Review 99: Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

History is like an exquisite jewel. It has many facets, and it will glitter differently depending on the point of view of the person looking at it. We see it change as we shift, as we shine the light differently upon it, but for the most part, we confine ourselves to a few simple views of history and convince ourselves that what we see is the truth of what the gem is.

But what happens when we remove the jewel from its setting and look at the faces we have never before seen? In that case, a whole new history may emerge, one that we find difficult to understand or even believe.

Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. We all think we know who he was: a hard-working, honest young man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, became President, saved the Union, and was assassinated for his troubles. Perhaps no other President in American history has been as carefully scrutinized and examined as Lincoln. You would think we had nothing left to learn about him.

You would be wrong.

You don't know about the vampires.

From the early days of the United States, the vampires have been there. They were there when the first ships pulled into Virginia, when the nation won its independence from Britain, and when the nation went west. They had their hands in the growth of the nation from day one, playing a long-term game to build a vampire paradise far from Europe, where the people there were wise to their evil and knew how to destroy them. Vampires were something that had always been talked about in the early days of American settlement. Strange tales of people dying mysteriously, sometimes their faces locked in a grim visage of fear. But no one really believed them of course. I mean really - vampires? Please.

The truth was, however, that they were out there. They were lurking in the shadows, waiting and planning and laying the groundwork for the land they would eventually come to rule.And from his youth, Abraham Lincoln was pulled into their nefarious scheme.

Born the son of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, Abraham suffered from his share of the vicissitudes of 19th-century life. Rural poverty was rampant, and his father was not the most skilled of laborers or diligent of workers. But he loved his children, as did his wife. That made it all the harder when those children started dying of a strange wasting disease. When his wife followed suit, it was tragedy upon tragedy. For Abraham, it was the beginning of a need for vengeance that would drive his entire life.

As he grew up and discovered the existence of vampires, he became a skilled and terrifying vampire hunter. He was so good at his vocation that a dissident group of vampires, led by a man named Henry Sturges, chose him as their instrument against their own kind. With Henry's guidance, Lincoln began to cut a swathe through the vampires in the United States.

But being the chosen one, as Buffy would attest, is not all it is cracked up to be. Plagued with doubts and depression, Lincoln tried many times to cast off the mantle that had been thrust upon him. He married, went into business, and did his best to live the normal life he thought he deserved. But destiny had other plans. The vampires were preparing their endgame - the establishment of a nation built on the backs of slaves, where humans would be cattle to the vampires. In time, they would take the United States and use it as a staging ground to spread their sickness around the world. They had to be stopped, and Henry and his fifth column knew only one man who could stop them.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest vampire hunter the nation had ever known.

Written by the same author who did Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this book was far more entertaining. Probably because I like Lincoln a whole lot more than I like Jane Austen, but probably because he did a much better job at integrating the Lincoln we know with the Lincoln he had created. He invents a vampire-system that would explain how they could manage to maintain influence over humans, and presents a reasonably plausible explanation for how vampires could be at the root of the Civil War.

More importantly, he keeps his Lincoln true to the character of the real Lincoln - a complex, driven man, beset by tragedy, lifted by hope, and motivated by a duty to a greater good. Perhaps a bit romanticized, of course, but we all romanticize Lincoln. It's hard not to. What's important is that we see a character who tries to fight his destiny, but in the end realizes that there are bigger things at stake than his own happiness. He has a nation to save and evil to defeat, and even if it should cost him his life, he will see that evil eradicated.

The only thing that bothered me was a bit of unfinished business in the book. The conceit of it was that Seth Grahame-Smith had been given the complete set of Lincoln Diaries - the real ones, mind you - by Sturges, so that he could tell the true tale. According to the introduction, this was a project that cost him his job, his marriage, and nearly his life, and after a fairly dramatic and mysterious introduction, we never hear anything from Smith as the author again. I would have liked for him to have explained some of the things he merely alluded to in the introduction - especially the eleven "individuals" he was instructed to talk to over the course of writing the book, but he didn't. It's a little detail, but one I wish he had taken care of.

It's a fun read, good for any vampire/Lincoln lover, or aficionado of alternate history.

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"I can see a man's purpose, Abraham. It is my gift. I can see it as clearly as I see you standing before me now. Your purpose is to fight tyranny... and mine is to see that you win."
- Henry Sturges

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter at Wikipedia
Seth Grahame-Smith at Wikipedia
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter on Amazon.com

The Trailer:

Review 98: The Drawing of the Three

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

I have a soft spot in my heart for world-crossing stories. Perhaps it's the remnant of the same childhood fantasy that everyone has - you know the one, "My family is not my family, my hometown is not my hometown - I'm really a lost prince of a strange magical kingdom and one day my true identity will be revealed and I'll be able to go do something more fun than this...."

Escapist fiction of this sort usually does really well, mostly because so many of us are unsatisfied with the way our lives are going right now. Harry Potter blew everyone away for the same reason that, say, Star Wars did - they spoke to that desire that we all have for a destiny, a reason for being in this benighted universe other than to consume, procreate, and die. It's a very powerful dream, that dream that we can lead a life better than the one we're living now, and it's one that very few of us get to realize. So we turn to fiction to realize that dream for us.

Of course, nothing comes without a price. In hopping from world to world, you may have to resist the temptations of a Snow Queen or fight off the forces of Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. You may discover that your father is the greatest force for evil in the universe, or that you've been born into a genetic cohort that scares the hell out of everyone. Crossing from one world to another - whether literally or figuratively - always comes with a price.

For Eddie Dean, Detta Walker, and Odetta Holmes, that price could very well be their lives.

When last we left the Gunslinger, Roland was sitting by a vast and gray sea at the end of the world. He had already sacrificed young Jake Chambers for his quest, and had been shown a vision of the universe that would have blasted the mind of a lesser man. Without any other direction, Roland continues on his journey - but not without some difficulty.

Wounded and ill, Roland has to go through three strange doors and draw out new companions to replace the ones he lost so long ago. If he is successful, he will draw out a new ka-tet - a group bound by the forces of destiny - that will stand with him on the way to the Dark Tower. If he fails, he will face total obliteration, to say nothing of being devoured alive by huge mutant lobsters.

Through door number one, Roland meets The Prisoner - young Eddie Dean, a junkie who has to bring a couple of pounds of cocaine through customs at JFK airport in New York. If he can do that, then the men holding his beloved big brother will let them both go, well-paid and well-loaded with the drugs that they so desperately want. Eddie can't do it without Roland's help, however - help that turns out to make the whole endeavor much more complicated and lethal than it might have been before.

Through door number two, Roland must bring the Lady of Shadows, a woman who is two minds in one body. One of these minds is Odetta Holmes, an upper-class African-American woman (though in her era of the early sixties she would probably prefer to be called a Negro) who has thrown her efforts and her fortune behind the growing civil rights movement. She is cultured and civilized, a little bit snobbish and prudish, but far, far better than her alter ego, Detta Walker.

Detta is the dark half, the evil twin who relishes in her misdeeds and embodies the worst qualities that can be found in a person. She likes to hurt people, to break things - partly out of the sheer enjoyment of hurting and breaking, but also out of a cruel sense of revenge for the ills the world has done to her. For the brick that was dropped on her head when she was a child, for the train that robbed her of her legs when she was an adult. Of all the people Roland has met so far, Detta Walker is the one who poses the most danger to him and his quest. Only by bringing the two women together can he have any chance of making it to the Tower.

Through door number three, Roland must meet death - but not for him - in the form of The Pusher. The aptly-named Jack Mort has a hobby - anonymous murder. Planning and executing the suffering of others is what brings joy to his heart and a stain to his jeans, and he has intersected with Roland's quest even before Roland reached the beach. He was the one who pushed Odetta Holmes under a subway train. He was the one who pushed Jack Chambers in front of a speeding Cadillac. Now, Roland has control of this man's body and will use it to get what he needs from our world so that he can carry on in his. A little poetic justice along the way is just icing on the cake.

If Roland succeeds, he and his new group will push on to find the Dark Tower and do... whatever it is that Roland needs to do there. If he fails, they will all die, and the hopes of Roland's world will die with them.

Like I said, I enjoy tales of crossing worlds, and so this book felt good to me. I liked seeing not only how Roland dealt with the unfamiliar reality of New York in three different decades, but how the stories of Eddie, Odetta/Detta and Jack intersected with each other. At one point in his section, Jack thinks, "Who was to say he had not sculpted the cosmos today, or might not at some future time? God, no wonder he creamed his jeans!" Crude though it may be, Jack is more right than he knows - a few simple pushes altered the destinies of not only the people he pushed, but those of entire worlds. So if you think small actions can't have big consequences, well, look to Jack Mort.

Actually, his section of the book was my favorite. While Roland vs. Eddie was an action-packed shoot-em-up, and Roland vs. Detta was a hostage drama, Roland vs. Jack was almost a dark comedy. Taking over Jack's body and keeping the man's mind at metaphorical gunpoint, Roland carves a swath of confusion through New York City. The mental disconnect people have between Jack Mort's appearance as a well-off CPA and his behavior as a seasoned gunslinger is enough for some moments of gold.

By the end of the book, we're not much closer to the Dark Tower than we were at the beginning, but we are very nearly ready to get started on the journey. Not quite there yet, but Roland now has people he can count on when things turn bad. And they will turn bad, you can set your watch and warrant on it.

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"Well, what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware."
- Eddie Dean, The Drawing of the Three
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The Drawing of the Three on Wikipedia
The Dark Tower Portal on Wikipedia
Stephen King on Wikipedia
The Dark Tower homepage
The Drawing of the Three on Amazon.com

Review 97: The Civil War

The Civil War by Bruce Catton

When I was a kid, my grandparents thought they would do something that every grandparent should do - share what they love with the next generation. They bought me a subscription to the Time-Life series on The Civil War. Now for those of you too young to remember, Time-Life used to publish these monthly book series on various topics. The idea was that you would receive the books once a month, each book on a different topic in the series. My father had the Science Series, which I absolutely adored, and my grandparents thought that I would fall similarly in love with the Civil War series.

After all, they both were interested in this most unfortunate periods in U.S. history. It spanned five years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and permanently altered the face of our nation. What's not to love?

Predictably, I found them kind of boring.

The pictures were all in black and white, static in composition and full of dead guys with beards. There were lots of dates that I couldn't comprehend, talking about places I'd never been and full of names I'd never heard of. I got them, flipped through them and was just not interested.

Looking back, I know that I was a bad grandson and I feel bad that I can't tell my grandparents that.

Now that I'm older, and I know some things about my country and its history, I can really appreciate the enormous change that the Civil War brought upon the United States. As horrible as it was - and it was horrible - without that war our nation would be a pale shadow of what it is today. If it were a nation at all....

We all know the facts: in 1860, following the election of Abraham Lincoln and years of arguing about slavery and its place in a modern nation, eleven states seceded from the United States and formed their own Confederate States of America. In response, Lincoln raised an army from the remaining states in the Union and launched it at the Rebels. After five years of relentless fighting, the war was won in favor of the Union. The rebel states were accepted back into the Union, and the nation has been putting itself back together ever since then.

That's the big picture, and that's basically what this book does. In less than 300 pages, Catton gives an interesting and dynamic overview of the War, from its origins in such decisions as Dred Scott and the Missouri Compromise up through the assassination of Lincoln and the failures of the Reconstruction. It follows the major battles of the war, listing the strikes and feints of each army and introducing all the major players. Between these, he talks about the political and social effects of the war - how the economies of the two states fared, how the international community viewed the conflict, and what the ultimate fate of the slaves was.

The pace of the book is very good, even if the blow-by-blow descriptions of the battles get a little soft in the middle. Catton acts as a narrator for the war, telling it as one might tell a story. He works up to climactic moments, then leaves us there to consider for a while before moving on to the next event. What's more, he's fair. It's very easy for people to be unfair to the South - they were rebels, after all. Traitors, some might say. But Catton wants us to understand that the South was doing what it thought was in its best interests, as with the North. What's more, he wants us to know that the South fought harder than any army has since, sacrificing countless men and an entire culture to a war that they really could not win. He does not demonize the South, nor does he praise the North. He is simply a storyteller, who knows from the beginning the tragic tale that he has in store for us.

So yes, I think this book is an excellent read, especially if you're just getting into the Civil War. My one real complaint about it is that the book lacks adequate maps which would otherwise help a reader visualize what kind of maneuvers the armies of the North and the South are making. There are maps at the back of the book, but I wouldn't call them "adequate." They're black and white where they really should be color - having both the Union and the Confederate advances marked with black arrows isn't really helpful. Given the intricate interactions between armies, some kind of clear visual aid might have been useful.

If you have access to the internet, of course, you can get a slightly clearer view of what happened, where and when. Mind you, even the better maps that you can find on line still take some interpretation. Still, it would have been nice to have the book more accessible to those of us who don't carry the maps in our heads.

The reason why this is important is that even though this book is kind of an index tour of the Civil War, it still gets into a lot of detail - which general moved which army across which river is vital to understanding how the war progressed. The reason the book can go into such detail is that this is one of the most extensively studied conflicts in our history. Every battle, the movement of every army has been studied and documented over the last century and a half, and there's no sign of it slowing down. The Civil War is fundamental to how our nation became what it is, and as such it is an obsession for the United States.

That's what this book really tries to understand - why, of all the wars that we have fought, are we so obsessed with this one? You don't see people doing a lot of World War 2 re-enactments or dressing up to fight mock battles of our cute little war with Spain. I'm pretty sure there won't be any kind of Afghan War Re-enactment Society a hundred and fifty years from now.

It was a horrible war. It took more lives in a single battle than we've seen in our current Middle East conflict so far. It was fought by untrained, inexperienced men who had no idea what they were in for when they signed up. It was a war fought not only for territory but for ideals - for the South's ability to maintain its agrarian slave culture and for the North's ability to keep the Union whole. It was a war that could have gone a thousand different ways, each more horrible than the last, and the fact that it ended as well as it did is completely due to the strength of character possessed by all the men involved in sealing that bloody peace. It was a war that was, perhaps, inevitable.

That was something I took away from this book. The Civil War had to happen. In order for our country to progress, it had to do away with the things that was holding it back, slavery being one of those things. It was a test to see if the union could balance its ideals of liberty and order, and to see if it was worthy of forging ahead. It was a war that settled who we are as a nation, at least for a little while, and put paid to the question of whether we were a bunch of congenial states or a true nation, ready to take its place in the world.

The Civil War is one of those topics that people spend their lives studying, and rightly so. Its effects can be felt even today, and the echoes from the shots fired at Fort Sumpter and Gettysburg and Shiloh won't fade as long as this nation survives. For Americans, to know the Civil War is to know how grateful we should be that we have the country we do. It is often said that soldiers die to keep us free, but I would say than no army of the United States since then has done so more literally than the army of this conflict.

For those of you who aren't American, this might give you a little insight into our character. Most nations wouldn't survive such a conflict, with such immense losses of life and the utter destruction of an economy. But we did, somehow. The wounds from that war aren't entirely healed - there are still scars. But we have stayed together since then, and I reckon that nothing is going to tear us apart again.

So Grandmom, Grandpop, I'm sorry. I really should have appreciated what you tried to teach me. But now I do, and I can pass it on to others....

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"A singular fact about modern war is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society's roots are nourished. They bring about infinite change, not because anyone especially wants it, but because all-out warfare destroys so much that things can never again be as they used to be."
Bruce Catton, The Civil War
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Bruce Catton on Wikipedia
The Civil War on Amazon.com
The American Civil War on Wikipedia

Review 96: Ryoma - Life of a Renaissance Samurai

Ryoma - Life of a Renaissance Samurai by Romulus Hillsborough

If he had been born in the US, Sakamoto Ryoma would have been an ideal model of the American Dream. He was born to a poor family that had bought its way into samurai status only a couple of generations before. When he was a kid, people thought he was kind of slow and useless, and never thought he'd amount to anything. He was terrible in school, and so his father enrolled him in a school for sword fighting, where he found his passion.

He was a damn good swordsman, and quickly became qualified to open his own dojo. By this point, it looked like Sakamoto Ryoma would have been simply another famous name in the annals of Japanese swordsmanship.

And then the Americans came, and all hell broke loose.

The shogunate, knowing it was outgunned by the Americans, agreed to let them in, a decision that sent shockwaves around Japan. A political world that had been fairly simple to live in - a hierarchical system in which the Shogun was at the top of one's loyalty chain and the Emperor was someone about whom one did not even think - became so complex that "Byzantine" doesn't even begin to describe it. Webs were spun, and within instants, there were factions who wanted a thousand different things for the future. The simplest of these, and the one that Ryoma and other lower samurai from his home region latched on to at first, was simple: Throw out the foreigners and throw down the Shogun.

Luckily for Japan, Ryoma was not stupid enough to follow that path for too long. He was a bright guy, who quickly saw what needed to be done. With the help of other progressive thinkers, both within and outside the Shogunate, Ryoma decided that the survival of Japan was more important than that of the Shogunate or any individual clan or region. And in order to save Japan, they'd have to let the barbarians in.

His plan was simple, really: learn from the West, build a navy, buy weapons, and form a western-style democracy. Only then, with Japan standing as a strong modern nation, would it be able to deal with the outsiders, to say nothing of avoiding subjugation by them. Ryoma had learned from the lessons of China and India, and knew that infighting within the various factions was a sure road to being invaded and colonized by France or Britain.

A simple plan. The only problem was that no one wanted any part of it. And so it became Ryoma's job to run across the country, cajoling, convincing and reasoning with the country's great powers, all while staying one step ahead of the law - he was a fugitive from his region, an executable offense, and he rose to the top of the Shogun's most wanted with undue haste....

It's a neat story, if really long. Hillsborough has used an interesting style, though, that I'm still not sure I really like. It's a kind of novelized biography. While I'm sure that his facts are solid - countless books have been written about Sakamoto Ryoma and he's considered one of the founding fathers of modern Japan - he tries to make the story more... story-like by dramatizing events. Writing dialogue with action and inflection that he could only have known by being there. Ryoma roars and pounds the floor with his fist a lot. In fact, pre-Meiji Japan seems like a very noisy place, what with all the yelling and roaring and pounding and high officials shouting, "Impertinence!" every time someone set a foot wrong....

Like I said, I'm sure he didn't make up anything important, but it still gives me a lingering feeling of doubt. By turning Ryoma into a character for his novel, Hillsborough displays his bias, and nothing is more deadly to history than bias. He portrays Ryoma as a kind of genius puppetmaster, twitching strings here and there until he got what he wanted, which kind of demeans the contributions of many other people without whom Sakamoto Ryoma would have died years before he was finally assassinated.

He was a very intelligent, very resourceful man, and without him Japan's history would have been drastically different. So if you want to know more about this man, a statesman who should be held up with the great statesmen of the world, check out this book.

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"A hero should go his own way!"
- Sakamoto Ryoma
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Review 95: Shinsengumi - The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps

Shinsengumi: The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps by Romulus Hillsborough

A few years ago, Japan's national TV network, NHK, aired a Sunday night drama about the Shinsengumi, a band of samurai who operated in Kyoto at the end of the Edo period. While I didn't watch it, mainly because I was working and even if I had, I wouldn't have understood, my students kept me updated and it sounds like NHK did a nice job of romanticizing the group. Indeed, if the sudden upswing in traffic around Mibu temple is any indication, NHK made them look positively heroic.

Romulus Hillsborough (which, for the record, is an awesome name) takes a different approach to the Shinsengumi story, proving once again that, in history as with so many other things, how you see things depends on where you stand.

The 1860s were a bad decade. Every American schoolchild can tell you that. But it was bad in Japan as well, on a similar level. You see, for the previous 250 years, Japan had pretty much shut itself off from the Western world. There was limited contact with China and Korea, but as for Europe and the Americas? Damn near nothing. Japan wanted nothing to do with the white devils, and did a fantastic job keeping us out.

But the march of progress is inescapable, and by the mid-1800s, word got round to the Shogun that Great Britain had been working its way across Asia, taking out India and China through treaty, deception and conquest. This, naturally, worried the Shogun, who although being the military head of the country, had not fought a significant military battle since Sekigahara in 1600 (well, not the same shogun, but you get what I mean). The Tokugawa family ruled over a peaceful land, the Emperors stayed out of the way in Kyoto, and everything was copacetic.

In other words, ripe for some rampaging foreign power to take over.

Lucky for Japan, the first rampaging foreign power to show up on their doorstep was the United States. Admiral Perry and his Black Ships arrived in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1853 with trade agreements and heavy cannon and announced that they would be happy to start trading with the Land of the Rising Sun. And if the Land of the Rising Sun wasn't too keen on that, well, maybe a few well-placed shells would change their minds.

The shogun at the time, Tokugawa Iesada, was no idiot. In 1854, a "Treaty of Peace and Amity" was signed in Kanagawa, opening Japanese ports to western ships for the first time, and basically ending the era of seclusion.

That's when all hell broke loose.

Most of the people living in Japan at the time had never seen a foreign person, and could rely only on rumor and misinformation to know what Westerners were like - pale-skinned, long-nosed blondes, as it turned out. No one knew what to expect from their new neighbors, and frankly, no one wanted to find out. Despite the "Amity" of the treaty, everyone knew that the only reason the American and British and Dutch had been let in was because they had better guns. Everyone, from the Shogun to the Emperor all the way down to the lowest burakumin wanted the foreigners kicked as far out of the country as they could get. With the possible exception of Sakamoto Ryoma, but we'll get to him later.

Two factions opened up. There were the Imperial loyalists, who wanted to overthrow the Tokugawa bakufu and restore the Emperor to power, while kicking out the foreigners. And there were the Tokugawa loyalists, who stood behind their lord and master, and who would fight to the death to keep him in power. While kicking out the foreigners. The famed Samurai, who had really nothing to do for two and a half centuries but collect their stipends and harass commoners, finally had their chance to see some action. Many of them left their homes and became ronin, ready to fight for whomever would give them a chance.

The city of Kyoto was the Imperial city, and if Tokugawa Wosshisname (there were four Tokugawa shoguns between 1853 and 1868) were to keep the imperial loyalists in line, he would have to do it there. So, a man named Matsudaira Katamori - a close personal friend of the shogun's, head of the Matsudaira clan and Lord of Aizu, and came up with an idea for keeping order in Kyoto. With the help of longtime friend and violence enthusiast Kiyokawa Hachiro, they got together the best of the wandering ronin and brought them to the village of Mibu, in Kyoto (where I used to live). They made quite an impact on the community, and were soon given the cute nickname of "Mibu Wolves."

The Mibu Wolves were soon shaped and molded into the Shinsengumi, "The Newly Selected Group." by three iron-willed men: Kondo Isami, Hijikata Toshizo, and Serizawa Kamo. Each of these men left lasting impressions on the Shinsengumi and on Japanese history.

So... what was the impression? Well, the Shinsengumi were a kind of police force for Kyoto, keeping the locals in line and watching for any threats against the shogunate. Unlike a regular police force, however, they had almost limitless power within the city. Their word was enough to arrest, convict and execute someone. There was no slight too small to provoke violence and murder, and no length they would not go to to destroy the enemies of Tokugawa. They fought to the end to keep the Shogun in power, even after Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the fifteenth and final Tokugawa shogun, abdicated control of the country to Emperor Meiji.

You could take the NHK view, that the Shinsengumi were on the wrong side of history, trying to uphold the virtues of their fathers and grandfathers, and that they were trying to keep the nation they loved from falling apart or changing irreparably.

Hillsborough takes the point of view that the Shinsengumi were deluded with the "germ of self-importance." That they couldn't see the broader picture of history unfolding around them and reacted to change the only way they knew how - with their swords. That they were thugs and bullies, relics of an age that should have ended long before it did. Perhaps the Shinsengumi were inevitable, perhaps they were even necessary for the Meiji Restoration to take place. But if even half the stories about them were true, they are not a group of men that I would really want to hang out with.

It's a very informative book, if a little too short. Hillsborough says in the beginning that you're reading a "historical narrative," which should be taken carefully. Given the lack of primary sources, knowing exactly what happened when is difficult. Many texts on the Shinsengumi contradict each other, and for a long time, they were not a polite subject of research. Think about it - from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 through the surrender to the United States in 1945, the Emperor was a living god and a subject of reverence among the people of Japan. Who, then, would have the balls to do research into the group that actively opposed imperial rule?

Still, it's a good read. It's even better when you actually live in Kyoto. I used to be able to see Mibu temple from my balcony. I've walked past the site of the old Ikeda-ya (where the Shinsengumi foiled a plot to burn down Kyoto and kidnap a high-ranking Tokugawa ally) hundreds of times. I could walk to the site where Ito Kashitarou was assassinated for splitting from the group. History becomes much more fun when you're right where it happened....

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"For all its worth, however, when the will to power is combined with the germ of self-importance - the conviction that one is of greater worth than his fellow human beings - it tends to transform into the stuff of tragedy, often lethal to the host."
- Romulus Hillsborough, Shinsengumi
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The Shinsengumi on Wikipedia
The Shinsengumi: The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps on Amazon.com

Review 94: The Gunslinger

Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

There's really not much more you need to know about this story except what's right up there. That's the essence of the whole thing - a chase. A man in black, who has obviously done something terrible, and a gunslinger, who is obviously going to set things right.

If, by "set right," you mean "kill a whole lot of people," then you're pretty much on target.

This is the beginning of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, a story told in seven volumes that manages to be the lynchpin for all the worlds that he has created. It's a story that was 22 years in the writing, and almost never got finished. It's an epic story, all about the endless quest for the Dark Tower, the center of all reality, the axle upon which the wheels of creation move.

Roland, the gunslinger, is hunting for this tower. He wants it more than anything in the world. He has lost everything in pursuit of this tower - his friends, his family, his world - and yet he pressed on. The man in black has information for him, can set his path towards his goal. If only Roland can catch him.

On his way to the man in black, Roland finds a small town taken over by a mad preacher woman, a sympathetic hermit, and a boy who doesn't look like he's terribly local to this world. All of them help point the way to the man in black, and none of them make it to the end with Roland. Even he is unprepared for the terrifying reality that awaits him when he and the man in black finally have their palaver....

There truly is something magical about this book. Even if there were no other Dark Tower books, it would stand out as a good story, well told. Part of this is its deceptive simplicity - moving from point A to point B, with only a few flashbacks to fill in the backstory. Well, quite a lot of flashbacks, actually, seeing as how King did set this story in a featureless desert with a singular protagonist, and there's only so much you can work with without dipping into the well of the past from time to time.

The glimpses of Roland's past that we get to see are tantalizing - they tell of a rich and cultured world that is nonetheless hard and merciless. The gunslingers are all that stand between civilization and chaos, and there are precious few of them left. Roland and his friends know they may be the last of their kind, but that doesn't deter them from pursuing their guns and growing up to honor their fathers.

The fact that we know from the beginning that they all fail just makes it all the more poignant to watch them try.

It's hard to talk about this book without trying to talk about the rest of the series, and it's even harder to convey the feeling of reading it when the series was still ongoing. My father, a huge Stephen King fan, had these books when I was a kid, and I eventually got into them, and was - like so many others - immeasurably frustrated by the pace at which King was writing them. I finished this book, which does not necessarily have a happy - or easy-to-understand - ending, and I wanted more. I wanted to know what Roland was going to do now that he'd had his palaver with the man in black, and I wanted to know if he would ever find the Dark Tower. Whom would he enlist in his quest, as the oracle had suggested? Whom else would he sacrifice, as he did young Jake?

Speaking of which, the relationship between Roland and Jake is an interesting one, especially as I got older and re-read it. When I first read the book, I was probably around Jake's age - eleven years old [1]. Reading Jake's story of how he came to Roland's world was horrifying enough, but to see how their relationship would eventually end was even worse. The idea that there might be something more important to, say, my parents [2] than I was - well, that was horrifying. To think that a purpose might exist for which they would let me fall to my death.... That's not the kind of thing an eleven year-old boy wants to think about.

From the point of view of an older person, a grown man, I found something uncomfortable about their relationship. The bond that formed between man and boy was instant, and intense, and having grown up in a culture where a strange man being that friendly to a young boy would be automatically colored with the taint of pedophilia, well, I had to work a little harder to stay in Roland's head. The fact that I know that wasn't where King was going with the relationship helps a little, but every reader brings his or her hang-ups along when they read and some of mine are a little more persistent than others. I'm sure any psychologist who needs to put a down payment on a yacht would be happy to help me work on it.

All in all, it's an excellent beginning. What follows is a massive tale, a great quest that spans time and space and reality, culminating in Roland's final understanding of who he is and why he exists. Not all of it is as good as this book, but it's still worth reading, I say ya true.

So put on your good boots, don't forget your hat and horn and donkey. It's a long trip to the end....

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"This is not the beginning but the beginning's end. You'd do well to remember that... but you never do."
- The Man in Black
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[1] This is another example of the Eleven Year-Old Boy Rule: if you have a major character in your book who is not an adult, chances are that it will be an eleven year-old boy. King is a master of this.

[2] Because if Roland isn't a father-substitute then I don't know who is.

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Review 93: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I have kind of a weird confession to make. It's not really a confession as such, since you only confess things that you're ashamed of or that you feel you have done wrong. But this is something that I believe people may find a little odd, so I suppose it's the best word under the circumstances.

I don't kill cockroaches.

Fortunately, I live up on the tenth floor in a nice modern apartment building, so they're not really a problem for me. But even in my old place, where they'd turn up from time to time, or walking about in the city, where you're bound to see them, especially after dark, I feel no desire to do what everyone else seems to do - freak out and jump on them with both feet. After all, why should I? They're just being what they are. They're just doing what millions of years of evolution have programmed them to do. They don't act out of malice or with the intention of trying to harm me, so I say live and let live.

Oh, don't get me wrong - I don't let roaches stay. I'll capture them, take them out to the riverbank or somewhere and let them go. I'll put down deterrents to roaches around the house. I may be kindly-disposed towards all living things [1], but I'm not an idiot. My point is, I feel a certain empathy towards those little guys, just trying to make their way in a hostile, anti-cockroach world.

And that's how I know I'm not an android.

When we talk about things like computer intelligence, one of the questions that comes up is how we would tell an artificial intelligence apart from the real thing? For a computer-bound AI, there's the Turing Test - a conversation with a human wherein the human cannot tell that she's talking to a computer. And that's good, as far as that goes. But what if we start putting them into physical bodies? What if we make these AIs in our image? Fleshy, sweaty, hairy robots that look and behave just like humans do? How, then, would we be able to tell the difference between a made being and a natural-born human?

Philip K. Dick's answer is empathy, and it is at the core of this book.

Dick is kind of like science fiction's mad mystic. He explores the hidden inner worlds of the people involved in the story, peeling apart issues of identity and psychology and reality itself, forcing the reader to ask him or herself what's really going on.

In other words, reading his work can be something of a head trip.

This novel introduces us to a near-future America, one which is greatly different from the one we know today. After a devastating nuclear war that wiped out countless species of plants and animals, the planet is being slowly emptied out. Those who are young, healthy and fertile are allowed to emigrate to off-world colonies. With them go the androids as servants, workers and slaves. Some people stay on Earth for reasons of their own. J.R. Isadore, for example, is a "special," one who doesn't make the genetic grade to leave the planet. Rick Deckard, on the other hand, is a bounty hunter, a man whose duty is to hunt down and destroy androids that come to Earth. Deckard has been handed a special assignment - six androids of the latest model, Nexus-6, have landed nearby. They're strong, intelligent, almost indistinguishable from humans, and Deckard has to "retire" them all before they get away.

Like many people, I first encountered this story in the movie Blade Runner, which followed much the same path. And, probably like a lot of people who saw the movie first, I was a bit thrown by the difference between the two. Rick Deckard in the book is not the morose lone wolf that he is in the movie. He has a wife here, and an electric sheep that he keeps on the roof (though he'd never admit to his neighbors that it was electric.) He has an interest in animals - the keeping of which is a mark of true status in a world where so many species have gone extinct. He's a more interesting character, with more depth and inner conflict than we see in the film. On the other hand, Roy Baty, Deckard's adversary, is far less interesting. He's intelligent and cruel, yes, but with so much less visceral power than Rutger Hauer gave him.

The major themes are different as well. In the movie, one of the overriding themes is the desire to live, the instinctive need that humans have to keep surviving even for just one more second. It's what keeps Deckard hanging on the edge of the roof when Roy's already broken his fingers. It's what sends Roy to Tyrell's home in the middle of the night with murder on his mind. The replicants in the film, despite being made beings, want what we want: more life.

The book follows a different path, though. The book looks at the difference between human and android, the Born and the Made, especially where it comes to that elusive quality of empathy. It is a capacity that only humans are supposed to possess, and indeed there is a whole religion founded around it - Mercerism. By using "Empathy Boxes," a person can become one with the iconic Wilbur Mercer, and share the joys and pains of everyone else connected to him at the same time. Life in all its forms becomes utterly sacred, and the destruction of a living thing is one of the greatest sins one can commit.

The androids, on the other hand, know nothing of empathy. They would gladly give up one of their own to die in their place. In one rather vivid scene, the android Pris starts snipping the legs off a spider, an act so monstrous that it drives J.R. Isadore to betray her and the other androids, people he believes are his only friends. The androids can pretend to feel empathy, but a simple test of involuntary physical responses show that they cannot truly feel it.

So, in a world where life has been scythed clean, respect for life is the highest virtue. The androids have no respect for life, and must therefore be kept off the planet, eliminated if they set foot on it. But what happens when they get more complex? What happens when the androids are so good, the humans begin to empathize with them? How can you destroy something when you can imagine its pain as your own? And if you can refrain from killing a lowly cockroach because you have empathy for it, how can you then turn around and kill thinking, self-aware android?

It's the kind of logical and moral conundrum that Dick excels at. The capacity for empathy cannot be what makes one creature worthy of protection and another not. After all, cockroaches don't feel empathy any more than androids do, yet they would be cherished in this world. It must then be the ability to generate empathy in others that is important, and in this book we see the androids cross that line. Deckard realizes that he's beginning to feel for the things he has to kill, and cannot reconcile that feeling with his job.

The theme of Born versus Made is reflected all through the book, especially where animals show up. There are animals that are presented as real, which later turn out to be androids. Others which the characters think are androids, but turn out to be real. Some characters can't even say with certainty whether they are not androids. All throughout the book, people find themselves in the position where they can't tell the difference between biological life and constructed life, which then raises a whole new question - if you can't tell the difference, then is there any difference at all?

It's the kind of question best discussed over a cup of coffee at Denny's with your friends in college.

Even today, people look down on science fiction as being less substantial than "real" fiction. Stories of androids and bounty hunters and off-world colonies, they think, can't compete with tales of single mothers raising kids in the inner cities or soldiers fighting and dying in a pointless war. To those who think there's nothing to grab on to in science fiction, I submit this book. It'll stay in your head, keep you up at night, and make you ask the kinds of questions that you'll never be able to answer.

If that's not quality writing, then I don't know what is.

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"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe."
- Mercer, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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[1] Well, almost all living things. There's still Ann Coulter....

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