Great Book, Appalling Movie

Original DVD Cover Image, 1998

Review: Starship Troopers with Casper van Diem, Michael  Ironside vs. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

Challenged to name a movie that fell disappointingly short of its source, my first reaction is Starship Troopers, out in a 20th anniversary edition this month.

Two decades ago, I was tremendously excited when I learned they would make this book into a movie, even as I doubted they would capture its flavor in full. The problem is internal dialogue. Truly interesting books take us into the inner life of their main characters; in revealing those meditations and self-recriminations, they expose their souls. 

Without that insight, fictional characters are as intellectually interesting as rock-em-sock-em robots.

Typically, movies substitute external dialogue and narrative for these inner debates. An example of this done well can be seen in the 1984 version of Dune. Without the narrative voiced by Gurney Halleck (Patrick Stewart) and Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) in that film, its story would be impenetrable. With it, and by dint of voicing much of the book’s mental dialogue, it succeeds as an adaptation.

So I knew it would not be impossible to capture the philosophy- and social-commentary-laden substance of Heinlein’s novel. Then I saw it in the theatrical release, and was sorely disappointed. This is simply not Heinlein’s story.

Oh, the bugs are there. The sneak attack by this alien hive-dwelling race that wipes out Johnny Rico’s home city is in the movie. The Mobile Infantry are there, with their armored suits complete with heads-up displays, pocket nukes and jump jets. What didn’t survive the cut? Only the reason why Johnny joins the service in the first place.

Heinlein’s novel hinges on two social differences in the world of Starship Troopers. First, only veterans—those who have chosen to place their lives “between their loved home and the war’s desolation”—have the right to vote. Civilians do not have that right, and neither do serving troopers. Heinlein justifies this very succinctly:

Suddenly he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?” ”The difference,” I answered carefully, ” lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

Second, it is anyone’s choice to enlist at any time after their 18th birthday. The services will find something for the enlistee to do, to allow them to earn the franchise. But if they then go AWOL, resign, or are drummed out for any reason, they never have the opportunity to try again. Politicians from dogcatcher to President must, under this system, be veterans, and there are no “reserves”.

The movie barely mentions either of these two critical concepts. Worse, the main source informing Rico’s choices, his high school “History and Moral Philosophy” teacher, Col. DuBois (who pointed his stump at Johnny in the quote from the novel), is barely there in the first scenes, and not mentioned again. These ideas are presented in hit-and-miss fashion, as if they are part of the recruit training after enlistment, instead of why recruits choose to enlist in the first place.

Moving the important motivation to enlist into the recruit training has another consequence—we do not get a real sense of the conflict between Rico and his father. As a result, his reaction when his home city is attacked is shallow. He’s now an orphan, okay, move on. This robs the viewer of one of the most poignant scenes Heinlein has written, when as an officer, Rico is relying on his master sergeant.

Lieutenant Rasczak (Michael Ironside) is given most of the lines that Col. DuBois has in the novel. So we get a tepid, PC-diluted “Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn’t solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst,” instead of

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that “violence never settles anything” I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

If this was the only shortcut, I would not complain. It is not. Sergeant Zim is another crucial character whose best lines from the book are given to Lt. Rasczak, or simply omitted. Rico’s relationship with training sergeant Zim is formative for him. Again, the movie simply ignores this part of the story.

In addition, the movie completely omits Juan Rico’s choice to go to officer training, and how this perspective changes his assessment of his life and responsibilities. I can see leaving this out to save time (and provide grist for a sequel). I suspect, however, that the movie’s creators were simply in a hurry to confront Rico with the alien bugs.

The other changes are minor, and do not, in my opinion, ruin the story. In Heinlein’s novel, women do not serve in the Mobile Infantry; Heinlein was a product of his time and served as a Naval officer in the 40s. He does give women a unique role that men cannot, for the most part, perform as well. In addition, Johnny’s best friend Carl does not end up as a commanding colonel in the novel—to describe where he does would be a spoiler. But these are minor changes, and I can roll with them. 

What I miss are the thoughts about why defensive war is necessary, and how best to conduct a war once one is begun. Once again, the words are those of Col. DuBois:

If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?… Of course not. You’d paddle it. There can be circumstances when it would be just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force.

Dune has been remade, and the second version has qualities that the first did not. I cling to the hope that Starship Troopers will be remade by someone with the vision to see past the great special effects opportunity to create a movie worthy of the power of Robert Heinlein’s novel.

In the meantime, skip the movie. Read the book.

Strength of Warped Materials

Review: Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, Compilation edited by Robert A. Baker

Anyone who’s had to revise ISO9000 documents, review a prosy thesis paper, or wade through jargon in an industry magazine, will welcome this compilation with heart-felt relief. These selections from the notorious 50s underground publication The Worm-Runner’s Digest are guaranteed to make you smile.

Consider, for example, “Postal System Input Buffer Device” by Joe and Gil Robertson Obsborne. A simple action, putting an envelope into a mailbox, right? Not in formal instructionese, which must specify that to operate such an input device requires:

a) a passenger in normal working condition mounted upright on the front seat or (b) a driver having at least one arm on the right-hand side which is six feet long and double-jointed at the wrist and elbow.

Then there’s F.E. Warburton’s “Terns,” which reliably informs us that because terns have webbed feet, they will be found in the same books as albatrosses and other waterfowl; further that terns won’t eat anything but fish, so “it is no use putting out bits of suet and coconut for them in the winter”. Besides,

Baby terns just a few days old are the cutest, fluffiest little things. They will sit on your hand just as friendly as anything, going “chirp, chirp” and looking at you with their big bright eyes and vomiting half-digested fish all over your shirt.

Two versions of the 23rd Psalm are included. The first, by Alan Simpson and R.A. Baker, commences: “The Lord is my external-internal integrative mechanism, I shall not be deprived of gratification for my viscerogenic hungers or my need dispositions…”. The second, from science fiction writer Lester del Rey starts: “The AEC is my shepherd, I shall not live. It maketh me to lie down in radiant pastures…”.

Hugh Sinclair contributed the brilliant “Hiawatha’s Lipid,” which simply has to be read entire. Sinclair spoofs the classic poem in an effort for which he concedes he “sought inspiration in innumerable manhattans—taken, of course, because they were good for me since the day’s immobility of listening to papers on atheroma and serum cholesterol had no doubt silted up my vessels, and alcohol is one of the few effective solvents.”

From his briefcase Hiawatha / Took his paper for the meeting… / Started on the introduction, / Giving first a brief description / Of the Proto-Keynesian period / When all fats in equal measure / Raised cholesterol in serum…

Berkeley engineer Charles Siem’s paper supplies the book’s title. “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown.” This piece includes a wonderfully evocative figure, Force Distribution of Cantilever Beam, complete with rotational and compressional component—in which the beam’s profile is distinctly mammalian. The critical element of the force diagram is identified, with the caveat:

If the female is naturally blessed with sufficient pectoral development, she can supply this very vital force and maintain the elemental strip at equilibrium. If she is not, the engineer has to supply this force by artificial methods.

Sometimes the bibliography is more interesting than the paper, as R. Arnold Le Win points out in “Logarithmic and Arythmic Expression of a Physiological Function.” In fact, the only thing in this item is the list of references, which include:

7. Shadrach, C., Meshach, H., and Abednego, H. and C.. An anaerobic heat resistant monoflagellate ornithine producing sulfur non-purple bacterium isolated from the rectum of a goat. J.Bact., 70: 1-11,1944.
10. Aschitz, K., and Spitz, G. Urea excretion, growth hormone production, and caudal temperature of the 6-week-old hypophysectomized, adrenalextomized, tonsillectomized castrated albino hamster. Proc.Soc.Exp.Biol.& Med.. 50: 2-4, 1956.
13. Strickstaw, A. The fats of cats. 27.Glycero-1, 4-alpha-feritol, a new liquid component of the milk of the lion. Felis leo. Biochem.J. 73: 108-113, 1946.

I can only excerpt a few high points here. To read the rest will take some digging, since Stress Analysis is, sadly, out of print. A slightly more recent compilation from The Worm-Runner’s Digest titled Science, Sex and Sacred Cows (which I reviewed in Spoofing Science Before the Ig Nobel Prize) is more available, as is The Worm Re-Turns. None are available on Kindle. Yet.

Tough-Guy Tango with Tolerance

Review: Flawless with Robert DeNiro and Philip Seymour Hoffman

I’ve learned over the years that any Robert DeNiro movie role will have much in common with other characters he’s portrayed in his distinguished career—not to say he is limited, but in every role, we see the real DeNiro shining through from beneath. He shares that quality with other icons. Think John Wayne or Al Pacino.

So the first time I watched it, I was a bit tentative about the story in Flawless, a 1999 film in which he starred opposite the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. I hadn't seen it for a while, but when I caught the film in a cable rerun last night, I was struck again by that ineffable quality.

DeNiro plays Walt Koontz, a tough-guy retired fireman who works as a security guard and lives in a seedy walk-up apartment across the airshaft from a room that always seems filled with flamingly-gay drag-queens. The film quickly establishes Koontz as physically-oriented (he dances Argentine Tango with a woman he regards as a girlfriend, but pays as a hooker), and more than slightly homophobic.

Thus far, classic DeNiro. Then, in responding to a shooting in the apartment building, Koontz suffers a stroke that paralyzes his right side. This strong, self-sufficient man is reduced in an instant to a dependent cripple. He can’t work, he can’t dance. His speech is slurred to the point of incomprehensibility. He can’t bear to have his friends learn of his disability. Recommended to get singing lessons as an aid to speech therapy, he reluctantly decides to take up an offer for lessons from the gay singer who lives opposite him. DeNiro’s portrayal of the loneliness of stroke-victim Koontz, and his struggle to return to his former ability, is flawless.

And for once, the DeNiro beneath the role is harder to discern. He’s still there, but Koontz is more apparent than DeNiro.

Hoffman, a standout in a secondary role in 1992’s Scent of a Woman, had already had experience holding his own opposite a screen icon—Al Pacino, who starred in that film. (Interestingly, Pacino also danced Argentine Tango on screen in that film.) Hoffman’s performance as Rusty Kimmerman, a pre-surgery transsexual who leads DeNiro’s crippled cop to understand that attitude and character are more important than superficial perfection, is nuanced, understated—flawless.

The two work together, not only to help Koontz recover some of his pre-stroke grace, but also to discover the murderers who shot up the apartment house the night of Koontz’ stroke. Touches of buffoonery and sexual innuendo offset the violence of those killings to provide a flawless balance.

Each time I watch this movie, I see more of value in its story, and in DeNiro’s performance. It’s definitely worth adding Flawless to your movie library.

Liner Notes:

Philip Seymour Hoffman played an another, far more subtle gay character in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Hoffman blackmailer Freddie Miles was a match in petty villainy to the whining schoolboy he played in Scent of a Woman, but each role was clearly a different persona. Contrast that with the gentle, and completely hetero, writer Joseph Turner White in 2000's State and Main, or the all-but-closeted gay writer of Capote.

Fun from the Vaults

Review: Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive-In by Joe Bob Briggs

Bad satirists are left alone; it only hurts when it’s good.
—Stephen King, reviewing Brigg’s movie commentary.

Before you can write a review, you need some standards by which to judge your target. For Joe Bob Briggs, who admitted in 1990 to having watched “more than 23,000 drive-in movies,” the standards are: Blood, Breasts and Beasts. Using these criteria, he has rated movies for The Movie Channel, the Dallas Observer, syndicated radio and newspaper columns, and in his own one-man touring show. 

He has put his eyes and soul on the line for us guys, telling us the Ten Best Flicks to Get Nookie By, and why Arnold Schwarzenegger is the No. 1 Drive-In Actor in the World.

Briggs, whose real name is John Bloom, is not afraid to rate films highly—even when “the entire Motion Picture Industry and Critics Galore” are in opposition. Consider the 1985 remake of Bride of Frankenstein, The Bride with Sting as the eponymous Doctor, and Jennifer Beals as his creation. Briggs’ bottom line for this film:

Excellent monster fu. Four breasts, but I’m gonna count em as eight, cause they’re these humongous fat-lady circus breasts that are the biggest breasts in the history of breasts. One gallon blood. Two beasts. One head rolls. Midget trapeze. Gratuitous Geraldine Page. Monster hangover. Crypt. Boneyard. Haunted mansion. Stake through heart. Four dead bodies… Four stars.

Some amateur critics agree with Joe Bob, by the way. Amazon's ratings of the movie give it a solid 4.5 our of 5, although that may be because it came out before Sting got political.

You have to understand, though, that Briggs is not just a movie critic. No, Joe Bob believes in things. Things like First Amendment rights, and anti-Communist activism. He even paid—″two bucks… it was the principle of the thing”—to verify that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

Bubba looked up the Second Amendment, and:

...it said I have the 'right to bare arms.' A lot of people don’t understand the US Constitution, and so they read that and they say, “All that means is you can wear muscle shirts to a Neal Diamond concert.” These are what is known in America as stupid people… Course, you know what happens ever time a drive-in movie critic gets assassinated. Somebody starts screaming for gun control.

And lest you dismiss this as the egotist’s version of political rectitude, in which only Joe Bob’s rights are of concern to him, there are the multitude of Communist Alert! items in the book. An eerie echo of today’s politically-correct, terrorist-fear-driven climate is found in the costume-party faux paux of Texan Russell Scott, who showed up dressed in a turban, with unlit road flares strapped to his chest—and this was years before 9/11.

The Travis County Sheriff’s department 

… arrested him while he was buttering a potato for impersonating an Arab Terrorist, ripped the road flares off his chest, cuffed him, threatened to arrest two other people who intervened, took him to jail, charged him with “possession of a hoax bomb,” left him in a cell with a guy charged with pushing heroin… We’re talking [Idjits] with Badges.

No, Joe Bob Briggs continues to do us all a cardinal service by pointing out the hypocrisy and cynicism rampant in movies. And by telling us which of those movies have great views of breasts.

Liner Note:

The (1985) winners in the three Joe Bob categories were…

• Blood: Four hundred thirty-five gallons (in George Romero’s Day of the Dead)
• Breasts: 16 (in Hellhole)—but two of them may have been Mary Woronovski's (Aside mine)
• Beasts: Forty-five, “auditioning for Empty-V” (in Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome)

An Institution More Peculiar than We Knew

Review: The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World is powerful not because it tells the story of a black man, a former slave, who is himself a slave owner. Its power comes from the way it makes us see how the “peculiar institution¹” warps human emotion, and restricts the possible self-definitions available to owner and slave alike.

In that sense, the “known world” of the title is this circumscribed sense of what is possible to a man. Ex-slave Henry Townsend defines himself based on his observation of and relationship with ante-bellum slave owner William Robbins.

Robbins has a black wife, and also a black mistress who was once a slave. Townsend sees his power, and desires that entire world for himself. For his part, Robbins genuinely seems to like this freed man, and acts as his mentor in many ways, drawing Townsend inextricably into the bonds that slavery places on the slave owner.

When Townsend dies, another slave, Moses, schemes to step into his shoes by seducing his widow Caldonia. Unfortunately, Moses is already married, so he convinces his wife to run away, then follows her and his son into the woods and kills them. In a telling sequence, Caldonia’s white advisor Counsel Skiffington "…considered Caldonia. He had heard of that white woman in Bristol who had slept with her slave. Bad business. But what the coloreds like Caldonia and Moses did among themselves was no crime in itself. Killing a slave for no reason was always a crime before man, before God." [Emphasis mine.]

Even the minor characters are complex, and each serves his purpose to define this twisted world, from the slave-takers Darcy and Stennis who kidnap Henry Townsend’s father Augustus back into slavery to the Cajun Broussard whose foreign accent is the direct cause of his conviction and execution for murder.

In addition to the complex story, Jones’ writing is lucid and evocative. Two examples:

…After the Richmond evening when Robbins hit her, Philomena Cartwright would not see the city again for many, many years. Her jaw did not heal properly and she could never eat hard food on that side of her mouth. The one time she threatened to flee and return to Richmond, Robbins told her he would sell her back into slavery. “You can’t,” she said. “You can’t, William. I got my free papers.” He told her that in a world where people believed in a God they could not see and pretended the wind was his voice, paper meant nothing, that it had only the power that he, Robbins, would give it…”

And:

…[Counsel Skiffington] thought of the men in the large family Bible in the destroyed library who talked the way he was talking now. Sometimes God heard and acted, took pity on his creations, and sometimes he heard and ignored the creations talking to him. His daughters had liked the stories in the Bible, the Bible with their names and the days of their births written large and in ink the general store man had said would last for generations. “First,” the man said,”the ink will note your children’s birthdays, and then it will note their marriage days. The ink will outlast you, Mr. Skiffington.” Counsel went on talking to God, and the buzzards came down and joined the flies, all of them feasting on the horse and ignoring the man who still had some life in him.

The Known World is engrossing, enlightening and altogether enjoyable.

Liner Notes:

1. The phrase "peculiar institution" is used extensively as a euphemism for slavery, notably in the speeches and writings of John C. Calhoun: Nullification, Secession, and John Caldwell Calhoun: The Philosophy and Thought Which Led a State and John C. Calhoun: Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions. In neither quote of John C. Calhoun’s words is the phrase set in quotations, but he does seem to expect that "peculiar institution" and "peculiar domestic institution" will be understood to mean slavery, so he may have been quoting someone before him. Maybe it’s as simple as a popular politician, John C. Calhoun, using the phrase “this peculiar institution” with its general meaning applied to the specific “peculiar institution”, and the specific meaning subsequently infecting the general as a meme that found fertile ground.
2. The Pulitzer Prize organization’s website quotes the book’s cover text. 
3. Jane Chord: Evening yet.

Breathtaking, Brutal—and Brilliant

Discussion: The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir

There are books I've read so often, I can no longer really review them. The Far Arena has been on my every-few-years list for over 30 years. Something about the Cold War revival of a frozen Roman gladiator by an American oilman, a Soviet physician, and a Norwegian nun just draws me back, time and again.

I first encountered the novel in a friend's collection in 1985 or '86. Rarely had I been so tempted to a five-finger discount! I borrowed it again every few months for a while until I had memorized several passages—when he moved away, I knew I had to find my own copy. 

I almost walked past it in a second-hand bookstore, because the cover was so different. Another publisher, plus an artist (or marketing department) that did not read past the opening chapters, lead to cover art that focused on "John Carter" buried deep in the ice.

What caught my eye, in fact, was a cover-quote from Howard Fast, author of Spartacus. "Breathtaking," it said, "you must read it." I had just re-read Spartacus, and the name grabbed my attention. Voila! I had my fix.

Even if Publius had my speed and strength and my perfect weapons and I but a club, still I would emerge alive. I had walked on arena sand, and Publius had not. ("Eugeni", Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus)

Over several moves, I lost and replaced the novel several times, most recently to add it to my Kindle. Each time, I dove into the story, rapt in a tale that addressed much more than the real life and culture of Rome, as seen through the eyes of a half-Greek slave rising to arena stardom in Rome. 

Each of the other three, modern protagonists has a similar journey to make, from their first innocent encounter with the gladiator, to their struggle to understand what they really want from him, to a final arena, with a battle that will cost each of them something very precious. 

Of the three, I most identify with Lew McCardle, the Texas petroleum geologist, promoted to Vice-President on the strength of his discovery in the ice. Again and again, his musings reveal a kindred spirit trapped by the Peter Principle in a conflict even his decades-past experience on the gridiron has not prepared him to face.

First, the naïve, focused engineer:

[H]e knew that good engineering did not have right angles in pipes.

Then the isolated husband wondering why he had chosen his wife, instead of a hookup girlfriend from his distant past:

She had everything to recommend her but a heart. And yet that is the last thing a young man looks at.

And the chip he carries on his shoulder, which may bring him down under its weight:

Oil men did not particularly like people who read books, nor did they trust them. Somehow Lew’s size, and his origins in a backwater Texas town, compensated for his reading.

The Cold War had yet to begin its thaw, with Soviets in Afghanistan, Reagan and Thatcher—and Gorbachev—still on or below the horizon, when Sapir was writing this novel. Many of Eugeni's reactions to modern life, his observations about the East/West conflict, rang solidly true to the readers who would soon sweep those politicians into office:

Why is it people think the authorities are some form of gods with either great justice or great, cunning evil, rather than the same plodding fools they see in their daily lives, and most of all in their mirrors?

And:

The purpose of an authority is to remain an authority, not dispense justice.

Re-reading it today, I find equally-cogent statements about the resurgence of Socialism and Communism, as well as identity politics:

You call people ‘masses’ when you treat them as a lump, as a hundred slaves more or less, as an army if you will. Nobody ever knew a mass or loved a mass or even paid the respect of hating a mass.

Because, Eugeni muses near the end of his story: 

...a man was a man because he thought, and all the cheers and all the illustrious parentage could not add one whit to any of his meaning.

It is not what one is, but what one thinks, that matters in the meaning of life. If one thinks.

Women on His Mind

Review: Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric & Desdemona Novels

Early in the novel Penric's Demon, a gormless young man pauses on the way to his arranged wedding to help an old woman at the side of the road. Unfortunately, she is inhabited by a demon, which jumps to young Penric when she dies, bringing along the memories and personalities of everyone possessed previously... all women.

As if being possessed by a demon weren't bad enough, Penric must now contend with the curious attention of a dozen women—many of them elderly—watching and criticizing his every move.

It's not all bad news, though. Penric acquires the powers of his ancient demon, whom he names Desdemona, along with the inescapable company of the clique of dames residing between his ears. And if their advice ruins his morning self-embrace, it saves him embarrasment far more often, and provides short-cuts to the scholarship he needs in order to be a competant sorcerer.

This book borrowed from world-building Bujold had already done for the Chalion fantasy series, although it is set in a different time in that world. The second two books of the Chalion trilogy are echoed in Book Two of this series, Penric and the Shaman. "Shaman" is the animal-bolstered equivalent of the sorcerer, so Inglis is, to some extent, Penric's peer. I was intrigued to see a different fantasy construct, the were-wolf, incorporated into the "paladin of souls" concept in Penric's world.

You can read these novels in any order you like, but I find they work best read in numeric order, 1-5. Further paragraphs may contain spoilers, so if you haven't read any of them yet, please stop here!

Book 4, Penric's Mission, came out before Book 3, Penric's Fox, was available for Kindle, so I orginally read them out of order. The third novel's story rises naturally out of the second, though, since it concerns a demon who has jumped, not to a human, but to the nearest creature available, a fox. It is also the closest to a murder mystery I have read from Bujold's pen. Desdemona really comes into her powers here, lending all her various riders' knowledge to the task of rescuing the lost demon.

Mission, on the other hand, is about Penric rising to the use of his powers, coordinating everything he has learned with the sorcerer's abilities to rescue General Arisaydia and his sister from an oppressive government. There is almost an engineering quality to his use of Desdemona's powers. (This is nothing more than I would expect from Bujold; my first encounter with her work was Falling Free.)

Book 5 is the first that doesn't feature Penric in the title. Mira's Last Dance has one of his embedded personalities, a courtesan with a predatorial way of controlling men, take center stage in the effort to enroll General Arisaydia in Penric's sponsor's cause (the escape that began in Mission). 

Not only does Penric's mission continue in Book 5, but his developing relationship with the sister does also. The convoluted way in which his female inhabitants inhibit this blossoming romance is a delight to read, conflict being the principal driver of good fiction! Throughout the series, in fact, I was reminded of the conflicts between Johann Smith, Eunice Branca and Jake Saloman (all residing in Eunice's head) in Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil.  

Liner Note:

Amazon lists these books as novellas. At around 100 pages, four of them are definitely short enough to class as novellas, but Penric's Mission is 224 pages. Further, all five read as novels, with lots of action (mental and physical) to reward the reader. 

Choose Wisely

Review: Hobson's Choice with John Mills, Brenda de Banzie, Charles Laughton

What makes a "classic" movie classic? For me it goes beyond the black-and-white film, and the stars, directors and screenwriters of the 40s and 50s. It has more to do with a philosophy, the sense that binary values exist. Call them good and evil, or right and wrong, but classic movies in my library tell the story of what happens when people must choose.

My favorite example is named for that choice: Hobson's Choice. Superficially, the titular choice belongs to the Charles Laughton character, a boot-seller in Old Salford (near Manchester).

The very common, Mancunian-accented widower Henry Hobson has three daughters, a modestly prosperous boot-shop, and a drinking problem, made worse by living over the shop—and across the street from the local pub. So the choice might be his, to drink or be sober.

Each of his daughters are also Hobsons, though, at least until they marry. His two younger girls have selected prosperous—and teetoal—beaus, and shifted to as posh a fashion as they can afford for courting. Despite their obvious steps to escape the influence and lifestyle of their father, however, the thick Manchester accent reveals the thin veneer of their change. Their choices have not challenged the limitations of their upbringing, so much as painted over them.

Then there's Maggie Hobson (de Banzie). Henry's oldest daughter knows exactly what she wants: the best bootmaker in Manchester, Willie Mossop (Mills)—and in that sense Mossop is also Henry Hobson's "choice". Hobson pays him pennies, and gives him a place to stay "down cellar" in the workroom under the shop. When a local dame finds Mossop's boots superior, Maggie siezes her chance and gives Mossop a choice: he can marry her and make a success in their own shop. Or he can stay and make boots for pennies for his sot of a boss for the rest of his life.

This movie might have been grim, filled with defeated people barely clinging to their dreams in a gritty industrial town. Instead, it is filled with lovely images of romance growing well-fertilized from the common soil of effort and discipline. I can watch it often, and never fail to be uplifted by its message: Success in marriage and business—and life—require the same commitment. 

It's your choice. 

The Material Value of Dreams

Review: The Untethered by S.W. Southwick

"[W]hen the price of peace with others is the surrender of one’s highest values, conflict becomes one’s greatest asset." The conflicts in Southwick's dystopia are disturbingly familiar, with elements that echo today's headlines. 

In a world where most people are increasingly constrained to toe the line and give at least lip-service to the dual social concepts of Unity and Sacrifice, anyone who does not conform must self-identify as criminal, or become actively anti-social. Society regards either as negative, of course, and so the real choice is self-abnegation—accepting the values imposed by society—or isolation from it. 

Advisory: This novel contains sex, drugs, and fighter jets. (From the author's description)

Young Roble Santos is anti-social, labeled delinquent, then abandoned to the foster system. Unlike his friend Danny Sands, the son of his last foster parents, however, Roble is never conflicted about what he wants. Given the choice between pursuing his dream of creating the ultimate jet plane or conforming, Roble rejects society's expectations and runs away. In his last interview with the Alexa Patra, the driven head of a private charity that places Nevada children in foster "care," he tells Patra:

"I don’t need to hear how scary the world is and how I shouldn’t try anything. I don’t need to know how much suffering there is out there,” he pointed out the window, “or how bad I should feel about it. What I need…” he looked up, his grey eyes pleading, “…is to see someone who is still happy after growing up.

If that sentiment seems familiar, perhaps you have read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I felt that connection from the first pages of The Untethered, and began looking for deliberate allusions to those novels. They weren't hard to find. 

But if Howard Roark and John Galt are flawless, pristine exemplars of Rand's philosophy, they are less accessible for it. Roble Santos and his fellow objectivists (Libby Dodge, Halvern Black, Victor Lafayette, Nicolette Popov) pursue their dreams whole-heartedly, with total focus and absolute rejection of society's demands—yet they are not blemish-free. Their foibles make them human even while their accomplishments reveal they are something more.

The protagonists share something else, however: all their dreams involve something material, a creation which will not exist in the world until they create it. Roble Santos makes this material, objective reality obvious in one scene on an airbase in Okinawa:

"Sir, I know what keeps your adversaries at bay.” Sircor folded his arms, muscles flexing under his uniform. Roble pointed at a picture of Sircor standing with a group of Thunderbird pilots. “Your piloting ability is real.” He pointed at a model jet on the desk. “Your fighter jets and maintenance performance are real. That,” he gestured out the window, “Skeleton Eagle sitting at Naha—is real. Those realities keep them at bay, sir.”

On society's side of the conflict, criminals like Jesus Gorronza, politicians like Preton Moore, religious leaders like Randal Graph, and ordinary citizens like Donald Sands and his wife, give the required lip-service to the ideals of their culture, while feeding off whatever amount of power over others their actions can give them. Southwick gives these antagonists all the petty banality that such characters usually possess. It is also no surprise that many of them are in the government, or campaigning to be involved in

[T]hat sweet, unlimited democratic system, allowing plunder at the drop of a vote.

The most revealing characters are those in the middle, who try to straddle the divide between the pull of their dreams, and the yearning to please society—or who embrace the idea that doing what pleases them makes them criminals. When laws are written by those who want above all to consolidate power over others and impose their own beliefs, pursuing your dreams may actually, literally, make you a criminal:

There is no sanctuary against those who impose their beliefs on others through laws, not one single strip of dry land on this Earth.

Whether the goal is to feed the world—not by theft/taxation or by shaming donors into giving, but by creating more productive crops—or to teach children to think, to explore—rather than to compel them to parrot one's own thoughts—the concept of sacrificing one's individual identity into a collective group identity is ultimately destructive to both the dream and the person who dreams. 

For everyone who wishes to fly, who yearns to soar (and to forget all those whose envy drives them to shoot you down), The Untethered is your next great reading experience.

Honor Among Men

Discussion: Honor of the Queen (Honor Harrington Book 2) by David Weber

This is a discussion because I've read this book far too many times to "review" it. Weber's Harrington is just beginning her naval career, fresh from her triumph On Basilisk Station¹. She's about to meet the intransigently paternal, religious societies of Grayson and Masada, where Honor must serve with, and command, men ill-prepared to cope with strong, capable women.

Contrasting forces and philosophies abound in this novel: diplomacy vs. military action; strong religious beliefs vs. religious fanaticism; even environmental technology vs. Luddite anti-techs.

Diplomacy

Honor commands a task group, in support of a diplomatic mission headed by once-Admiral Raoul Courvosier, whose mission is to bring Grayson into alliance with the Kingdom of Manticore. (At this point in Weber's Honorverse, although Manticore has a protectorate in the Basilisk system, it is still a single-system kingdom.) Honor can whole-heartedly support Courvosier, despite her suspicion that diplomacy is a sneaky way to achieve something, because she respects his tactical experience. 

War may represent the failure of diplomacy, but even the best diplomats operate on credit. Sooner or later someone who's less reasonable than you are is going to call you, and if your military can't cover your I.O.U.s, you lose.

Others in the diplomatic mission are not as respectable; in fact, one of Honor's long-running enmities is about to develop as she deals with a nit-wit diplomat who seems to believe that his touchy-feely assumptions about the Grayson-Masada conflict ought to be considered. In the character of Reginald Houseman, Weber was ahead of his times, writing about "snowflakes" before the type was recognized.

Religion

I often think of the opposed religious groups portrayed in this novel when I see entire religions tainted by the perfervid actions of a tiny minority within them. Grayson's society may have a religion at its base, but it is also a balanced, constitutional polity. When we and Honor first encounter Grayson, women are treated more as near-adult children: they are to be protected, guided, and treasured. In contrast, Masada's women are chattel. 

Many reviewers have cited the black-and-white nature of Weber's characters. Good guys are all good, bad guys are not just opposed, they are evil. So here in this novel, the Graysons are revealed as capable of learning to respect Honor and, by extension, others in the Manticoran navy who are, or are commanded by, women. 

If Captain Harrington is as outstanding an officer as you believe—as I believe—she invalidates all our concepts of womanhood. She means we're wrong, that our religion is wrong. She means we've spent nine centuries being wrong.

Technology

Weber sets up the story of Grayson and Masada with a pair of ironies. First, Grayson was settled directly from Earth as a religious colony, pro-environment, anti-technology "true believers." Arriving at Yeltsin's Star, they found a lovely, blue-green world—that was poison to human life. They did not discover this fault until they had already, literally, burned their boats. A second world in the Yeltsin system, Masada, with its less-welcoming climate, was out of their reach once they made land-fall on Grayson.

The colonists spent the next generations battling their environment, gradually re-acquiring space flight, and needing the technology they had rejected back on Earth simply to survive. After a schism divides them into the few, fanatic "Faithful" and the larger original colony with their adapted belief in appropriate technology, Grayson decides to use their limited space flight to move the Faithful to Masada.

The Faithful on Masada could now re-abandon technology and revert to the original belief system. But they do not, because now they are focused on reclaiming the original world of the colony and substituting their belief for that of Grayson, whom they call "The Apostate."


I find the technology and religion themes comforting to re-read, especially as I am aware of how they will play out again in later novels in the series. With so many similar conflicts in today's news, I reflect, with David Weber, on the need for open discussion:

There are two sides to every dialogue, but if you accept the other side's terms without demanding equal time for your own, then they control the debate and its outcome.

Liner Notes

1. I discussed On Basilisk Station in the post The Beginning of Honor.
2. I prefer the older cover illustrations by David Mattingly. The recent editions in paper- and hardcover are distressingly spare, focused on Harrington's image—and Nimitz is nowhere to be seen!

Selling the Nazi Narrative

Review: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left by Dinesh D'Souza

I remember as a youngster being puzzled by a common mob punishment in the Western world: tarring and feathering. Okay, being covered with feathers was ridiculous, but surely it wasn't as big a deal as all that!

Then my history teacher opened my eyes. Think of the tar as like napalm, he told me. It was boiling hot; victims were not only burned, they were permanently marked with scars. Feathering simply added insult to injury, although the "feathers" also commonly included barnyard straw, dung, and other filth that practically guaranteed an infection.

Imagine, then, that an entire community—an entire philosophy—undergoes this brutal mob punishment. Further, there is no defense allowed; hands are tied and mouths stopped. The final injustice? The mob applying the tar and feathers are themselves guilty of the offense being punished. Their victims are not.

There are Nazis still among us, I know. Not all of them post on white supremacist blogs or wear swastikas. Some of them are more like the bearded ladies in the stoning mob in Monty Python's Life of Brian, masquerading in virtue as they cast their stones.

D'Souza's book documents the many ways in which the American progressive, socialist and communist left turns this accusation upon their political opponents, despite the long history of support, acceptance—even adoption—of Nazi and fascist thought by the left. In this inversion, defending any non-left political philosophy becomes, in and of itself, a proof of "fascism." 

Mussolini and Hitler became “right-wingers,” and the people who supposedly brought them to power became “conservatives.” The Left, then, became the glorious resisters of fascism and Nazism. To make this story work, fascism and Nazism had to be largely redefined.

We accept that actual Nazism is vile, because we agree that the actions and accomplishments of the Nazi regime in Germany were largely vile. We accept that fascism was foul, to the extent that it supported and agreed with the goals of German Nazism during the Second World War. Without knowing the history of these philosophies in the USA, we are in danger of agreeing that violence to suppress these evils here, now, is a good thing.

D'Souza reveals that these current-day violent suppressors of Nazi and facist evil are themselves the actual successors to the mid-twentieth century Nazi, fascist thugs, and their violence is just the latest incarnation of that evil we thought we won against in WWII.

John Locke says that whatever other tasks a government undertakes—whether humanitarian or otherwise—its primary duty is to protect its own citizens from foreign and domestic thugs. That isn’t fascism; it’s classical liberalism. [Emphasis mine]

Let's have an end of defending against this calumny by saying it's "the pot calling the kettle black." It is more a case, as D'souza's careful scholarship shows, of the pot calling the bone china black.

Liner Quotes:

In the German camps and on the Democrat-run plantations, forced labor was employed with “human tools” solely with regard to productivity and with little if any regard for the lives of the workers who were, in both cases, considered inferior and even subhuman. The analogy between two of the worst compulsory confinement and forced labor systems in human history is not merely legitimate; it is overdue.

[The Nazi platform included] universal free health care and education. If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party.

H[itler] admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.

Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun insisted slavery was a “school of civilization” although it was apparently not a school from which anyone was intended to graduate.

[A]nother refugee from Nazism who nevertheless in his youth worked with the Nazis and now directs, in much the same manner Mussolini and Hitler did in their early days, his own private militia. Note that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, but this guy does. With him, as with Marcuse, fascist thuggery derives its moral legitimacy and public respectability from a fake anti-fascist pose. His name is George Soros.