Assorted almost Zelazny news

I figure in the Big Venn diagram, there's a fair amount of overlap between people who are interested in Roger Zelazny and people who are interested in Chris Kovacs, Renaissance Man and one of the people who put together the Collected Stories. He and his wife, Susan M. MacDonald, author of the young adult book,  Edge of Time wrote a piece for the The New York Review of Science Fiction: "Medical Myths and Errors in Science Fiction and Fantasy." I haven't read it, but I'm told it looks at the tropes we see in genre works and examines how realistic they are. That's in the September issue.

While were on the subject of Chrises and their works, if you enjoyed Chris DeVito's Anise you might also enjoy this interview with him about the story.

And if none of that tickles your fancy, Dr. Kovacs was kind enough to point me to a video of Zelazny reading LOKI 7281. (There's also a bit with Merlin at the end, but I assume everyone will just want to skip that part.)

Link to the video of the reading..

Josh's favorite comics: All Star Superman

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Superman. The post here of which I'm proudest explains why.

He's not an easy character to write, but when an author gets him right, it reminds me why he's one of my favorite characters in all fiction.

Here are a few panels that get him right. They're from Grant Morrison's All Star Superman. In this story, Superman is dying, poisoned by an overdose of solar radiation. He's rushing from crisis to crisis,  acutely aware of how little time he has left. This might be his last chance to speak with Lois Lane before he dies. And yet, when he needs to choose, he has to go. Because someone needs him.

I love that last panel.

Another post about Josh's weekend!

We had another in our series of good weekends. On Saturday, we got together with my friend Amy and her family and we all went to a local event with scarecrow building and pony rides. Jen built a new boyfriend

If he only had a brain

and the little kids had a great time burying me in straw.

A rare picture of me for your collection

Lily was positively euphoric for the pony ride. She was so excited for the whole thing. She went on five times and we gave the guy a good tip.

We went out for pizza afterward. You can tell that we're all parents because when Amy was moving one of the kids around, three pairs of hands reached for her ice tea to make sure it wasn't knocked over.

As we were leaving, Lily had seen some face painting. Amy's family had already taken off, and Jen thought that the other kids would be upset if Lily showed up looking like a little kitty. So on our way home, we stopped at the store and Jen picked up some face painting supplies and made all three of us into a family of puppy dogs. Best mom EVER!

In other news, I'm very proud of Lily. Her dolls are playing more nicely with each other. Princess Daisy is in the hospital with a broken arm and a leg. The other dolls are visiting her to wish her well.

She was watching a scary Scooby Doo movie and Scott Pilgrim was watching it in the other room. She heard him screaming and at first he denied it and said maybe an invisible person in another room was screaming.

Lily as Daisy: I went to every room and touched everywhere and didn't feel any invisible people.

Scott: How did you do that if you have a broken arm and leg?

Daisy: (After a very brief pause) Someone carried me and I used my good arm to touch things.

I thought that was some good reasoning on the spur of the moment.

After that she said, "If you were scared, that's okay. You're my best friend and you never need to be embarrassed around me."

On Sunday I went to church with Jen and Lily. Jen wound up teaching a Sunday school class, and I'm not into the whole Cthulhu-worship aspect of Unitarian Churches, so after they went to the classroom, I quietly slipped out of the church. Afterwards, I heard they put on a performance of The King in Yellow, and it was "mind-blowing".

I, of course, went to a local cemetery and walked around there. It was nice. Peaceful. They always are.

A friend recently asked me "What's the deal with you and cemeteries?" I'm not sure what it is. They say that in Europe they think 100 miles is a long distance and in America they think 100 years is a long time. I guess that's the reason. I think it's because they're one of those places in any town where time seems to run deep.

I said before that Lily seems to be recovering well from her burns. I guess she's carrying a little baggage with her though. I came back to the church as Sunday school was wrapping up and picked up Lily. We went down to the coffee room, but all the good snacks were already gone (the only thing was chicken in white ganglia sauce) so we went outside. I was wearing short sleeves, so Lily started asking about the scar on my arm. (I was burned by sulfuric acid in high school chemistry)

"Is that a first level burn or a second level burn?"

We talked about second degree burns in front of her, but not really to her. I'm surprised by how much she's internalized.

After that, it was on to a local Celtic Festival. Lily had another good time here too. She especially enjoyed the girls performing the step dancing. While it was going on, she said to Jen, "I might cry because this is so beautiful!" We ran into my friend Eric and his family and that added further to Lily's enjoyment.

That night she asked me, "Did you know that only men used to be allowed to vote?" I told her that I did, and I asked her where she learned that. She said it was at Sunday School. I knew the answer when I asked the question, but for all my teasing about Unitarians, I'm happy that my daughter is learning about Susan B. Anthony in Sunday school.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Love is an Imaginary Number

After a long delay, my Zelazny reviews are back!  ;


I'm not the first to observe that Godfrey Justin Holmes was something of a proto-Sandow, and similarly the character in this story has a number of attributes that would later become codified in Corwin and his kin. (There's more than a little of Sam in there too.)

I've been fascinated by imaginary numbers every since I heard of them in about fifth grade, though I haven't thought about them in ages.  Normally, when you square any number, you always wind up with a positive number, however, the square of an imaginary number is always negative. A quick trip to wikipedia confirmed what I remembered from grade school, that imaginary numbers are used in the calculation of electrical resistance.

(You know, when I was younger, I was this smart kid who hated school, and here I am, writing book reviews in my spare time. This one even has a math lesson.)

Like Corwin, the nameless narrator is a man who awakens one day to his birthright after a long period of quiescence. He was bound by his fellows, most recently for the crime of introducing gunpowder where it didn't belong.

They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.

He awakens to strange music, and wanders through the house as it goes stronger.

Then I descended the stair to the living room, moved to the bar, poured out a glass of wine, sipped it until the music reached its fullest intensity, then gulped the remainder and dashed the glass to the floor. I was free!

I like that. It's a bit corny, but a nice visual.


Stella is his wife and warden. He flees her and others of their kind, slipping through worlds and manipulating probabilities. An exchange between the narrator and one of his adversaries mirrors the one between Brahma and Sam at the beginning of Lord of Light.

"Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?"

"Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly," I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. "All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do."

He is the greatest of their kind and dispatches his adversary, and is then confronted by Stella. He leaves her, flees his fellows in many forms, and is overwhelmed and captured.

"I pleaded with them to give you a chance at peace, but you threw that gift in my face."
"The peace of the eunuch; the peace of lobotomy, lotus and Thorazine," I said. "No, better they work their wills upon me and let their truth give forth its lies as they do."

In the end, he is bound again, this time where

All day long a bound serpent spits venom into my face, and she holds a pan to catch it. It is only when the woman who betrayed me must empty that pan that it spits into my eyes and I scream.

But I will come free again, to aid long-suffering mankind with my many gifts, and there will be a trembling on high that day I end my bondage. Until then, I can only watch the delicate, unbearable bars of her fingers across the bottom of that pan, and scream each time she takes them away.

It's a nice story. Is the narrator Loki? He's a shapeshifter, as Loki was, and is bound in a similar fashion, but he also had a vulture ripping at his side in punishment for his gifts to humanity and you don't see me asking if he's Prometheus. My personal opinion is that Zelazny was just playing with mythology and archetypes and he drew upon those myths to lend some heft to the story, but not to populate it.

Legion of Super Heroes: Sundown, Part 2

I love this episode. It's probably my favorite of the series. It has two of my favorite themes, the team up with the bad guys and heroic sacrifice. And yeah, spoilers, but I find it extremely unlikely that anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the Death of Ferro Lad story arc. (If you're not, Wikipedia has a pretty decent write-up.)

As you can see, the episode borrowed quite a bit from the original story. That's okay though. That's what I like about the series. It changes some details, but it distills the essence of the Legion. In some ways, I think this improves on the original story. It's important that Ferro Lad actually turns into metal, for instance, rather than being your basic comic book super strong guy.

We open with three people breaking into Takron-Galtos.

I really like the visual here. Superman breaks open a blast door and then he and Saturn Girl and Phantom Girl each pull down their mask so the audience knows who they are.

Superman smashes his way through Takron-Galtos, rather unnecessarily, I thought, since Phantom Girl came along and she could just phase them through.

Shrinking Violet pops up to announce that she's knocked out the cameras. Yay, Shrinking Violet! We get to see more of her in the second season, which is one of the very few good things about it. She tells everybody that it's time for stage two and then hustles off to take care of it.

Superman passes Alexis, who sticks her tongue out at him.

 I would have liked to see more of her, but loyalty to the source material demands that this be a Fatal Five show. They release the group, but Tharok reminds them that the alliance is only until the Sun Eater is defeated.

There's a cute moment where the Empress cuddles with the Eye

Awwwwww...

My daughter likes the Emerald Empress. She thinks she has pretty hair, but she feels bad about liking her, and she asked if it were okay to like her a little because she was helping the good guys. I said it was.

The teams start to tussle, but Bouncing Boy calms everyone down and tells them the plan. The group splits off into teams an collects the components for Brainy's machine. It's a cool little montage, and we get a family reunion with Validus, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl and finally see Ultra Boy in uniform for the first time.

Since the Sun-Eater is still powered by Cheyenne's red sun, Superman would be powerless against it, so Brainy sends him off to the now sunless Cheyenne system, ostensibly so he can look for the Controller who engineered the release of the Sun-Eater, but in reality, it's just so that if everybody dies fighting the Sun-Eater, Superman won't be among them.

We get a couple great scenes of the vast legions of the Legion, and man, they did dig up some obscure legionnaires. They even have Tyroc, who I never thought we'd see in a cartoon in a million years. He has something of a strange history.  I forget the exact quote and I haven't had any luck finding it, but the gist of it was "Tyroc was offensive to anyone who had any opinions about anything."

Anyway, Brainy builds the device, and the combined forces of the Legion and the Fatal Five team up to deliver it to the heart of the Sun-Eater.

Meanwhile, Superman has found the Controller, but it's more than a match for him.

That had to hurt.

The Fatal Five try to go for a double cross, but Bouncing Boy anticipated this and had Shrinking Violet hide herself in the Emerald Eye. She sabotages it at a critical moment and it takes down the Fatal Five when it malfunctions. Bouncy uses the cruiser emergency force field as an impromptu prison. I like his plan quite a bit, in both planning and execution. Of course the Fatal Five are going to try to pull something, and while heroes don't go back on their word, they're ready if the villains do. Bouncing Boy anticipated this betrayal and took a reasonable countermeasure. Bravo!

Brainy activates his device, but it fails to detonate. Analysis shows that a coupling came loose on impact. Ferro Lad slips away from the bridge, armors up and fights his way to the heart of the Sun-Eater. Once there, he tears the casing free with casual ease, reaches for the broken coil, pauses long enough to say, "Long Live the Legion," and then reaches out and completes the circuit, destroying the Sun-Eater and himself.

The Legionnaires aboard the cruiser avert their eyes in silent grief, and on the other side of the galaxy, the Controller mocks the battered Superman, which was precisely the wrong thing to do. Superman goes absolutely berserk and manhandles the Controller, shredding the armor with his bare hands and countering the Controller's every move. The Controller tries to escape, but Superman demolishes the devices that would trigger the escape portal. He finally activates it on his fourth try, and as he's making a parting threat before slipping away, Superman blurs over, grabs him, issues a threat of his own and then tosses him through the portal. Great scene.

Superman addresses the assembled Legion at the memorial for Ferro Lad. The camera briefly pans to deep space, where Ferro Lad's body has gouged a path across the surface of an asteroid. The first time I saw it, I was sure he was dead. But then I read some other reviews and they saw some ambiguity there, and I'm less certain that he's dead after this most recent viewing. Specifically, the fetal position suggests to me the possibility of rebirth.

The scene returns to Superman, who concludes the service by leading the Legionnaires in "Long live Ferro Lad! Long live the Legion!" The first time I watched this one with my daughter, she said it right along with them, and there's something about a four-year-old chanting "Long live the Legion!" that brings tears to my eyes.

"Long live Ferro Lad! Long live the Legion!"

The episode wraps up with Superman returning to the 21st century and his more or less normal life. He takes off his Legion gear and puts it in his suitcase, and then goes down to join his family for dinner. It's a nice ending for the season.