Against The Fall Of Night

 I have to make this confession, or else I can't really tell you the rest of it. My brother, my sister-in-law and I managed to do a near-surprise visit to our mom on Mother's Day. (near surprise because he called up mid-evening to ask "Is Peter there yet?") It was fine caper, which as early as the previous Monday I thought I couldn't do. And it was not until Thursday evening that I didn't know whether I'd be making the Chicago-to-New York drive with my brother or by myself.

Just to be safe, I stocked up on audiobooks from my excellent local library. This time, though, the pickings for really good stuff of some length were kind of slim. Idid fin the last Harry Potter book on disc, but beyond that...

...well, it was just sitting there, nice and long and, after a fashion, science fiction. (There was also some Terry Goodkind and his Ayn Randist sword and sorcery stuff, which was like eating lightly fried sandpaper. No thank you.) I thought, well, it's being read to me, which is better, while the other part is saying you must have some kind of obsessive-compulsive disaorder to even think about this.

In short, I ended up taking out the audiobook version  of DUNE: the battle of Corrin, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Yes the third volume of a saga whose first volume exasperated me and whose second volume dropped my jaw for its stupendous badness--as I have blogged before.

The sucker is even longer than the first two--23 hours, once I actually computed it, and the reading helped, but not much. So I'm still listening to it, with Harry Potter in promise like the November elections. 

I didn't have to wait long for the first howler. The Butlerian Jihad space fleet is in orbit about a planet they intend to conquer, and the Primero is standing on the bridge of his flagship hearing reports about the preparation for the assault. His lieutenant describes the massive forces preparing to attack and finishes with: "In short, Primero, we should be in control of the planet before nightfall!"

he says from orbit.

They follow up not long after with the truly amazing simile that negotiating with Parliament was like 'flying through a minefield," But what made this particularly aggravating is that this volume is chock full of "it works because we want it to." Biological warfare across a galactic empire, with each world insulated by light-years of hard vacuum? It works because the evil computer Omnius has a delivery system that can send small torpedoes interstellar distance and rain down on the inhabited worlds--never mind that that same delivery system could have earlier rained down far more effective nuclear bombs. I can fume all I want and come up with counter-arguments, but it's after all their book and it works. And the climactic battle of the Jihad? Omnius gathers absolutely all his warships for a killing blow at the human capital--even ships guarding himself. (Stupid, but things like this have been known to have happened.) So the humans counterattack using their risky space-folding ships to eradicate the machine worlds. And do they go after the capital first--or even fifth? No, they go after the source last, after their fleet has been decimated both by fighting and by bad jumps. No rationale is given for this strategy--nobody even brings it up in the story. It's done because the writers have a tableau they like. They spend a great deal of time (believe me) describing the Titanic picture, and it's all just handwaving to get there, innit? It's science fiction, me buckos!

To be sure, making up the rules as you go along has its charms: having the Doctor stand there with a stunned look on his face, and then turn to his human traveling companion in the tardis and rattle off the pseudo-scientific game rules for the episode is great fun, and superheroes are forever whipping up just the right energy projector to defeat the invincible menace--when they're not reversing polarity or feeding it more energy than it can handle. I can complain about the language (and will), but is it worth it to demand a better brand of snappy patter?

Well, the answer is yes, right? That's how you set these things up: observation, counter-argument, rhetorical question? But, quiite seriously, the answer is not always yes. At least one of my favorite books, David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus, not only makes up the rules as it goes along, but often neglects to tell the reader about it--and yet it will take the top of your head clean off. And while one can bitch about bad plotting in the event, but it's very often those tableaux that remain in the mind. 

What, after all, are the rules to writing without rules?

Let me look at another painful experience. I don't usually buy issues of Wolverine: after all, my very last work for Marvel was (with Hilary Barta) a parody of him and the Punisher. But Howard Chaykin, whom I like and admire, was doing the art. So pick it up I do. As is ususal with my comics reading these days, it can be some months before I actually read it--which was the case here.

On the face of it, the story had a nice gruesome twist to it: this criminal organization has Wolvie captive in a pit, and, playing upon his healing powers, they shoot him with a barrage of high-powered bullets every fifteen minutes or so, to keep him pinned down and  in the maximum amount of pain possible. Not bad at all. And the story focuses on the ordinary guy who takes the day shift at the gun. It turns out his life is shit: he lives alone since his wife left him, and has no friends. Wolvie, who hasn't been talking to anybody else, starts to talk to him, preying on his weakness. He manages to push him far enough that he gores to his father (who beat and abused him for all his youth) to ask the father to kill him, but the father is senile and doesn't know who he is. So the guy decides to kill himself by letting Wolverine free. And (this is inevitable) once he let's Wolverine out, Wolverine refusesto kill him, but throws him into the pit.

A bit obvious at the end, but not bad. An emotionally strong story, talking about things other than death rays and time streams, right. I finished it--but something was really wrong about the story, and I went back to read it again, a little more carefully.

This time around there's a scene in which the shooter goes and pays his wife alimony. But he does it in cash, through a door with the chain still on it.Paying alimony in cash? You don't pay alimony in cash: you pay it with a check so you have a record. But it gets worse: the hot secretary at the criminal complex still thinks he's together with his wife, and Wolverine tells the guy he knows his wife left him a couple of weeks ago, because of the change in the way he smelled. My reaction was, how old is this writer? does he know nothing about divorces? Alimony is imposet by the courts, and it doesn't happen within weeks, only after a court proceeding. (And that, in turn, gave rise to the delightful scene of her divorce lawyer saying "Your honor, as the valued employee of a large insidious criminal organization, surely he can afford a proper alimony payment!")

That doesn't materially affect the plot, but it deals a real blow to verisimilitude. (Not, of course  if you're twelve and/or have never experienced a divorce.) But at the end, when he's made his decision, he goes to work, and when the time comes to fire st Wolvie, refrains. This sets off an alarm, which causes a squad of heavily armed and armored security forces coming in, waving their weapons and saying what the hell is going on? Start firing or else!

And the guy, an ordinary ex-cop with no particular training, turns the gun on them and kills them all.

And of course this works because he just happened to have loaded the gun with a supply of Good Guy Bullets™. The poor saps not only were equipped with Bad Guy Bullets™, but wearing Evil Guards Armor™. They never stand a chance.

This had to work, of course, for the story to have the shape it does. So is it that important to fill in the details properly? Between the reverse-polarity hand waving and the escape-from-a-prison-cell-by-feigning-sickness clichés, does it really matter?

It's true that I wouldn't have found the Wolverine story so ludicrous had the writer not screwed up both the mechanics and the stuff supposed to be important--and the Dune book is just multidimensionally bad--from the writing to the plotting to the sheer interminable length of it to the mangling of a great writers vision. But if I'm going to break a(nother) long gap, bitching isn't really enough.

(Other than that, how did you enjoy the novel, Mr. Sturgeon?)

When you're off in the land of do-as-you-please, being 'right' and 'wrong' no longer really apply. Yo can decree that on Marvel-Earth alimony is paid in cash and immediately after a seeparation, and the writer would be right and I'd be wrong. But what happens in fantastic fiction is that when you rework a rule, you devalue that part of the story. What was the pressure of immediacy and detail becomes a Seinfeldic yadda-yadda-yadda. You can do this to almost any aspect of a narrative and get away with it, but the price is a change in what is important in the story. Adjust the wrong things in a story, and they and the power and the effect can vanish--change the rules in too many places and and you get nothing but colorful smudges. Space operas routinely change the rules on the speed of light limitation on travel--it smudges away any sense of the size of the Universe--which is perfectly OK to smudge if what you want is a vast array of colorful worlds and creatures. You can keep bringing people back from the dead, and that's fine if you want to keep all your wonderful characters on stage--but along with death, heroism gets smudged. You can use all manner of devils, ghosts and demons in a manner analogous to Vince McMahon and the WW(W)F--and it's fine if you want thrills, but God becomes a smudge  if you're not careful. (It took the amazing James Blish to do a horror story based on the implicit fact of horror fiction--that God is Dead.)

A novel, properly done, tends to be a landscape, while a short story can be thought of as a picture. Both are amenable t all sorts of stylization, and the 20th century demonstrated the truth of that in wild profusion. There is, however, another form which is neither--whose model is the journey.

(That, btw, was going to be my Master's thesis at the University of Chicago: an exploration of the formal and historical ties between the German novella of the 19th century and modern science fiction. The theory of the novella was extremely well developed, and there were strong similarities to the structural rules of sf. [enabling me to type unerhörte sich eriegnete Begebenheit in this blog once again.]  There's a good case to be made for E.T.A. Hoffmann being the great-grandfather of science fiction. But I digress.)

Most science fiction novels, and most fantasy novels (as well as mosst adventure stories of any quality) work as journeys. It's that aspect, I think, that imbues potentially fluffy or trashy entertainment with  a splash of the sacred, and why, as our world, as science progresses and expands and changes our perspectives,  becomes less of a known place where we live and die and more as an unknown we're moving into, journey literature has become more and more central to that art that gives us understanding. It's this form that science fiction and fantasy both take part in, and which unite two sometimes radically opposed kinds of fiction.

And when you're doing a journey you'd better know the difference of a smudge of the scenery and a smudge of the map. By know, there's all sorts of convenient and even standard smudges everybody agrees on: space warps, conscious robots, time travel, telepathy. (Less'n of course they are the map of that particular journey.) If you're reading or listening to or watching an sf or a fantasy story, discovering the bad science of the plot-by-fiat isn't necessarily a sin--rather a sign to what the real map is. And if the map is intact, the rest can be as clumsy and arbitrary as you want. I'm the guy who spotted the bid plot hole in the original King Kong: if those gas bombs knocked Kong out on the island, why on earth didn't Armstrong/Denham/Cooper have some ready at the Broadway show in case, oh, the ape gets loose? But  that's OK: that's not what the story is about.

The problem with the Wolverine story is that it has bad smudges both on the human-interest side (How can you make the story look like real life when you don't know what real life looks like?) and the mechanical adventure side (If it's such an ingenious trap, why is  that truck sitting in that plot hole?) The Dune book is, admittedly, just plain ugly no matter what map you seek out in the book. It's hard to say honestly that you can get anything, even insight, out of a total failure. (but you know me, Al...)

Classic  Science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Olaf Stapledon, to Lester del Rey to Hal Clement to Greg Bear, plots a map driven by, if not logical, then scientific speculation. The map is clear, and the scenery can be filled with poetry, but once you've taken that route, there's not much reason to retrace it: even though I loved it, I readily admit I can't tell you the details of the plot of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, or the names of any of the characters, or anything except the Premise and the Conclusion. Likewise Bear's Blood Music. I don't reread Agatha Christie either--nor do I erase a crossword puzzle so I can solve it again.

When it comes to rereading, Fantasy represents itself far out of proportion to my normal reading ratio, and that's largely because, at its best, the maps are different. It's not at all easy to say why, but even when the journey has an unsatisfying ending ("No! it was a place! And you, and you--and you were there!"), arch and depressing (James Branch Cabell's The Cream of the Jest) or even when it wanders off into incoherence (The bewildering last volume of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books), the call is much stronger than the far more intellectually confirming works that did immense amounts to stretch my brain in times past. Is it because they spend far much more effort on the scenery than on the map? Is it that the intellect is a less comfortable place than the fancy?

It's an excuse for lots of bat fantasy, Crom knows. And it's also an excuse to denature lots of science fiction for the pleasing tableau or the big fight. I think it's one of the two things that the authors of the Dune Book wanted readers to be pleased by, the other being the never-before-revealed origins of the elements of dad's original book. (And of course, they all--Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild navigators, the Suk doctors, the Frremen, and the Mentats--start at the same time.) They think we should like the big space battles, the bad guys stomping their jackboots on the skulls of innocents, crushing them with a squish, and giant cyborg robots stomping across alien landscapes. The writer of the Wolverine story had nobler aims, and in many cases better technique (being helped by a master.)

But in both cases what got smudged, what got erased was the journey. And what, at bottom, they used to replace it was something similar. (wait for it...)

What the Wolverine story spends lots of time on is what the current comics community likes to characterize as cinematics. the introduction of our shooter is positively leisurely. Instead of the Golden Age convention of one panel per action, or the classic Marvel convention of three panels per action, the action in the decompressed comic today is a long fluid process taking pages. There's nothing wrong with that (other than the ultimately extraneous problem of publishing them in too-thin slivers)--unless you use that seductive camera work to imitate and supplant the journey. Making it look like you're there and that things pass by jes' like a movie unfortunately makes it all the more ludicrous when you screw up your world.

It's kind of appalling to realize this, but the analogy to the cinematics in the Dune book is frankly its length. There's something deeply troubling about the concept of enhancing a bad story by dragging it out, but there seems to be no other purpose to the hundreds of pages of characters standing around rehashing and maundering than to increase our feeling of presence by stop-lossing our tour of duty. My dear friend Lin Carter used to write as badly as these guys upon occasion, but he was over and done inside of 120 paperback pages. You could read three whole Jandar of Callisto novels before the dumbness caught up with you.

But at the end of the day, while cinematics may mightily enhance the picture, and might fill in the lanscape, more often than not it interferes and distracts from the journey. The journey isn't always by plot--it can be by character, or by the  symbolic echoes in the structure, or simply the language--but it must be done with care, whichever map the creator has chosen--and the reader must do some of it. Cuz a roller coaster ride doesn't get you very far.

My favorite Arthur C. Clarke book, and the one I re-read, is his first. It's called Against the Fall of Night, and it's a visionary trip to the far, far, far future, when humanity has confined itself to the city of Diaspar  for over a billion years--and the first new human finally breaks free of that eternal creche to confront an aged, dying universe. Clarke rewrote it, fleshing it out substantially as The City and the Stars--but the original version, sparer and simpler, is still my favorite. And it's clear that the Dune guys either are or have become ignorant of it, since the final epiphany of the book is Alvin, the traveller, looking at the aged Earth from its far above its pole, seeing that the same process is the dawning of day as well as the fall of night, and it's as profound a completion to an imaginative journey as I could ask for.

And fifty years later, we get a book five times as long, shepherded by a big corporate team, who looks at that station of that immense journey--and gets it completely wrong.

That's why, in contravention of the trends of 21st century multimedia video interactive civilization, I am drawn time and again to those works that are sketchier, briefer and more schematic up against the big fluid and cinematic --and not just because the blunders become far more obvious. It's because I would rather be away as soon as possible.

Because I have an appointment to be there up against the fall of night, to stand facing the third hemisphere of Earth, a place east of the sun and west of the moon, that I have always known and where I have never been, and I'm most eager to embark.