Readings

We Few / David Weber and John Ringo

Blowing Up Your Series Character

One other thought

OK, one other thought: Will Shakespeare plays a regular part in Sandman. It was the "Midsummer's Night Dream" issue which won the World Fantasy award and issue 75, the last issue, is about The Tempest. I like those issues well enough, though more in the thrown away parts than the things directly involving the plays.

That preference is somewhat due to feeling that any writer in English is secondary to Master Will.

Wait, no, that's not the right way to put it. In college, my pal Flynn had a professor who had studied under Bloom at U. Chicago. Bloom apparently had a copy of The Republic in which he had underlined every single line in different colors, a coding system which he had developed over decades of approaching the text. And after all this study, Bloom had concluded that, instead of Plato being a subset of philosophy, all of philosophy should be consiudered a subset of Plato, encompassed and anticipated by him. And all the subsequent history of philosophical thought was just a matter of filling in the margins and blanks spaces which Plato hadn't had time to address.

For a fiction writer in English, Shakespeare looms as large. In "The Tempest" issue, Gaiman kicks it up to the point that he has Shakespeare rewriting the Book of Psalms for the King James Bible. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble". And then, with Ben Jonson, WS creates the Guy Fawkes doggerel, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November..."

I don't actually agree that WS encompasses the entire history of fiction in English (nor do I agree with Bloom's purported opinion about Plato), but, like God, it's a hard fiction to resist. Especially since I'm finishing the edits on a damn book which has a title swiped directly from WS.

Return to the Sandman

So, because of that damn post about fake bios, I re-read all the Sandmans.

Preludes and Nocturnes / Neil Gaiman
The Doll's House / Neil Gaiman
Dream Country / Neil Gaiman
Season of Mists / Neil Gaiman
A Game of You / Neil Gaiman
Fables and Reflections / Neil Gaiman
Brief Lives / Neil Gaiman
World's End / Neil Gaiman

And after that, I moved on to the original issues I have of The Kindly Ones story arc, and The Wake, plus the two final issues.

Ten years of writing about stories. Man o man. It's pretty intense, and fairly -- hell, what's the right word? Not depressing. Maybe it's Thanatos. Thanatos-obsessed. Early on, in "24 Hours", the Diner Massacre issue, Gaiman writes , "All Bette's [the waitress who dreams of being a writer] stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

So, in the 6th issue of a 75 issue story that last over ten years, Gaiman pretty much tells us what's going to happen to the main character. That's a freightload of foreshadowing. Reading the beast all in one extended go, it's interesting to see how Gaiman works with stories echoing each other in various ways. For example, up until the point that Dream rescues his greatest love Nada (and you have to wonder if Gaiman was indicating that Morpheus was in love with the idea of nothingness even that early on in the story), he had been the bad guy in his relationships. (He spurns Calliope, for example, and as a result their son Orpheus goes through the whole Eurydice-Bacchae-Torn to Bits tragedy. He banishes Nada to hell for 10 thousand years.

But then Morpheus is imprisoned in a small space for 80 years, and suddenly finds limitation. From then on in, women bust him and bust him, from his sisters Death and Delirium, to Thessaly/Larissa, and most obviously Lyta Hall.

But it's the Nada event that seems to have the most resonance. She burns in hell for 10 thousand years. Then the other black women in the book burn in echoes of that event. Ruby, the driver in Brief Lives, burns in her motel room. Carla, Lyta Hall's friend, is burned alive by Loki in the Kindly Ones story arc.

It's interesting, anyway, how layered the whole thing is. Like Gore Vidal's (and Italo Calvino's) idea of the novel as cube -- where each item has resonance both on the past and future.

One particular note, about World's End. When Sandman was a more-or-less monthly publication, I liked World's End the least of the story arcs. It's much more satisfying as a collection, though my taste still prefers the issue with Petrefax's story about the Necropolis named Litharge. At one point, Gaiman is telling a story about Brant Roberts, who is telling a story about being at an Inn called World's End, where he is hearing a story told by a mortician named Petrefax, who tells a story about telling stories at a burial, where all of the morticians tells stories, and the Master Mortician tells a story about HIS teacher, who told him a story. It's reminiscent of the scene in Troilus and Cressida, where the audience is watcing Odysseus watch Troilus and Cressida. The amount of refraction, like two mirrors facing one another, makes an emerald look uncomplicated.

Oddly, in a 75 issue series which deals directly with the main character's drive toward suicide, I liked the well-adjusted characters the best: Destruction and Hob Gadling and Rose Walker and Barnabas and Death. Of course, EVERYONE likes Death. (Which is an enjoyable sentence to write.)

Back to editing Time's Fool.

The Cold War Swap / Ross Thomas

The Cold War Swap / Ross Thomas

The Subtle Knife / Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife / Philip Pullman
Started it at around 11 this morning, finished it around 6PM. So it reads fast, obviously.

The Golden Compass / Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass / Philip Pullman
I'll wait to say anything until after I read the other two books in the trilogy. I'm already well into the second book.

Legion of Super Heroes

The other thing I cranked through in the last couple days was the entire V3 and V4 runs of the Legion of Super Heroes, the DC comic book series. That was the result of reading about Giffen below.

It's not quite accurate to say I went through the entire runs of both since I don't own them all. But near enough.

V3 was entirely written by Paul Levitz, and the consistency of quality is pretty stunning. The balance between straight action hero plot and the interaction between the characters made that series a comfortable community.

V4 -- for all of its groundbreaking qualities -- seems to be more hated than loved, unlike Watchmen or Dark Knight. Maybe because Watchmen didn't do anything to known characters, and Dark Knight was an approach not in any way out of line for Batman as he had been presented.

But V4 takes the characters who had lived in relatively static times throughout all of V3 and makes their times full of war and political instability. Then the characters get to show their true mettle (or not).

As an interview with Giffen makes clear, a lot of the inconsistency in V4 had as much to do with outside influences as plot problems. For example, the original concept of the LSH has Superboy as an inspiration. And as a member of the group! Supergirl, too. Then around the time the V4 series started, DC continuity decided that Superboy and Supergirl had never existed.

All sorts of things like that plagued the series.

Still and all, it's pretty amazing. The closest thing to Heinlein-style science fiction I've ever seen in comics. Which is to say: fantastic situations, but human choices.

And boy: reading all of these books in one extended setting, interrupted only by meetings and work, shows just how bloody they were. By the time V3 starts, the body count stands at Ferro Lad, Invisible Kid, and one of Triplicate Girl's bodies. Chemical King, too, I think. Lightning Lad, though he came back (sort of).

So, the continued body count:

(V3) Karate Kid. Mentalla. Superboy. Supergirl. Laurel Kent. Another one of Triplicate Girl’s (now Duo Damsel) bodies. Magnetic Kid. Mon El.

(V4) Wildfire (dead before the series starts). Phantom Lass (not really dead but sent back in time -- gone, anyway). Blok. Don and Dawn Allen. Jed. Clone Karate Kid; Clone Chameleon Lad; Clone Princess Projectra. Sun Boy. Laurel Gand.

Oh, right: plus the entire planet Earth and 2 billion people (even though 6 billion were saved).

And then the Zero Hour came along and killed EVERYONE.

That's not even counting the lost arms, legs, eyes. Bruises, burns, and brainwashing. And bystanders.

It's a pretty brutal series, even before V4 started. Since V4 took place in the middle of almost universal warfare and economic collapse, it's almost surprising the body count wasn't higher.

Except for Laurel Gand. I didn't even like the character, but that death seemed so out of character for the situation. Plus, the character is "nigh-invulnerable", so no matter how big the bomb was, it doesn't seem plausible it would kill her.

Crimson Joy / Robert B. Parker

Crimson Joy / Robert B. Parker
A re-read. Part of the huge Spenser series which Parker has been writing since the early 70s. In the last few years, Parker has started up a couple of new series characters, since Spenser is clearly a man of a different period and finding him an ass-kicker into his late 60s becomes less and less plausible. I have been vaguely thinking for awhile that Parker is avoiding killing Spenser off.

The Spenser novels are still good, enjoyable reads, but they haven't felt vital since the books in the mid-80s where Spenser and Susan Silverman have their relationship troubles. Those books include A Savage Place, The Widening Gyre, Ceremony, and A Catskill Eagle.

Most series characters never get a final chapter, because the authors write them for so long that they can't get out of the habit. One notable exception is Travis McGee, who at least got The Lonely Silver Rain. Not perfect, but a reasonable ending point.

Finished The Runelords today

Finished The Runelords today. Hoo hah.