It really pays to check out the “bargain” table at Borders. While shopping there a few weeks ago, I took a passing glance at the bargain table and saw several copies of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, marked down to $9.99. That’s a hell of a bargain, given that the book’s original price is $40.00, and the normal markdown at Amazon is still $28.00. The book is a lavish volume that details a large number of mythical realms from literary works. Entries include Middle Earth, Narnia, Never-Never Land, Fionavar, Flatland, the various places to which Gulliver travels, and more. Any lover of fantasy should have this book, and having it for one-fourth the publisher’s price is even better.

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Ever a sucker for fantastic stories involving baseball, I enjoyed a new story by Gardner Dozois that appears in the current issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, entitled “The Hanging Curve”. In the story, the scene is set with the ultimate baseball situation: the top of the ninth in the World Series, Game Seven, and the home team (in this case the Phillies) are one strike away from winning it all (against the Yankees, who are only down by a single run and have a man on base). The pitcher winds up, throws, and then the ball stops midway to the plate. It simply stops in midair, and all efforts to move it are met with complete failure. The ball becomes, literally, a hanging curve — hanging there, in the air, for years as the players and then the game itself pass on. This striking image becomes the obsession of the home-plate umpire, who returns more than fifty years later to witness the ball’s sudden conclusion of its original journey. Analyzing the angle the ball takes as it flies through the spot where a catcher’s mitt once would have been, the umpire reveals what has been on his mind all these years: whether that pitch was a strike or a ball. The story is a nifty allegory about how, in the face of events of such unbelievable strangeness, we can still focus to exclusion of all else on those things that matter most to us.

The story also includes a few other neat details, such as Game Seven of a World Series only drawing ten thousand or so fans. Who knows how far in the future Dozois has envisioned this tale taking place, but to anyone alarmed by the recent refusal of baseball to clean up its act, such an image is very cautionary indeed.

(Gardner Dozois, by the way, is the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction and of the yearly anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, as well as an impressive number of other anthologies in SF. He is also, by the evidence presented in this story, a fine writer.)

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Scully’s baby is in mortal danger, Mulder is in hiding, and The X-Files is wallowing in disarray. It’s a shame to see the show sinking slowly, but I can at least take heart in that Chris Carter has decided to pull the plug rather than keep flogging it any longer. Two years ago (or thereabouts) the show lost that feeling that it was actually building toward something, that there was a “truth” that really was “out there”. I will grant that the mytharc involving Baby William has to a small extent restored that feeling, but so many plot threads have been left behind that I really don’t think any satisfying resolution is now possible. Oh well, just a few more episodes to go and then the whole thing is history. (And next week’s bonus: the new Star Wars Episode II trailer will air on FOX, just before The X-Files. Can’t wait for that.)

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NPR’s Morning Edition featured an interview with film composer John Williams yesterday. Listen to it here.

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Just when I thought that ER was returning to something similar to its former glory, it showed some signs that all is still not well the other night. First, we get a cameo by Eriq La Salle. Nothing wrong there, as he is a fine actor and his character was central to the show for many years, but earlier this season we were given a Very Special Episode in which we were supposed to “say goodbye to Dr. Benton”. But, it turns out that La Salle’s contract wasn’t actually up; he still owed them some episodes — which I guess now they’re using up in strange fashion. It’s kind of like if the Denver Broncos called up John Elway next year and said, “You know, your last contract still had five games on it, so we’d appreciate it if you’d play those and then call it quits again.” Weird.

But worse, of course, is the fact that the show’s writers are obviously going to treat us to watching Dr. Greene’s downward spiral into death by brain tumor. In all honesty, I’ve seen enough drawn-out terminal-illness storylines on various TV shows that all I can do right now is yawn for this one. The best such storyline I’ve ever seen was a few years back on NYPDBlue, when Det. Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) died of complications following a heart transplant. That storyline played out over just five episodes, the last of which was probably the best single death of a beloved character I’ve ever seen on TV — it was by turns harrowing, touching, and in the end heartbreaking as we watched Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) try to deal with his friend and partner’s impending passing. The five-episode story arc was just long enough to be involving and just short enough to be jolting as all such unexpected deaths should be; and the even better stroke of genius was that it was executed at the beginning of the TV season whereas many lesser shows would draw it out so that the death could occur during May sweeps, probably even the season finale, as ER seems to be doing. I have grave doubts (no pun intended) that the writers of ER are in the same league as David Milch, the great writer responsible for the NYPDBlue story.

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This week’s listening: The Music of COSMOS. Carl Sagan’s amazing PBS series Cosmos is a landmark in science television (and probably television in general). The show’s production values were remarkable, and the series holds up fairly well today, even though more than twenty years have passed since its making and the shifts in scientific knowledge that are inevitable. One of the show’s most successful facets was its use of music. The show drew from a very wide array of musical sources, from the classical repertoire to New Age electronica to ethnic folk music and so on. A soundtrack album was produced when the show originally aired in 1980, but as with so many soundtrack albums of that era it was incomplete. A 2-CD set of the soundtrack has now been released, and it is a wonderful listen. One would not necessarily expect something like this — basically a compilation recording — to work so well as a whole, but the musical selections are so well chosen that they seem to blend together organically into a compelling work of its own. The selections are occasionally bracketed by sounds of Planet Earth — thunderstorms, oceans, a rocket launch countdown, et cetera — which adds to the overall effect. What has been produced is a sort-of amalgam to the famous Voyager Record, whose creation was spurred by Carl Sagan in the first place.

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No reader of fantasy literature should be unfamiliar with the work of Lloyd Alexander, author of the classic Prydain Chronicles (based on Welsh mythology, particularly The Mabinogion) and other works based on the mythologies of other cultures. His books are children’s literature, but anyone who sees in that distinction some indication of “lesser quality” is a person who is not really interested in fine storytelling, but rather in intellectual pomposity. Harsh words, but there it is. Anyway, a happy occasion is the reissue this month of Alexander’s novel Westmark, the opening book in a trilogy set in a country called Westmark that is full of political intrigue and revolutionary fervor. The trilogy is only fantasy in that the story takes place in a make-believe locale, but there is no magic, no wizards, and no giant beasts; it’s more of a historical novel set in a place that never was. Westmark has been out of print for a number of years, and now it can be had again. Read it.

(Addendum: The WESTMARK reissue is part of the launch of Firebird, a new imprint by Penguin Books that is geared toward “excellence in fantasy and science fiction”. They are to be commended and supported in this endeavor. Godspeed, Firebird!!!)

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One of the most memorable books I’ve read is A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, a wonderful volume about book collectors and book collecting. This book is full of amazing stories about book collectors and the lengths to which they will go to acquire the objects of their passion (the most memorable of whom, especially to anyone from Iowa, is surely the infamous Stephen Blumberg). Well, apparently A Gentle Madness was the first in a projected trilogy about books, and the second volume — Patience and Fortitude — is out. I’ve already bought it and it has shot to the top of my “To Read” list.

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After September 11, I kept wondering why Osama Bin Laden selected the targets that he did, and why he seems to have been particularly fascinated with the World Trade Center. As horrific as that day was, it seems to me that he had far more in mind than mere body count; had that been his goal and nothing else, he could have scheduled his attacks for September 9 — a Sunday — and targetted NFL stadiums that were full to capacity.

While searching the archives at Slate Magazine, I happened upon this article that suggests just such a reason for Bin Laden’s apparent obsession with the WTC. It might not be that the buildings were to him symbolic of a decadent culture at odds with his own warped interpretation of Islamic tenets; the buildings themselves — as physical artifacts — may have been offensive to him because of a family connection to the WTC’s main architect and the WTC’s implementation of Islamic architectural styles. Scary stuff.

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You Only Live Twice was on last night on ABC. I still find it a far more enjoyable film than its successor, Thunderball, but this one is still not without its faults. It is one of the most blatantly sexist Bond films, with one male character informing Bond that “In Japan, men always come first and women come second” and Bond enthusiastically approving. It also has a plot that is highly improbable even by James Bond standards: would the world’s superpowers stand down from nuclear alert after Bond has thwarted SPECTRE’s plan with only seconds to spare? would a space launch from Japan really be completely undetectable by everybody? The sets are all very well-done, but some of the film’s photographic effects are just-plain lazy. For a Russian spaceshot we are shown stock footage of a NASA rocket launch, complete with swaying palm trees in the foreground, ignoring the fact that the Russians launch their rockets from a vast plain in the middle of the country which is about as likely to have palm trees as the middle of Nebraska. Late in the film, when Blofeld’s mountain base is blowing up, we are shown footage of an actual volcanic eruption complete with lava. I suppose it’s not really fair to bust on a 1967 film for such things, but I’m doing it anyway. Another flaw is the film’s two main women: one of them, named Aki, is the Bond film “sacrificial lamb”; after she dies another Japanese girl shows up whose name I don’t think we ever even learn.

But the film is still a whole lot of fun; the producers seem to have learned from their pacing errors in Thunderball and constructed a Bond film that actually moves. The sense of fun is restored, and the score by John Barry — with its nifty Asian influences — is a gem.

An added bonus during last night’s telecast was a Top Ten list, of the best Bond theme songs. This was hosted by Brandi, a person of whose existence I was almost completely unaware until last night. Ah well. Apparently the list was collated from the results of an ABC online pole, and it shows. That’s the only way I can think that one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard in any setting was actually listed (Tina Turner’s song for Goldeneye). I would have appreciated that ancillary feature more if Brandi had taken time to explain just what the hell the lyrics to Duran Duran’s A View To A Kill song are about, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Next week brings us Diamonds Are Forever, which began the trend of increasing goofiness in Bond films during the 1970s. For those who blame Roger Moore for taking Bond in a farcical direction, tune in next week for Connery’s last Bond film. You might notice that Moore isn’t so much to blame for that.

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