Roger Zelazny Book Review: Night Kings

I liked Night Kings a lot as a kid. I like it a lot less as an adult. Specifically, I like it a lot less as an adult in 2011.

Also, I hear the chords to Bob Segar's Night Moves every time I read the title, but that's just me.

It's not a bad story at all. The problem is that it first saw print in 1986, and Zelazny had no way of anticipating the proliferation of urban fantasy as a distinct genre that would rise up in the intervening twenty-five years. I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-80s. I owe my interest in fantasy and science fiction to role-playing as much as anything else. In 1991, White Wolf launched Vampire: The Masquerade, and followed it with a game where players played werewolves, and then one with magi, ghosts, fairies, demons, mummies, and so on, until it became a crowed place. They all took place in the same world eventually, and the atmosphere was very much a product of the grim & gritty, trenchcoat and katana 90's zeitgeist. (That's not intended as a dig, mind you. There are still elements about the whole deal that I appreciate non-ironically, and given the random stuff about which I write here, I'm hardly in a position to criticize anyone's tastes.) They, in turn, influenced the burgeoning genre, and this story is very understated compared to later works.

The nameless narrator is the proprietor of a specialty shop that sells silver bullets, wolfsbane and the like. He and his assistant Vic are doing a brisk business selling their wares when a hemoholic vampire named Leo arrives at the back door and informs nameless that his opposite number has chosen tonight to finish it.

So our hero closes up shop, and the evil counterpart's apprentice, Sabrina, a green-eyed woman with perfect teeth, arrives to take them to confrontation. (I had wondered if Sabrina and Vic were references to something that I had missed, but the Collected Stories, which I consider the definitive reference work in matters such as these, doesn't mention them as references to anything, so I expect that Zelazny just assigned the names without any particular meaning behind them.)

They banter and begin their duel within the cemetery, calling upon those who represent their side of the conflict. The adversary begins with "Asthtaroth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Belial, Leviathan...," and our hero answers with "Newton, Decartes, Faraday, Maxwell, Fermi...,"

It's probably that bit and those that follow that inspired me to write this post about the story, because it reminds me of a similar piece in one of my favorite books, A Wrinkle in Time, in which the characters are talking about humans who have opposed the darkness.

"Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked.

"Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said.

Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

"Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!"

"Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by."

"Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?"

"And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!"

Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!"

What can I say? I like the sentiment of poets and scientists and humanitarians as the champions of humanity.

The fight goes on, the hero has the upper hand, but the cock crows and the adversary vanishes before the hero can dispatch him.

It's a trifle of a story, but I'm sentimental about it for the above reasons. It's not a bad story, but compared to the contemporary fantasy works that would come later, it's rather vanilla. I have no doubt that had the genre been more firmly entrenched, Zelazny would have put a kickass spin on the modern urban fantasy story. But it just didn't exist, and a genre has to be established before it can be deconstructed.

Prelude to Thanksgiving

We had a nice week leading up to Thanksgiving. I usually skip going to church with Jen and Lily, but I'll sometimes go along for special occasions.  This past week they were singing together as part of the family choir, so I went along to see it.

While we were walking along to the church, Lily told me "You're going to love church!" It's nice to see her enthusiastic about things. I'll often ask her questions to draw out her opinions of things, so I asked her what church was all about, and she answered, "It's where we go to learn how to be kind."

I joke about Jen's UU Church (though Jen has mentioned that it annoys here, so I try not to do it as much anymore) and I'm a pretty staunch atheist, but I am happy that my daughter is attending a church that leaves her with this impression.

They sang "I'm Going to Sit at the Welcome Table" Lily varies pretty widely. Sometimes she'll be the world's biggest ham and rattle off twenty jokes to her audience, and other times she'll hide behind me or Jen and tell us in sentence fragments that she wants us to do her talking. Luckily we got gregarious Lily for this performance.

On Tuesday we went to the little feast they were having at her class. It was pretty nice, if unfortunately named. (Jen mentioned that she can't help but think "And in the master's chambers/They gathered for the feast./The stab it with their steely knives/ But they just can't kill the beast.")

It's always interesting to see her interacting with her cohorts. I try to fade into the background because it's just a glimpse into her world that I so seldom get to see. She had one little boy laughing at everything she said. It was very cute.

Wednesday was less good. She was going to go see Happy Feet 2 with her great grandmother, and Jen had the foresight to think that she might be upset when Great Nanny would take her to the movie without me. The last thing we wanted her to say was  “But I don’t want to go with Nanny to the stupid movie!” in front of her.

Well, I spent ten minutes bribing/reassuring/comforting Lily when it was time to go. At first she was hysterical "I want to be with daddy," but she was mostly calmed down.  However, Nan saw that she was upset and told her that she didn't have to go.

So Nanny took off and I very gently told her that I was disappointed in her and she freaked out and started acting like the world was ending. She sulked in there for almost an hour. Every time I knocked on the door, she said, "You can't come in if you're still upset or disappointed with me."

As I kid, I always felt intensely guilty when grownups were mad at me, and it looks like Lily has the same trait. She gets over it eventually, but it's rough to see her that way.

Thanksgiving itself was almost an anticlimax. Our families are scattered all over the place, and we have potentially four meals we might attend (if we count my mom in Florida), but we just had a quiet dinner with Jen's dad's side of the family.

Lily saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the first time. I hadn't watched it in ages. I'd forgotten how long it really takes to get rolling. It's still a solid movie, better, in a lot of ways than the Johnny Depp channeling Michael Jackson version.

While we were at the meal, Lily sang a little song that she learned for Thanksgiving two years ago, "I saw a little turkey/standing by a tree/he gobbled and he wobbled/and ran away from me/I said, little turkey, please come out and play/I promise not to eat you/on Thanksgiving Day!" but somehow "on" got changed to "until" in the last line, which kind of changes the tone of the song.

The Replacement JLA: The Devil is in the Details

We had the fourth session of our superhero campaign on Sunday. (I've started a separate page for the campaign log posts and that can be found here.) It was a bit of an odd duck and two days later, I'm still forming an impression.

Eric, our GM was raising funds for prostate cancer research as part of Movember. To that end, he auctioned off plot twists in our game to the highest bidder. He's a phenomenally gregarious guy who knows a million people, and he wound up raising a bit of money to make the world a better place and got a couple ideas to torment his feckless players. It was one of those rare situations where everybody wins.

We opened on Themyscira, with a bunch of pissed-off amazons demanding to know where Wonder Woman was. This was Dave's first outing with his retooled character, Ash, aka "The Suit". The pitch had been that he'd be *based* on the guy from the Greatest American Hero, but in actual practice, we were treating him as if he *were* that guy, down to the red pajamas, silly name and sillier hair. And I was guilty as anyone, but it did tend to undermine the seriousness of the game. He was reinvented as a globe-trotting explorer who happened to have a suit of alien armor that looked like a uniform. Anyways, he bungled his interaction with the amazons to the point that his severed penis was added to their list of demands. I did no better, absent-mindedly making finger quotes when talking about "Batman". Rächen didn't do as badly, and Blink just mostly stayed quiet and didn't dig us in any deeper.

The Amazons stalked off, saying that they would have words with this "Batman" and we were shooting the shit, (I was like, "Why does John keep calling your mom Milf? Isn't her name Maggie?") then all of a sudden a golem popped up and started blasting at Rächen and warning him that he was in danger.

"You're in danger, my precious!"

He went down pretty quickly, when Ray blasted the animating sigil off of his forehead with an expertly executed called shot.

We poked around the golem and found the artist's imprint the first place we looked, inside its mouth. It would be the first and only time we picked up on any kind of clue. Apparently, one Beatrice Strobel was responsible for this thing. We took it and ported up to the satellite, where we were verbally abused by Batman. Apparently, he thought things would go poorly with the Amazons no matter who the envoy was, so he sent us as a "fuck you" to them and a punishment for us. ("Batman" is kind of a dick.)

We figured John Constantine would know who she was, but he was off on a personal errand, but Mister Terrific was good enough to track him for us. We ported down and Eric asked me for a sanity check, because we arrived right next to John and a hooker in the middle of the act. (On seeing this Katy wordlessly crumpled up the "Do you like Maggie? Yes/No" note she'd been planning to give to John.)

So, after a little bit of screaming, we found John some pants and he told us where we could find Beatrice. We headed on over there and had a chat with the delightfully eccentric Beatrice. She had a pet raptor named Roger. At first I thought this was a request from a fan of Tekken 2, but when I went home to look it up, I saw that Roger was the kangaroo and Alex was the raptor.

Yes, friends. This is the kind of game it was.

Beatrice told us that the golem was named Ulysses and he was her gift to Heinrich, her ex-husband, when they separated. She gave us his address in a shitty part of Gotham (as if there are any other parts of Gotham) and we took off to see him.

Eric had mentioned that this was going to be a skill-focused adventure, and I didn't really think that I'd be able to contribute much to it beyond some interesting interaction, because my character is a seventeen-year old who spent sixteen years growing up in a clean room, but she has a couple super-senses and I gave her high ranks in perception and insight to reflect that, so she actually found a couple clues.

We went up to the apartment, and Ray intimidated a dude threatening his girlfriend by speaking directly into his mind. We got to the apartment and saw some mystical patterns on the door. Ash made his expertise:history roll and identified them as warding patterns used by various cultures, Rächen made his expertise:magic roll and recognized them as Elder Signs.

I peeped through the wall with my x-ray vision and saw Heinrich's eviscerated corpse. Ash was ready to break down the door, but Blink just popped over to the other side and opened it. We poked around for clues for a bit, and noticed that Heinrich did not cast a shadow, and that his heart and fingerprints had been removed. We noticed that his name had been cut out of all the documentation in the apartment. It seemed to be some kind of ritual to erase his identity. I went downstairs to see if the mail still in his mailbox had gotten the same treatment.

Casey: That's a federal offense.
Me: We're the JLA. I'm not afraid of the postmaster general.

The mail still in the box was untouched, so we did more searching. We found some sticky, foul smelling substance on one of the walls, and a box with a box of matches, a small fire extinguisher and a note that read "When in doubt, burn the note."

Just as we opened the box, we got a call from HQ that demons were running riot in Gotham, and it wasn't immediately clear if our opening the box was the cause of that. They ported us over, and the Bloodson, on seeing the other demons, quipped that "High School never ends."

We made pretty short work of them. Eric was trying out the minion rules. (Minions automatically take the worst result from any failed check, so they go down in one hit.) They were immune to attacks with the fire descriptor, so Rächen wound up chucking a big mailbox at them, further irritating the US Postal Service. One of the demons threw a baby like a football, but I made my athletics check and caught it, zipped over and handed it over to a police officer who was cordoning off the area, getting my picture on the front page of every newspaper in America.

The demons poofed away when defeated, (Eric described the effect like the dusting of Buffyverse vampires) and we had enough foresight to capture the last one in order to question him. We tried to intimidate him, but I think we had about five ranks total in intimidation between us so that went about as well as anything we tried. However, I had the halfway bright idea, "Hey, Intimidate is resisted by Will, right? Just use your will draining power on him," and we got him to talk doing that.

Unfortunately, he didn't have a lot to say. The demon mentioned it was part of a horde, and made some threats about what awaited us, but didn't really give us anything actionable. Ash received his second offer of castration for the night. Once again, our powers filled in when our smarts failed us, and we were able to backtrack the residual heat of the demon's flaming footprints back to their source. Ash and I flew, and Ray climbed on to Blink's back and they did quick ports.

Rächen's magic sense started tingling when we passed by a club called Details. I thought it was an odd name for a club, because it made me think of the magazine. It turned out there was a method to Eric's madness, though we didn't learn what it was right until the very end.

Ray and Blink stopped to talk with the gentleman who had set off the alarm. He called himself Mister Mammon and he engaged them in Auric Goldfinger-style sinister banter,

A man of wealth and taste

  while Ash and I continued on and found the warehouse with the portal.

We called in to the satellite of love, but the portal was interfering with our coms, so we couldn't get through, though we did get a hero point for our troubles, so that was nice.

We gathered up the other two and once Ray had a look at the portal, he figured he could devise a ritual to bring it down with seven rounds of prep time. So we just had to keep him alive long enough to do it. Blink looked in to the portal, and saw an Elder Evil, but made his will save. A bunch of minions swarmed in on the second round, but Blink is an absolute beast against minions, and he decimated them with his selective burst area attack.

And then Mister Mammon teleported into our midst and things got really interesting. This was a bear of a fight, and he shrugged off two consecutive critical hits without even a bruise.

Of course, we didn't need to win this fight, just survive it long enough for Rächen to do his thing. My character is more or less the tank of the group. She isn't much tougher than the other characters at this point (and I'll really be glad when we go up a level and become more able to differentiate ourselves through our saves), but she does regenerate from damage very rapidly. The problem is, her regeneration is fueled by sunlight, and the sun went down several hours ago, and there's nothing darker than a Gotham City night.

We held Mammon off long enough for Rächen to do his thing, and we closed the portal, and Blink stunted a nullify effect to drop Mammon's force field, and we managed to start accumulating some hits on him, but he ported out before we could drop him, as a good villain should.

We went to Heinrich's funeral with Beatrice, and with a little prodding, we figured out that we should light the turpentine-smelling fluid on the wall. It spelled out, "THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS" and I was like, "Oh, I get it!" and I proceeded to explain it everyone else, which was rather unnecessary, because they had all figured it out too.

Overall? Good adventure, though the disparate elements at times made the session at feel like a series of vignettes and not a logical progression of cause to effect. They were fun vignettes, though, so I'm not complaining. The fights were good, the investigation was neat, we all had our times to shine and I think everyone had a lot of fun. My biggest disappointment is that we're all going to be so busy that we're not going to have another game until the New Year rolls around. That's okay. The game is good enough that I'm willing to wait.

Parent-Teacher Conference

We had Lily's first parent-teacher conference on Wednesday, and it went about like we were expecting. She already knew her letters when the year began and the class is going to start covering them in January. It's frustrating for a couple reasons. I've mentioned them in other posts, but I feel like this is only going to teach her that school is not where you go to learn, but just some place you go because you have to.

I was talking to a friend whose son, while generally doing well, is facing challenges with one or two aspects of his school work. And he says he's fine with that. And I think I would be too. I don't want Lily to be some sort of manufactured prodigy like John Stuart Mill, but I think facing and overcoming challenges is an important part of growing up.

I was among the smartest kids in my very small high school, able to coast on natural talent and that led to a difficult adjustment in young adulthood, as I had vastly overestimated my own capabilities. No parent wants their child to repeat their mistakes, and it bothers me that she might.

She's still amazingly precocious, though. We were playing our version of "20 Questions", "I'm thinking of an animal". It's just what the title suggests, with one player thinking of an animal, and the others asking yes or no questions trying to determine what kind of animal it is.

Jen has played this with kids older than Lily, and they're generally terrible at it until they hit eight or ten, asking questions like, "Is it a dog?" or "Is it a bear?" without first trying to narrow it down. But Lily shows a lot of thought with her questions, trying to figure out where the animal lives, what it eats, if it has fur or feathers and other questions along those lines. Today she asked, "Does it move slowly?", which is not only a good question, but which also shows a very solid grasp of grammar.

We were having a tea party earlier today.

Me: This is great tea! I'll give you one million dollars for your recipe!
Lily: Thank you, but I already have one trillion and ninety-nine dollars already.
Me: Wow, how did you get so much money?!
Lily: I do the mayor's dirty work.
Me: Um...

She also left me speechless when we were talking about sports. I mentioned that she was old enough to join a sports team if she wanted, leading to this exchange.

Lily: I can join a sport?
Me: That's right.
Lily: Like...golf?!
Me: Um...
Lily: (Looks at me eagerly)
Me: ...I suppose?

What kind of five-year-old is interested in golf?

Legion of Super Heroes: Cry Wolf

I'm continuing my reviews of the second season of the Legion of Super Heroes animated series, with episode three, "Cry Wolf".

I don't like Timber Wolf, but the little widget on the side of the page that tracks the most visited posts says the one about him is the seventh most popular post on the site, so I guess I'm in the minority here.

Courtroom dramas are an episode that can be dropped into any series and Cry Wolf is a terrible episode that could have been a really solid one with a couple minor changes.

We open on a scientific symposium. I think it's on Heisenberg-7, but I'm not certain. (Hey-o!) Dr. Mar Londo, Timber Wolf's dad is there, showing off these new bio-golems he invented. Timber Wolf is in the audience. He rips off his disguise, jumps on the stage, wolfs out to a more feral form reminiscent of his first appearance,  beats up the bio-golems, bays at the moon and then moves in to finish off his dad, who is begging for mercy.

Then the image freezes and we see that it's a video. Timber Wolf is on trial.

On trial for sucking. The verdict? Guilty.

Cosmic Boy declares him guilty and sentences him to life imprisonment on Takron-Galtos.

Credits. Cam is pleading with Cosmic Boy and the rest, and whatever other problems the second season had, it wasn't the art direction or the animation, both of which are consistently superb. I thought this scene was particularly well done in that respect, with the shadows and subdued colors lending a very somber mood to the piece.

However, it's also this scene that shows off the big flaw with the episode. When Cam says that Timber Wolf wouldn't do this kind of thing and asks for other character witnesses, Cosmic Boy points out, quite legitimately in my opinion, that hundreds of eyewitnesses, a holographic record of the attack and physical evidence outweigh any testimony they might offer.

Timber Wolf breaks loose and most of those present pursue him. He fights them off and Phantom Girl helps him escape. There are several sloppy moments here.

Though the cool S-shield force field is not one of them.

The first is when Timber Wolf says to Superman-X that he didn't think X would vote with the rest of them.

Superman X: "I had no choice. The evidence -"
Timber Wolf: "-was rigged. "

This is actually two problems in one. The first is, well, dickhead, maybe that's an argument you should have made during your trial intend of just mounting a defense that amounted to a sullen "Fuck you" to Cosmic Boy.  The second is that the only characterization we've had so far of Superman-X is that of shouty space asshole and there's no reason to assume that he'd extend the benefit of the doubt to Timber Wolf moreso than any other Legionnaire would.

Except there is. If Superman had been in this role, everything would make sense. But he's not, though I think it was written with him in mind and it just doesn't work with Superman-X in the role.

We see Timber Wolf running off, and they catch him, but he turns out to be Chameleon Boy, which was actually fairly well done. Even though Phantom Girl and Cam helped Timber Wolf escape, Cosmic Boy doesn't do more than wag his finger at them disapprovingly.

Meanwhile, in New Metropolis, Timber Wolf gives a Deckard-like narration as he looks for clues. He tears up the apartment of an acquaintance of his father, "Yin Des Neerg" (which is an anagram for Sidney Green), and this scene goes a long way towards illustrating what's wrong with the second season. They tried to make it more "realistic", but it lacks the verisimilitude of the first season. For instance, when 's ransacking Neerg's closet, Timber Wolf comes across a collection of lab coats. And that's fine, as far as it goes. Lab coats are shorthand for scientists in visual media after all. When I worked in a laboratory, I had a lab coat.

But here's the thing. I had a lab coat. As in one. And I left it in the lab at the end of the day. It wasn't the only clothing I owned, as seems to be the case here. You can't see it that well in this still, but Neerg's closet is filled with nothing but lab coats. It's a trivial detail, but it's characteristic of the problems that crept in with the second season.

Neerg comes home, apparently unable to hear a wolfman tearing his apartment apart through the door.

Then the Legionnaires arrive. They have this brief exchange,

Cosmic Boy: "I don't want to hurt you, Timber Wolf."
Timber Wolf: "Well, that makes one of us."

which doesn't make much sense. I would assume that Cosmic Boy's original line was something like, "We don't want to fight," because, as written, Timber Wolf's reply suggests that he doesn't want to hurt himself, which is the kind of thing that should go without saying.  Anyway, Timber Wolf attacks Cosmic Boy and Superman-X and the fight spreads to the bar below. More Legionnaires show up, and Cosmic Boy manages to put down the idiot ball long enough to put up a good fight. First he blocks the exit with two video games, then pulls loose some bar stools and batters Timber Wolf with them. And again, I have to express my admiration for the animation here, because that scene just looks brutal. 

"All right, Brin, I'm just going to need a stool sample"

 He wolfs out, escapes and is picked up by Neerg (really Cam in disguise). Cam makes fun of Cosmic Boy, which is kind of funny,

and Phantom Girl gets some quality snark in.

"Melodrama and self-pity. A toxic combination."

 They head to Heisenberg-7 where Timber Wolf announces that he's going to do what he does best. I don't know what that is, but one would assume that it isn't pretty.

So they go back, Timber Wolf sniffs around and realizes that he was there. Again, if he were really interested in mounting a defense rather than being an aggrieved martyr, this is probably the kind of thing he should have done when he was first accused. A bunch of science police show up, but he smacks the shit out of them and upon escaping, decides to exile himself to Rawl.

He stomps around the jungle for a while, and there's a neat continuity nod to ans they show the old facility, now overgrown with vines. (At least, I assume so. I don't care enough to go back and rewatch the Timber Wolf episode.)

Timber Wolf smells his dad and confronts him. Dr. Londo tells him that he sent a bunch of nanites into Timber Wolf's brain and controlled him in order to frame him for murder, so that Brin would have nowhere to turn and be forced to rejoin him. Timber Wolf refuses and destroys a bunch of bio-golems and turns feral just as the Legion shows up. He smacks Phantom Girl around in his rage, and she winds up helpless and unconscious for the second episode in a row.

Seeing her like that snaps him out of it and he turns on his father and destroys his mind control headband. At the end of the episode, they're on the Legion Cruiser, and Timber Wolf says he's not sure he can go through this alone again, but Phantom Girl assures him that he won't have to.