Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Black Throne

I meant to review The Black Throne earlier, but I had a hard time finding the copy I was annotating on my trip back from Florida. I made some notes, and then I promptly misplaced the book. I did a little brushing up on Poe (My knowledge of his works is sadly limited to some long ago AP English classes.) I found the book a couple days ago and then lost it almost immediately thereafter.

Zelazny clearly liked Poe enough to take a line from one of his poem for one of his stories. (A Night in the Lonesome October. It's taken from Poe's Ulalume). Poe also appears as a character in Psychoshop, but in the part that Bester wrote.

At its heart, it's the story of three friends who meet as children - Annie, a girl possessed of powerful mesmeric abilities  and two versions of the same boy,  Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Perry. I thought that was kind of clever, because though I'm by no means any kind of Poe expert, I knew enough that he had used the name Edgar Perry when enlisting in the Army.

Years, later when all three are adults, Annie is kidnapped. In order to take her from her world,  Poe and Perry must be exchanged in accordance with a Changeling-like cosmic balance.

There are some notable differences between the two worlds. The first is that people from our world have profound resistance to the intoxicating effects of alcohol and the mesmeric forces that exist in the other world. I liked this. It's not a trope often used in SF, where our world is clearly the stronger one, and it's a consistantly maintained theme throughout the book, which serves greatly to enhance the sense of place.

Perry is by now a a sergeant in the Army and he is recruited by a man with the awesome name of Seabright Harrison. It's a shame that I don't have the book handy, because Harrison's explanation of his motives is a scene I really enjoyed. Perry notices that Harrison is clearly very wealthy and observes that his motivation must be love or revenge. Harrison corrects him, saying that with Annie, the kidnappers can generate enough gold to devalue his investments, and that his financial interests dovetail neatly with Perry's own personal ones.

Perry is an enjoyable protagonist, and I think it's the presence of Saberhagen that prevents him from becoming as sardonic as most of Zelazny's characters. And I like the Zelazny Archetype, but it's a nice change of pace to see someone a little different in what's otherwise a Zelazny story.

Several of Poe's better known characters assist him in this quest, among them the dead man M. Ernest Valdema, the enchanting Ligeia, who has mesmeric powers of her own, the gentleman detective C. Auguste Dupin, a certain orangutan, a certain raven and Marie Roget. And this is both the book's strength and its weakness. We occasionally switch over to Poe's perspective in our world. He has taken Perry's place, and as he has the sensitive constitution of those of the other earth, he quickly succumbs to alcoholism. He is still linked to Perry in some manner, however, and has dreams of his counterpart's adventures and writes them down, thereby producing the stories for which Poe is known.

I liked Coils, their earlier collaboration. The Black Throne starts out promising, but then it just seems to descend into a mishmash of Poe's greatest hits. I'm certainly guilty of this. For my online RPG, I stole just about every element of Zelazny that wasn't bolted down. (We had a story arc where the reinforcements from Avalon were instrumental in closing the Gateway in the Great Game. And it was AWESOME!)

My big complaint about it is that the authors don't make much of an attempt to provide a framework for the story. First we're swimming in allusions to Poe; then we're drowning in them. After a clever gambit to get him there, the authors just have Perry lurch from one Poe story to the next. Valdemar was a unique character quite unlike anything else in fiction...unless you count his earlier appearance in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar". The ending is not great. (Rocks Fall, just about everybody dies. Ooops, spoilers.)

It has its moments. The use of the language of the time, specifically,  "incarnadined" does an excellent job as establishing it as a period piece. I knew enough about Poe's works to have some fun playing, "Hey, identify that reference!" I think the best thing about the story is that it inspired me to read more of Poe's works.

Call them lies

Like anyone, (or at least, like any twelve-year old) I sometimes get involved in fights on the internet. As the xkcd strip goes:

I'll fight back on things that I should really let go, and I'll pursue things so vigorously that I win on facts, but lose in the court of public opinion.   There are arguments from which I'll walk away, but if I do engage, I'll fight to win. (As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “If you shoot at a king you must kill him.”) That's just who I am (and this trait doubtless accounts for my high blood pressure).

That's why I can't understand National Public Radio's reaction to the smear campign directed against it.

Basically, two men posing as members of a Muslim organization met a senior NPR official for lunch. They spoke for two hours and made six overtures to buy favorable coverage, and each and every time they were rebuffed in no uncertain terms.

About a month after the exchange, a heavily doctored video was released online. When I say doctored, I don't mean it was "inappropriately edited" as the tepid criticism voiced in NPR's later reports timidly suggested. I mean it was chopped up to the extent that comments early in the conversation were being presented as answers to questions that hadn't been asked yet. It's a complete and utter fabrication.

It was planned by James O'Keefe whose whole career is based around this kind of thing. You may remember him from the ACORN videos which were also "inappropriately edited" and crippled a 40-year-old organization that had worked tirelessly to get housing and healthcare for the poor. This Post from another blog has a good breakdown on the kind of things he's done.

Anyway, the video surfaces, and NPR management says "That O'Keefe boy seems like a credible source. Let's take this video at face value and fire the executive featured in it before we can get any facts about it!"

And they did. They were bending over backwards so as not to appear to be criticizing him. Coverage was positively hagiographic, for lack of a better word, "Crusading citizen journalist  James O'Keefe III bravely exposed the rot at NPR's core..."

I blogged about something similar at this this post, which covered Shirley Sharrod's firing. She was, and stop me if this sounds familiar, a left of center individual abruptly fired when doctored footage made it appear that she was saying something that she wasn't.

This is another post that highlights the almost instinctual desire to cave displayed by any liberal on the national stage. (Not that I think that NPR is especially liberal, except in the sense that reality, as they say, has a liberal bias.) Money quote from that post: Both [Wisconsin Governor] Walker and NPR’s Schiller were caught saying bad things but doing nothing wrong (though Walker arguably intimated that doing wrong was seriously contemplated). The difference is that NPR acted like they did something wrong, and Walker served the world a giant slice of fuck you marblecake.

I'm a worrier. If I get an email at work from a client questioning my research, my heart goes into overdrive, even though I know I do quality work and keep excellent documentation supporting my conclusions. Even so, though, when someone questions me, I automatically think I'm wrong and they're right. When I get those emails, I go back and look at my notes, and see what's wrong, and it's really pretty rare that I make a big mistake. In spite of all that, I still have that knee-jerk fear when I'm criticized.

But I don't let it rule me. I don't act out of my fear. I go back, I look at all the information I have, and I act on it aggressively and forthrightly. (And if I'm wrong, I admit it. It's not easy to do, but it doesn't get any easy after a week of denials.) National democrats though, fold like a card table at the whiff of criticism, simultaneously emboldening and validating their critics. It's short-sighted, it's cowardly and it's just plain stupid.  Perhaps more importantly, this apparent tacit acceptance of the charges that they should be fighting alienates their most ardent supporters.

NPR's Ira Glass says "As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it's biased news, it's left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it's not. And we are not fighting back, we are not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying, and I don't understand it."

It reminds of a line I like on The West Wing:  "But it's not the ones we lose that bother me, Leo. It's the ones we don't suit up for!"

At least the Republicans will fight for their interests. The Left just surrenders, over and over again. I feel like Walter in the Big Lebowski: "Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

The Left doesn't need to engage in false equivalences. It doesn't need to be nice to its attackers. What it needs to do is stand up and call these fabrications what they are. It needs to call them lies.

Roger Zelazny Casting Call: The Corwin Chronicles

I've decided to expand on the casting for an Amber movie, just because I had a fun time touching on it in my review of Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber a couple days ago.

My usual go-to choice for Corwin is Clive Owen, but I went with Timothy Dalton in the first post because the Trump in the Visual Guide looks just look like Dalton. If I'm not mistaken, both men have green eyes too. I tend to prefer Owen in the role on most days, so that's what I'm going with today.

"Talk is cheap. Whiskey costs money."

I sometimes think of Chris Sarandon as Humperdink as Eric. Not that there is any resemblance between how Eric is described and how Humperdink appears, but I was exposed to both Amber and the Princess Bride at about the same time and over time, the two adversarial princes got combined into a single entity.

"...I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped."

(And on a similar note, I still like Christopher Walken as Julian, but maybe Christopher Guest as Count Rugen can be his understudy)

Chris Kovacs came up with Robert Downey Jr. as  Random, which is an excellent choice on which I can find nothing to improve.

"Look, they're making a movie! Robert Downey, Jr. is shooting it out with the police."

"I don't see any cameras."

He also nominated Gérard Depardieu as Gérard, and while I'm always partial to David Morse, I think Depardieu just slightly edges him out.

 "I can kill you, Corwin. Do not even be certain that your blade will protect you, if I can get my hands on you but once."

I suppose I'd cast Emma Thompson as Llewella, but who really gives a shit? Does anybody read the Chronicles of Amber and go away thinking "Llewella was my favorite character"? You could give this part to a mannequin with a good agent. Merlin kept a piece of string tied to his wrist, and it got more lines in one book and one short story than Llewella did in the entire series.

"..."

I was thinking a young Marcia Cross as Fiona, but then I though of Tilda Swinton. She's got frightful intelligence and absolute self-possession one needs to play Fiona, but she's really too tall and if I recall correctly, Fiona's height is given at 5'2". Julianne Moore is another possibility, but I cast her in everything. Maybe Gillian Anderson. She's short and has shown a willingness to dye her hair red.

David Tennant could do a really good Brand, I think. Take one part the Doctor, one part Hamlet and the combine with some red hair dye. He's got the manic intensity to pull it off.

Go sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here.

And to finish up the redheads, I'm pretty happy with Kenneth Branagh as Bleys. I think he's finally finished making a movie out of everything William Shakespeare has ever written, so perhaps he's ready to play a prince of Amber with all of his dash and charm.

Benedict was giving me a lot of trouble but I think I finally found the right actor in a young Christopher Lee. At 6'5" he's tall enough to loom even over bigger guys like Corwin and he just has absurd amount of presence.

Caine is a tricky one. Antonio Banderas is a more talented actor than people tend to give him credit for. (I'm told that he learned and delivered his lines in The Mambo Kings phonetically, which still continues to impress me.) His English still has an accent, though it's certainly better than my Spanish and if we can bring back Audrey Hepburn from the dead to appear in this movie we can certainly get Antonio Banderas a dialect coach.

Flora was the other one that held up this post. I always thought Téa Leoni was really attractive, but apparently only David Duchovny agrees with me.

Seriously, though, she's super hot.

I had considerable difficulty finding someone to play her. I was going back and forth on this with a friend, and I said that I imagine Flora as someone really beautiful somewhere in her thirties, with a maturity about her, and all these actresses these days are so young. (And if you'll excuse me, I need to wave a rake at some darn kids who won't get off my lawn.)

It took a lot of looking at pictures of attractive women, which was a bit of a chore, but one I'm willing to suffer for this project, but I finally decided on Virginia Madsen to play Flora. She's mature, but still extremely attractive, and has the adult beauty, and more importantly, the poise needed for the part.

So, that's that. In the next day or two, I'll combine all the images into one page.

Honey ice cream and a lack of ducks

We've been having a pretty nice week. I took Lily to see Rango because I started writing for an online magazine and that was the movie I was assigned to review. I'll link to it when it goes up. She enjoyed it despite a couple scary parts, and Jen enjoyed her time alone with her episodes of Glee.

I can't believe how much fun it is playing with the little Scott & Romona plushies with Lily. The specifics of the story usually varies, but the general plot is the same. The boy is irritating and the girl wants him to leave her alone. This morning she was trying to take a nap and the boy burst into her room and asked "Maybe you'd like to hear me sing a particularly irritating folk song with several hundred choruses?" Later on, the girl ran him over with her car, then put it in reverse and backed over him again.  Not incidentally, talk of playing with the dolls is one of the few things that really motivate her to jump out of bed in the morning.

She's also really enjoying the They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science CD. "I am a paleontologist" is the breakaway hit. The songs are catchy enough that we don't mind listening to them.

We spent some time visiting Jen's friends at the parks department for the maple sugaring class. We had a lot o fun running around and playing Ice Cream store, where she gave Baby Bear some honey ice cream with bee sprinkles on top.

Then we went to downtown Clinton. I used to spend a lot of time there with my buddy Tim and the place hasn't really changed a lot in the past 20 years. The same shops closing ridiculously early. The famous Clinton Mill. One time, Tim and I were feeding the ducks and we decided to see if we could get them to go off the waterfall. It took about fifteen minutes and the duck just glided down safely to the bottom when it realized what was happening.

The famous Clinton mill! Not pictured: Ducks.

Lily had a hot dog and some ice cream and she wound up with a tummy ache. Kids can sometimes be kind, but they're generally just monstrously selfish. That's why I was so happy to hear Lily say to Jen, "I'm glad that you didn't eat as much as I did, because then you'd have a tummy ache too." It's not easy to think about someone else's comfort when you're uncomfortable, especially when you're a little kid, and I'm pleased and impressed that she did.

Of course, not everything was peaches and gravy this weekend. I went to the doctor on Friday and he put me on some medication for my blood pressure. We'll see how that goes. I've been eating like a slob because of my dissatisfaction with my job, and not getting as much exercise as I could, both of which are aggravating factors for something to which my family is already predisposed. So, bleh.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Visual Guide to Castle Amber

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny are a fantastic resource, but not one I consult when writing these reviews, simply because the commentary there is so incisive that it would be too easy to unconsciously incorporate the observations there into my own work if I started reading it before I had an idea of the form a particular entry will take. So, if I read it at all, it's right before I publish, to see if I overlooked something blindingly obvious.

That's what I did this time around and I saw that I had pretty much said the same things about it that people have been saying since its release at the end of the 80s and that Chris Kovacs already covered the points that I was going to make when he looked at it in the "And Call Me Roger..." segment.

I'm not sure I even consider it a proper Zelazny book. The book was written by Neil Randall and Roger Zelazny, though Zelazny's contributions seemed to be limited to answering the questions Randall posed to him. I don't feel that's a role to which he's entirely suited, because by his own accounts, he makes up his worlds as he goes along, often having no idea how a story will end when he begins writing it. And it's possible for him to reverse engineer it to an extent, by remembering what he's written, determinging what would lead to that state of events and projecting where they might go in the future, but it's not as if Amber had been rigorously planned from the beginning.

Randall plugs his Amber choose-your-own-adventure books (Black Road War & Seven No Trump) a couple times but I'm okay with that because I happened to like them. My biggest complaint is that I read Black Road War right before I started The Hand of Oberon for the very first time and Zelazny casually mentions that Oberon is Ganelon in the introduction.

It's probably the best semi-canonical work in regards to giving the neglected princesses some real character. Sometimes it's a mess, when it suggests that Gérard played defensive tackle for a college team. We never get an official age in the books for any of the princes, except for Benedict, who by Corwin's account is "several" millennia old. Gerard was at least a young adult when Corwin was banished to the London during the plague and that was several centuries ago. I suppose it's possible that Gérard played football as an undergrad on some adjacent shadow, but a more likely explanation is that Randall or Zelazny just didn't think that one through.

Showing how each royal decorates his or her room was really clever. I like maps of the room, and the little details, like Julian's bearskin rugs or Fiona's Scandinavian decor.  I was amused by the account of Bleys's chess match with Tlingel the unicorn, though it's not something I'm inclined to treat as canon. I especially like the characterization of Diedre as an urbane Manhattanite and "the first to comfort the grieving Yoko Ono", and I will forever after imagine her as Audrey Hepburn wearing a black turtleneck.

I really liked the art in the book with a few exceptions. (Why, exactly, was Fiona's head so flat? Why did you give the unicorn those horrifying goat eyes? Gérard looks like he's really enjoying that goblet of wine.) It got me thinking about the perennial pastime of Amber fans, the casting of the hypothetical Amber movie.

I'm terrible at this, but I have a couple of suggestions:

If the artist is to be believed, we should absolutely go with Timothy Dalton as Corwin. I like him in The Lion in Winter (one of my favorite movies), but he's just too young in that role to play Corwin.

Eric Bana as Eric, naturally.

Christopher Walken as Julian. In my most recent reading of the books, Julian came across as emotionally stunted, what with his awkward wooing of his sister and "his slow, almost impeded way of speaking". There is something...off about each of them and I think Walken would be a great fit. Ideally, I'm thinking young Walken, like from the Deer Hunter or Annie Hall.

"I enjoy slaughtering beasts and I think of my relatives constantly. Please brothers, scooch closer."

Audrey Hepburn as Diedre, as per above.

Brendon Gleeson in his role as Menelaus as Ganelon 

Bernard Hill in his role as Théoden as Oberon

And finally Justin Bieber as Merlin.

Ha ha ha. Fuck Merlin.

 I may be back for the characters I missed, because this was kind of fun.