Chicago 4: Visitations

I hope it turns out to be nice today in Chicago for book shopping.  Goodness gracious, what additional books will you be looking for?

- Excerpted from an e-mail from Laurie Smith

I realize that for most people, a trip to a foreign city doesn't necessarily involve visiting the local book stores. However, I view it as an opportunity to get a bit off the beaten track left by other tourists, see a part of the area I might not otherwise see, and perhaps make some judicious purchases for my collection.

Now, as per Laurie's e-mail, people are often surprised that I still feel the need to buy books - I've got thousands of the damn things, isn't that enough?  And there's a certain element of truth to that. I've certainly reduced my book buying in the last few years, but I still like to keep my eye open for interesting additions to my little library.

A little research on the Internet aimed me at Bucket O'Blood in Chicago - sadly, The Stars Our Destination, another local science fiction specialty store, is no longer open. In addition, another conference attendee recommended a bookstore called Myopic as being a good spot for used books.

Myopic is certainly a classic old-school used bookstore - in fact, as you can see from this photo of the science fiction and fantasy section in their basement, if it was any more old school it would probably be unsafe to visit. Regardless, they have a large and varied selection, and I walked away with some interesting finds, including the three volumes of the Neustrian Cycle, by Leslie Barringer: Gerfalcon, Joris of the Rock, and Shy Leopardess - 1976 reprints of books which were originally published in 1927, and exactly the sort of thing that I hope to find in these little book shopping trips.

(The funny thing is that I couldn't remember how I'd heard about this trilogy.  I knew that I'd read about it being a classic read somewhere - but where?  As it turns out, I stumbled across the answer purely by accident while shelving books - it was Andre Norton, who recommends Barrington in her excellent 1971 essay On Writing Fantasy, wherein she discusses the influences and sources for her work.)

I was surprised by how small Bucket O'Blood was compared to most of the bookstores I've visited, especially since half of the store is dedicated to vinyl. (Never before in my life have I been in the same room with so many hipsters.)  However, it's obvious that their relatively small selection of second-hand genre literature has been carefully selected - and, to be honest, there is a lot of chaff in most used bookstores, it was actually a bit of a pleasure not to have to wade through shelf after shelf of bad Conan the Barbarian rip-offs in search of something worthwhile.

Most noteworthy of the five books that I purchased there were the 1955 printing of Star Guard, by Andre Norton, and the 1965 version of Second Stage Lensmen, by E. E. "Doc" Smith, both replacement copies for books that I already own - sad how Time has its way with paper, ink and glue. I was particularly pleased to find the E. E. Smith book - my mother owned this edition, but by the time I was old enough to pick it up, both cover and binding were in sad condition. It was a pleasure to see an old favourite again in such good condition: they literally don't make covers like this anymore.

You know, now that I think about it, I've never been to a used book store in England, how have I missed doing that? Obviously that's on the list for my next UK visit. (Oh well, there goes my weight allowance for the flight home from that trip...)

- Sid

What do you mean, "would have"?

It appears to be Travel Month on the Infinite Revolution - here's a card from Laurie, aka the Evil Doctor Smith.

 Is it just me, or is it a bit creepy to end a sentence about the domination of humanity with a little smiley face?

- Sid

Chicago 3: The Bean...

And now I present to you the Chicago Bean - one part neutronium sphere, one part Slaver stasis box, one part time bobble.*

Hmm...okay, actually that's not quite accurate.  All of the above would be perfect spheres, this is more like an alien spacecraft of some sort.  Not to mentioned that a neutronium sphere that size would weigh...lessee, if we pretend it actually is round, call it ten meters high, which is 523,599,000 cubic centimeters.....a cubic centimeter of neutronium would weigh 1,212,541,000 tonnes..so that's about 6.35 x 10¹⁷ tonnes…the earth weighs 6.585 x 10²¹ metric tonnes...okay, so it wouldn't quite weigh as much as the Earth, but certainly well up there.  Probably not the sort of thing that you’d leave lying around in a park, although I'm sure it would pull in the tourists.

- Sid

*Respectively, Larry Niven's short story There is a Tide, and Vernor Vinge's novel Peace War.

UPDATE:  First, in answer to a couple of inquiries, no Photoshop is involved in the second picture, just a wide angle lens and careful positioning.  If you click on the picture to open it at full size, and lean forward to the monitor and squint a bit, you can see me in front of the trees, almost in the exact middle of the sphere, taking the picture.  What was involved was a lot of patience while waiting for people to get out of the way.

Second, I have been remiss in not thanking Dan Cooke from my office, who suggested that I visit the Bean during my visit to Chicago.  My apologies, Dan - now stop harassing me about it or I won't help you with your CMS problems anymore.

Chicago 2: "Quick, everyone, back to the Knickerbocker!

Watch her, trail her, pipe her as she goes,
With her high-heeled boots and her patent leather toes.
That she was one of those flash girls I soon found out in time
When her high-heeled boots went clattering down the Knickerbocker Line.

The Flash Girls, The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones

As per my previous posting, I'm writing this in Chicago, where I attended a four day publications conference.  I've booked a couple of days of vacation time in order to do some sightseeing, but because my pockets aren't quite as deep as those of my employers, I've switched hotels.  I'm now staying at the wonderfully named Millennium Knickerbocker, which sounds to me like the perfect name for Han Solo's ship in the steampunk version of Star Wars.

 - Sid
 

Chicago 1: One to beam up.

(First draft written while waiting for a flight to Chicago.)

I greatly enjoy time spent in different locations - all of my best memories involve foreign locales - but I don't enjoy the process of getting there, the actual travel itself.  Our family didn't travel at all when I was younger, so I when I began to travel as an adult, I had no background or experience to draw upon..  As such, even at the age of 52, going to the airport feels like having to take a really important test that I can't study for and which I could fail at any moment, especially when I'm crossing the border to the United States.

So, let's talk about teleportation.

On the face of it, easy access to mechanical teleportation would be fantastic - when I say "easy", I mean something on the level of taking the bus:  not universal, not free, but affordable and accessible. Step into a booth, swipe your card, pick a location, press GO, open the door, and you're at work.  Or in Zimbabwe.*

But, as always with new technology, it would have both a positive and a negative effect.  In the case of teleportation, the effects would probably be massive, changing the world on the same sort of scale as the introduction of the computer. 

Science fiction author Larry Niven has written a lot of good stories and essays on mechanical teleportation, which detail the various issues involving the collapse of all the transportation and shipping industries at once and the subsequent economic issues, the problems involving smuggling and crime (including the end of location as an alibi for murder) and a myriad of other issues. 

Niven also addresses the physics behind the process and the various problems that would need to be overcome.  For example, if you teleported to the other side of the world, you would have to land running at 1670 kilometers per hour to compensate for the simple fact that the other side of the world is rotating in the opposite direction.

But what actually happens when you teleport?  How does it work?

Well, in theory it kills you.

In some way shape or form, you cease to exist.  You are scanned and disintegrated, then rebuilt at the far end, but is it still you?  There are several science fiction stories that look at this question - notably, there's a teleporter in China Miéville's entertaining novel Kraken who goes insane because he's being haunted by the ghosts of all his previous selves who were killed by the process.**  

“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my point. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But take something living and do that? Beam it up? What you done is ripped a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around. He died. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died.”

And there are creepier options.  After all, why should the machine disintegrate you when you're scanned?  Or delete the template?  Or just make one copy at the far end?  The most chilling take on this process comes from Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, who posit the use of doppleganger copies of people being used for suicide exploratory missions in space in their Cuckoo novels.  After all, if the original person doesn't go anywhere, and they get a lot of money, why would it matter what happens to their copy - or copies.

Even more disturbing is the possibility of error in the process, as demonstrated in a couple of episodes of Star Trek, but nowhere more graphically than in The Fly (either version, although the 1983 remake has better special effects.)  Personally, I think I'd want to see a whole lot of other people try the damn thing out before I set foot into a transportation booth.

You know, suddenly security lineups, immigration scrutiny and airline delays seem a lot more tolerable. 

- Sid

* Should anyone reading this actually live in Chitungwiza and work in downtown Harare, feel free to substitute "Vancouver".

**  Not to mention the controversial question of the soul. The next time you watch something from the Star Trek franchise, imagine that everyone on the Enterprise is actually a soulless zombie - creepy, isn't it?  No wonder Denise Crosby seemed so stiff.

Damn - I had my heart set on X-ray vision...

In an odd coincidence, LinkedIn™ was kind enough to inform me as to the nature of my personal super-power while I was working on my posting about Days of Future Past.  Ha - take THAT, Magneto!

- Sid

A stubby would have been even better.

Speaking of Alpha Flight, I was discussing comic book movies with my long-suffering co-worker Terry, and asked if he has seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Upon discovering that he hadn't, I told him that he would have to get it when it reached the general marketplace, because it would fit in perfectly with his conspiracy-oriented view of the government.* 

He replied, "Absolutely - I'll sit down with my son and we'll give it a good watch."

"Isn't Ed a bit young for that sort of movie?"

"Well, he's only four, but he loves that stuff. Spider-Man in particular, he loves Spider-Man.  I was a bit worried about Wolverine, it's so violent, but it doesn't seem to bother him at all."

"Wolverine is an interesting character all around.  He was introduced by Marvel in order to get some Canadian content - at one point the X-Men was being drawn and co-written by a Canadian, fellow named John Byrne, and he introduced an entire Canadian super-group called Alpha Flight, with members from BC and Alberta and Québec and so on.  Wolverine had been a member at one point, and then left under a cloud, so when they meet up again they do that whole weird hero-fighting-hero thing that seemed to happen so often in Marvel comics.  Wolverine and Nightcrawler, the blue X-Man who can teleport, go to Ottawa so Logan can reconnect with Alpha Flight, and there's a whole bunch of Canadian Easter Eggs**, like conversations with Trudeau and Wolverine drinking Canadian beer - Molson's or something similar."

Ah, well, nobody's perfect - a little research revealed that it was actually Labatt's. Although, when you think about it, a can of Canadian would have been a better joke.

 - Sid

* Well, to be honest, his conspiracy theory view of everything.  I'm not certain that Terry believes that we've actually landed on the Moon.

**  Alpha Flight had its own comic for a few years, and if memory serves it continued to have a distinctive Canadian flavour: for example, Northstar, one of the team's super-powered mutant Québecois twins, turned out to have been associated with the FLQ. 

Past, Present and Future.

As per my previous comments regarding comic book movies, I was already familiar with the basic plotline for Days of Future Past when I walked into the theatre: the X-Men of the future send the consciousness of one of their members back in time* to 1973 in order to change history and prevent the extinction of mutant-kind.  However, after seeing the movie, I felt it necessary to revisit the comic book version in order to determine exactly how much the movie version differed from the print version.

The changes are substantial and dramatic – and you know what?

The movie is better.

The X-Men movies have always been back and forth on comic book canon, but the largest variation comes from the storyline of First Class, which in many ways tears down the origins of Professor X and Magneto and rebuilds them from scratch.  Days of Future Past continues that process, but it adds much more depth to the characters of both men, especially Professor X.

Stan Lee initially created these two characters as mutant parallels to the civil rights struggle of the 60s:  the Professor represented Martin Luther King, and Magneto stood in for the much more militant Malcolm X – hopefully no pun intended.  There are glimpses of that aspect of Charles Xavier in First Class, but in Days of Future Past, we start to see his evolution into a more mature character through his relationship with Mystique and Magneto.

The comic book version, which shows Canadian comic book artist John Byrne doing some of his best work, gets bogged down in the sort of clichéd expository team-versus-team fight scene that is one of less pleasant legacies left to Marvel by Stan Lee.  The movie version keeps things much simpler, and offers a far more emotional - and powerful - interaction between the characters throughout.

A special shout-out to the producers for the casting of Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, inventor of the anti-mutant Sentinel robots. Initially, when word got out that Mr. Dinklage had been cast for the next X-Men movie, it was widely assumed that the story would involve Alpha Flight, Marvel's Canadian superhero team, because one of the members of Alpha Flight was a dwarf.

In the original version, Bolivar Trask is a man of average height, but there’s not one reason why Peter Dinklage would be unable to play the part.  And, impressively, not once during the entire movie does the question of his height garner any sort of mention.  Full points to the producers for casting based purely on talent.

 - Sid

*  The joke is that the original two-issue sequence in the comics was published in January of 1980, and Kitty Pryde is sent back from about 30 years in the future – now, in other words.  How quickly the future becomes the present…

Cautionary Tales.

"All men must die."
                                   The Game of Thrones

People are often surprised to find out that I haven’t been watching The Game of Thrones.  Initially, I didn’t see the need – I’d already read the books, and I was more than a little sceptical about the adaptability of George R. R. Martin’s epic tale of the struggle for succession in the kingdom of Westeros as mysterious supernatural forces gather in the North and prepare to invade.

The bad news is that I think I was wrong.  All evidence seems to indicate that the adaptation is a complete success, a success which I think can be attributed primarily to the casting.  Peter Dinklage has become the most noteworthy breakout star from TGOT – the role of Tyrion Lannister might almost have been written with him in mind, and I have to wonder how he feels about the opportunity to play a character who opens the book (no pun intended) into the difficulties of life as a dwarf.

The good news is that thanks to Blu-ray and the Internet, it will be fairly easy to catch up with the episodes to date, although I doubt that I’ll be doing a four season marathon.  After all, the adaptation has stayed fairly close to the books, so I won’t have that desperate desire to find out what happens next that a new viewer would usually have.

However, I gather that viewers who had not read the books have been shocked, if not horrified, by the twists and turns of Martin’s plotline.  When the TV series began and people were telling me that they were watching and enjoying it, I gave the same advice to everyone:  “Don’t get really fond of anybody.”

The body count in Game of Thrones is astonishing: Martin sets the stage with an extensive cast of players, but no one – NO ONE – is safe.  The plethora of characters presents a target-rich environment, and Martin ruthlessly removes pieces from the board as he sees fit.

This is a deliberate strategy on his part.  Martin makes it clear that the conflict in Westeros is merciless, and those who do not win will die.  The heroes are not invulnerable, nor are the villains, and simply because a character has been an active participant for four of the novels in no way guarantees that they’ll survive the fifth book.  

On one hand, this is a brilliant approach. The reader (or viewer) can never be complacent.  In the majority of fiction, the hero may be placed in harm’s way, but everyone realizes that ultimately they will triumph over adversity.  In The Game of Thrones, you are constantly on the edge of your seat because there are no guarantees that anyone will survive.

On the other hand, the down side of this approach is that it makes it a bit of a struggle to follow the story.  Generally in fiction, one observes a protagonist experiencing conflict (generally referred to as plot).  I have no idea who the protagonist is in The Game of Thrones, and as such, reading the books feels like reading a sequence of disconnected vignettes.  A character will be dealt with in excruciating detail for two hundred pages and then get their head cut off.  As a reader, you end up feeling sort of lost, and perhaps a little bitter that you had invested so much in a character who turned out to be disposable.*

And ultimately, this may be the downfall of both the books and the adaptation.  Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series is a similar sort of epic fantasy tale, albeit with a higher survival rate on the part of the cast. The series spans a daunting 14 books, but after the sixth or seventh novel, Jordan's treatment of the characters was such that he began to lose my interest, to the extent that I no longer cared as to their ultimate fates.  I stopped buying the books, and put the ones that I did own down in the laundry room of my building in hopes that they would end up in a good home.

I don't think that George R. R. Martin will lose my interest in the same way, but he's only five novels in with apparently another three to go, and quite frankly there were a couple of times in the fifth book where my reaction was, "What, are you kidding me? Him too? And her as well?"  Careful, George.  After all, it's a two-way street.  You're certainly allowed to treat your characters in whatever fashion you choose - and we're allowed to stop reading about it.  Or watching.

- Sid

* To illustrate this for readers unfamiliar with either the books or the adaptation, imagine if by the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker had died in the snowspeeder attack on the Imperial AT-ATs, followed by the execution of Darth Vader by the Emperor.  Han Solo is assassinated by Boba Fett, and Princess Leia gang raped and shot in the head by Imperial troopers who then feed her dismembered corpse to an imprisoned and blinded Chewbacca.  Would you not feel a bit confused as to where the story was going?

The New Fan.

(Contributed by Dorothy Hatto)

 
The other day I was talking to one of my friends who is into science fiction and was amazed to discover that she had never heard of Andre Norton, one of the founders of modern science fiction/fantasy.*

Now, my friend is going to Australia, and she takes books rather than her tablet to read. They weigh less in carry on and it's easier to read half a page or so if you have to wait. She suggested that I lend her one of my books to take along.

My brother Sid might be the only one to really empathize with the decision of which book to choose.  Andre Norton or Alice Mary Norton was writing science/fantasy books before it was popular for women to be in the genre. (Ergo the "Andre" of her name.) She wrote under a few other pseudonyms, all male - I don’t think she ever used her actual name in print, although I may be wrong about that.

She was born in 1912, started writing science fiction in the 1940s, and died in 2005, still collaborating with other writers.

So, which book do you choose out of the 300 or so titles that she wrote and co-wrote?

I took a couple of days to think about it and finally chose the same book that I think I read first. My mother owned Daybreak 2250 A.D. as an Ace double and I believe it was the first Andre Norton story I ever read. My current copy was printed in the 1970s and was 50 cents at the time. I have replaced it twice** and also inherited my mother's Ace Double for my collection.

I will have to wait till my friend gets back to see if she liked it, but she does like Anne McCaffrey books and their styles are similar. 

- Dorothy

* Along with H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Hugo Gernsbach, Arthur C. Clarke, and a few I have probably forgotten.

** I always like to get the used copies as the story has changed a bit every time it was published.

Postscript
I completely agree with Dorothy: anyone with a serious interest in science fiction or fantasy should be aware of Ms. Norton's contributions to the two genres.  Andre Norton was one of those rare authors whose mastery of tone and vocabulary was complete and flawless.  Her writing style was formal and dignified, and matched itself perfectly to the stories which she crafted with such consummate skill.

Hmmmm...but which one to lend to a first time reader? Daybreak 2250 A.D., with its outcast post-apocalyptic hero (and his cat) is certainly a good choice in terms of a characteristic novel.  I might have gone with The Time Traders, or Witch World, or Year of the Unicorn (which starts a whole series of connected novels).  The Beast Master?  Star Rangers? Sargasso of Space?  The Crossroads of Time? As my sister suggests, a difficult choice due to the uniform excellence of Andre Norton's writing.

Thanks very much for the posting, Dorothy!

- Sid