Roger Zelazny Book Review: Donnerjack, part two

Welcome back to the second part of my Donnerjack commentary. This one will have some smallish spoilers, so if you haven't read the book yet, please be warned.

I like George Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, but I've seen the criticism that the form he's chosen for the books, that of alternating the viewpoint character with each chapter, tends to break up the flow of the narrative. And while I'm not sure I agree with that, I could certainly see why someone might hold that opinion. Further into Donnerjack, we're introduced to more characters. They have a rather great supporting cast. There are a bunch of them, but the story never lingers on them long enough to lose momentum, and the various storylines gradually converge.

We have Virginia Tallant, a ranger in the Virtù Survey department. Her body in Verité is blind and paralyzed by an untreatable neurological disease, but she is hale and hearty in the virtual world. She enters into a relationship with Markon, the genius loci of a node in Virtù.

The concept of the genius loci is not a new one, but it's one I quite like. It's used in the more modern sense, of an entity possessed of great power, but only within a small area. Markon is pretty neat, and I'll be getting into him further in a later installment.

We meet Dack, the robotic major domo of Castle Donnerjack. His features are described as an art deco rendering of Clark Gable done in silver and bronze.

I liked that we got as much description of Gwen and Lydia's vacation in Virtù as we did before it started to go off the rails. It helps sell it as something that has an existence beyond the story, rather than just an excuse to get the characters where the authors want them.

We meet the gods of Meru, Seaga, Skyga and Earthma. (Someone mentions that the names are kind of silly later in the book, so the reader doesn't have to!). We also encounter a lesser god, Celerity, who will grow to be important.

The more I read them, the more I like Death's servants. Here's his creation of Mizar, and it's just...neat.

Death moved his hands to his left, cupped them, opened them as if releasing a wish or an order.

"Hound, hound, out of the ground,' he muttered, and a heap of bone and metal stirred below in the direction he faced. Mismatched bones reared up, along with springs, straps, and struts, to form them selves together into an ungainly skeletal construct, to which pieces of plastic, metal, flesh, glass, and wood flew or slid, turning like puzzle pieces after unlikely congruencies, fitting themselves into such places, to be drenched suddenly by a rain of green ink and superglue, assailed by a blizzard of furniture covering and shag rug samples, dried by bursts of flame which belched from the ground upon all sides. "There is something that needs to be found," Death finished.

The hound sought its master with its red right eye and its green left one, the right an inch higher than the left. It twitched its cable tails and moved forward.

When it reached the top of the hill it lowered itself to its belly and whined like a leaky air valve. Death extended his left hand and stroked its head lightly. Fearlessness, ruthlessness, relentlessness, the laws and ways of the hunt rose from the ground and rushed to wrap it, along with the aura of dread.

"Death's dog, I name you Mizar," he said. "Come with me now to take a scent."

Mizar showed up in my role-playing campaign. The players called him Scraps, which I liked. In fact, I liked all of Death's animal companions, and talking animals usually just annoy me intensely. I like Phecda the snake, slithering through Deep Fields and digesting bits of wisdom before they could decay.

Zelazny mentions Thomas Ray, which I thought was really cool. Who's going to know who he is? And yet there's the reference.

I mentioned Sayjak briefly in the first part, and in this section, he kills a bounty hunter named Big Betsy.

I don't know if the character is an homage to Big Barda or or not, but it's possible, as I am continuously impressed with the scope of Zelazny's knowledge.

Coincidence? I think not!

I like her. Her fight with Sayjak is as savage as any Zelazny has ever written and I really like the manner in which her likeness lives on after her death. Also, Sayjak eats her heart and her liver. Shout out to Strygalldwir! (Sayjak, of all people, gets in a dig at civil servants, observing that the bounty hunters were better at their jobs because "Not being civil servants and actually making or not making their money as a result of their actions had much to do with it." Man, you know you're reading a Zelazny book when even the savage arboreal humanoids are snarking about bureaucracy.)

I do have two exceedingly minor complaints.  I felt like all things Gaelic had been romanticized very heavily, and between the caoineag, Wolfer the Piper, Donnerjack as a Scottish laird with the "soul of a poet", it got noticeable enough to be somewhat distracting. Not always, and the authors manage to dial it back before it gets overwhelming, but I think those elements could have been somewhat more understated.

For as smart as Donnerjack is supposed to be, he's really appallingly slow on the uptake. Death brought you back to life and incarnated you in the flesh in Verité in contravention of every law of both worlds because you promised him your firstborn? And now you're suffering morning sickness, your belly is swollen and those home pregnancy tests you keep peeing on are all coming up positive? What could it mean?!

To their credit, the authors do try to come up with reasonable excuses, that Ayradyss is not a native of Verité and doesn't really understand how humans reproduce and Donnerjack is busy with his work, but I mean, damn, I think any guy who has ever had a girlfriend immediately flashes to "Are you pregnant?" if his partner is throwing up every morning, especially considering the whole firstborn thing.

Like I said, two minor complaints, but I still like the book a heck of a lot.

I don't like stuff that sucks: Firefly

New feature here at Josh's blog!

I hate Firefly. Google that phrase and you get some hits, but they're mostly variations on the theme of "I hate Firefly because it's so sublimely brilliant that it ruined science fiction for me forever, as nothing else can approach its transcendent genius. Watching Firefly was like experiencing the birth of my first child and eating a hot fudge sundae and having an orgasm all at the same time!"

This is something of a minority opinion, because among the geek community, saying you like Firefly is like saying you hate Jar Jar Binks or enjoy breathing air. I first heard about it when I was working at a mall book store. I met my friend Jen and her vervoid-loving husband Tom there, and I also met another friend named Kate. Kate was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. HUGE. The way she talked about made me want to see it, despite how stupid the premise sounded. So I had a couple bucks to burn after my birthday one year and the Buffy Season 1 DVD was on sale, so I picked it up and we LOVED it.

 

Then Kate started telling me how Firefly was even better than Buffy. We had Netflix, so I moved the whole series to the front of my queue and eagerly waited for it to arrive. It came, (not soon enough) and I threw it into the DVD player and watched the first episode, and thought, "That was meh, but they were simply introducing the cast. ( If you've somehow avoided being exposed to Firefly, there are nine main characters: a priest with mysterious past, a dinosaur loving pilot who wears garish Hawaiian shirts, his tough ex-soldier wife, a space pirate who is Han Solo without everything that made Han appealing, a space hooker, a young doctor, his idiot-savant sister, a cutie pie mechanic and a moronic mercenary), Mal Reyolds is a Browncoat from the Space Confederacy. They lost the Space Civil War after they tried to secede, presumably because the Space Union told them they couldn't keep Space slaves on their Space plantations. Or some such shit.  It's a ridiculously literal space western. They have a fucking cattle drive. More on that when we get to the appropriate episode, but it was absurd.

So we wrapped up the pilot and started up the next episode. 

"It'll take off from here!" I thought.

It didn't.

I'm not saying it's all terrible. Some episodes were downright tolerable (Though Shindig was just about the worst piece of shit I've ever seen) It was...okay.I watched it at first, didn't see the point and was largely indifferent to it and only slowly grew to dislike it every time somebody mentioned it as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It was a space western. (or Western in Space, if you're my friend Eric).  It was a middle of the road sci-fi show, but its pedigree and the circumstances of its cancellation have elevated it to the status of sacred martyr and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that began when it was yanked eight years ago have not even begun to subside. 

People at the Eden Studio's (publisher of the Buffy RPG) boards have mentioned that Joss Whedon's dislike of large organizations tends to show itself in his work.  I think this is true, but seeing it stated so starkly like this made me think of  the scene from Alien: Resurrection (which he wrote) where the people on board the research facility are scanning the visiting space pirates for weapons with a handheld metal detector. They get to the pirate in a wheelchair, and he has some kind of sassy comment, like "Are you gonna scan me?" and they let him through, and later on, he assembles a wide variety of weapons for his fellow pirates, based on stuff that had been hidden in the chair. I imagined Joss Whedon pumping his fist in the air after writing that, "Yeah! Stickin' it to the Man!" 

To digress for a moment, my friend Karen loves giraffes.

Actually, she doesn't. But I tell everyone she does. I forget why I thought it would be funny, but I started telling everyone that she loves giraffes, so now people send her links to giraffe-themed gifts and I send her giraffe cards on her birthday and hide stuffed giraffes in her apartment whenever we come over to visit. Karen has accepted this mostly with good grace saying, "I am neither a giraffe lover or hater but I think I will end up hating them if this keeps up!"

That's how I feel about Firefly. It's mediocre. I could forget about it entirely if people would stop telling me how brilliant it is. I get random fans cruising by this blog to tell me how great it is and how much I suck because I don't appreciate it.

It wasn't terrible. It plays like the account of a Traveler campaign run by an indulgent high school freshman. The plans the crew of the Serenity come up with are something you might expect from a smart sixth-grader, not totally idiotic, but not really brilliant either, though presented in-universe as incredibly clever.
 
Rodney Dangerfield tells us "If you want to look thin, hang around with fat people". And likewise, the only way Mal can appear clever is if Joss dumbs down the rest of the 'verse.It's not that they're smart; it's that their opponents are idiots. It's the Constantine problem. John Constantine is the lead character in the Vertigo series "Hellblazer". He's a more or less normal guy from Liverpool with some magical powers, but he manages to triumph against more powerful foes because he's smart and ruthless. In the "Dangerous Habits" storyline, he learns he has lung cancer, so he sells his soul to three demon lords, and if they go to war over his soul, they'll tear the universe apart. He does it because he knows that none of them will back down, so they're forced to cure his cancer to save face. And it's kind of a clever plan, but it's not so clever that supernatural beings that having been buying and selling souls for literally millions of years should be surprised by it. Nobody's ever tried this before? Really?

So I don't hate Firefly. It's an entirely unremarkable sci-fi show. It's just overrated, and I just don't care. 

In fact, I care so little that I'm going to be writing about how much I hate each and every episode.

Christmas time is here

Christmas was nice. Lily was really extraordinarily sweet, picking up presents and saying "Open this one first, mommy!"

For the second year in a row, she's been very good about keeping the secret of Jen's present. I told her about a month ago and while she told some other grown ups, she didn't utter a peep to Jen.  We bought her a hula hoop and a little fountain.

Lily was really excited for Jen about the fountain, and really gracious about every gift she got. "I love it!" was her constant refrain. Jen's mom showed up at around 9:30, then we took off for her dad's house at around noon. Lily was really well-behaved there too. I'm glad we're raising such a good little kid.

 I was pretty happy with the stuff I got. In addition to the gift cards and other stuff, I also wound up with Argh! Thar Be Zombies for All Flesh Must be Eaten and DVDs of the Last Unicorn and Fantasia/Fantasia 2000. I've always loved Fantasia. I was sitting on the couch as we started playing it.

Five minutes in:

Lily: Daddy?
Me: (Leaning forward in anticipation) Yes?
Lily: This is really boring.

She came around when we got to the Pastoral Symphony. We must have watched that sequence fifteen times over Christmas weekend. She loved the "naked flying babies" and giggled whenever they came on the screen. She told us that she she wished she had a pet Pegasus. When asked what she would do it, she replied that she would fly down to Florida on her back, but not before she let the Pegasus take a super duper long nap so she would have enough energy to make the trip.

Previously, Jen hadn't liked the movie, but only because she had been expecting something entirely different. Now that she knows what it is, she really likes it as well. It's nice to have a movie we can all enjoy.

Earlier in the week, Jen found something that looked like food on the floor near the computer.

Jen: Is that food?
Me: (Leans over. Put some in my mouth.) *Grimace* ...No. Ah...it's dried up paint.
Jen: ...Weren't you a scientist? Shouldn't you be more discriminating about what you put in your orifices?
Me: Quiet, you. I haven't finished sticking it in my orifices.

We hung out over the weekend, watched some movies. Jen and I enjoy Parenthood and we caught up on our viewing of that. The show keeps getting steadily better. I especially liked the Thanksgiving episode, because it shows them as a family, rather than as four different groups of people who happen to be related.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Donnerjack, part one: All Patience

In our world, called the Verité, he is a Scottish laird, an engineer, and a master of virtual reality design. In the computer-generated universe of Virtù, created by the crash of the World Net, he is a living legend. Scientist and poet with a warrior's soul, Donnerjack strides like a giant across the virtual landscape he helped to shape. And now he has bargained with Death himself for the return of love...

I'd been reluctant to review Donnerjack because I think it will mark the last of my favorites. I mean, I like just about everything Zelazny has written, but there are some that I just adore and Donnerjack is right up there.You'll see that I gave it a better grade than A Rose for Ecclesiastes, something that will get me lynched by other Zelazny fans, but there it is.

I've never encountered a fan of the book. I was talking to a science fiction author who says that Nine Princes in Amber is his favorite book, and who told me how influential Zelazny was on his style. As of four years ago, he said he hadn't read the book, but that he'd probably get around to it some day. That's the kind of tepid response it seems to engender.

I picked it up because we were flying to the UK and I wanted a long book to read on the plane. I'd been burned by the other book posthumously completed by Jane Lindskold, (Lord Demon), but figured I'd take a chance on Donnerjack.  It's huge for a Zelazny book, but that's because it was originally supposed to be a trilogy.

I bought it at a Barnes & Noble, though I was shopping on eBay for a used copy. I noticed that somebody was auctioning an autographed copy, which was a neat trick. (The auction explained that Zelazny had autographed a sticker, which was later placed inside the book.) I went from being open to the book to mild interest, to incredible excitement in the first chapter.

I love it. I think it's the best thing he's written in thirty years. I even like the photo on the back of the hardcover!

Oh, man, where to start?!

The opening lines are as good as any he has ever written:

In Deep Fields he dwelled, though his presence extended beyond that place through Virtù. He was, in a highly specialized sense, the Lord of Everything, though others might lay claim to that title for different reasons. His claim was as valid as any, however, for his dominion was an undeniable fact of existence...He could assume any form, male or female, go where he would, but he always returned to his black-cloaked, hooded garb over an amazing slimness, flashes of white within the shadows he also wore...There was no other like him in all of creation. Known by thousands of names and euphemisms, his most common appellation was Death.

The story begins when Death is wandering Deep Fields, and one of his servants, a black butterfly named Alioth, informs him of intruders. (My wife tells me that all of Death's servants,  Mizar, Alioth, Phecda and Dubhe are all names of stars in the Big Dipper.)

"What desecration is this?'' Death inquired, raising his arms, his shadow flowing toward them. "You dare to invade my realm?"

The one with the sack straightened and the man dropped the light, which went out instantly. A great babble of voices and strident sounds filled the air as if in synchrony with Death's ire. There came a small golden flicker from within the trench as his shadow reached it.

Then a gate opened, and the figures passed through it, just before the shadow flooded the trench with blackness.

I really liked that passage above. It reminded me of when Jack escaped from the Lord of Bats.

[Death] "Yet all patience is but an imitation of my ways, and even in the highest realms I am not unknown."

Dubhe sprang to his shoulder and settled there as Death rose up out of the trench.

"I believe that someone has just begun a game," Death said as he headed across Deep Fields through a meadow of blackest grass, black poppies swaying at the passage of his cloak, "and, next to music, they have invoked a pastime for which I have the highest regard. It is long, Dubhe, since I have been given a good game. I shall respond to their opening as none might expect, and we will try each others' patience. Then, one day, they will learn that I am always in the right place at the proper time."

I love that line. "All patience is but an imitation of my ways." Death is mythic, man! I was talking with a friend a few years back, and he was big into heavy metal music. He said that Iron Maiden had come under fire for their album Number of the Beast, but they denied any kind of occult influence, with Bruce Dickinson saying  "Metal isn't the type of music where you talk about prancing in the tulips.  It is epic music where you talk about epic battles like God and Satan."

I was never huge into metal, but I've got to respect that. Roger Zelazny set up an epic here, and he succeeded brilliantly.

After the scene in Deep Fields, we meet the title character of the book,

John D'Arcy Donnerjack loved but once and when he saw the moiré he knew it was over.

I love that too. The rhythm of that sentence sets the scene well and makes us feel like we're in a fairy tale. Virtù is, as the name suggests, a virtual world. Some time ago, the Internet crashed for a short time, and when it came back up, it was completely different. There had been hundreds of virtual years of warfare and evolution among the programs, even though little time had based in Verité. This event was called the Genesis Scramble.
 
Donnerjack had thought his love was a real woman projecting into Virtù, but when he sees the distortion effect of a moiré, which precedes the failure of a program, he realizes that she is not. This in no way diminishes his feelings for her, however, and he resolves to enter Deep Fields and bargain with Death himself for her return.

(Ayradyss is similar enough to Eurydice that I have to assume that that was intentional, considering they're both led out of their respective underworlds. Also, Donnerjack plays Politian's Orfeo for Death, which is an opera of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.)

"I know you, John D'Arcy Donnerjack. I am an admirer of your work. I am especially fond of the delightful fantasy of the afterlife you designed based on Dante's Inferno."

"The critics liked it, but the public proved somewhat less than enthusiastic."

"It is generally that way with my work, also."

Donnerjack stared, not certain of how to respond until Death chuckled.

The conversation continues. Death offers to release Ayradyss in Verité rather than in Virtù, but Donnerjack doesn't believe it possible.

"If I am to violate one law of existance for you, why not another?"

"But the principles which govern this place would not permit it. There is no way to manage the 'visit' effect permanently, fully either way."

"And if there were?"

"I have made a lifetime study of this."

"A life is a shallow place in time."

"Still..."

"Do you think me a proge-generated simulacrum? Some toy of human imagination? I came into being when the first living thing died, and I will not say where or when that was. Neither man nor machine ever wrote a program for me."

Donnerjack drew back as a moiré flowed between them.

"You make it sound as if you really are Death."

The only reply was the continuing smile.

Death's price for her return is construction of a palace, and Donnerjack and Ayradyss's firstborn. Donnerjack agrees pretty readily, which is really, kind of stupid. Has he never read a fairy tale at all? I mean, or even fucking heard of one? Because that whole firstborn thing is really pretty boilerplate. He's not convinced that what Death is what he claims to be so, he agrees to the terms right away, because he doesn't think that there is any chance of a child resulting from their union, and this causes some trouble down the line. But, as Faust said, if one imaginary thing exists, then all imaginary things must exist. Meaning, if you're dealing with a creature thought to be impossible, and he asks for your firstborn and you say "sure!" because you think that's impossible too, well, maybe you could have stood to be more prudent.

Slowly, other characters are introduced. I'll expand on them later in the second part of this review, but the big ones are Arthur Eden, "tall, very black, his beard shot with gray, heavily muscled in the manner of an athlete somewhat past his prime, which he was -- was a professor of Anthropology at Columbia's Verité campus." I like how Zelazny just offers up "Verité campus" too, with the reader being left to infer that there are campuses that exist only in Virtù. Also, Zelazny didn't write a huge amount of African American characters, so it's nice to see one here. He's going under cover to research a church that has sprung up out of Virtù, whose adherents sometimes seem to manifest special powers.

We also meet Tranto the phant, a rogue elephant proge and the unfortunately named Sayjak of the People (could you come up with a name that doesn't make me think of Wheel of Fortune?), as well Lydia Hazzard, a teenage girl with jungle green eyes.

It's fantastically complex, and there is a hell of a lot going on. The bit above is just from the first chapter and a half. In some ways, I think it's Zelazny's most ambitious work and in some ways I think it's better even than Lord of Light.

Okay, that was just laying the ground work. I'll be back in another day or two for the second part of this review.

Happy Holidays

I've been doing my part in the War on Christmas. I never understood the rage among certain people when they are addressed with that phrase.

I always said "Happy Holidays" when I worked retail. I didn't know what someone might be celebrating and that way I covered all my bases. I'm an atheist and have been for a long time, but I like Christmas. I exchange gifts. Look, I even got my wife a hula hoop.

She was so surprised!

I was raised Christian, and most of the people in my personal life are also nominally Christian, so I tend to wish people a Merry Christmas these days.

(Though there is one woman at work who is so aggressive in her hatred of the phrase "Happy Holidays" that she'll try to get store clerks fired if they say it to her. I always go out of my way to wish her "happy holidays".)

It's weird seeing these people standing up to defend their right to shout Merry Christmas. I mentioned in an earlier post about this guy online taking a brave stance by speaking out about Nazis. Sure, gutsy for 1942 Berlin, but today, not so much. And likewise, white middle class Christians aren't an oppressed minority. Nobody's trampling on your rights by wishing you happy holidays.

Pictured above: Not you

Political correctness has never been anything but a straw man. Are there people out there who really believe that we atheists descend into an incoherent rage when someone wishes us a Merry Christmas? I'll grow mildly aggravated if someone says "I'm praying for you" as a deliberate provocation, but mostly I accept Christmas wishes in the spirit they were offered.