Review 53: Crisis on Infinite Earths - DOUBLE FEATURE

Crisis on Infinite Earths: Absolute Edition by Marv Wolfman and George Perez

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the works that has affected me deeply. More importantly, it is something that has caused considerable harm to my wallet and bank account, as I have been collecting comic books for almost twenty-five years now, and it's all because of Crisis. I can still remember going to the drugstore after church one Sunday and seeing the cover to Crisis #9 - a classic George Perez group shot of some of the most terrible villains ever seen in the DC Universe. You name the baddie, I guarantee he or she was in there somewhere. I was hooked. Of course, coming into a 12-part series in issue 9 meant that I was really lost as to what was going on, but some effort and visits to comics shops eventually got me up to speed. Unfortunately, once I understood Crisis, I realized that there was much more that I didn't understand.

You can't really understand this story without understanding something of the DC Comics Universe. In the late 1950s, they published a story called "Flash of Two Worlds" (Flash #123), in which the Flash, Barry Allen, managed to, using his prodigious super-speed, vibrate through some dimensional barrier or other, and meet the Flash, Jay Garrick, that he had read about as a child in - you guessed it - comic books.

The explanation for this was simple - the guy who wrote Flash comics in Barry Allen's childhood had, somehow, "tuned in" to this Alternate Earth, watching Jay Garrick's adventures and, thinking they were fiction, wrote them up as comic books which, in turn, inspired Barry Allen as a child. So when Barry was struck by lightning and chemicals, gaining super speed, he called himself The Flash, in homage to his childhood hero.

Anyway, in "Flash of Two Worlds," Barry Allen finds out that the Flash he had read about actually existed, only on another Earth in another universe that vibrated at a different frequency from ours. Personally, I think this is a really cool idea, and my personal goal in life is to drink enough coffee in one sitting to accomplish the same thing myself.

Confused yet? Well, it did help if you were an avid comics reader for 25 years before Crisis came out. But to condense the whole thing, here you go:

In the Beginning, there was One. A Universe that grew and shaped and changed. Life was created, rose from the dust, and began to think. On the planet of Oa, located in the center of the universe, life grew with great swiftness, advancing at incredible speed. The beings of Oa embraced science and research. One Oan, a man by the name of Krona, sought to know the origin of the Universe they inhabited. Despite the warnings of his colleagues, he created a device that would allow him to do so. The result was a complete rupture of time and space, for the beginning of things must never be witnessed.

So.... In the Beginning, there were Many. Universe upon universe, each moving at its own speed and vibration, separated by a shadow's thickness, but each unknown to the other.

That was the idea, anyway. The whole "multiple universe" thing, after Gardner Fox wrote his "Flash of Two Worlds" story, became one of the best plot devices the comics writers at DC ever had. Finally they could have silver age and golden age heroes meet and work together. At first, there was only Earth-1 (silver age) and Earth-2 (golden age), which was odd, because the golden age heroes of Earth-2 were older. But I guess since Barry Allen (the silver age Flash, remember) was the one who broke the barrier, he gets precedence.

Anyway, like I said - at first there were two Earths. That number grew swiftly, both for plot and copyright reasons. For example: At a certain point, DC was working on the rights to own characters from Charlton Comics (The Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, etc), and they inhabited Earth-4. Then they went to obtain characters from Fawcett (the whole Shazam line), who went onto Earth-S. As if the Hungry Beast That Was DC wasn't finished, they put characters from Quality Comics (Uncle Sam, Phantom Lady, The Ray, etc), onto Earth-X.

Hang in there, I'll get to the story eventually....

There was also Earth-3, where the doppelgangers of our favorite heroes were villains, and the only hero on the planet was Luthor. Then came Earth-D, Earth-Prime, Earth-Omega and, eventually, Earth-Sigma.

Suffice to say, by 1985, there was a huge mess.... Older readers had no problem following the continuity, but newcomers were baffled, and writers were no doubt also befuddling themselves. The decision was made to clean the whole thing up, make one Earth, one timeline, and one continuity. No more parallel Earths, no more vibrating through dimensional barriers.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it took twelve issues and the appearance of almost every hero and villain ever seen in DC Comics' fifty year history to pull it off. The research took over three years, with one guy tasked with studying every comic DC had printed since 1935 (my thought when I heard that: "What an awesome job!"). It also required the cooperation of dozens of writers and artists across all of DC's titles, and a company-wide effort to make the Crisis a truly universal event.

Our story opens with the end of the world. Or the end of a world, more to the point. A vast white cloud encroaches upon the earth, vaporizing everything in its path, without pause or remorse. Panicking, people try to flee, but to no avail. Into this horror appears a man with dark eyes and a tortured face, who watches the world die, helpless and weeping, and vanishes again as the universe becomes nothing more than a mist of free-floating electrons.

Not a bad way to start a book, eh?

The man is Pariah, and he is condemned to appear wherever great tragedy strikes, unable to help, unable to die, only able to watch. He is there when the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 put aside their evil to try and stop the wave of energy that devours their planet. Again, Pariah appears, and again the world is destroyed, but not before the planet's only super-hero, Luthor, rockets his son through the dimensions, in the hope of freeing him from his world's destruction.

Sound familiar? I thought so....

If you think you're going to know what's going on this quickly, you're wrong. A mysterious figure sends his associate, a woman named Harbinger, who can split herself among many forms, to gather heroes from Earths that have not been destroyed and bring them to a satellite that hovers in orbit. While she searches them out, one of her is corrupted by a shadowy evil that tracks her through the ice of Atlantis. She gathers them, heroes, villains and otherwise, to the satellite, where we first meet a character that had been hovering around various DC titles for a few months, always in the shadows - The Monitor.

The Monitor informs them that there is great evil abroad, that universes are perishing at an astonishing rate, and are doing so at the hand of his adversary. Waves of anti-matter are consuming the universes, and with each one gone, the Monitor's power decreases. He has a task for these heroes, spread out over millennia of Earth's history. This is the first attempt to save the worlds....

The basic rundown of the story is that there is an anti-matter universe out there, created when Krona performed his experiment, controlled by the mirror version of The Monitor. This "Anti-Monitor" wants nothing more than to see his brother dead, and to see the positive Universes brought under his control. He's a good, old-fashioned Evil Overlord, I must say.... So as each universe is destroyed by the great sweeping cloud of death, he grows ever stronger.

It has been pointed out to me that some people out there get all anal over this concept, thereby calling the whole damn plot into question. So, a bit of elementary physics. The above scenario cannot happen. When matter and antimatter collide, there is a huge burst of energy as the two forms of matter vaporize each other. Nothing is left - in "reality physics," both the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor would be playing at a zero-sum game. Given that these people are willing to accept, however, the existence of thousands of metahumans who can perform feats that also fly in the face of real physics, I think their arguments about the properties of antimatter are so much hot air. As a very wise man once said, "Blow."

Anyway, the Anti-Monitor's release is tied with Pariah's fate as well. Determined to do as Krona did, Pariah set up a chamber, of matter and anti-matter, so that he may see the beginning of all things. The result was the beginning of the end, and his world was the first consumed by the anti-matter wave. The Monitor, observing this, imbued him with his curse, using him as a "tracker" to see which universe might be the next to die.

So we have an unstoppable force tearing through the Multiverse, and it is up to The Monitor and Our Heroes to stop him. But the Monitor dies, and the worlds keep dying....

Of course you know that, in the end, the good guys win. But as with any good story, it is the telling of the tale, not the tale's end, that is important. Wolfman and Perez did some very daring things with this story, not only in rearranging the whole order of the DC Universe, but also in killing off some pretty heavy hitters. The best cover in the series, so good that they came out with a statue based on it, was the cover of issue number seven: The Death of Supergirl.

The other major character to be killed off was Barry Allen, The Flash, who inadvertently started this whole mess a long time ago. But he died well, and, as Marv Woflman says in the forward to the collected edition of Crisis, there was a way left to bring him back if they needed to. Indeed, Barry Allen's presence has not yet vanished. The current Flash, Wally West, has long held Barry to be the high ideal which he must match, but at the same time leave behind. In one version of the Legion of Super-Heroes books, the character of Xs, another super-speedster, is Barry Allen's granddaughter, and the character of Impulse/Kid Flash, is Barry Allen's nephew. So the Flash lives on, in his way. In fact, he's recently been resurrected in DC continuity - though how long that will last is anyone's guess.

On the other hand, no one remembers Supergirl. By the end of the Crisis, she had been wiped from existence, and was seen only once more, in a Christmas issue several years later, reminding the character of Deadman about what it means to work without reward. While several new Supergirls have appeared since then, unlike Barry Allen the pre-Crisis Supergirl is lost to history.

As you can probably guess, I really like this story. It has an immense cast of characters, without becoming unwieldy or dispersed. The storytelling, with its multi-universal scope, nevertheless allows you to feel for individuals, with their triumphs and tragedies. Ultimately we see that even the mightiest of mortals is, at heart, human. There is foreshadowing galore, mysteries abound, the plot twists and turns, and you get glimpses of what is yet to come - the hand in the swirling pool of stars, the image of the Flash appearing before Batman and vanishing with words of doom, the Green Lantern's ring sputtering and failing.... It all intertwines together so very nicely and really satisfies my inner comics geek.

The Absolute Edition was aimed at people exactly like me. Someone who would say, "I've read this story a dozen times, I could probably recite it... but I need it to be bigger. Like, big enough to club a man to death with." So yeah, they had me from the word go on this one, and as soon as the opportunity arose to buy it, I did so without hesitation. It really is very pretty - it's been recolored and everything, AND it comes with a companion book about how the series came to be. Fascinating reading.

The big question, of course is this - after nearly twenty-five years and at least two other universe-wide reboots (Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis) that have changed the changes made by Crisis, why is this story still worth reading? Well, for one thing, the writing is solid - you can follow the story without having to buy a couple dozen other titles, and there are dramatic moments that have hung in my memory for years. In addition, there's the art. George Perez has been one of my favorite artists for years. His attention to detail and his ability to draw dozens of characters to a page while keeping each of them dynamic, interesting and individual is, in my opinion, nothing short of superhuman. If I could choose to draw like anyone, it would be George Perez, and I will never get tired of looking at his artwork.

More importantly, however, this book is about the heroic ideal. On many scales, from the small-scale of characters like Hawk and Dove or the Losers, all the way up to the big guns of Superman, the Flash and Supergirl, the idea of what it means to be a good person is presented over and over again: you do good not because it's easy, not because it will benefit yourself. You do good because it is what you must do, even when you know it could lead to tragic consequences for yourself. My model of heroism was formed in these books, and the model set by these characters has guided my moral choices ever since. Where other people take their moral guidance from Jesus or Marcus Aurelius or Oprah, I take mine from Barry Allen and Kara Zor-el and from so many others who put their lives and their interests aside for the greater good.

Can't ask for much more than that.

Crisis on Infinite Earths: the Novelization by Marv Wolfman

Why yes, I own both the comic and the novelization. Is there something wrong with that?

Actually, here's a Little Known Fact about me: when I was in, maybe, junior high school I tried to novelize Crisis. I sat down with the comics and went through them, panel-by-panel, trying to put them into a narrative form. I tried to fill in things like expressions, reactions, to bridge the gap between the kind of story you can tell in a comic and the kind you tell in a novel. To my memory, it was pretty good, though it's no doubt lost to the ages by now. If I ever run across it, I'll either marvel at my innocent youth or cringe at my fumbling attempt to do the unnecessary.

I am not the only one who gave that some thought, it seems. To his credit, though, since Marv Wolfman was the guy who wrote the comics, I think he has far more right to put it into novel form than I ever did. But whereas mine was a straight page-by-page translation of the comic to text, Wolfman decided to tell the story from a very different angle. He decided to let us see the Crisis on Infinite Earths through the eyes of Barry Allen, The Flash.

As I said in my review of the comic series, Barry Allen was (more or less) the beginning of the Multiverse in DC Comics, so it was fitting that he be the one to narrate the end in this book. After all, he didn't get all that much page time in the comics - a few ghostly visitations, some taunting and then he was dead. Yes, his death saved billions of people, but still - for someone as important as he was, you would have thought he'd have gotten a few more pages.

The thing about The Flash, though, is that he's hard to pin down. Literally. Even on an ordinary day, we're talking about a man who can race laser beams - and win. He can alter his subjective view of time to the point where a hummingbird in flight becomes a still life. He can run fast enough to travel through time, and vibrate the very molecules of his body to a point where he can not only ghost through solid matter but pass between the dimensional barriers that separate the multiple Earths.

How any villain ever got the best of this man is beyond me. If the writers had ever taken his powers seriously, The Flash never would have had a challenge.

So who better to narrate our alternate view of the Crisis than he? The fact that he's dead by the time the book begins doesn't really make much of a difference. There's too much for The Flash to do, and suddenly the fastest man alive doesn't have enough time.

I don't really need to re-iterate what the Crisis was about, why it happened and who the main players were. None of that has changed in this version of the story - we just have a different point of view. And from this point of view, we learn many interesting things that the comic held back from us. The relationship between The Monitor and his young ward, Lyla, for example - he knew even before he found her that she would kill him. In fact that she would have to kill him, if any of the Earths were to survive the coming apocalypse. We get a much better look at the Psycho-Pirate, the mad puppet of the Anti-Monitor whose ability to manipulate emotions becomes key to the control of worlds. And we get first-person views from so many other heroes and villains that took part in the Crisis - getting a much deeper look at the work.

Most of all, of course, we get to see Barry Allen. What drives him, even in this semi-dead state, to continue to play an active part in this Crisis? Incorporeal and largely unable to interact with - let alone avert - the catastrophe, The Flash remains a witness until the time comes that he is able to (with a little time-travel cheating) free himself from his bonds and go to a death that he knows he cannot avoid, and which he also knows is not the end. Honestly, how he survives beyond death the way he does isn't very clear in this book. It has something to do with the Speed Force, a kind of semi-sentient energy field that grants speedsters their powers and provides them with a heaven when they die. His jaunts through time and space seem to be at the control of a higher power, but exactly who and what that power is we are never quite sure of.

As with any transition from one medium to another, there are changes. The villainous takeover of three Earths is gone, for example, as is the involvement of Superboy-Prime, and much of what occurs after the Anti-Monitor's ultimate defeat is completely different (and is therefore, if you've been keeping up with the DC Universe over the past three years or so, decidedly non-canon). But Supergirl's death is expanded upon, and we get to see the decisions that bring her to her doom. We know that, like Barry Allen, she did what needed to be done, knowing that it would be her end. Getting a quick look inside her head before she took on the Anti-Monitor makes her death just that much more poignant.

But also as with any transition from one medium to another, it is very hard to compare the new rendition to the original. While this novelized version of Crisis is a quick and enjoyable read, it doesn't have nearly the scope and depth and visual punch that the comic did. Because comics are such a visual medium - a story told in mixed media - you're going to lose something when you take one of those media away. While I enjoy reading this (and it's a lot easier to carry around than the Rosetta-stone-sized Absolute Edition of the comic), it's never going to take the place of the original. Wolfman is an excellent writer of comics, but he's not a novelist.

If you are a fan of Crisis and you just want another look at the old story, pick this up. If you've never read Crisis before, get your hands on the comics and let this one come to you later.

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"Worlds lived, worlds died. Nothing will ever be the same...."
- Psycho Pirate, Crisis on Infinite Earths #12
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"Barry, I know people die. From the moment I understood what they meant, I was very aware of all the memorials around me. But my mother, God bless her, Barry, she said and kept saying until I believed her, that although we have to remember the dead, we can't ever let ourselves act like we're one of them."
Supergirl (Kara Zor-El), Crisis on Infinite Earths: the Novelization by Marv Wolfman
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Crisis on Infinite Earths on Wikipedia
Marv Wolfman on Wikipedia
George Perez on Wikipedia

Crisis on Infinite Earths: Absolute Edition on Amazon.com
Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novelization on Amazon.com
The Annotated Crisis on Infinite Earths
Crisis on Infinite Earths on the DC Wiki

Review 52: Maps and Legends

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

In this book, Michael Chabon has done something very interesting - he has uplifted me and humbled me at the same time. It's a weird feeling, that combination, probably because I'm reviewing a book about literary criticism and the telling of stories, which put me in a kind of meta-reviewer mindset. Reading this book not only forced me to think about myself as a reader, but as a reviewer of and writer about books.

Let's do the first part and then I'll get to the second.

The beginning and ending of this collection of essays focuses on something very important regard the telling of stories: the idea that reading is entertainment. Reading a book or a short story, Chabon maintains, should be, first and foremost, fun. It should be a good way to rest your mind and give it a break from the rigors and stresses of daily life. Movies, music, juggling - those are all labeled entertainment and are generally accepted as being fun, so why not books?

With me as a reader, Chabon was certainly preaching to the choir. I've always regarded reading as fun, and if I have time to spend with a book, then it's time well spent. But even I, the reader looking for a good time, have fallen prey to the idea that reading a book should Mean Something. I mean, look back on these reviews for a moment. How many times have I dug deep to find some kind of moral or philosophical "lesson" in a book that was probably written with nothing more in mind than to pass a few pleasant hours on an airplane? Far too often, and more often than not it was born of a desire to make the review a little longer than, "I liked this book and you will too."

Many readers have this secret shame that we're reading for fun. This drives us to pick up books that we wouldn't normally read - and in my case here I'm thinking about pretty much anything written by a Russian in the 19th and 20th centuries - in order to pick up some kind of intellectual cachet. We wander around the bookstore, dawdling before the "literature" section in the hopes that someone will see us there instead of in the science fiction/fantasy ghetto, which is where we really want to be. Chabon suggests that it is this ghettoization of books that contributes to such book snobbery and, if he had his way, he would see it gone. Every bookshop would be one section - Books.

The title of his book, Maps and Legends evokes this feeling. Maps, you see, serve two purposes. They chronicle where you have already been, showing you the roads you took and the things you saw. But, and possibly more importantly, they show you where you haven't been yet. Who among you has never sat down and looked at a map and thought, I wonder what's there? Even a map of the town in which you live can be oddly alluring. I lived in Kyoto for nearly nine years, and yet I could still look at a map and wonder where I should go next.

Books, Chabon maintains, should have the same quality. When I go into a modern bookstore, I head straight for the ports I know. I don't explore distant shores or unknown islands. I'm provincial, a homebody of the literary sort. Perhaps if there were a store where the map was different, the layout unfamiliar, I might discover new worlds that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

So this is where the uplift comes - Chabon inspires me to be a better reader. To not only read more, but to read better. To not gloss over the details in order to enjoy the book, but to actively search for them. To stare at some part of a story and wonder, What is that? Have I been there before?

Where he humbles me is simply in his writing. For the purposes of this book, he and I are in the same field - talking about books and writing and how they affect us. And Chabon is much, much better at it than I am. His writing is a pleasure to read - not in that frenetic, sensory overload Tom Wolfe kind of way, but more in the same way one would enjoy a really good meal. You want to pause and roll the words around in your head for a moment before you move on. He digresses and wanders and then comes back again, just when you were wondering where he was going with all this.

In the essays to be found in this book, he looks at the immortal allure of Sherlock Holmes, the bleak horror of The Road, and the unfortunate lack of anything worthwhile for children to read. He talks of golems and death and imaginary homelands for speakers of dying languages, and makes it all compelling and enthralling. I want to write like Chabon when I grow up.

If there's higher praise, I don't know it.

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"The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve."
- Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
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Michael Chabon on Wikipedia
Maps and Legends on Wikipedia
Maps and Legends at Amazon.com

Review 51: Blood Rites

Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

"Hell's Bells" count: 19 [1]

As far as I know, The Dresden Files is an open-ended series that Butcher will continue to write until he decides to end it, which is fine with me. He's set up a universe that has endless possibilities to it, from simple mysteries to humorous romps to soul-searing betrayal and heartache. Can't go wrong with all that, and if Butcher wants to just keep putting out Dresden books every eighteen months or so, I'll happily keep buying them.

One of the dangers of such a plan, however, is stagnation - you end up rehashing similar plot points, perhaps throwing in a few twists and turns, but never really advancing the plot because, well, you don't know where the plot is going. I can imagine Butcher would get to a point where he thinks, "Ummm... Okay, Harry Dresden fights vampire werewolves.... from the future!" At which point, the shark has been well and truly jumped. As I've said before, I would much rather see a series end well than see it go on beyond its useful life and leave me with sad, sad memories. I'm looking at you, X-Files.

While I don't know if Butcher knows exactly where the series will finally end (though he probably does), he does manage to avoid stagnation very nicely, mainly by putting Harry in mortal danger. Okay, that's nothing new, but this time it's Mortal Danger with bonus Crippling Injury! And a side order of Serious Disillusion to boot. This book really stirs things up for the world of Harry Dresden and lets the readers know that there is far, far more in store for us than we knew. So bravo to you, Jim.

In this volume, Dresden is asked by his kind-of-sort-of friend Thomas to do a favor for him. Despite being a vampire of the White Court and a soul-sucking incubus, Thomas is an okay kind of guy and has helped Harry out of a few tight spots in their time. He can't say he trusts Thomas, but he likes him. And therefore we like him as well. The job sounds simple: a movie producer has been having weird accidents happen to people linked with his movie, and two women have already died mysterious deaths. Harry's job would be to figure out who's putting the bad mojo on the movie studio and stop it.

The fact that it's an adult movie studio is not brought up until later.

In the process of trying to help out with an astoundingly powerful (and regular) Evil Eye curse, Harry runs afoul of the Black Court vampires in a side plot that really has nothing to do with the main one. This seems unusual, since most of the Dresden books that have featured multiple cases do so in the spirit of Raymond Chandler, where we find out that they were all part of the same case after all.

The B plot in this book is an attempt to put down Mavra, a truly terrifying member of the Black Court of vampires. The Black Court is the type of vampire we all think of when the word comes up - the Nosferatu, the Dracula, all black and dry and horrible. They're also the toughest, most resilient and most vicious of the vampire clans. What's more, Mavra is an accomplished sorceress, whose power makes even Harry Dresden think twice about crossing her. Which is why he has a Plan this time. And we all know about Harry and his Plans....

All of this, though is incidental to the things he learns in this book, both about himself and the people he trusts. Those are the things that truly shake up his world and which will shape the books that are to follow. This book is a turning point for Dresden, and not a good one. While the Black Court plot, for example, didn't have much to do with the main plot, it sets up very important elements and concepts that are deftly exploited in later books. And Harry's always-fragile relationship with the White Council endures what could be a crippling blow.

All this is setting up the next few books and laying the groundwork for the rest of the series. One of the things I've come to admire about Butcher's writing is that nothing is wasted. I once heard that the process of writing a story is like packing for someone else's hiking trip - you only want to put into the bag what you think that person will absolutely need. After all, if they get to the end of their hiking trip and they haven't used that ten-pound bag of rice you thought might come in handy, they're going to be very pissed off at you.

Butcher doesn't do that. You can be sure that the elements he lays out in his stories will be used, sooner or later., and you'll never be left wondering, "But what was that scene with the baseball player and the chicken farm about?" If Butcher puts a baseball player and a chicken farm into his book, there's a very good reason for it, and you'll find out eventually.

As with the other books in The Dresden Files series, this is great fun to read. Which makes it no surprise that the series had some measure of success outside its original format - a TV series and a comic, at last count. I look forward to following it as it goes on.

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"No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Harry Dresden, Blood Rites
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[1] One of these was the maxi-expletive "Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells," which I must commit to memory

The Dresden Files on Wikipedia
Blood Rites on Wikipedia
Blood Rites on Amazon.com
Jim Butcher on Wikipedia
Harry Dresden on Wikipedia
Jim Butcher's homepage

Review 50: The Stupidest Angel

The Stupidest Angel - A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore

It's an old saw, but a good one - Be Careful What You Wish For. It's the staple theme of many a cautionary tale, which I suppose we could say this book is. It's a warning I've always kept close to my heart, even though I know I have no rational reason to do so. For example, I might wake up one morning, tired from a poor night's sleep, and a thought will emerge from my brain - "I wish I could just stay in bed all the time." I have to squash that thought, because I know it'll inevitably lead to some mystical creature appearing in a puff of smoke, saying "IT IS DONE!" at which point I get hit by a bus and become a quadriplegic.

No thank you, sir.

I'm lucky - I learned this lesson from reading the right stories and watching the right movies. Little Josh Barker of Pine Cove, California didn't seem to have that advantage. To be fair, though, he was under a lot of stress. He had just seen Santa Claus get killed with a shovel to the throat, and that'll mess up any seven-year-old's day. So when an angel - an honest-to-God Angel shows up in town, looking for a child to grant a Christmas Wish to, what else is a boy to do but wish that Santa would come back?

If it had been any angel but Raziel, it might have worked. Another angel might have gotten more details from the child about where Dead Santa was, rather than just "Out behind the church." Another angel might have been more diligent in making sure the child got what he wanted, rather than what he asked for. Another angel might not have carelessly caused a zombie invasion of the weird little town of Pine Cove.

But this is Raziel, who has that most unfortunate of personality combinations - stupidity and confidence. Mix in a little laziness, and you have a recipe for the most horrible Christmas celebration ever.

This book is nice, entertaining, and very silly. Intentionally silly, really - try as I might, I couldn't find too many overarching themes or messages other than the one I've already mentioned - be careful what you wish for. Alongside the unmedicated movie queen, the Evil Developer, the doped-up constable, and the talking fruitbat (who chooses not to talk, of course) you'll find a diverse cast of bizarre characters that you're not sure you'd ever really want to hang out with. I mean, don't get me wrong but Pine Cove seems like that weird little town where they're just one bad day away from, well, a zombie apocalypse. And god help you if you are the one who decided to wear your red Star Trek shirt to the annual Christmas costume party.

So if you like zombies, dope paranoia, swords and some good laughs, check out this book. As Christmas stories go, I can guarantee you've never read anything quite like it. It's funny, not entirely scary, and written in Moore's very conversational style that makes you want to turn around to your friends and co-workers and read passages out loud, no matter that they've developed a Pavlovian twitch every time you open your mouth while staring at a page....

It's also a kind of Christopher Moore All-Star story, so if you're a fan of his other works, you may see some of your favorite characters show up in these pages. And that's always fun, although if he had added Biff and Maggie, I would have been a thousand times happier with it....

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"It's Christmas! Ah, Christmas, the time when all good people go about not decapitating each other."
- Tucker Case, The Stupidest Angel
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The Stupidest Angel on Wikipedia
Christopher Moore on Wikipedia
Christopher Moore's homepage
The Stupidest Angel on Amazon.com

Review 49: Comrade Loves of the Samurai

Comrade Loves of the Samurai by Ihara Saikaku

At last, the book you've been waiting for - a book of gay samurai love stories! Woo-hoo! Hot Bushido love! Awwwwww yeah.....

No, seriously, it's short stories of gay samurai love.

You see, here's the thing - prior to the modern era of Japan, the attitude towards gay love was similar to that of ancient Greece. Women were fine for having children and securing alliances and building property, but if you want real passion, real true love, you needed a bright-eyed young boy. This kind of relationship between an older man and an adolescent boy, generally known as pederasty (which is often wrongly confused with pedophilia), was considered a natural and healthy bond in those days, and assuming that both parties acted honorably and respectfully, it was mutually beneficial.

As in many other world cultures, this kind of bond was a common one, especially amongst the religious and ruling classes - people who were less interested in breeding large families and more interested in the aesthetic aspects of romance and eroticism. It wasn't necessarily a lifelong bond, but it could be, and some of these pairings have inspired love stories as passionate and heartbreaking as any other.

This being Japan, of course, most of the love stories in this book don't end well. About half tend to finish with seppuku, ending the lives of the lovers and, occasionally, other people who are unlucky enough to be in the area. The story All Comrade-Lovers Die by Hara-Kiri is a case in point - it's the story of Ukyo, Uneme and Samanousuke, three youths bound together by a deep, passionate love. When Ukyo murders a romantic rival in order to prevent the deaths of his friends, he is ordered to kill himself to pay for it. His beloved Uneme joins him in death, and Samanousuke, unable to live without either of the men he loves, takes his own life soon after.

Then there's Love Vowed to the Dead, in which young Muranousuke fulfills the dying wish of his best friend Gorokitji by giving himself to Gorokitji's lost lover. In He Died to Save his Lover, young Korin allows himself to be tortured and executed by one lover to save the life of another, and of course, He Followed his Friend into the Other World, After Torturing him to Death, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Let it be said, though, that Sasanousuke didn't mean for Hayemon to freeze to death, it just kind of happened that way.

In my favorite, The Tragic Love of Two Enemies, a man, Senpatji, falls in love with the young son of the samurai that he had been ordered to kill many years before. The boy, Shynousuke, is ordered by his mother to kill Senpatji, and thus avenge his father, but the boy cannot bring himself to murder the man he loves - especially since Senpatji had been acting under the orders of his lord. He convinces his mother to give them one more night together, which she does, because she's not completely heartless. She finds them dead the next morning, both impaled through their hearts on Shynousuke's sword.

Who says the Japanese aren't romantic?

There are happy(ish) tales, too. Tales of constant dedication, of loyalty and hidden desires in the courtly world of the ruling classes of Edo-period Japan. Men and boys endure great hardships and risk their lives to be together, and on occasion get to spend the rest of their lives together.

These stories were all written back in the 17th century and the author gained great notoriety writing these kinds of soft romances. One of his books was titled, Glorious Tales of Pederasty, which I would really love to see on a bookshelf at Borders someday. Just to see the reactions.... There's a whole lot of, "They lay together through the night" kind of language, and a general avoidance of sordid detail. Still, they're well-written, and well-translated, so you can get a very good sense, in these short, short stories, of the kinds of relationships that popped up among the samurai class way back before Western prudishness got its claws into people. In the preface to Glorious Tales, Ihara says:

Our eyes are soiled by the soft haunches and scarlet petticoats of women. These female beauties are good for nothing save to give pleasure to old men in lands where there is not a single good-looking boy. If a man is interested in women, he can never know the joys of pederasty.

So that should give you an idea of the cultural divide you're working against when you pick up this book. It's tough for us modern folks, whose culture is dead set against cross-generational homosexual relationships, to really be comfortable reading stories like this. Usually when you hear stories about a grown man and a teenage boy, it's immediately classified as "abuse." Images of windowless panel vans, sweaty gym teachers, NAMBLA meetings rise up and.... Yeah.

Speaking from an American perspective, I can't think of any situation where a relationship such as the ones in this book would ever be considered acceptable, despite the purity of the feelings involved. The characters in these stories, it must be noted, are not leches. They're not Herbert from Family Guy. But no matter how pure my intentions might be, if I were to start hanging around the arcades, chatting up fifteen year-old boys, my life as a respectable citizen would be effectively over.

Even assuming that a relationship built on pederasty can be mutually beneficial - and it could be argued that it can - it's still a) illegal in most places and b) massively creepy. So that makes it an interesting challenge to get into these stories. Life was different back then, after all. The extended childhood that we take for granted in our teenage years pretty much didn't exist. As soon as someone reached the age of sexual maturity, they were basically proto-adults, rather than lingering children, and were therefore fair game. So as much as I hate to invoke cultural relativism (because I find it wishy-washy and noncommittal), I have to just say, "It was a different time." In times gone by, pederastic relationships worked, but our culture has moved to a point now where even if it were legalized, the emotional and experiential gulf between the older and younger party would probably make it impossible to go beyond a relationship built on physical eroticism.

Still, the feelings in these stories are just as valid and pure as "traditional" romances, the obstacles they overcome and risks they take are just as real and just as difficult. If you can set aside your more judgmental self, you can appreciate the depth of feeling that existed in these relationships, and recognize the universal themes of all great love stories - discovery, love, loss, betrayal, redemption.... They're all here. So get reading.

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"The fairest plants and trees meet their death because of the marvel of their flowers. And it is the same with humanity: many men perish because they are too beautiful."
- Ihara Saikaku, Comrade Loves of the Samurai
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Ihara Saikaku on Wikipedia
Comrade Loves of the Samurai on Amazon.com
Pederastic couples in Japan on Wikipedia

Review 48: The Green Futures of Tycho

The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator

It's always dangerous to revisit a book that you loved when you were a kid. Everyone knows that. Some books are really just geared towards a certain age, a certain time in your life where that book can step in and say, "Here - someone knows what you're thinking about." And those books are amazing. You read them and your life changes. Maybe only in small ways, maybe in ways you don't even realize until later, but it does.

Then you come back to it ten or twenty years later and think, "I remember this book. I loved this book. I think I'll read it again." So you do, and it's a disappointment. Not because the book isn't as good as you thought it was but rather because you aren't the person you were when you first read it. There's nothing wrong with that - it's just life.

When I ordered this off Amazon, I did so with a certain amount of trepidation. This book occupies a very special place in my heart. I read it over and over again when I was a kid. It instilled a love of time travel that I keep to this day. I even adopted the name Tycho as a pseudonym for various parts of my own mind all the way through high school and beyond. I knew that re-reading it would put that entire past at risk of becoming foolish or stupid or childish, and I wasn't sure my ever-vulnerable pride wanted to take that.

Fortunately, I discovered that the book was as good as I recalled it being. Shorter than I remember, of course, but still quite good.

The story is deceptively simple - Tycho Tithonus, the youngest of four siblings - the other three being very talented and thoroughly unpleasant - finds a small, silver, egg-like object while digging up a new vegetable garden. As innocuous as it seems, that object is about to change everything. It is, in fact, a time machine.

It's not very difficult - it has a series of dials on one end, which you turn to set the time you want to go to. Press the other end and it's done. And Tycho does what anyone would do when presented with such an amazing device: go back and re-work an unpleasant event in his past. And if by doing so he could maybe teach his nasty siblings to appreciate him more, well, so be it. Of course, the ramifications of this act don't become clear until it's much too late.

But the past doesn't really hold that much allure for young Tycho. It's over and done with, and was never very pleasant to begin with. So he decides to go to the future, to see what has become of himself and his family. A quick twenty-year jump to April 23,2001 shows him what's in store for himself. A desperate, unhappy, bitter man, fronting for a lunar entertainment industry and reduced to begging sponsors for money.

Disappointed and upset, Tycho comes back. Later, he visits the future again - same day - only to find it has changed completely. He's no longer a sad, shapeless man but a tough, ruthless one, a man who uses his ability to travel through time to make money and ruin his family. Terrified, Tycho returns to his own time. But his curiosity can't be stopped. He needs to see a future where everything works out right. Unfortunately, every time he goes there it's worse and worse. His future self becomes a monster and a murderer, a willing agent to bring beings of higher power onto this planet.

This is one of the things I've always liked about Sleator - his mind turns around corners. Everyone and his uncle can write about a time traveler going to the past and changing the present, but who writes about someone changing the future by messing about in the present? Not many, I'll tell you that. Each time Tycho comes back from the future, the knowledge he has gained causes him to say something or do something that alters the course of his future in a new and terrible way. And seeing how much worse it gets just forces him to make even more terrible decisions, until you have the final, terrible paradox of an old Tycho trying to chase down and kill his younger self over the course of millennia.

Which does bring up the problem of paradox, unavoidable in any time travel book, known in fiction as "massive, gaping plot holes."

For example - if Tycho time-travels twenty years into the future to see his older self, there shouldn't be any older self there for him to meet. It's impossible - as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Tycho vanished on April 23, 1981 and re-appeared twenty years later. Everyone else lived through that time, but he simply side-stepped it. Instead of finding a letter from his older self to his mother in their future house, he should have found perhaps a black-framed picture of 11 year-old Tycho with a note to the effect that they should have loved him more. The only way I can think of to resolve this problem is to assume that Tycho was absolutely and incontrovertibly determined to return to his own time after each future visit, thus ensuring that he would eventually live out those twenty years.

Fortunately, Sleator handles these paradoxes in a very simple and straightforward manner. During one of Tycho's experimental first trips into the future, he meets his teenage self, who shows him how the dials work on the egg:

"But," Tycho said. "But if you're me... I mean, if we're the same person, how can we both be here at the same time?"

"No time to explain now," said the other Tycho, bending over him. "I've got to show you how to work this thing, fast, so you can get back to your own time."

"But that doesn't make sense," Tycho said, more confused than ever. "If you have to show me how it works, then who showed you how to -"

"Shut up and concentrate."

There you go. That bit there is the author saying, "Yes, I know there are paradoxes involved, but that's not the point of the book." That pretty much sweeps aside all those little picky details, like older Tycho trying to kill his younger self, or the fact that, by the end of the book, the entire story didn't, technically, happen. "Shut up and concentrate."

He handles the alterations resulting from time travel very neatly as well. Rather than beat us over the head with "Things have CHANGED!" he just inserts a simple descriptive line in there. If you're reading carefully, you'll notice that Ludwig's hair has gone from proto-emo long to a nice crew cut. Even Tycho doesn't notice, which is interesting. When presented with the results of a change in time, he has a moment of jamais vu - the feeling of something familiar as totally new - and then the story moves on. The effects multiply and resonate, and even Tycho isn't aware of how much he's changed.

Going back to the plot hole problem for a moment, there is the small issue of the egg's origin and purpose. We know it was planted on Earth by aliens, something like 150 million years ago. It seems they did so with the intention that it one day be found and used in order to prepare the way for their arrival and dominance of Earth - this is what can be gleaned by the ravings of older Tycho. But why would an alien race which has time travel sorted out need such a roundabout way of conquering the world? Why drop it into some Jurassic mud and leave it at the whims of plate tectonics? Why not just show up at Tycho's house one day and drop it on his bedside table? This is never adequately explained in the book, probably because it's not what the book's about. But it nagged me when I was a kid, and it still does now.

All plot holes and paradoxes aside, it's a really good book, and if you have a kid, I recommend it. It's the kind of story that you really can pick apart and look from many angles. In one sense, it's a story about destiny. Tycho and his siblings are all named after extraordinary famous people - Ludwig Beethoven,Tamara Karsavina, Leonardo DaVinci, and Tycho Brahe - in the hopes that they would grow up to emulate them. Tycho's siblings fall into line very easily, adopting the roles that they'd been given from birth. Tycho doesn't - he's interested in a little bit of everything, and isn't entire sure what he wants to do with his life. I knew that feeling when I was eleven years old. Hell, I know that feeling now.

And of course it's about the futility of letting your future control your life. The future isn't fixed. It's an organic, growing thing that you can't begin to control, and the tiniest change in the present could become a radical change in the future. Sure, it's good to have goals and plans, but to try and wield unbending control over who you're going to be is foolish at best.

And that brings me to the nagging question that occurred to me right around chapter 9, the first time Tycho sees his adult self and is terribly disappointed in him. Reading this again as an adult, I found myself wondering that if eleven year-old me suddenly appeared, what would he think? Would he be impressed at the path my life had taken? Would he be disappointed by my physical appearance? Would he be surprised at the relationship I have with my siblings? Would be be shocked that I have a boyfriend? What would his judgment be on his future?

Following right on the heels of that, of course, was the more important question of, "Who cares what eleven year-old me thinks of my life?" Not to disparage the eleven year-olds out there, but you don't know nearly as much as you think you do, and becoming a teenager isn't going to confer any more wisdom. Tycho doesn't know the twenty years of history and context that led to him becoming a miserable bastard. Perhaps if he had learned a little, he might have made better decisions when he returned to his own time. And if eleven year-old me gave me any lip about what I'd become, I'd send him back to his own time with a whole host of new neuroses to deal with.

Anyway, my point is this: The Green Futures of Tycho is a damn fine book. It's a good time travel adventure, and it's a good allegory for the existential angst we all go through when we consider the future. While such feelings might be new and raw to a child of Tycho's age, and old and familiar to us adults, it's still something that we need to deal with. And perhaps that best way to do it is to simply appreciate what we have now.

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"After all, he wasn't doing anything dangerous, like interacting with the past, which might have unexpected effects on the present. What harm could a little peek at the future do? How could he change anything there?"
from The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator
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The Green Futures of Tycho on Wikipedia
William Sleator on Wikipedia
The Green Futures of Tycho on Amazon.com
Green Futures fan site

Review 47: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

I want an electric monk.

As Douglas Adams tells us in this book, every civilization creates mechanical devices designed to save us from our labor. We have dishwashers to wash our tedious dishes for us, VCRs to watch those tedious television programs so we don't have to, and finally the Electric Monk to believe in those things we can't be bothered to believe in.

Is that cool, or what?

As strange as it sounds, the Electric Monk is actually integral to the plot. But this plot is complex enough to deserve it. The main character, more or less, is Richard MacDuff, an up-and-coming young computer programmer who has several unique problems. The first problem is that of his couch - it's stuck in the stairwell and, by all logic as affirmed by the best computer modeling systems, should never have gotten where it was in the first place.

The second problem is that he's wanted for the murder of his boss. He didn't do it, of course, but that kind of thing doesn't really impress the police. And, of course, there's the problem with the woman he loves, Susan, who just so happens to be the sister of the boss whom Richard is accused of murdering.

Add into all that the titular Dirk Gently, if that is his real name. Dirk is a man who, since college, has unswayingly, constantly denied having any kind of psychic powers whatsoever - which caused him some problems during his university days when he managed to correctly predict, down the the comma, the contents of a major exam.

Now older and weirder, Dirk runs his Holistic Detective Agency. His work rests on one simple principle: the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things. Based on a common misunderstanding of quantum theory, Dirk believes that all things are fundamentally connected to all other things, no matter how tenuous those connections might appear to the unaided eye. So during the course of, say, looking for a lost cat, it is entirely possible that he may have to go down to the beach in Bermuda. Because, fundamentally, all things are connected. And billable.

Then there's the matter of a time machine hidden in Cambridge and the temptation that can arise from having one. With what amounts to a TARDIS, one could go to any point in time and space. You could visit ancient lands, pet extinct animals or, if necessary, fix something that had gone terribly, terribly wrong. It's tricky, but it can be done. And if you're the ghost of an alien whose simple mistake – putting his trust in an Electric Monk, for example – consigned it to billions of years of insubstantial solitude, a time machine might be very tempting indeed.

There's really no good way to summarize this book. As Douglas Adams is fond of doing, there seem to be several plotlines and events which, at first, seem to have no relation to each other. But as you read, you find out that the Electric Monk isn't as funny as we thought he was, that putting a salt shaker into a piece of pottery can cause more problems than you think, and that you should always be afraid of people with nothing to lose.

As Dirk claims, all things in this book are fundamentally interconnected, even if it's not obvious at the moment.

Yes, even the couch.

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“My mind is my center and everything that happens there is my responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know it clearly.”
- Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on Wikipedia
Douglas Adams on Wikipedia
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency at Amazon.com