarette of any brand among us.” Wait, what was that last phrase again?

Most Triumphantly Stupid Carson Napier Moment: Instead of taking a fast trip out of Amlot with the rescued Mintep, Carson decides to swing by Zerka’s palace (because why not?), even though he knows she is under suspicion. He gets capture immediately, of course. If Zerka was his romantic interest, I might understand. But she isn’t, so what was the purpose in going back to see her?

Best Monster: The gantor, an elephantine creature used for transportation, is the only new animal in the novel, so I have to give this spot to the tharbans, the carnivores who were great fun in Pirates of Venus and carry on here.

Most Uncomfortable Moment for the Modern Reader: It’s not “uncomfortable” as it is “unintentionally hilarious,” but when Carson goes undercover in the city of Amlot, he chooses the name “Homo” as his false identity. Because Homo sapien; makes sense. Oh, English — how you change!

Casrson Napier and the Sexual Revolution: “The word that Taman used instead of wife was ooljaganja—lovewoman. I like it.”

Should ERB have continued the series? No. It feels finished. Carson has come full circle on Venus. Unless Burroughs changes heroes, as he did in Pellucidar and Barsoom, this is a good place to stop.

Next Up: Escape on Venus

Candle in the Attic Window Pre-Order Sale

2011-09-07T01:20:00.000-07:00

Candle in the Attic Window, the Gothic horror anthology that features my short story “The Shredded Tapestry,” has an official release date: September 20th.

Innsmouth Free Press is offering a 20% discount on the volume for orders placed before the 20th, so grab one early. You’ll like my story: it has a killer ghost cat and a Bavarian monastery.

And if you’re reading this after the 20th, go purchase a copy here.

Remembering The Rocketeer

2011-09-06T00:57:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Update: The Rocketeer is out on Blu-ray! Nix my complaints about the old DVD. But—no special features. Sigh.

The summer is over, and it was a good one at the movies. It was certainly better than 2010, known as the year that Inception made everyone else look like idiots. This year the movies gave us more variety, more base hits, and a few home runs. Unfortunately, it also gave us the tremendous flop of Conan the Barbarian, but in a summer that took one of my beloved heroes and put him in a great movie (Captain America: The First Avenger) and also refreshed one of my favorite film series with a stunning new kick-off (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), I have plenty to feel thankful for. Other films I enjoyed: X-Men: First Class, Hobo with a Shotgun, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (and I’m not even much of a Potter fan), Attack the Block, Midnight in Paris, and Thor. I didn’t hate Green Lantern either!

But Captain America is the reason this post exists, because it got me thinking about 1991’s summer surprise and fan-favorite flick, The Rocketeer. The films share the same director, Joe Johnston, who is a natural with this sort of big-hearted, nostalgia-filled, period superhero film.

There is an unfortunate difference between the films, however. Captain America was a hit. The Rocketeer was considered a disappointment in 1991, and Disney ditched plans for a sequel. However, you would never know that the film was a box-office failure based on talking about it with people today. The Rocketeer has enormous of fan-love.

Let me set the scene to explain one reason The Rocketeer is such a big hulking deal to me. The Summer of ’91 was an important one for Hollywood. This was the summer of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the CGI Revolution. For me, it was also the summer between the end of high school and the start of college. This is a time period where everything has the shimmer of a “Golden Age,” and The Rocketeer is a film that creates instant Golden Age nostalgia right as you walk out of the theater. No wonder it stood out for me; and people my age seem to all have a similar reaction to it.

Twenty years have passed since the summer of The Rocketeer’s premiere. Twenty years. That astonishes me, because the film exists in a part of my memory where everything is fresh and green and nothing seems to age. And then I look at the calendar and do the math. 2011 – 1991 = 20. Damn, I hate math.

When I revved up my DVD of The Rocketeer to do this article, I realized there was a reason I had not given the film a view in a few years: the DVD is horrendous. I purchased it in 1999 the day it was released in the new format, and the disc displays all the flaws of early DVDs: a lazy transfer from a worn print, zero extras, dull compressed Dolby Surround without a 5.1 mix, and worst of all, a non-anamorphic letterbox presentation. This means that if you watch the movie on a widescreen television—now the default for most homes—the image appears shrunken in the middle of the screen and doesn’t stretch to fill it. You can manually enlarge the picture to fit a 16 x 9 screen, but this chops down the resolution, making the poor transfer look substantially worse, as if you were watching the movie through a screen door.

The biggest insult on top of this is that between 1999 and now, Disney has never released an improved DVD, and no Blu-ray plans are on the horizon, as was recently confirmed at a 20th Anniversary screening at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood. This piece of digital blarney is the only version of The Rocketeer available, and it dampened my spirits as I watched the disc. Disney either doesn’t know how many people love this film, or else doesn’t care. Equally likely conclusions. The company can do astounding home video releases when they feel like. When they don’t, they really don’t.

Hey Disney! Do you know that the same man who directed this summer’s hit period superhero movie Captain America also directed the period superhero movie The Rocketeer? Which, by the way, you own? Jump to it, Mouse! Golden opportunity. Maybe the massive attendance at the El Capitan for the anniversary will change your mind.

While watching The Rocketeer, the awful video presentation constantly intruded on my enjoyment. Cramped onto a tiny, blurry image, filled with dust and scratches and with a muddy version of the sound effects and James Horner’s charming score, the DVD threatened to make the movie’s wonder evaporate. No, make that “sublimate.” In order to give the old film a fair shake, I tried to remember how great it looked back on the El Capitan’s screen when I was a teenager. It helps, but still—The Rocketeer is difficult to enjoy in this format.

Okay, if I somehow shove past that . . . I still adore this movie. It is so unassumingly charming and so sincere in its goals that it rises above most empty blockbusters of yesteryear. Look at the Mission: Impossible films. Look at the Transformers films. Now look at The Rocketeer. See what I mean? Yeah, I still love this film.

But it is honest love, and I can see what holds the film back from being even greater, especially compared to the similar period charm and Nazi-fighting Captain America: The First Avenger, which is so far Johnston’s best film. Bill Campbell isn’t a charismatic enough leading man. The title hero doesn’t have enough big flying set-pieces and sometimes feels incidental to the story. The pacing feels off at times.

Well, so be it. The Rocketeer aimed primarily to achieve an old Hollywood serial feel, a do-it-yourself aesthetic, a love for the underdog, and an adoration for the 1930s, and it achieves all that. It certainly shows what a talent Johnston is when the material suits him.

Starting with The Rocketeer, I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Joe Johnston fan club. He sometimes does poor movies, like Jumanji, for a paycheck; I don’t hold those against him. I see him as a sort of a junior Spielberg, chasing the sort of dreams from Spielberg’s early career on a smaller scale. It makes sense that he directed the third Jurassic Park film and turned in a much better film than Spielberg did on the second. The playful, nostalgic Spielberg was in the same playground that Johnston wants to romp around in, and his three best films, The Rocketeer, October Sky (an unjustly overlooked ‘90s classic), and Captain America, we see him having the most fun on that jungle gym. I’m in lonely company here, but I also enjoyed The Wolfman. May Joe direct twenty more films! I’ll watch ‘em all.

A disappointment I’ve always had with the film is that it doesn’t have enough bold flying action. The air show rescue is the only action set-piece that really unleashes the Rocketeer in full swooping, vertiginous action out in the opening. The other two flying sequences don’t really let the character fly free. The South Seas Club scene has the hero flying through corridors and under domed ceilings where he can’t do much. The Zeppelin finale is great, but not because of the Rocketeer’s amazing flying. Maybe it was a problem with the mid-level budget or the limitations of the effects, but the film’s action ends up feeling a bit, well, grounded.

In fact, something surprising occurred to me while watching The Rocketeer this time: one of the less successful aspects of the film is the superhero of the title. Bill Campbell as Cliff Secord is adequate—he looks the part and seems comfortable around planes—but Secord isn’t a character with much charisma to start with. His superhero identity looks amazing, with one of the coolest helmets ever designed, but the Rocketeer himself never hits the mythic level, never develops the sense that the public loves him or that they would care if the hero continued on.

Normally, having this sort of problem with your costumed hero in a costumed hero movie would kill the movie. But . . . it doesn’t! The combination of style, a terrific supporting cast, and a fun script with surprises coming fast (A Spruce Goose joke! An animated Nazi propaganda film! A re-creation of the filming of The Adventures of Robin Hood!) that audiences can get into the character of the Rocketeer because the world around him is so wonderful. Having a great villain and stunning romantic lead also gives the Rocketeer’s jet-pack a big boost.

So let’s talk about the dastardly villain(s) and the pretty lady.

First, “pretty” doesn’t work as an adjective to describe how Jennifer Connelly appears in this movie. I’ll use another flashback to 1991 to describe it: I as well as every guy I knew was completely and helplessly in love with Jennifer Connelly in this movie before we even saw the movie. She had our attention earlier that year with Career Opportunities, a John Hughes-written and produced film that we went to see strictly because of how she appeared on the poster. The image of her in 1930s glamour outfits and sporting Bettie Page hair (by the way, the female lead in the comic books was based on Bettie Page and worked as a nude model, but Disney nixed this idea) was causing serious damage to our neurons.

Moving back to today: Jennifer Connelly, Best Actress Oscar winner, gives a good performance as Jenny Blake in The Rocketeer. Not an amazing one, not one that indicates she would eventually win an Academy Award. However, she simply feels right in the setting, as if the only movies she should ever be in are period 1930s and ‘40s flicks. She projects enormous sex appeal, especially in her scenes with Timothy Dalton, which are steamy in the fiery way of classic films of the era. There’s terrific tension between the two, a combination of attraction and manipulation. The way Jenny keeps picking up on Neville Sinclair’s romantic seduction ploys as lines lifted from his movies (and Jenny knows his leading lady in each case) is simply great material, and Connelly shines at this. And when I see her in this movie, I’m still in love with the way I was in love with her as an eighteen-year-old kid.

The Rocketeer has quite a few villains, and they all work. Cliff Secord not only has to deal with a Nazi spy disguised as a Hollywood star, but also a super-strong back-breaking thug named Lothar, the most powerful mobster in L.A. and all his goons, and the G-men who want to nail him for using a top secret rocket pack.

Ah, Timothy Dalton. What might have been if MGM’s legal tangles had not delayed the James Bond series for six years and Dalton had chosen to stay on a Bond! The guy has the perfect combination of cool and lethal for 007, fitting Fleming’s character closer than any other actor who has played him. But when The Rocketeer came out in 1991, people weren’t talking about Dalton playing Bond—they were talking about Dalton playing Robin Hood! The Kevin Costner-starring Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the first big hit of the summer, but jokes about Costner’s miscasting were legendary. Then Dalton jumped on screen playing an ersatz Errol Flynn, even getting to imitate Flynn in a scene filming a movie called The Laughing Bandit that is a barely disguised substitute for 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. “Why wasn’t this guy playing Robin Hood?” was asked in every review of The Rocketeer from that summer.

Dalton kills it as Neville Sinclair, sophisticated box office-topping movie star who is also a Nazi spy and saboteur and lives in one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s California homes with a seven-foot tall personal enforcer wearing Rick Baker make-up so he looks like 1940s monster actor Rondo Hatton. Yes, this all makes no sense—how long ago did the Nazis plant this guy in Hollywood, and how were they certain he would become a huge celebrity?—but Dalton makes the man’s evil charm and growing megalomania believable and great fun. Although, now that I’ve seen Captain America, I can’t watch The Rocketeer without wondering if the entire Nazi scheme was masterminded by the Red Skull and Neville Sinclair was just his point man.

The hoodlums are all old Hollywood stereotypes, which is exactly what they should be. Every gangster actor turns in the right amount of sneering tough-guy attitude that they seem like they would be perfect supporting players in a James Cagney movie. It’s a blast seeing them turn their allegiance around and join the government agents in raining bullets down on the Nazi goons in the finale.

Paul Sorvino is especially fun as big-time mobster and club owner Eddie Valentine. He gets the film’s best line when he discovers that his paymaster is a German spy: “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m a hundred percent American. And I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” I’ve been waiting years for an excuse to use that line in casual company. However, I make an honest buck and no Nazi has tried to hire me, so I’m stuck with screaming, “Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!” instead.

The action at the South Seas Club isn’t high flying, but it’s still a great sequence because of all the 1930s Hollywood glamour that Johnston pours onto it, much the way he would later handle the USO performances in Captain America. Although the band playing at the South Seas Club is unidentified, it is clearly meant to be Artie Shaw and His Orchestra. The band plays Shaw’s arrangement of his big hit, “Begin the Beguine,” the number one chart-topper for the year the film takes place, and the actor playing the clarinet is a dead-ringer for Shaw. Considering that Clark Cable and W. C. Fields pop-up in the same scene, it has to be Shaw, and his singer (played by Melora Hardin) would have to be his chanteuse at the time, Helen Forrest. I think this scene started my personal love for 1930s swing music, which a few years later would make me a Lindy Hopper and a hardcore Artie Shaw fan. Thanks Rocketeer! And “Begin the Beguine,” despite Shaw’s later distaste for its fame, is one of the greatest popular songs ever written. So again, thanks Rocketeer!

The finale, despite a lack of much flying, is a corker: gangsters in a shoot-out with Nazis at Griffith Park observatory, a fight on top of a blimp, a gag with Hollywood(land) sign, a villain defeated by chewing gum, Howard Hughes flying a gyrocopter, and the Nazis learning another lesson about hydrogen vs. helium.

Whatever limits Industrial Light & Magic had to deal with, they worked through it: the flying work still looks good, even in the digital age. It was the best “flying man” effect put on screen since the two Superman movies.

This is one of James Horner’s best scores. Horner often uses a repetitive style that makes many of his scores run together, but when he’s good, he’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan good. Horner’s score here makes all the right decisions, going for charm over bombast and generic action cues. His main theme, which starts over the opening credits on a solo piano and then opens up to golden soaring flying sound, is versatile enough to play gentle moments and the hero poses. His theme for Jenny, which only gets its fullest statement during the end credits, is sumptuously beautiful.

The Rocketeer twenty years later is still as fun, even with its flaws, as it was in the summer of ’91. It will probably feel the same way in the summer of 2031. And maybe by that time Disney will have finally given it the home video treatment it deserves.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 2: Lost on Venus

2011-08-30T00:50:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

The parade on the second planet continues in Lost on Venus. This one of the most controversial works that Edgar Rice Burroughs ever published, although it surprises me that enough readers managed to get through the lackluster first book, Pirates of Venus, to want to pick up the sequel and be able to argue about it. But here it is, so get out your anti-tharban gear and be ready to test your genetic purity!

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novelettes, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932).

Today’s Installment: Lost on Venus (1933)

Secret Origin

Burroughs completed Lost on Venus in early 1932, before Pirates of Venus made its first appearance as a serial in the pulp elder-statesmen magazine, Argosy. Since the first novel hardly “ended” at all, Lost on Venus picks up the story moments later, and with only a short gap between the two serials in Argosy.

The cliffhanger had Carson Napier on the continent of Noobol in the clutches of the Venusan version of communists: the Thorists. The Thorists didn’t do much in Pirates of Venus; will they make up for it here? Oh, someone is apparently going to get lost. Burroughs was superb at getting his characters lost, so this has promise.

By the way, Edgar Rice Burroughs held some controversial views. Just giving you the heads-up on that.

The Argument

The Thorists take Carson Napier to the city of Kapdor, where he is placed in a fiendish death trap. Carson manages to escape using 20% ingenuity and 80% dumb luck, and stumbles upon his Thorist captor, Moosko, who is torturing Duare. He overcomes the fat oligarch, and finds out that the birdman who was supposed to fly Duare to safety changed his mind and flew her to Kapdor and captivity. Carson gets Duare out the city, and immediately gets lost. He and Duare wander and bicker (“I love you!” “You must not say that to me!”) until the savage men of Venus, the kloonobargan, capture them and plan a cannibal feast.

At this point, Carson and ERB decide they are tired of the Amtorian convention of creating plurals with the prefixes “kloo-” and “kl-” and tell us to forget about it. The kloonobargan and the klangan become the nobargans and the angans, and a typesetter somewhere gets paid slightly less.

Carson and Duare escape the nobargans and find an edenic valley. There they meet Skor, the jong (king) of the country of Morov. He is no ally to the Thorists, but when Duare and Carson enter his gloomy castle, they find a greater threat: dead men who walk! Skor has discovered a science that allows him to re-animate the dead and place his commands in their brains; he also experiments on living humans to create his own race. Duare vanishes in the night, and Carson escapes with another prisoner, Nalte, the daughter of the jong of the country of Andoo.

The two fall in with the men of the nation of Havatoo. One of the warriors, Ero Shan, escorts them to their high-tech city of beautiful people and electric power. The citizens follow a strict eugenics program that breeds a rational society that requires no laws. Nalte receives the genetic approval, but Carson fails their psychological test, and the scientists choose to execute him. Carson redeems himself with his knowledge of astronomy unknown on Venus, and the men of Havatoo rescind his death penalty. Carson starts working at developing a flying machine that he hopes to use to return to Vepaja.

The dead men of Morov infiltrate the city and kidnap Nalte. Carson enters the dead city of Kormor through a tunnel under the river and enters the palace of Skor. He finds not only Nalte there, but also Duare. They receive help escaping from an old woman, Kroona, one of the few remaining living people in the city. Carson must make a double rescue, and then face an even more difficult test when the Havatoo scientists decide that Duare is unfit to live.

The Upsides

Lost on Venus is the best book of the series. It moves fast, and even in its poorer sections it keeps the reader hanging on the action in a way that Pirates of Venus never manages. It also contains twisted ideas that spark debate and offer a look into the mentality of the early 1930s, although these concepts will disgust most readers. I’ll phrase it this way: Lost on Venus is an “interesting” book.

Burroughs puts his wild imagination into deadly obstacles for the heroic duo, where in the first novel he used it to create the Amtor background and showed scant interest in imaginative plot devices. The story is the standard “one damn thing after another” as Carson and Duare/Nalte wander lost over unknown regions of Venus and through bizarre cultures, but it at least presents constant momentum.

Carson receives more direction this go-round. It’s the same “get the kidnapped girl back home” (and not always the same girl) patter, but it’s something. With all the Amtorian cultural background established in Pirates of Venus, the new book can get moving right away and pack in more adventuring.

Although Carson still falls prey to lunk-headed decisions, he seems more realistically fallible here. He cannot charge at any attacker and come out victorious, as he finds out during his encounter with the tharban, a leonine carnivore, where he ends up retreating to a tree branch and acting as spectator to the vere and batso (a bison-like beast) smashing it out. Duare has to save Carson at least once, and this is a nice piece of turnabout that I can get behind. If it was Burroughs’s intention to make Carson a realistic hero from the outset, or to make him a parody of earlier indestructible protagonists, then he starts to succeed with him here.

The Room of the Seven Doors, the deathtrap where the rulers of Kapdor place Carson, is a wickedly creative piece of physical and psychological torture. This sort of gonzo inventiveness mixed with action was missing entirely from Pirates of Venus, and seeing something this fun so early in the book makes it feel that ERB has gotten his swagger back. The tharban vs. basto fight is another fine piece of ERB giddiness, and the image has caught the attention of most illustrators of the novel. Frank Frazetta made this moment the cover of his edition of Lost on Venus.

The City of the Dead is also a great concept, and Skor comes the closest to “main villain” status seen so far on Amtor. The dead men are eerie and weird, and much more of the second half should have been built around them instead of exploring Havatoo’s society.

Nalte is the first supporting character on Amtor who can carry her own weight. She seems a better romantic fit for Carson than Duare, but Burroughs rarely permits his heroes to change romantic interests once he established the conflict. The plot arranges to switch Nalte over to Ero Shan, along with some minor confusion so Duare thinks Carson doesn’t love her, but I really wanted Carson to end up with the livelier Nalte.

A surprisingly emotional moment appears near the end with the character Kroona, the first elderly person Carson or any of the other Amtorians have met on the planet. Both Kroona and Duare are amazed at seeing the difference in age, and Kroona’s tears feel like something that the aging Burroughs understood. This is, so far, the most effective use of the “Eternal Life” theme of the Venus novels.

Finally, the “Eugenics Screed.” This is something that is both an upside and a downside to the book. Once Carson arrives in Havatoo, the story turns into an explanation of how selective breeding—which includes the execution or forced sterilization of genetic and intellectual “undesirables”—can create a utopian society. Carson Napier doesn’t flee from this in horror, or try to stop the rulers of Havatoo (as if he were skilled enough to); he instead supports it with enthusiasm, even when the scientists come close to killing him for his perceived psychological aberration. Carson is angrier at one of his male relatives for selecting an inferior bride than he is at the people who wish to kill him because of some mental deficiency.

However, passages like this in the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 1930s are one of the reasons that reading popular literature of the past is important and should not be dismissed because the weltanschauung does not match ours. It provides a window into the thinking of another era that feels more alive than turning to a dry nonfiction book of from the same time. Keep in mind that Burroughs wrote Lost on Venus in mid-1932, a year before the Nazis took power in Germany and most Americans had even heard the name “Adolf Hitler.” It would not be until after World War II that the planet witnessed the horror of what a eugenics program in action could achieve. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, eugenics was a popular topic, even taught in college classrooms; opinions were strong on both sides of the issue, but it didn’t cause the instant revulsion that it does now. Burroughs was solidly in the pro-eugenics camp; he wrote an unpublished essay, “I See a New Race,” that encourages forced sterilization of “criminals, defectives, and incompetents.” The eugenics philosophy of Lost on Venus is therefore the undisguised view of the writer, and it’s more interesting than reading a nonfiction support of the ideas because it tries less to hide behind defensive academic wording.

(And wait a minute . . . is Burroughs implying that the reason the scientists of Havatoo marked Carson for execution is because he is “incompetent” and has a terrible sense of direction? If this is true, then it’s a pretty damn ballsy example of an author slapping his own hero in the face and making a sly bit of self-parody. And Carson is dense enough to agree!)

I find the system that the Havatoo use to run their city to be repugnant, and Carson Napier’s support of it is inexcusable. He doesn’t even turn against it when Duare gets the death sentence; then it’s only a personal inconvenience, not a condemnation of the system. But the pulp scholar in me also finds the eugenics preaching of Lost on Venus a reason for fascination, adding a new layer to what is supposed to be light entertainment. Here is further support of the importance of pulp literature as an avenue of serious cultural studies.

The Downsides

But — ugh. The eugenics system of Havatoo that Carson Napier supports is horrid. Most proponents of eugenics of the time did not see a connection to genocide, but the scientists of Havatoo carry out the cold-blooded murder of the “social misfits” of their society (such as the handicapped and physically weak) to create a so-called utopia, an extreme position that the hero of the story agrees with. They even have a mass-murderer in their past, “Mankar the Bloody,” who they worship for starting the genetic tyranny. “He saw to it that the physically, morally, or mentally defective were rendered incapable of bringing their like into the world; and no defective infant was allowed to live,” Ero Shan proudly explains to Carson. No matter the time period, this is obscene, and the language comes so uncomfortably close to Nazi terms that modern readers unfamiliar with the pulp era might toss the book aside. I would encourage them to keep reading and engage the text as look into 1933 and the major shift that Nazi atrocities would later cause in scientific thinking, but I can’t blame those upset readers from stopping.

(I suggest readers find a copy of Norman Spinrad’s amazing novel The Iron Dream for a fascinating satire on the eugenic ideas of early science fiction. Burroughs certainly wasn’t the only science-fiction author of the time to suggest these ideas.)

The biggest in-story damage that the Havatoo society does is that it undermines Carson’s shaky hero credentials even further. Right when the contemporary reader wants to see the novel’s hero smash apart these dystopian murderers, he instead falls in line with them. He’s supporting a society that to modern eyes looks freakishly like something Heinrich Himmler might have arranged. However, the next novel, Carson of Venus, shows a huge change in attitude (as well as awareness of the Nazis) with an evil fascist group called the “Zanis.” At least we have that to look forward to.

On to the lighter criticism. . . .

There is only so far that the chase formula can carry a tale, and Burroughs had used up most of his tricks by the early ‘30s. The plot moves faster, but the creative possibilities of ERB’s fantasy Venus play small part in it. Most of the time the action is interchangeable with a Tarzan jungle story or a Pellucidar adventure: savage tribesmen, battling wild beasts, lost cities. Some interesting possibilities get hurled aside fast, like the nobargan and a tribe of pygmies. The Thorists are again sidelined; why did Burroughs set them up as the main adversaries and ideological whipping boys in the first place? The people of Havatoo would make great enemies, but instead they become allies and only in the final chapters does Carson have reason to oppose them, and even then he still admires them.

Carson may have the “hapless hero” element in his favor, but it doesn’t always work for him or us. The coincidence that Carson escapes from captivity in Kapdor only to immediately stumble upon Duare, who is in the city because her angan rescuer at the end of Pirates of Venus decided to abruptly turn around and fly the other direction, is a stretch even for Burroughs. In fact, he coincidentally stumbles onto her again later in the novel. Carson’s heroics often depend too much on coincidence, or someone else happening along to save him; he isn’t a hero that offers readers many chances to cheer him on.

Skor’s “City of the Dead” is a great concept, harkening back to some of the strange cities of Barsoom. But Burroughs never takes it anywhere amazing; it’s only a pit-stop where Duare gets separated from Carson so he can go chasing after her. The eventual climatic escape from it happens too easily.

Chapter One contains on of the thickest, widest, tallest, most impenetrable Walls of Exposition I’ve ever come across. As the narrator, Carson seems he can’t spit out the details of the previous novel fast enough. Behold this single paragraph, composed in one breathless sentence:

This country in which we were was almost as strange to Vilor as to me, for he was from the distant mainland of Thora proper, while the party that had assisted in my capture were natives of this land of Noobol who had been induced to join the Thorists in their world wide attempt to foment discord and overthrow all established forms of government and replace them with their own oligarchy of ignorance.

Phew! Everyone got that? Oh, no time—we’ve got ten more pages of this! What is most head scratching about this awkward cramming of information into Carson’s narration is that it’s unnecessary. There’s a Foreword written in the voice the “fictional Edgar Rice Burroughs” describing how he received the telepathic story from Carson. He could have more naturally laid out the catch-up material before Chapter One started.

The hope that maybe the Thorists might, oh, do something in this novel evaporates as rapidly as water on the real Venus. Moosko, set-up in the previous novel as a major adversary, punches out for the rest of the novel after a quick fight in Chapter Two. Once Carson and Duare get lost, the Thorists are out the picture. So, why do we have them around again?

Craziest bit of Burroughsian Writing: “He was a large, gross man, fat and pussy.” I had to read that over four times before I could proceed.

Most Triumphantly Stupid Carson Napier Moment: A split here. First, the subtle indication that Carson believes that he should be executed because he’s incompetent. But maybe that’s not “triumphant” because it isn’t so out in the open. Second, Carson gets five feet outside a city gate and declares that he’s lost. This is indeed the same man who aimed for Mars and ended up on Venus. Carson is the sort of guy who’d read the mall directory to get to Restoration Hardware and instead end up in Darfur.

Best Monster: Definitely the vere, a reptilian nasty that tries to chomp on Carson when he first enters the paradise valley. Massive tusked jaws, far-shooting tongue, venomous breath—the beast is too much for Carson, and Duare has to leap in to save him. I would have loved to see Willis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen animate this thing.

Most Uncomfortable Moment for the Modern Reader: The whole eugenics lecture that Ero Shan gives in Chapter Twelve will set off screaming alarm bells, but Carson’s reaction is—well, read it for yourself: “I shook my head as I thought of the mess that earth men have made of government and civilization by neglecting to apply to the human race the simple rules which they observe to improve the breeds of dogs and cows and swine. I . . . pray that there might arise in my own world a Mankar the Bloody.” Sorry, I’ve got nothing else on this topic.

Paging John Norman, Paging John Norman: Carson explains to Duare why he admires primitive man: “[He] was not bound by silly conventions. . . . If he wanted a woman and she did not want him, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to his lair; it was all very simple.” To offset this, Duare responds that if a man tried that with her, she would kill him. Ah, Romance ERB Style! Hmm, maybe I like Duare more than I thought.

Should ERB have Continued the Series? This book improves enormously over the last in the excitement quota, but I feel content to end here as a duology. The Carson-Duare romance has reached a satisfactory conclusion, and they are on their way back to Vepaja. Burroughs exhausted most of his new ideas for Venus, and one of them was pretty thorny, so I'd rather he got back to working on Barsoom.

Next Up: Carson of Venus

A (Pleasant) Open Letter to Jason Momoa Regarding Conan the Barbarian (2011)

2011-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

I thought about doing a full review of the new Conan the Barbarian movie on Black Gate. However, John Fultz put his well-done review out first. Honestly, I was relieved. The movie was not showing at my local theater—which is strange since the AMC Century City 15 gets all the big new releases—and I didn’t feel like driving out to see it that opening weekend. I was still recovering from a bad cold, so I would wait. Perhaps I would put a review on my blog instead once I got out to the theater.

I saw the film this morning (mysteriously, it moved into the AMC 15 the week after it opened and flopped), and again debated writing a complete review. I was penning it in my head as the movie ran before my eyes. But, no. I have other things to do. Instead of a review, I would like to offer this letter to Jason Momoa, who plays Conan in the new film.

Dear Mr. Momoa,

I appreciate your interest in Robert E. Howard and his character Conan of Cimmeria. I know you are a fan, and it shows on screen. There were doubts when you first got cast, but you proved you could pull it off. You put as much of yourself as possible into the character. I can tell that you viewed yourself as carrying on an important tradition in a famous icon of fantasy literature. I believed you did the best you were able to do given the circumstances.

Those circumstances being an utterly awful film directed by a man who probably not only doesn’t know who Robert E. Howard is, but apparently has never heard of John Ford, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, François Truffaut, or even Steven Spielberg. I’ll bet Marcus Nispel only watches Underworld and Resident Evil films, right? Come on Jason, share some dirt with us on this guy. After all, he screwed up your chance to have a franchise.

So, buddy, I feel for you. I know this hurts. I’ll buy you a beer if I meet you, even though I don’t make that much money. I’d like to read that Conan sequel script you wrote. Sorry it won’t get made.

Do you think I can write to Lionsgate and get a refund for the $11 I paid for a ticket so I can buy you the beer? I’m kidding; they’re broke now as well.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

From a fellow Conan fan,
Ryan Harvey

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 1: Pirates of Venus

2011-08-23T01:30:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted to Black Gate.

Next year brings the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first two published novels: A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, as well as a big-budget film version of A Princess of Mars from Disney. (The film is saddled with the unfortunately bland title of John Carter. Fear of a Red Planet?) The effect these novels had on popular cultural was immense: they created a whole medium, they altered the nature of reading for pleasure. Pulp magazines already existed before Edgar Rice Burroughs had the idea he could write better than the tripe found in the publications where he was working to place ads. But it was the success of first Under the Moons of Mars (the serial title for A Princess of Mars) and then Tarzan of the Apes that made the pulps into the artillery of the Reader Revolution. The pulps turned the U.S. into a nation of readers, and ERB fired the first two shots in the revolution.

Then, twenty years into the revolution, he fired off the few rounds of the “Venus” series.

I have planned some festivities for the upcoming centenary of the Burroughs Upheaval. One is an ambitious project I have wanted to try on Black Gate for the last two years. But as a prologue to my 2012 ERB projects here in 2011, I present a look at Burroughs’s least popular series, the last one he started before his death.

These posts will have a different structure from my usual free-form analysis style. Inspired by columns I’ve seen on the movie review sites I frequent, I’ve laid out a template for tackling each of the five installments of the Edgar Rice Burroughs “Venus Saga.” An experiment? Or an admission that trying to go academic on this series feels like the wrong approach? I’m not sure myself, but here it goes. . . .

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novelettes, and an orphaned novella.

Today’s Installment: Pirates of Venus (1932)

Secret Origin

The year is 1932, and Edgar Rice Burroughs is not only a man, he is a corporation. The enormously popular author of the Tarzan novels has become the first writer to incorporate himself. And so far, ERB Inc. is doing exceptionally well, with its third successful book release, Tarzan Triumphant, landing in the bookstores, and a rash of lucrative subsidiary products such as the hit movie Tarzan the Ape Man (the first Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan film), a Tarzan radio series, and a Tarzan Sunday comic strip.

And yet, Burroughs, nearing his sixties, wants to show that he can stretch a bit. The Tarzan series is still selling, but it has has fallen into one of its most tired phases; the glory days of Tarzan and the Ant Men are gone. The Martian series and the Pellucidar series are both sputtering. What to do? Why not start another series to get back to the early enthusiasm that made all those earlier series so great? Other authors, such as Otis Adelbert Kline, have turned their sights on Venus, so that might be the place to go.

(A fable circulated for years that Kline and Burroughs were in direct competition with each other, swapping Venus and Mars stories tit-for-tat, but it appears this is something Sam Moskowitz invented. The success of one author must have influenced the other, but it was no “feud.”)

Burroughs ignited the “The Carson Napier of Venus” saga: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938), Escape on Venus (1946), plus the novella “Wizard of Venus” (finished 1941, published 1964). Although not published consecutively except for the first two (which followed one another closely in serialization in Argosy), the four books form a continuous story from the point of view of Earth hero Carson Napier.

How does the last series of the Great Progenitor, the Carrier of the Mystical Three Initials, hold up compared to the rest of his gallery?

The Argument

As is the standard for most of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “scientific romances,” the story begins with a fictional version of the author relating how he came across the remarkable story you are about to read. Pseudo-ERB receives a visit from Carson Napier, a relative of the famed John Carter, a former Hollywood stuntman, natural telepath, and now a rocket-designer with the intention of visiting Mars. Later, he uses his telepathy to send his incredible story to Mr. Burroughs.

Carson didn’t quite get to Mars. He and his scientists failed to account for the gravity affect of the Moon when they launched the rocket. Carson’s decision to simply aim for Mars on the horizon, instead of accounting for its movement as well, didn’t help. Carson’s misguided rocket puts him on a course straight into the Sun. But incredible luck (“the all-time cosmic record for poor shots”) brings him into Venus’s gravitational pull, and he pilots into the clouds and parachutes from his ship into the thickly vegetated planet below.

Carson finds himself in the country of Vepaja, populated by an arboreal human culture who call their planet “Amtor.” The Vepajans are all beautiful and have attained near-immortality with a longevity serum, which they freely give to Carson. Because of fears of overpopulation, they practice strict control of reproduction among their people. Vepajan was once a vast country, but now only one island remains. The rebellion of a group called the Thorists, who attacked the cultured class and set up a cruel oligarchy while promising full equality, has taken over the rest of old Vepaja.

After a series of mishaps in the jungle, Carson and the Vepajan man Kamlot fall into the clutches of klangan (sing. “angan”), the birdmen of Amtor, who take them to the Sofal a prison ship from Thora. Carson readies the crew for a mutiny, and once taking control of the ship he rescue Duare, the daughter of a jong (King) of Vepaja. Carson is madly in love with Duare, but she’s forbidden to him. Further ocean action ensues before the story comes to an abrupt cliffhanger ending.

The Upside

Phillip R. Burger, in his Afterword to the Bison Frontiers of Imagination Commemorative Edition of Pirates of Venus, suggests that Carson Napier may be Burroughs’s attempt to create a more modern, fallible hero. That’s a stretch—I think Burroughs’s rambling plot is what drives Carson into looking incompetent—but the character does have the appeal of seeming more human than ERB’s other heroes. Carson can swashbuckle, but he’s never going to conquer a world or make himself “Lord of” anything. And I agree with Burger that this is a nice change of pace. If Carson’s fallibility worked in tandem with some ambition, Burroughs might have had something here.

I love the planet Venus, both its post-Mariner 1 scientific reality of a hothouse of atmospheric and geo(veno)logic mystery, and the early science-fiction vision of a biological wonderland of swamp and oceanic dangers. For ERB to change from the desert adventures of Mars to the moist jungles of Venus makes the enterprise worth reading—at least for me. Your Venusian/Amtorian mileage may vary.

Burroughs delves into the world-building of Amtor with his usual zeal, describing a culture that has no sense of the sky, stars, sun, or moon. The language details are especially well developed; ERB had a knack for faux-linguistics in his imaginary worlds. By 1932, other science-fiction writers were doing a better job at creating believable alien worlds (Stanley G. Weinbaum was about to blow apart that whole corner of SF), but Burroughs was one of the originators and he still knew how to cook up the anthropology for places of the fantastic.

The early chapters centered on Carson trying to get to Mars and then fumbling to find a way to keep his off-course rocket from roasting in the Sun have the same kind of dangerous fun that appears in the early chapters of At the Earth’s Core. A long time has passed since Burroughs got to do an inaugural journey story, and it feels good to have him back in the exploratory mood. The premise of missing-Mars-but-hitting-Venus is ludicrous, but this is a quaint retro-reminder of the days of space travel in the manner of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, when it all came down to fuzzy science, plucky individualism, slide rules, and dumb luck.

The prologue with the pseudo-ERB is one of the most interesting of these fictionalized looks at the author’s real world. Burroughs was going through a difficult time during the writing of Pirates of Venus, and some of that comes through in his idealized version of his office life.

The Downside

Of all the “Origin Novels” from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s various series, Pirates of Venus is the weakest—and by a significant margin. Stacked against A Princess of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, and At the Earth’s Core, all of which were written pre-1920, this is some tepid, weary storytelling going on here on Amtor. The prose is about the same—ERB reached a plateau with his style early on—and the level of imagination invested in the setting is laudable, but the enthusiasm for telling a ripping yarn must have flown into the Sun when Carson changed course. Even ERB’s generic plot devices/crutches are absent, and not a single supporting character is the least bit memorable. I just finished re-reading it and I can barely connect anybody’s name with his title or role in the story.

The world is fascinating, but the story is a flop—as much as there is a story at all. Pirates of Venus suffers from the set-up slow-down that also pesters the opening of A Princess of Mars, but it doesn’t have the bombastic energy of that book’s second half to offset the problem. The real adventures on Venus don’t begin until Chapter Six, when Carson and Kamlot go on a simple tarel-gathering expedition and end up lost because neither of them is very good at his job. Not until Carson ends up on the ship the Sofal, past the mid-point of the book, does he get much motivation to do anything at all. And even then, it’s soft.

Not much happens in Pirates of Venus. Events occur, but not in the sense of an on-going story. Burroughs doesn’t even trot out his old standby of capture-escape-kidnap-pursuit until the last chapters. Most of the time, pure accident whips Carson Napier around, and he never shows much enthusiasm for any goal. He doesn’t appear eager to find a way off of Venus. He shows no ambition to destroy the Thorists and liberate Vepaja. He has some vague notion about exploration of the equatorial regions, but not toward any end. He either does what seems the most immediately necessary (seize control of a slave ship) or else lets chance do the work (get swept overboard in a storm).

Carson’s only real motivation in the novel is his infatuation with Duare. Impossible romances between an equally hardheaded hero and heroine are one of Burroughs’s trademarks, but the one in Pirates of Venus takes the length of a real Venusian day (which is longer than its year) to get in motion. Carson catches glimpses of a beautiful woman while in the gardens city of Kooad, but the Vepajans tell him he cannot meet her or know more about her. But when mention is made of an important woman named Duare aboard a ship, the reader knows that it can’t be anyone other than the mystery woman that Carson fell for at first sight. Their meeting is inevitable, as are the complications (she’s the “Virgin daughter of a jong” and therefore sacred), but it happens so late in the story that it might as well have waited to happen in the sequel.

Which brings up another problem: the novel has no ending. The last chapter concludes on a cliffhanger, with Carson a captive of the Thorists in the strange country of Noobol. Burroughs used cliffhangers effectively before in his novels, such as in The Gods of Mars. But without a strong storyline behind Pirates of Venus, the non-ending isn’t tense, it’s annoying. Carson finally gets something to motivate him, and the big villains at last show up—and then suddenly it’s all over. I can understand why many readers of Pirates of Venus never went on to the next novel: the story starts to improve, only to give up before it has improved enough to make the reader want to read the sequel.

The obvious Thorists-as-Communists allegory might have worked if ERB gave the Thorists anything villainous to do, but it seems like they’re stuck off-stage and keep missing their cue to enter and liven up events with some mustache twirling or red flag-waving. Why create villains as a social critique if they hardly appear at all? In a related gripe, the klangan are a great adversarial race, but they are rapidly tossed aside as directionless thralls. They can’t compete with the Wieroos of The Land That Time Forgot in the “winged villains” department, that’s certain.

Craziest Bit of Burroughsian Writing: When Carson thinks he’s held captive in the city of Kooad, he tells a Vepajan that he has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But he goes on a bit more for the readers’ enlightenment: “I did not think it necessary to mention chambers of commerce dinners, Rotary and Kiwanis luncheons, triumphal parades and ticker tape, keys to cities, press representatives and photographers, nor news reel cameramen, the price that he would undoubtedly have had to pay for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Wow, imagine what he would complain about today.

Most Triumphantly Stupid Carson Napier Moment: Our hero has the intelligence to build a rocket that can reach another planet, but tries to get to Mars by simply aiming the rocket at the planet without considering that both Earth and Mars are in constant motion. Even five-year-olds know that won’t work. Hell, pre-Copernicus, people knew this wouldn’t work.

Best Monster: The tongzan, a hyena-bodied creature with clawed arms extending from its neck and a stalk with a single eye protruding from its head.

Most Uncomfortable Moment for the Modern Reader: The mutiny organization that Carson creates on the Thoran ship, “The Soldiers of Liberty,” translates in Amtorian as “KKK.” Hah hah. Associating your heroes in any way with the Ku Klux Klan is not—a—good—idea.

Selective Science! Amtorians have developed powerful “R-ray” and “T-ray” guns, achieved medical advances that have effectively eliminated aging . . . but they haven’t figured out any better form of ship-to-ship communications than hand signals and flags, nor do they understand the curvature of their own planet.

Should ERB have continued the series? He kind of had to. He left his hero in the hands of his foes and his heroine declaring her love as she vanished into the sky. A follow-up sounds better than another mediocre Tarzan novel where Lord Clayton gets amnesia and finds a lost city. So, let’s see if we get any more plot the next time out.

Next Up: Lost on Venus