Extremely guilty pleasures.

It all started out innocently, honest it did. I was disposing of extra images in the Picasa picture album for the blog, and there they were, the pictures from last year's Major Matt Mason posting. Really, I was just curious to see just how ridiculously expensive the figures were now when I logged onto eBay and did a search.

And trust me, when I put a bid down on one of the figures, I never thought I'd win the damn auction! Good grief, it's for an original 1966 blue stripe version of the Major complete with original helmet and Cat Trac, it's got to be worth more than, oh, let's put a $50 cap on the bid, ha, that should be the top bid for about ten minutes.

Imagine my surprise (and mild embarrassment) when 6 days and $43.02 later, I found myself the proud owner of six ounces of rubber and wire from the 1960's, accessorized with 15 cents worth of molded plastic.

But it seemed that my unexpected opportunity to reclaim childhood memories was doomed - four long weeks went by without a sign of the parcel: no notes from the post office, nothing. The seller reassured me that the items had been shipped within three days, but someone could have walked here with the package in a month for heaven's sake, obviously something had gone amiss.

On Monday night I trotted down to the building laundry room to drop in a load of darks (having missed my usual Saturday morning laundry due to a weekend trip to Toronto) and to my mingled relief, curiousity and anger, there the Major was, dumped on a shelf beside the laundry sorting table. He and his helmet were in a Ziploc™ bag, his Cat Trac was loose but undamaged, and everything was exactly in the condition described in the eBay listing,

What happened, I wonder? Obviously the [expletive deleted] postie just left the package at my door rather than returning it to the post office to wait for my signature, and just as obviously someone nicked the package and opened it. And then...had an attack of conscience? Decided they didn’t really need a 6 inch rubber man? Got caught by their mother? But why leave it in the laundry room instead of returning it to my door?

Regardless, I’m pleased by the positive conclusion to the story, if somewhat baffled by the circumstances that led up to it.

The Major Matt Mason dolls were painted rubber moldings over wire armatures – think Gumby in a spacesuit, if that helps. The down side of this style of construction is that the wire involved has a relatively short life span in the hands of an imaginative and playful child, who will probably subject the joints to the kind of stress and extension normally associated with the Spanish Inquisition.

Once the wire is broken, the rubber expansion joints are left with nothing else for support and can easily tear. As a result, eBay listings for Major Matt Mason figures tend to cite number of broken joints, and in a few cases one-armed or one-legged astronauts are offered for sale.* As you can see in the photos, my Major is a little bit on the grimy side, and his paint has peeled off in a couple of spots. However, all of his limbs are there, his wire joints are good, and he still has his original helmet, which I gather is unusual.

I don’t remember to what extent my original Matt Mason figures had lost their paint – I did see one for sale on eBay with no paint at all on the black rubber, and to be honest I thought that the all-black spacesuit looked somewhat cool, sort of a ninja astronaut look. Not practical, though – NASA's spacesuits are white in order to reflect heat. I think that the multi-coloured space suits of the original line of figures were based around the idea of visibility on the Moon in case of accidents, an idea which shows up semi-regularly in science fiction.

I can see why the various collectors' websites advise soaking the figures in a dilute solution of cleanser for 20 minutes before attempting a gentle cleaning (very gentle - everyone agrees that the paint is a bit fragile). My first attempt at wiping away the stains with a dampened soft cloth was almost pointless: imagine almost 45 years of grimy little juvenile fingers rubbing filth into the rubber and acrylic. (Or don't if you have a weak stomach.)

I find myself wondering as to the exact circumstances that led to the Major ending up in the laundry room. I picture this sort of Toy Story scenario, wherein he finds himself held captive but plans a desperate escape. Choosing his moment, he grimly snaps down his visor and climbs onto his scarlet Cat Trac to make a courageous dash for freedom, but finally succumbs to lack of oxygen and tumbles unconscious from his seat...

You know it's a good toy when it can still inspire your imagination 43 years after it was made.

- Sid

 

* There's a 1949 short story by Ray Bradbury titled Kaleidoscope where an orbiting spaceship blows up and the spacesuited crew survives, but is scattered in all directions by the force of the explosion. Some fall into the atmosphere and burn up, and some are hurled into the depths of space. One unfortunate finds his vector to be opposite that of a meteor cloud, and as jagged hunks of iron amputate his extremities, a rather brutal safety feature in his spacesuit allows him to close an iris that stops the bleeding and seals the joint. First his left hand...SNICK...then his right foot...SNICK... Perhaps this is how damaged Major Matt Mason figures explain their, ah, shortcomings in bar conversations.

Adumbration, solecism, plangent, phthisic.

From: Sid
To: Chris
Subject: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009, 7:45 PM
Just in case, I thought I should warn you that I won’t be at the Frog and Firkin tomorrow night, your sister has evinced a desire to purchase Chinese food for two.

From: Chris
To: Sid
Subject: Re: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:04 pm
Evinced - a word not commonly used.

How often are you able to cite the exact source from which you learned a word?

In this case, it's Jack Vance's Hugo and Nebula* award-winning 1966 short novel The Last Castle, which contains the following bit of narrative:

"After the council meeting I descended immediately to the storeroom where the Mek was confined. It lacked nutriment; I gave it syrup and a pail of water, which it sipped sparingly, then evinced a desire for minced clams. I summoned kitchen help and sent them for this commodity and the Mek ingested several pints."

I probably read The Last Castle for the first time in the early 70's (my copy certainly looks like I've owned it for that long, and I mentally associate it with about that point in my life) and I have no idea why the picture of a corduroy-faced alien worker expressing his longing for shredded shellfish stuck in my mind. But it did, and thus we increase our word power, as Reader's Digest used to say.

By the way, if you're looking for something a bit different in the fantasy and science fiction reading department, Jack Vance is a fabulous choice. As demonstrated above, his vocabulary is both recondite and pedantic - his writing style is formal and slightly archaic, and his sense of humour can be described in exactly the same terms.

Some science fiction authors invent bizarre and improbable technologies, some create strange and unusual aliens, others are planet builders. Vance's books tend to have a backdrop of convoluted and elaborate social structures: societies based around odd practises, peculiar rituals, and the observation of unique traditions. As an example, here's a description of the tribal group called Khors from Vance's The Dirdir, the third novel of the Tschai, Planet of Adventure series:

"Remember," Anacho warned, "the Khors are a sensitive people. Do not speak to them; pay them no heed except from necessity, in which case you must use the fewest possible words. They consider garrulity a crime against nature. Do not stand upwind of a Khor, nor if possible downwind; such acts are symbolic of antagonism. Never acknowledge the presence of a woman; do not look toward their children – they will suspect you of laying a curse; and above all ignore the sacred grove."

Sadly, sometimes Vance's fascination with the oddities of language and society take precedence over plot, and I have to admit that for me, some of his work falls a bit flat because of that problem. But nothing can diminish the brilliance with which Vance builds his dream palaces, and that brilliance has garnered him respect and praise from fans, critics and fellow authors for over 60 years.

In addition to The Last Castle and the Tschai series, Vance's best known works would be the Dying Earth stories, The Dragon Masters, and the Demon Princes series. I suspect a lot of it is out of print, Vance was born in 1916 and hasn't been very productive recently, but if you're willing to spend a little time in used book stores I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a suitable selection. I'll warn you in advance, though: you may find yourself evincing a desire for a copy of the Oxford Concise Dictionary in order to fully appreciate Jack Vance.

- Sid

* This is the equivalent of winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe in the real world.

Digital Reading Part Two: Virtually Free

I find that there's an odd fragility to the concept of the digital book. Short of a big fire, my physical library is almost immortal. Parts of it are more worn around the edges than others, but there's a good chance that even with wear and tear a lot of those books will be around after I'm dead.

The digital library? Back up often - one drive crash and you're wiped out. Even more of an issue is obsolescence. If you hitch your literary wagon to a particular proprietary format, you may find that it's unreadable in a few years as support for the technology vanishes. As an example, I have graphics files from ten years ago that I would have trouble opening right now due to changes in format, version, and in some cases because the software developer went out of business and their product was never updated to the current operating system. Now imagine the same problems with your ebook version of The Lord of the Rings.

However, many of the same comments would apply to digital music, and it hasn't stopped most of the world from switching over to iPods. And it would seem that ebooks are going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, as demonstrated by the plethora of overly-expensive (in my opinion) digital readers that are popping up in the stores. But high-priced hardware is only part of the problem. After all, buying a reader is just the first step - you'll probably want some books too...

Logic - a sadly flawed device for analyzing these situations - would suggest that ebooks would be cheaper than their physical cousins. To my astonishment, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon's Kindle bookstore lists digital bestsellers ranging from $7.00 to $12.00 and claims this as a saving because the hardcover editions sell for about $26. Unfortunately, not quite as much of a saving when compared to the paperback that most of us would buy anyway.

Surprisingly, there's actually an acceptable number of options online for those of us in search of less expensive virtual reading, some of which are aimed directly at the science fiction and fantasy audience.

Topping the list is the venerable (by internet standards) institution of Project Gutenberg, which actually dates back to 1971 and got its start on the University of Illinois mainframe. Gutenberg is based on a very simple idea: free text files of books that have passed into the public domain.

For a genre reader with a taste for the classics, Gutenberg is a bonanza: the Oz books; the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Tarzan and Mars books; the text of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, which introduced the term "robot" to the world; Skylark and Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith (staples of my early experience with SF); classic fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard; stories by H. Beam Piper; novels by Andre Norton - the list goes on and on, and it's all free.

For the reader whose preferences are a bit more modern, Baen Books offers a surprising selection of free books at the Baen Free Library, a basic web site that offers over a hundred different novels for download: mostly SF with a leavening of fantasy. Updates are irregular, but the books listed would make up a pretty good foundation for anyone's ebookshelf. There's also a site called The Fifth Imperium that offers downloads of Baen's free promo CDs, which include ancillary material such as cover artwork or interviews as well as the stories.

The Manybooks site falls between Baen and Gutenberg, with its base offering coming from Gutenberg but in a wider selection of formats, and more current additional material. Free Speculative Fiction Online has a reasonable selection as well, although perhaps with a bias toward short stories over novel-length works.

A Google search reveals dozens of other sites, albeit some that may offer texts of dubious provenance. There used to be a thriving newsgroup community dedicated to bootleg books, and although I have to admit to downloading some of these samizdata files, quality tended to be uneven.

The free solutions that I've listed would certainly give you a good starter library, but I think that there's a better answer to the digital reading question than relying on giveaways. In order for the whole ebook concept to really get a foothold in the marketplace, it needs to have a solution like the iTunes store, a solution which will offer a simple method of purchasing and managing digital literature without charging the same prices demanded by the dead tree publishers.

It’s a shame that Apple has already released a product called the iBook, but I have a lot of faith in Steve Jobs. If or when he decides it's time to reform the digital book marketplace, I’m sure he’ll come up with something equally in line with the rest of the iProduct list.

- Sid