Ridley Scott's Socialist Science Fiction Classic

Socialists have inflicted much impenetrable prose and lugubrious narrative upon the world, but their outsider status and  extensive reading of theoretical texts often give them insights denied to us drones in the mainstream. At the Socialism 2014 conference in Chicago last month, Nicole Coleson enthralled a packed room with her brilliant presentation on “Capitalism and Horror,” a connection that only seemed obvious to me once someone else had made it. She noted Upton Sinclair's early success in presenting capitalism as a horror story in The Jungle (1906), wherein work in an industrial slaughterhouse converted workers into machines or worse. Coleson then discussed the importation of Sinclair's themes into two seminal horror movies of the 1970s*, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (whose villains had themselves been slaughterhouse workers) and Alien.

In the latter movie, with which I suspect my readers are familiar, a nameless** Company demands obedience from its employees, even Captain Dallas – things on the ship Nostromo happen, he tells protagonist Ripley, “because that's what the Company wants to happen" – sets them against one another with a hierarchy of rank and pay, and sends them to retrieve a hideously dangerous but valuable alien species which uses human beings, in Coleson's words, “as its eggs.” This is figuratively true in the case of crew-member Kane, whom the juvenile alien “cracks open” in the film's most memorable scene. It becomes literally true in a scene cut from the original theatrical release, in which Ripley discovers that the adult alien has begun converting the captured Dallas and Brett into egg pods, presumably to incubate the “facehuggers” that restart its life-cycle.

The filmmakers intensify the characters' alienation from their employers by introducing two additional non-human characters who, we gradually learn, outrank the humans: the ship's computer, “Mother,” who informs the surviving crew members that they are expendable, and the science officer, a concealed robot who has been studying, protecting, and admiring the alien all along. Officer Ash's description of the alien as “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality” reminds one of the profile and behavior of a modern corporation, like the Company. Arguably, everyone on the Nostromo has been working for an alien intelligence all along.

Ash the robot science officer is the model of a good employee***: he keeps his own counsel, obeys his orders, and admires the alien, which suggests he probably also admires the corporation which employs him. The others are less ideal: they decide in the end to blow up the giant factory-like ship in which they work, along with its payload – “the money,” as Dallas called it. Take that, capitalist swine!

Incidentally, Dan O'Bannon, Alien's scriptwriter, hated the idea of making Ash a robot and creating a conflict between the Company and its employees. To the extent that this conflict makes Alien a more engaging, more relevant, and more humanistic movie, the credit belongs to co-writers Walter Hill and David Giler, and to Ridley Scott, whose subsequent descent into crapulence should not obscure our appreciation of his earlier work. But, then, Scott began his career as a director of television commercials, so he knew rather more about capitalism and popular demand than the average sci-fi fan. If he has turned from thoughtful speculations on alienation and the human condition to mindless spectacles like Gladiator, perhaps this says more about audiences than directors.

*Coleson also discussed, at length, the novel and film versions of The Shining, both of which include a critique of American upward mobility: as the plot progresses, Jack Torrance becomes more loyal to his employers than his family, and eventually starts taking orders from the wealthy ghost-patrons of the Overlook. They reward him with a permanent invite to one of their parties. Stanley Kubrick always did like happy endings.

** Nominally identified in the film as “Weyland-Yutani,” but you'd have to look pretty close to catch that.

*** Not surprisingly, since the word “robot” means “worker” in Czech. It first received its modern meaning in Karel Capek's play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum's Universal Robots).” James Cameron, in the sequel Aliens (1986), took Isaac Asimov's robots, rather than Capek's, as the model for the android character Bishop. Notably, Bishop is much more concerned for his co-workers than his employers.

Lost Carcosa

Fans of the HBO series True Detective (2014), which your humble narrator recently watched en bloc, have praised the show not only for its excellent acting and direction, but also for writer/creator Nic Pizzolotto's intelligent and subtle incorporation of themes from American occult fiction. On the surface, Season One of TD is a buddy-cop story, in which two deeply dysfunctional but ultimately simpatico detectives track the leaders of a murderous pagan cult. Just below the surface, the story crawls with references, some obvious and some veiled, to H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and his works. One of the main characters, Rust Cohle, actually resembles author photos of Lovecraft: tall, gaunt, affectless, conservatively dressed, toting a ledger reminiscent of a musty old grimoire. In Episode 5, Cohle, in a double allusion to the extra-dimensional horrors of Lovecraftian fiction and to Edwin Abbott's Flatland, argues that extra-dimensional observers would perceive humans' lives as endlessly repetitive circles. The series as a whole takes place in Louisiana, one of the settings of HPL's seminal story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and its villains reek of rural degeneracy, incest, and insanity, themes in several of Lovecraft's stories. Those villains, the cultists, recognize Cohle's inner darkness and amplify his eerie trans-dimensional musings with their own references to a dark cosmos beyond this one (“black stars”) and, more notably, to “the Yellow King” and “Carcosa.”

These last two references are actually to characters and places Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chambers' anthology The King in Yellow. Chambers's stories tell of an evil supernatural king, a haunted city, and a cursed play that unites them. (Chambers, in turn, borrowed names and ideas from Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allen Poe.) More recent fantasy writers have used either Carcosa or the Yellow King in their works: Marion Zimmer Bradley, for instance, employed the place names “Carcosa,” “Hastur,” and “Hali” (all from Chambers's mythosphere) in her Darkover novels, while Lawrence Watt-Evans used the Yellow King as a major character in his under-appreciated Lords of Dus novels. The Lovecraftian Call of Cthulhu role-playing game had several adventures referring to these arcane entities.

True Detective, to the best of my knowledge, is the only television series to employ these references, and also the only one to show a version of Carcosa itself. Episode 8 portrays this mythical place as a maze-like jumble of rooms, cluttered with timbers and brambles and children's clothing, within an abandoned underground fort. My “read” on TD's Carcosa is that Pizzolotto intended it only to serve as an avatar or manifestation of the actual city, which according to Chambers and Lovecraft actually stands on another world, somewhere in the Hyades or near the star Aldebaran. The show itself remains silent on this matter, but it has kept all such otherworldly entities entirely off-screen. Cohle makes vague references to unseen pan-dimensional beings, the evil cultists make sacrifices to someone or something undefined, the Yellow King appears by name but never in the flesh*, and no actual monsters appear except for human beings who commit monstrous acts. (One of the most resonant scenes in the series, in Episode 3, has Cohle intoning "there's a monster at the end of it" right before viewers get their first look at cult leader Reggie Ledoux, half-naked and face hidden by a gas mask.) “Carcosa” is thus, I would suggest, an earthly place warped by spiritual or ideational proximity to the actual otherworldly city of madness**, just as the monstrous beings at the heart of True Detective's storyline are earthly humans warped by their devotion to supernatural or otherworldly beings. Whether these beings actually “exist” within the series's milieu, or are just figments of cultists' imaginations, is another question Pizzolotto leaves unanswered, and perhaps that's just as well. The worst horrors are usually the ones readers or viewers conjure up in their own minds, just as the most outre and fearsome demons are the ones that stare back at us out of the mirror.

* Jason Shankel of io9 has an alternate theory about the Yellow King, one which is consistent with other clues in the series but also takes away some TD's supernatural frisson.

** That proximity may be more than just spiritual: at the heart of the “Carcosa” maze, Cohle briefly glimpses a hovering, luminous, coelenterate structure that may in fact be a gate to another reality, or to the actual Carcosa.

Princess Pimp-tastic

Hiero's Journey, Chapter 11, Continued:

(For the previous installment of this series, transport yourself hither.)

In out last installment, a rescue party of dryads led by the redoubtable Princess Luchare managed to save Hiero's paralyzed bacon, and very nearly destroyed the vast psychic hive-creature known as The House. Shortly before bedding down for the night, however, the heroes determine that The House has not been permanently defeated – it manages to preserve a third of its realm by inducing some of its subordinate fungi to extrude a fireproof resin (273). Spoiler alert: We will be meeting this particular villain again.

Our heroes then go to sleep, and Hiero has one last dream vision of Vilah-ree, who lures him to her boudoir for splintery sexytime. Per Desteen is very taken with Vilah-ree's “cold” white body, which gives him something in common with Bella Swan. The next morning Captain Gimp suggests that other tree women visited the various sailors in their dreams. One hopes they don't develop oneiric arboriform chlamydia.

Luchare turns up with a jeweled golden torc obtained from Vilah-ree. It turns out her previous day's conversation with Lady V concerned granting the dryads permission to use Hiero and his male companions for stud service – this particular race of humanoids can only reproduce with aid of humans. This is reminiscent of dryads in the D&D multiverse, and I suspect Lanier is the original influence here. Hiero has an angry exchange with Luchare about this arrangement, but in the end he decides that the teenager is more upset than he is, and anyway, it's a nice bit of bling.

After breaking camp and bidding their farewells to dryad land, Hiero and his band head southward, skirting the edge of the forest, before turning into the remnant domain of the House. Hiero gets skittish when the group approaches a surviving puffball field but Luchare urges the group onward. Later, Hiero gets angry with his fiancee's insubordination and off-handedly threatens to “spank” Luchare if she doesn't obey his marching orders – but I think we've determined who the real pimp is here. I mean that in a kindly and constructive way, of course.

The travelers split into search parties, and eventually Gorm the mutant bear discovers a mound covered with grass and thorns, under which he smells metal. He and the others dig out an ancient door made of “white bronze” (286), which Lanier identifies to the readers as aluminum alloy. (Hiero and co. would never have seen this before, as aluminum is very expensive to refine without electricity). Prying open the door, the party sees a very, very long staircase leading deep into to the earth, and into the conclusion of the novel. 

Coming next: High time for a climactic underground SMACKDOWN.

Leering Fungus Beastie, Avenging Princess

Hiero's Journey, Chapter 11:

(For the previous installment in this series, click here.)

At the top of Chapter Eleven, and from the top of the forest, the Dryad Queen Vilah-ree tells Hiero a little bit more about his new adversary, The House. This formidable mutant slime-mold, Per Desteen realizes, probably occupies the very site of the ruined city he had traveled so far to find. This convenient coincidence reconciles him to doing battle with the monster, though in his patriarchal way he does ask if there are any dryad-type men who can help him fight. Vilah-ree first says no, then backtracks and says there are none capable of fighting. We will learn the cause of her hesitation later in the chapter.

Hiero also demands to see his companions again, and Vilah-ree, at length, agrees. Once the priest and dryad return to the companions' campsite all of Hiero's compadres have a good leer, and Brother Aldo gives Vilah-ree a pious swat on the bottom, which she ignores. The dryad queen asks to have a word alone with Hiero's fiancee Luchare, presumably about post-apocalyptic girl stuff. “Women! Who knew what they were thinking?” asks Hiero (p. 264). I am tempted to say “Not Lanier,” but we've already established that Per Desteen isn't omniscient, and by mid-chapter it becomes clear that Vilah-ree and Luchare have motives that make sense to the reader but which Hiero can't predict. This is better characterization than one finds in the average pulp novel, and Lanier deserves some credit for it.

After Vilah-ree and Luchare have their private chat, a party of dryads leads Hiero and his core companions to the edge of the forest, where they are stopped by the overpowering odor of corruption. Gorm and Hiero go ahead as scouts, leaving Aldo and Luchare behind. The latter is quite angry at being ditched again, and as it turns out her anger will prove Hiero's salvation.

Per Desteen and his mutant bear friend advance into a landscape of evil mushrooms, puffballs, and blowflies, all of which turn out to be part of The House's collective intelligence. The flies alert the enemy to the intruders' presence, and abruptly The House seizes control of Hiero's mind. As Hiero stands paralyzed, with his foe extruding psychic tendrils into his brain, he learns that The House is a hive mind, with many life-forms' mentalities “swarming like so many maggots in and through the gelid and gelatinous structure” (268). It is also more than a little Borg-like, and mentally urges Hiero, “leeringly” as Lanier puts it, to abandon his physical body and become part of the all-consuming hive. Is The House trying to seduce Hiero or just eat him? Both, apparently. That's just how post-apocalyptic wastelands roll. 

Fortunately for Hiero, he is not alone with Mssr./Mlle.* House. The House has no interest in mutant bears, and Gorm is able to interrupt Hiero's communion with the slime-hive, allowing Per Desteen to regain control of his mind if not his limbs. Then, as the giant slime creature with burning tentacles from Chapter 10 hoves into view, Hiero's other companions come to the rescue. Luchare, who I suspect is the leader of the rescue party, and Aldo and several of the dryads enter the scene and shoot flaming arrows at the monster. The House proves highly inflammable, and the flames quickly spread to the nearby fungi and puffballs, cleansing the land of the fungal menace and its “filthy vapors” (272).

Luchare apparently got fed up with Hiero's insistence that she stay out of harm's way, and decided to prove that she hadn't forgotten the combat skills she learned earlier in the narrative. It seems that you can only patronize and marginalize a D'alwah princess for so long before she decides she has to rescue you from certain death.

Coming next: Hiero does field research on the reproductive cycle of the post-apocalyptic dryad.

* I assume The House is of indeterminate gender, but it doesn't hurt to be polite.

Low-Budget Galadriel

Hiero's Journey, Chapter 10 (Continued):

(For the previous entry in this series, go here.)

It doesn't actually take Aldo and Hiero long to catch up with the readers and discover there is a Disturbance in the Force, and after a Mind-Mojo scan of the forest Hiero reports that he has seen from afar the ghostly form of a green-eyed and greenish-skinned woman. This future mutant dryad-thing appears to be watching the party, and possibly reading its thoughts. Luchare immediately gets mad and says she is jealous of the green woman, and Hiero and Aldo paternalistically dismiss her “female anger” (250) so they can get on with more important guy things. I would give Lanier a hard time about this, but A) it's not entirely out of character for Luchare, who is very young and from an overly privileged background, and B) it's not entirely out of character for two priests to act like douchebags toward women. Anyway, none of these three characters are particularly important to the reader at the moment: what interests us, or what should interest us, is the identity of the Mysterious Vilah-ree, and to what stereotype she conforms. I'm putting my money on "Low-Budget Galadriel."

As Hiero and company debate turning around and getting the hell out of Dodge, Gorm informs Hiero and Aldo that the return path has been blocked by some large, ominous mutant beast, or so his Spidey-bear senses tell him. The travelers reluctantly continue onward, until they reach a large clearing in the woods, festooned with moss and lit by an unsettling light. These magical clearings have a way of appearing in the strangest places, don't they? This one contains three tables loaded down with food and wine, which, after some consulting with his mojo - actually, with the same mysterious green woman Hiero has seen - Gorm confirms are safe to eat. The party tucks in, and most of them go to sleep shortly thereafter. Hiero tries to stay awake and stay on watch, but either the food was drugged, or the wine was very powerful, or his mysterious host is just too psychically powerful, because he too passes out.

**

Hiero then has a dream vision of the green woman, who is nekkid and kind of purty. "The manhood in him rose to the sexual challenge of her shape" (254), which I'm sure is just a figure of speech. (Ahem.) He is also oddly repelled, because the woman appears to be a construct run by some sort of plant intelligence. Reading this, I could not help but think of Bela Lugosi's line about women and vampire movies in Ed Wood: "It both ATTRACTS and REPELS them." Presumably men are the same way with beautiful plant women. I must therefore conclude that Luchare was right to be jealous of this 76th-century dryad. You're welcome.

Mlle. Green identifies herself with a string of syllable sounding like "Vilah-ree," which Hiero decides to use as her name. After showing Hiero that his companions are still asleep and unharmed, she leads Dream-Hiero out of the virtual audience chamber where she had met him, and up to the top of one of the taller trees in the forest, from which they can get a good view of the radioactive wasteland nearby. It is clearly a very dangerous and threatening place, even more so than the usual radioactive wasteland. Between the desert and the forest is the front line of a biological attack: “sickly,” “diseased” fungi cling to dying trees, and a giant slime creature, with a body of “dark, rotted velvet” and pseudopods tipped with “putrid orange fire” (257) roams the land. Lanier's description of the fungi forest includes this line: “Even as he watched, a bloated bag of some monster puffball sort exploded, and the view was momentarily darkened by the billions of tiny spores [it] scattered” (ibid). I wonder if Hayao Miyazaki read this novel before directing Nausicaa, as this image is very reminiscent of his post-apocalyptic toxic jungle.

Vilah-ree says that the slime monster, and presumably the fungi, are creatures of The House, an alien intelligence that, presumably, Hiero must now help Mlle. Dryad defeat. Good luck with that, Per Desteen.

Coming next: Come and play with us, Hiero, forever and ever and ever...

(The illustration above is of a Public Domain Dryad. Like many of my readers, I prefer my Public Domain Dryads clothed, and not necessarily green. YMMV.)

Settlers Ain't All That

Since its release in the mid-1990s The Settlers of Catan has been a name to conjure with in the gaming community. Combining some of the colonization, trade, and development features of Civilization with the blocking strategies of railroad games, Settlers quickly gained a big fan base and helped start a craze (in the United States) for so-called Eurogames, heavy on strategy and light on theme. It also generated many supplements and spin-offs, such as Seafarers of Catan, Starfarers of Catan, and Settlers of America; a collectors' edition with a molded resin board; and many lavishly detailed and scaled-up home models of the original game, some of which one can find at GenCon and other gaming conventions. Settlers generates much excitement among neophyte gamers who have never played it before but heard good things about it. Once they've tried it out a few times, however, their excitement usually fades. I know mine has. Why?

1)      It takes too darn long. I've rarely played a game of Settlers that wrapped up in less than two hours, and three-hour games aren't unheard of. Long games are fine if, like History of the World or Through the Ages, they give players lots of choices to make, but simple entry-level titles like this one, or Alhambra, or Guillotine should take only about 45-60 minutes.

2)      There's too much luck involved and too much potential downtime as a result. An unlucky player who sets his/her initial settlements next to land tiles that the dice don't like can spend long stretches of the game doing little more than rolling those dice, while others steadily accumulate the resources they need to build new roads and settlements and thereby acquire more resources. Bad die rolls deprive players of the ability to make choices, and the paralytic effects of bad luck are cumulative.

3)      There's little incentive for players to trade. Presumably players should benefit from exchanging resources they need with each other, but as the game progresses the advantages that trade gives to the active player grow too great to risk. No-one wants to give a rival the means to complete the Longest Road or build the new city that will probably hand them the game. Interactivity thus quickly turns into “screw your neighbors” (by moving the Robber or blocking other players' expansion), and nothing else. I've had more than one Settlers game end with my feeling like I'd just played a stupider version of Diplomacy.

Some of these problems are theoretically fixable. Giving players who receive no resources on a given die roll a gold token that can be swapped, 2-to-1, for any resource card is one way to deal with Problem 2. So is creating some sort of mechanism for borrowing resources from the game supply or other players, with a victory-point penalty if they don't repay the loan with interest in a set period. However, a game that has been around for twenty years shouldn't still need basic repairs to make it appealing. There are certainly variants and spin-offs that I enjoy: the Cities & Knights of Catan expansion makes for an appealing, if very long version of the base game, and the spin-off games Settlers of America and Merchants of Europe are well-made geographical variants with some agreeable historical “chrome.” I wouldn't recommend any of these for beginners, however, and I don't think I would recommend the original game to anyone. In the world of designer board games, older doesn't necessarily mean better.

The Blood-Sucking Monkeys of Northern Ohio

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Ten:

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

We begin this new chapter with a brief change of scene, from the pirate battle on the Inland Sea to the evil port city of Neeyana (named for the ancient land of Indiana, wherever that may be). There, in an Evil Tower, members of the Evil Unclean Mutant conspiracy's “Yellow Circle” are meeting to discuss our hero Hiero Desteen and whether he can be stopped before he achieves his goal. They reveal to the reader that they are tracking Hiero's movements, which Per Desteen has not quite figured out himself. Only bad things can come of this, we realize.

Back on the good ship Foam Girl, Hiero and Brother Aldo study a map they captured from the pirates and EUMs they defeated in the last chapter. We learn that it is an Evil Map, which reveals that “Neeyana is wholly given over to evil” (231). (I believe that's also the modern Indiana state motto.) It also displays an Evil Trail heading south through the Great American Forest, whose northern fringes, Captain Gimp helpfully notes, are inhabited by "a wee kind of red dwarf man with poisoned arrows" (233). Presumably these descend from modern Ohioans. At the trail's end lies a ruined city bordering a wasteland, contaminated by radio-cobalt bombs in centuries past. There, allegedly, is the Macguffin Hiero has spent the whole novel trying to find, i.e., the Computer.

After an uneasy night's sleep Hiero realizes the mind shields he captured from the pirates in the last chapter are probably also tracking devices, and he destroys them. But too late! Aldo senses an EUM lightning-ship in hot pursuit, and Captain Gimp runs the Foam Girl into a mangrove swamp to elude them. The EUMs set fire to the heroes' ship with their lightning gun, but the crew, or most of it, manages to escape into the forest.

The two dozen sailors, ex-pirates, and assorted hangers-on who now constitute Hiero's companions head south, where, later that day, they are attacked by a giant mutant animal, because Lanier has a random-action-scene quota to meet. The beast may be a neo-mammoth of some kind. Aldo calls it a "poro," and reports that he mentally directed it to run off to the Inland Sea and cool its feet, which it had wounded in another battle. In any event, Mssr. Poro blunders through the travelers' camp and charges off to the north without hurting anyone. Whew.

Another anti-climactic scene soon follows, as Brother Aldo and Captain Gimp have a brief altercation. Gimp wants to know who will pay him for his destroyed ship. Aldo tells him the Eleveners will compensate him. The captain says, essentially, "Well, that's good enough for me! Orders, please!" Apparently he is Agreeable Doormat Captain.

The travelers continue south into the Great American Forest, which is hot and tropical and full of monkeys. We are reminded that the climate of North America has greatly warmed since the Final War, as monkeys are not currently endemic to northern Ohio. Later that day, two of the sailors, presumably wearing red shirts, are killed in a hit-and-run raid by giant mutant foxes, and two more are hauled off that evening by large unnamed creature, possibly a giant blood-sucking monkey. Hiero agrees that he and Aldo and Luchare and Gorm, who have greater mind-mojo than their companions, will take watches henceforth. One suspects that Gorm will sleep through his watches, or possibly just suck his paws, like C.S. Lewis's Bulgy Bears.

A few days later the sojourners reach a fork in the trail that does not appear on their maps, but decide to continue south anyway, thereby entering “the realm of Vilah-ree, unknowing” (248).  Whom this mysterious female-type person might be, and what she may want of Hiero and his cohorts, is the principal subject of the next post in this series.

**

Coming next: The House is indahouse.