cnvarbiter

This book has been on my shelf for over twenty years, unread. Not surprising: the odds are in favor of any book in my collection being unread. I may have mentioned that my personal library exceeds 2,000 books and 10,000 comic books and magazines. I have an extremely acquisitive nature, so I buy books and comics and magazines much faster than I can read them. When I was a college student with a part-time job and no girlfriend (half my college career), I frequented used books stores, sometimes spending hours of a Saturday in one. Used Paperbacks then averaged about 50 cents per, where they're now $3 - $5. There were also a lot more used book stores in the early 1980s than there are now! So I scarfed up a lot of books, largely Science Fiction and TV and movie tie-ins.

When I was a practicing Librarian (as opposed to a Librarian in recovery, as I have been since 1997), I had a lot of opportunities to add to my growing library. My library got a lot of book donations. I'm sure donors believed that, libraries always being poor, we could use their donations to expand our collection. But my library's problem was never the need to expand its collection. If anything, we needed bigger buildings and more shelving! The fact was that we could not store all the books we owned. If something like 30% of them weren't always in circulation, we would have been stacking them outside under tarps. Besides that, most people don't realize that it's not cost-effective to add a single copy of a book to a library collection. If you gave us an extra copy of a classic or a current bestseller, sure, it was going on the shelves. There was already a record for it in the catalog, no one had to research its bibliographic information, its reviews, its suitability for our collection... all we had to do was slap a barcode on it, scan it into the catalog, and go. But a copy of something we didn't already own cost time and money to add, usually more money than the donation was worth in actual cash value.

So the books donated were quickly scanned by a staff member to find the few gems (maybe a dozen a week, out of probably 250 donated books) and the remainder were sold. Prices varied, but paperbacks usually sold for a dime. The money was used to fund library operations, so the donors definitely accomplished their goal of supporting us.  I was a regular customer of that sale shelf, and it contained a lot of Science Fiction. A public library collection usually includes Hugo and Nebula Winners, whatever the big SF publishers released last year, and a sampling of works by the major authors like Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein. They generally don't have room for much else, SF being one of the smallest chunks of a library collection, so a lot of the SF paperbacks donated were not already in the catalog, and thus were turned into dimes. I picked up anything by any author I'd heard of, and multiple copies of my favorites. I figured, if I never read them, someday I'd be able to share them with someone who would appreciate them. I'm happy I did that. A lot of these books I now never see on any bookstore shelf, and I've been able to place in the hands of friends and family books they might otherwise have a hard time finding, or that they might not know existed.

Since used bookstores are rare things and I'm no longer at the library daily, I don't buy books as often. I now go on sprees which make my family's heads spin. The collection is still growing.

Anyway, somewhere in all that orgy of buying, I picked up Kate Wilhelm's Hugo-Award-winning novel, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.  I finally pulled it off the shelf two weeks ago and read it. Poor thing, the glue was dry in its spine and two or three pages were actually completely loose. I didn't mind. I don't recall what prompted me to grab it. It may have been mentioned in an article I was reading. Whatever the motivation, I'm glad I picked it up. I can't believe I waited all these years to read this wonderful book, since it was first brought to my attention by my now-old-friend Don Sakers, when I was just taking my first hits of librarianship and he was already a full-blown addict. That is to say that I was a student in the Maryland Library Associate Training Program, and Don taught Science Fiction Readers' Advisory. Don, by the way, never conquered his addiction. He's still hitting the library five to six days a week; I suppose there's some comfort to be taken from the fact that he's a functional addict: despite his daily usage, he can still write fiction and blog, so it doesn't interfere with his work; and he never drives while shelf-reading.

Cloning is a much-misunderstood practice. I'm pretty sure that most members of the general public still believe that a clone of you would somehow be you, sharing your soul, as it were, or that it would be a soulless copy and not really human. (This was the position taken in the most offensive hour of television the Star Trek franchise ever produces, the Next Gen episode "Up the Long Ladder," in which two crew members have their DNA taken to grow clones, and they proceed to murder those clones, with much holier-than-thou blather about their DNA being their personal property.)

But Wilhelm gives a very thoughtful analysis -- within a well-told, very human story -- of the implications of sexual reproduction versus growing a fetus using the exact DNA which created an already existing human being. Indeed, the jacket-copy on the 1977 Pocket Books edition boasts that this novel was deemed by Locus to be "The best novel about cloning written to date." I don't know that it's been surpassed in the 36 years since the original hardcover publication. Unfortunately, when the publisher's staff stopped quoting other sources and tried to summarize the book's contents, they decided to describe the struggle between the clones and their creators as "man and mannequin" turning on one another. Ugh!

To be fair, Wilhelm's story does delve into the degeneration that is theorized to occur when one person's DNA is used to create multiple generations of clones, with no live births in the mix. And she does show, after several generations, that the cloned humans are losing their ingenuity, their creativity, if you will, their spark of divine fire. (She never calls it that.) I suppose you could describe the final products of generations of cloning as mannequins, just as you might describe cult members, or member of the Hitler youth, as mannequins. They don't think for themselves. But Wilhelm doesn't outright tell you that the loss of human genius is caused by cloning. Indeed, she doesn't over-explain anything in the story. She presents a series of scenes, with some explanatory dialogue, but not too much, leaving the reader to figure out a lot for himself. That's one of the delights of the book: it leaves a lot of secret passages for the reader to explore on his own.

No, there's plenty of room to infer that it's the collectivist / totalitarian lifestyle of the clones which brings about a loss of genius. You see, this is a post-apocalypse novel, with three distinct parts. In the first, David, the scion of the Sumner family which owns a large portion of the Shenandoah Valley, grows to manhood and becomes one of a team of (related) scientists who, following plans developed for generation, are preparing for a nuclear holocaust, readying a lab in the Shenandoah caverns where new humans will be able to be grown, free of the threat of radioactive fallout, thus saving the race itself to flourish again. David is sympathetic, very likable. His story is, until the war comes, pastoral and familiar to a lot of American readers. Although death is all around him at the end, he is a force for good, a hope for the future. His cloned "children" will carry on the human race.

In part two, Wilhelm follows Molly, one of the first generation clones. Like all of her generation, she is one of several identical clones the same age. Like identical twins are suggested to, each group of clone brothers and sisters share a psychic bond. They can sense each others' thoughts, they know immediately when one of them is hurt, they have no secrets. On a scouting expedition into the ruins of Washington, DC, Molly becomes psychically separated from her sisters, presumably due to time and distance away. When she returns to them, she does not recover. This is the first time the clone survivors have dealt with a unit being split apart, and these results frighten them. By the time we meet Molly, the clones have already established as custom that any one of their number who goes mad must die or be permanently removed from their midst, to spare her sisters pain.

Part three is yet a generation later. Molly's son Mark, born naturally and in secret, lives on amongst the clones after his mother leaves them. By this time, the "loss of genius" effect is being seen. Clones whose parent generation were known for eidetic memories and artistic skill can still draw maps, but they can't draw anything from imagination. Clones whose parent clones were physicians can still work as field medics, but they haven't the imagination to solve unforeseen problems or conduct medical research. Mark becomes their guide and explorer, teaching the young clones to survive the wilderness and not fear self-reliance. But Mark is resented by many because he is an individual. There are quite a few in the community with outright murderous intentions toward him.

This is a much more sophisticated tale than the "man and mannequin" quip would suggest. It's a story of genius against orthodoxy, and individual against collective. It reminds us that, while we all want to see the human race outlive us, and go on and thrive, that it's the individuals within the race who are the ones which give the race worthiness to survive. It's not our DNA or our magnificent cities which are sacred, it's each of us and our particular genius.

The first and third segments of the book are my favorites, I think largely because Molly, the protagonist of the second part, is such a creature of the collective at the beginning that it's hard to identify with her. Hers is a story of an alien becoming familiar to us, rather like that of Equality 7-2521 in Ayn Rand's Anthem. Her son Mark, though, is the most admirable character in the book, something of a Moses to his people. His solitary explorations of territory familiar to me -- Baltimore, the Chesapeake, the Susquehanna, Philadelphia -- are of special personal interest. My only disappointment with his story is that there were no specific landmarks mentioned to bring extra realism to the prospective loss of all those familiar places if we were to suffer a massive nuclear strike. That's a minor point, however.

This is a story well worth your time: a story which invites you to think.

There was a good deal of unrest amongst longtime fans of Dark Shadows, the original 1966 gothic soap opera on which Tim Burton's film is based, when previews made it clear that the movie wasn't taking itself too seriously. Johnny Depp, as two-century old vampire Barnabas Collins, looked a lot like Michael Jackson (as many also said he did when he played Willy Wonka a few years ago), and preview footage was full of people from 1972 responding to an 18th Century vampire as, well, people from 1972 probably would: "Is he for real?" "Are you stoned or something?"

Repeatedly, I saw and heard the comment, "Oh, Burton's decided to go camp with it." I don't quite agree with that statement. 

It's one of the most misused terms in popular culture lingo: "Camp."  It's often used to describe a work that the speaker found in poor taste, or poorly executed, so much so as to be funny. I've heard both Star Trek and Forbidden Planet called "camp." Reviewers call things "Camp" when they want to pretend that no one could possibly like something on its own merits, and so anyone who enjoys the work in question must be laughing at it. 

Wikipedia defines the Camp style as " an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing or humorous because of its deliberate ridiculousness." Deliberate is the key word. The artist must know that the work is ridiculous, and present it because it is ridiculous, knowing entertainment will result.

I suppose a case could be made for Dark Shadows being ridiculous. A family who runs a cannery in New England discovers that one of its ancestors is a vampire who has slept in their midst for two centuries. He keeps company with witches, ghosts and werewolves, and he wears way too much product in his hair. But a Camp treatment of that subject would take itself intentionally too seriously, allowing the vampire to lapse into Shakespearean monologues about his torment, yes, but always with a wink to the audience. But the original Dark Shadows had no wink to the audience. The story was taken seriously on both sides of the screen. If perhaps it looks a little silly to modern eyes, that doesn't mean its creators intended it to be so serious that it was funny. It wasn't Camp. The 1960s Batman was Camp.

Nor is this movie "camp," because it's intentionally funny. It's clear that the writers meant for us to laugh when the dignified Barnabas, trying to become hip, quotes the lyrics to Steve Miller's "The Joker," when he joins a pack of hippies for a joint in the woods (before feeding off them), and when he engages in reckless sex with his nemesis, Angelique, destroying a room in the process. No, this movie is far closer to parody, and affectionate parody at that. It retells the story of the Collins family amidst deliberate injection of the character of the early 70s. The original show tried to be timeless. Other than the occasional costume inspired by the Age of Aquarius, it could have been set any time in the 20th Century. We never saw a television, rarely heard any contemporary music, and there was no reference to current events. So, for the 2012 remake, Tim Burton shoves lava lamps, drug references and Alice Cooper in our faces, and, along the way, reminds us where America was when a huge percentage of its population was in love with this story. 

It's not a journey back to Collinwood as its original fans remember it; it's a reflection of a memory tossed into a time capsule. Personally, I thought there was a lot to love:

The introduction - we begin in a flashback to 1760s Liverpool. It's Tim Burton's Liverpool, of course. Depp's Sweeney Todd could have as easily appeared on the dockside as the Collins family. But over this scene is Depp's narration of his early years, the journey of his family to America, how they became wealthy and built a mansion, how he dallied with his servant, Angelique, but always was honest with her that a dalliance was all it was.  It was a wonderful storybook opening. 

Chloe Moretz - is the perfect Carolyn Stoddard, daughter of the current matriarch. Carolyn, in all incarnations has been bratty, impulsive, thrill-seeking and easily led into mischief. Moretz, who charmed me in Hugo playing a completely different type of adventurer, brought Carolyn convincingly to life and gave her an inner strength I never saw in the character before. I'm prejudiced, of course. I think Moretz is talented and adorable. If she re-makes Full Metal Jacket, I'll pay to see it. She's just that fun to watch. And she has a secret that the original Carolyn didn't; a secret which works in an aspect of Dark Shadows which might have been otherwise overlooked.

Roger's farewell - Roger Collins, Carolyn's uncle, is not, and never was, a nice guy. He was created on the TV show to be a villain, but, when his vampire cousin showed up, he sort of devolved into a silly buffoon who looked down on everyone. He was a terrible father, and you wondered why he hung around his only son, David. In this movie, circumstances conspire for him not to hang around. His departure is, especially in an often-funny film, a moment of true pathos. In the theater where I saw the film, several viewers sat loudly saying, "Wow!" for the next sixty seconds. 

Michelle Pfeiffer as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard - I didn't see where this came from when I read the cast list. I love Michelle Pfeiffer, but the matriarch type she is not. This was a role created by a sixty-ish Joan Bennett: dignified, sometimes fragile, but rock solid in the end. Again, Liz came to play second fiddle to the vampire next door, so Joan Bennett didn't often get to play the sort of role audiences probably expected of her. Pfeiffer does get to play that role, and he Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is a reservoir of strength and dignity, even as she does often make us laugh.

Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman - Julia Hoffman is one of the wackiest characters ever introduced in fiction. She's a career woman who's well into middle-age, single at a time when most women were terrified of being single, and yet you can't believe she's not had offers. She's too confident, too comfortable in her own skin. She considers herself a woman of science, but she's fascinated with the occult, and she's not the least bit hesitant to try experiments which would cause Victor Frankenstein to faint. She also has a craggy voice, the worst fashion sense this side of Tiny Tim, and she's in love with a dead man who doesn't even give her the time of day. Bonham Carter pulls this character off - especially the signature look of Dr. Hoffman's original co-creator, Grayson Hall. As always, she's a perfect foil for Johnny Depp. My only complaint is that she's not in enough of the film. 

"I'm on the Top of World" - never in a million years would I imagine hearing Karen Carpenter in any way associated with Dark Shadows, yet the montage of the family restoring the Collins Cannery to this tune was brilliant. (Though, having lived through the early 70s and been a Carpenters fan, I have to say the timing was off. This single wasn't released until close to Christmas, 1973. The song was part of an album from 1972, but I doubt it had hit Collinsport, Maine that quickly.)

But I have my complaints, too.  The ending was too "movie"-ish, if that makes sense. I have the sense that the writers, producers, or Mr. Burton at some point said, "Look, unless it's a romantic comedy, a successful movie must have explosions, and it must have a knock-down dragout battle between good and evil in which evil dies grotesquely. They delivered just such a climax, but it felt forced. It even felt rushed.

And perhaps part of my problem with this good-vs-evil ending is that I don't buy the "evil" side of it. Angelique Bouchard Collins, as portrayed by Lara Parker in the 60s and 70s, was a vindictive, murderous, emotionally unstable piece of work; but I doubt there was anyone in the audience who considered her completely evil. She was a woman scorned, used by the man she loved, and forced into a station in life that she refused to accept. The things she did were wrong, but you knew, in her position, you'd be pissed too. And Lara Parker knew how to walk the angel / vixen line.

Eva Green, on the other hand, was just evil. I don't mean to knock her. She's a terrific actress and a good comedian. She just didn't bring any depth to the role of Angelique. She portrayed a matinee villain who only job was to advance the plot and then be defeated, along the way making you realize how evil evil could be. Because she had no sympathetic qualities, I couldn't see why Barnabas would fall for her at all. Whereas Lara Parker could make you feel that the evil was something that maybe you could work around.

Still, overall, a worthy tribute to both a beloved cultural phenomenon and the time which spawned it. I'll close with a capsule review from a 12-year-old Dark Shadows fan to whom the Seventies were just a back story for an Ashton Kutcher character: "It's like Twilight, but all in one movie, and it doesn't suck."

So I've been out of my parents' house for 24 years. I left a lot of stuff behind, as you do. I also, in the course of two subsequent moves, put a lot more stuff (mostly books and papers) in storage in my old bedroom. My parents have one of those houses where things don't tend to go away, or necessarily move from their positions. I won't say that my old bedroom is a shrine to their youngest child. In fact, they did pull the classic stunt of turning my bedroom into an office a week after I left for college. So my "old bedroom" is actually nothing of the kind. It's the room I was moved into while I was off learning the laws of physics as they applied to quarters landing (or not landing) in shot glasses. Valuable thing, a college degree. Greatest nation in the world. (I joke. Stay in school. Go to college. Professors need to eat and they can't be retrained. It's sad, really.)

So the room I lived in on weekends and holidays for three years, and then full-time for another two years while I tested the value of an undergraduate degree and prepared to get married, it's still pretty much as a left it.

Recently, my parents have decided to get organized. They took a look around and realized that about 60% of the usable space in the house is taken up by empty boxes, or boxes which were filled about as densely as some of the Titanic's early-departing lifeboats. All of my family are collectors (some might call us hoarders), so any room we occupy is likely to be stacked to the ceiling with stuff, especially books and magazines. Engineers, teachers, librarians, computer programmers and writers also tend to generate a lot of written material in the course of their careers. (My sister, the medical technologist, probably also generated a lot of paper, but she moved out fifteen years before I did, and didn't seem to bring much of it back home.)

In short, there are a lot of paper tigers to tame in that big old house in Clarksville. The whole family, grandkids included, has been enlisted to sort, shelve, consolidate and, hopefully, recycle.

My old room is a scrapbook of my life, with heavy emphasis on the 1980s, when I last lived there. There are hundreds of books (I've since adopted thousands more), dozens of fanzines, a lot of artwork, and boxes and boxes of papers from college and from my early days in what we once called Star Trek Fandom. (Now it's just loosely called "Fandom," I think. Half the people in it have never seen Star Trek, or, if they have, don't understand why anyone ever watched something with such poor special effects.) 

A couple of these mementos of 1980s Trek cons made me smile, evoking, as they did, a time when a "Star Trek" or "SciFi" Convention (at least in the Baltimore Washington area) was something held at a small hotel or a library meeting room, not an event sponsored by large corporations which takes over the convention center and a half-dozen hotels. I thought I'd share a couple of these time capsule items, and my memories of them.

Item: Scripts from the 1985 "Shore Leave Showcase" - Shore Leave began as a Star Trek convention in 1978. I wasn't there, but my wife and her family were. It's still around, lo these many years later, with a huge slate of actor, author and scientist guests and an attendance which often exceeds 2,000 people. When I first met my wife Renee, it was through Star Trek Fandom. It was a conspiracy, in fact. Lookouts on grassy knolls were involved. I was led, unsuspectingly into the jaws of ultimate peril, while my lovely wife was in on the scheme and had power of veto. (I had no say in the matter. She walked into the room and I was done - have you seen my wife?) As a condition of being cast in the role of youngest-daughter's-boyfriend in the sitcom that was my in-laws' life, I was expected to dive in and become an active part of this whole Star Trek Fandom thing. (I was already part of it, going to cons and even publishing my own fanzines, but this was sort of the difference between being an itinerant preacher and going to work at the Vatican.)

At both local conventions, ClipperCon and Shore Leave, I ran films (16 mm films, not VHS or DVD!), coordinated the dealers' room, collated, folded and bound program books, fliers and zines... and I appeared on stage. They found out I had stage experience, you see. I won't say they found out I could act, because acting isn't an absolute requirement for appearing in a play mounted at an S.F. Con. The only requirement is willingness to actually walk out on the stage. Oh, and you have to be able to read, because you most likely will have a script in your hand when you walk out there. Memorizing lines was a show-off stunt only a few of us ever attempted.

Shore Leave ended their con every year with "The Shore Leave Showcase," a series of hopefully humorous skits, usually put together by the committee. Over the years the skits became ambitious full length plays, and ultimately they became the province of the celebrity authors. (Though I should point out that Peter David, who is the more or less principal writer of the Shore Leave entertainments now, began doing this almost forty years ago as a skit-writer at August Party; so things have really just come full circle!)

But these two scripts, and each less than ten pages, date back to a simpler time. Written, I think, by either David Gordon, Gerry Sylvester or both, are "Hooker II," a parody of William Shatner's then-just-cancelled cop drama T.J. Hooker, and "Star Trek III: The Search for Bill the Cat." I played both Sarek and the Klingon Commander, Moe in the Trek bit. Apparently I was replacing someone named Mike, for his name is written next to all my lines. At the top of the first page of one script is the phone number for Marilyn Mann, later co-chairperson and programming chairperson for Shore Leave, and her late sister Allison. It's still a valid number! Marilyn and Allison played my fellow Klingons, Curly and Larry, respectively. As I recall, we all wore signs around our necks reading, "Dumb Klingon."  In Curly and Larry's big death scene, they flipped their signs so that they now read, "Dead Dumb Klingon." According to the cast notes, my now dear friend Suzanne Elmore played the Vulcan Priestess (as an elderly Yenta) and my friend Bob Greenberger had a walk-on. The only thing I recall about the Hooker script is that I played the villain ("Man") and was assisted by a sweet and pretty young lady named Laura Bolling who's still just as sweet and pretty 27 years later. 

This was the beginning of an involvement in convention theatrics which would play -- and still does play -- a huge part in my life. I won't reproduce the scripts in their entirety. They're David's or Gerry's property, and of course I've redacted Marilyn's phone number. If I need to talk to her, I don't want someone else tying up the line.

Item: A "Fandom Feud" questionnaire  - my friend Jan Davies put this together. In the main ballroom at the con, two rival "families" of fans would compete to give the most popular answer to a question, the answers having been provided by this survey of the convention attendees. The "families" were filk groups, or the "staffs" of fanzines. I seem to recall the crew from Destiny's Children playing the crew from Vault of Tomorrow. DC was, appropriately, a Washington, DC-based zine edited by Florence Butler. It focused on fiction about the secondary characters in the original Star Trek: Sulu, Uhura and Chekov. I wrote several stories for it, including the novella in which I first created the characters who would populate The Arbiter Chronicles decades later. I also wrote and drew for Marion McChesney's Vault of Tomorrow, which featured Trek fiction which Marion liked, with no special theme. I don't know which team I played on!

I think the most amusing question on this one is "(Name your) Favorite Hurt-Comfort Scene (in Star Trek.)" "Hurt-Comfort," for the uninitiated, is a concept developed amongst purveyors of fan fiction. It refers to a story or a scene in a larger story in which one character is suffering and his friend comes to his aid. (The variations on the theme I'm familiar with always involve two males.) My mother-in-law, Beverly Volker, together with her sister, Nancy Kippax, specialized in this kind of fiction. It was a staple of their fanzine, Contact. Some of the ways fan writers tortured their favorite characters were truly disturbing. Me, I preferred Bev and Nancy's crazy-ass Trek melodrama, "Phase II."  (So named years before Gene Roddenberry proposed the same title for a second series of classic Star Trek episodes, elements of which ultimately became Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  Apparently, though a fan film company has now taken the title for its own and plans to film some of the scripts from that aborted series, the name itself was no in common parlance. When the Reeves-Stevens published a book about Star Trek: Phase II, Bev was shocked and even skeptical that the name of her Trek sequel had ever been considered by Paramount for a new series.) 

The Hurt-Comfort concept is alive and well in fan fic still. Its aficionados in Trek Fandom insist that this content not only existed in the original Star Trek series, but was placed their deliberately by writers who enjoyed seeing characters getting hurt and being comforted as much as they did. I claim no knowledge. I only know that, to this day, I can't name one such scene in the series.  The answers on the attached copy are mine. You can see I ran out of steam.

Item: A Stuart Hall spiral 5-Subject Notebook, purchased at the UMCP Book Center, probably from the Fall Semester of my Junior year.  The first set of course notes are for Government and Politics 460, a course in local government and administration taught by Mavis Mann Reeves, a friend of then PG County exec and later Maryland Governor Paris Glendenning. The first page of notes is, appropriately enough, a letter to my friend Ward Cunliffe. Did I ever send it? I tended to rough draft and then type my letters back then. Ever the journalist.

My college notebooks are a fifty-fifty split between actual class notes and personal writings.  The class notes are littered with sketches, 'cause I was bored, and frequently marred by diagonal lines made across the page when I fell asleep while writing. The personal writings are fragments of fiction, journals of young adult angst, and, as mentioned, drafts of letters.  I never completely filled a notebook during a year or semester, I admit with some shame. As I recall, my father filled his college notebooks so completely that the covers and fly leaves were dense with notes. But I didn't let the blank pages go to waste. I would go back months and years later and fill them with writings.

In the case of this circa 1985 notebook, I apparently revisited it three years later, post-graduation. Section 5 was not devoted to a class. It contains random notes about articles I was assigned to work on.  I interviewed "Economic Grads Against Apartheid?" Really? No memory at all. It contains budget information from my first year of marriage. Wow. I had to buy plane tickets when my friends Ward and Kathy got married in August of 1988, and it looks like it took months to pay them off. The good news is that they're still married and have two beautiful daughters. That 1988 marriage was also the result of a conspiracy, but I was in on that one.

But the real piece of interest in that section, to me, anyway, is an outline for a convention play, including a complete four-page teaser, plus summaries of Acts 1 & 2 and the tag. It has no title, but it was my treatment for what was to become closing ceremony play for the final ClipperCon in 1989. (I think we billed it as "ClipperCon: The Final Voyage.") Marion McChesney, ClipperCon's chairperson and financial backer, decided after six years of running Baltimore's second Star Trek convention that she was tired. That was that. No more ClipperCon. But the committee wanted to do something special to say goodbye to their attendees. I had done a play a few years before, a musical parody of Star Trek IV, which had made people laugh. (Okay, it made George Takei laugh. You had to assume others were laughing, because you don't notice anything else when George laughs. George's laugh is a national treasure.) So they asked me to come up with something. I wrote the outline and the opening. As I recall, the committee finished the script. I don't remember the particulars, but I was young and arrogant (now I'm middle-aged and arrogant); so I probably walked when someone suggested putting an apostrophe in a contraction. The idea of the story was that, like Hawkeye in M*A*S*H, a fictional convention planner named Mary Congoer had suffered a psychotic breakdown and we were meeting her while she was confined to a mental hospital. Her doctor felt that getting back on the horse was the best therapy, so he took her on a tour of ClipperCon.

If anyone cares, that treatment is here, in my block-letter scrawl. I learned cursive long ago in a time after quill pens and before Microsoft. I did not like it, and the animosity was mutual. The story dates itself with Roseanne references. The jibes at Redskins fans were for the benefit of my dear friends Sandy and Mary. The final product does not see Mary through to a cure. In fact I think Mary disappears after the first scene. And there was a Last Supper montage. Don't do Last Supper montages on stage. They go great in rehearsal, but on stage they crash, burn and kick their legs.

Wow. That's a lotta memories pulled from a few dusty old pieces of paper, huh? But scarfing up old memories is what we do as we get older. I understand it's a natural function of the mind, to make sure that it stays spry enough to remember to operate the heart and lungs. As Mr. Cellophane says, I hope I didn't take up too much of your time.

Most people my age are familiar with this work because it was once a "long-running" TV series. "Long-running?" Two seasons? Well, that's what's on the fly-leaf of the 1974 Pocket Books mass market paperback edition. Perhaps the copy-writer was thrown by the fact that the show ran in syndicated re-runs well into the mid-70s, and didn't realize there were only 48 episodes. One must also keep in mind that, in 1974, a "long-running" show ran about five seasons, as did Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie and The Brady Bunch.  Some made a lot more.  The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet , believe it or not, is still the longest-running live action sitcom of all time, followed by My Three Sons. 

But the tale of Captain Daniel Gregg and the Widow Muir ("Lucy" in all versions except the TV show) began life in 1945 as a bestselling novel.  I mean I guess it was a best-seller. I can't find New York or London Times Bestseller lists on line going back to 1945. There are reference volumes at the library, I know, but, well, how much research does one do for a weekly blog? (I'm probably already pushing any reasonable limit!) If it were not a best-seller, then it's a bit surprising how quickly a film was made.

The book was written by Josephine Leslie under the pseudonym "R.A. Dick." I can find very little information about Ms. Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie. She was Scottish, lived from 1898 until 1979, and wrote at least one other novel, The Devil and Mrs. Divine.

In 1947, Joseph Mankiewicz directed Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in an extremely popular film version which some readers consider superior to the novel. I don't like to play those games, but I will say I've read the novel twice and wouldn't feel cheated if I didn't have time to read it again. I've watched the movie over and over, and it's one of my favorite all-time films. It's a bit more focused than the novel, with fewer extraneous characters and better development of those it maintains. While it derives its best bits of dialogue from the novel, it brings them to life so brilliantly with the performances of Tierney, Harrison and George Sanders and the score of Bernard Herrmann (Buy it. Now. No excuses.) that a whole new level of emotional depth is added to the story.

One December 1, 1947, the film's story was presented, as many film stories of the time were, as a one-hour radio play on the Lux Radio Theatre.  None of the principals re-presented their roles for this version. Instead, Madeleine Carroll and Charles Boyer played the Widow and the Ghost, respectively. 

Boyer must have enjoyed the role, or audiences must have particularly enjoyed him in it, for he returned to play Captain Gregg in 1951 on the Screen Director's Playhouse, this time opposite Jane Wyatt, just a few years shy of her first appearance as Margaret Anderson in Father Knows Best, and more than a decade and a half before she created the role of Amanda Grayson in Star Trek. This performance differs from the previous radio play and the film in that Captain Gregg is the narrator, making it somewhat more his story, where in the book, film and 1947 radio play it's solidly Lucy's.

Boyer is a bit jarring as the Captain, whom one assumes is British, since he has a Scottish name and he built his retirement home by the sea in England. It's never made clear what service he was Captain in, though the suggestion seems to be it was private shipping of some sort. The strong French accent doesn't suit the dialogue as well as Rex Harrison's harsh but crisp British one. 

Edward Mulhare and his directors must have agreed on the British accent, for, when he took on the role of Captain Gregg in the TV version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir in 1968, he looked and sounded very much like Harrison in the film, despite the fact that the Captain, on television, was an American. (Nationality is never discussed, but many episodes make references to the Captain's residence in the town of Schooner Bay, Maine as though he were a lifelong resident.)  All else on TV was different, though. As mentioned, the setting was now New England, and Lucy was now Caroline, and no longer a put-upon young wife controlled by others, but an independent writer who seems not at all troubled by the challenge of raising two children without a husband. (Mrs. Muir being a mother of two hearkens back to the novel. There is only a daughter in the film.)

For the sake of completeness, I'll mention there was also a musical adaptation of the story which opened in Los Angeles in 2005. I know very little about it, but Variety gave it a mixed review.

Lucy Muir -- "Little Mrs. Muir" she is often called -- is a young widow with a son Cyril and a daughter Anna. Her husband has left her badly in debt, forcing her to sell her home and seek out cheaper lodgings. Her in-laws, particularly her husband's opinionated spinster sister Eva, propose all sorts of plans for her future, including some for giving up the children to foundling homes or parents in better circumstances, but Lucy decides to get away from it all and move to the small town of Whitecliff by the Sea. She finds a cheap rental house and learns immediately why it's cheap: it's haunted. Just a few years ago, its owner, a retired sea captain, committed suicide using a gas heater. Since then, no tenant has lasted the night. Lucy decides to out-stubborn the ghost.

It's important to point out that, in the novel, the ghost has no form. He is only a voice in Lucy's mind. She has little doubt as to his reality, but she does not see him. Her only visual representation of Captain Gregg is what we're told is a very poorly painted portrait on the wall. The Captain, despite his gruffness, quickly agrees to allow the widow and "her brats" to remain, provided she buys the house and makes out a will leaving it in trust as a retirement home for seamen. The purchase is easily made, as the Captain left behind gold in the basement about which his relatives knew nothing.

And so, essentially, the bereft and the departed take up housekeeping together, the Captain serving as her confidant and occasionally meddling in her affairs. Cyril grows up snotty and annoying like his father and Anna grows up more free-spirited than her mother, moving to London to study dance. The characterization of Cyril is particularly interesting, for he sheds much light on what kind of person his father must have been: not a bad man, just not one worth writing home about, much less marrying. The Captain despises him, considering him "Eva's child," close as he is to his spinster aunt. (There's that word again. I've never used it before and I'll likely never use it again.  So here it is twice. Three times: spinster.  Ugly, stupid word, really.)  The Captain's resentment of Cyril is in contrast to his TV counterpart's obvious love for Jonathan, the son of Carolyn Muir. 

If you're a fan of the film, you'll be struck by the absence from the book of Harrison's most memorable scene, when Captain Gregg decides he's meddled too much in Lucy's life, and he must go away and make her forget him. She does, for decades. It's incredibly sad, and it's a sequence introduced by a magnificent, stirring speech about what the two of them have missed because they met only after his death. (Not in different times, as you might think. In book and film, the Captain has been dead only a few years, so his and Lucy's mortal lives overlapped about three decades.) A lot of the words in the speech are in the book, here and there; but the moment itself is missing. The Captain, in the book, never leaves Lucy.

But the book does delve more into the delightfully obnoxious Eva (the one who carries the S-word around like a badge of merit.) In particular, there's a scene where Lucy, hard up for cash because of Cyril's medical bills, must visit a pawn shop. Eva catches her en route and shanghais her to lunch. When Lucy says she's come to town to visit a friend, Eva reminds her how poor her judgment is when it comes to people: "... you remember that girl you picked up in Whitchester and we found out her father was a retired undertaker." (Gasp!) Eva is so obnoxious she makes some of the worst people in your everyday life seem like Elwood Dowd by comparison.

There's a description of Lucy's first use of a typewriter (a manual typewriter) which not only serves to remind us that human reaction to new technology has changed little in 100-odd years, it gives a perspective on something as commonplace as a typewriter that no modern writer could infer:

This innocent looking little machine seemed to have a perverse personality of its own, that persisted in showering the paper with uncalled-for exclamation marks, with brackets, percent signs, fractions and dashes; nor could it spell. Lucy had always prided herself on her spelling, but on this typewriter the simplest words came out looking like a foreign language, and some letters seemed to have stronger characters than others, insisting on coming first on all occasions;

But perhaps the bits I enjoyed most about the novel which are not duplicated in any of its adaptations are a few brief, philosophical ruminations about the nature of life after death. Captain Gregg is mostly heard only by Lucy (or Carolyn) in all versions of the story. In the film, and especially the TV show, we're told that the reason for this is that others can neither see nor hear the ghost unless he wishes it. The novel gives a more subtle, more fascinating explanation, one more in keeping with the beliefs of modern ghost hunters: one must be sensitive in order to perceive the spirit. Thus it is beyond the Captain's control who can see or hear him, though he seems to be able to discern without trial and error which type of person he's dealing with. The "sensitivity" concept leads to an interesting observation. When Lucy is baffled that her unfaithful suitor Miles can hear the Captain, Gregg explains:

"Rogues aren't necessarily insensitive... and all sensitive people can hear me -- that's why Miles heard me. It's only those with one-track minds, who can never see or feel anyone's point of view but their own, who are deaf spiritually." He goes on to say that Miles is "Selfish, but not insensitive... he could feel and see anyone's point of view and turn it to his own advantage. And good and bad doesn't always mean spiritual and unspiritual, that's another man-made distinction;"

A nice piece of commentary on morality, spirituality, good and evil, especially from a book that, at least in its 1974 release, looks like a drug store romance novel!

And it's those bits of speculation which make me believe the story goes beyond a simple example of pre-21st Century paranormal romance. It speculates on ideas of immortality, spirituality and morality, without presuming to give pat answers to the questions it engenders. In other words, it makes a reader think.

The book is a little hard to find as books of its era and popularity go, but there is a hardcover reprint on Amazon for less than $20. The original hardcover, with dust jacket, is listed on eBay right now at $999. Move quickly. I think they only have the one copy.

Last week, the man who brought to life a cultural icon, the vampire Barnabas Collins on TV’s Dark Shadows, died at the age of 87. His death came only weeks before the anticipated release of a feature film based on his best-known work, and only days after I’d received a flier advertising his planned appearance at a Dark Shadows fan event in July.In fact, Mr. Frid is reported to have a cameo role in the Tim Burton film which stars Johnny Depp as Barnabas. Played for laughs, it’s not a continuation of the original, nor is it likely an attempt to reboot the franchise. It will probably focus public attention, for a time, on the 60s horror soap opera which spawned it. It’s a shame Frid won’t be here to revel in that renewed celebrity.

In honor of his memory, however, I’d like to share a few memories of encounters with Jonathan Frid. I first met him in 1984.  I went to the Kennedy Center with my friend John, like myself just old enough to remember the original Dark Shadows being introduced to us by elder siblings (we both had pre-teen crushes on the vampire Roxanne). A touring company was presenting “Arsenic and Old Lace,” starring Jean Stapleton, Marion Ross and Gary Sandy, with Frid as the villainous, long-lost brother. My brand-new press credentials (I was a freelancer for a local magazine) got me through the stage door at the end of the show, and we met the entire cast, save Ms. Ross. I don’t remember what we talked to them about, I just remember being awed to be in the presence of so many TV legends. 

Many years later, (having seen Jonathan at several conventions and personal appearances in between) I introduced the next generation to the Dark Shadows phenomenon. My older son Ethan could take or leave the Collinses and their perilous lives in their cardboard castles, but my youngest, Christian, became an addict. We watched an episode of Dark Shadows every day before he went to school, eventually watching all 1,000 or so episodes of Frid’s run on the show.

In 2009, after many years away, Jonathan Frid returned to the convention circuit, and we took Christian to the Dark Shadows Festival in Newark to see him alongside several of his co-stars. Frid loved to read out loud to audiences, selecting works of Poe or darker passages from Shakespeare, as well as stories by Jack Finney. This particular weekend he read one of the Finney stories about time travel. My ten-year-old fell asleep on my shoulder. I suppose that could be taken as an insult to the performer, but I prefer to think of it as Christian having the opportunity to be read to at nap-time by Barnabas Collins himself.  After he woke up, we ate lunch in the hotel restaurant. Christian was a bit more animated when he realized that Frid was seated at the table next to us. (And I sent the poor man an apology via his website in case the resultant staring and photo-snapping from the next table offended him!)

Naturally, Christian was disappointed by the news of Frid’s death. To mark his passing, we downloaded and listened to his final performance as Barnabas. (I assume he doesn’t somehow play an elderly Barnabas in the upcoming film – he’s listed as “party guest” on IMDB.) “The Night Whispers” is a fifty-minute audio drama from Big Finish Productions. This UK-based company offers audio dramas based on many popular TV series of the past, including two dozen titles based on Dark Shadows. Jonathan Frid appears in only “The Night Whispers.”

This drama begins, appropriately, on a dark and stormy night. Barnabas Collins, no longer a vampire, has battened down the hatches of his old house in Coastal Maine in preparation for a vicious Nor’Easter. He and his servant / companion Willie (voiced again by John Karlen, a regular on both the original TV series and the Big Finish efforts) sit by a roaring fire in a house with no electricity. Barnabas begins to hear voices. More accurately, he hears one voice, that of a woman from his past (voice by Barbara Steele, a regular on the 1990s prime time remake of the series). 

There follows a night of fear, personal revelation and soul-searching. Barnabas tells Willie the story of his first journey away from home in the late 1700s, to the island of Martinique. One of the young gentlemen in his company committed an impropriety” with a local girl. She placed a curse on the head, not only of the man who had wronged her, but on all his friends, Barnabas included. As he recounts the horrible lengths to which he went to save himself, the spirit of the girl Celeste returns to taunt him, not only with his past sins, but with his current treatment of his friends and family. 

The story is not completely to be classed as audio drama, for a good deal of it is recounted as history by Barnabas, as opposed to be dramatized by a cast and heard by the listeners in real time. For longtime fans of Dark Shadows, however, hearing the story told by Jonathan Frid is not a bad thing. At first his aged voice is jarring, even unrecognizable to those who knew it primarily as it sounded four decades ago. Listening closely, though, and for a while, you can pick up the resonance of the old in the new.  The old strength and dignity are still there, and the atmosphere created by the team at Big Finish (especially the music by Sam Watts) underscore them very well. 

The show (and many others in the Big Finish catalog) is available on CD or MP3 download from the company website. It’s a very nice way to spend one last hour with an old friend.

Okay, EFF does not sponsor me; but they do very, very good work. They've asked friends of Internet Liberty to please post this statement on their blogs this week, and I am more than happy to comply: 

Congress is currently considering CISPA – the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act – a bill that purports to protect the United States from “cyber threats” but would in fact create a gaping loophole in all existing privacy laws. If CISPA passes, companies could vacuum up huge swaths of data on everyday Internet users and share it with the government without a court order. I oppose CISPA, and I’m calling on Congress to reject any legislation that:

*  Uses dangerously vague language to define the breadth of data that can be shared with the government.

*  Hands the reins of America’s cybersecurity defenses to the NSA, an agency with no transparency and little accountability.

*  Allows data shared with the government to be used for purposes unrelated to cybersecurity.

Join me in opposing this bill by posting this statement on your own page and using this online form to send a letter to Congress against CISPA:

https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8444

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program:

So, both in the course of preparing for my weekly blog entries, and just because I enjoy re-visiting the Fantastic Worlds of my childhood, I've devoured a lot of SF TV, lit and movies recently which date from the first third of my life. I'm reminded, in comparison to the fantastic fiction of other time periods, that, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was a genre badly in need of a daily dose of Prozac! I mean it wasn't all dark and dreary, but, really, my first fifteen years were overlorded by some depressing s__t! 

Herein a few examples. I tried to go chronologically. Feel free to add your own examples or counter-offerings! Oh, and, yeah, SPOILER ALERTS.  I reveal lots of endings. 

Star Trek - "City on the Edge of Forever" (1967)

The granddaddy of depressing SF TV, in an age that had only known the likes of Tom Corbett, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space, though The Twilight Zone had delivered us some dark stuff, I find the likes of "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" and "Time Enough at Last" to be more delightfully ironic character pieces with twisted, almost Poe-like endings. They didn't depress me or rob me of hope. Nuclear holocausts are too big to absorb, and the small tragedy of the last man on Earth losing his glasses just as he finally has time to read books is almost humorous in the face of the loss of the human race. And a man being shot because paranoia has whipped his neighbors into Xenophobic fury? Suckage, yes, but suckage that lets the viewer shake his finger at the screen and say "I'm glad I'm more enlightened than those idiots!"

"City," however, hands us a gem of a problem, a gem so awful that it keeps getting used over and over again by writers who either can't think of another story to tell, or who just are so defective and demented that they actually enjoy the idea. And the gem is this: suppose you were the man tasked with saving the universe, you had to kill one person to do it, and it just happened to be the woman you loved?

Ain't no delicious irony or finger-shaking sense of schadenfreude in that one, kids. Just pass the little brown bottle with the pills in it. This script was penned by the much-revered Harlan Ellison, who if I'm not mistaken, until Babylon 5, did not have a single positive experience writing for a TV show. And he wrote for a bunch of them! He was unhappy with changes made to his script by D.C. Fontana, the story editor, and he's written a whole book about the subject. Not surprising such a book would be published, though, as it's possibly the most famous and popular episode of the series and a Hugo winner.

Planet of the Apes - whole series (1968 - 1973)

Had the sequels not been made, I might have placed the 1968 SF Masterpiece in the "deliciously ironic" category. It was, after all, scripted by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, and it's an intelligent and satisfying film. Yeah, it's a pretty grim prospect, human civilization decaying until we're all savages, treated like animals by intelligent, civilized apes. There's satisfaction to be found, though, in seeing that our successor species is just as short-sighted, bigoted, scape-goating and political as we are. And it leaves its hero with the hope of a new life, perhaps as the father or a new human race.

And then they decided to make another one. Charlton Heston saw right away what a bad idea this was. He let them bribe him into appearing, on the condition that his character be killed so that he'd be off the hook. He got his wish, and then some. Beneath the Planet of the Apes killed not only George Taylor, but the whole freakin' planet Earth. Naturally, it was human technology that did it. A Rod Serling film points out human foibles and makes us think about them. A knock-off sequel just passes judgment and tells us we're inherently evil. Dead world and everything, APJAC productions still managed to milk three more sequels out of this franchise. Only the last contained any glimmer of hope for the future, though the third, with Apes in modern Los Angeles, was easily the most fun, for all its ending is brutal. 

"The Cold Equations" - selected for SF Hall of Fame in 1970

Did I give Harlan Ellison credit for the scenario in which killing an innocent is the only option? That wouldn't be fair, for it was Tom Godwin who wrote "The Cold Equations," published in Astounding in 1954. (And even then, there are those who say the story is derivative.) Yes, it's a bit outside my time frame of analysis, but I'd point out that it was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1970, which is probably a good indicator of the mind set of the times.

In this one, a teenaged girl stows away on a space ship, thinking that the signs warning against unauthorized entry are, like most such signs, just rules dreamed up by bureaucrats, with no real bite behind their bark. Turns out she's aboard a ship with only enough fuel to carry its declared payload -- medical supplies for a colony world. The pilot has two choices: let her live, doom the mission, and allow a lot of colonists to die, or...

Out into space the innocent-but-rule-breaking girl goes. Who enjoys thinking about scenarios like this, much less writing them down? A lot of people, apparently, for it's one of the most anthologized and adapted SF stories ever written... even if it is pretty much a textual snuff film without sex.

U.F.O. - "A Question of Priorities"

I love Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's work, but, well, they're English, aren't they? (So am I, genetically, almost 100%. A little Irish, a little Cherokee, but mostly English. So no outcries, please!) It's a county where it's dreary and foggy a lot, so perhaps cheerfulness doesn't come easy. Perhaps that's why British SF can be especially depressing. Unlike depressing American offers, British SF stories where the hero must make the choice of letting an innocent die tend to incoporate the events into something more pedestrian, some less prone to stop all traffic for a moment. "Right, chaps, we've got to defeat these aliens, so Johnson has to buy it. Sorry, old man. (BLAM!) Right, so Johnson's dead, who's for tea before we launch?"

Okay, I exaggerate. Still, I think there's a special "stiff upper lip" quality to the "somebody's gotta die" scenario when it's done across the pond. Ironically, it's American-born star Ed Bishop who headlined the series UFO, and it's his character, American Air Force Colonel Ed Straker, who must make the hard choices here. Straker's young son has been hit by a car. He needs antibiotics or he's gonna die. Straker allows the plane which is rushing the drugs to the hospital to be diverted to investigate a UFO sighting. This kinda dulled the sheen of those nifty, purple wigs and silver bikinis the women on Moonbase wore...

Omega Man - 1971

I don't believe I've ever seen all of this movie! Remember, if you can, the days when there were no DVRs, VCRs or other three-letter givers of pain and delight to let us catch the shows we missed. Most of the time, you didn't know what the SciFi Saturday movie on the local independent channel was until you tuned in. And you usually didn't tune in until the movie was about a half-hour gone. (Don't ask about independent channels. They're gone. Now we have YouTube.)

Anyway, the amazing Mr. Heston was back, the death clause firmly stapled to his contract. Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is pretty much a zombie apocalypse pic. A plague has wiped out humanity, and those who survived the infection have become albino mutants. They want to kill all remaining, non-infected humans... which is pretty much Chuck Heston. His requested death is almost Christ-like, and it does leave hope for the future. Trouble is, after sitting through an hour or so of this movie, one wonders if a future is even something one wants.

Six Million Dollar Man - "Population: Zero" (1973)

Harve Bennett is someone for whom I have a very soft spot in my heart. Not only did he bring us the Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman back in the day, he saved the Star Trek franchise from oblivion with The Wrath of Khan and its sequels.  He's also personally been kind, gracious and encouraging to my family and my friends over the years when he's been our guest at conventions. A man with a five-decade career in Hollywood who can be troubled to ask a 13-year-old playwright (my eldest son) for a DVD copy of his first production is someone whose generosity knows no bounds. 

So it's not surprising (to me, anyway) that the Six-Million Dollar Man episode which comes closest to capturing some of that dark, 70s feel isn't really an example of depressing SF at all. Oh, yes, "Population Zero" contains imagery which has haunted me since I first saw it at the age of eight: an empty swing with a doll seated upon it, still swinging, as dust blows by; a pan to laundry on a clothes line, unattended, and then the reveal... one body... two... a dozen or more... bodies, lying in the streets of a town whose welcome sign boasts 23 inhabitants... But all is not as it seems, and Bionic Man Steve Austin's Andromeda-Strain-inspired venture into the town wearing a space suit soon reveals the inhabitants to be alive, but immobilized by sound waves from a piece of high tech ordnance. Steve battles the mad scientist who built the device and saves the day. Not depressing at all, but the opening images are enough to say to a small child, "this is serious!" without giving him nightmares.

It's too bad that an attempt to bring the bionics back a few years ago resulted in a Bionic Woman series which was bloody, dark and hyper-violent.  As Lindsay Wagner observed, they just didn't get what her show was all about: people with phenomenal abilities and extraordinary courage and compassion, trying to make the world a better place. Some modern creators think that won't fly with a modern, "sophisticated" audience. Perhaps they're right. Now there's a thought which does keep me awake nights!

Space: 1999 - "The Last Enemy" - (1976)

More British SF from the Andersons, who unfortunately divorced following the first series of this ground-breaking program. This contains elements of the "somebody's gotta die" concept. It's far subtler, however, than, say "City on the Edge" or "The Cold Equations." The wandering Moonbase Alpha drifts into the line of fire between two warring planets. One side lands on the moon with enough armament to destroy the other side. Martin Landau's Commander John Koenig is told he has two choices: destroy the visitors, or be destroyed by their opponents. He chooses the lesser of two evils, blowing the fiercely erotic alien commander Dione to hell. Dione, of course, is not an innocent. She's a devious predator who doesn't care what happens to the innocents who have drifted onto her battlefield. Still... nobody's happy here.

Logan's Run - "Man Out of Time" - (1977)

I loved this show. There was a lot to love, honestly. It was story-edited by D.C. Fontana, who had shepherded Star Trek's scripts and could reasonably be called the co-creator of Spock, as well as full creator of his parents, Sarek and Amanda. Some amazing writers contributed scripts, including Logan creator William F. Nolan, Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, John Meredith Lucas, Denny O'Neil and Fontana herself. Headlining the series was rising star Gregory Harrison, supported by the beautiful and somewhat edgy Heather Menzies and Donald Moffat. It extended the story from the film Logan's Run, in which a futuristic police officer (a "Sandman") whose primary job is to ensure that all citizens obey the law and voluntarily die at age 30, flees his oppressive utopia in search of a better life.  Being produced for television, it adopted the formula of the previously successful series The Fugitive, with Logan and Jessica travelling from place to place, helping the afflicted. Still, despite the formula, it was a bright, adventurous show with a sense of humor. It cancelation, following many local pre-emptions, caused me to make my first ever call of protest to a local TV station.

David Gerrold (who used the pen name "Noah Ward" due to third-party rewrites) wrote "Man Out of Time," a story of a visitor from the past who comes to Logan and Jessica's 24th Century Earth hoping to find out what event triggered the nuclear holocaust he was pretty sure was about to happen in his own time. He'd build an impressive data back to store all news and history, and this allowed him to come forward a few centuries and grab the data, which he could then analyze to see what went wrong. The theory being, of course, that the knowledge would allow him to prevent Armageddon. Well -- surprise! -- he caused it, just by inventing time travel and letting the world know it existed. Happy times.

Not that I'm knocking David, who's one of my favorite SF authors. I'm not really knocking any of the creators listed herein. Indeed, I have a great fondness for almost every work I've covered. Just sayin'... y'know... lighten up! 

And there's a sampling, bringing us to the Summer of 1977, where we get to say... ... Thank god for Star Wars! (Not something I say very often anymore, but I do love the first fourth first film in this series, and it did rescue us once and for all from a plethora of SF downers.)

I have a confession to make: I lived nearly forty-seven years, calling myself a science fiction fan, and I'd never read Spider Robinson. 

Correction: I've read Variable Star, which Spider wrote based on an outline for a novel left behind by the Grand Master, Robert A. Heinlein; but I read that because it was a "lost" Heinlein novel.  It's also technically a collaborative work, though I think Spider had little more than six pages to work from, and those included no ending for the story.  Still, it wasn't a pure Spider Robinson creation. It was an attempt to write the way Heinlein wrote.  I appreciate that sort of work, but I think it's generally best for writers to write with their own voice, as opposed to aping someone else's. 

I now think that's especially true when your the voice just happens to belong to Spider Robinson.

I have another confession to make, this one leaving me especially shame-faced: twenty or more years ago, a friend loaned me a copy of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, told me I would love it, and made me promise to get it back to her, as it was a cherished possession.  I thanked her, promised its return, and promised to read it.  Then I didn't do either.  Didn't read it, didn't return it.  (Hey, Cindy -- if you see this, I have it, it's safe, and you were right.  I love it.)

I'll focus herein on just the introductory story.  It's the first story Spider Robinson ever had published, and I can see why Ben Bova bought it. It's just that good. The sense of story, of character, the richness imbued in just those few short pages... wow. I not only see why Spider's story got selected for Analog, I see why so many of mine and so many others did not over the years: they didn't stand up and scream, "Damn, this guy can tell a story!"

Don't get me wrong. I still think it's too hard for a good writer to find a publisher in 2012. I still think a lot of crap gets published because the author knows a guy and a lot of good stuff gets overlooked because the author does not know a guy. I also still think the stories I've had rejected over the years were good stories. They just weren't fantastic stories. They weren't candidates, any of them, for the status of the best thing I'd written to date. "The Guy with the Eyes" is fantastic, and I can easily imagine that it was the single best thing Spider had written as of the time of its publication. When you're unknown, being good probably isn't good enough. You have to be great, and this story is.

"The Guy with the Eyes" is, when we meet him, sitting in a bar named Callahan's on Long Island. The narrator tells us if we're poorer if we've never visited Callahan's ("God's pity on you," is his exact sentiment.) And he tells us about the Guy with the Eyes. They're not just haunted eyes, they remind him of "a guy I knew once in Topeka, who got four people with an antique revolver before they cut him down."

SPOILER WARNING: When I review short stories, I give away important plot points. You can't say anything substantive about a short story without doing so. If you want to read "The Guy with the Eyes" and be surprised and delighted, stop now, go read it based on the above, and then come back if you care to. Or spend your time more wisely and read more Spider Robinson instead of this silly drivel I'm producing.

After we meet some of the regulars and soak up some of the atmosphere, we realize that Callahan's place is a tonic for a lot of souls. We learn that Callahan loses a lot of regulars because, after they're sought solace within the walls of his establishment, they often find it unnecessary to continue drinking liquor. At Callahan's, a customer may purchase one drink -- any drink -- for fifty cents, but he must pony up one dollar to do so. Upon finishing the drink, he may then take his change and leave quietly, or her may stand before the fireplace and offer up a toast. Upon completing a toast may he have a second drink. Apparently, the toasts are never trivial. The first comes from a hopeless teenager who drinks "to smack!"  He then expresses a litany of his fears and dissatisfactions, and his desire to run away from an unfriendly world, possibly through drugs, possibly through death. No doubt his expectation is that his elders -- even in a bar -- would come down on him for being an irresponsible slacker. Mike Callahan says simply and without implied judgment, "So run." This freedom to make up his mind seems to have a positive effect. The kid throws his unused drugs in the fire.

And then the Guy with the Eyes steps forward, takes not one drink but ten, and drinks ten toasts to his profession. He then reveals that his profession is that of advance scout for an alien civilization. He's been on earth three days, and in two hours he'll go home. When he leaves, earth will be destroyed by his masters, who will view the data he's collected about it and see that humanity is a cancer which must be eradicated.

Only this alien scout has realized, in his hour at Callahan's, that humans have love:

"This place, this . . . `bar' place we are in-this is not like the rest I have seen. Outside are hatred, competition, morals elevated to the status of ethics, prejudices elevated to the status of morals, whims elevated to the status of prejudices, all things with which I am wearily familiar, the classic symptoms of disease.

"But here is difference. Here in this place I sense qualities, attributes I did not know your species possessed, attributes which everywhere else in the known universe are mutually exclusive of the things I have perceived here tonight. They are good things . . ."

Here's the catch, though: the alien has no choice in the matter. He contains "installations," he explains, data recorders, we assume. These will automatically transfer his data to his masters at the prescribed time... as long as he is alive and conscious.

When the alien, whose name, he says, is Michael Finn, reveals his nature and purpose, he is met, not with hostility or rage, or even fear, but with sympathy. If this were a modern SF story, inspired by a video game and aimed at hyper-adrenalized adolescents in their forties, all three of those emotions would ooze from the page, gagging and even strangling the reader. But this is a story about human nature, about how we all have our burdens to carry, and, beneath them, we're just, well... people.  Sometimes we're green alien people, but we're people all the same.

At Callahan's, Finn is met with sympathy. His listeners, even when he invites them -- begs them -- to kill him and eliminate the threat to themselves, don't see a dangerous invader. They see a guy with a problem who could be them. They tell him not to be so hard on himself. They tell him they've been there. And then they find a better answer, saving the Earth and their new-found friend.

In these post 9/11 days, when we're all slapped in the face with fear and told how angry and hateful we should be; when we're admonished that the only way we can be safe is by being suspicious, even paranoid, and that we're gonna have to kill some people to preserve our freedom... it's refreshing to be reminded that there once was, and maybe still is, compassion in the human race. That guy we're supposed to be afraid of? Maybe he's just a guy, y'know? Doesn't mean we have to be stupid and hand him a gun, or trust him with our valuables, or lie down and die for him; but maybe we could try to understand what it's like to be him.

It's not an easy thing to do. It's a little scary. It's possible though, and it might make things better. This story was written nearly forty years ago, when no one expected the events that have since transpired, or the world we now live in. Still, it speaks to us today. It certainly spoke to me. So, belatedly, thank you, Spider, for sending me a reminder across the decades, that there's a little good in all of us, and we all have the potential to recognize that.

But we knew what he meant, and we loved it.  (And wow, I just dated myself!)

But there’s a problem with most tell-offs, excepting Thomas Jefferson’s… they don’t actually accomplish a damn thing.  In most cases, they don’t even make us feel better. They may seem satisfying, if you don’t think too hard; but in truth…? Telling off someone, be it a co-worker, family member or friend, creates animosity and hurt feelings; it damages relationships and often makes working or living together impossible. Really, it’s something from the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy (“I’d like to tell him off!”) that has no place in practical reality. 

So should it really be one of our favorite dramatic devices?

For me, tell-offs make the teller-offer look desperate, as Admiral Kirk was when he screamed from the belly of an asteroid, knowing his scream would accomplish exactly nothing. People had died and more would die, and all the telling off in the universe wouldn’t change that. So Admiral Kirk’s scream was a good use of telling off. It showed how powerless he was, made us sympathetic, conveyed to us that the stakes of the game were high. It reminded us that just venting our anger and frustration is pointless. We have to find a way out of the asteroid of frustration so we can actually make a change for the better in the universe.

Sitcom tell-offs, on the other hand, make us believe that there’s power to be found in letting loose on our enemies, spewing bile, venting our spleen, and in other disgusting ways manipulating our bodily secretions. These tell-offs sell us a bill of goods: talk isn’t cheap. Displaying your anger and disapproval gives you the moral high-ground. 

T’ain’t so, kids.

Warning: comic-book-geekery ahead!

Today I react to a tell-off that I find unsatisfying. I believe it’s offered by the storyteller in hopes that the audience will cry “it’s about time!” I found it depressing, discouraging and empty of any genuine feeling.

To wit, in the first issue (or the first issue less one) of Marvel’s much-ballyhooed event series AvsX (Avengers vs. X-Men), the Vision tells off his wife (ex-wife, we’ve believed for twenty years), the Scarlet Witch. Why? Well, about ten years ago, Marvel decided to boost sales on The Avengers.  This is a title originally conceived in the 1960s as an answer to DC’s Justice League of America.  The idea being, “Hey, kids! Look! All your favorite heroes in one title!” So it starred Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and, for a couple issues, the Hulk. And then Marvel’s editor, Stan Lee, realized (wisely) that it’s pretty hard to maintain credible continuity when you’re writing about the same characters in two different places.  So they turned The Avengers into a book about second-stringers, characters who didn’t already have their own title. The heavy hitters came and went, but the stories focused on the also-rans.

This formula worked for, oh, about forty years. Then Marvel decided it didn’t work anymore. So they plotted an “event series” in which one of The Avengers most long-standing second-stringers, the aforementioned Scarlet Witch, lost her mind one day while sipping wine by the pool and used her reality-warping powers to kill four or five of her friends, including her former husband, the Vision. Apparently she had a delayed reaction to the decades-gone death of the couple’s twin sons and decided to kill all her friends in her grief. Endless tiresome plot complications followed, with the Witch eventually losing her memory and going to live a private life in an undisclosed location. We’d heard the last of the Avengers’ leading couple for many years. Then Gray’s Anatomy writer Allan Heinberg crafted a story which explained that the Witch had, in fact, been manipulated by premiere Marvel villain Victor Von Doom, who wanted her chaos powers for himself, and used her as a tool to get them. 

An elegant explanation which saved a character. Almost…

Across town, the Vision, an android, had been unceremoniously resurrected. One assumed that this was preparatory to a reunion of the two. And, of course, you’d expect there’d be some angst. What you didn’t expect – at least I didn’t – was an excuse for a tell-off.

You see, it seems Marvel has decided that all of its characters are permanently angry and painfully stupid. They’d rather rant and rave about things that have gone wrong than try to understand them. They’d rather commit a revenge killing than try to understand someone’s motives. And, if you tell them that someone was under outside control and couldn’t stop themselves, they understand… and still hate that person and heap guilt on them. It makes not one damn bit of sense, and the message being relayed is completely unclear. But after all, this is the same company that made Tony Stark, Iron Man, into a fascist dictator a few years ago with almost no explanation, and expected him to have the same fan following as before. 

So, despite knowing what happened to his wife or ex-wife or whatever, Vision decides he’s pissed, and that the most important thing he can do is tell her off.  Never mind the fact that the world has turned against the woman he once claimed he loved. Never mind the fact that her failings were tied to the deaths of their children. Never mind the fact that his children are now alive, and he’s expressed no interest in seeing them! He’s pissed, and he’s damn well gonna tell that woman off, because that will solve… nothing. 

Which seems to be about par for Super Heroes in 2012. They don’t solve anything, but they look great not doing it, and they have clever, witty dialogue to boot.

This is entertainment?

Below is a scan of the tell-off itself, which I reproduce here in very small part for purposes of review. Following is what I believe, with a grain of self-analytical thought, the Vision could have as easily said. Neither is satisfying. I don’t approve of either; but hopefully they balance each other. 

Yeah.  Another negative review. But Marvel has urinated all over characters I grew up loving. So, if tell-offs are the order of the day, here’s mine. 

Does it make me feel better? Does it help? Hmm… Maybe a little. What say, President Jefferson? Does my tell-off rate an exception?  “When in the course of human events…”

Android events?

Mutant events?

Ah, hell, here’s some pictures. I’ll do something more relevant and clever next week.

I don't remember what form the attacks took.  I do remember writing an editorial in the school paper about "Chaos." We'd done a news article about it in the same issue. (I was the news editor for the paper.) I was somewhat disturbed by quotes from one enthusiastic player to the effect that the simulated killing was more of a rush than sex. This quote coming, I'm fairly certain, from someone who, at sixteen or so, had firsthand knowledge of exactly neither.  (Nor, I quickly point out, did I have... much... firsthand knowledge of such things at the time either.) 

A friend on the paper was antagonized by my moral high-handedness. (Probably a fair reaction on his part.) Once he learned that I was one of those "don't glorify violence" types, he began to taunt me by reading passages from his favorite science fiction novels which described violence. We had a running, fairly friendly rivalry going throughout the rest of our shared school careers. I particularly remember him telling me that I would hate the Dorsai series, because I was a lily-livered coward. For some reason, I must have taken him to heart, for I went another 30 years without reading a Dorsai novel. Probably not surprising, as I overall don't care for military science fiction. While Robert A. Heinlein is, hands-down, my favorite author, and I recognize that Starship Troopers is a well-written novel, that book is, nonetheless, grandparent to a genre I don't care for. I also found it made me too uncomfortable to want to read it again.

Why did it make me uncomfortable? Hmm. Interesting question. Perhaps I am a lily-livered coward. Lazarus Long was, too, and I never resented him for it. Seriously, though, none of Heinlein's other opinion-laced works disturbed me. I think it was simply because Starship Troopers is a very realistic depiction of basic training, albeit dressed-up and fictionalized, and I recognize that the military life is not, and never will be, for me. Also, I am one who comes down firmly in the opposition camp when it comes to the suggestion, proposed in the book, that military service should be required before citizenship is awarded. To me, that's just too close to a draft. I don't know that Heinlein endorsed this system which he described, but I know he was opposed to the military draft. And I'm opposed to both of these methods of enticing people to serve.

Why do I call Starship Troopers the "grandparent" of military SF and not the parent? Most likely because I consider Dickson's Dorsai! to be the parent, and S.T. the elder which inspired that parentage. That may seem an illogical conclusion, since Dorsai! was published first, serialized beginning in May, 1959 in Astounding, with S.T. following five months later in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I would defend my argument, however, by pointing out that Heinlein was being published regularly for nearly two decades before Dickson's career began. I view most S.F. authors who began writing after the Forties as Heinlein imitators, and I do believe S.T. was a Heinlein novel which excited interest in the genre without being part of the genre, while Dorsai! is a prime example of the genre itself. It's the same reason I wouldn't say that Stoker's Dracula is part of the vampire genre typified by Twilight, or that The Bride of Frankenstein is a "monster movie" in the vein of its later sequels.

So, I basically just admitted that I shied away from this book, that I don't like the genre it's a part of, and I've compared it unfavorably to a book by a more famous author, a book I also didn't care for, despite its artistic merits. Why, then, am I writing this review? My goal (unstated, perhaps?) in these columns is not to take current works and say whether or not they're worth your time. It's to tell you about works I've encountered which are worth your time, even though they may not be marketed on the shelves of a local bookstore. That goal, I hope, prevents the tone of my missives from becoming too negative. I'm reminded (often) that I'm prone to be negative.

Well, I'll tell ya... I'm reviewing it because I think you should read at least one Dorsai book, in the name of S.F. literacy. At the very least, you should know what a typical military S.F. novel is like. I also think Gordon Dickson is a talented author, even though I wasn't thoroughly absorbed by this very early example of his work.

This novel breaks a lot of rules coming out of the gate. Now you know how I feel about rules. I said in the self-publishing diatribe a couple weeks back that you need to write them yourself. An artist breaks and/or makes rules, a technician follows them. I am therefore not offended by a novel that breaks the rules that have been laid down, telling authors how they must structure a novel. I do cast a sad, wry smile, however, when I reflect on how many rules are broken by novels that were published early in the days of the S.F. genre, and early in the careers of those writing them. It makes me wonder if those same novels would see print today, when many novelists are trained and expected to be mere technicians.

It opens with Donal Graeme, young son of a proud warrior family, walking through a spaceport and reflecting.  Not an auspicious beginning. It has no action, no mystery, no demonstration of why we should feel sympathy or admiration for Donal... it has no hook. The first rule broken is a pretty good rule, and a pretty bad one to break: have a hook to catch the reader!

We then move into Chapter Two, in which Donal has dinner with his family and engages in the old world custom of retiring with his elder male relatives afterwards for liquor and "male" conversation. A lot is revealed about the essentially libertarian culture of the Dorsai world, but it's too much all in one chapter, and it's revealed by a big cast of characters. There are too many of Donal's family in this chapter; they do nothing to distinguish themselves; so I didn't find it easy to tell them one from the other. Consequently, their use as a device to tell me a whole world's history was about as exciting as listening to a Greek chorus during a marathon performance of the Oedipus cycle. So, broken rule two, don't put all the exposition in one block, and especially don't stick it at the beginning of the book. Still, you see the author trying to break it up and make it a part of a lively dinner discussion. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it at the time. 

And rule three that's broken is covered in the same chapter - too many damn characters! I get that Donal is part of a big family, but I don't think it's good storytelling to meet all of them in one scene near the beginning of the book. 

On the other hand, it's a good storytelling technique to start with a young protagonist who's just coming of age. We can all identify with that. If we're very young, we dream of coming of age. If we're coming of age right now, we have a built-in sympathy for Donal. If we're way past the time of young adulthood, well, we were there once and we remember it fondly. (Personally, I think I especially enjoy coming of age stories because, though I'm a whole young adult's lifespan past young adult-hood... and then some... I feel that my life has been filled with "coming of age" moments, and they're not finished happening yet.)

I think the part which makes the book most worth reading, though, is its depiction of an actual battle in space. The whole reason I picked up Dorsai! when I did is that I'd been asked to be on a panel at MystiCon called "Kicking @$$ in Hyper-Space," in which four authors tried to come up with what made for a good space battle, be it literary, filmed or televised. I felt at a loss, since, apart from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, I couldn't think of a good space battle, despite all the S.F. I'd devoured.  I thought it was time I gave the Dorsai a try, and I'm glad I did, if for no other reason than Dickson's handling of the Battle of Newton, one of the seminal moments of Donal's career.   

The description focuses entirely on Donal, his observations of what's going on in his immediate surroundings, and his reaction to the events of the battle. There is no discussion of the weapons employed, nor even any description of the types of ships that are engaged in combat. These are not things that an office in battle would be thinking about, and so we are not exposed to them. We live the battle with Donal, and so see firsthand what it's like to be that office on that ship. It's a very personal account (although it is third-person), and thus is strong storytelling. When we reach the words, "The battle of Newton was over," it comes as a surprise. Surely the end of the battle came as a surprise to Donal as well, caught up as he was in trying to help wounded friends. It's the most powerful sequence in the book, and the reason I know Dickson is a capable writer, even though this book, as a whole, did not satisfy me.

I've been assured by friends who've read other books in the series that it does get more exciting, and particularly that the Dorsai includes some strong female characters. That explains to me why at least one of the four narrators of Heinlein's Number of the Beast thought fondly of "the Dorsai yarns." I can't imagine any of Heinlein's protagonists wasting his or her time on stories that didn't satisfy. 

One stray question I've been asked a few times I feel I should deal with here, since I've mentioned that I don't care for military S.F.  I answered it, in fact, on that "Kicking @$$" panel. That question is, if I don't like the genre, why have I written nearly two dozen stories in the Arbiter Chronicles series? Isn't it military S.F? Library Journal compared it to David Drake and David Weber's works, and most reviewers class my stories as military S.F. I don't class them so. I similarly don't consider the original Star Trek, one of my inspirations, itself inspired by the adventures of Horatio Hornblower, which is another of my inspirations, to be military S.F. I don't even consider Hornblower to be military fiction. To me, military fiction is about the military, military life, protocols, strategy and chain of command. Arbiter Chronicles and the series I loved which inspired me to write it are about people who are in the military. They are no more "military fiction" than Hill Street Blues was a police procedural drama. If you ever look to me for a good discussion of strategy or protocol, you're going to come away sorely disappointed!