One year ago tomorrow, the blogosphere shuddered with the crushing impact of…well, it didn’t shudder so much as proceed unimpeded. Anyhow, tomorrow Byzantium’s Shores is one year old. Get your party-hats ready. (The tin-foil ones, naturally.)
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New in “Other Shores” at left is Green Man Review, an online publication for which I will soon be writing reviews — mostly of books, I expect, but I may do some films as well.
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AICN has a nifty article up about this summer’s film Pirates of the Caribbean. While the whole idea of Disney making movies not from folktales and legends but from the rides in its theme parks may seem goofy*, I’m actually looking forward to this film and am hoping that it’s good. This is because I’m something of a junkie for a good pirate film. Of course, as a genre the pirate film is fairly limited, but there’s something about a tall ship, sails filled with the wind, with cannons a-thundering and a crew of scruffy-looking men wielding cutlasses shouting things like “We’re sucking the wind out of the Spaniard’s sails, Cap’n!” that never fails to make me smile. Unfortunately, pirate films have pretty much fallen by the wayside over the last few decades, which is probably inevitable given the limited nature of the genre and the fact that you really can’t hope to improve on Errol Flynn. (Though Burt Lancaster, in The Crimson Pirate, gave it a really good try by eschewing the traditional pirate-stuff like swordplay in favor of acrobatics that have to be seen to be believed.) Cutthroat Island was a decent film that didn’t deserve to flop as badly as it did, but it wasn’t anything special either. For a pirate film to succeed these days, it would have to sport a screenplay of Raiders of the Lost Ark quality. (Yes, I tried writing one once. No, it didn’t turn out well.)
I don’t know if Pirates of the Caribbean will be any good, but I hope it is. This is a genre that might not need a fullscale rebirth, but it at least warrants being taken out of the drawer and dusted off now and then.
* Starting with The Country Bears — which I did not see but which looked just awful — Disney has apparently decided that the rides in its themeparks that are not currently tied to a movie are to be so tied, poste haste. Hence the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and the Haunted Mansion movie. I wonder what the Space Mountain movie will be like, or if they’ll do a gonzo-Western for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. I’m not sure I want to see a Hall of Presidents movie, and by gum, there’d better not be any attempt at a Carousel of Progress movie. Oh, and while we’re at it, could we possibly get Song of the South released from whatever bizarre purgatory it’s been consigned to?
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I have a few final thoughts on the Columbia disaster.
:: For some reason, whenever something like this happens and we mourn the people killed in the event, we are reminded of all the hundreds or thousands of people who die each day throughout the country or the world, and whose deaths are generally unremarked except for their immediate circle of family and friends. We’re told to “keep it all in perspective”, because after all, X number of people die each day in car crashes or in accidental gun discharges or whatnot. I’m never sure what to make when we’re reminded of death’s omnipresence in our mundane lives; are we being told not to mourn the astronauts because we don’t know them? or are we just being told not to mourn them that much, because they — like so many others — simply died in the course of the jobs they willingly chose? I’m not sure. “Let’s keep it in perspective” is a sane enough proposition, but I’m never sure exactly what perspective we’re supposed to be maintaining. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I mourn the astronauts because they died in the pursuit of something that I personally hold to be absolutely essential to the future of our species. Not our country, but all of humanity. People who die in service to humanity are, it seems to me, to be mourned even if I don’t know any of them personally or even have any personal connection of which I am aware. These people were doing something extraordinary, and it claimed their lives. For that reason I mourn them.
:: The chorus of voices calling for an end to manned spaceflight is predictable, if a bit disheartening. I certainly agree with all those who say that the shuttle program, for all its successes in its flight history, really constitutes a “missing of the boat” as far as humanity’s outreach into space is concerned. The reasons for this belief are legion and can be easily found elsewhere (this MSN article and this Usenet post by SF author Charles Stross are good starting points), and I absolutely agree with them. In the opening moments of Cosmos, Carl Sagan describes our early space exploration efforts thusly:
Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows that this is from where we came. We long to return.
Keeping with Sagan’s metaphor, it seems that we’ve tested the water, decided that we like it…and promptly retreated back to the very edge of the beach, there to remain. Having reached once for other worlds, we have decided that low-earth orbit is more to our liking, and everything we have done in terms of manned exploration has been with low-earth orbit in mind. It’s a self-perpetuating circle: the shuttle is only fit to get us into low-earth orbit, and for reasons that are bureaucratic to a depressing degree we’ve put all of our space-eggs in the shuttle basket; this being the case, we are restricted to building our International Space Station in low-earth orbit. So the ISS exists, as Gregg Easterbrook noted recently, to give the shuttle someplace to go, and the shuttle exists to service the ISS.
What’s depressing is that it didn’t have to be this way. I’m not sure where exactly we went wrong in our space endeavors. Perhaps it was in not developing Project Orion, which was probably the best design for an interplanetary ship available with current human technology. Perhaps it was with the rigid adherence to the shuttle, even after the Soviet Union aborted its own shuttle program as being unacceptably more costly than the good, old, reliable Soyuz rockets. Perhaps it was even partly in the Apollo missions themselves, and in the sense of anti-climax that inevitably set in once the Moon was no longer a goal to be reached but someplace we’d already been.
I keep thinking about the disconnect between the world as it exists now and the world as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gary Westfahl may be partly correct in that science fiction has conditioned us to expect space colonization, but I think there is a reason for this. After all, science fiction does not exist in a vacuum. Somewhere, somehow, we really do expect to take to the stars. Or at least we did.
What’s really bothering me about the “Let the robots do it” crowd isn’t so much that they are unconvinced that manned spaceflight is desirable; it’s that in a saddeningly large number of cases, they are telling us: “Forget it; space colonization is so 1960s; let the dreams of the old people go and get some new dreams.” God, how that stings! I may not be properly “young” anymore, but I’m certainly no old fart. I’m only 31; Neil Armstrong had been back from the Moon for two years when I was born. And yet I’ve always believed that humanity’s destiny lies beyond the fragile sphere of earth; I can’t remember not believing it. It’s looking less and less likely that it will come to pass in my lifetime, which I find depressing enough, but now there are people who not only don’t see it, but they don’t want to see it. Witness the words of Kevin Drum, who is one of the most forward-thinking bloggers I’ve yet encountered, a guy not adverse to thinking in terms of the future:
But the worst part is the final sentence, which I’ve seen repeated over and over: we need to colonize Mars (or whatever) so that humanity will live on in case we blow ourselves to smithereens here on Earth.
There’s really no polite way to put this, but the notion is simply nonsensical. Do space enthusiasts keep writing this stuff because their neurons stop firing before they put finger to keyboard, or is it just that they’ve been saying it for so long that it’s become a habit? Do they have any idea how dumb the proposition really is?
Now, to be sure, I’m not totally sure on what Kevin is attacking here; it may not so much be the idea of space exploration and colonization at all that’s got his goat, as opposed to a belief that we’ve done well for where we are technologically but if we’re going to make some real progress we need to wait a while. If the latter, than he’s somewhat correct, but I have to point out again that at least some of this work has been done, but it’s either been ignored in favor of bureaucratically-favored means of doing things (i.e., the shuttle) or shelved for other reasons (Orion). But if Kevin genuinely believes that the entire proposition of colonizing other worlds is dumb — not just now, but forever — then I have to pray this view does not take root in society as a whole.
It most certainly is not dumb to worry about what might happen when a large rock in space happens to intersect Earth’s orbit when Earth just happens to be there already. Space is a staggeringly violent place (just look at the lunar surface) and Earth’s biosphere is fairly fragile, at least as far as specific organisms go (just look at those neat skeletons at the Museum of Natural History). It’s simply not starry-eyed wishful-thinking to consider that, if such a rock were to strike tomorrow, the species that produced Shakespeare and Beethoven and Miles Davis and Frank Lloyd Wright and Hayao Miyazaki and Gandhi and Jesus would be gone, with nothing left behind save the Voyager spacecraft to tell the tiniest part of the tale. Now, if President Bush were to do what President Kennedy did, and forcefully set us on the road to establishing a Mars colony; and if that colony were established in, say, 2035; and if that colony consisted of, say, twenty men and women; and if while they were there the asteroid hit…humanity would end anyway. That colony would not be enough, not by a long shot nor by a damned sight. I’m not sure if this, too, is what Kevin is getting at; but I have to note that the failure of Jamestown did not sour the European colonials on the Americas. (Fully admitting, of course, the faultiness of comparing the colonization of America to that of space.)
But the problem with such pronouncements is that we are rarely afforded the opportunity to say, “OK, now we know enough; now we’re ready; now we can safely assess our chances of success and survival.” This is true of just about anything. It’s true of graduate students who do, at some point, have to stop researching and start writing the thesis, and it’s true of a species that wishes to colonize the other worlds in its solar system. Our efforts in space might fail over the short term; the last twenty-five years of our space program might eventually be more notable for what we’ve learned not to do than for any know-how we’ve accumulated. But I remain convinced that five hundred years from now, our post-human descendents will look up at the sky from their homes on Mars and on the moons of Jupiter and wherever else, and they will think back to this time in history, and they will think, “That’s when this began.”
Call it a dumb dream, if you will. I prefer to call it a vision.
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Peter David, a writer primarily of comics and media tie-in novels, has his own weblog. It’s always interesting to read the thoughts of an “insider”. I always enjoyed David’s comics writing — particularly Peter Parker, the Sepctacular Spiderman, for which he wrote a wonderfully dark story called “The Death of Jean DeWolff” — but I found his Star Trek novels nearly unreadable (well, not all of them; Imzadi was halfway decent), and I haven’t tried him since.
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I never heard about the contest to decide who writes the next Godfather novel until just now, and given the popularity of the original novel and film, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard about this until now. I would think that a sequel to The Godfather would command as much interest as the sequel to Gone With the Wind did twenty years ago or however long ago that was. Oh well, I missed my chance….
….but then, I almost certainly would not have won. There’s no way I could write a convincing Godfather novel, because I have next to no interest whatsoever in Mob stories. I’ve not seen a single episode of The Sopranos, I haven’t seen a single Mob movie since GoodFellas (unless you count Analyze This), and I’ve never read any of Mario Puzo’s work. Oh well….maybe the estate of JRR Tolkien will announce a contest to chronicle the Fourth Age of Middle Earth? or maybe George Lucas will license some novels set after Return of the Jedi….oh. Never mind.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
“The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill”, John Trumbull.
Judging by the shelves in the US History sections at Borders, Barnes&Noble and just about every place else, the conflicts that have the strongest hold on American history buffs are the Civil War and World War II. While I share the fascination with WWII, I’ve never been much interested in the Civil War. Not for any real reason, mind you; it actually is an interesting part of our history, and the issues that sparked that war still resonate today, almost a century and a half after that war’s fighting. But along with WWII, the conflict from American history that has most interested me over the years is our first conflict, in which the United States underwent its painful, violent birth: the American Revolution. Perhaps it is the tale of an oppressed group of colonies banding together and throwing aside their oppressors that appeals to me; I have always found something of a heroic nature about the Revolution, whereas the Civil War is instead a terribly sad story. I don’t know, really — I’ve just always found the exploits of George Washington and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among so many others, particularly compelling.
Along those lines, I just finished reading Jeff Shaara’s novel of the American Revolution, Rise to Rebellion. The first volume of a duology (the second of which, The Glorious Cause, has just been released), Rise to Rebellion tells the story leading up to, and into the Revolution. He begins with the Boston Massacre, and as one might expect the most famous and folkloric events of the 1770s are here: the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Lexington and Concord, the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Shaara does an excellent job here of showing how these much-celebrated events fit into the historical tableau of the Revolution. I’m not qualified to assess Shaara’s degree of accuracy here, but it seems to me that he’s probably given a good sense of the buildup to, and breakout of, the war.
The novel is one of the “shifting viewpoint” novels that seem to be very popular these days, wherein each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character. The main ones here are Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Gage (the British general charged with containing the rebellion). There are others along the way who get the focus, but those are the main ones. This being the case, Shaara does a masterful job of conveying what Franklin and Adams were doing before the revolution, what their lives were like, and how their thoughts are driven inexorably toward the concept of independence. Gage, too, is handled well, and it is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength that it depicts how the stubbornness of the British created many of the problems that drove the colonists to revolt. But still, Gage does not come off as a villain or an unbending Tory — he is a complex man who is given an impossible task. Washington comes off less successfully; he doesn’t show up until the Continental Congress, so I didn’t get as fine a sense of the man who was swept into revolution as we do with Adams and Franklin. But I did get a strong sense of his ability as a commander.
The greatest weakness in Rise to Rebellion is in its women. They are strictly supporting players in Shaara’s drama, to whom the men return when they are not planning a break with England. I would have liked to have seen how the Revolution really affected the women — how they felt about a break with England, how they felt about war, how they supported the colonial effort in their own ways. I’m not entirely sure how Shaara could have addressed this problem, given the viewpoint structure he has chosen for his novel, short of including entire chapters from the viewpoints of various women — Abigail Adams, perhaps — and thus increasing the page-count. But the book reads quickly as is, which is no mean feat for a 550-page novel; I have a feeling a 650-page novel including some material from the standpoint of the women would not have been beyond Shaara’s considerable skill.
I further found interesting Shaara’s decision to actually tell his story from the viewpoints of the “major players” in the Revolution. He took a considerable risk in attempting to make into flesh-and-blood some of the most beloved personages in American history; a less daring writer might have created a fictional character or set of characters to interject into the historical proceedings. Of course, that’s been done before — Johnny Tremain, the John Jakes novels, the movie The Patriot — so Shaara has, at least to my knowledge, done something fairly unique here. Rise to Rebellion is an excellent book. I highly recommend it.
(My recent resurgence in my usually-latent interest in the Revolution was probably brought on, at least in part, by my daughter’s fascination with the PBS show Liberty’s Kids, about a trio of youngsters who work for Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper during the Revolutionary War. It’s not really geared toward the 4-year-old set, but she loves it.)
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FICTION SAMPLE
This is the opening scene to one of my first forays into short fiction, “The King’s Taster”. I’m not enamored of the results, but I’ve always like this opening, so I thought I’d use it here. Its main source of fascination to me lies in its brevity. That’s a quality I don’t often achieve.
:: “The King’s Taster”, opening scene
When Fesk Rangol was born, just after his mother completed the Naming, the Priest placed a tiny droplet of orange liquid on his tiny pink tongue and closed his mouth.
“Be silent!” the Priest hissed. The woman’s wailing was highly irritating. She knew the risks of delivering a child this month.
The Priest held his breath as little Fesk swallowed the juice of the whisperberry. It would take seconds to enter his blood, and seconds after that for the seizures to begin. But in Fesk there were no seizures; the child only continued to scream the shrill howl of the newborn. The Priest handed the child back to his mother, who slid her bare nipple into his waiting mouth.
“We will come for him in six months,” the Priest said to her as he wrote down the child’s name and the mother’s. He then packed up his belongings and left. On his way he passed a wagon in which lay six infant corpses. Six, before he found one resistant to whisperberry. It was a good year.
Six months later that same Priest came and took little Fesk away to the Venomous Academy. The mother cried and wailed a lot. They always did.
–finis–