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Worlds Without End Blog

Grand Master Reading Challenge May Review Poll Winner: Jeremy Posted at 9:47 AM by Dave Post

Dave Post

Grand Master Reading Challenge jfrantzThe people have spoken and the May GMRC Review Poll winner is Jeremy Frantz (jfrantz) for his excellent review of Way Station by Clifford D. Simak. Jeremy is a huge WWEnd supporter and has posted many fine reviews both here and on his blog The Hugo Endurance Project. Take a minute to click over and bookmark his site. He’s got lots of great SF/F for you to enjoy.

Jeremy will receive a GMRC T-shirt, a GMRC button and a set of commemorative WWEnd Hugo Award bookmarks as well as his choice of books from the WWEnd bookshelf and the Everlasting Glory he’s been seeking. All runners up will be getting a button and a set of bookmarks in the mail.

Continuing with our streak, we’ve now had 5 different winners in 5 months so jump in with your own review – there are more prizes to be won and plenty of time for June. You could be our next winner!

We’re happy to report that, after 5 months, the Grand Master Reading Challenge is still going strong. We jumped up 12 participants in May to 128 and went from 285 books read to a whopping 353 with an additional 27 reviews taking us to 127 total. Huzzah, indeed! So, how high can we go? Seems the sky’s the limit. The GMRC is a challenge that you can easily catch up on if you miss the start. Heck, if you come in half way through you can still hit 12 books by the end of the year. Especially people who visit this site!

Outside the Norm: Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg Posted at 8:28 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

Rhonda Knight is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses. When she looked over last year’s reading list, she was shocked to see that only 17% of the authors she read were women. This blog will record her attempts to read authors that are generally considered out of the science fiction norm: women, persons of color, and non-U.S. and non-U.K. authors.


Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

I began this Outside the Norm blog because I wanted to challenge myself to read more books by women, persons of color and nationalities other than American and British. So far I’ve read canonical authors like Le Guin and those who are starting to make a name in the F and SF world like Nnedi Okorafor. I’m also beginning to see this title as a license to write about others whose speculative work is just outside the parameters of the lists and awards compiled here. This blog is about one of those books, Dubravka Ugresic‘s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg.

This book first came to my attention because it won the 2010 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The Tiptree’s mission, as stated on its website, is to honor a science fiction or fantasy work "that expands or explores our understanding of gender" and is given each year at WisCon. Ugresic is a Croatian academic who was forced into exile by a nationalist government. Most of her books and collections of essays are political in nature. This book was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, so, as you can see, she’s not an author whose name would typically end up on a list of the year’s best fantasy writers. Yet, her use of myth in this book placed the book in the realm of fantasy for some readers like the Tiptree jury. The book is a three-part engagement with Baba Yaga, the witch-like character of Slavic folklore.

I confess that all I really knew about Baba Yaga came through an introduction via the prog rock CD Pictures at an Exhibition (1972) by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. That group had recorded a suite by the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky, which Mussorgsky had based on an art exhibition by the Russian artist Viktor Hartmann. (For more about Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, check out the music and new images here.) One of the images that inspired subsequent songs by Mussorgsky and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer was "The Hut of Baba Yaga." This song sent my younger self off to research Baba Yaga. Pictures in an ExhibitionI learned that Baba Yaga lived in a giant hut that walked around on huge chicken legs. Much like the witches in Grimm’s fairy tales, she lured children to her forest hut and ate them. She flew around in a mortar, using the pestle like an oar, and used a broom to sweep away her tracks. Here you can see her connection to the more western witches on broomsticks. However, no previous knowledge of Baba Yaga is required to read this book because the reader is slowly educated through the author’s three sections. This structure and strategy is what makes this book so interesting and made me decide to write this review.

The short prologue "At First You Don’t See Them…" unapologetically tells the reader that this book will be about old women:

Sweet little old ladies. At first you don’t see them. And then, there they are, on the tram, at the post office, in the shop, at the doctor’s surgery, on the street, there is one, there is another, there is a fourth over there, a fifth, a sixth, how could there be so many of them all at once? (2)

The invisibility of these "little old ladies" is a direct comment on society’s tendency to dismiss the elderly and their needs and forget about their continued usefulness to society. Ugresic’s book goes beyond this generalization of invisibility and takes on the ways that our view of "little old ladies" is often based on gender stereotypes created by earlier patriarchal societies, especially crone figures like the Baba Yaga.

Baba YagaThe first section "Go There – I Know Not Where – and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack" has no speculative fiction elements. It is written in the first person. The narrator is a famous author who frequently returns to her hometown of Zagreb, Croatia to take care of her elderly mother. Her widowed mother has had a stroke: she uses a walker and her language was affected so that she often uses the wrong word. This leads to some humorous conversations between mother and daughter:

"Bring me the…."
"What?"
"That stuff you spread on bread."
"Margarine?"
"No."
"Butter?"
"You know it’s been years since I used butter!"
"Well, what then?"
She scowls, her rage mounting at her own helplessness. And then she slyly switches to attack mode.
"Some daughter if you can’t remember the bread spread stuff!"
"Spread? Cheese spread?"
"That’s right, the white stuff," she says, offended, as if she had resolved never to again utter the words ‘cheese spread.’"
(11)

I think my favorite one is when she asked for "the biscuits, the congested ones," instead of the digestive ones. (11-12)

Baba Yaga HouseWe learn that the mother is Bulgarian and came to Croatia as a young wife. Some of her most treasured curios represent Bulgaria or are mementos of her early life. The daughter decides that she wants to visit Bulgaria as her mother’s bedel: "[c]enturies ago the wealthy would send someone else off on the hajj or the army in their stead as a bedel, a paid surrogate" (41). The daughter wants to bring back pictures of her mother’s city so that her mother can remember her youth. She enlists the help of a Bulgarian fan, Aba, who had written the author earlier, wanting to visit her in Croatia. Aba, a student in folklore, was in Croatia on an academic fellowship. The author was unable to meet Aba but facilitated a relationship between her mother and Aba, as fellow Bulgarians. The mother and Aba hit it off, so the daughter later arranges for Aba to accompany her while in Bulgaria. Her best-laid plans of "bedelship" go astray: she finds her mother’s hometown a victim of the communist and post-communist economies and finds the locations of her mother’s home and school changed and worn down; she also finds Aba annoying because the young fan wants to quote the author’s writing back to her. Thus, this first section is a look at aging, relationships and post-communist Eastern Europe.

The second section, "Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies," continues the theme of playing with language that Ugresic began in the first section. One character, Beba, says the wrong word when nervous which leads her to say things like "Have a nice lay," when she means to say "Have a nice day." This playfulness continues throughout section two whose genre is closest to magical realism. It is full of improbable happenings and unbelievable coincidences that the characters never seem to notice. Also all the characters seem more symbolic and less real. Each seems like an archetype for an idea that I don’t quite grasp. (This is not a criticism. I didn’t feel lost at all.)

In this section, three old Croatian ladies, Pupa, Kukla, and Beba, ranging in age from sixty to eighty (or maybe more), visit the Wellness Centre, a spa in the Czech Republic. Their only connection to section one is that Pupa is mentioned there as one of the mother’s friends. Most of the men that the women meet in this section are part of the beauty and anti-aging industry. Mr. Shaker is an American who owns a business that sells pills, potions, and remedies, "bearing the food label supplement" (92). His American market is collapsing because reports are emerging that his remedies "pump up muscles" but "reduced potency" (93). So now he is looking into the "post-communist market" (93). Dr. Topolanek, the owner of the Wellness Centre, makes his living via "human vanity," selling his theory of longevity as well as spa treatments and massages (98). Finally, the old women meet Mevludin, a young Bosnian refugee, who works as a masseur at the Centre. The women spend a fantastic six days at the Centre. The endings are "happy" for Pupa, Kukla, and Beba, but they each travel from the spa into unknown worlds and challenges.

Baba Yaga ClockHere Ugresic criticizes the cult of youth and beauty. Her Croatian perspective is interesting because in Eastern Europe this cult is directly tied to post-communist capitalism. Dr. Topolanek sees his generation’s revolution as an internal one, one that allows people to change their bodies to whatever they want them to be. One of the best moments of this section shows Beba, who has been portrayed as an airhead up to this point, relaxing in a bath of warm chocolate (one of the therapeutic treatments) and musing upon the reproduction of Renior’s Woman with Parrot, hung on the wall. Beba’s thoughts carry us through an art history lecture that connects parrots with women’s sexuality in western art. This is a fun (and unexpected) tangent, but again illustrates why the book appealed to the Tiptree jury.

The third section continues on this scholarly tone. It begins with a letter that Dr. Aba Bagay, presumably the Bulgarian folklore student in section one, writes to an unknown editor who has asked her to read a manuscript and "explicate the correspondences between [the] author’s text and the myth of Baba Yaga" (239). The remainder of the section is her response, "Baba Yaga for Beginners," which discusses symbols related to Baba Yaga, supporting these with quotations from Eastern European myths and legends as well as quotations from scholars in the field, such as Maria Gimbutas and Marina Warner. Aba includes discussions of Baba Yaga’s name, her connection with witches and cannibalism and all her symbols, such as the hut, the mortar and pestle, birds and eggs. After each part, Aba provides "Remarks" that analyze the fictional author’s text in reference to the topic she just explained.

The surprising part is that the text that Aba is reading and commenting upon is made up of the two sections we just read. So, effectively, we have an author in the guise of an academic analyzing the book she just wrote. Ugresic shows her readers all of the Baba Yaga symbols and allusions that she included and they missed (at least many were missed on my part). For example, following her discussion of the hut, Aba writes:

Returning home, your author returns to the maternal ‘hut’ and repeats the initiation rite for the nth time. She must respect the law of Baba Yaga’s hut, otherwise Baba Yaga will eat her up. (263)

Dubravka UgresicI’ve tried to find some other examples, but many of them give away too much about the plot. Just trust me; I couldn’t wait to finish each part so that Aba could connect my new knowledge of Baba Yaga to the previous plots. This set up makes for a very rich reading experience. I’ve never read a book before that taught its readers how to read it. I enjoyed being educated about the myth of Baba Yaga in this unorthodox manner.

The ending brings in an element of the supernatural and that, along with the heavy dose of myths and folklore in section three and the magical realism of section two, shows me why this book was nominated for and won the Tiptree Award, even though at first glance this is not an obvious candidate. I found this book a very pleasurable read because I was continually intrigued about the way the story was being told.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson Posted at 8:24 PM by Ben Oldham

Engelbrecht

WWEnd Grand Master Reading Challenge Ben Oldham (Engelbrecht) grew up reading the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, forever ruining his chance of enjoying bad genre writing…. While in college, he worked for a time at A Change of Hobbit bookstore, the store in which Harlan Ellison began writing stories in storefront windows. His username comes from Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht, one of his favorite books. This is his first review for WWEnd.


23122312 is something of a post-Accelerondo space opera, pinballing back and forth between our suns various planets, moons, terrariums (terraformed asteroids) and spaceships, all the while pursuing the mystery of an attack on a city on Mercury, possibly by AIs with unfathomable motives.

On the surface, 2312 seems to invite comparisons with Corey’s Leviathan Wakes. But 2312 is a far superior novel, packed with speculation: the expansion of the human race into the solar system, the many varied and ingenious ways in which asteroids and larger bodies may be modified in order to accommodate human needs, the many varied and ingenious ways in which the human body can be modified to accommodate human needs, including longevity, sexual options, and accommodations to the various environments. The political and economic consequences of this expansion are well considered, as are all the postulated extrapolations.

In contrast to Leviathan Wakes (which seemed like it might just as well have occurred in some generically seedy Earthbound archipelago), 2312 makes every community throughout the solar system authentically reflect its environment and circumstances.

The exploration of this dastardly mystery is entertaining enough, but the real story here is a fascinating and unlikely love affair between the mercurial Swan and the saturnine Wahram. The protagonist Swan is a great character, interesting and all too human. Her bickering with Pauline, her personal AI, is the source of much humor (humor which is to be found throughout the book, especially in the form of subtle shout outs to some of the sci-fi greats).

Kim Stanley RobinsonThis love affair is, in a sense, the heart of the book. But in truth, the book has two hearts: KSR’s love affair with the universe is the true inner heart here. The amazing complexities stemming from a few simple laws of physics are brought to life time and time again, all in vivid Technicolor™. And it’s all right here in our own backyard, waiting for us to embrace it, waiting to embrace us.

KSR’s joyous optimism here is sublimely irrepressible: despite the dire picture he paints of our poor, hag-ridden, raddled old Earth, he almost makes us believe that it’s still possible to overcome our own perniciously destructive nature.

2312 is probably Robinson’s best book to date, and should, at the least, be considered to be amongst the best of 2012.

GMRC Review: Gateway by Frederik Pohl Posted at 1:07 AM by Jeremy Frantz

jfrantz

WWEnd Grand Master Reading ChallengeJeremy Frantz (jfrantz) reviews SF/F books on his blog The Hugo Endurance Project where he has given himself just 64 weeks to read every Hugo Award winner. This is his fifth GMRC review.

 


Gateway

Humans have been living in tunnels on Venus for a number of years, but when suddenly ancient alien spacecraft are uncovered, the universe, just as suddenly, gets a heck of a lot smaller.  Robinette Broadhead makes his way out to the Gateway asteroid/base in hopes of striking it rich as a prospector and leaving his problems behind.  Once he arrives though, he realizes it’s not quite as simple or as safe as he’d hoped.  Alternating between Robinette’s prospecting journeys from Gateway and therapy sessions with a computer some years after later, we slowly unravel the details that have plunged him into a stiflingly dark depression since leaving.

How much do I care about this guy?

I almost always love super advanced computers/self-aware machines.  If I have not made this clear in the past, let me do so now.  I don’t even care if it is a really anachronistic view of computers – if you make that personality real enough or you give that computer the power to do cool enough stunts, I will be drooling all over the pages.  I’m not sure when this obsession started, but I am thoroughly stuck in it and I don’t care to get out.

So when Gateway begins with a computer named “Sigfrid” putting Robinette through a Freudian psychoanalysis session–and it’s a pretty sassy program–I knew I was going to have fun with this one.

My immediate fascination with Sigfrid may have actually worked against my interest in Robinette.  He is kind of a jerk and just not that interesting to me, or at least he wasn’t as I read through this time.  He isn’t completely colorless, he’s just a really immature guy and maybe a little bit of an anti-hero who had trouble currying any of my favor (come to think of it though, Pohl probably intended that very much).  I think there was probably some potential for him, but the way he kept making it so hard to get to know more about Sigfrid made me more than a little frustrated.

The therapy sessions did go a long way to humanizing Robinette in the end though.  And that was my take-away here; even once the entirety of space is opened up to us, we are still going to need to deal with our problems, parents are still going to suck (I should know) and people are still going to just have sex and use drugs rather than face up to their issues.  Scalzi said it: “I’m still going to need to take out the trash.”

For those who have read this, the ending, which I hope I will not give away for those who haven’t, gave me a little of a Hitchcock’s Psycho feeling – you know the feeling of being made to believe we should care about one person and then abruptly realize it was someone else?  I don’t normally like the shocker type ending, but given my previously mentioned propensities, this one worked out in my favor.

Classifieds

Throughout the book are little vignettes, classifieds excerpts or other miscellany from life on Gateway.  Some of the excerpts worked better than others.  I’m not sure if it was just my printing but they seemed to be placed nearly at random and practically every other instance interrupted a thought/sentence and, even if it was interesting, the effect was to pull me right out of the story almost every time.  Of the different types of excerpts, I most enjoyed the classifieds and the mission reports.  Most others were not quite mildly interesting and there were quite a few aimed at simply reiterating how little we know about the Heechee and seemed redundant.

Grand Master Frederik PohlI didn’t always understand why this method was chosen either.  Sure it functions as kind of a unique worldbuilding technique but interrupting the rest of the text didn’t make sense and to be honest some of the mission reports just seemed like copouts in place of having to work include some semi-relevant info into the story when it otherwise would not fit. The classroom exchanges could have easily been shortened and worked into their own chapter and would have been much easier to read and probably more interesting to boot.  But then, Pohl won not only the fan choice (Hugo) but also the writers’ choice (Nebula) awards, and according to the back cover copy Pohl called this the best thing he’d ever written, which probably illustrates the fact that I’m just making this up as I go along and my literary judgment is worth slightly less than squat.

Recommendation

I had a little trouble identifying with Rob as I read Gateway, but now that I’ve written this review, I’m starting to see him as an ingenious character as devised by Pohl.  He’s just so blah that it makes the ending all that much more shocking.  This was an easy, fast-paced read (not for the action, it just read that way) and while it incorporated a lot of my favorite SF elements, I wouldn’t expect this to be one of my favorites.  It did make me want to seek out more of Pohl’s work.  I couldn’t say how accurate they were but if you enjoy the tension and drama of a juicy therapy session, you’ve got to read this!

GMRC Review: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury Posted at 6:14 AM by Daniel Roy

Triseult

WWEnd Grand Master Reading ChallengeDaniel Roy (triseult), has contributed over 30 reviews to WWEnd including this, his second, for the GMRC. Daniel is living his dream of travelling the world and you can read about some of his adventures on his blog Mango Blue.


The Martian Chronicles

There are SF books that age superbly well, staying relevant and believable decades beyond their publication dates. The Martian Chronicles is not such a book; it’s a delicate antique, the fossilized remains of dreams and terrors gone by, of a time when Mars had water irrigation canals, and everyone feared death by atomic war. It may not have remained relevant, but its lyrical beauty is intact.

Martian Chronicles is a series of loosely connected short stories set on the planet Mars; more specifically, on the planet Mars as it existed in the collective consciousness of the 1950s, when the lines slashed across its surface were water canals built by an ancient and alien civilization. In 2012, it reads not so much as science fiction, but as a form of dreamy fantasy, an alternate universe where the science fiction dreams of the Martian wild frontier are true. This gives a charming air of naïveté to the stories, a nostalgia of dreams gone by, made impossible by the images sent back by Viking and Pathfinder.

There exists a quaint notion in the public’s mind that a SF author’s greatness can be measured by his or her power to predict the future: much attention is given to Isaac Asimov anticipating the Laws of Robotics, or of Arthur C. Clarke having predicted orbital satellites. But reading The Martian Chronicles, it’s obvious that great SF writers do not so much try to anticipate and predict the future, but rather dream of all possible futures.

That’s what the stories in The Martian Chronicles feel like; a dream. They possess a dreamy, ethereal quality, the descriptions filled with a deep sense of wonder and joy at the Universe, a lyricism and poetry that depart in a formidable fashion from the dry intellectualism of Bradbury‘s contemporaries at the time. The stories themselves are enchanting, sometimes gripping; they never grow grim, even if they deal with death, yearning, sometimes murder, sometimes outright war. Some of the stories present arresting imagery to this day: the sight of all African Americans, having given up on ever being granted full civil rights, gathering their belongings and leaving for Mars; or the clockwork rhythms of an automated house, calling the children to breakfast long after Earth has died in an atomic war.

Grand Master Ray BradburyMy biggest gripe with Martian Chronicles is the fate of the Martians themselves, and the relative lack of empathy given to what Bradbury imagined as beautiful, wise creatures. Their fate mirrors that of Native Americans, and perhaps because the novel was of its time, their destruction under the relentless wheels of colonization did not stir much sympathy in Mr. Bradbury. There was a huge opportunity to discuss the human/Martian cost of the American spirit of endeavor, but this is a theme which Mr. Bradbury has preferred should remain untouched.

On a personal note, I began reading The Martian Chronicles on June 5th, 2012, unaware that Mr. Bradbury had passed away on that very day. By a strange twist of fate, despite having grown up with SF stories, I had never read any book by Mr. Bradbury before. I’m glad I finally, if a bit too late, learned to appreciate the greatness of his writings, and why so many authors consider him an inspiration.

When Mr. Bradbury passed away, Humanity has lost a dreamer. But judging by the beauty and grace of this book, the dreamer’s dreams live on.

Forays into Fantasy: Edgar Rice Burroughs One-Hundred Years On Posted at 10:01 AM by Scott Lazerus

Scott Laz

Scott Lazerus is a Professor of Economics at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, and has been a science fiction fan since the 1970s. Recently, he began branching out into fantasy, and was surprised by the diversity of the genre. It’s not all wizards, elves, and dragons! Scott’s new blog series, Forays into Fantasy, is an SF fan’s exploration of the various threads of fantastic literature that have led to the wide variety of fantasy found today. FiF will examine some of the most interesting landmark books of the past, along with a few of today’s most acclaimed fantasies, building up an understanding of the connections between fantasy’s origins, its touchstones, and its many strands of influence.

 


Edgar Rice BurroughsAround age eleven, Edgar Rice Burroughs was my favorite writer, and I devoured all of his books I could find. Rereading Burroughs’ first two novels today–A Princess of Mars (originally serialized in 1912 as "Under the Moons of Mars") and Tarzan of the Apes (serialized later in 1912), both of which have just been reprinted in beautiful facsimile editions by the Library of America–it’s harder to overlook the weaknesses, but the appeal remains clear. The prose is often awkward, incredible plot coincidences abound, relationships are simplistic, race and gender assumptions are problematic (more on that below), yet all these problems are (mostly) redeemed in the best of Burroughs’s novels by the relentless storytelling imagination and energy at work. Over one-hundred million copies sold, and counting…

Burroughs was the most popular fantastic writer of the first third of the twentieth century, and it was during this period that the fantastic became “ghettoized” as it moved into the realm of the pulps, while mainstream writers for the most part stopped delving into the fantastic. As Paul Kincaid writes in “American Fantasy 1820–1950” (in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature):

“By the 1920s and 1930s the freedom that had allowed Jack London [and, earlier, Mark Twain or Henry James, among others] to move readily between realism and the fantastic was becoming more restricted. A mode now most readily identified with the smutty comedies of [Thorne] Smith and [James Branch] Cabell or, more damningly, with the grotesque horrors of Lovecraft and the crude, highly coloured adventures of [Robert E.] Howard could not be employed for serious literary purposes.”

As reading for pleasure became more widespread due in part to the development of low-cost “dime novels” and pulp magazines, the literary divide widened. The three main branches of the pulp fantastic were exemplified and inspired by Burroughs’ “science fantasy” adventures, Howard’s sword and sorcery (Conan, etc.), and Lovecraft’s weird fiction. Writers with serious literary ambitions no longer wanted to be associated with a mode of writing increasingly linked to the pulps.

All-Story MagazineBurroughs got started earlier than Lovecraft or Howard and, reading him today, I think of him as the ultimate pulp writer–embodying both the positive and negative aspects of those early magazines, as well as informing all who would follow in his footsteps. Burroughs famously turned to writing relatively late, his military ambitions during the 1890s having been quashed. He failed to get into West Point or to be chosen as one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, but did spend some time in the cavalry in Arizona before being discharged for health reasons–an experience that helped inform the opening chapters of Princess–before attempting and abandoning a series of business ventures during the 1900s. He tried writing in part out of desperation, needing to support his young family, after reaching the conclusion that he could write better stories than the majority he was reading in the pulps of the time. (He was right!) His two best-known novels, both of which would spawn long-running series, both appeared in The All-Story magazine in 1912, the year Burroughs turned thirty-seven.

By his death in 1950, Burroughs had, in the prolific pulp tradition, published nearly seventy novels, and several more appeared posthumously. Along with the Barsoom (Mars) series, which eventually included eleven books, and the Tarzan series (twenty-four books), the trilogy beginning with The Land That Time Forgot probably remains best-known today. In addition, he wrote the Carson of Venus series, the Pellucidar hollow-Earth series beginning with At the Earth’s Core (which included a Tarzan crossover) and numerous other genre stories, as well as a few attempts at Westerns and contemporary fiction. To my mind, Burroughs peaked in the 1920s, with novels like Tarzan the Untamed (1920) and The Chessmen of Mars (1922), and both series are worth pursuing for readers who enjoy the opening books. After the ‘20s, however, diminishing returns set in, as will be clear to anyone who attempts to get through the last few volumes of the two series, or compares the tired-seeming Venus novels (1934–1946) to the earlier Mars books. Even as an enthusiastic adolescent, I think I gave up after sixteen or eighteen Tarzan novels.

Tarzan of the ApesTarzan, of course, would live on in films, television, and comics, most of which greatly annoyed fans of the books, since they tended to leave out the more fantastic aspects (ancient lost cities, underground civilizations, dinosaurs, immortality drugs), but most importantly because they deemphasized the most interesting aspect of Tarzan’s character–his dual existence as a primordial jungle denizen and a highly intellectual English aristocrat. The combination makes him a superman. (And certainly, one of the impacts of the popularity of Tarzan and other pulp heroes would be on the creation of superhero comics beginning in the late ‘30s.)

Tarzan is really Lord Greystoke, whose parents were stranded on the African coast following a mutiny by the crew of the ship they were traveling on. Lady Alice died soon after, leaving a despairing father with no way to feed the infant. When a band of great apes–an invented species that seems to be the “missing link” between apes and humanity, with the rudiments of a spoken language–breaks into the cabin and kills Lord Greystoke, a female ape who had just lost her own baby adopts the boy and forces the rest of the band to tolerate Tarzan (“white skin” in the ape language) and allow her to raise him as one of them.

Despite having no direct contact with people, Tarzan does gain access to his parents’ cabin. Sitting with their skeletons, he discovers books, including, crucially, an illustrated dictionary, and his hereditary intelligence kicks in as he, amazingly, teaches himself to read. Once he started to identify groups of letters with accompanying pictures, “his progress was rapid… and the active intelligence of a healthy mind endowed by inheritance with more than ordinary reasoning powers” took over. For Burroughs, the aristocratic white man is clearly the peak of evolution, and even being brought up by apes cannot prevent the “higher” qualities from asserting themselves. Later, meeting Jane Porter brings his hereditary nature to the fore: “It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, and hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training could not eradicate.” The impact of heredity and environment, and the conflicting appeals of his own kind and jungle life, will remain central to Tarzan’s character.

A Princess of MarsIn A Princess of Mars, John Carter is similarly presented as a superior white aristocrat (an American southerner, in his case), who becomes the greatest man on Mars, just as Tarzan surpasses the rest of humanity due to his superior intelligence and character. Carter’s “features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel grey, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.” Even his family’s slaves “fairly worshipped the ground he trod”! All in all, Carter is a “splendid specimen of manhood,” irresistible to the aristocratic Barsoomian princess Dejah Thoris: “Was there ever such a man! she exclaimed. ‘I know that Barsoom has never before seen your like… Alone, a stranger, hunted, threatened, persecuted, you have done in a few short months what in all the past ages of Barsoom no man has ever done.” As for Tarzan, Jane “noted the graceful majesty of his carriage, the perfect symmetry of his magnificent figure and the poise of his well shaped head upon his broad shoulders. What a perfect creature! There could be naught of cruelty or baseness beneath that godlike exterior. Never, she thought, had such a man strode the earth since God created the first in his own image.”

The racial implications are uncomfortable to the modern reader, but they are not as simplistically racist as they might at first appear. Both characters are the only white men in their respective worlds, and this is seen as a source of their superiority. Yet both are more at home in their adopted worlds than with their own kind. The racism is accompanied by the idea that the “lower” races (apes, blacks, Tharks, etc.) have positive qualities that have been lost by modern “civilized” whites. Carter is more at home with the green Tharks and red Martians, just as Tarzan feels the pull of jungle life whenever he returns to the constraints of civilization. And, despite the implication of miscegenation, Carter marries red-skinned Dejah Thoris, and the couple’s son will hatch from an egg. (Exactly how this works is happily never explained, and this is the sort of thing that, to me, makes Burroughs a fantasy rather than a science fiction writer.)

Frazetta cover art for A Princess of MarsCarter is the embodiment of the Western hero suited for a frontier life–a life no longer available to him at home, but possible on Barsoom, which can be seen as an extension of the “manly” frontier life Burroughs himself had longed for in his military years. And Tarzan’s superiority to other men is not just because he is a white aristocrat in black Africa, but also because his upbringing by the apes has freed him from the constraints of civilization. Thus, it is the combination of heredity and upbringing that makes him superior to both Africans and whites. After learning the ways of civilization, which Tarzan/Greystoke takes to quite easily, he never loses the call of the wild.

“Tarzan had no sooner entered the jungle than he took to the trees and it was with a feeling of exultant freedom that he swung once more through the forest branches. This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.”

Throughout the series, Greystoke would be drawn back to civilization by his family and hereditary obligations, but he would always long for and ultimately return to the jungle–his true home. Similarly, at the end of A Princess of Mars, when Carter returns to Earth as mysteriously as he had originally appeared on Mars, all he can think of is his desire to return to the dying red planet. “I can see her shining in the sky through the little window by my desk, and tonight she seems calling to me again.” He, too, will return for the sequel.

Tarzan became one of the best known character creations of the twentieth century, but it is Barsoom that would have the biggest impact on fantasy and science fiction. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, with its dying planet crisscrossed with canals and home to ancient ruins of once-great civilizations, can be traced back to Burroughs, as can the entire subgenre of science fantasy and planetary romance, as traced through the works of Leigh Brackett (Sea-Kings of Mars), Jack Vance (Big Planet), Michael Moorcock (the Michael Kane trilogy), Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun), George Lucas (Star Wars), and countless others. In a planetary romance, the alien planet and its exploration are important aspects of the story; the means of getting there are not. In Princess, Carter, longing to reach Mars, “stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.” Such stories are often marketed as science fiction, but they are distinguished from fantasy only in that the imaginary settings are on other planets rather than undefined earthly realms like Middle Earth or Westeros.

Edgar Rice BurroughsBurroughs’s influence, then, arises from the subgenre he pioneered–exciting adventure stories set in fantastic locales with one foot in reality, and he is seen as the progenitor of science fantasy and the planetary romance. But is he still worth reading? The books have not avoided becoming dated (Tarzan more so than Barsoom), but Burroughs is a natural storyteller, and it’s easy to see why these books were so compelling to legions of readers over the years, especially younger readers like my ten-year-old self, for which Burroughs has served as a major gateway into fantasy and science fiction. It could be argued that genre readers no longer need to bother with Burroughs, but if so, this is because his influence has been so thoroughly absorbed into the field, even those who haven’t read the originals have still, in a sense, internalized them by reading so many works influenced by them. Apparently, one of the criticisms of the recent John Carter film was that, for many viewers, it seemed overly familiar and unoriginal. This is the potential fate of the most influential stories–decades of homage and imitation can make the original seem unoriginal!


Next up: The Enchanter stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt…

CLANG! Posted at 8:47 AM by Dave Post

Dave Post

Check out this awesome Kickstarter project headed up by famed SF authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Their goal is to raise $500K to fund a new interactive sword fighting video game. From Neal’s intro:

In the last couple of years, affordable new gear has come on the market that makes it possible to move, and control a swordfighter’s actions, in a much more intuitive way than pulling a plastic trigger or pounding a key on a keyboard. So it’s time to step back, dump the tired conventions that have grown up around trigger-based sword games, and build something that will enable players to inhabit the mind, body, and world of a real swordfighter.

Sounds like the kind of project WWEnders can appreciate. What do you think?  Is it time to pledge?

GMRC Review: Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg Posted at 12:17 PM by Carrie Naughton

Bookkeeper

WWEnd Grand Master Reading ChallengeCarrie Naughton (Bookkeeper), can’t settle down. She has lived all over the US and worked as a retail clerk, short order cook, librarian, teaching assistant, farm apprentice, and office manager. For the past six years she’s been slow-roasting in Tucson, Arizona, dividing her life between bookkeeping by day and book writing by night. An astrologist once summed up Carrie’s stars by dubbing her a Hermit Opportunist. Too true. Check out her wee fledgling blog at hermitopportunist.tumblr.com.

 

Editor’s Note: This review was posted in May be we missed adding it to the blog so it’s now our first June review.


Shadrach in the FurnaceI was pleasantly surprised to find Shadrach in the Furnace a page-turner with vivid characters. I expected it to be dull and dreary, but instead there’s suspense, a noble hero, and lots of sex!

That said, the plot is slightly transparent, and the ending comes a little too quickly, but this near-future dystopian story of an ailing despot, Genghis II Mao IV Khan (oh, just call him the Khan), and his personal physician, Shadrach Mordecai, pulls the reader into an enjoyable, if mild, parable of intrigue, betrayal and quiet heroism. The story hinges on whether or not the Khan will use his cadre of doctor-scientists to transfer his consciousness (or is it his soul?) into the body of Shadrach, and continue living forever while the people of his kingdom, plagued by a disease called organ rot, wait for a cure that is available, but will never be distributed if the Khan continues to reign.

Silverberg‘s use of present tense, which can often be jarring and annoying, here works fluidly, turning the narrative into a kind of sly, urgent aside. The prose reveals the dual nature of Shadrach: his responsiveness as a doctor (and a lover), and his calm, aloof personality. Despite the fact that as part of his position as royal doctor, his body has been implanted with a full range of bio-sensors that attune him to every fluctuation of the Khan’s failing systems, Shadrach possesses a yogic calm (maybe a little too calm – and how come those body sensors never cause him to experience sex from the Khan’s physical perspective?) from the first chapter, when we meet him as caregiver for the dictator, to the end, when he becomes caregiver for the human race.

The novel has a richness to it that you don’t find in too many old dystopian novels, and I think it’s partly because of the vivid allusions to religious history (whether cliched or not – Shadrach’s form of meditation happens to be carpentry) and the global settings. Most post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read take place in a battered America, but Shadrach’s tale spans the globe. And it must be pointed out that you don’t come across too many science fiction heroes in the form of young black men.

Grand Master Robert SilverbergShadrach’s bedroom romps with his two paramours (a man like Shadrach – beautiful, strong, intelligent – of course finds himself linked to two different women, both fierce and flawed) deepen what could have been a boring futuristic medical thriller. A good many racy boudoir scenes provide Silverberg with the opportunity to keep the reader turning pages but also to play upon archetypes and stereotypes (sometimes unsuccessfully). It’s the Valkyrie versus Pocahontas. One of these women will disappoint Shadrach, and one will surprise him.

There’s also some hypnosis-induced recreation in the form of "dream-death," which is a kind of hallucinatory self-discovery vacation for the non-diseased elite. In a different story, this kind of Huxleyed up mind trip might be overblown and contrived. But the character of Shadrach keeps the story grounded.

Overall, not a bad tale, and surprisingly hip.

Game of Thrones Remix Posted at 9:36 PM by Dave Post

Dave Post

I saw this over on Topless Robot and had to share it here. This is a hip hop remix of the Game of Thrones theme from Dominik Omega and The Arcitype. Its just about the coolest nerdiest thing I’ve ever heard. I particularly like the line "instead of spitting lies i use my imp-like mind and never back down i am The Mountain That Rhymes".

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury (1920 – 2012) Posted at 2:28 AM by Rico Simpkins

icowrich

Grand Master Ray BradburySad news today. Author Ray Bradbury died last night at the age of 91. Ray Bradbury is among the most celebrated, and perhaps even under-celebrated, science fiction authors. On the one hand, his masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, appears on eight different "best of" lists, and the epic The Martian Chronicles is on seven. On the other hand, his novels never won a major science fiction award. His books have been alternately banned and required high school reading. Like many geniuses, many of his works have appreciated in value over time. Mr. Bradbury will write no more, but we are left with a body of work that I believe has only begun to show its relevance. Since I lack the eloquence to bid a proper farewell to such a great writer, I’ll let another great writer, Robert Louis Stephenson, do it for me:

Virgil of prose! far distant is the day
When at the mention of your heartfelt name
Shall shake the head, and men, oblivious, say:
‘We know him not, this master, nor his fame.’
Not for so swift forgetfulness you wrought,
Day upon day, with rapt fastidious pen,
Turning, like precious stones, with anxious thought,
This word and that again and yet again,
Seeking to match its meaning with the world;
Nor to the morning stars gave ears attent,
That you, indeed, might ever dare to be
With other praise than immortality
Unworthily content.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. You will be missed.