What’s going on in Batman?

Short answer: I have no freaking clue.

Long answer: DC, not content to completely blow their vaunted continuity out of the water with Death of the New Gods (and Countdown to Final Crisis), thereby angering their fans who drank the purple Flavorade and believed that DC was cleaning up their continuity and in fact making it relevant again (read all the books, kiddies—it matters), DC took a year-long teaser and has mangled continuity even further, then tied it to an incomprehensible mess of a story that confounds long-time readers and will drive away the new fans in droves, the new fans this gimmick was trying to pull in.

For a year, DC has promised "Batman R.I.P." a story that would forever change the way that readers looked at Batman. The title implies a death (or perhaps just a rest) for Bruce Wayne, and the consequences of his stepping away from the cowl were to last for at least a year, if not longer. Grant Morrison took over the reins of Batman about a year ago, working his magic to get the comic to the place where Batman could R.I.P. (included in the teaser interviews in the past year has been the possibility that "R.I.P." doesn't mean what it usually means for this storyline). Now I'll lay my cards out on the table right here—I accept that some people think Grant Morrison is brilliant. He did some amazing things with Doom Patrol, but they weren't the kinds of things that interested me, and struck me as being the result of too many psychedelic drugs. His time on Justice League was more interesting, but again, the stories were outré and dense. I don't mind working at reading books and comics, but the payoff for fighting through his writing was not very gratifying. I did not read Invisibles nor did I read We3 (but I have friends that swear by them, enough to make me at least interested in trying them out). I have seen him speak at Comic-Con, and he seems really well read, and he has some interesting ideas about the interconnectedness of people and cultures. I loved All-Star Superman where he seemed to keep his psychedelia in check, restraining it within a more mainstream plot. That said, I think I like my psychedelic writers more along the lines of Ellis and Moore (even though Moore's Promethea drove me nuts despite the gorgeous work by the artist), who do interesting things with the plot and story-telling without twisting the framework completely into an unviable state.

And sadly, that's where I find Batman now. I have a hard enough time figuring out what's going on in the actual pages of the book; there are passages I read three or four times and I can't figure out what is going on. Understand, the art is gorgeous, but it's being used in distracting and sometimes counter-useful ways. The passage where Joker is introduced in Arkham Asylum still makes no sense to me, and I have stood in my local comic book store and asked other people to help explain to me what is going on. No one could come up with a consistent practicable theory of the chain of events in that passage.

That's bad enough, but the plot for the storyline appears to depend on events that happen between issues but are not actually contained in a DC title or explained at the beginning of each new issue. At the beginning of one issue, suddenly Batman is wearing a purple, green and red costume and talking to Bat-mite who may or may not actually be there. And while the content of that issue minimally outlines the series of events that lead to the new appearance, that explanation has to compete with advancing a plot that is apparently denser than anything I have ever read before in comics (short of The Blue Lily). And in that competition, both sides are losing. So I can't connect what's happening now to my tenuous understanding of what has happened in previous issues.

Compounding the difficulty, Morrison appears to be relying on incredibly obscure continuity (or he could just be making it up) without telling the reader what that continuity is. Batman underwent psychological training under the US government? Really? I don't mind retcons, but usually retcons have a marker giving off signals of their changes to the continuity. In Morrison's writing, everything is assumed, meaning nothing is actually stated, removing the framework on which a plot is supposed to hang. The result of all this is that I cannot summarize what has been going on…which sort of defeats the purpose of comics. Even if I am reading a novel with a psychedelic stream of consciousness, I can look back and say "that was a psychedelic stream of consciousness). Even that kind of summary does not work for the last few issues of Batman.

And yet it gets worse (and I'm starting to have trouble coming up with transitions to describe the descent into badness). Batman's companion series, Detective, is one of DC's best titles going right now. Despite it being tied to the lead weight that is "R.I.P.", the story is tremendous, breaking new ground and filling out the history of an important character, without being inchoate and impenetrable. There is passion and drama and fully developed characterization. I firmly believe that Paul Dini's Detective is one of the top interpretations of the character ever. That it conflicts with the supposedly concurrent Batman story is unfortunate, but to be honest, I don't yet see its relationship to the "R.I.P" storyline. It's just ripping good stuff.

And then the final straw—the continuity of other titles related to Batman has already moved past "R.I.P." implying that its events are over. Robin is concerned about the missing Batman in his own title. Nightwing is too. And Batgirl has announced her determination to keep the Outsiders going despite Batman's disappearance. Those titles are being very careful not to let on the secret of what's happened. Or it could be that they've been reading Batman and have no freaking clue either. But the result is a mishmash of supposedly relatively tightly interconnected stories. And readers picking up the other titles for their "R.I.P." tie-ins are being completely misled, since there is only the idea that something has happened without any clarification of what it is.

I spoke to my local store owner about my concerns, and he claims to share them as well. He says he has talked to other store owners about the issues and has been rebuffed with claims that if he truly knew Batman, there would be no questions about what is going on. Considering how long I've been reading Batman and my hunt for old back issues, I think I know the character pretty well. But even if I am just stupid, doesn't it defeat the entire purpose of these colossal events? Aren't these designed to pull in new readers to see seminal events in the lives of the characters or within the universe? But if the event is impenetrable, don't you end up turning those readers away and then turn away regular readers as well?

Interworld

Sometimes, you just happen to stumble on things that brighten your day. I have no idea how I found out about this novel by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, but it was easily orderable. And I'm tremendously glad I did.

The story focuses on young Joey Harker, a boy in his mid-teens, dealing with all the issues that come with that age for boys, including matters of self-esteem and, of course, girls. It's no help that Joey has a penchant for getting completely and totally lost. And one day, for a school project, he finds himself in the middle of his home town with directions to get back to school, accompanied with the object of his school-boy crush; in other words, he faces the confluence of all his teen-age angsts. And his day doesn't get any better when he tries to scout his way back to school and finds himself passing through a fog bank and then into a city that looks a great deal like the one he knows, except that there are subtle differences…such as another Jo Harker living in his house, who happens to be a girl. And then he finds himself under attack, first by robots and then by an evil sorceress.

And so begins an action-filled novel that posits a multiverse with individual universes spread across a continuum. Pure science resides on one end and pure science on the other, and they are fighting for mastery of the multiverse. Fortunately Joey finds allies in a group determined to let neither side win, a group that saves him and then takes him in as a trainee in the fight.

With such a fascinating backdrop, the story doesn't have to do much to succeed, but Gaiman and Reaves do much more. This story is very much in the vein of Heinlein's juvenile novels, where the young protagonist must learn to first be self-reliant and then an integral part of a community. Interworld is written in first-person, capturing the same kind of voice that Heinlein used so successfully in books like Podkayne of Mars, a character at once curious and concerned but at the same time self-doubting and confused. (I recognize this is yet another reference to Heinlein in recent blogging. I promise that I am not seeking out these kinds of relationships or trying to force them. It's food for thought, however, and it may not be much of a stretch to say that his influence permeates deeply.) And it is this juvenile sense of wonder that grounds our exploration of this multiverse along with Joey.

Interworld turns out to be a page-turner. Most of what happens should be fairly predictable to experienced readers of fiction, but that doesn't keep the story from moving briskly as Joey falls from one complication to the next, from one revelation to another. It is also tightly plotted, with nicely placed hints provided early on and used to solve problems further down the road. Of course at some point, Joey finds himself in the clutches of the evildoers, and his escape is ingenious, based on twists on the rules of the multiverse that have been provided to the reader earlier on. There is a wide range of characters from across the universes that accompany Joey—a wolf-girl, a cyborg, and even a winged woman. Their interaction is usually fairly simplistic, but still entertaining and sometimes surprising.

According to the notes in the back, this book was originally imagined as a TV series. I imagine it would have been a highly entertaining animated series, with hooks for both young and adult viewers alike. And this describes the book as well. It strikes me as being a tremendous way to introduce young readers to speculative fiction—an engaging, adventure-filled romp through some of the tropes of the genre. But it is also appealing to older readers as well, reminding us why we fell I love with the genre in the first place and providing smiles and slight shudders along the way.

Not Quite Farewell to a Friend

The story of how I got into speculative fiction is kinda funny. I was an seven-year old reader who went fairly regularly to the library to pick up mysteries. One time I went, I found this fascinating book in the mystery section entitled The Gods of Mars and the Warlord of Mars, which if you know anything about the series is a strange combination to put in a single omnibus. And if you know anything about the stories, you'll also note they are not mysteries. Fortunately, someone had mis-shelved the book and I stumbled across them, fascinated but completely confused by their lack of connection and the way Warlord is in many ways the third part of a three-part novel. Soon after reading it, I found the first six books in a slip case edition and ended up ordering the last five books with a coupon in the back of one of the first six.

At that time, my divorced Mom was regularly singing in the church choir and instead of hiring a baby-sitter for an hour, she would take me with her to the church. I would sit in a quiet corner of the choir loft and read my books. At it turns out there was a man in the choir who noticed the books I was reading and let me know that he was interested in the same kind of books. Soon thereafter, I was reading the Venus books and Caspak, and Pellucidar, all the Ace editions with the wonderful Frazetta covers. Over time, he loaned me E. E. Smith, then Clarke, and Heinlein, then Asimov. And when I got older, he was loaning me Farmer (the not very risqué stuff). And by that time, I had begun buying books on my own, reading more work by those same authors and then branching out into books that looked kind of cool on the shelf. I had also received a copy of the Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and used it as a resource to find out what the good books were and the classics.

Not only did Gene share his books with me, without any hesitation that at under ten years of age I might damage them, he talked about them with me. Perhaps he asked questions in part to gauge what else he could offer, but we ended up having discussions about what was probably pretty basic criticism—why did the character do what he did, for example. And sometimes, we would go out in the church parking lot and look up into the sky after choir practice, and Gene would point out to me constellations and planets, building on the basic knowledge I was getting of astronomy from the hard science fiction I was reading.

Once, when I was in my mid-teens, Gene loaned me one of the Lavalite World books by Farmer, with a typical Boris Vallejo cover with glistening over-muscled and skimpily clad bodies. I took it into church on a Sunday morning in order to return it to Gene, and Mom had a fit: there was no way that kind of trash could be allowed in the church. So, from then on, we made our trades in the parking lot, never telling Mom that the content of the books was sometimes far worse than the covers. I mean seriously—Dejah Thoris wears less in the novels than she does on the covers of the books she can be found in.

So, in 2001, when I put together a book group for the sole purpose of discussing speculative fiction, Gene was among the first people I asked to participate. And to my delight, he joined us. For more than seven years, he brought the book group a more mature and sometimes spiritual insight to our discussions, asking thoughtful questions and picking books that predated a lot of the people in the group.

But over time, he found it harder and harder to come to the book group. He had retired and had other interests, like his vacation home in the mountains and his grandson. He finally had time to travel, which made scheduling the book group a chore for him sometimes. And the book group tilted more and more to fantasy, which he didn't have a high tolerance for. To be honest, I find this last to be ironic—he is a huge fan of Lewis and Tolkien, but could never get into the newer things like Kay or Brust. But he persevered, reading what he could and taking part in our conversations. And our roles got a little reversed: I loaned him a number of DVDs of the classic speculative fiction movies and then some of the better recent things. He enjoyed Firefly for instance, but I don't think he really liked The Fifth Element. But that's the nature of taste. We have plenty of common interests, and we don't have to agree on everything.

Just before our last book group, Gene announced he was leaving our fellowship. I think it was a combination of things—not as much time and what time he did have he wanted to spend on reading the things he liked, not so much the fantasies we were delving into. My first reaction was to be a little hurt, but then I realized it would be worse if I tried to change his mind. So I thanked him for sharing his time and experience, and his insight and taste with us. But deep inside, I'm sad. We don't go to the same church any longer (indeed, I don't go to church any more at all, and he is okay with that—pretty remarkable for a man who was my Sunday school teacher for a while). I see him about twice a year when there is a reunion of the people who went to that church. And I see him when we go to funerals for shared friends. Those aren't remotely the same as sharing points of view about the books we love, laughing at shared jokes, and reveling in a relationship nearly forty years in the making. And soon, he may be moving permanently to his mountain home, or perhaps even to Norway, where his wife has family.

To recap. Gene introduced me to Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Farmer and Niven. But more importantly, he introduced me to the idea of not just sharing books, but sharing conversations about them. Which of course leads to sharing ideas in general. He grew my interest in astronomy, which led to an interest in science and technology. It is not stretch at all to say I would not be remotely be the man I am if he had not been in my life. He was a powerful influence in so many ways in my life, and a rudder to a young boy who had no male role models in his life.

Thank you, my friend, for showing me the world I live in, the worlds beyond it, and the universe they all inhabit. You were my Jubal Harshaw in your own inimitable fashion, my Gandalf, my Hari Seldon. Don't be a stranger.

The Difference Engine

For sordid reasons I'll not go into here, I was inadvertently compelled into reading Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's shared steampunk novel. I had read this when it came out originally, but could remember few details about it, only that I had a general feeling of liking it. Given I enjoy both authors anyway, the compulsion wasn't unwelcome; I was looking forward to the opportunity to reread it.

The premise of the book is fascinating—Charles Babbage's difference engine works and is hooked up to steam engines as a source of power in the Victorian era. As a result, Great Britain is a far greater world power than factual history would have it, leading the world in computing power and associated technologies and advancing science beyond its historical bounds. Steam-powered cars race at Ascot and "digital" movies are shown at theatres, where such artists as John Keats show off the latest innovations at "clacking"—programming the behemoth engines of logic. Lord Byron is an aging Prime Minister who oversaw the cultural upheaval in Great Britain at the advent of the difference engine, empowering "common" people into positions of authority and government ahead of the titled leaders, whose only claim to such power is ancestry. Great Britain is governed by thinkers and people who have earned their position through work and research, and this powerful combination gives them the initiative and ability to create transforming technologies.

The plot itself is a series of vignettes following relatively famous British people as they deal with the circumstances surrounding a special program that has been written as specially created punchcards and apparently fallen into the wrong hands. First Sybil Gerard, a courtesan and daughter of a leading Luddite, retrieves the package from the wreckage of an aborted attempt by representatives of the Nation of Texas to gain political and popular support from the British in their ongoing troubles at home. They then fall into the hands of Edward Mallory, a paleontologist and accidental British agent in the New World. His possession of them occurs as a great heat inversion drowns London in a deadly smog and obscures revolutionaries trying to take down Byron's reformed government. Those revolutionaries make Mallory's professional and personal life miserable, acting against his family and his scientific interests in order to blackmail him into returning the program cards. After Mallory, the story follows Laurence Oliphant a writer of travelling journals who is also a British spy who takes up the trail of the cards, which in turns leads him circularly back to Sybil Gerard.

The majority of the book--those vignettes--are stylishly crafted and nearly decadent in the richness of details surrounding British life in the age of the difference engine. Immersion into alternative London culture is nearly complete, including slang and history as our characters move about the city. The reader is exposed to all classes of people, from the lowest dregs to near-royalty. The prose is lush, leaning towards the style we typically refer to as Victorian today. Gibson and Sterling revel in the details of their shared world, and sometimes even the most attentive reader is merely adrift in those details as the plot sometimes moves sluggishly along beneath. London is at once a beautifully advanced city as well as a piteous eyesore to its masses. The Difference Engine is an exhibit for the trope of the "-punk" subgenres' depiction of society as having only upper and lower classes and relying in some part on the furtive intercourse between them.

There is also a strong feeling of movement in the course of the novel. Something is going to happen by its end, and it is going to be revelatory. And this is where the novel fails for me; its conclusion is chaotic and indecipherable, leaving the reader with no real conclusion at all. The short story and novella length vignettes become articles and snippets, out of order as if they had fallen free from a scrapbook, that lead to …I don't know what. Some of the concluding passages clearly reflect on the events of the earlier vignettes, but others seem unassociated at all. And while the shorter and shorter passages imply accelerated movement toward the end, further implying there being something at the end, that end is unsubstantial and abstract. As a result, I can only make guesses at what happened, and research about the ending reveals interpretations the bases of which I can't figure out.

Which is all a shame. I genuinely enjoyed the vignettes, with their writing and storytelling. I'd like to see more stories set in this world, perhaps an anthology of short stories written by notable authors. I'd like to erase the conclusion, or at least understand its foundation without resorting to interpretations from other sources. And so I am left with an incomplete feeling, and a puzzle regarding recommending the book. I am reminded of a book group I used to belong to, where we were to read some French modern novel, and I just came away from the book with despair. Long passages are incomprehensible to me, and characters said and did things that had no logic to me. And when the group discussed the novel, one of the less thoughtful members of the group proclaimed their thorough enjoyment of the book. I was amazed, and when I pointed out long packages of chaos that had befuddled me, he replied "I didn't read parts that I thought I wouldn't like." I can't recommend picking up this novel and reading until the last forty pages or so and then walking away. But I can half-heartedly recommend a potentially stunning book, by two very strong authors, that just seems to fall apart in its final pages.

Anathem

It's been a while, and I have fallen behind in my reviewing and general blogginess. I have a number of reviews to post plus some other stuff, so the weekend may see a run on writing.

I had this book pre-ordered for months, as I am a really big fan of Neal Stephenson's work. The reviews for it have been stupendous, and based on those, I expect the book to be short-listed for the major awards. So I had great expectations for the book as I began reading it.

One of the traits I admire most about Stephenson is his power as a writer, beyond that of a storyteller. Two of the sentences I best remember for their stylishness and craftiness come from Stephenson's work. His sentences are fashioned and as a writer, I can spend lots of time considering the choices he makes in his writing. Some critics talk about the shortcomings of Stephenson as a plotter, latching on to a perceived inability to end a story cleanly, and while I can see those points, I don't really agree with them. But those criticisms resonate some with Anathem, not so much with not being able to end a story, but with some plot decisions that affect the sweep and scope of the novel.

Anathem imagines a world not very different from our Earth, where in some ways science has taken the place of religion. Stephenson makes a very writerly comment in the introduction, how the world of Anathem is not our world but he strives to make it seem familiar by using common terms—while it may not be called "carrot" on their world, he will use the term anyway since the foods are analogous. And so we see a common replacement throughout the novel. But at the same time, basing the novel on men of science as he does, he doesn't perform the one-on-one replacement for technical terms that have clear analogs also. For example, the quadratic formula is named after its discoverer on the other Earth and so the reader has to remember that name. And it grows somewhat annoying over time, even with the glossary thrown in at the back of the novel, to try to keep up with those types of connections. Why is it that some terms are okay to replace, but not others?

The answer lies, in part, in the ultimate destination of the novel, which I don't want to spoil for potential readers. But Stephenson made a conscious decision to go this route, recognizing the limitations he was setting upon himself and working with them to provide clues to the denouement of the novel. And while I was annoyed by the seeming inconsistency, the pay-off is well worth it.

In the novel, Fra Erasmus, a member of the scientific-pseudo-religious element of this world, recounts the events surrounding a major upheaval in the global culture of this planet. Of course, to establish the significance of that upheaval, some time must be spent characterizing the culture in the first place. Stephenson does masterly work in the long-term stage-setting while keeping the story moving along. There are only one or two places where the plot drags, consumed by the effort to set the stage, but those moments remain Stephensonian and thus as strong as some of the best moments for other writers.

As the novel begins, Erasmus finds himself on the cusp of some of the points to which an adult looks back and spots profound moments of growth. He is about to celebrate one of the major events in the calendar of his near-monastic order, and he has also just turned 18, an age at which a man's world changes mostly because of his more-mature perception. Not to mention girls. At this crucial point, unexpected and core-shaking changes begin taking place in his scholarly environment, which have their root causes in changes that are unexpected events that are rattling his entire world. The novel follows Erasmus as he considers all the changes and traces them back to their roots, and then sets about to solve the crises in his life.

This description makes it sound like I am describing a Heinlein juvenile, and the comparison is not totally inappropriate. The narrator is a young immature man dealing with the changes in his world as best he can. There is a lot of lecturing by mentors, with momentary asides describing what the audience is doing during the impromptu lectures. There are distinct personalities among the narrator's peers, given far more description and space than Stephenson usually gives side characters. I could even see the circumstances that drive the novel coming out of Heinlein's imagination. But when the writing starts, it's clearly Stephenson. While the style may be somewhat akin to Heinlein's, no one delves into the interesting but secondary issues as deeply as Stephenson does (including appendixes with drawings that describe some of the lectures in for more detail than is required by the main text). Heinlein never did as much world-building in a single novel as Stephenson does in Anathem, even though it could be argued that Stephenson cheated somewhat by making his world so very Earth-like (it pays off, though; I swear it!).

The end result is a strong book that goes in a different direction than the main thrust of Stephenson's repertoire this far. Some critics have described it a space opera, and there are moments that parallel space opera. But I would see it more as a scientific romance if we are thinking about subgenres. Until, that is, the science behind everything that is happening is explained, and pushes this novel firmly into the core of science fiction—stories about how science and technology affect people and culture. I don't think this is a great book, but it is a stunning writing achievement, and a joy to dissect for its decisions from a writer's point of view. And even if you are not a writer or you don't like thinking about the craft of writing, it's a compelling story, though sometimes pedantic and slow-moving. The pay-off makes those slow moments worthwhile, and the entirely non-Stephensonian ending is a nice touch. In fact, the not-so-veiled reference to Jules Verne is also a fine touch. I'll read this book again, I'm sure, and look forward to Stephenson branching out in other directions in his story-telling.