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