A Wind in the Door

I liked Stranger things season one, though looking back ten years later you could see the rot that would take root.

I felt that each season was worse than the last and I was annoyed when they adopted Vecna, who was just an iconic D&D villain.

But I am really honestly angry that they co-opted A Wrinkle in Time too.

Looking back, Madeleine L'Engle really was a huge influence on me. Forever Fallen has a nod to A Wrinkle in Time (“And yet often it is the weak things of the world that confound the mighty") and one of my stories from the Lovecraftzinene of my stories from the Lovecraftzine features The Echthros Club. Most specifically, her views on Christianity inform how I'm writing one character in my current project. ("All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.)

Recent events had caused me to think about A Wind in the Door, the direct sequel to Wrinkle, and I'll get to them at the end of this post, because the context that surrounds them has spoilers for the climax. In fact, this whole post has a bunch of spoilers, so if you haven't read A Wind in the Door, you've been warned. 

I'll sometimes say that the first Star Wars movie is the only one that doesn't take place in the Star Wars universe. It has that early installment weirdness and the conventions hadn't yet become codified. The same is kind of true for A Wrinkle in Time. It's one of the greatest children's books ever written, but it doesn't quite fit in with the other four in the series.

A Wind in the Door asks the question, "What if an angel was a drive of dragons  and also Frasier Crane?"

"I'm listening."

Okay, maybe that's a little harsh on Proginoskes. He's slightly snobby at first, but is mostly a supporting albeit alien presence. I was probably thinking of Sporos, who is super-douchey for a lot of the book.

At one point he's like, “All I want to do,” he was murmuring to himself, “is go some place quiet and recite the names of the stars . . .” and I'm like, "Bro, I know that feeling."

But I'm getting ahead of things. This book takes place shortly after the first. Charles Wallace is now enrolled in kindergarten and having significant trouble adjusting because, well... 

Meg is off at high school this year and can't help him, though she's very concerned about his welfare, even to the point of slipping off her bus and sneaking into the elementary school to confront the principal Mister Jenkins, with whom she had had her own run-ins. 

She gets home from school, and Charles Wallace tells her about dragons in the twins' vegetable garden. She delays responding by making herself a liverwurst and cream cheese sandwich. The Murrays and their liverwurst sandwiches! Her mom ate one in the first book. I don't know if they were more common 50 years ago, or if this was a favorite of L'Engle who brought it into her own writing or what. All I know is that I won't be buying the Wrinkle in Time cookbook.

So they go out to look and find some weird feathers and Charles Wallace mentions that there may be something wrong with his mitochondria (The powerhouse of the cell) and that's making him sick. I think the farandola/mitochondria parts are the weakest parts of the book, tbh. L'Engle wrote that she  knew that Proginoskes and the Three Mister Jenkins would be part of the story, but had trouble developing it beyond that until a physician friend (the inspiration for Doctor Louise, I'm certain) gave her some articles about mitochondria.

On one hand, I like it when authors do this. It's one of the things I really enjoy about Roger Zelazny's writing. "Hey, I'm really excited about learning this thing and I want to share it with you through this story!" (And, in the purest sense, is what my writing here is all about, come to think of it.) On the other, since it was a later addition to the story, the mitochondria stuff feels less fully developed than those previously mentioned elements. 

Anyway, the siblings go out again and meet Proginoskes and his Teacher Blajeny. Proginoskes is a cherubim, all eyes and wings.

Charles Wallace’s drive of dragons was a single creature, although Meg was not at all surprised that Charles Wallace had confused this fierce, wild being with dragons. She had the feeling that she never saw all of it at once, and which of all the eyes could she meet? merry eyes, wise eyes, ferocious eyes, kitten eyes, dragon eyes, opening and closing, looking at her, looking at Charles Wallace and Calvin and the strange tall man. And wings, wings in constant motion, covering and uncovering the eyes. When the wings were spread out they had a span of at least ten feet, and when they were all folded in, the creature resembled a misty, feathery sphere. Little spurts of flame and smoke spouted up between the wings; it could certainly start a grass fire if it weren’t careful. Meg did not wonder that Charles Wallace had not approached it.

Blajeny informs them that they will have to pass three trials. The first is to identify the Echthroi Mister Jenkins. You see, two of them have taken his form, and Meg has to identify the real one. 

The Echthroi are the source of all that is evil in the universe. Proginoskes says humans would consider them fallen angels. He is a Namer, recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of entities by recognizing the beauty of their truest, most perfect self, and the Echthroi are Un-Namers, who would make everything into nothing, "Sky tearers. Light snuffers. Planet darkeners. The dragons. The worms. Those who hate."

I like this scene a lot. Meg watches and listens. One Mister Jenkins in compassionate, promising Charles Wallace the care and protection he needs to thrive. Another is strong  and decisive. The third is scared and confused and wants to know when this whole thing is  going to be over.  That, of course is the real one.

Meg remembers a story from Calvin, which allows her to love Mr. Jenkins enough to Name him.

“When I started seventh grade and went over to Regional, my mother ought me some shoes from a thrift shop. They cost her a dollar which was more than she could spare, and they were women’s Oxford’s, the kind of black laced shoes old women wear, and at least three sizes too small for me. When I saw them, I cried, and then my mother cried. And my pop beat me. So I got a saw and hacked off the heels, and cut the toes out so I could am my feet in, and went to school. The kids knew me to well to make remarks in my presence, but I could guess what they were sniggering behind my back. After a few days Mr. Jenkins called me into his office and said he’d noticed I’d outgrown my shoes, and he just happened to have an extra pair that he thought would fit me. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to make them look used, as though he hadn’t gone out and bought them for me…I’ll never forget that he gave me the first decent pair of shoes ever had."

I just love that story of decency. He's a good character. After Meg Names him, he joins them on their journey, even though it would have been easier to return to his "safe life as a failure." 

As an aside, I think I'd be annoyed at Meg if I had to deal with her every day. Look, I love that character, but she must be exhausting. She's impatient and hot-headed, in need of constant reassurance and her breath probably smells like liverwurst, but she's wonderful because of it and no less deserving of love. And the same is true of Mr. Jenkins. He's an adult, he's had to compromise, and he's compromised when he should have stood firm. He feels that he's too old for the world he finds himself in, but he perseveres. 

They shrink down to visit one of Charles Wallace's mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) and the second test is to convince Sporos, a farandola, to put aside childish things and mature. 

Sporos is a fucking dickhead. He almost throws in with the Echthroi, but they convince him to Deepen at the last possible moment. Also, the Echthroi are still using Mr Jenkins' form to walk around and be evil, sometimes in a giant-size and it must be a sobering experience for him.

He rescues Meg, but leaves himself vulnerable to possession by the Echthroi. The third task is to save him, which is achieved when all of those assembled use their own light to fill in the emptiness of the Echthroi.

Cold.

Cold beyond snow and ice and falling mercury.

Cold beyond the absolute zero of outer space.

Cold pulverizing her into nothingness.

Cold and pain.

She struggled.

You are not to X me, Echthroi. I fill you.

Cold.

Darkness.

Emptiness.

Nothing.

Naught.

Nought.

Echth

X

Then

Prognoskes.

A great cry. A tempest of wind. A lightning flash of fire across the cold, breaking, burning the cold and pain.

Prognoskes Xing.

Wings. All the wings. Stretched to their fullest span.

Eyes. All the eyes opening and closing, opening, dimming—

Oh, no—

Going out—

No—

Flame. Smoke. Feathers flying. Prognoskes flinging his great cherubic self into the void of the Echthroi who were Xing Mr. Jenkins and Calvin and Meg—

and Charles Wallace.

Wings and flame and wind, a great howling of all the hurricanes in the world meeting and battling—

And that brings me to my point way at the beginning of this post. I was thinking about the series with the dissolution of the corporation for public broadcasting. 

Proginoskes chooses to erase himself from existence rather than allow the Echthroi to do it to him. And CPB said they did pretty much the same thing, dissolving the organization entirely rather than allow it to be suborned

A Wind in the Door is not a story about a big bad you punch harder. It is about Naming instead of Un-Naming, about filling emptiness rather than conquering it, about choosing to spend yourself so that something fragile can continue to exist. Proginoskes does not win. He refuses corruption by opting out of being usable at all. That is a theological, moral, and civic idea, and it is vanishingly rare in modern genre work.

So when I look at CPB choosing dissolution over capture, I do not see cowardice or defeat. I see something very old and very unfashionable. A refusal to become an instrument of negation. A choice to leave the door open, even if the wind that comes through it is loss. L’Engle understood that some things can only be defended by being given away, and some evils cannot be beaten, only denied purchase.

"What, nephew", said the king,

"is the wind in that door?"

Roger Zelazny Book Review: He That Moves

Hey, been a while since I've done one of these! 

I recently needed to drive down to Florida to help someone out and I flew home after it was done. I'm glad I could help, but that drive is not an experience I'd want to repeat. Shades of Damnation Alley.

I traveled light. Carried everything I needed in one backpack. Among those essentials was my copy of Volume 3 of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: This Mortal Mountain. I read some stories for the first time in years and others for the first time ever.

I don't think I had read He That Moves previously.  It is not, as the title may suggest, a companion piece to He Who Shapes, but rather something else entirely.

I think I would have remembered it. It's everything I love about Zelazny's writing. According to the Speculative Fiction Database, the Collected Story represents the first time it was published since its debut in 1968, so it's unlikely that I would have encountered it elsewhere and if I missed it during my initial readthrough, as it now seems I must have, then this is indeed my first time encountering it.

I'm delighted to have read it within the Collected Stories, because the endnotes serve to provide some much needed context and background. I love it because it's classic Zelazny, mythic! Literate! One of the introductions to the volume notes that Zelazny was one of those writers who made you feel smart for understanding his allusions and that's on full display here. However, had I encountered it as a young teen, the age where I first started reading him, I feel I might have found it frustratingly opaque in parts. I doubt that I would have identified Eric Weiss as Harry Houdini, though I would have felt clever for recognizing Sappho and Agamemnon. Perhaps that's why it had remained unpublished for so long. If you're unfamiliar with the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb,

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here. 

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

then you'll likely have the nagging sensation that you're missing something vital. 

It's difficult to explain succinctly and I'm somewhat loathe to give too much away. It seems to hardly exist at all online, and I'm reluctant to spoil the chance for someone to discover a new-to-them Zelazny story so long after his passing. So instead, I'll touch on its origins. It was another story written to match the cover art, a la Angel, Dark Angel, which endlessly fascinates me. Given a million years to write, I would have never gotten from there to here.

Science Fiction’s bold vision of the future where everyone lives inside a lava lamp

I like it a lot. I love living in a world where this exists. I particularly enjoyed the final line: Eric Weiss turned away from her strange, sad eyes, prisoner once more in the barless cage of himself.

That's your reading assignment, everyone. Find your copy of This Mortal Mountain and treat yourself to this story!

I'm back! (Redux)

Although I'm back, Google has been slow to reindex the 1100 pages in the blog, which is kind of disappointing. You can find it with a direct link, but search engines don't yet have it. This was a silly distraction, but it represents fifteen years of my life. I like sharing what I've made with other people who might appreciate it (Where there had been darkness, I had hung my words...) and I hope it gets corrected sooner rather than later.

I'm back!

I briefly took the blog private because I was involved in running for local office and it got really ugly really quick. I had people selectively quoting movie reviews I wrote more than 25 years in an effort to smear me.  So I figured that this would be one less point of vulnerability.

But now I'm back! And I can get back to the business of bimonthly Zelazny posting.

The Fair-to-Middling Four

 I really wanted to like Fantastic Four more than I did.

The beginning, the first steps, if you like, are phenomenal. The look, the feel, the family dynamics, pitch perfect.

I'm a sucker for analog retro futures and FF nails it. Everything seemed authentic. Too often, movies fail to think through the ramifications of the fantastic elements they add to the real world. It's just New York now with added superheroes! without considering the ripple effects that would inevitably result.

Verisimilitude isn't just about good production design or costumes. It's about a world that behaves as if it truly exists, where even the most outlandish elements follow an internal logic and cast believable shadows on everything around them.

But First Steps perfectly conceptualizes it and spins it into a living breathing world.

They felt like a family in exactly the way they should.

I'm sick of superhero origin stories and I thought the retrospective was an elegant way to get the exposition across.

The Thing looked great. 

Not quite it

Getting warmer...

There we go!

I wasn't sure about a mustachioed Reed Richards

but Pedro Pascal won me over. I shouldn't be surprised. He's always been consistently excellent 

I didn't care for the Storm Siblings. Percy kinda hates Vanessa Kirby for some reason. I liked her in the Crown, but there was something about her here that seemed out of place but I can't quite put my finger on it. I might have a better grasp of just what I felt was wrong if I watched the movie again but I'm certainly not going to do that.

Every time the force field came on, I felt like I needed an eye exam.

Eddie from Stranger things was Johnny Storm and...I didn't like him. The 2005 version was dogshit on so many different levels but Chris Evans delivered a pretty good performance.

And while I really liked the golden records, a brilliant mise-en-scène contributing to the worldbuilding, it feels like the arrival of the Silver Surfer is when the wheels started to come off.

Canada Dry must be huge on earth 828. (Or maybe not if they need to advertise as much as they do)

It felt like so many decisions were made solely to advance the plot. If you'll excuse a digression, The Last Unicorn is one of my favorite books, in my opinion, one of the greatest fantasy books ever written. It's full to the brim with iconic writing, but I'm thinking of one the scene where Schmendrick performs card tricks to entertain the bandits. The applaud politely at the right times, and generally act like the perfect audience, but everyone knows that he's not doing anything special.  "Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them." Everyone involved in the process is just going through the motions.

So the Shalla-Bal Silver Surfer shows up and kinda looks like crap. And shit on the 2007 movie all you want, that was a better looking Surfer.

And again, I could see the reason for the decision as clearly as if I were reading the script. We have a female Surfer so Johnny can fall in love with her, setting in motion the third act betrayal.

And now a caveat.

Back when Percy was a little kid, we were watching Stuart Little together. About halfway through the movie, there's a bit with a boat race, where Stuart pilots a remote controlled boat directly.  Baby Percy got scared when the mean kid started smashing the boat Stuart was piloting and climbed up on the couch with me. They were watching the drama playing out on the TV, and I was watching the one playing out on their face. There were whole worlds written there. They gritted their teeth when it looked like Stuart was in trouble, relaxed when he got control of the boat, and laughed out loud when he won the race.

I remember thinking how amazing it is that these hoary clichés we've seen literally thousands of times are still novel to them.

And I am aware that my approach is unusual; most people watch movies to enjoy them not dissect them and I may be holding this movie to an impossibly high standard it could not hope to meet. But dress it up a little. Tell me a story. Don't go through the motions. Offer us some magic. I was always acutely aware that I was viewing something someone had created. I was never able to suspend my disbelief.

Anyways, the FF, including 13-month pregnant Sue get on a ship and blast off to find Galactus. I imagine that her doctor would warn her away from boarding a commercial flight, so a trip on a spaceship is probably right out.

Galactus looked pretty good. No complaints about his appearance. Let's be honest. A lot of the Kirby stuff looks great on the page, but would need to be tweaked at least a little so as not to look silly in live action.

"It's not a G. It stands for Hope."

Maybe put some pants on if you want to keep eating planets?

The problem was with his demeanor. Galactus needed to be ancient and alien and inscrutable. What we got was a big guy who talked a lot.

Ideally, Galactus wouldn't talk at all. Telepathy or using the herald as an intermediary. Anything other than making small talk in unaccented English like a dude chatting you up from the next barstool. (A bit of trivia from Wikipedia "The actor spent time "ruminating" at the top of tall buildings to prepare for the role", knowledge which fills me with rage.)

But he's like, hey, gimmee your baby and I'll spare the planet. And again, I was annoyed, because not only did Sue have no reason to be there, but they made no attempt to justify her presence.

Quick chase scene, the baby is born, quelle surprise, and they dump the Surfer in a neutron star before hoofing it back to earth. They land and immediately hold a press conference and Reed Richards, the smartest man in the universe, announces, "We had a chance to save the earth but decided not to. No further questions." 

And that's a little bit uncharitable of me, but whatever. The Fantastic Four gets enough lucky breaks over the course of the movie. They don't need any additional help from me.

I don't think "I would have done it differently" is a valid critique, and I do try to avoid it when reviewing movies, but I'm going to break my own rule here. The offer from Galactus is never taken seriously. There has been a lot of online discourse positing that he was never going to follow through or that his hunger would have been transferred to Franklin, but that feels like after-the-fact justification in an attempt to deflect valid criticism.  If those points were to be made, they would have needed to have been raised by characters in the movie in order to carry any weight. 

The whole world hates the Fantastic Four. But then Sue gives a very mid speech. So the whole world loves the Fantastic Four again. Yay, I guess. I guess bellyaching about adequate speeches in superhero movies is going to be my thing this summer.

Speaking of unlikely events, the team also convinces the entire world to build an extensive network of hyperspace pylons to shift the earth away from Galactus. It is by far the most monumental undertaking in the history of human civilization by about a factor of about a billion and although we don't get a sense of the time involved, it seems to concluded without a single hiccup in about a week.

This seemed rushed and they could have spent a little more time to add some stakes to the leadup to the climax, but that would take too much screentime from the extended Natasha Lyonne scenes that don't go anywhere and the painfully unfunny Moleman bits.

We gave up Red Ghost and his Super Apes for this!? 

It doesn't matter because the Surfer shows up and immediately blows up most of the pylons. But Johnny translates an entirely alien language from a couple messages well enough to deliver his own adequate speech. Didn't I just gripe about implausible translation in a superhero movie only the other week?  

Decoding the Rosetta Stone took TWENTY YEARS. 

So she flies off and we never establish just how big his ship is. In the comics, Taa II is described from anywhere from planet to star-system sized, so at the very least, we can assume it's...large. But Galactus only has one employee, and she's off getting ready for her third act betrayal so he has to come stomp around Manhattan himself like some kind of budget kaiju in a mockbuster Pacific Rim. 

He's on the cusp of sating his billion-year hunger, but still finds the time to play with his Stretch Armstrong. 

God, I hated this part.

Anyway, Galactus stomps around a little bit, then they teleport him away through the last remaining portal. He escapes, but the Surfer knocks him in just as it closes! Sue dies! But she gets better! Whew! 

I saw it with a buddy. He gave it a B. I gave it a C. It started out so good and deflated completely. It may sound like a joke, but I still think the Incredibles is the best Fantastic Four movie ever made.