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.

Guilty Pleasures: Deathrace 2000

I was too young to see Death Race 2000 in the theater, and while the movie remained a kind of lurking presence in my life, making appearances in Stephen King's The Stand and in the acknowledgments to Car Wars (one of the designer games I played), I never watched it until the 1990s and didn't learn to enjoy the film until very recently. This is because it is actually rather bad. Produced on a shoestring budget by schlock-movie producer Roger Corman, Death Race features wooden acting, less sophisticated production values than the average junior prom, and a script that probably owes more of its inspiration to the studio coke-wrangler than the writers. (The movie's slapped-together dystopian future, featuring a dictator with a summer palace in Beijing, an economic collapse, and fake French terrorists, makes no sense unless one realizes it was probably written between lines of blow.) One needs a certain level of patience and experience before one can appreciate bad movies as camp.

As I recently discovered, DR2000 actually has a good bit of charm, stemming from Corman's ability to attract a variety of talents to his movies. The central plot device, a coast-to-coast road race in which contestants win points for running over pedestrians, makes little sense except as a fantasy, but like George Romero's contemporaneous zombie movies it makes for lots of action and several opportunities for humor. I am thinking in particular of the nursing-home that used the Deathrace to dispose of inmates ("Euthanasia Day"), the commentators' observation that it was tragic that one victim was only 38 because he would have been worth more points at 40, and the color commentators' own over-the-top expressions and commentary. These last were played by disc-jockey Don Steele and talented career actress Joyce Jameson; theirs was the least wooden acting in the film, but several others had opportunities to prove their acting chops, including Sylvester Stallone, who delivered his goofy lines with a certain thuggish enthusiasm. (E.g. “You know, Myra, some people might think you’re cute, but me, I think you’re a very large baked potato.” No, I don't know what it means either.) Recognizing that the movie's script didn't exactly give the actors much room for, you know, acting, the director and production designers instead differentiated between the racers by giving each one a campy, stereotyped theme: one racer (Stallone) had a hoodlum's car with a giant switchblade attached, one (David Carradine) drove a lizard car, went by the sobriquet “Frankenstein,” and wore a leather fetish suit and gimp mask, one car had a bull's horns and cowgirl driver (“Calamity Jane”), and one had a Nazi theme. To add an additional element of conflict, the writers threw in an underground resistance movement determined to sabotage the race, whose leader was the elderly “Thomasina Paine.” How cool is that?

As one reviewer concluded, “You’re not here to hear discourse on the decline of America, you’re here to see these ridiculous cars kill a bunch of people, have a few laughs, and see some women take their clothes off .” And David Carradine, who manages to disrobe gracefully even when marinated in whiskey. As he usually was.  

*

Image above via Wikimedia Commons. Deathrace 2000 is (I think) Copyright (c) 1975 by New World Pictures.

Avast Ye Scurvy Dogs

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Nine (continued):

For the previous installment of this series, use your web-linking mojo to link here:

Having run afoul of a ship-load of pirates on the Inland Sea, Hiero tries to divert the scurvy dogs by using his mind mojo.  He mentally persuades one of the pirates, a red-shirt named Gimmer, to kill the pirates' helmsmen, but pirate archers shoot Gimmer dead before he has a chance.  Apparently, they were very much on their guard against Mister Mojo.  A second attempt to kill the helmsman also fails: Per Desteen seizes control of one of the archers, but only manages to take down an unnamed sailor before the other pirates kill his pawn.  Lanier doesn't spare much sympathy for these mooks, which is unfortunate because I believe they all had the potential for better lives, like Chee-Chowk in Chapter Six.

The pirate ship, which Captain Gimp identifies as the Ravished Bride, overtakes the Foam Girl.  It is a much larger sailing vessel with a huge expanse of canvas, and Mssr. Gimp describes it as “unprintably lovely” (215), which I suspect is not actually the adjective he used.  The pirate crew is, as we have noted, a stereotypical band of cutthroats.  Lanier spares a little more detail for the captain, Bald Roke, a colorful villain with a facial scar (it was a prerequisite for the job) who wears “orange velvet” and lots of bling, including a “mechanical” psychic shield that was apparently a gift from the EUM Conspiracy.  Alas, he lacks that essential accessory of every well-dressed pirate: a mascot.  Lanier could have given us a mutant cyclops parrot cursing in a French Canadian accent, or a three-tailed pet monkey with a moustache and a miniature zap gun, but either he was in too serious a mood, or too pressed to move on with the plot.

Just before the pirates assemble an evil boarding party to take the Foam Girl, Brother Aldo manages to summon some animalian help, in the form of two large mutant water birds who menace the pirate ship and force its captain to parlay.  Mssr. Bald Roke demands, modestly enough, that Captain Gimp hand over Hiero and Luchare.  The other captain tells him to go “fry your crew of man-eaters in human grease” (218). Roke has a good opening here to reply “Well, we do have some extra human grease lying around...” but he isn't in the mood to joke either.  Instead, he listens as Captain Gimp challenges him to fight a duel for clear passage, then counterproposes a doubles match, with Hiero and the Gimp* as one of the teams.

The duel, staged aboard the Ravished Bride, is fought with sword, shield, and a minimum of actual whoop-ass.  Hiero's opposite number turns out to be a new kind of mutant, a “Glith,” with scaly skin and dead grey eyes.  Hiero taunts Roke and Mister Glith before the battle: “The grave yawns for all of them [i.e., the pirates] and for this creature and for you as well” (220).  Advice for aspiring writers: avoid using the word “yawn” before a battle scene, as it will tend to anesthetize your readers.  It might even anesthetize your hero: rather than quickly succumb to Hiero's combat mojo, the Glith proceeds to hypnotize Hiero with his mutant eyes, and nearly kills him before Luchare rouses her fiance with a well-timed scream.

Hiero uses his shield to cover his eyes, while Mister Glith nearly trips him with his axe and shield.  Eventually Per Desteen regains his footing and flings his shield at the Glith's legs, dropping him to the deck and allowing Hiero to dispatch him with a sword blow to the head.  Once the Glith gives up the ghost, Captain Gimp, while wounded, is sufficiently encouraged that he manages to hack off Roke's sword arm.  The well-dressed pirate captain dies in a jet of blood, and the “scurvy wretches” (225) of the pirate crew surrender.  Actually, they pal up with Gimp's crewmen, and in the process demonstrate how easily one falls into cliches when writing a pirate scene.  I suspect that's why such episodes appeal to writers: they're fun and don't require much thought.  Probably when he was outlining this novel Lanier wrote a note to himself saying “at least one pirate scene.”  Will there be more?  Tune in next time and find out.

Coming next: Into the realm of Vilah-ree, unknowing.

* A good name for a late-1970s TV show, come to think of it.