A few nice long links to occupy my readers' time while I complete the next installment of my Hiero's Journey review:
1. Ana Mardoll has been working on a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and their cruel governing philosophy for much of the past year. She has posted her book-length review of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in .pdf and .doc form here (scroll down a bit), and it's a very engaging read. One hopes she will do the same with Prince Caspian, which she recently finished giving the critical thrashing it deserves.
(Apropos of this, Mardoll reminds us that Prince Caspian ends with Aslan sending most of the Telmarines back to the Pacific Island where their pirate ancestors were shipwrecked. He doesn't warn them that things on their home world might have changed a bit since the Days of Sail - and one of Mardoll's commenters notes that the deportees would have arrived in the Pacific region right at the start of the Second World War. Now THAT would be an interesting premise for a story...)
2. Ms. Mardoll also provided her readers with a link to this extraordinarily well-written essay on the horrific racism and misogyny of Robert Howard's Conan stories. While the piece is over 20,000 words long, it provides a thoughtful, humorous, and suitably horrified summary of the Conan oeuvre. Here's an example of the reviewer's prose:
Having fulfilled his titillation quotient, Howard has his tribe of
undomesticated homosexuals try to sacrifice Livia to a giant bat,
because that is totally what lesbians do to nice straight white girls
who fall into their clutches, and Conan charges in to save the day.
Plus, the author provides a summary of the Silmarilion, for the benefit of those of us who A) haven't read the book, and B) never plan to do so.*
3. Speaking of misogyny, it seems to have been an important component of George R.R. Martin's "gritty," by which we mean "creepy," fantasy novels, A Game of Thrones et al. So sayeth Good Queen Sady, in last year's excellent blog post, "Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype." Sady wrote shortly after the publication of the fifth novel of the series, so her review only covers volumes 1-4, but I don't think she misses much by leaving out A Dance with Dragons, which in your humble blogger's opinion was a waste of everyone's time.
* (Update, 21 Aug. 2015: One can also watch this short video.)
Monday, December 24, 2012
Friday, December 7, 2012
Captain Exposition and the Water Weasels
For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.
(For the previous chapter, see here.)
The second chapter of Hiero's Journey, "In the Beginning," contains, as one might expect, an expository flashback, but this only takes up about half the chapter. A more descriptive name for these 24 pages might be "Flashback, with Weasels," since they end with another knockdown fight, this one between Hiero & Klootz and a pack of ravenous mutant mustelids. (I take no credit for the fancy vocab, by the way; the last term is Lanier's.) The fight in question is partly Hiero's fault, since he had decided to follow a stream down to the marshes on the northern fringe of the Inland Sea (which is what the swollen Great Lakes have become in this era), and the water proved an ideal attack corridor for the weasel-oids in question. Having heard the attackers well in advance, and having detected their "blind, ravening appetite" (45) with his Psychic Canadian Priest powers, Hiero at least manages to avoid an ambush.
Lanier has fun describing the five giant "water weasels" (possibly mutant mink, but let's call them weasels) who attack Hiero, Klootz, and Gorm "like streaks of dark, undulating lightning," their faces "grinning masks of fury" (46). Our author isn't the most gifted wordsmith, but one must give him credit for decent action scenes. The fight that closes the chapter is brief but intense, and gives Hiero and Klootz an opportunity to show off their combat skills. (Gorm seems to have spent the fight in the underbrush, sucking his paws.) By my count, Hiero dispatches three of the mutant beasties with his spear, cutlass, and a shot from his gun, which apparently shoots explosive rockets (not exactly overkill when one is beset by 10-foot-long weasels). Klootz squashes two water weasels with his hooves, catching one of them off guard by "minc[ing] up to it" like a baby morse (aww...) before breaking its back. Klootz may be a giant mutant moose, but he ain't stupid. Hiero suffers a bad leg injury and chapter's end sees him treating his wound and pumping himself full of narcotics.
Lanier could as well have begun Hiero's expository flashback here, as our protagonist drifts into a drug-induced haze. The scene takes place in Sask City, capital of Hiero's Metz Republic and one of the few centers of civilization on the continent. Father-Abbot Demero, Hiero's mentor and boss, tells his star pupil that the Republic's efforts to expand the pale of civilization are failing, apparently due to coordinated attacks by the Evil Unclean Conspiracy. Among other outrages, the Evil Mutants have destroyed a convoy carrying scientific equipment from the nearby Otwah League, have killed or captured all the members of a huge colonial expedition to "Huzon Gulf" (the expanded Hudson Bay, I assume), and have sunk a ship of "yellow-skinned people," presumably travelers from East Asia, off the "Beesee" coast. Apparently, the Evil Mutant Conspiracy doesn't like science or immigrants. Comparison to a certain modern American political party I leave as an exercise for the reader.
To break this "deadly tightening web" (29) is the purpose of Hiero's journey: he was sent south to the lost cities of the old "American empire," a land of "endless marshes...vast tracts of poisoned desert" (32), and ginormous mutants, to search for old technologies that might aid the Good Guys in their struggle. This is where Hiero's mission most clearly resembles that of a swords-and-sorcery hero: travel into a dangerous land full of monsters and find powerful magic treasure in the ruins of a lost civilization. The specific McGuffin he seeks is a computer (cue portentious music), an ancient device which will help his Abbey analyze its enormous files of information. Following the mid-20th-century assumption that a computer's power varies directly in proportion to its size, Lanier has Abbot Demero observe that some were so powerful they were "larger than this building we're in" (34). The very largest of these computers, I imagine, were almost powerful enough to run an app from my iPod. Okay, enough cheap shots. For now.
Up next: At the dread hour the Mind-flaying Mist Dweller comes.
Picture credit: The above illustration, "H is for Hiero," is by Andrew Neal and is used by permission of the artist. The original image may be found here.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Enter Hiero Desteen, Pursued by Mutant Wolverines
Hiero's Journey, Chapter One:
(For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.)
While no-one could confuse Sterling Lanier with William Thackeray, one cannot say that his prose is terrible. His writing is generally clear and workmanlike, and in the opening chapter of Hiero's Journey he demonstrates two characteristics that serve this particular post-apocalypse adventure story well. One is the ability to describe wilderness scenes in rich detail; Lanier's forests, for example, are full of deadfalls, seedlings, colorful lichens and fallen leaves. The author, in other words, treats his landscapes like characters rather than as speed bumps in the narrative. Lanier's other useful talent is efficient exposition. Within one page of the start of this novel the reader knows the main character's name and titles - "Secondary Priest-Exorcist, Primary Rover and Senior Killman" - that he can read minds, and that he rides a giant moose, or "morse," named Klootz. Within ten pages, we have been introduced to the larger setting: northern North America in the year 7476 CE, about 5,500 years after something called "the Death" (a nuclear war) and several millennia after the "Greenhouse Effect" (6) has warmed up the continent considerably, enlarging forests and shrinking coastlines. (We may congratulate Lanier for introducing this idea into a novel published in the early 1970s, though it's unlikely global warming would continue once industrial civilization and its emissions disappeared.) Apparently the Death has left behind a fair amount of radiation and created a variety of mutant species, such as the giant snapping turtles and bison we encounter early in this chapter, both of which came all the way from a '50s scifi movie to be with us today. It hasn't left much in the way of civilization, though judging from a page or two of inventory porn Hiero's people can still smelt metals and make firearms. Moreover, their priesthood appears to have psychic powers - including precognition and clairvoyance - which they can use with the aid of seeing stones and predictive tokens. Probably this is the meaning of Hiero's title "exorcist.".
In the second half of the chapter Lanier introduces Hiero to one of his sidekicks, an intelligent mutant bear named Gorm, and to his enemy, a vast Evil Conspiracy called the Brotherhood of Unclean Evil or Something. Gorm is a two-dimensional character, and the idea of an intelligent bear doesn't impress me too much; I've suspected real-world bears were intelligent ever since one of them offed Timothy Treadwell. Gorm, however, will play an important role in this novel and is about to save Hiero's bacon, so let's not look a gift ursine in the mouth.
Shortly after meeting Gorm, Hiero barely avoids running into some of his forthcoming antagonists: "Leemutes" (or "Lethal Mutants"), in this case a pack of bipedal, intelligent wolverines (cue obligatory Red Dawn reference) whom our protagonist calls Furhoppers, creative nomenclature not being his forte. As in pulp fantasy novels, and the role-playing games inspired by Lanier's work, evil is not merely a behavior but a racial characteristic, one inscribed on the bodies of the evildoers. Lanier takes care to mention the Leemutes' "beady eyes" and "oily-looking fur," and says they are preceded by "a wave of evil purpose...like a cloud of gas" (15). Maybe it's just me, but these Furhoppers sound less like an evil army and more like a pack of disaffected teenagers. You wolverine kids get off of my lawn!
It soon becomes apparent that there are hierarchies of evil mutant-ness in Hiero's world, as the Leemutes' leader, a robed humanoid named S'nerg (I kid you not!), lurks into view. Hiero refers to this human-seeming person as one of the Unclean, and recalls rumors that when killed they dissolve immediately into masses of corruption, so vile are their motives and intentions. This Evil High Priest (to borrow a D&D term) is practically a moustache-twirling villain, who detects Hiero hiding nearby, taunts him with B-movie insults, and paralyzes our hero with his evil mind powers. Things are looking dark for Hiero, and it appears that our novel is about to become a short story, when of a sudden Gorm the Bear comes out of hiding and bites S'nerg in the balls.This was probably the point at which, while I was first reading Hiero's Journey, I realized I was going to finish the novel. You just don't get mutant-bear groin-biting in conventional stories.
At chapter's end, Hiero dispatches S'nerg with a killing blow from his ancient pre-war sword. I think, though, that we're going to give Gorm the medal for this particular event.
Coming next: Our obligatory interview with Captain Exposition.
(For a chapter-by-chapter index to this series, click here.)
In the second half of the chapter Lanier introduces Hiero to one of his sidekicks, an intelligent mutant bear named Gorm, and to his enemy, a vast Evil Conspiracy called the Brotherhood of Unclean Evil or Something. Gorm is a two-dimensional character, and the idea of an intelligent bear doesn't impress me too much; I've suspected real-world bears were intelligent ever since one of them offed Timothy Treadwell. Gorm, however, will play an important role in this novel and is about to save Hiero's bacon, so let's not look a gift ursine in the mouth.
Shortly after meeting Gorm, Hiero barely avoids running into some of his forthcoming antagonists: "Leemutes" (or "Lethal Mutants"), in this case a pack of bipedal, intelligent wolverines (cue obligatory Red Dawn reference) whom our protagonist calls Furhoppers, creative nomenclature not being his forte. As in pulp fantasy novels, and the role-playing games inspired by Lanier's work, evil is not merely a behavior but a racial characteristic, one inscribed on the bodies of the evildoers. Lanier takes care to mention the Leemutes' "beady eyes" and "oily-looking fur," and says they are preceded by "a wave of evil purpose...like a cloud of gas" (15). Maybe it's just me, but these Furhoppers sound less like an evil army and more like a pack of disaffected teenagers. You wolverine kids get off of my lawn!
It soon becomes apparent that there are hierarchies of evil mutant-ness in Hiero's world, as the Leemutes' leader, a robed humanoid named S'nerg (I kid you not!), lurks into view. Hiero refers to this human-seeming person as one of the Unclean, and recalls rumors that when killed they dissolve immediately into masses of corruption, so vile are their motives and intentions. This Evil High Priest (to borrow a D&D term) is practically a moustache-twirling villain, who detects Hiero hiding nearby, taunts him with B-movie insults, and paralyzes our hero with his evil mind powers. Things are looking dark for Hiero, and it appears that our novel is about to become a short story, when of a sudden Gorm the Bear comes out of hiding and bites S'nerg in the balls.This was probably the point at which, while I was first reading Hiero's Journey, I realized I was going to finish the novel. You just don't get mutant-bear groin-biting in conventional stories.
At chapter's end, Hiero dispatches S'nerg with a killing blow from his ancient pre-war sword. I think, though, that we're going to give Gorm the medal for this particular event.
Coming next: Our obligatory interview with Captain Exposition.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Sterling Lanier's Not-Quite-Forgotten Not-Quite-Classic
A few months ago, while poking around several old boxes of role-playing game supplements I had left over from the 1980s, I happened upon a reference to a sci-fi novel that I remembered enjoying when I was a teenager, and which was an inspiration for the old RPG Gamma World. The novel was Hiero's Journey (1973), an adventure story pitting a biracial Canadian priest with psychic powers (and you don't find enough of those in fiction, do you?) against post-apocalyptic mutants in the 75th century. After doing a little online research, I learned that the novel, pulpy and goofy as it was, still evoked fond memories from other SF fans, and that it was apparently one of the inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons, which struck me as odd given the large difference in genre between the novel and the game. In an effort to solve this riddle - how did a post-holocaust SF novel inspire a fantasy role-playing game - and as a tribute to a "good bad book" (in George Orwell's phrase) that is still entertaining, I plan to devote a number of future blog entries to Hiero's Journey.
The novel's author, Sterling Lanier, also merits attention: he wrote several science fiction novels in
the '70s and '80s, and he was the publishing-house employee who first decided to publish Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune, which alone should guarantee him a place (if a small one) in the SF pantheon. Lanier was also one of the few science fiction writers to graduate from my alma mater, though he was rather less talented than some of his fellow Harvardians (Edgar Pangborn, Hal Clement, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin). Not everyone gets to be famous when they grow up, and perhaps it's as well merely to be useful and inspiring.
The novel's author, Sterling Lanier, also merits attention: he wrote several science fiction novels in
the '70s and '80s, and he was the publishing-house employee who first decided to publish Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune, which alone should guarantee him a place (if a small one) in the SF pantheon. Lanier was also one of the few science fiction writers to graduate from my alma mater, though he was rather less talented than some of his fellow Harvardians (Edgar Pangborn, Hal Clement, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin). Not everyone gets to be famous when they grow up, and perhaps it's as well merely to be useful and inspiring.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Welcome to Your Apocalypse: Plague
Our planet has
experienced several pandemics in the last millennium, all of which killed
several million people and all of which left some sort of documentary
record. The Black Death of 1346-50,
probably a mixture of bubonic plague and anthrax, was introduced to Europe via
the overland trade route to East Asia, and slaughtered over one-third of the
continent's population; by the end of the 1300s, the global
population had fallen by about 25% (or 100 million people). The epidemics of
smallpox and other illnesses that European mariners introduced to Mexico,
Brazil, and the Caribbean in the 16th century killed millions of Indians and probably reduced those regions' indigenous populations by 80%
before the century was out (see Crosby, Germs,
Seeds, and Animals [M.E. Sharpe, 1994]). Cholera
pandemics in the 19th and early 20th centuries killed
upwards of 10-15 million people. Spanish
flu killed at least 50 million people
worldwide at the end of the First World War. HIV/AIDS has killed 30 million people since
the 1980s, and as many more people are still living with the disease today.
History can tell us a great deal about the consequences of a large-scale epidemic. Massive die-offs, first of all, can result in the loosening of economic bonds, as surviving serfs or peasants use their scarcity to negotiate with landlords for freedom. They can also result in the stark curtailment of freedom. When labor is scarce, lords and conquistadors are just as likely to resort to slavery to provide it. Parts of Europe where slavery was in decline, like Italy, saw a resurgence of slave labor in the decades following the Black Death, and when Spanish and Portuguese colonists found that their Indian laborers were dying they replaced them with African slaves.
Epidemics can lead to medical breakthroughs, like the
development of public sanitation to fight cholera and of anti-retroviral drugs
to fight AIDS. They can also provoke
superstitious responses and violence: think of Europeans who blamed bubonic
plague on the Jews, Huron Indians who associated smallpox with Jesuit missionaries,
and evangelical Christians who attribute AIDS to divine displeasure with
homosexuality. And huge
die-offs generally don't have any long-term effects on the survivors. Given the relationship between long-distance
travel and large-scale epidemics, one might expect trade and travel to decline
after pandemics, but I know of no case where this has occurred. Humans still prefer to live in crowded
cities, sometimes in close proximity to livestock, an ideal environment for generating new illnesses. They tend to forget the need for prophylactic
measures, like vaccination or condom use, once a generation has passed
since the die-off. A realistic
novel or movie set after a future plague would have some of the survivors sold
into slavery or the equivalent; others killed as scapegoats; and the
rest forgetting anything ever happened – until the
next epidemic came along and killed another hundred million people.
To what species, finally, might our fictional (we hope) future superbug
belong? Damned if I know, though it's comforting
to realize that epidemics are to some degree self-limiting. Truly frightening and lethal diseases like
Ebola tend to kill their hosts before they have time to spread; those that are
both highly contagious and have a long incubation period, like smallpox or
influenza, can spread far and wide but kill only a fraction of those infected
with them (25%, in the case of untreated smallpox, less, in the case of
flu). There may be exceptions. Extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis is both contagious and very dangerous, and apparently one can only treat it with chemotherapy and quarantine, both of which are expensive. It is apparently also possible to create a
genetically engineered strain of smallpox that suppresses the host's immune response,
making it both highly contagious and 100% fatal. I can't imagine anyone setting a science
fiction novel in a post-immunosuppressant-smallpox world, however, because
there wouldn't be any humans left to write about…
Monday, October 8, 2012
The Annotated "Colder War"
One of the most popular SF
writers in the field today is Charles Stross, who began writing fiction
full-time about 15 years ago and started publishing novels around the turn of
the century. His particular specialty is blending, subverting, and critiquing
the tropes and cliches of science fiction and its allied genres, fantasy and
horror. His published books of just the past ten years reveal his authorial
range: they include three space operas (including one with an all-robot
cast), an anthology of stories set during a technological Singularity,
a six-volume alternate-history
series disguised (at least initially) as a fantasy adventure, three
near-future police procedurals, and four spy novels
(and several associated short stories) set in a world where H.P. Lovecraft's
horror stories are real.
I am fond of Stross's novels, but find that some of his best work can be found in his (fairly infrequent) short stories and novellas. My favorite Stross story, "A Colder War," is typical of his writerly technique, insofar as it takes the people, places, and monsters of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" and incorporates them into a 1980s techno-spy thriller, with predictably horrifying results. In re-reading the story recently, I realized that much of my enjoyment stems from understanding the various historical and fictional references that Stross makes, and that not all readers would appreciate Stross's terminology, genre references, and jokes. "This," I thought, "is a story that could benefit from a few footnotes," much like Howard Waldrop's story "The Annotated Jetboy" from the Wild Cards milieu. Since Mssr. Stross is a busy man, and doesn't mind fans writing derivative works as long as they're free and he doesn't have to read them, I thought I might perform this minor service for his readers. Herewith, then, my notes to "A Colder War."
**
All page-number references are to the version of this story found in the paperback edition of Wireless (2010). The abbreviation "HPL" refers to Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), creator of the Cthulhu Mythos that forms the background to the story.
84: Nellis AFB [Air Force Base]: Located near Las Vegas, it is one of the largest military air bases in the United States. Yes, it's a real place.
Pitot tubes: Partially closed tubes used to measure airspeed.
85: SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM: Stross's protocol for identifying Top Secret information – a string of unrelated nouns – is actually not a bad form of encryption, though to the best of my knowledge no real-world intelligence service uses it as a security protocol.
86: like pentacles: Stross's description of the symbols on the tarps indicates that they are Elder Signs, used in the Cthulhu mythos to bind or banish otherworldly nasties.
ORBAT: Order of Battle, a list of the combat units available to a particular army, arranged by command hierarchy.
Live servitors: also known as shoggoths (see p. 92), first described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness. The Elder Things, an alien race which came to Earth in the Precambrian Era, created them as a servant race; they later rebelled.
87: this conclusion is questionable: The Soviet ploy referred to here was quite famous by the 1980s, though it apparently caused great consternation at the time of its use (1964).
88: KH-11: also known as "Key Hole," the most sophisticated spy satellite in use by the United States in the 1980s, when this story takes place.
Church Commission: A 1975 Senate commission that investigated abuses of power by the American intelligence community in the 1950s and '60s.
89: eighteen-year-old faked missile photographs: Assuming this refers to the 1963 file in the next paragraph, this establishes the starting date of Stross's story as 1981.
Koschei: A nearly-invulnerable villain from Russian folklore.
It had been enough to stop JFK running: Either the Dallas assassination didn't occur in this continuum, or Stross is writing subjunctively, eliding the phrase "even if he had lived."
90: the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus: Location of the city of Elder Things described in "At the Mountains of Madness," apparently known to and covered up by the American, Soviet, and Nazi governments.
Balloon ever does go up: A term popularized during World War Two, when raised barrage balloons signaled an impending air raid. Used during the Cold War to refer to the outbreak of general war.
91: the colonel: Oliver North, the director of several of the Reagan administration's illegal covert operations in the 1980s (both in the real world and in Stross's continuum). Anyone familiar with Oliver North and Cthulhu should now realize that this story is going to end very, very badly.
This fuckup in Tehran: presumably a reference to the Islamic revolution of 1979, rather than the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, which ended just as Reagan was taking office.
92: Upper Volta: Reference to a derogatory phrase used by diplomats to refer to the Soviet Union – "Upper Volta with rockets," i.e. a Third World country with a First World military. Upper Volta is now Burkina Faso.
The Company: The CIA.
Wet ops: Lethal covert operations, or as we mundanes call them, assassinations.
Marque and reprise: Stross means "marque and reprisal," a license to commit piracy on behalf of a nation-state. Used in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, now obsolete.
93: Lake Vostok: In the real world, an ancient lake buried beneath several miles of pack ice in eastern Antarctica; in Stross's continuum, an equally ancient lake buried beneath the Ross Ice Shelf on the same continent.
94: ELF: Extremely Low Frequency, a long-wave radio communications technology used to communicate with submerged submarines.
Ullage: loss of liquid from a container.
96: Predecessors: The American intelligence community's term for the Elder Things. An improvement, arguably, on Lovecraft's own term.
General LeMay would be proud: Reference to Curtis LeMay, pioneer of saturation bombing during World War Two, creator of the Strategic Air Command, and author of the slogan "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age."
98: Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: This may be a figurative reference to human sacrifices performed in order to summon or feed the creature at the heart of Project Koschei (i.e., Cthulhu), or an actual reference to the extermination camps, which in Stross's continuum may have been used for the same purpose.
Organization Todt: Nazi slave-labor firm, which employed over one million prisoners on large-scale engineering works.
Professor Gould: Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and popular-science essayist, and author of, among other books, Wonderful Life (1989), an account of the Burgess Shale mentioned on the following page.
99: skinny woman: Fawn Hall, Col. Oliver North's secretary and resident paper-shredder.
99-101: anamalocaris: A real-world organism, extinct for approximately 500 million years, which in Stross's continuum is an alien creature, introduced to Earth via the gate under Lake Vostok. In our own continuum, anomalocaris is pretty weird.
100: cauliflower head: One of the distinctive features of the Elder Things or Predecessors.
102: minox: Film from a type of miniature camera developed in the 1930s and commonly used by mid-20th century spies.
on the Baltic Floor: The Cthulhu "entity" in the Koschei bunker is either an avatar or copy of HPL's original (which lay "undead and sleeping" beneath the Pacific Ocean), or else Cthulhu's tomb-city of R'lyeh is in Stross's continuum under the Baltic Sea. One supposes it would have been difficult for the Nazis to reach the South Pacific, even with Japanese help.
103: Baltic Singularity: The intelligence community's use of the word "Singularity" to describe Cthulhu makes it clear that the entity lies beyond explanation by conventional twentieth-century science.
104: shy bald admiral: John Poindexter, National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan.
End-user certificates: Issued by arms manufacturers to their customers to prevent, often ineffectively, the resale of weapons.
105: Jermyn Street: High-end London men's tailoring district.
Old man Ruhollah: Ayatollah Khomenei, supreme religious leader of revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1989.
106: very dangerous men: Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed religious terrorist group whose capture of several American hostages in 1984-85 initiated the Iran-Contra scandal.
Unholy brotherhood of Tikrit: Presumably an Iraqi cult, associated with Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, which worships the Lovecraftian deity Yog-Sothoth (a deity associated with inter-dimensional gates) and uses his power against Iran, with which Iraq was then at war.
Mukhabarat: See page 110.
Bekaa: Valley in Lebanon where Hezbollah was based during that country's civil war.
107: Leng: Mythical plateau which was the site of an evil kingdom of flesh-eating sorcerers in HPL's work. Leng may have been in central Asia, in the other-worldly Dream Lands, in Antarctica (hence Mehmet's reference to "icy spoor"), or all of these places at once.
Kitab al-Azif: The Necronomicon, a legendary book of summoning spells found in several of HPL's stories. Its author, Abd Al-hazred, was allegedly devoured by invisible demons.
F-14C: Revolutionary Iran used a number of American weapons that were either acquired by the Shah (who was an American ally) or illegally sold to the Iranian government as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Dimona: In the real world, Israel played an intermediary role in the shipment of American weapons to Iran, but none were nuclear.
109: advanced robotic systems: HPL implied that the shoggoths were biological, but Stross's explanation makes more technical sense, and reflects the kind of concepts that the American and Soviet intelligence communities would have used to understand them.
Utility fog: Actually, this idea appears to have been prefigured in a 1964 novel by Stanislaw Lem.
Molotov Raid: Presumably, a Soviet expedition which looted the Elder Thing / Precursor city in Antarctica after the return of the Pabodie Expedition.
110: weakly godlike agencies: a carryover term from SF-nal speculation about transhuman intelligence, used in Stross's own science fiction novels.
K-thulhu: Since it is supposedly impossible for humans correctly to pronounce "Cthulhu," Roger's spelling and pronunciation of the name is as correct as any other. One may infer from it that this world's intelligence community reserves the "K-" prefix for Mythos-related places, beings, and technology.
111: Buckminster Fuller: inventor of the geodesic dome.
113: cracked some kinda joke: Reagan did, in fact, make the aforementioned joke about "outlaw[ing] Russia forever" over an inadvertently open mike (1984), and apparently the Soviet Union did take it seriously and put one of its armies on alert. CPSU officials were not known for their sense of humor.
115: Ligachev: Soviet Communist Party hardliner and putative successor to Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.
gate into Sothoth: Curiously, Stross isn't the only person in the world to speculate (tongue-in-cheek) that Saddam Hussein would be interested in mucking about with Cthulhu Mythos lore and monsters. Tyler Stewart, proprietor of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Mass., told me in 1991 he was playing around with the same idea.
Yellow rain: a fungal poison allegedly weaponized and used by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
WarPac: Warsaw Pact
SS-20: Intermediate-range ballistic missile deployed by the USSR in the 1970s and '80s.
Koschei is loose: Stross leaves open the question of whether the Project's directors unleashed Cthulhu against the Americans or against Saddam Hussein's temple/gate of Yog Sothoth. In the end, I suppose, it matters not.
**
(Links added 21 Aug. 2015.)
I am fond of Stross's novels, but find that some of his best work can be found in his (fairly infrequent) short stories and novellas. My favorite Stross story, "A Colder War," is typical of his writerly technique, insofar as it takes the people, places, and monsters of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" and incorporates them into a 1980s techno-spy thriller, with predictably horrifying results. In re-reading the story recently, I realized that much of my enjoyment stems from understanding the various historical and fictional references that Stross makes, and that not all readers would appreciate Stross's terminology, genre references, and jokes. "This," I thought, "is a story that could benefit from a few footnotes," much like Howard Waldrop's story "The Annotated Jetboy" from the Wild Cards milieu. Since Mssr. Stross is a busy man, and doesn't mind fans writing derivative works as long as they're free and he doesn't have to read them, I thought I might perform this minor service for his readers. Herewith, then, my notes to "A Colder War."
**
All page-number references are to the version of this story found in the paperback edition of Wireless (2010). The abbreviation "HPL" refers to Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), creator of the Cthulhu Mythos that forms the background to the story.
84: Nellis AFB [Air Force Base]: Located near Las Vegas, it is one of the largest military air bases in the United States. Yes, it's a real place.
Pitot tubes: Partially closed tubes used to measure airspeed.
85: SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM: Stross's protocol for identifying Top Secret information – a string of unrelated nouns – is actually not a bad form of encryption, though to the best of my knowledge no real-world intelligence service uses it as a security protocol.
86: like pentacles: Stross's description of the symbols on the tarps indicates that they are Elder Signs, used in the Cthulhu mythos to bind or banish otherworldly nasties.
ORBAT: Order of Battle, a list of the combat units available to a particular army, arranged by command hierarchy.
Live servitors: also known as shoggoths (see p. 92), first described by HPL in At the Mountains of Madness. The Elder Things, an alien race which came to Earth in the Precambrian Era, created them as a servant race; they later rebelled.
87: this conclusion is questionable: The Soviet ploy referred to here was quite famous by the 1980s, though it apparently caused great consternation at the time of its use (1964).
88: KH-11: also known as "Key Hole," the most sophisticated spy satellite in use by the United States in the 1980s, when this story takes place.
Church Commission: A 1975 Senate commission that investigated abuses of power by the American intelligence community in the 1950s and '60s.
89: eighteen-year-old faked missile photographs: Assuming this refers to the 1963 file in the next paragraph, this establishes the starting date of Stross's story as 1981.
Koschei: A nearly-invulnerable villain from Russian folklore.
It had been enough to stop JFK running: Either the Dallas assassination didn't occur in this continuum, or Stross is writing subjunctively, eliding the phrase "even if he had lived."
90: the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus: Location of the city of Elder Things described in "At the Mountains of Madness," apparently known to and covered up by the American, Soviet, and Nazi governments.
Balloon ever does go up: A term popularized during World War Two, when raised barrage balloons signaled an impending air raid. Used during the Cold War to refer to the outbreak of general war.
91: the colonel: Oliver North, the director of several of the Reagan administration's illegal covert operations in the 1980s (both in the real world and in Stross's continuum). Anyone familiar with Oliver North and Cthulhu should now realize that this story is going to end very, very badly.
This fuckup in Tehran: presumably a reference to the Islamic revolution of 1979, rather than the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, which ended just as Reagan was taking office.
92: Upper Volta: Reference to a derogatory phrase used by diplomats to refer to the Soviet Union – "Upper Volta with rockets," i.e. a Third World country with a First World military. Upper Volta is now Burkina Faso.
The Company: The CIA.
Wet ops: Lethal covert operations, or as we mundanes call them, assassinations.
Marque and reprise: Stross means "marque and reprisal," a license to commit piracy on behalf of a nation-state. Used in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, now obsolete.
93: Lake Vostok: In the real world, an ancient lake buried beneath several miles of pack ice in eastern Antarctica; in Stross's continuum, an equally ancient lake buried beneath the Ross Ice Shelf on the same continent.
94: ELF: Extremely Low Frequency, a long-wave radio communications technology used to communicate with submerged submarines.
Ullage: loss of liquid from a container.
96: Predecessors: The American intelligence community's term for the Elder Things. An improvement, arguably, on Lovecraft's own term.
General LeMay would be proud: Reference to Curtis LeMay, pioneer of saturation bombing during World War Two, creator of the Strategic Air Command, and author of the slogan "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age."
98: Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: This may be a figurative reference to human sacrifices performed in order to summon or feed the creature at the heart of Project Koschei (i.e., Cthulhu), or an actual reference to the extermination camps, which in Stross's continuum may have been used for the same purpose.
Organization Todt: Nazi slave-labor firm, which employed over one million prisoners on large-scale engineering works.
Professor Gould: Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and popular-science essayist, and author of, among other books, Wonderful Life (1989), an account of the Burgess Shale mentioned on the following page.
99: skinny woman: Fawn Hall, Col. Oliver North's secretary and resident paper-shredder.
99-101: anamalocaris: A real-world organism, extinct for approximately 500 million years, which in Stross's continuum is an alien creature, introduced to Earth via the gate under Lake Vostok. In our own continuum, anomalocaris is pretty weird.
100: cauliflower head: One of the distinctive features of the Elder Things or Predecessors.
102: minox: Film from a type of miniature camera developed in the 1930s and commonly used by mid-20th century spies.
on the Baltic Floor: The Cthulhu "entity" in the Koschei bunker is either an avatar or copy of HPL's original (which lay "undead and sleeping" beneath the Pacific Ocean), or else Cthulhu's tomb-city of R'lyeh is in Stross's continuum under the Baltic Sea. One supposes it would have been difficult for the Nazis to reach the South Pacific, even with Japanese help.
103: Baltic Singularity: The intelligence community's use of the word "Singularity" to describe Cthulhu makes it clear that the entity lies beyond explanation by conventional twentieth-century science.
104: shy bald admiral: John Poindexter, National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan.
End-user certificates: Issued by arms manufacturers to their customers to prevent, often ineffectively, the resale of weapons.
105: Jermyn Street: High-end London men's tailoring district.
Old man Ruhollah: Ayatollah Khomenei, supreme religious leader of revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1989.
106: very dangerous men: Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed religious terrorist group whose capture of several American hostages in 1984-85 initiated the Iran-Contra scandal.
Unholy brotherhood of Tikrit: Presumably an Iraqi cult, associated with Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, which worships the Lovecraftian deity Yog-Sothoth (a deity associated with inter-dimensional gates) and uses his power against Iran, with which Iraq was then at war.
Mukhabarat: See page 110.
Bekaa: Valley in Lebanon where Hezbollah was based during that country's civil war.
107: Leng: Mythical plateau which was the site of an evil kingdom of flesh-eating sorcerers in HPL's work. Leng may have been in central Asia, in the other-worldly Dream Lands, in Antarctica (hence Mehmet's reference to "icy spoor"), or all of these places at once.
Kitab al-Azif: The Necronomicon, a legendary book of summoning spells found in several of HPL's stories. Its author, Abd Al-hazred, was allegedly devoured by invisible demons.
F-14C: Revolutionary Iran used a number of American weapons that were either acquired by the Shah (who was an American ally) or illegally sold to the Iranian government as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Dimona: In the real world, Israel played an intermediary role in the shipment of American weapons to Iran, but none were nuclear.
109: advanced robotic systems: HPL implied that the shoggoths were biological, but Stross's explanation makes more technical sense, and reflects the kind of concepts that the American and Soviet intelligence communities would have used to understand them.
Utility fog: Actually, this idea appears to have been prefigured in a 1964 novel by Stanislaw Lem.
Molotov Raid: Presumably, a Soviet expedition which looted the Elder Thing / Precursor city in Antarctica after the return of the Pabodie Expedition.
110: weakly godlike agencies: a carryover term from SF-nal speculation about transhuman intelligence, used in Stross's own science fiction novels.
K-thulhu: Since it is supposedly impossible for humans correctly to pronounce "Cthulhu," Roger's spelling and pronunciation of the name is as correct as any other. One may infer from it that this world's intelligence community reserves the "K-" prefix for Mythos-related places, beings, and technology.
111: Buckminster Fuller: inventor of the geodesic dome.
113: cracked some kinda joke: Reagan did, in fact, make the aforementioned joke about "outlaw[ing] Russia forever" over an inadvertently open mike (1984), and apparently the Soviet Union did take it seriously and put one of its armies on alert. CPSU officials were not known for their sense of humor.
115: Ligachev: Soviet Communist Party hardliner and putative successor to Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.
gate into Sothoth: Curiously, Stross isn't the only person in the world to speculate (tongue-in-cheek) that Saddam Hussein would be interested in mucking about with Cthulhu Mythos lore and monsters. Tyler Stewart, proprietor of Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, Mass., told me in 1991 he was playing around with the same idea.
Yellow rain: a fungal poison allegedly weaponized and used by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
WarPac: Warsaw Pact
SS-20: Intermediate-range ballistic missile deployed by the USSR in the 1970s and '80s.
Koschei is loose: Stross leaves open the question of whether the Project's directors unleashed Cthulhu against the Americans or against Saddam Hussein's temple/gate of Yog Sothoth. In the end, I suppose, it matters not.
**
(Links added 21 Aug. 2015.)
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Timeline of Events in Vinge's Across Realtime Novels
The following is a timeline of events in Vernor Vinge's "Across Realtime" series of novels and stories - specifically, The Peace War (1984), Marooned in Realtime (1986), and the short story "The Ungoverned" (1985), which can be found in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2002). Obviously, this timeline contains spoilers, and one should probably not read through it without at least having read Marooned in Realtime.
1992-93: Livermore Energy Labs developer Paul Hoehler discovers containment field ("bobble")
1992-93: Livermore Energy Labs developer Paul Hoehler discovers containment field ("bobble")
1997: Peace Authority (PA) seizes
power after instigating limited nuclear war between U.S. and Soviet Union
1997-2010: War viruses and genetic
plagues kill 5.5 billion worldwide
2015: Huachuca war plague, released
by surviving remnant of U.S. government, kills 100 million of remaining 500
million humans
2020s: PA discontinues radar watch
for illegal aerospace craft
2038: Middle California Tinkers
agree to hide their best new electronics gear to avoid PA detection
2040s: PA embobbles Yakima after
discovering DNA recombination analyzer
2047-48: Bobble War; fall of Peace
Authority
2050s: Longevity breakthrough
2080s: Water War between New Mexico
and Aztlan (over Colorado River, presumably)
2090s: Disgovernance of Aztlan; New
Mexicans invade Kansas
2097: Republic of NM renounces tax
authority and effectively disgoverns
2100: W.W. Brierson shanghaied;
family bobbles gifts in 2140 and 2180
2101: Livermore returns to realtime
2150s: Della Lu and Miguel Rosas
explore outer Solar System
2160: "Philippe Genet"
becomes construction contractor
2190s: Miguel Rosas dies on Dark
Companion expedition
2195: Monica Raines enters stasis
2197: Mudge leaves systems
programming and becomes chiliast
2200: Jason Mudge and Juan Chanson
enter stasis
2201: Korolevs and Genet enter
stasis
2202: Della Lu departs for
Gatewood's Star (Lalande 21185)
2207: Tunc Blumenthal's company
opens antimatter distillery in southern solar hemisphere, begins plans to turn
Dark Companion into Tipler Cylinder*
2209: Blumenthal attends marketing
conference on Moon; can't understand discussions but thinks Stellation, Inc.
has lost interest in Dark Companion project
2210: Tunc Blumenthal enters stasis,
crashes into sun
2230: Juan Chanson claims Norcross
graffiti were composed this year
2295: Mudge out of stasis; notes he
is past Singularity
2465: Rohan and Dilip Dasgupta leave
stasis
3400: Lu returns from Gatewood's Star; finds evidence of nuclear war
10,000: Korolevs move Dasguptas and
others to Canada
32,000: W.W. Sanchez and Korolevs
rescue T. Blumenthal
62,000: Blumenthal re-enters
realtime
MY 20: Grave robbers wiped out by
Korolevs and others
MY 30: W.W. Sanchez founds dropout
community
MY 49.5: Dragon birds evolve
MY 50: Rescue of Peace Authority
bobble in Cambodia. Della Lu returns
from interstellar expedition
MY 50 + 2 years: Marta Korolev
reaches Peacer bobble
MY 50 + 40 years: Marta Korolev dies
MY 50.050: Peacers leave stasis and
found own town. Brierson
investigation. Peacer-NM-High tech war.
MY 50.060: Juan Chanson dies; Earth in ice age
MY 50.1: Della Lu returns after
defeating Gerrault
(Links added 21 Aug. 2015.)
* A Tipler Cylinder is a very long, rapidly-rotating tube which transects the space-time geodesics ("light cones") of one or more stars. The cylinder's mass and velocity bend those geodesics into timelike curves, allowing a traveler to move backwards in time along them.
(Links added 21 Aug. 2015.)
* A Tipler Cylinder is a very long, rapidly-rotating tube which transects the space-time geodesics ("light cones") of one or more stars. The cylinder's mass and velocity bend those geodesics into timelike curves, allowing a traveler to move backwards in time along them.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Vinge's Road to the Singularity
Vernor Vinge's 1986 novel Marooned in Realtime undertakes two different tasks, succeeding brilliantly at one and achieving some success, of a rather peculiar sort, in the second. Its first goal was to tell a mystery story stretched across several millennia of future time, and to convey the impact of those millennia on ordinary human beings. This, Vinge certainly achieves. He was probably the first science fiction author so vividly to convey, on a human scale, the massive changes that can occur in deep geological time: the emergence of strange but believable new species, the reshaping of continents, even the slowing of the earth's rotation. Vinge is able to do this because the protagonists of his novel have access to high technology that shields them from the dangers of their environment and the ravages of time – in particular, a tunable stasis field, or "bobble," that prevents the occupants from experiencing the passage of time and protects them from outside forces. (The bobble is a holdover from Vinge's otherwise forgettable prequel novel, The Peace War, a mediocre post-holocaust adventure story.) When conflict or skullduggery separates Vinge's characters from their tech – well, that's when things get particularly interesting.
Vinge's second goal was to explore the impact of high technology on human intelligence, and this exploration yielded a surprising and, as it turned out, very influential result: the idea that we now refer to as "the Singularity." Vinge began his journey to the Singularity with his very first story, about a human with computer-enhanced intelligence. His younger and more sensible sister persuaded him to set this half-baked first effort aside in favor of another story idea about a chimpanzee with computer-enhanced intelligence. The result was "Bookworm, Run!" (1966), Vinge's first published SF story (and a very entertaining story at that). When Vinge subsequently tried to publish his original story of a super-intelligent human, however, editor John W. Campbell sent him a rejection letter with the note "You can't write this story. Neither can anyone else." Campbell's point was that human beings don’t have the intellectual tools to understand someone with super-human intelligence, from which one can infer that we can't comprehend a society built by ultra-intelligent people, either.
Vernor Vinge returned to the theme of ultra-intelligent people in his first novel, Grimm's World (1969), and his proto-cyberpunk novella "True Names" (1980), in which characters with genetically or computer-enhanced intelligence conquer their worlds, or at least threaten to do so. In an 1983 Omni article, and more extensively in Marooned in Realtime, he finally embraced and built on Campbell's implied point that superhuman intelligence produces motives incomprehensible to humans. Trans-humans, Vinge observes, could develop technologies that modern human minds simply couldn't understand, and thus would either have solved or lost interest in human problems and solutions. (In the novel, one group of slightly super-intelligent humans develops the means, in the early twenty-third century, to distill antimatter directly from the sun and to construct a time machine; another population of slightly more super-intelligent humans, just two years later, finds these projects boring.) The path that a society of transhumans would follow is not one that ordinary humans could possibly predict or comprehend. As in the interior of a black hole, ordinary rules of human behavior break down in the presence of super-human intelligence; like a black hole, it creates a singularity in human societies.
This is probably what lies behind the largest mystery in Vinge's novel: what happened to all the people? The main characters of Marooned in Realtime entered stasis for a variety of reasons, but all emerged sometime after 2250 CE, to discover that Earth's cities were completely abandoned and in ruins. Much speculation about what happened follows, but the hypothesis advanced by astronauts Della Lu and Tunc Blumenthal seems to be the one Vinge favors (though he doesn't ever come out and say so): that human beings evolved into a ultra-intelligent form and disappeared, leaving this plane of existence for one more suited to their unfathomable interests. This is sort of what happened at the conclusion of Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, though Vinge chose to treat the Singularity as a prologue to a first-rate adventure and deep-future time-travel story, rather than the conclusion of his tale. Writers like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow may call the Singularity hypothesis "the rapture of the nerds," but Vinge at least was willing to suggest that life would go on, and remain interesting, for those Left Behind.