Tau Zero

I really enjoy writing that sits out on the edge of genres, mixing various aspects of different kinds of writing, pushing the boundaries and challenging the reader. But reading Poul Anderson's novel of deep space flight, I'm reminded of how I got to where I am today. That is, to find the edges, I pretty much started in the exact middle. Nothing gets more middle than traditional hard science fiction, where the science often overtakes the plot, and less expert writers end up lecturing. I'm quite pleased that Anderson does not fall anywhere near that category; his hard science fiction is an adventure with no dearth of science.

Tau Zero is the story of a Bussard ramjet travelling to a planet some 32 light years from Earth with a crew of 50 and enough cargo for them to establish a colony. Anderson holds to relativity as we generally understand it: the speed of light is an absolute limit, and the Leonora Christine will never reach that speed. But it can always grow incrementally closer, thus causing massive time dilation, meaning that the time on the ship is less than the time of the objects moving at a normal speed. Anderson starts the story with introductions of two of the main characters, Charles Reymont and Ingrid Lindgren, indicating with a fascinating conversation and enticing descriptive passages that his prose is going to attempt to match the scope of his story. The characters that inhabit Tau Zero are not flat, providing numerous lenses through which the reader can witness the effects of the voyage.

Along with the astrophysics that Anderson describes—what exactly it means to move so close to the speed of light, he also spends a good deal of time moving through the cast of characters, flirting with sociology and psychology as he examines the effects of the voyage on individuals and relationships, both personal and professional. And generally speaking, he nails the characters: they are lively and interesting, even when they are not good people. For the first third of the novel he intersperses the travelogue with the characters' stories, setting a foundation for the tragedy that follows. For just as you think you have a grasp on the science and the people, Leonora Christine passes through a nebula, damaging her engines such that she cannot slow down. As Anderson has explained, the engines that provide propulsion also protect the ship from the particles and waves that relativity have made excruciatingly dangerous, and since they are basically nuclear reactors, they must be shut down to be repaired. But shutting them down removes the protection the engines afford the ship, so their only hope is to accelerate and move out into intergalactic space where particles are nearly non-existent and shut the engines down. But the faster they travel, the more time that passes in the universe.
General understanding of relativity makes this obvious, and if the reader doesn't have that knowledge, Anderson imparts it in his physics lectures that have a feel of the poetic about them. They are not only educational, but they are brilliantly crafted, mixing the wonder and power of the universe with the hard laws of physics. It's strange to find myself saying that his physics lectures actually sing and challenge the craft of some of the best writers of science fiction, mainly because I didn't think such a thing is possible. But what are often the most tedious passages in hard science fiction are delights, begging to be read over and over again, not for clarity's sake, but because they are compellingly constructed.

Thus, the Leonora Christine travels faster and faster, approaching the speed of light, hours passing on board the ship while thousands of years pass in the rest of the universe. And just as devoted as he is to the science of his work, Anderson realistically ponders the result of such a journey upon people. How does a person cope with not just the fact that everyone they know is dead, but eventually that by the best estimates, the solar system itself has been destroyed by the natural laws governing stellar evolution? Reymont and Lindgren attempt to keep hope alive among the crew, reminding them that as bad as it gets, they are still alive; but as more and more time passes in the universe, that hope becomes a burden that nearly no one can bear. Even Reymont, the feisty sergeant at arms for the ship has to rely on other people to lift his spirits. And while this may sound depressing and perhaps even maudlin, Anderson has crafted the characters so well that the reader wants to read the stories of their coping with their situation.

Not since I read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity have I seen the type of craft that can be used to create such a compelling hard science fiction story. And not since I read James Blish's Cities in Flight have I seen a novel go the places that Tau Zero takes the reader. It's a tour de force, both of science and writing, and a desperately compelling read. I begrudged every moment I did not have the book in my hands, and I feel I have to go find more of his writing, despairing that I will only be adding whatever I find to the big stack of things to be read. Fortunately, the books shouldn't be hard to find, as I am told that Baen books is about to reprint the Anderson library. If it's true, I intend to take advantage and buy a stack of his books. And if they are even a quarter as good as Tau Zero, I'm going to be a very happy reader indeed.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

This entry deals with a book my book group is reading so I won't go into as much detail as usual. Instead, I intend to focus on a single aspect of the book.

I think there is an assumption underlying most fiction, that the story being told must in some way be interesting to the reader. The very fact that a story is being printed calls out that there is something special about it, and we align our expectation to that—something worth telling must happen in the story or the story wouldn't be told. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle takes that assumption and breaks it, because I don't think there is a more uninteresting character than Toru Okada, the "protagonist." Okada is ridiculously mundane, between jobs and biding his time so that he can evaluate what he really wants as a career thanks to a successful wife, Kumiko, who can support them both for a while. In his newfound free time, he does a little job hunting and keeps house for his wife, but most of the time he looks out from his veranda at his lovely garden. He wears t-shirts and jeans and sneakers and basically does nothing each day, not even watch TV since he does not own one. The first few chapters make clear the total banality of the character as he gets up in the morning, makes breakfast, washes clothes and dishes, and then ponders his navel until it is time to prepare dinner for his wife. It would be tempting to think that something would be made of his utter normalcy, that perhaps he is special exactly because he is so normal, but that isn't the case. In essence he floats along wherever fate takes him and does enough to keep from falling asleep, and sometimes doesn't even succeed at that.

There are only two things that are exceptional about Okada: his love for his wife and his utter hatred for his brother-in-law. Sadly, he uses more passion describing his hatred than his love because he is so confident in Kumiko's love that he takes it for granted. And so it is he tries to be helpful when Kumiko asks favors of him—when their cat goes missing, she asks him to look around the neighborhood, especially in the odd closed in alley that backs up to his home's property. And as he searches, he is propelled on a journey that dances on the thin line between magical realism and surrealism. Each succeeding interaction from that point forward adds to the layers of weirdness, much like Griffin Dunne's journey through New York in Scorsese's After Hours. For instance, Kay Masahara is a teenaged neighbor who is skipping school in order to, in part, poll men's hair loss for a toupee company. Kumiko introduces Okada to Malta Kano, who supposedly has some sort of psychic power and whom Kumiko has enlisted to find the lost cat, but all she can say is that the cat is not near the house. There is also the odd woman who calls Okada's house, claiming to know him, and offering him phone sex.

And through each relationship, Okada remains completely passive, doing whatever is asked of him no matter how ludicrous and only drawing a line at actions that might be taken as unfaithfulness to his wife. Such passivity leads to more bizarre interactions that begin to pile up on each other, so that Okada comments to himself how strange his life has perhaps become, but he never does anything about it. As the strangeness piles up, the most active thing he does is take a train daily to a high rise and sit in the plaza, watching the people there until it starts to get dark.

It's frustrating for the reader, because we have been trained to try to make connections between the events in a story, to unify them in some way that pushes the plot along. But not only does Okada resist any such impulse, so does the novel, actively forgoing any but the most ephemeral of relationships between events. And as a writing device, it's wildly successful: while I wanted to throw the book aside in frustration as more and more inexplicable things happened, I was determined to make it to the end of the novel to find out why they were happening. The result is an incredibly dense narrative of the life of an average man, from the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep, and sometimes even into his dreams. And this denseness seems to be the hallmark of literariness; density of narrative more accurately reflects the disparate aspects of any person's life, so that the more faithful a narrative is to that multi-layeredness, the "better" the writing. One of the points of humor in the novel is that Okada does stupid things, things each of us does when we are alone, things for which we have no explanation other than we did it. But even those moments are fleeting and add to the banality of Okada's life and his unrelenting acceptance of it.

The Wind-up bird Chronicle is a peculiar statement about daily life: no matter how odd or bad things get, life goes on. You have to get up the next morning and face it all again. And perhaps, Okada's response to all of it is the best response; getting worked up like a reader will only be frustrating. You just have to turn the page and keep going. Such a thesis is at odds with most story-telling experiences, when the specialness of the story is why we want to read it. Murakami is thought-provoking and at times painful to read, but The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a fascinating experiment nonetheless.

Slow River

I've spent a number of weeks pondering what to say about this novel. The problem is not so much whether or not this is a good book, which it surely is, but along the lines of why it is a good book. Such lines of thinking have sparked entire new academic disciplines, so I'm not sure why I felt I had to resolve it to any sort of satisfaction before I put virtual pen to virtual paper. But I feel that part of the process of critiquing is to establish a baseline for why I feel a certain way about a subject; not only that, but these are interesting questions to me, running parallel to my ponderings about genre differences, because surely "good read" and "bad read" are just another way to classify books.

Nicola Griffith very adeptly handles three storylines in Slow River, each dealing with three distinct phases of the life of young Lorelei van der Oest's (who goes by the name of Lore). Each storyline is slowly intertwined with the other two, patiently providing a relatively full life history for Lore. The main plotline concerns Lore's attempt to create a new life for herself, escaping from we know not what, told in the first person. The second plotline describes her life immediately after she escapes from a kidnapping attempt, in which she accidentally kills one of her abductors, or so she thinks. The final plotline is a retelling of her life story from her childhood up to the point where she escapes from her kidnapping. These last two threads are told in third person, immediately implying that Lore wants to separate herself from the events she is telling. And almost immediately, the events she describes lead to related questions, the answers to which the reader must patiently await: who is Lore that she should be kidnapped? What kind of life is she escaping when she takes up a new identity and a job at a sewage plant?

The engrossing story is the strength of this novel; Griffith has a fascinating story to tell, made that much more interesting by the way it is revealed piecemeal. Each of the three threads of deal with Lore's escape from something: a wretched family life, a kidnapping, and codependence on a woman who is not stable emotionally. But Griffith, through Lore, points out what we often forget when we consider escape—you must escape to something; it is not merely enough to get away, because the place one gets to may not be any better, and in fact it might be worse, than where you escape from. Lore never explicitly says this, but Slow River reflects her implicit acceptance of this truth and the related maturity that comes with it. Part of what Lore escapes from is her lack of control of her own life, which is feels appropriate when we find out that Lore is a relatively young woman in her mid-20s.

So on one level, the reader ends up with smaller mysteries to solve for each thread, while Griffith also craftily ties all three threads together in ways that go beyond just being the repetition of her life's story. As Lore escapes her trials, she is better able to observe the events of her life, reflected in the third person narrative, and see the patterns that bring them all together. Part of the joy in Griffith's writing is that the reader probably isn't aware that they can all be tied together until Lore begins to do so, and yet all the hints for where the story ends up are embedded in the simple story-telling. The movement along the different threads feels so very organic and yet when it is done, the reader can only admire the hidden hand of the craftsman who led the novel to such a place. And upon reflection, the reader realizes that each of the story beats is relatively simultaneous for each thread, that there is a relationship between the specific events described in each passage.

Set in what is apparently a generic English city, Slow River is not a wordsmith's dream; such a decision would be disrespectful of the voice that Lore shares with her readers. That voice is simple and straightforward, sometimes painful in its innocence, further tying the reader to the experiences that Lore shares. And while it has also won the Best Novel award from the Nebula committee, it is only tangentially science fiction; the future she imagines is not so distant and a nice extrapolation of technology we have today, but that technology is not what the story is about. Nonetheless, Griffith is blessed with the ability to make the technology she describes feel real, perhaps especially because in the fourteen or so years since its publication, some of the technology she imagines is already being made available. To be honest, part of me wants to dislike the novel for its lack of genre awareness; I wanted it to be more speculative fiction-y, but I realized as I thought about it that a good book is a good book. That Griffith has taken a narrative structure that is rather common in mass media today and nearly perfected it with interesting characters and a tight plot should be sufficient to recommend it.

Griffith also takes a hard honest look at difficult subjects. Lore, in her innocence, makes a powerful lens through which a reader can examine societal failings not only from an outside perspective but also as someone who has led a strangely difficult life. I realize that I am being nearly spoiler-phobic as I write, but there is little I can say about the novel that will not give away important information that should be revealed in Griffith's own time and fashion. And unfortunately, despite its award, Slow River has proven a difficult book to find—it only took me nearly eight years of searching to find a used copy. But ultimately, I feel that it was worth the effort, now that I have been exposed to Griffith's apparently lethargic but terrifically piercing story.

Dollhouse: "Becoming"

The structure of the Fox science fiction series Dollhouse makes it very easy to end up with a "mission of the week" format. Joss Whedon's series about people who have their memories and personality erased in order to have then replaced by memories and personality of a client's choosing could easily fall into something like Love Boat, where no plot is really advanced over the arc of the series, but each week brings the viewer an episode where the dolls go off and have a crisis then come back, forcing the series to become, in the process, more of an anthology series than anything really self-contained. The first few episodes of the first season were exactly that, which Whedon has blamed on the interference of the network. Those same introductory episodes are what drove away more thoughtful (and perhaps impatient) viewers. But by the end of the first season, while the dolls still had "engagements", it was clear that another story was being advanced in the interstices and with the supporting characters.

I was fortunate enough to see the culmination of that first season when I saw the "lost episode", "Epitaph 1", in San Diego when Whedon presented it to Comic-Con this past summer. Fortunately, "Epitaph 1" is available on the DVD set, and as I have noted elsewhere (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/07/comic-con-2009.html), it is something any fan of Whedon or science fiction on TV simply must see. The first season pointed out some of the moral ambiguity of what the dollhouses were capable of, while "Epitaph 1" really nailed it home in an unforgettably chilling fashion. Also a delight in that episode is the sudden appearance of character for our resident mad scientist, Topher Brink (played by Fran Kranz). Topher really is the weakest link on the show, because he is almost sociopathic in his devotion to his work and his own self-interest. Throughout the first season, the character does not seem to evolve, or even show any depth at all. It was hard to say if this was the result of the writing or Kranz's acting…until "Epitaph 1." Suddenly, we see just how deep Topher is and, as a very happy aside, the power of Kranz's acting once he is given more than a single dimension to play. Unfortunately, most viewers will never see the episode, so they will had no idea what Kranz can do.

The most recent episode of Dollhouse, "Belonging" (which aired 10/24/09), appears to be a character study of Sierra (Dichen Lachmann). In it, we at last uncover the origin of one of the regular characters in the series—a beautiful artist, Priya attracts the attention of a brilliant and wealthy man who has connections in the corporation that owns the dollhouses. Using his connections, he has Priya given to the dollhouse (in as villainous a fashion as any depicted on recent television) where she is given the code name Sierra and becomes one of the best dolls available. But when Echo hints to Topher that all is not as it seems with one of Sierra's engagements, Topher discovers the truth behind Priya/Sierra's joining the dollhouse and shares it with the security chief Boyd (Henry Lennix) and manager Adele (Olivia Williams).

The results are some of the most compelling TV of this young season, if not the past few seasons. The focus is on Sierra, and Lachmann gives a strong performance as she fleshes out a fan-favorite character. What Priya/Sierra is put through in order to become a doll is horrific, and the results of her engagements perhaps even more so. Vincent Ventresca plays a creepily villainous foil, Nolan Kinnard, for Sierra in his few scenes, just enough to hint at the depths of Nolan's own madness. And while Sierra's loss and recovery were the main plot of the episode, it was what happened around the periphery that made it so emotionally compelling and such strong science fiction.

At last, an episode is broadcast that shows that Topher is not mono-dimensional, a much fuller role that allows us to see Kranz's acting chops. As Topher learns what has been done to Sierra and then argues with Adele over her fate, and then as he turns that fate and becomes something of a hero (a twisted hero no doubt, but heroic all the more for his twistedness), Topher becomes human, something of which we have only seen glimpses in the past. Suddenly he realizes that the knowledge he has and what he does with it have repercussions, and rather than meekly accepting those repercussions, he does something about them. And Kranz's acting is just sublime throughout Topher's epiphany; in his facial expression, his body language, and in his cadence, Topher is wracked with horror at what his beautiful technology can be turned into. This directly echoes the path his character takes in the aforementioned "Epitaph 1" and is transcendentally powerful given how the character has been portrayed up to now. That stark difference between the versions of Topher just make it that much more clear how horrible Sierra's fate is if no one acts on her behalf. Nonetheless, in many ways, "Belonging" is more about Topher than Sierra since by the end of the episode, he is the one who has changed the most.

Mirroring Topher's horror is Olivia Williams's Adele, who seems to honestly believe she is doing what's right for the dolls while living up to the guidelines of the parent Rossum Corporation. Through three successive interviews with Ventresca's Nolan, corporate bigwig Matthew Harding (stoic and evil, played by Keith Carradine), and then finally with Topher, her outrage is beaten into submission. Her own despair is written into her face and delivery even as she tells Topher to do what he is ordered to do, no matter how grotesque and damning it might be. In one of the best lines of the series, which arises from that conversation, she tells Topher, "All of our employees but one were hired in part for their moral ambiguity. You were not. You were hired because you have no morals at all."

And yet, while most of the action of "Becoming" seems to be at a personal level, there are broad strokes that cannot but affect the activities of the dollhouse. On the one hand, the original discoverer of the unpleasantness is Echo (Eliza Dushku) who regular viewers already know has something special about her, given that she is supposed to remember nothing and, especially, instigate nothing when she has not been imprinted with a personality. But there she is, diving to the core of Sierra's fundamental issues when the dollhouse staff is either too distant or too preoccupied to notice that something is terribly wrong with her. Only Boyd, the security chief, seems to notice that she is not acting like the rest of the dolls, and rather than reporting her, he offers her advice as she warns "the storm is coming" (again, I have to refer to "Epitaph 1"—the storm is coming, and what a storm it is).

Most important is the sudden realization that the doll technology is vulnerable to corruption. In a couple of episodes in the first season, Adele uses the technology for her own purposes—creating her perfect lover and helping a friend find out who murdered her—but it never seems to strike her that if she can use the dolls for morally ambiguous reasons, other people can use them for whatever reasons they want. Rossum, in the person of Carradine's Harding, basically orders Adele to murder one of the dolls in as repulsive a way as imaginable, simply to benefit the company and to protect it from potential liability. What Boyd knew all along, Adele and Topher now know for themselves: the doll technology is extraordinarily powerful and thus incredibly vulnerable to those who would want to use it for their own reasons. And this is what makes Dollhouse ultimately such powerful science fiction.

At its deepest roots, science fiction has been used to celebrate the hope of future technology while warning of its potential misuse. Perhaps the grandfather of all science fiction, Frankenstein, is a powerful story of the unintended repercussions as man delves into places he might not be morally ready to explore. And throughout its history, some of the best science fiction stories have been about the competing interests between discovery and use, as knowledge outpaces morality. This, ultimately, is what Dollhouse is—a cautionary tale about the repercussions when technology falls into the hands of the unscrupulous and corrupt. Dollhouse, when it is at its best, brings that conflict to the fore in the most personal terms possible, in the lives of its dolls, the scientists who discover, and the people who pay to use the discovery. The episodic, "doll of the week", format could be entertaining in its own right, but Whedon and his cast and crew continue to push Dollhouse into thought-provoking areas while engrossing its viewers with powerful stories about individuals. "Belonging" is, by far, the best episode so far to make that dichotomy clear and so compelling.

New name!

I haven't posted in the past couple of weeks, for some fairly diverse reasons. I started reading a Hugo award-winning novel and after 50 pages of drudgery, had to set it aside. Maybe I just wasn't in the right head space for it, because it was supposed to be funny and I couldn't find anything so much funny as trying really hard to be funny. I put it back in the reading stack, so I'll end up giving it another shot eventually.

Then I read the Nebula-winning Slow River, which was quite good but has caused all sorts of conflicting ideas about why it's good, so I haven't been able to pull together a review yet. And now I am about 50 pages short of finishing a novel that I see described as a masterpiece, and my ideas about its value are getting mixed in with my thoughts about Slow River such that…well, it's hard to write. I was talking with a regular reader last evening, and I realized that in a lot of cases, I sometimes clarify my own thoughts by writing and perhaps I should sit down and try to bang it out. So that's what I'll probably end up doing in the next couple of days.

On the home front, Mrs. Speculator has gone back to college, and the first couple of weeks have been exhilarating. She's doing awesome, as her grades will attest, but the shared office has changed its tone a little—it's more of a personal study space for her than before and, through no action on her own, I feel like my being there while she is working might be something of a distraction. And since it's hard to post a blog without a computer, I'm not writing as much. An interesting repercussion of her return to school is that, of course, thoughts of doing the same flit about in my head. There's just something awesome about college; if I could win the lottery, I would be a lifelong student. I spent…oh my (going to check the resume)…the better part of 12 years pursuing degrees with mixed success. I jokingly talked with a friend about chasing a degree in film studies, but then in an attempt to take a break from work and think about something else, found that I might be just 12 hours shy of an actual B.A in English with a concentration on film, with those 12 hours all being devoted to actual film classes. It's so very tempting, and Mrs. Speculator is being a lovely partner when she chimes in with the well-reasoned thought: "Go for it!" At the same time, I am reminded how much I loved teaching, as Mrs. Speculator asks for input on her assignments and I find myself falling into the pattern of Socratic discourse and evaluating rhetorical skills. Not to mention reviewing papers beyond what my job currently calls for: discussing how to more effectively make an argument rather than pleading with a subject matter expert to please answer my question. So, when I'm not thinking about what aspects of a book make it literarily "great", I'm pondering little things like going back to college. Not really good for writing.

And then, given Mrs. Speculator's studies, we've been hard pressed to take time to see any movies. I had some interest in Surrogates (and not just because of the song in the soundtrack from Breaking Benjamin), and it was so bad that it might even be out of the theatres now. I have a lot of interest in Where the Wild Things Are (and a lot of that is in fact because of the trailers that include music from Arcade Fire) but finding time to see it is not coming easy. And the Netflix copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has been sitting on the TV stand for probably two months now. So no movies to review. Also, we're also hard-pressed to watch TV, and the DVR is filling up. Though I do have some thoughts on the new season of Big Bang Theory, so there's a blog post there also.

And, finally, it's college football season! This is what the fall is all about and being a season ticket holder, it is incumbent upon me to practice fiduciary responsibility by using the tickets I have already purchased, and then I should probably watch the away games on TV, and some games featuring teams that the Wolfpack are going to play, and some games of national importance, and then some other games that aren't so important, and then some other games that are interesting because it's college football for heaven's sake. As I was reading comics last night, I had the TV jumping back and forth between the classic rock music channel and the Tulsa-UTEP football game (why am I watching Tulsa and UTEP??). Yeah, I got it bad when it comes to college football. And Mrs. Speculator, being the brilliant wife she is, just permits it to consume me for the fall months.

Did I mention comics? DC has really turned things around in the past months, due in no small part to Blackest Night, so there's stuff to write about there also.

All these potential blog entries and what do I do? Write about things I can write about and, oh yeah, change the name of the blog.

If you haven't noticed, I've removed my nom de plume/de guerre and attached my real name to the profile. I decided if I wanted to try to do this seriously, seriously enough that I could use it as a reference for potential side jobs or a career change, I had to identify myself. And then, I also figured I needed a more accessible name, something that would not only roll off the tongue, but paradoxically, stick in the reader's mind. And while "Perrynomasia" made me chuckle and my wife giggle, it was awful esoteric and, you know, hard to say or remember (see it's a pun about punning, a metapun…). I've remembered the first rule of punning, the rule that everyone knows: if you have to explain it, the pun is ruined. And frankly punning by inventing a word that inserts a very Anglo-Saxon name into a technical Greek term…no fun any more (okay, it still makes me chuckle).

So I've been racking my brain for the past 10 days or so for a new name. I actually tried to find the name of the medical scanner in Star Trek—you know the little whirly thing that transmits to the tricorder so that Bones or Dr. Crusher can read the results. I thought it was called a "Fimbrini device" or something like that, based on memories of my old Star Trek Technical Manual, but that's clearly not it since a Google search returns no hits (and who took my Star Trek Technical Manual?). Anyway, I could recently be spotted at intersections, waiting for the light to change with a glazed look as I tried to think of something witty for a title. So of course it hit me last night while I was reading comics and either listening to Journey and The Outlaws or the Golden Hurricanes take the lead over the Miners (oh, look at that: UTEP came back to win). There's no telling where inspiration comes from.

Plus, you know, it's sort of a pun, and it makes me chuckle.

So I got a new name, and with it a promise to buckle down and get some writing done. You know me; it's not like I'm reluctant to talk about my opinion….

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach

I have not been shy about my enjoyment of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series by Steven Erikson. The world he has set the series in is incredibly dense and multi-layered, but the difficulty this could present to the reader is mitigated by the utterly accessible characters who are the center of the novels. The crisis in each book often has national, if not international importance, but instead of allowing the reader to be overwhelmed and perhaps numb to what happens, the point of view is always based on the characters we have spent hundreds of pages getting to know as individuals. And so the horrors of war, the nobility of sacrifice, the depths that make us human are thrown into sharp relief and exploited with deft hands. This is not to say that the books have no humor in them, but it is the humor of a well-loved friend or of witnessing people who have spent lifetimes together, alternating between despising one another and also knowing they would be completely lost without each other.

As Erikson has published the novels of the series, he also published some novellas in small press. While the novelettes thus far have nothing to do with the events in the novels, they remain poignant with the examination of humanity in alternately horrible and hysterical conditions. He doesn't much rely on the Malazan setting to tell stories that feel like they have been ripped from the pages of classic Weird Tales; instead they are set in a generically fantastic milieu, with only allusions to Malazan to portray their bigger setting without getting in the way. The focus is not national, but intensely local, even personal. And Erikson relies even more on the comedy of people interacting with the unknown to make the novels at once some of the funniest things I have read in a while and also some of the most suspenseful.

Meet Emancipor Reese, a man in his 60s or early 70s, whom friends have nicknamed Mancy the Luckless. It seems that any person who hires Reese does not live long enough to appreciate his hard-working nature, usually ending up dead within a few weeks of the hiring, usually in some horrible way, and in no way associated with Reese other than coincidence. As one might imagine, having a string of dead employers is difficult on one trying to find steady employment, and it is awfully suspicious to boot. And Reese is hard-suffering, trying to support his termagant wife and the children he is not sure are even his. So he finds himself answering a poster he found in his town square, describing two men looking for a manservant. Reese interviews with Bauchelain, a somewhat foppish intellectual that speaks in riddles that Reese, in a drunken state, thinks he can understand. When asked if he is willing to travel, Reese instantly agrees, anything to get away from his family while also ensuring that they will be well cared for in his absence. Reese doesn't meet his second employer, Korbal Broach, until days after he has been hired.

It turns out that Bauchelain is a magician of some sort, specializing in working with demons and preferring to do research rather than actually perform any spells. What Korbal Broach does is not clear to Reese, especially because he never really meets him. Ultimately we discover that Korbal Broach is, among other things, a necromancer, working with the dead (the more recent the better). In fact he is something of a savant, enjoying research and experimentation much like Bauchelain, but not quite so rigorous in his practice. And when Reese sobers up, he is more disgusted with where his luck has found him work than appalled at what his employers do. In fact he is a very human, supremely cynical witness to their activities but also unwilling to break his contract with them. His best method for dealing with their activities is to drown his sorrows in more alcohol and light narcotics, which somehow only further endears him to his employers that much more deeply.

The three novellas in this book describe the conditions of the three coming together and then two examples of their adventures. Erikson's style is nearly staccato—using chapters that are sometimes only a page-long as he jumps from character to character, participants and witnesses to the chaos that Bauchelain and Korbal Broach always seem to find themselves mired in. By far, the best story in the book is "The Lees of Laughter's End," wherein the three travelers find themselves aboard what appears to be a sturdy ship but soon discover that the ship, and its crew, are not quite everything they seem. Recent repairs to the ship have been made with nails made from the melting of artifacts stolen from graves, so each contains a little bit of the soul of the owner of the grave they were taken from. A reptilian monster lives in the bowels of the ship, leading to some unexpected interaction with the ghosts from the nails. The crew is captained by four soldiers on the run from a country from whom they stole mysterious artifacts, which now reside in the main hold. The watch upon the top of the main mast either suffers from multiple personalities or is possessed by the ghost of her mother. And then Korbal Broach looses his pet on board the ship while performing a fishing experiment off the keel, attracting all sorts of unwanted attention. Bauchelain struggles to respond to the disasters that simultaneously befall the ship, but accidentally takes a supernaturally aphrodisiac and must first work off its effects. And through it all, the stoic, cynical Reese just tries to survive. I found myself laughing merrily as chaos piled on top of chaos and the all-too-human characters try to respond to issues that are way beyond their pay grade. Of particular delight are the three characters who all share the same name, whose genders are not entirely clear (even to themselves), and who are drafted to see what's going on in the bowels of the ship.

Just describing what happens in the story should be indicative of the humor that lies underneath it. Any one of the supernatural events is suspenseful, but when Erikson continues to pile them all upon one another, the sheer weight of them all makes them more and more funny. And the shifting viewpoints of the chapters just add to the chaos and sharpens the comedy. Erikson even includes the viewpoint of the strange Cthuloid aggregation that is one of the terrors the crew must face, and it turns out that it is severely conflicted about what its lot in life (or unlife) as well. Erikson's craftiness is most clear when you can take a step back and realize that crewmen are dying, some of them horribly, and yet you can't deny the humor that pervades the scene of destruction.

I really recommend this book, not just for anyone interested in the entire series. Erikson has crafted something that feels firmly grounded in the great pulp tradition of Weird Tales and the planetary romances of Moore and Kuttner, but then taken it further and poked at the boundaries of what that type of writing can contain. And while the Malazan Book of the Fallen is a powerful and thought-provoking read, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach distills what makes those novels so great and concentrates it into 100-page stories that require no other knowledge of the world on which they are set.

The Wizard of Oz

Mrs. Speculator and I were able to score tickets to the movie that all of Hollywood, and perhaps America, have been gushing over pretty much since it started filming a year ago. As expected, the theater was packed and the audience was murmuring amongst themselves until the lights went down. There was still a silent anticipation as the movie trailers went past, and everyone settled in as the film we had all come to see began.

We were all surprised when the movie began (and ended as it turns out) not in the brilliant Technicolor that all the advertisements promised, but in sepia tones. After a short epigraph, the movie introduces Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her dog Toto moving quickly down a dirt road through farmland (later we learn this is Kansas). Using the sepia tones, Dorothy's home feels terrifically mundane, if not humdrum, even though events cause her to try to run away from home and sing such wonderfully haunting songs as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." While Garland's acting is pedestrian despite its enthusiasm, she holds absolutely nothing back from her singing, and "Somewhere" is destined to become a classic, especially when given spectacular voice by Garland. Opposed to the sepia tones are the brilliant colors of Oz, which a tornado whisks Dorothy and Toto off to. When the windswept house lands in Oz, Dorothy opens the front door and the fantastic colors come sweeping in.

Dorothy finds herself surrounded by munchkins, a nation of little people who have come together to celebrate Dorothy's inadvertent victory over the Wicked Witch of the East—she had the good fortune of landing her house on the evil witch. Dorothy meets the Good Witch of The North (played delightfully by Billie Burke) and receives awards from the grateful munchkins. The singing and laughter is bright until Dorothy announces her real reward would be a return trip home to Kansas. Glinda the Good Witch advises Dorothy to take the ruby slippers from the fallen Wicked Witch and find the titular Wizard of Oz at the end of the yellow brick road. The Wicked Witch of the West appears (played menacingly by Margaret Hamilton) and threatens Dorothy for killing her sister, but is run off by Glinda. And so Dorothy sets out to find the magical city of Oz.

And so the movie explicitly sets up the comparison between sepia-colored home and the brilliantly Technicolor Oz. As Dorothy wanders through Oz, she makes new friends who look remarkably like her friends back in Kansas, but she never meets her guardians' analogs. Though she meets fantastic characters and makes what appear to be lifelong friends, she still pines for home. Part of the basis of her desire is that, even though she hadn't had such wonderful adventures in Kansas, she also has never been threatened so forcefully as when she is in Oz. For every delightful moment Dorothy has, she also encounters new and terrifying aspects of Oz, and frankly some of them are just weird. Dorothy also places great trust in the stories of the Wizard she has been told, and so her disappointment is that much greater when he initially fails her and her companions, sending them off on a quest in order to earn their wishes.

Those companions are played delightfully by a trio of well-known actors. Ray Bolger is Scarecrow, who is searching for a brain, and his mastery of dance is apparent in every scene he is in. No opportunity to represent Scarecrow as gangly and awkward is missed, and he is a joy to watch. Jack Haley plays Tin Man, who is searching for a heart. And finally Bert Lahr is the Cowardly Lion, who steals every scene he is in. Lions are of course more demonstrative than tin men and scarecrows, so Lahr is given the opportunity to ham it up, which he does with gusto. The Cowardly Lion, of course, wants courage, and to this end, he really is the only one whose theme song varies from the main tune: the others sing "If I Only Had a Brain" and "If Only Had a Heart" while the Lion sings "If I were King of the Forest" making distinctly Lear-ian near-rhymes with words like "hippopotamus." His every scene invokes laughter while the others merely invoke curiosity. The companions also add to the comparison between home and Oz, since each of them has an analog on the farm where Dorothy lives; her friends in Kansas have near-twins in Oz.

The result is a splendidly beautiful movie for children about the importance of valuing what you have and perseverance in the face of adversity. Adults will be entertained by the comic moments and the exquisite scenery, but ultimately, this movie is not very deep nor does it long withstand critical scrutiny. But it is a great deal of fun (especially the Cowardly Lion). Absolutely well worth the time to see.

[on the occasion of my 200^th blog entry, I thought I would write about a movie Mrs. Speculator an I did go see—the 70^th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz. I tried to take on a voice of someone who saw it in 1939, but the heart of the experiment failed me. And seriously, the movie does not take a good deal of examination well. But it is a delight to watch.]