Hey, I haven’t plugged my book in…like…days! Many, many days! So, I feel no guilt in doing so now.
Yesterday, I googled Twice the Trouble just to see if anyone had posted anything new about it, and I discovered that it’s available on Hoopla. With pretty good ratings! Who knew?
It made my day.
As I was working on a recent post about the great sci-fi and fantasy movies of 1982, I re-read the Wikipedia page on one of those films, Conan the Barbarian. It’s a great movie, despite the fact that it’s really just a raunchy, gory, over-the-top B-movie with an A-movie budget. I loved it when it came out, as did millions of others. It was, in fact, a culturally significant film, in its own way, and the Wiki page reflects this. A lot of passionate, obviously smart people have contributed to the page over the years. (Wikipedia is, imho, the single greatest triumph of the internet, but that’s a subject for another post.)
Of course, the page inevitably includes a rather insightful section called Themes, in which people have enumerated the topics that the film explores—or at least seems concerned with. These include “The Riddle of Steel,” “Death,” “Wagnerian Opera,” “Individualism,” and “Sex.”
I’m sorry, but “Sex” is not a theme of this movie, nor any other. Neither, for that matter, is “Death.” It’s a topic, surely, perhaps even a motif. (Note that I’m using the word “motif” in its strictest, compositional sense, as it is referenced in musicology.) But it’s not a theme.
Yeah, I know. I’m being a bit of an English-major-snob on this one. A word-Nazi. But bear with me, please. If you’re a person who really tries to appreciate literature, either on the page or on film, then the distinction between theme and motif is important. It’s even more important if you’re a fiction writer who struggles to create books that have some meaning and not mere entertainment that is purely disposable. Not that there is anything wrong with fiction that is mere entertainment—entertainment is great—but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the pinnacle that people should aim for.
The film’s Wiki page comes much closer to the idea of a real theme when it discusses “The Riddle of Steel” (although it completely mischaracterizes and misinterprets the real matter at hand). As anyone who has seen the movie knows, The Riddle of Steel is a connundrum—not so much a riddle as a philosophical question—that Conan believes god will ask him when he dies. The question goes something like this: “Which is stronger? The sword, or the hand that wields it?” Or, put another way, “Technology? Or willpower?” “Brute force, or the power of conviction?”
It’s actually a pretty deep question, especially when one considers that film’s original script writer, Oliver Stone (who later went on to direct a few films, himself) is a veteran of the Vietnam War, which surely represented one of the greatest struggles of all time between technology, on the American side, versus sheer determination and courage on the North Vietnamese side. (Please don’t write to me and tell me that determination and courage were displayed on both sides of that tragic war. I realize this, and I am over-simplifying the conflict for the sake of argument.)
This posing of a philosophical and moral question, which the hero of the film (and, thus, the viewer) struggles to answer is, to my mind, the real definition of a theme. Perhaps the supreme example of this questioning is Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in which three couples—all in late middle-age, all alchohic, and all jaded—discuss the definition of “love” over drinks. It’s a great story, not just because it captures the individual voice and attitude of each character, but also because all of the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with something—a matter of real import that, each one senses, will reveal something about their own lives. As one might expect, each character has their own story to tell about the subject, beginning with this one from a woman named Terri.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terry said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that.”
She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She like necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.
“My god, don’t be silly. That’s not love and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”
The story continues around the table, with each character telling their own story about the general subject of “love.”
In Carver’s supremely able hands, each of these stories is shocking, yet rings true. Completely, brutally true. Some of them are also funny as hell, in a gallows-humor sort of way. One of the greatest things about the story, though, is the way it never gives us a definitive answer to the question it asks. To the contrary, the story raises even more questions—deeper meta-questions that the characters, themselves, are unaware of but which we, as readers, are. Is there a single definition for love? Is that question even meaningful? Does love even exist, really, in the cosmic sense? Does it matter?
In the same way, Conan the Barbarian presents its hero with several possible answers to its central thematic question. The first is given by Conan’s father (played by the great character actor William Smith) in the opening scene, where he tells the young Conan that the one thing he can ever depend on. “Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This,” he says, gesturing to a sword he has just forged. Of course, he is not talking about that particular sword, or even swords in general. He is, we sense, talking about all the intangible things for which the sword is a symbol—discipline, training, courage. The martial ideal.
Later in the film, the villainous Thulsa Doom presents Conan with another answer. In that famous (and surprisingly shocking, even now) scene when he beckons one of his followers to literally jump off a cliff, he suggests that control over the human mind—through dogma, religion, and all the other tools of tyrants—is far more powerful than strength of arms, either literal or metaphorical.
So, which of these answers does Conan accept. Neither! In fact, his tale seems to suggest a third answer, one which is never articulated—never explicitly told—to either Conan or the viewer, but is rather born out by the action of the narrative. The answer, simply, is love. It’s Conan’s love for his murdered parents that sustains him through the ordeal of slavery and drives his desire for revenge. He also loves his friend, Subotai, and he comes to love Valeria even though she is, initially, a rival. Later, it’s Valeria’s love of Conan (along with some help from Subotai) that saves his life after they rescue him from the Tree of Woe. And it’s Conan’s grief over the death of Valeria that causes him to go on his final (foolhardy) confrontation with Thulsa Doom, where he uses his father’s broken sword (note the symbolism, there; steel really isn’t that strong, after all) to behead the man.
I think it is important to note that even in a “silly” genre movie like Conan the Barbarian, good writing can add a level of thematic resonance to any work of fiction. That is, it can turn a potentially crappy movie into a good movie, and a good movie into a great movie. It’s this complexity that separates the vast majority of films (and books, for that matter) from the few we remember years later—that tiny minority that we deem “classics” after the fact.
Another thing to consider is how Conan the Barbarian, like Carver’s short story, doesn’t fully answer its own thematic question. At least, not completely. The ending is ambiguous. Yes, Conan kills the bad guy, and (we are told) ends up a king himself, but he “sits on his throne with a troubled brow.” In others, the verdict is still out on what the real answer to The Riddle of Steel is, after all.This kind of ambiguity is, of course, a hallmark of all good fiction. We, as viewers and readers, don’t get a definitive answer—mainly because the kinds of questions that good fiction asks are, ultimately, unanswerable in any objective sense. They are always about choices. Priorities. Does honor matter more, or friendship? Revenge, or love?
This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.
As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.
So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.
Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.
I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom.
Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.
In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish. And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.
But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.
I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic.
Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang.
Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Not a bad hour, actually.
Attention all book nerds!!! My great friend Margaret Luongo and I have made another book talk video, in which we reveal the various books we’ve each been reading instead of David Copperfield. Enjoy!
When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.
Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.
For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.)
Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories.
Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension.
Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.
The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.
Yeah, it’s heavy.
This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself.
Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.
Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet).
Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.)
As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else.
But that’s a subject for another post.
As usual, I was on Wikipedia the other night, looking up one of my favorite rock songs of all time—“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There, I was surprised to learn that the first line of the song, “[t]hese are days of the expanding man,” is a reference to a classic sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Donald Fagan apparently said,
The concept of the “expanding man” that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Walter [Becker] and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, “expanding” his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.
Finding this unexpected reference to Bester’s novel was yet another moment of that Synchronicity for Bookworms phenomomenon that I write about so often, mainly because I had been considering to a post on a great cover I had found for the book. And here it is!
I read The Demolished Man in my late twenties and found it a really bizarre yet engrossing sci-fi novel, one that seems to straddle two eras, “Golden Age” (1940s-50s) sci-fi—with its Buck Rogers’ style future and tropes—and New Wave (1960s-70s) sci-fi—with its trippy, subversive themes and immoral main character. (Roger Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, which I posted about recently, is very similar in this respect.)
Bester’s novel asks this intriguing question: How does one commit murder in a world where all the police have E.S.P. and can literally read your mind? Yeah, it’s a very, very similar idea to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, which was published three years later. In Bester’s book, people with telepathic abilities—“espers,” who come in ability levels 1, 2, and 3—form a kind of privileged Mandarin caste on 24th Century Earth. They run much of the government and law enforcement with apparent competence, benevolence, and integrity. They may only marry and have children within their own esper class, and they prefer their own company. Most importantly, they can suss out crimes, either before they happen (usually) or afterward (always).
So, what’s a brilliant, daring, sociopathic billionaire like Ben Reich to do when his mind tends toward homicide? The target of his animus is an older business rival, Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich despises with a passion bordering on obsession. Reich devises a cunning plan to kill D’Courtney at a swingin’ dinner party they are both scheduled to attend, and he hires the services of a rare corrupt esper to run interference. Reich also—in one of the book’s cleverest plot devices—pays a corporate jingle-writer to play him the most annoying, brain-embedding ear-worm she has. Reich knows that he won’t be able to get the jingle out of his head, which will temporarily flummox any espers who might try to scan him.
After Reich does the deed at the party, an esper police detective, Lincoln Powell, shows up to investigate. Using a mixture of his esper abilities as well as good old-fashioned intuition, Powell immediately realizes that Reich is guilty of the murder but can’t prove it thanks to the layers of interference that Reich has devised. The rest of the book is like a futuristic episode of Columbo as Powell pursues Reich across the solar system, trying to trap him and reveal his guilt.
If Powell does manage to catch him and prosecute him successfully, Reich faces neither prison nor execution but a fate far worse—“demolition,” the process whereby espers mentally strip a person of their memories and personality so that they might be “rehabilitated” as a productive, normal (non-evil, non-insane) member of society.
In this way, The Demolished Man becomes a very suspenseful inverted detective novel, with the reader breathlessly following Powell and wondering how—or whether—he will catch Reich. I also found myself rooting for the wicked, rebellious anti-hero Reich, which was clearly Bester’s intention. The last half of the book has some genuinely surprising and cool plot twists, and it’s very entertaining overall—especially if you can get past Bester’s very 1950s, conservative, often misogynistic sensibilities (which are very similar, alas, to Robert Heinlein’s).
I really like this 1979 cover by Adrian Chesterman because it evokes the sense of horror (of demolition, presumably, but also of insanity, self-discovery, and other dark things) that pervades the book.
It’s also just really, really trippy.
Ever since I stumbled upon it some years ago, In Deep Geek has been one of my favorite video podcasts. In each episode, the creator/narrator (known only as Robert) goes into extreme depth on some subject of profound interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and A Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen those two latter shows (yeah, I know; I live under a rock), but I am a big fan of LOTR, so I watch those episodes with great interest and enjoyment. I don’t know Robert’s background, but I would guess he has some training in English Literature. His explications—which are unfailingly graceful, insightful, and genuinely interesting—remind me of the “close readings” I used to do as an English Major.
One especially perceptive episode is one that I saw recently on the subject of Tolkien’s Eagles. These are, of course, the race of giant, sentient eagles that play a small but crucial role in the lore. In fact, they literally save the heroes from catastrophe, flying in to assist in the Battle of the Five Armies at the conclusion of The Hobbit, and rescuing Frodo and Sam from incineration on the slopes of Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. As Robert explains, the eagles provide a eucatastrophe—a word I had never heard before, and one which (as Robert helpfully goes on to explain) was coined by Tolkien himself.
You don’t need to be a linguist like Tolkien to get the gist of what the word eucatastrophe means. Basically, it’s the opposite of a catastrophe—a sudden, unexpected change of fortune that saves the hero(es) from near certain doom. I think the key adjective here is unexpected. Indeed, a true eucatastrophe must be not only unexpected but unforeseeable, coming (quite literally, in the case of the eagles) out of the blue. For example, the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker uses the Force to blow up the Death Star, is a great, thrilling ending, but it’s not a true eucatastrophe. After all, Luke did what he came there to do. Yes, the odds were incredibly stacked against him, but the ending is not unforeseeable. It’s just very, very unlikely (and, therefore, very exciting and dramatic).
Upon being introduced to the term, one might wonder—as I did—what the difference is between a eucatastrophe and the classic Deus ex machina ending, as used in the theater of ancient Greece. Literally the “God-from-the-Machine,” it took the form of an actor playing Zeus or Poseidon or some other God, who was “levitated” over the stage using a wooden cherry-picker called a mechane. The “God” would then deliver some boon that rescues the protagonists and resolves the drama. Basically, a happy ending, courtesy of the divinity.
All good writers know that a Deus ex machina-style ending is usually pretty lame, simply because it has nothing to do with the drama that has preceded it. It doesn’t force the characters to get themselves out of trouble in a way that has meaning for the reader (or viewer). It’s the sudden “happy ending” that completely subverts the conflicts and themes that the reader has invested themselves in and is anxiously waiting to see how they will be resolved, not by some magical deity swooping in and snapping His fingers, but by the characters themselves.
Clearly, this is not the kind of ending Tolkien had in mind, nor does it describe the rather fabulous and exciting conclusions of both The Return of the King and The Hobbit. Rather, in both cases, the sudden appearance of the eagles seems somehow perfect. Unexpected, yet totally satisfying. And fitting.
But how? How does Tolkien do it?
I think it has something to do with the fact that, in Tolkien, the appearance of the eagles only comes near the end of some great struggle. In The LOTR, for instance, when the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, the main goal of the story has already been achieved. That is, they have already destroyed the ring and defeated Sauron. More importantly, they have overcome—not just Sauron—but themselves. Their own fear, exhaustion, and despair, as they held the true course to victory.
Tolkien knows that if Sam and Frodo were to die afterward, their deaths would serve no purpose, either dramatically or thematically. So, the eagles’ showing up at the critical moment seems not only fitting but logical; the eagles have witnessed the Hobbits’ ordeal, and, like us, they seek a better ending for those poor little fellows who have saved the world.
In other words, unlike a Deus ex machina ending, a true eucatastrophe comes as a result of what has come before. It is a kind of miracle, but an earned miracle.
Also, as Robert points out so beautifully in his video, the eagles also function as a stand-in for God in Tolkien’s legendarium, Eru Ilúvatar. Ultimately, a eucatastrophe represents a kind of divine intervention. A deliverance from evil.
As Robert states:
This is sometimes dismissed rather sneeringly as Deus ex machina…. The writer intervening in the plot to save characters or move things along in a way that otherwise wouldn’t happen in that created world. The eagles, some have said, are a failing in Tolkien’s writing. A convenient, easy way to save characters from whatever scrape they find themselves in. But to think that would be to completely misunderstand Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe and what the eagles represent. The eagles’ appearances aren’t failures of imagination on Tolkien’s part. They are deliberate and intentional, and they are supposed to feel like God intervening. They are God in the works.
The important thing to note is that intervention comes after the fact. The battle, in a sense, must already be won, if only symbolically. In the Battle of the Five Armies, for instance, the true victory—the coming together of dwarves, elves, and men in common purpose—has already been achieved, even before the battle starts. The intervention of he eagles to finally win the day is, more or less, just icing on the metaphysical cake.
Come to think of it, there is a kind of eucatastrophe in Star Wars: A New Hope. It comes, not at the end of the battle for the Death Star, but just before it, when Luke is about to be blown to smithereens by Darth Vader. “I have you now,” Vader intones from inside his deluxe, specially fitted TIE Fighter as he prepares to pull the trigger. At that very last instant, though, Vader’s ship is hit by a laser blast and disabled. Luke is free to finish his mission.
But where did the blast come from? All of Luke’s friends are already dead.
The blast was fired, of course, by Hans Solo, who has come to the rescue in the Millenium Falcon. The moment feels momentous because we, the viewers, know that Solo should not be there. He has, in the previous scene, vehemently declared himself to be a selfish man—a cynic—concerned only with his own survival. He would never be a sucker for any crazy, doomed cause like the Galactic Rebellion.
Yet, there he is—a symbol of people’s ability to change, to discover their own basic, human decency and courage. And, just as the eagles are a stand-in for Eru Ilúvatar, Solo is a stand-in for God, The Force, or whatever you want to call it. He represents the potential for good in all people and living things.
For this latest entry in my Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series, I’ve chosen a fairly recent (2004) edition of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. The book is a great, sci-fi action yarn about a post-WWIII America in which most of the heartland is scarred by nuclear radiation. Gale-force winds above 500 feet prevent any kind of air travel between the coasts, where the few remaining cities struggle to survive. When an epidemic breaks-out in Boston, officials in Southern California offer a tough criminal, Hell Tanner, a pardon if he will lead a convoy through Damnation Alley, a cross-continental route that bypasses the worst radiation spots. The rest of the story is a kind of post-apocalyptic Iditarod, complete with bandits, micro-hurricanes, and grotesque mutants (both human and animal), all of which Tanner must survive in order to deliver a vaccine.
If you grew up in the 1970s, you might remember the really cheesy (but fun) B-movie that was adapted from it (starring George Peppard, no less!). But even if you’re younger than that, the outlaw-turned-hero plot might seem familiar, mainly because it’s been ripped-off so many times in movies, from Mad Max: The Road Warrior to Escape from New York to Pitch Black.
Speaking of movies, Zelazny himself was probably inspired by numerous Westerns from the 1950s and 60s that used the same story. (I’m thinking of The Magnificent Seven, 3:10 to Yuma, and even The Searchers). All such tales focus on a criminal whose ruthlessness and brutality cause him to be ostracized from civilization under normal circumstances, but whose strength and cunning become indispensable in a crisis.
The idea, of course, goes back further still. Greek and Hindu epics like The Iliad and The Mahabarahta are full of instances of big, nasty warriors who must face a seemingly insurmountable gauntlet of enemies (warriors, monsters, demi-gods, etc.) and defeat them all to achieve some seemingly unattainable boon. In the process, the hero delivers his people from danger and (usually) achieves some kind of moral rehabilitation, if only after his death.
But there are a couple of key differences between modern tales like Damnation Alley and The Illiad. In ancient literature, the warrior’s violent tendencies are not a minus; they’re a plus. Paleolithic civilizations valued and glorified violent aggression even more than we do, probably because they faced real, existential threats much more often. Also, in ancient myths, it’s usually the hero himself who, seeking glory, embarks on the challenge of his own free-will. In stories like Damnation Alley, the hero (really more of an anti-hero) is compelled by others to take part in the saga. In the end, he might fight some deeper, non-selfish part of himself—or not. It all depends on the worldview of the author.
I really like this cover (by renowned comic book artist Dennis Callero) because it highlights the book’s anti-hero—Hell Tanner—in all his badass glory. He looks like a Hell’s Angel because, according to the story, he is a Hell’s Angel (back before the world got nuked). Now, instead of a Harley, he rides a tank-like vehicle called a Landmaster, bristling with weaponry, which is shown in the background. I also like the greenish glow (of radiation, presumably) coming from the edge of the picture.
Most of all, I admire how the cover, which was probably done using some kind of digital tool, still looks like an oil painting from old days of 1960s and 70s sci-fi illustration. It’s realistic, but not photo-realistic. It looks like…art.
In the latest episode of our Read a Classic Novel…Together! channel, my great friend Margaret Luongo and I reveal the books we have been cheating with while we were SUPPOSED to be reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
Books (briefly) discussed in this episode:
Check it out…!
Once again, I have the great library district of Alachua County to thank for my latest classic sci-fi book cover post. I was browsing through the library’s website, looking at their most recent e-book purchases, when I stumbled upon this oldie by famed sci-fi author Robert Silverberg. I don’t know how exactly, but I never read Silverberg before. I had heard of him, of course. I knew that he was a famous sci-fi author (he’s actually still with us, at 91, as of this writing), often lumped in with the New Wave that emerged in the 1960s.
Having read one book by him now, I must say that he feels more like a Golden Age writer to me. The Man in the Maze, after all, has not one but two brilliant, highly educated yet macho heroes (ala Heinlein) who live in a Buck-Rogers-style galactic civilization of the future (ala Asimov), where they are very successful with the hot babes of many, far-flung planets.
Still, this book has a lot more character depth and thematic complexity then the average sci-fi tale, then or now. In fact, it’s clever as hell. I mean, how many other sci-fi works are based on an ancient Greek play? Specifically, this one is a retelling of Sophocles’ drama Philoctetes, in which the titular hero, a great archer and warrior of the Achaeans, is wounded early in the Trojan war. His wound is of a supernatural origin—literally a curse from the Gods—and will not heal. It also stinks to high-heaven, so much so that the other Achaean Greeks dump him on an island called Lemnos, where he stews in his own self-pity and growing hatred of all humankind.
Silverberg cleverly transposes the tail to a far-future civilization, where interplanetary diplomat Dick Muller is similarly afflicted after completing a mission to a newly discovered planet, Beta Hydri IV. During his visit, the Beta Hydrians bestow upon him the “gift” of telepathy. Unfortunately, the kind they give him only works one way, outward. When he returns to human-occupied space, he is horrified to learn that his innermost and darkest thoughts, fears, and impulses are constantly transmitted to those around, to the point that people literally run away.
Basically, he stinks. In despair, he exiles himself to a bizarre planet (called Lemnos, naturally) which was abandoned millions of years earlier by a highly intelligent but now extinct race. All that remains of their civilization is a huge, diabolical maze, filled with automated traps and snares that kill virtually everyone who goes into it. Except Mueller, that is, who finds his way to the center and takes up residence there.
All this occurs before the main action of the novel, when, as in the original Sophocles drama, Muller’s old friends soon realize that they desperately need the forsaken man to save them from a new crisis. In the play, the Achaeans learn via prophecy that only Philoctetes, with his awesome archery skills, can secure the final victory over Troy. In the novel, Muller’s old friend, Charles Boardman (the guy who sent him to Beta Hydri IV) seeks his help in dealing with yet another alien civilization, this one threatening to enslave all humanity.
I really like this cover from the 1987 Avon edition because it feels like a great, archetype 1980s cover. Done by master illustrator Jim Burns, it has the photorealistic, industrial style that was typical of that era, the age before digital art was even a dream. (It feels a lot like a Syd Mead work actually.) It’s also got a strangely muted scene, with a rugged-looking man—Charles Boardman, presumably—sitting in the cockpit of a starship while a younger comrade—Ned Rawlins, presumably, whom Boardman convinces to venture into the maze and befriend Muller, in hopes of gulling him into coming with them back to civilization. And behind Rawlins, of course, is the insane, sci-fi maze of Lemnos.
It’s a really fun book. Kind of a precursor to The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner and lots of other, later yarns. Check it out…
