Roger Zelazny Book Review: Permafrost

This was a hard review to write. I like Permafrost, but not as much as I think it deserves and I can't put my finger on exactly why.

 It's a rather short piece, just over 8,000 words. Permafrost was nominated for the Nebula and took the Hugo for best novelette in 1987. It actually feels more like a short story to me, and it barely made the threshold for the novelette category, defined for the purposes of the Hugo as between 7,500 and 17,500 words

I've commented in other reviews that Zelazny was amazingly adept at painting a a scene with remarkably few strokes. Take this one for example:

She sits in the bar beside a window. The patio outside is gray and angular and drifted with snow; the flowerbeds are filled with dead plants--stiff, flattened, and frozen. She does not mind the view. Far from it. Winter is a season of death and cold, and she likes being reminded of it. She enjoys the prospect of pitting herself against its frigid and very visible fangs. A faint flash of light passes over the patio, followed by a distant roaring sound. She sips her drink and licks her lips and listens to the soft music that fills the air.

She is alone. The bartender and all of the other help here are of the mechanical variety. If anyone other than Paul were to walk in, she would probably scream. They are the only people in the hotel during this long off-season. Except for the sleepers, they are the only people in all of Playpoint.

And Paul . . . He will be along soon to take her to the dining room. There they can summon holo-ghosts to people the other tables, if they wish. She does not wish. She likes being alone with Paul at a time like this, on the eve of a great adventure.

He will tell her his plans over coffee, and perhaps even this afternoon they might obtain the necessary equipment to begin the exploration for that which would put him on his feet again financially, return to him his self-respect. It will of course be dangerous and very rewarding. She finishes her drink, rises, and crosses to the bar for another.

And Paul . . . She had really caught a falling star, a swashbuckler on the way down, a man with a glamorous past just balanced on the brink of ruin. The teetering had already begun when they had met two years before, which had made it even more exciting. Of course, he needed a woman like her to lean upon at such a time. It wasn't just her money. She could never believe the things her late parents had said about him. No, he does care for her. He is strangely vulnerable and dependent.

She wants to turn him back into the man he once must have been, and then of course that man will need her, too. The thing he had been--that is what she needs most of all--a man who can reach up and bat the moon away. He must have been like that long ago.

In just six short paragraphs, he has given us a vivid picture of the setting of Playpoint, two of our main characters and their relationship with each other. That's nothing short of brilliant. 

It's a brief story set on a the bitter off season on a resort planet with a very small cast of characters: The aforementioned Paul, a has-been con man down on his luck, Dorothy, the woman whose point of view we hear in the previous section, Andrew Aldon, the computer overseer of Playpoint, and one other character whom this review will not discuss. I especially like Aldon.

Andrew Aldon, once a man of considerable integrity and resource, had on his deathbed opted for continued existence as a computer program, the enchanted loom of his mind shuttling and weaving thereafter as central processing's judgmental program in the great guardian computerplex at Playpoint.

I can't help but think of Saberhagen's Berserkers, because that's the first place I had encountered AIs that were digital copies of human minds. (Specifically, I'm thinking Nicholas Hawksmoor from Berserker Kill) I was already familiar with Saberhagen and I first read Permafrost in the Frost & Fire collection, which also contains Zelazny's Berserker story, "Itself Surprised", and the confluence just cemented the relationship in my mind.

Paul returns to Playpoint a century after his previous venture. He's hoping to turn his fortunes around now that his current girlfriend can bankroll him. He's not wholly unsympathetic, and he's very slick. Dorothy is much younger, but she gives as good as she gets with her interactions with Paul.

"I note your use of the singular pronoun," she says steadily, meeting his gaze at last.

His smile freezes and fades.

"I was referring to only a little preliminary scouting," he says softly.

"No," she says. "We. Even for a little preliminary scouting."

He sighs and sets down his fork.

"This will have very little to do with anything to come later," he begins. "Things have changed a lot. I'll have to locate a new route. This will just be dull work and no fun."

"I didn't come along for fun," she replies. "We were going to share everything, remember? That includes boredom, danger, and anything else. That was the understanding when I agreed to pay our way."

"I'd a feeling it would come to that," he says, after a moment.

"Come to it? It's always been there. That was our agreement."

I've long admired his economy of style when reading his work, but it seems like this story was just too lean, the resolution too neat. I wanted more. It's by no means a bad story (and people more qualified to judge its merits thought it was the best genre novelette of the year) but something about it just leaves me cold.

As it were.

Superman and the better angels of our nature

Superman gets no respect. Nolan's Batman movies are all kinds of awesome (and the Tim Burton ones are great too) but Superman hasn't had a decent movie in 30 years. The most recent one, Superman Returns has been unkindly but accurately described as "Superman lifts successively heavier things". Also the Superman as Jesus metaphors were about on par with the Narnia books for their subtlety. And this is coming from somebody who liked it.

I was trying to decide if I wanted to wanted to blog about how great Superman or how great Batman is not. Superman being great won out, partly because of a conversation I had with a friend and partly because of a point/counterpoint essay in online magazine Geek Speak. I like Geek Speak. I contributed a segment for their Zelazny Zealotry piece a while back, though mine was kind of crappy. (I only learned about the call for contributions after the submission deadline and I whipped something out in literally twenty minutes). I think they dropped the ball on the Superman issue, though. Even the person they got to represent the Pro-Superman side doesn't seem to like him very much.

Links: (Pro-Superman/Anti-Superman)

My friend mentioned that she thought that Superman was too powerful to be easily challenged, and therefore boring. There is certainly more than a little merit to that point of view (Pre-Crisis Superman, I'm looking at you. You're welcome to address these complaints here if you're not too busy pushing around suns and beating up God), but I think the best Superman stories don't ask if he can do something, but if he should.

I've noticed that a lot of casual fans like Superman, though self-identified geeks tend not to.You probably wouldn't peg me as a Superman fan. I'm a geek, a cynic and also kind of an asshole too. But I love Superman.

I was looking into information on Alfred Bester for one of my Zelazny reviews (he completed Psychoshop when Bester passed away with it uncompleted) and apparently Bester was considered to write the screenplay for the 1978 Superman movie. He wanted to focus the story on Clark Kent as the real hero, while Superman was only "his gun." (Which, of course, makes me think of The Iron Giant.)

I like that turn of phrase, though I doubt I would have said it that way myself. But my favorite interpretation of Superman is the super-powered Kansas farm boy who never wants to see anyone hurt or scared or hungry.

My favorite Superman story is Kingdom Come, though my favorite Superman moment is from the Dark Knight Returns when he intercepts the Soviet super-nuke. He knows that he's probably going to die in the process, and even if he survives, he's got the fight of his life ahead of him, but never once does he hesitate. One moment, Clark Kent is there, and the next only his empty clothes remain, with Superman high in the skies above.  I can almost hear the faint strains of John Williams' Superman theme when I'm reading these panels.

"Twenty Million die by fire if I am weak"

Kingdom Come is another comic that gets him right. It's one of the most beautiful comic books ever made. It's set in the near future, about ten years after the Joker killed everyone at the Daily Planet. He's eventually arrested and a superhero named Magog blasts him down like a dog in the street as he was being brought in for trial. Superman then hauls Magog into trial himself for the murder. Magog is acquitted, Superman retires, and Magog's brand of anti-hero runs wild across the globe in the absence of any forces that might temper them.

The event that brings Superman back into the world is that Magog and his gang were curb-stomping this terrified villain. The villain realized that they were going to kill him, so in desperation, he broke open a nuclear-powered hero and the resulting explosion killed most of the population of Kansas.

Superman realizes that this kind of thing has to stop, so he comes back and he inspires the traditional heroes to return from their own exiles and they start cleaning things up (thought it's not as easy as they'd been expecting). I love the scene when they finally track down Magog. He's in Kansas, and he's trying to rebuild it one house at a time. Superman and his group fly down to confront him. They start talking about the events that led up to this.

Magog: How many did he take out just that last time? Ninety-two men...?

Superman: And one woman.

That's the quintessential Superman moment right there. His wife and almost everyone he ever loved were murdered in the most horrific way possible, and not only does he not take revenge, but he steps in to see that justice is done.

Just before it looks like they're going to have a super-powered brawl, Magog breaks down.

Superman and the rest of the returned heroes round up the rampaging superhumans, but they encounter significant trouble in figuring out what to do with them. They eventually build a giant prison, but it reaches critical mass and a riot breaks out. Superman flies in to intervene, but he's intercepted by Captain Marvel. 

If you're not familiar with the character, I always think of Captain Marvel as a "magical" Superman. By speaking the word "Shazam!" he calls down a bolt of magical lightning and transforms from a normal guy, Billy Batson, to the super-powered Captain Marvel. If he says it when he's Captain Marvel, then it hits him and it changes him into Billy Batson again.

On the off chance my father is reading this review, here's a passage from Revelation: "And When He Cried, Seven Thunders Uttered Their Voices."

Superman is vulnerable to magic. At the conclusion of Kingdom Come, the brainwashed Captain Marvel intercepts Superman and keeps yelling Shazam!, dodging the lightning bolt, smiting Superman with it over and over again.

Finally, when Captain Marvel is going to blast him again, Superman pulls himself off the ground and dashes forward at an incredible speed to clamp his hand around Billy's mouth, allowing the lightning to hit and revert him in his non-powered form.

Superman sees that there is a nuclear bomb coming towards them, and it's going to kill everyone unless he can sacrifice himself to stop it.

So what does he do to Billy? Break his jaw? Knock him out? No. He talks to him. Reasons with him. Appeals to his better nature. Inspires him. Superman says to him "So, listen to me, Billy.  Listen harder than you ever have before.  There’s a bomb falling.  Either it kills us, or we run rampant across the globe...You can let me go.  Or, with a word, you can stop me…  Decide the world."  Superman lets him go and flies in to the air to stop the bomb (and I don't know why so many of my favorite Superman moments involve him intercepting bombs, but as Freud said, sometimes a warhead is just a warhead). Billy watches him and then cries, "Shazam!" and takes off after Superman, hurling him to the ground and dying in his place so that others might live.

This is Superman

My daughter was saying some prayers the other night, "I hope that everyone can be their best selves in the world. And not litter."

In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln concluded with this statement.

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The emphasis is mine. While I'm sure Superman is against littering, the important part of that is that he inspires people to be their best selves. It goes back to to that Bester quote. Clark Kent is the real hero, because he sees those better angels with those X-ray eyes of his and and he'll move mountains to help them grow to their potential.

Another Superman story that gets it right is Superman: Peace on Earth. It's an oversized book by Paul Dini of the Animated Series, with Alex Ross providing beautiful painted art.

The gist of the story is that Superman comes across a starving teenage runaway when decorating the Christmas Tree in Metropolis. He resolves to do something about world hunger. He's going to spend one day feeding as many people as he can, not because he thinks the effort itself will solve the problem, but because it will show people that it can be done, and that it is worth doing.

He spends several days gathering the grain and then begins delivering it in one marathon day. He encounters early success, but the tide shifts when he tries to deliver food to an oppressive regime. He knows the corrupt leader will seize it as soon as he leaves, to hoard it or to sell it, and he can't overthrow the regime without making things worse. Plus, he threatens to shoot a group of hostages if Superman dares drop off the food.

That part goes about like you'd expect. Superman drops off the food and the bad guys open fire, but Superman interposes himself and then heat visions the rifles from their hands. And still he doesn't win, because the dictator tells him that he's going to seize the food the moment he turns his back. He can be anywhere, he can't be everywhere. Knowing that he's lost, Superman flies away.

He gives food to refugees and when a little boy without a home asks if he's going to be back with more food tomorrow, Superman has to look away.

He encounters further resistance and by the end of the day he is disillusioned and wondering if his acts have made any difference at all. At the end of the day, Clark Kent is the hero again, writing an interview with Superman, allowing him to explain what he was trying to do. He ends with:

There's an old saying: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." That simple message asks humankind to nurture with knowledge, to reach out to those in need and inspire others to do the same. That is life's greatest necessity and it's most precious gift.

I ask everyone to share what they have with those who need it. Their knowledge. Their time. Their generosity.

Especially with the young, for on them rests our future...

And all hope of a true peace on Earth.

I read it to Lily as a bedtime story.  Initially, she said "Oh, why do we have to read a boy's story?!" but she got into it as I started reading. It took us almost an hour because we would frequently stop to ask questions when she encountered something that she didn't understand.

There weren't really any concepts she was unable to follow with the story. She asked why bullets were bouncing off his chest and I explained that was one of his superpowers, and it struck me that it was such a little kid question because I tend to think of super strength and invulnerability going hand in hand. (Unless you're Sunspot, but that's a horse of a different color)

I doubt she caught the deeper meanings about planting seeds and making sure that they all had room to grow, but that's fine. When we talked about the story afterward, and I asked her to tell me what it was about, she said "People all over the world are hungry so Superman flies all over to help them, but some people are scared because they don't know that he's there to help. In the end, he gets sad because he can't help everybody, but he talks to a reporter who tells people that they can work together and help each other," which I thought wasn't bad for four years old.

This is Superman

Roger Zelazny Book Review: A Thing of Terrible Beauty

I am unfortunately running out of Roger Zelazny books to review. Just a handful left now. I've already been interspersing shorter works between the novels and that's what I'll do today.

I say that I've always liked Zelazny's short works, but that's not completely true. Take A Thing of Terrible Beauty. It's a wonderful story, told over the course of just a couple pages. I came across it when I was still in my teens, and could make neither head nor tails of it.  I obviously understood on the strictly literal level, that some bodiless entity was riding along with a critic and experiencing things along with him, but there was clearly a deeper level that I knew I was missing. (I don't have my copy of Threshold here as I'm writing this, but there are so many references to classical literature that I imagine the end notes are almost as long as the story.)

I'm paraphrasing Zelazny badly here, but I recall  that he said in an introduction or an afterword somewhere  that he read a poem that caused him to reassess his views on poetry. Until he read that particular poem, he believed that it needed to contain a narrative elements. I'm entirely at a loss for specifics here, but I feel the same about A Thing of Terrible Beauty, because it is such a lyrical work that I would be content to read it as poetry, even if it didn't tell a story.

I love the opening line: "How like a god of the Epicureans is the audience, at a time like this!" but teenage Josh was probably like, "Fah, what the fuck is this? That last story had a robot vampire and I'll bet this one doesn't have robots or vampires!"

I did read the whole thing, because it was so short and there was a reference to Oedipus in the first paragraph and I've been a huge mythology buff for as long as I've been able to read.

I tend not to like long excerpts for shorter works, but the thing I love about the story is that the lines are so poetic that they remain powerful even when divorced of context: Now that inchoate scream from the dawn of time, and Oedipus stalks the stage in murky terror!

The story is a simple one. An incorporeal entity, a self-described itinerant esthetician, has been benignly coexisting alongside Phillip Devers for ten years, perpetually on the cusp of his awareness. Understanding of certain human emotions has eluded it, and, as it has learned that the world is about to be destroyed, it comes right out and reveals itself by asking "DO YOU SMELL ME, DED?"

Whoops, wrong story.

His mood is a strange one. It is almost as if he knows what is to occur at one o'clock—almost as if he knows what will happen when the atom expands its fleecy chest, shouldering aside an army of Titans, and the Mediterranean rushes to dip its wine-dark muzzle into the vacant Sahara.

But he could not know, without knowing me, and this time he will be a character, not an observer, when the thing of terrible beauty occurs.

I usually love Zelazny for the concepts he brings as much of as the poetry of his work, but this story is something special even by the standards of a career defined by poetic prose.

I mean, this short story has more beautiful lines than most books: "...and in the last moment when the unalterable jungle law is about to prevail,, he must stare into the faceless mask; of God, and bear himself, for that brief moment, above the pleas of his nature and the course of events."

The plot itself is unremarkable, but the beauty is in how it's told. One of my all time favorites.

Scary Princesses

So, I was talking with Lily about what movie we should watch for our Wacky Wednesday and she said, "What about that movie with the scary princesses?" and I said, "What movie with the scary princesses?" and she replied, "When we were on the computer, I saw a movie of Ariel with hairy seashells and a skeleton face. Can we watch that movie tonight?"

I told her that I didn't remember that movie. (Because if I had seen it, I would certainly be seeing it every time I closed my eyes!) and I asked if she meant the movie where the girl plays the piano with the boy, (Corpse Bride) but no, she repeated the thing about undead Ariel, this time with the added detail of a green (presumably decomposing) tail. I have no idea where she saw this. I remember somebody put a a slideshow on youtube of scary princesses, but we didn't watch that one. I said that I didn't remember that movie and she said, "That's okay. Just go to the computer and type in 'scary princesses'". Sheesh.

She only likes two segments of Fantasia. One is the Pastoral Symphony with the cute little baby Cupids and Pegasui and centaurs all frolicking around. The other is Night on Bald Mountain where Chernabog summons from these horrifying ghosts to make war against the living. I'd say this would give her nightmares, but she already has nightmares. The one the other night involved the ears falling off her stuffed bear and someone sewing bunny ears on in their place. The horror! Zombies and monsters she can handle, but don't lay a finger on her Baby Bear!

Working for the Weekend

When we were driving to the grocery store and Lily suddenly blurted out, "Did you know that if you didn't have any air to breathe, then you would die?!"

I said that I did, and that's always why I try to stay in places that have air. She went on to say that Outer Space had poison air and she'd never want to visit because she didn't have a special suit that would let her breathe in space. (I corrected her once by telling her that space actually had no air, but just that one time, as this was not a conversation I had particular interest in prolonging, as she talks about death a whole lot already for such a little kid)

Jen is still getting stuff straightened out with her car that was hit in early October, so she went of to the DMV and Lily and I settled in to watch some Superman!

We got the Superman: The Animated Series disc in the mail from Netflix and watched a couple episodes. She liked it, and had lots of questions. The thing that was toughest to explain was why Superman had two sets of parents. She'd somehow never been exposed to the concept of foster parents or adoption, which is odd, because we know several non-traditional families. I explained that Superman's parents knew that they wouldn't be able to take care of him, so they sent him to a family that would love him very much and that seemed to satisfy her.

It does get pretty complicated in parts. In Lex Luthor's initial appearance, he hires some criminals to steal his battlesuit because the client resides in a hostile country, and he can't go ahead with an above board transaction. That, of course, went over her head, but she liked it.

Since Jor-El and the adult Superman look so similar, every time he came on screen, she would giggle hysterically and say "Look, it's Superman's daddy!"

We joined my grandmother for lunch at a local restaurant and that was nice. I overheard a woman talking about how her World of Warcraft account was compromised by a keylogger. Funny to hear random nerdery while eating out.

We returned to the house and Grammy turned on the Hallmark channel, which was having some kind of wedding movie marathon and caught most of the The Good Witch's Gift.

Sadly, I was paying closer attention to the movie than anyone else there. When Jen said she wasn't following it, I kind of huffed and said, all in one breath "No, it's not that complicated. Listen, Cathrine Bell is Cassie Nightingale, she owns the store, she's going to marry the police chief, his son is dating the blond girl, who the other kid thinks might have stolen the wedding ring because her dad was a bank robber," thereby solidifying my position as a thirteen-year-old girl.