Author: Burrowing Wombat Press
Date: 2013-01-01 04:00:00+00:00

The New York Review of Science Fiction

ISSUE #292 December 2012 Volume 25, No. 4 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

- Victor Grech: Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers

- Michael Andre-Driussi: The Politics of Roadside Picnic

- Grady Hendrix: God and Tesseracts: Christian Love in L’Engle’s Time Quartet

- Douglas A. Anderson: Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit

REVIEWS

- Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, reviewed by Jenny Blackford

- Robin D. Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign, reviewed by Lisa Padol

- Hope Larson’s Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel, reviewed by Avram Grumer

- Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens, reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld

PLUS

- Plus: Philip Wylie and nuclear destruction, photos from Philcon, and an editorial

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

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Victor Grech

Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers

Introduction

Science fiction was born in the pulps, an ingenious medium credited to Frank Munsey that utilized the then-new high-speed printing presses to print on cheap, untrimmed, pulp paper, resulting in low-priced magazines. It was by way of these cheap pulps that sf began to emerge as a self-conscious genre, despite the repeatedly recycled clichéd stories.

Superhero comics evolved alongside the sf pulps. They depict latter-day surrogate gods and goddesses, whether human, alien, or mutant.

As a seasonal treat, I would like to survey the changing depictions of Santa Claus on these covers.

Covers

Covers spanning 1941 to 1948 (figures 1-5) depict Santa assisted in his task of delivering gifts by a wide variety of superheroes. In figure 5, his role is appropriated (albeit temporarily) by superheroes who pitch in with toy construction as Santa is ill and abed in the background. These are all conventional depictions of Santa, and the 1945 cover incongrously also exhorts readers to “back the 6th war loan.”

Figure 1: Captain Marvel Adventures #19, January 1941

Figure 2: Comics Cavalcade #5, Winter 1941

Figure 3: Batman #27, Feb-Mar 1945

Figure 4: Action Comics #105, February 1947

Figure 5: Comics Cavalcade #25, Feb-Mar 1947

The decade 1951–1960 featured several covers from Galaxy Science Fiction magazine by Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (1925–1990), also known as Emsh. All of his Santas superficially resemble the orthodox Santa, a jovial, fat, pipe-toting, balding, white-haired and white-bearded fellow in the customary red suit (figures 6-13). Notably, Santa has four arms. However, even over this relatively small period of time, Emshwiller depicts important changes in Santa.

The 1951 cover (figure 6) conventionally depicts Santa having a drink, albeit with a mixed bag of humans and aliens, being served (and having his pipe lit) by a very alien waiter in a tuxedo next to an alien Christmas tree, in a futuristic building or vehicle and with an equally futuristic and possibly alien window view.

Figure 6: Galaxy Magazine, December 1951

The following year’s cover (figure 7) is also innovative, with Santa standing just inside a spaceship airlock (which is signposted with warnings to check the external environment before opening the door) and listening to four carolers of whom only one is human. Overhead, a wreath contains a candle in the shape of a spaceship.

Figure 7: Galaxy Magazine, December 1953

The 1954 cover (figure 8) illustrates Santa taking off from a futuristic base that is off the Earth, possibly the moon, with Earth visible in the background. His vehicle is rocket propelled and is assisted by reindeer who, like Santa, have donned space suits.

Figure 8: Galaxy Magazine, December 1954

Two years later, the cover (figure 9) shows a worried Santa attempting to plot courses across space, presumably in order to hand out gifts. He is aided by coffee from a spaceship-shaped dispenser, a fob watch, navigation textbooks, a calendar, and a huge computer that is labeled not only with names of planets, but with names of stars, subdivided further by the labels “good” and “bad.” Transport technology has advanced in that one of the books on his desk is Principles of Space Warp.

Figure 9: Galaxy Magazine, January 1956

The 1957 cover (figure 10) portrays Santa playing with an alien baby and dispensing gifts not only to humans but also to aliens who are so different that they cannot even breathe the same air as Santa, and therefore wear space suits.

Figure 10: Galaxy Magazine, January 1957

In the following year, Santa shares his task with an alien and octopoid Santa who crosses his path in space while being pulled by equally alien equivalents of reindeers, which appear to be vaguely saurischian with kangaroo-like hindquarters (figure 11).

Figure 11: Galaxy Magazine, January 1958

The 1959 cover (figure 12) is similar in theme to the 1957 cover, with Santa arranging toys on a Christmas tree while being watched by two alien toddlers. Christmas’s characteristic green is the predominant color used in the depiction of aliens in this series of illustrations.

Figure 12: Galaxy Magazine, December 1959

The December 1960 Galaxy cover (figure 13) shows a puzzled Santa in the background gazing at a robot Santa who has seemingly supplanted the organic Santa and who adorns an angular, inorganic Christmas tree with bits of machinery, such as nuts, bolts, and springs. Emshwiller’s cover for that same year for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction features a young girl and a small robot watching a cyborg decorating a Christmas tree (figure 14). The cyborg has prosthetic arms, legs, nose and a metal patch replacing part of his skull. The same theme is also reflected in the cover of the 1958 Popular Electronics magazine with male and female robots decorating a Christmas tree, accompanied by a robotic pet dog (not pictured).

Figure 13: Galaxy Magazine, December 1960

Figure 14: F&SF, December 1961

Skipping forward, the next cover from 1972 constitutes a watershed with Santa’s role appropriated by Batman (figure 15). Similarly, a 1976 cover shows the monstrous Thing (one of the Fantastic Four) dressed as Santa (figure 16). These two covers seemingly prefigure Lyotard’s postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” in that Santa is rejected and traded for a superhero. These covers indirectly intimate incredulity toward Santa himself, an attitude that persists in the remaining illustrations.

Figure 15: Batman #239, February 1972

Figure 16: Marvel Treasury Edition #13, 1976

Thus, a 1986 cover portrays a sleazy Santa replete with shades, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and a handgun in a fingerless glove (figure 17). Similarly, a 1991 cover depicts Santa fighting the incredible Hulk with a crowbar (figure 18); it must be remembered that the Hulk, while constituting an antihero, is ultimately one of the good guys.

Figure 17: Peter Parker #112, 1986

Figure 18: Incredible Hulk #338, 1991

The next cover from 2008 is a single acknowledgment to the past with Santa being helped by a group of superheroes (figure 19). But our final cover from 2009 is the ultimate postmodern rejection of the Santa metanarrative: a haggard Santa stares at the reader in consternation while being arrested by Judge Dredd, who sneeringly admonishes him: “Housebreaking—twenty years, creep!” (figure 20).

Figure 19: DC Universe Holiday Special #1, 2008

Figure 20: Judge Dredd Megazine #279, 6 January 2009

Discussion

Asimov noted that “[t]he history of science fiction can be divided into four eras: 1. 1815–1926; 2. 1926–1938; 3. 1938–1945; and 4. 1945 to present,” and these eras were respectively the relatively primitive, adventure-dominant (e.g. Wells and Burroughs); 1938-50 science-physicist-engineer dominant (e.g. Campbell and Astounding); 1950-65 sociology-dominant (e.g. Wyndham and Bradbury) and 1966 to the present being style-dominant, with narratives of deliberately enhanced literariness along with the development of sub-genres within sf itself (168).

This relatively small sample of magazine covers within the genre has exposed similar tropes and aspirations, which have mutated over the decades. The early covers were unassuming and fêted a conventional Santa who consorts with other and equally mythic characters such as superheroes. Santa is arguably a superhero, doing good by using powers that are beyond human comprehension, such as the near-instantaneous delivery of uncountable presents.

This era was followed by the inveiglement of science and technology, exposing the genre’s emphasis during this era which “valorizes a particular sort of writing: ‘Hard sf,’ linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom” (Roberts 195).

The next era of covers just predated the rise and popularization of postmodernism, leading to a refutation of the Santa metanarrative, in the same way that postmodernism resulted in skepticism toward all metanarratives.

SF magazines and comic books can be said to reflect scientific progress, which portrays aliens, computers, androids, robots and cyborgs as the new, frightful and mysterious adversaries and “we have populated these new unknowns with monsters and ogres that could well be the close relatives of the trolls and ogres of folklore fame. In that sense . . . sf is modern folklore” (Schelde 4).

In conclusion, the mythical Santa metanarrative has been rejected outright by magazine covers or replaced by superheroes who temporarily don the Santa mantle in order to keep the myth alive, a loss of innocence that is as inevitable as it is sad.

Victor Grech lives in Tal-Qroqq, Malta.

Bibliography

- Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

- Asimov, Isaac. “Social Science Fiction.” Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. Edited by Reginald Bretnor. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1953.

- Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics September (1960): 26-27, 74-75.

- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

- Schelde, Per. Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science Fiction Films. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

Michael Andre-Driussi

The Politics of Roadside Picnic

The Russian novel Roadside Picnic was first published in 1972 and translated into English in 1977. Its Swedish edition won a Jules Verne award, and in 1981, it received an award for best foreign novel of the year at the Festival du Science Fiction in Metz. Over multiple re-readings of the 1977 translation in 2011, my sense of the politics of Roadside Picnic altered considerably. A breakthrough came this year when a new translation was published and I read the new edition’s foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and the afterword by Boris Strugatsky.

Le Guin revisits the context of the novel, telling what a refreshing text it was in the 1970s, written as if the authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were “indifferent to ideology” (vi). In contrast, Boris Strugatsky’s piece is about the complicated publication history of Roadside Picnic as a book in the USSR and the long-running arguments with the Soviet censors. If I understand it correctly, the censors were not concerned with the ideology, since the novel’s ideology followed Soviet orthodoxy. As Strugastsky repeatedly told them,

the novel contained nothing criminal; it was quite ideologically appropriate and certainly not dangerous in that sense. And the fact that the world depicted in it was coarse, cruel, and hopeless, well, that was how it had to be—it was the world of “decaying capitalism and triumphant bourgeois ideology.” (207)

It was precisely the graphic coarseness, vulgarity, and immoral behavior in the novel that was the problem for the censors. This material may have been acceptable for a literary journal like Avrora (where Roadside Picnic was serialized in 1972), but publication as a young adult title was a different matter.

Roadside Picnic is about humans dealing with weird artifacts left on Earth after a mysterious alien visit. The aliens are never seen nor are their vehicles; there are just the six Zones scattered across the globe where they visited, and the strange objects left behind. (The novel’s title comes from one theory about the Visit—that it was merely a roadside picnic, and the artifacts are only alien trash.) The Zones are dangerous, filled with weird monsters and deadly traps, but adventurers called “stalkers” sneak in to bring out artifacts they can sell. The novel is a series of episodes over a span of years following a stalker named Red.

Initially I took Roadside Picnic to be an action story that was, for a Soviet work, remarkably free of politics. It was a page-turning thriller with a heady mixture of elements from film noir, the fey logic of Wonderland, and even scenes from the Bible. The novel does an incredible job of shifting around: At the beginning, stalkers seem to be like prospectors who undertake personal risk in order to win their gold; then they more closely resemble gangsters trafficking in contraband; finally they are revealed to be still worse. Humor is used as a setup for a dark surprise time and time again in the tale. The opening radio interview suggests that mass hysteria and wild rumors exaggerated the alien arrival, but as Red enters the Zone in the next section, he offhandedly reveals that the reality of the Visit was far worse than what was ridiculed in the radio show. Nearly every section also has a dark surprise about its hero, too, whether it be that good guy Red has just smuggled a weapon of mass destruction out of the Zone or that bumbling bureaucrat Dick Noonan is also a brutal whoremaster working for the secret police.

By the third reading, though, I began to perceive Soviet details. For example, a wall is put up to protect the humans from the Zone, and it seems inconceivable that this was not related to the Berlin Wall. I resisted that interpretation, because such a reading reduces the Zone to mere “capitalism,” the stalkers to simple smugglers, and the wondrous alien artifacts to being only lipstick, blue jeans, and rock music—items of everyday Western “decadence” that worked their way into the USSR and “polluted” it. This transmutes the wonder into a typical anti-bourgeoisie rant. And yet I was forced to conclude that ultimately the work really is a devastating jeremiad by a pair of communist utopians earnestly warning about the horrors of capitalism.

This interpretation seemed to be a “magic key,” possibly capable of unlocking the texts intractable mysteries, so I researched whether it was already in common use.

Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) says of Roadside Picnic:

This text moves in a space beyond the facile and obligatory references to the two rival social systems [capitalism and communism]; and it cannot be coherently decoded as yet another samizdat message or expression of liberal political protest by Soviet dissidents. (294)

Jameson states it is not a simple and obvious case, which seems rather cagey to me, but he points out that the text is not anti-Soviet. On this last item, Landon’s Science Fiction After 1900 (1995) agrees: “nor were the Strugatskys ever dissidents or anti-Soviet” (96).

Roland Boer, in Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1999), goes further: after describing how the brothers had been blacklisted for the unauthorized 1972 publication of their novel The Ugly Swans in West Germany, he writes, “Yet, it would be a mistake to see the Strugatskys as dissidents in the Soviet era, a view that led in part to the flood of translations and publications of their works in the 1970s” (111). In this way Boer claims that a misperception of the brothers as dissidents is what led to their being embraced by the West in the first place.

The notion of the Strugatskys operating within a Western ideological blind spot is picked up by Stephen W. Potts in The Second Marxian Invasion (1991), where, on the topic of the Strugatsky novel Space Apprentice, he writes: “Despite Theodore Sturgeon’s contention (in his introduction to the 1981 Macmillan edition) that this novel contains very little Marxism, it is in fact wholly dialectical” (20). Potts continues this topic of ardent Marxism with regard to Roadside Picnic: “gangsterism is closely tied to capitalism in Marxist thought; since both are geared to the accumulation of material wealth to the exclusion of other values, one is merely a form of the other. This connection is evident in the behavior of Red and his colleagues and contacts” (78); and, “Of all the works of the Strugatsky brothers, Roadside Picnic provides the strongest criticism of the capitalist ethic” (80).

Finally, the highly influential Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. wrote in 1986 that Roadside Picnic is “a fable of the despair of the ’60s [Russian] intelligentsia facing the complete destruction of the [Soviet] reform movement” and sees it as “the convergence of Eastern and Western ennui, the fruit of global acquiescence to purely material satisfactions and the abdication of all higher moral purposes—the victory of ‘realism’ over utopian idealism” (“Towards the Last Fairy Tale,” Science Fiction Studies #38). This is encoded, but I read it as asserting that Roadside Picnic is a firmly pro-communist utopian work that rails against the anti-utopian West.

A summary of this survey is like examining the layers of an onion: we see that the Strugatskys were taken to be Soviet dissidents by the West’s hoi polloi; then Jameson, Landan, and Boer aver the brothers are not anti-Soviet, which implies a type of political neutrality; while Csicsery-Ronay and Potts claim the brothers are really quite pro-Soviet, demolishing the pretense of neutrality.

I find myself in the camp of Csicsery-Ronay and Potts. To develop my reading further, I will start with the wall at the Zone. In Section 1, bureaucrat Dick Noonan tells stalker Red,

They’re starting a lot of construction. The Institute’s putting up three new buildings, and they’re also going to wall off the Zone from the cemetery to the old ranch. The good times for stalkers are coming to an end. (46)

Section 1 is set thirteen years after the Visit, that moment when the six Zones appeared on Earth. When Section 2 begins, eighteen years after the Visit, we find Red and Vulture at the cemetery, two stalkers hiding in the shadow of the nine-foot tall wall. So the Institute was talking about building a wall in Year 13, and in Year 18 the wall is in place, apparently with a stalker hole through it already.

Roadside Picnic is set in the fictional Canadian mining town of Harmont. The Harmont Zone, “a belt of empty land 50 miles across” (110), has overlapped perhaps half of the town at one edge. The text is very quiet about which half of Harmont is located in the Zone, but based on movements to and from, it seems to be the west side. I interpret the clues such that the Institute, the legal gateway into the Zone, is situated at the midpoint of the wall that stretches north to the abandoned ranch and south to the cemetery.

The timeline of the Zone wall’s construction has an eerie echo in that of the Berlin Wall, which was built in 1961, sixteen years after the end of World War Two. The Berlin Wall completely encircled West Berlin, and while the Zone’s wall does not surround the entire Zone, still west Harmont seems to be in the Zone. These points suggest that the story’s hidden internal date is 1958 to 1966 and that Harmont is a stand-in for divided Berlin.

Moving from the Berlin Wall itself, the items routinely smuggled into East Germany from the West are commonplace: newspapers, magazines, recorded materials, films, radios, medicine, cosmetics, and Western clothing. The newspapers and magazines especially jump out as likely artifacts from a real “roadside picnic,” but otherwise it is difficult to match up any of these products with the wondrous alien artifacts from the Zone: the “empties” (force-field containtment bottles, full and otherwise), the spacells (self-multiplying batteries), the bracelets (which confer health benefits), the hoops (which exhibit perpetual motion), the black sparks (worn by citizens as jewelry), the sponges, the shriekers, the pins (which “talk” when squeezed), the jars of carbonated clay, the rattling napkins, and the lobster eyes.

“Pins that talk” easily fit into the category of “recorded materials,” i.e., vinyl records that talk via needles. “Lobster eyes” could be contact lenses. The “black sparks” (called “black sprays” in the 1977 translation), used as feminine ornamentation, are probably an encrypted version of false eyelashes or mascara.

The spacells, which reproduce in a quasi-biological manner, remind me of a detail from Fritz Leiber’s short story “Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me” (1963), in which the narrator is being quizzed on Norse mythology by a strange girl who reinterprets each magical device with a scientific explanation:

“And the gold ring Draupnir, that dropped eight rings like itself every ninth night—”

“That could be atomic transmutation,” she said thoughtfully, “or maybe just the capitalist economic system as it dreams of itself.” (310)

That is, the self-reproducing spacells strike me as a Soviet view of the capitalist system “as it dreams of itself,” creating wealth out of nothing, contrary to the zero-sum game expounded by communism. The same holds for the perpetual-motion hoops.

This tracing of low-level artifacts to black market consumer goods in the USSR may be haphazard, but I have a much greater degree of confidence in tracking the high-level artifact called “hell slime.” For Section 2, the military-industrialists commission the two stalkers, Red and Vulture, to fetch some of this notoriously dangerous stuff. In doing the job, Vulture’s legs are splashed with hell slime, and they rapidly waste away into a rubbery material. Red still sells the slime to his patrons. They, in turn, put it into a specially designed facility called Carrigan Labs, which subsequently suffers a disaster when the slime gets out of control: “thirty-five dead, more than a hundred injured, and the entire laboratory is completely unusable” (135).

Hell slime seems to be the equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, so it is probably a code for the atomic bomb, first developed in the West. The Soviet atomic bomb project used spies in the West from 1942 to 1945, and the first Soviet bomb was tested in 1949. So Red and Vulture are analogous to atomic spies. The novel’s Carrigan Lab accident seems like the USSR’s Kyshtym Disaster of 1957, a military-industrial mishap that is currently the third-worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011).

So, by this reading, the Zone is capitalism, how the wall is the Berlin Wall, and how hell slime is the atom bomb. Next I will touch on how Roadside Picnic is a different kind of alien-invasion novel.

The seminal alien-invasion novel, Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds, gives us the storm of (heat-ray) guns, (Martian) steel, and (plucky Earth) germs. In sharp contrast, Roadside Picnic presents a soft invasion, something like the coca-colonization implied by the list of Western goods in the Soviet black market. At the same time there are strong hints of a slow-motion invasion along the lines of botanical propagation, vermin eradication, and plague.

In the botanical analogy, the artifacts can be seen as alien seeds, with the stalkers then recast as birds and squirrels, transporting the seeds and accidentally replanting some of them. The first artifact encountered in the text is the empty, a cylindrical force field with a copper disk at each end. When the stalkers find a full empty, there is a fluid inside, described as “blue filling swirling slowly” (31) and “blue syrup” (32). Red says the context makes it plain that an empty is a container, but one might also call it a husk or eggshell. When Red later finds the Golden Sphere, he notes that, despite its name, its color is “closer to copper” (188). Thus it seems possible that the empties are seeds/eggs of the Golden Sphere.

In the vermin eradication analogy, the artifacts are like those sweet poison ant traps where the worker ants carry the tasty poison back to the queen, thereby dooming the entire colony. The Zones might be the beachheads for an impersonal alien terraforming project.

Then there is the plague model. Plague terms are used to describe the effects of the Visit (for example, the Plague Quarter is the first neighborhood of the Zone from the Institute), but such a model can be extended far beyond the day of the Visit. The text tells of an emigrant effect (139–40) wherein people from Harmont who move away are followed by uncanny coincidences that harm those around them. This weirdness is never resolved, yet it seems as though each emigrant is a Typhoid Mary who, having successfully survived the Zone plague, is now a carrier of the same strangeness in a smaller scale.

In The War of the Worlds, the arrival of the Martians is marked by a shooting star in the sky, an impact crater on the ground, and a spaceship in that crater. Roadside Picnic has none of this—no signs in the sky, no crater, no vehicle or remnant of same. This fits perfectly with Dr. Pillman’s theory in the text of a “roadside picnic”: the vehicle and the aliens are gone and all that is left behind is their incidental trash.

We have few clues about what the Visit was like. For the vast majority of people it seems to have been taken as a hoax, as Dr. Pillman reports about his own initial reaction (2). For those caught in the suddenly created Zone, there was something real and immediate, yet the evidence suggests that effects were highly localized: in the Plague Quarter the people caught a “disease” that later made their skin peel off and their fingernails fall out (21); in the three Blind Quarters adjacent to the Plague Quarter there were said to be some bright flashes, yet the people caught permanent night blindness from a loud thunder (22).

Having argued that Roadside Picnic is a profoundly pro-Soviet work and that it describes a slow and often deadly invasion, I would like to cap it all off by showing how Roadside Picnic is surprisingly like a Soviet version of Blish’s Black Easter—a science-fictional treatment on the literal arrival of Satan on Earth.

The satanic elements of Roadside Picnic show up early in the text, in full view and not encoded. The first mention is in “Satan’s blossom,” a spitting plant of the Zone (18). Then there is Gutalin, the quixotic counter-stalker who buys up artifacts and returns them to the Zone. Gutalin preaches that Satan put the Zone there to tempt humans and that the artifacts are Satan’s toys. As he says in Section 1:

And futile are the prayers of the worshippers of Satan. And only those who renounce him shall be saved. Thou, of human flesh, whom Satan has seduced, who play with his toys and covet his treasures—I tell thee, thou art blind! . . . Stamp on the devil’s baubles. (44)

Gutalin declares that doom is near, “Because the pale horse has been saddled, and the rider has put a foot in the stirrup” (44). This is an allusion to the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, a figure in the Book of Revelations (6:8). It turns out to be a foreshadowing of many details shared between Revelations and Roadside Picnic.

• The resurrection of the dead is a part of Revelations, which finds a mockery in the reanimated corpses of Roadside Picnic (including Red’s zombie father).

• Revelations tells of demonic “miracles,” including non-divine healings (13:12), which translates into Vulture’s answered wishes and his hope for new legs from the Golden Sphere.

• Revelations says that the Beast “maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in sight of man” (13:13), and Roadside Picnic has Red and Arthur attacked by demonic lightning that goes sideways between two hills (179–80).

• Revelations describes a false prophet and an idol made in the image of the Beast of the Sea, an idol that comes to life and kills those who do not worship it (13:14, 15). This is close to Vulture as false prophet and the Golden Sphere as idol, especially in how the artifact seems to come to life for Red with aquatic detail, “to dance in place like a buoy in the waves” (192).

The links between Revelations and Roadside Picnic show that, in order to transmit the apocalypse of their vision, the brothers Strugatsky lifted bits from the Bible’s apocalypse. But they took more from the Bible than just that.

The action in the final section with Red and Arthur trudging deep into the Zone reminds me of Abraham taking his son Isaac up the mountain to sacrifice him to God (Genesis 22). Yet the analogy is not quite right, since Arthur is not Red’s son. Sacrificing “someone else’s son” sounds like a warped version of the crucifixion of Jesus, and there are some strange Jesus-like details to Arthur.

Red’s daughter, Monkey, along with Vulture’s offspring, Dina and Arthur, are all children directly affected by the Zone. Monkey has been cursed with a mutation that causes her to devolve over time into an animal. Through Vulture’s wishes and human sacrifices, the Golden Sphere has blessed both of Vulture’s children: Dina has been given physical beauty as well as an attitude that makes her a good stand-in for the Whore of Babylon (another figure from Revelations); whereas Arthur seems to be genuinely good, a paragon of innocence, idealism, and altruism. The three offspring of stalkers are thus partially children of the Zone. So Red’s feeding of Arthur to the grinder guarding the Golden Sphere is a perversion of Jesus being offered up to his father, God, in exchange for universal redemption.

From this angle, with Red sacrificing Arthur in a satanic parody, it looks like a very black Easter indeed. Such a reading also provides a logical solution to the vexing problems regarding the arrival of the Zones, since if they came up from infernal regions like fairy rings rather than coming down from the sky like meteors, there would be no shooting stars, no craters, and no vehicles.

Now we come to the famous enigmatic ending and the curious way in which this text has been perceived in the USA. The very first note is emblematic of all I’ve seen:

The Strugatskys’ deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness [produces] a truly superb tale, ending most poignantly in what can only be called a blessing

—Theodore Sturgeon, introducing the 1977 edition

“Can only be called a blessing?” No. This is too far overboard for me to tolerate. “Might be called a blessing” is a form I’m more comfortable with, but even then it raises many questions.

It boils down to how one interprets the abrupt ending of the novel. If one believes that the Golden Sphere grants wishes, and that Red really is a sort of Galahad who just found the Grail, then the device bestows Utopia on Earth, and reality as we know it ends as suddenly as the text with the ascent of mankind to superman or angelhood.

If one doubts that the dingus grants wishes or believes that the wishes are as limited as Vulture suggests (such that Red’s wish is clearly impossible), then what you have is more like a wild savage who has just committed human sacrifice to an evil idol that is demonstrably taking over the world on its own. Witness the descent of modern man to primitive, bloodcurdling superstition.

So by my reasoning, Sturgeon must see the utopian ending and feels that “the ends justify the means,” that is, murder of Arthur is bad, but it is worth it for the worldwide good of the utopia.

I would be curious to find a published Soviet reading that finds the ending utopian or even “ambiguous,” as I suspect the majority took it as unambiguously anti-capitalist. Room for further research.

Michael Andre-Driussi lives in Albany, California.

Works Cited

- Boer, Roland. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. London; New York: Routledge, 1991.

- Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. “Towards the Last Fairy Tale.” Science Fiction Studies #38. Greencastle, Indiana: DePauw University, March 1986.

- Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2007.

- Landon, Brooks. Science Fiction After 1900. New York: Routledge, 2002.

- Leiber, Fritz. “Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me” (1963.) In Worlds of Fritz Leiber. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979.

- Potts, Stephen W. The Second Marxian Invasion. San Bernardino, California: Borgo Press, 1991.

- Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris. Roadside Picnic. Translated by Olena Bormashenko. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012.

- ——. Roadside Picnic. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis (1977). London: Gollancz (SF Masterworks Edition), 2007.

Grady Hendrix

God and Tesseracts: Christian Love in L’Engle’s Time Quartet

In 1959, Madeline L’Engle began writing her sixth book, called Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, & Mrs Which. She finished three months later, then spent the next year having her manuscript rejected by publishers for being too complicated, too simple, too much like science fiction, too much like fantasy, for having a female protagonist, and for pretty much every reason imaginable. It was published in 1962 by an editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, who was a fan of L’Engle’s first novel. When the book came out, it was attacked in Florida for promoting witchcraft, in Iowa for promoting sadism, and in Alabama for including the name of Jesus on a list of great artists, philosophers, and religious leaders. Between 1990 and 2000, it was the 22nd most challenged book in libraries, only three spots lower than Madonna’s Sex and several spots higher than Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. It also won a Newbery Medal and sold over ten million copies. By the time it reached bookshelves, it had acquired a new title: A Wrinkle in Time.

February 2012 was the 50th anniversary of the book, which occasioned a media-wide outpouring of appreciation, some of which seemed to miss the point. Pamela Paul, the children’s book editor of the New York Times Book Review, wrote a lovely piece praising Wrinkle for its feminism, but not once in her 1300 words does she mention religion, which would have come as a shock to L’Engle, who described herself as “a writer struggling to be a Christian.” L’Engle’s four loosely connected Time Quartet novels (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters) are remarkable for a lot of reasons; they are among the highest profile YA books dealing with Christian faith.

Most young adult books avoid religion. While magic is everywhere, from Harry Potter to Twilight, specific theology is notably absent. When religion is depicted it’s often not the actual faith but only its institutions that appear, usually portrayed as repressive and theocratic, as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. C. S. Lewis is one of the few other major YA authors to tackle Christianity. Lewis’s approach to Christianity comes across as instructive and unquestioning, which prevents the Narnia books from being philosophically compelling. L’Engle, on the other hand, asks questions to which faith and belief are the unspoken answers. As she herself once said, “C. S. Lewis has more answers and I have more questions.”

This nonpresentation of Christian faith is a strange blind spot for the YA genre, since the teenage years are when most people come to terms with their faith, either rejecting it or embracing it. But while there are specialized markets for Christian YA, in the broader YA market Christianity usually only appears in the context of historical novels.

A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels focus on the cosmic adventures of the tight-knit Murry family. Dad is an award-winning scientist who’s gone missing, and Mom is a stay-at-home microbiologist, who later wins a Nobel prize. There are the two practical ten-year-old twins, Sandy and Dennys; a preternaturally intelligent five-year-old, Charles Wallace; and his older sister, the angry, impatient, unattractive, and mathematically gifted Meg. The family argues over science, congregates for impromptu midnight snacks, eats dinner in Mom’s lab, looks out for each other at school, and basically serves as an emotional security blanket for a generation of kids who yearned for this kind of familial togetherness.

Wrinkle’s plot kicks off when the Murry clan are visited by three creatures—Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit—who are either bag ladies or stars disguised as bag ladies. They teach Charles Wallace, Meg, and Calvin—their friend from an abusive home down the street—to travel by tesseract, which essentially involves stepping through folds in time and space. The threesome venture to the planet Camazotz in an attempt to rescue Dr. Murry who has been abducted by the planet’s inhabitants. Camazotz is a world of utter conformity where all the children on every street bounce their balls in time, and jump rope in perfect synchronization, like participants in a North Korean mass rally. On Camazotz, Charles Wallace is possessed by its ruler, IT (a giant disembodied brain), and Dr. Murry is rescued only to prove totally useless in a crisis, leaving Meg to step up and save everyone herself.

A Wrinkle in Time is suffused with L’Engle’s own flinty Episcopalian faith. L’Engle’s books were always marketed as science fiction, and so, when alien creatures on the planet Uriel sing a wordless song whose meaning is translated for Meg as, “Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth. . . . Let them give glory unto the Lord,” the expressly Christian sentiment feels jarring nestled up next to lessons in microbiology, the scientific method, and the value of reason.

Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit are extraterrestrial angels who also sing praises to God, and the book’s central conflict is resolved by that most Christian of life lessons: Love is greater than hate. This is a pretty bland and fairly common theme in YA books—yay, love; boo, hate—but it is usually presented as simple humanism. L’Engle was specifically talking about Christian love, in which the human capacity to love is a reflection of the Creator’s love for his flawed creations. Meg goes to her final confrontation with IT like a lamb to the slaughter, armed only with advice from Mrs Who (“God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. . . .”), and a declaration of love from Mrs Whatsit (“Mrs Whatsit loves me,” Meg thinks. “That’s quite something, to be loved by someone like Mrs Whatsit”). Ultimately their love inspires her to channel her own love for Charles Wallace to break the hold IT has on him.

Meg’s confrontation with IT reflects what was, for L’Engle, one of the central stories of the Bible, the Annunciation to Mary that she had been chosen to bear God’s child. Mary, like Meg, was still a child, still capable of accepting that there are forces at work that we cannot see, still capable of seeing angels. Both Meg and Mary are called upon to do the impossible, and instead of balking, they both accept their roles: one as the mother of Jesus, the other as the rescuer of her brother. The Annunciation also reflected L’Engle’s idea of the creative process. In her book of essays, Walking on Water, she wrote,

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one.

She went on to explain that when she wrote, “I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. . . . this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.”

As a genre, science fiction tends to avoid issues of faith. Plenty of books, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Sparrow, deal with organized religion as a social structure, but when spiritual concepts arise—from The Force in Star Wars to the theology of Battlestar Galactica—it’s often literalized, leaving no doubt as to its objective reality and thus no room for faith. As L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water, “If it can be verified, we don’t need faith.” And for her, faith was the bedrock of her religion and her art. “Why does anybody tell a story?” she rhetorically asked in an interview. “It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose to say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

When L’Engle had her own crisis of faith in the 1950s, she discovered the work of Albert Einstein (she called him “Saint Albert”), Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, who opened her eyes to quantum physics. She felt that the laws of the universe Einstein had uncovered were a glimpse into the mind of its creator. As Meg says of her parents in A Wind in the Door, “Their discoveries . . . had made the Murrys more, rather than less, open to the strange, to the mysterious, to the unexplainable.” In L’Engle’s view, “Theologians and scientists seem surprised that they work together. It’s not that much of a surprise to me. I’ve always seen the discoveries of science as a way of finding out more about God, more about the universe.” Particle physics was a form of theology to her because it was an honest attempt to understand God’s creation, while she felt that theology often got lost in “peripheral things.”

Today, cultural forces on the left and the right have turned the science versus religion debate into one with no middle ground. Just as rejecting certain scientific theories (evolution, global warming) are articles of faith for many on the right, rejecting organized religion is an article of faith for many on the left. According to one survey, 52 percent of Americans in the sciences claim to have no religious affiliation as compared to only 14 percent of the general population. But for L’Engle, religion and science were one and the same. Her Time Quartet deals with mitochondria and cherubim, Noah and quantum physics, nuclear proliferation and salvation.

The strength of science to L’Engle was that it was always open to new discoveries even if they forced a reevaluation of all that had come before, a point of view she felt theologians had backed away from out of fear. Fear had no place in her church. “Christianity was not meant to be a fearful religion,” she said in an interview. “It was supposed to be affirmative, showing that everybody matters. It wasn’t supposed to be about picking and choosing who is good or who is bad.”

In A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, this expression of her faith blossoms fully. Meg is forced to defeat the nullifying aliens, the Echthroi, by finding it in herself to love her odious principal, Mr. Jenkins, a man with dandruff on his shoulders and dark sarcasm in his voice. Meg’s “love thy neighbor” moment isn’t treated as sentimental or sappy but as a tough-minded rejection of her natural instincts in which she’s forced to recognize within herself the things she most hates in this adult.

And it wasn’t just her character’s assumptions that L’Engle interrogated but also her own. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Calvin’s mother, a slovenly, abusive, fearful woman, sacrifices her life to save the world. It’s one thing to listen to a minister give a sermon about how the least of these shall be the greatest, but it’s another thing entirely—a much tougher thing—to make the character who was the butt of your jokes for two books the hero of the third. But L’Engle used her Christian faith as a scourge with which she forced weakness and insecurities from her writing. L’Engle’s Christianity was not for sissies. As she once said, “The Lord Jesus who rules my life is not a sentimental, self-pitying weakling. He was a Jew, a carpenter, and strong.”

Where religion and science parted ways for L’Engle was that science dealt with fact while religion dealt with truth. She believed that the Bible was important not because it was literally true but because its stories conveyed irreducible truths about human nature that could only be understood through metaphor and revelation. “Nothing that’s worth anything as far as living our lives is concerned is in the realm of fact,” she said on PBS in 2000. “Jesus was talking about a man with a plank of wood in his eye. It’s a true story, it’s not factual. It’s about people who are slow to recognize their own faults and too quick to point out others’ flaws.”

L’Engle’s Time Quartet was expressly written because she wanted to speak a simple truth to the younger generation: that love defeats hate and that compassion defeats anger. Is that a fact? Probably not. One only has to look at history and see Anne Frank incinerated in an oven, Syrian troops shelling hospitals, or peaceful protestors pepper sprayed and arrested, to conclude that love, in fact, gets very little accomplished. So what is the force that inspires a scientist to devote their entire life to the mind-shattering intricacies of string theory, that causes a parent to forgive the killer of their child, that makes an ordinary, unarmed person block a tank with their body? L’Engle believed that it was an instinctive belief in a received truth that inspired us to do great things, and that no matter what the facts on the ground indicated, this greater truth was that we should love creation and each other the way our creator loved us. Believing in this despite all factual evidence to the contrary was a central tenet of her faith, and L’Engle’s faith is what motivated her life and her art. It was quiet, it was strong, and it was not always easy, but it endured. Just like her books.

Grady Hendrix lives in New York City.

Douglas A. Anderson

Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit

My title for this article may seem like a jest, an incongruent pairing of one author’s name with the uniquely titled work by another—a combination unlikely to exist save in an alternate reality as might be imagined by Paul Di Filippo—but I’m actually entirely serious here. Joanna Russ did write such a work—a play based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s well-known children’s book (using Tolkien’s own subtitle) There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday.

For some years I’ve known of one copy in private hands with (as described to me) Tolkien’s “waspish” comments handwritten in the margins, but I’d never seen that. With the passing of Joanna Russ in 2011, I learned that a collection of her papers is now held in the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. So on a recent research trip, I finally got to read Joanna Russ’s version.

The typescript is undated (but more about that later), and on the title page there is a note in Russ’s hand, initialed by her, noting that “Tolkien didn’t like it, wouldn’t let it be publicly performed.” The typescript is 49 pages with three additional pages of front matter (a title page, a cast of characters, and a synopsis of scenes). Russ divided Tolkien’s storyline into three main scenes, adding a narrator to fill in some gaps of the story that are not portrayed on the stage. The company of dwarves is reduced to five in number (Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, and Thorin). Many characters and events are omitted without any reference to them at all (e.g., the eagles, Beorn, the Elvenking, Laketown, Bard, the Arkenstone), but some missing scenes are mentioned in the narration (the encounter with the Trolls, and, later, with the spiders).

Scene one (the first twelve pages) tells of Gandalf visiting Bilbo and the coming of the dwarves and their enlisting Bilbo to join in their adventure. There is no mention of the Map of the Lonely Mountain, but two of Tolkien’s poems are used in the text, “Chip the glasses and crack the plates” and “Far over the Misty Mountains Cold.” Strangely, Russ, for no apparent reason, has altered the wording of the poems in several instances.

Scene two (13–30) gives a bit of the journey leading up to the taking of refuge from a storm in the cave, on the shoulder of what the narrator calls Mount Gundabad. Bilbo is wary of the supposed shelter, but the goblins spring upon the group and take away the dwarves. Bilbo is missed in the shuffle and wanders down the tunnel to meet Gollum. Bilbo finds the ring, and the riddle match ensues with the usual result. Gollum goes to get his ring and realizes that Bilbo already has it. Bilbo escapes into the sunlight where he finds Gandalf and the dwarves. Gandalf tells the party that he is leaving (he refers to having business in the North) and suggests that the dwarves choose Bilbo as their leader.

Scene three (31–49) begins at the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo doesn’t go down the tunnel alone to meet the dragon but is accompanied by the dwarves. At this time he tells the dwarves about his ring of invisibility. They still admire him for his pluck (leaping over Gollum in the dark, dodging goblin-guards, fighting spiders). The party observes Smaug from a discreet distance. Thorin requests that Bilbo pick up a memento, like a cup, from Smaug’s treasure. Bilbo does so and returns it to the dwarves, realizing that Smaug will notice its absence and trap them in the mountain without food. Bilbo returns to Smaug and has the usual conversation, discovering Smaug’s weak spot. The ring accidentally slips off Bilbo’s finger and is lost. Smaug laughs at him, but Bilbo runs toward the dragon with his sword drawn. The dwarves join in, attacking Smaug. Kili twists his foot and falls down, remaining in view of the audience to tell what he sees of the battle. Bilbo and the dwarves kill Smaug. The dwarves return to Kili, carrying Bilbo, who is told by Thorin that while they worried Smaug, it was Bilbo who killed him with one blow. Bilbo just wants to go home. The dwarves hoist him on their shoulders and sing of Smaug’s death. Bilbo joins in with Tolkien’s verse “The Dragon is Withered” (again substantially altered). A closing vignette shows Bilbo in his hobbit hole, telling Gandalf about coming home to find his possessions being auctioned. He thinks his aunt Lobelia may have taken his silver spoons. They are interrupted by a young hobbit, Bill Fernytoes, who wants to hear stories of Bilbo single-handedly killing the dragon. The young hobbit is scolded by his mother, Lobelia, who has followed him. Bilbo seizes her umbrella and turns it upside down, causing several spoons to fall out. Bilbo recites a poem he has written, “The Road Goes Ever On” (again with strange alterations by Russ). Curtain.

There is no indication of date of composition, save for the fact that Russ references tomatoes in Bilbo’s larder, indicating that she used a pre-1966 text (“tomatoes” were changed to pickles in the 1966 revision—see annotation number 26 to chapter one in the 2002 revised edition of my Annotated Hobbit). I have long suspected that Russ’s adaptation might have dated from her time at the Yale School of Drama (c. 1958–60); she received an MFA in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature from Yale in 1960. So it is nice to find corroborating evidence that this is true. There are published references in Tolkien scholarship about a dramatization of The Hobbit that originated from a female student at Yale, though the name of the adaptor is nowhere given, and all evidence points to it being Russ.

On April 23, 1959, Charles Lewis of George Allen & Unwin (Tolkien’s London publisher) sent Tolkien a letter saying that the Yale Drama School would like to perform an adaptation of The Hobbit with the adaptor paying a royalty, subject to Tolkien’s approval of the adaptation.

On April 30, Tolkien replied to Charles Lewis, noting that the adaptor had sent him a copy of the play some time before but said nothing about any performance and didn’t even ask for his opinion of it. Tolkien told Lewis that the adaptation seemed to him “a mistaken attempt to turn certain episodes of The Hobbit into a sub-Disney farce for rather silly children. . . . At the same time, it is entirely derivative.” Though he would prefer not to be associated with such stuff, Tolkien said he would waive his objections on the understanding that the performance is “part of the normal processes of Drama School (sc. in the teaching and practice of drama-writing); and that the permission for performance does not imply approval of the play for publication, sale, or performance outside of the Yale School.”

On May 6, Lewis wrote to Tolkien, saying that he had outlined Tolkien’s arguments concerning the adaptation in a letter to the adaptor, also stating that Tolkien would not object to a performance of the play by the Yale Drama School. On May 26, Lewis wrote to Tolkien that the adaptor of The Hobbit had requested the return of her manuscript.

Tolkien presumably sent back the copy he had annotated, which Russ later gave away, preserving in her own papers only her own un-annotated version. Looking at the details of her adaptation, one can see why Tolkien didn’t like it. There are a number of things in the first two scenes that would have bothered Tolkien (not least the rewriting of his poetry or the application of the name Mount Gundabad to the wrong mountain), even though much of what is presented stays fairly close to the source material. But the third scene diverges widely from what Tolkien wrote (a feature which especially irked him with every proposed adaptation of his work), and he would certainly not have approved of Russ’s alteration that has Bilbo heroically killing the dragon. On its own as a play, Russ’s version doesn’t work very well, even with the way that she has altered the plot. But overall, Russ’s version isn’t really any worse than other adaptations that have been done over the years. Whereas those were done without Tolkien’s input or approval, Russ did the honorable thing and asked Tolkien. I suspect that Peter Jackson’s forthcoming films of The Hobbit, now expanded from two to three films, may make Joanna Russ’s version appear as the more faithful to the original text. Time will tell.

Douglas A. Anderson blogs about Lesser-Known Writers (mostly neglected fantasists) at desturmobed.blogspot.com.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

London: Gollancz, 2010; £12.99 pb; 330 pages
reviewed by Jenny Blackford

Hannu Rajaniemi has produced an extraordinary first novel: a fast-paced, often funny, hard sf thriller about the adventures of an interplanetary gentleman-thief, Jean le Flambeur, on a thoroughly French far-future Mars. The Red Planet is well known for producing the best wine, chocolate, and cheese in the Solar System, and the male honorific appears to be Monsieur. Indeed, the book is permeated by references to French detective novels and film, particularly Jean-Pierre Melville’s early film noir, Bob le flambeur, and Maurice Leblanc’s well-known stories of gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin; there are explicit, important references to Leblanc’s Le Bouchon de cristal and “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late.”

When the book starts, Jean le Flambeur (“John the high-roller”) is an inmate of the Archon’s Dilemma Prison, a huge cube floating somewhere in space, where (so the theory goes) criminal minds are trained into cooperative behavior through continual iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As Jean says, “a few million rounds more and I’ll be a Boy Scout.” He is unexpectedly rescued by a wild Oortian warrior-woman, Mieli, and her charming spidership, Perhonen. (Like the conscious, hyper-intelligent ships and devices in the work of Iain M. Banks, Perhonen is definitely a major character in her own right—and possibly the most lovable person in the book.)

None of the people in this brave new world inhabit ordinary human bodies as we know them: they are complex uploaded minds running on various strange substrates. “Human” bodies, if people have them at all, are built not born, and babies are created in an expensive technical process. Death is seldom final. Except for the neo-primitive warriors of the Oort, who pride themselves on being “singletons”, there can be, and often are, huge numbers of copies of any of these people, both serially and simultaneously. We even see the process on Mars where the “Resurrection Men” collect corpses and store their minds for rebirth. (It is no accident that Arsène Lupin was a master of disguise, who took dozens of different identities over the course of his fictional career.) When Jean is a little skeptical about his rescue from the Dilemma Prison, Mieli points out to him that “there are still several million of you in the Prison, so consider yourself lucky.”

Mieli is a thoroughly reluctant savior. She only rescues le Flambeur at the express command of the “goddess,” the “pellegrini,” who is hiding in her mind, and who has a strange task that she needs her old friend Jean to perform. Unfortunately, once Jean is inside Perhonen, it transpires that he has lost almost all of his useful memories of his spectacular past as an interplanetary thief; his first discovery is that he must go to Mars to gain them back before he can start the goddess’s work. Soon he deduces that he hid his memories from himself (as well as from others), decades earlier, in a huge and very deliberate scheme—and that he must outwit his fiendishly cunning past self if he is to find them again.

Quantum stuff is everywhere. Quantum computing is the least of it. Powerful strangelet bombs and q-dots—artificial atoms capable of assuming any range of physical properties—are among the quasi-magical devices that get the gentleman thief and his companions out of tight spots, though I have no doubt that Rajaniemi, whose PhD concerns string theory, has explored the possible science behind these inventions.

As the reader may suspect by now, it’s impossible to read The Quantum Thief without being struck by how much it’s like the work of Charles Stross—and it’s not a substandard version, either. Stross has been generous enough to supply a congratulatory front cover blurb: “Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am.”

Stross is right. I’m not sure that Rajaniemi is actually better than him, but he’s certainly extremely good. There can be little disagreement with the rest, especially about the similarities with Greg Egan. And it’s worth noting that Rajaniemi’s PhD means that the science in The Quantum Thief is as solid as Egan’s terrifying physics.

I’d like to add another candidate for comparison: Australian polymath Damien Broderick, now living in lovely San Antonio. Like much of Broderick’s body of science fiction, The Quantum Thief is full of multiple layers of gradually unfolding puzzles of often hellish difficulty. It’s also exuberantly playful with science, with language, and with sly references to old books and films. Again like much of Broderick’s work, the technology behind the events of The Quantum Thief (for example, the q-dots) follows Clarke’s law: it’s so far beyond ours that it operates a lot like magic. And the future solar system of the book is full of mysterious and powerful entities of unknowable motivations, and even their names have a fairytale air about them: Kings and Queens, Gods, Founders, Dragons, diamond worlds, the zoku colony, the Quick Ones on Venus, gogol pirates, the tzaddikim, and more.

(In theory, these characteristics that I’ve just listed might make one think of Gene Wolfe at least as much as Damien Broderick, but from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter the book feels far more like Broderick’s manic, polymath playfulness than like Wolfe’s beautifully layered puzzle-boxes.)

But enough of the other authors who Hannu Rajaniemi writes like. It’s time to attempt the daunting task of describing the experience of reading The Quantum Thief.

The first time I tried to read the book, I got about 60 pages through before I stopped, bewildered by a succession of wrenches from full-immersion point-of-view to point-of-view in a series of richly detailed far-future milieux, told with a flurry of invented or totally repurposed words (gevulot, warmind, Sobornost, guberniya . . .). The reader starts in Jean’s slippery, allusive brain, as he explains the bizarre inner workings of the glass-walled Dilemma Prison, then we move into Mieli’s mind: “In the dream, Mieli is eating a peach, on Venus.” Mieli is luxuriating with her lover Sydän “in a q-dot bubble fourteen clicks above the Cleopatra Crater. . . . The amber light of the cloud cover filtering through the adamantine pseudomatter shell makes Sydän’s skin run copper.” That’s not too difficult—the prose is a little dense, but rather lovely—but the banter between Mieli and Sydän is trickier. For example, the first sentence of the conversation, “‘You bastard’, she says, breathing heavily,” seems to be intentionally misleading: it turns out to be a compliment from Mieli to her (female) lover on her sexual skills.

The episode on Venus is not real-time, but a memory given to Mieli by the goddess/pellegrini to keep her sane in the Prison, and Mieli is joltingly dragged out of it to rescue Jean. This rescue is described in what are apparently rather nice metaphors for hijinks on a quantum computing level: “Mieli spits the peach-stone at the glass wall. It shatters like ice. . . . Mieli holds the dead thief in her arms: he weighs nothing. The pellegrini is flowing into the Prison from the peach-stone, like a heat-ripple.” Next there’s a Delany-esque poetic passage of several fragments from Jean’s past lives—e.g., “The god of thieves hides inside thinking dust threaded together by quantum entanglements. He tells the diamond mind lies until it believes he is one of its thoughts and lets him in.” Then, we are back in Jean’s remade mind, in the new body built for him by the pellegrini, on the ship Perhonen.

By page 32, just as we are starting to feel tentatively comfortable at shifting among the POVs of Jean, Mieli, Perhonen, and even, for a few paragraphs, the voice of the intelligent Prison, the reader is thrust into the mind of young detective Isidore on Mars, trying to deduce who murdered a chocolatier in a chocolate factory. Isidore turns out to be the sweetest character in the book (except, possibly, for the lovable spaceship Perhonen)—but the reader has to absorb so much about this new milieu, including even more new terminology, that it takes a few pages time before Isidore has a chance to charm the reader into wanting to know more about him, and caring what happens to him. Then there is an “Interlude” in the POV of the King of Mars, at some unspecified time, before we are back in Jean’s mind, now on Mars with Mieli—all by page 60.

None of these POV changes is made particularly easy for the reader. Like Broderick, Rajaniemi apparently delights in making each new character and situation as exotic and interesting as possible—and therefore making the text a touch challenging. But—as in Broderick’s work—if you persevere, there are wonderful payoffs.

One tip: Rajaniemi frequently follows a pattern of using a new word two or three times with no explanation, then providing a nice, clear definition on the third or fourth usage. Just read on, then double back. Also, you’ll find that most of the simpler puzzles are explicitly unraveled a few chapters after they are set for the reader—though with puzzle laid upon puzzle, it can be hard to keep them straight.

Jean is a captivating character; it’s hard not to like him. Isidore is even more appealing: smart and truly sweet. Other less-important characters are also excellent, notably Perhonen and the Gentleman. In theory, Mieli should be the most fascinating character in the book: a fierce, winged warrior from the exotic future-tribal Oort culture, carrying within her mind the goddess whom she worships and serves, but seldom happy with any course of action that the goddess proposes in her mind. But we learn too little about Mieli in The Quantum Thief. Her whole motivation is that the goddess has promised to reunite her with her lost love Sydän, but we don’t learn enough about Sydän—not even how she was lost—to care whether Mieli ever gets her back. I hope that the sequel, The Fractal Prince, fills in this gap

The final chapter closes a few earlier mysteries, but opens up huge new ones. We have still not even discovered the nature of the task that the pellegrini needs Jean to perform for her; we’re nowhere near the end of the over-arching story. The cover of the Gollancz edition that I was sent to review bears no indication that it’s anything other than a stand-alone novel, but The Fractal Prince has recently been released, and another book is planned to round off a trilogy.

Jenny Blackford lives in sunny Newcastle, NSW, a little north of Sydney.

New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws

Alexandria, Virgina: Atomic Overmind Press, 2012; $16.95 tpb; 176 pages
reviewed by Lisa Padol

When NYRSF asked me to write a review, we discussed several options. I came to the conclusion that, for quicker results, I should do a simple review of Robin Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign rather than a review of the new edition of the roleplaying supplement Masks of Nyarlathotep, which, to do justice, would have to survey nearly 40 years of gaming history. After all, New Tales of the Yellow Sign doesn’t require much of a backwards look, right? Oh . . . wait. . . .

New Tales of the Yellow Sign is among other things, a response to Robert Chambers’s 1895 collection, The King in Yellow, which, in turn, owes at least a nod to Ambrose Bierce. Bierce coined the names “Hastur,” “Hali,” and “Carcosa” in his stories “Haïta the Shepherd” (1893) and “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1891). In the former, Hastur is a god whom Haïta worships. In the latter, the ghost of Hoseib Alar Robardin walks among the ruins of the city of Carcosa, not realizing he and it are dead. Robardin recalls the philosophical musings of Hali. These two tales of Bierce feel vaguely Dunsanian, before Dunsany.

It was Chambers who made the names of Hastur, Carcosa, and Hali haunt the mind. Chambers created the concept of The King in Yellow, a play which enthralls anyone so foolish as to even glance into its script. In the play, Carcosa remains a city, but Hali becomes a lake. Camilla and Cassilda are characters in the play, along with a Stranger who cannot unmask because he wears no mask, a fact which terrifies the characters. The King in Yellow may or may not be Hastur, a figure of terror, the Living God into whose hands it is terrible to fall. And his emblem is the dreaded Yellow Sign.

Only four of the stories in The King in Yellow deal with or even mention the play. Four out of ten tales in a collection, no more, but they persist in a dreamlike mood with an oddly attractive nihilistic beauty. Chambers’s collection influenced other authors. One was Marion Zimmer Bradley, who took names—Hastur, Camilla, Cassilda, Hali, Carcosa—for her Darkover novels. Another was H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft made one reference to Hastur and the Yellow Sign in his fiction, a throwaway line in “Whisperer in Darkness.” There one might have expected it to languish, hardly as important to the Mythos he created as Cthulhu or the mi-go or Yog-Sothoth.

Perhaps they would have been forgotten without August Derleth, who (according to Robert Price’s The Hastur Cycle in 1993) thought that Lovecraft’s Mythos should be called the “Hastur Mythos.” Or perhaps not, for Lovecraft also referred to Hastur, the Yellow Sign, and Carcosa in his influential 1933 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” where fans of his work could learn of those authors who had influenced him.

Lovecraft encouraged authors who wanted to try their own hand at Mythos stories, one such being James Blish. His story “More Light” (1970) tells of Bill Atheling, a man who, as a boy, contacted Lovecraft to ask about the actual Necronomicon. Lovecraft, of course, told him that there was no such book, and that to try to create one would be as much of a mistake as Chambers’s attempt to create an actual King in Yellow play was. Atheling naturally demanded to see the thing, and the almost-complete manuscript for the play appears in the story. Blish’s version is an interesting, if hardly horrifyingly maddening, text. And, it became the more-or-less canonical version of the play.

At this point, a force extends the influence of The King in Yellow: roleplaying games. In 1981, Chaosium published a game called Call of Cthulhu, where players take on the role of investigators into Lovecraftian mysteries. How closely these scenarios stick to Lovecraft’s vision varies, of course. Some focus on parts of the mythos emphasized by other writers, and, inevitably, some focus on Hastur.

The Hastur scenarios include Kevin A. Ross’s “Tell Me Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?” (in The Great Old Ones, 1989), and this is where a version of Ross’s now-canonical design for the Yellow Sign first appeared. John Tynes created both gaming material and short fiction capturing the beauty of Carcosa, including King in Yellow in 1999. Oscar Rios wrote Ripples from Carcosa (2005), three scenarios set in different ages where the same people are reincarnated to fight Hastur again and again. The future scenario even includes the summary of a play that is the sequel to The King in Yellow.

Tim Wiseman’s Tatters of the King (2006) presents a massive campaign focusing on Hastur’s attempt to affect the world in the winters of 1928 and 1929. It captures the feel of surreal beauty and horror of Carcosa, and it creates a range of people with different, but believable, motives for worshipping the nihilistic Hastur. The campaign features an adaption of the play The King in Yellow, this one called The Stranger and the Queen. One scene will be perceived differently by everyone, and the Keeper (gamemaster) is given three different summaries of the scene. When I ran this, one of my players decided that his character would pay for a private performance (as the theater was shut down after the first performance of the play ended in a minor riot) to find out which version of the scene was the real one. After some internet surfing, I discovered that some truly dedicated soul had created a script of The Stranger and the Queen that included not one, not three, but eight different versions of the scene.

While Call of Cthulhu was the first of the roleplaying games created primarily to model Lovecraft’s (and fellow mythos talespinners’) works, it was not to be the last. Kenneth Hite wrote a game called Trail of Cthulhu, published by Pelgrane Press, using their “Gumshoe” rules system, which was created by Robin Laws. Laws in turn wrote a scenario for Trail of Cthulhu, “Repairer of Reputations,” based on the Robert Chambers story that introduced The King in Yellow.

And, several roleplaying publishers have Lovecraftian fiction lines. Chaosium published The Hastur Cycle (1993), collecting thirteen older tales with some connection (sometimes tenuous) to the Hastur/Carcosa mythos. Miskatonic River Press has just released A Season in Carcosa. And, this past August, Atomic Overmind published Robin Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign, with an introduction by Kenneth Hite; Kevin Ross’s version of the Yellow Sign adorns the spine and back cover. It’s a tight-knit world.

This, then, is the context for the collection.

The first story in the collection, “Full Bleed,” is probably my favorite. This is unsurprising, as it is the closest in feel to “Repairer of Reputations,” which is my favorite story in the original King in Yellow. The point of view character in “Repairer” is trying to ensure that he is not denied what he considers his rightful inheritance. The point-of-view character in “Full Bleed” is investigating signs of corruption by the book The King in Yellow. This sets the tone for the collection, as Laws riffs off Chambers, faithful to the spirit of the original collection, but making no attempt to imitate it slavishly.

“Repairer of Reputations,” written in 1895, is set in a future 1920. New York City has opened the first public suicide booth. “Foreign-born Jews” have been excluded from the country “as a matter of self-preservation,” and there is a “new independent Negro state of Suanee.” There was a “Congress of Religion” which apparently ended bigotry and intolerance, at least officially (9).

Chambers gives a few more tantalizing references to the way this future world differs from his own, but he shows very little of how this world works. None of the other stories in The King in Yellow consider this future world, yet it remains vivid in readers’ minds. Laws sets a number of his stories in the world of “Repairer,” or in a world that might be about to become that world, or a world that has been that world, but is now changing. Since he is taking into account modern technology, and since some of his characters question whether their world is the world that was truly meant to be, the exact relationship of the world of “Repairer” and the world—or worlds—in Laws’s tales is as delicately obscured as exactly how the world of “Repairer” functions.

“Gaps,” told in the second person singular, has an unreliable viewpoint character who knows that he (or at least, I assume the character is male) is unreliable. He has gaps in his memory and only a vague idea of what triggers these gaps. The gaps started when he accidentally read the play. Like many others, he was “yellow rolled,” tricked into clicking on a link to the play. He becomes involved in very unsavory deeds, as one might expect from reading That Play—and yet, whatever causes the gaps, whatever personality takes over, seems to be not only protecting him but also trying to do what is right. The shape of the story changes until, in the end, it has become a chilling yet oddly touching ghost story, with the narrator still suffering from gaps, still trying to do the best he can, and making the best peace he can with the situation.

“The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress” is not actually listed in the table of contents. While it would be amusing to theorize about mystical or conspiratorial reasons for this, I am fairly sure it was a simple mistake. This story continues to focus on unreliable viewpoints and alternate timelines. Set in a world where war is raging in 1947, the point of view character’s senses cannot be trusted—or can they? Is he hallucinating the ever increasing amount of blood, or is he causing it? Is he guilty, as his fellow soldiers and commanding officer (who is reading Notes on the Yellow Sign by Albert Camus) claim? If so, of what? Of madness? Of perceiving a reality the others do not want to acknowledge? Of creating reality? Things seem to be spiraling out of his control and into the hands of something worse.

“A Boat Full of Popes” seems to have a sane and competent narrator and to be set after “Gaps.” The narrator is one of the men who service the suicide booths introduced in Chambers’s “Repairer of Reputations,” booths which do not kill cleanly and which sometimes require a lot of cleaning. These are also booths which, since some kind of revolution took place, many hoped would no longer be needed, and yet, despite the new freedom from the old regime—a regime which had something to do with the Yellow Sign, I think (and yet, wasn’t Chambers’s Castaigne insane? Surely there was no truth to any of his delusional ramblings?)—are still used and still carry a fascination for many.

This story ends happily, or so it would seem. The narrator saves his friend and coworker from a group of alien cultists. And yet, while the aliens were a threat that had to be dealt with, the words of their leader are not so easily dismissed. He preyed upon those who were unhappy because they did not fit in, instead making them unhappy by forcing them to conform. Is this really so different from what any society does? And, while the narrator escaped that fate, the alien leader’s description of him seems spot on, a man openly revered but secretly feared for his competence at a distasteful job, a man doomed to loneliness. Kenneth Hite’s mention of the “fantasy of competence” in his introduction to this book echoes uneasily in the mind.

“Distressing Notification” is a nicely creepy tale about the titular smartphone app, made by the company Carcosa LLC. Download it and you’ll get all sorts of distressing messages, telling you what your neighbor really thinks about you, how your coworker is planning to stab you in the back, and so on. Occasionally, the app will inform you that it cannot come up with a topper to its most recent distressing notification for you. People trying to remove it from their phones may discover that it reappears. Just a small bug, no doubt. The narrator reluctantly agrees to try the new app at the urging of her friend, a woman who may or may not have truly broken up with her abusive boyfriend and who may or may not resent our narrator’s meddling. As events run their course and the narrator’s friend meets her fate, the app and the company that makes it vanish without a trace—but not before the app sends one final message to the narrator: “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

This still puzzles me as I am not sure if this means that the narrator’s friend could not have been maneuvered by the app if the narrator had not tried it out. This seems unlikely; the app seems quite capable of maneuvering people all too well on its own. I wonder if the narrator’s job has something to do with this. We know she has some kind of marketing position, but not what is being marketed.

Of all the stories, I find “Pendulous” the most ambiguous. Skygaunts, creatures with skeletal wings, darken the sky at irregular intervals and feast off those unfortunate to be passing by. This is not an occurrence worthy of comment by the protagonist and her boss, both of whom freeze in the boss’s office until the skygaunts are done and then return to their conversation. In his introduction to the collection, Hite describes the protagonist as “maneuvering for the corner office,” yet I fail to see signs of this. The protagonist is told by her boss that she can stay as his assistant if he is offered the promotion they both are sure is coming or he can recommend her for his current position. No maneuvering seems necessary, unless one considers the everyday actions of businesswomen competing with men to be “maneuvers.”

In addition to the decision about her future career path, the protagonist is concerned with an architectural project in the lot next to her workplace and with its advertising sign, which she abhors. She later meets the architect and starts a relationship with him. This relationship is still going on as the story ends, months later. She has chosen to take her boss’s old position and now has an assistant of her own.

Of course, her lover has no idea that she has subtly altered his plans for the building. In the world where the Yellow Sign dominates, I do not know if her changes are an attempt to wreck a good project or to to modify a potentially dangerous one, whether they are attempts of a frustrated architect to improve on someone else’s work or are evidence of the “motiveless malignity” Hite sees in the story.

The protagonist of “The Dog” is a fringe member of a circle of would-be revolutionaries, hoping that the woman in the group will notice him. His father was apparently a revolutionary, for in his basement, the protagonist finds some very interesting books, including The Communist Manifesto, which one revolutionary insists is what should have been influenced the world, rather than The King in Yellow.

A copy of the infamous play is also in the basement, and the protagonist thinks of it as a dog hoping for approval. Soon, there is a strange, four-eyed animal in the basement, an animal that the protagonist forces himself to think of as a dog. After his ailing mother dies, he uses the dog to deal with minor enemies and has one of his fellow revolutionaries dispose of the remaining evidence.

At this point, the cell of revolutionaries is dealt with, for one member turned out to be a collaborator. The collaborator now has a place with the regime, and he also has made a place for the woman, who, the protagonist guesses, is probably only going along with him out of self-preservation. But the protagonist has a “dog,” contacts among the larger revolutionary movement “up north”—which is apparently far more successful than the regime would have its citizens believe—and an opportunity to use these to bring down the regime.

The final story of the collection, “Fuck You You’re Not Getting Out of This Car,” is a perfectly respectable monologue of a tale, but it seems a little obvious and workmanlike compared to the others. Then again, perhaps for just that reason, it makes a good closer.

Throughout the collection, Laws captures the ambiguity at the heart of The King in Yellow mythos. The play is supposedly irresistible and beautiful, yet fatal and nihilistic. Seeking it out, or seeking tales about it, is as strange as collecting Yellow Sign jewelry or Cthulhu plushies (of which we have five). Yet there is a promise of beauty in some of the tales and a promise that evil can be destroyed, as in “Gaps” and “A Boat Full of Popes” or “The Dog.”

Even there, it is not clear how meaningful victory is. I think this is another part of the appeal of the tales. We do not want ultimate bleakness, but neither do we want facile assurances that good will inevitably triumph over evil.

And we do want mystery. Is there a coherent chronology of the world Laws constructs on Chambers’s foundation? We see only glimpses of it, dis-ordered and fragmentary. As with the play The King in Yellow, perhaps these glimpses are more satisfying than any whole could ever be.

Lisa Padol lives in Sunnyside, New York.

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel
adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012; $19.99 hc; 392 pages
reviewed by Avram Grumer

L’Engle’s Prose Novel

Published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (after being rejected by dozens of publishers), and continuously in print since then, A Wrinkle in Time is part science-fiction story, part religious metaphor, similar in spirit to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and Space Trilogy. But while Lewis’s work grants a unique metaphysical status to the Christian story of the Incarnation and Resurrection, L’Engle’s is more ecumenical, putting Jesus on the same level as Gandhi, the Buddha, Beethoven, and Einstein, and emphasizing the value of math and science.

Wrinkle is the story of a teenaged girl, Meg Murry, the daughter of two scientists, currently being raised (along with her three brothers) by just her mother, her father having vanished while working for the government on some mysterious classified project. Meg’s younger (but precocious and psychically sensitive) brother, Charles Wallace, is also a major character, as is Calvin O’Keefe, a neighboring teenaged boy, but Meg is the hero, which may have accounted for some of the difficulty L’Engle had finding a publisher.

Meg is an awkward teen with glasses and perpetually tangled mouse-brown hair, convinced that she’s ugly, unpopular at school, bright but academically undisciplined, and on top of that having to deal with neighbors who believe that her father has run off with another woman and that her younger brother is mentally handicapped. She’s impatient and short-tempered as well. When we first meet her, she’s sulking over the fight she got into with a boy who’d said something insulting about Charles Wallace. She bears a big bruise under one eye.

We aren’t given many details about where Meg lives. There’s a house with an attic and a garden, “isolated on a back road.” Meg walks home from school and lives someplace small enough for neighborhood gossip, but she’s ridden on a subway train. There are no references to popular culture and only occasional mentions of the existence of radio, telephones, and televisions. When I first read the novel as a child in the 1970s and reread it as an adult around 1990, it seemed to me to have a timeless quality that probably has helped keep it appealing to audiences across the decades. Nowadays, the absence of cell phones and computers makes it seem dated, as does the line about how Meg’s mother is “planning on giving her a typewriter for Christmas.”

A storm (“It was a dark and stormy night” is the novel’s first sentence) introduces us to Mrs Whatsit, one of three enigmatic figures who turn out to be Not of This Earth. (Here companions are Mrs Who and Mrs Which. We’re never told why they are “Mrs” rather than “Miss” or “Ms”—I imagine the former would make them seem too young, and the latter was too obscure or radical at the time.) Mrs Whatsit drops hints to her otherworldly nature, first mentioning that she’d been “caught in a down draft and blown off course” by the storm and then mentioning a tesseract.

The tesseract is a figure from non-Euclidian geometry, the four-dimensional analog of the cube, as the cube is the one-dimension-higher version of the square. In the world of Wrinkle, it is a five-dimensional figure (L’Engle doesn’t quite have a handle on her math) and a way of crossing interstellar (or even intergalactic) distances in a few seconds and even traveling in time. This turns out to be what happened to Meg’s father—his government project had discovered tessering (space-travel-by-tesseract), and he had tried to tesser to Mars, winding up instead in an entirely different star system on the planet Camazotz, a world whose population lives under the totalitarian control of a giant, pulsing brain called IT, itself an agent or manifestation of “the Black Thing,” a darkness that shrouds various worlds (and taints but does not dominate Earth). IT controls every aspect of life on Camazotz, even forcing the children to bounce balls and skip rope to the same rhythm, and torturing them if they fail to keep it.

Here is another example of how the book can appeal to multiple audiences. To a typical American, Camazotz evokes the threat of totalitarian communism. To a free-spirited member of the counter-culture, it can read as an indictment of the conformist pressure of middle-class consumerism and managerialist technocracy. The rows of identical houses (“all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray”) that we encounter in the suburbs of Camazotz’s capital could have been plucked straight from the lyrics of Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes,” recorded the same year Wrinkle was published.

Fortunately for Meg’s father, there are agents of light opposing the darkness. Who, Which, and Whatsit are angels in the celestial order, and at least one of them was formerly a star. In a conversation about fighting the darkness, the children learn that all of the great artists, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers of history were also doing their part to fight the darkness.

Who, Which, and Whatsit cannot interfere directly on Camazotz but can and do transport Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace there to rescue Mr. Murry, which they do, at the cost of losing Charles Wallace to IT’s domination.

In their escape (Mr. Murry knows enough about tessering to get them to another planet in the same star system), Meg is exposed to the darkness, leaving her paralyzed and filled with bitterness. Luckily, this is an untainted world, and the locals can nurse Meg back to health and summon Who, Which, and Whatsit for a second rescue attempt. This time, it’s just Meg who goes. Her stubborn individuality protects her from IT’s telepathic domination long enough for her love to rescue Charles Wallace, and they (along with Calvin and Mr. Murry) are tessered back to Earth.

Larson’s Graphic Adaptation

This is a very faithful adaptation, following the novel very closely. It has the same chapters, and most of the dialog is verbatim from the original. Some of it has been trimmed, but very little—while the Yearling paperback edition of the prose novel is a bit over 200 pages, the comic clocks in at nearly twice that.

Faced with the option of bringing the book into contemporary times (maybe giving Calvin a cellphone and putting a laptop computer in the Murrys’ lab—given how much of the story takes place off-planet, these wouldn’t have changed the plot), Larson instead leaves it in the 1960s. When Calvin borrows the landline phone to call home, Larson depicts it as an old ’40s-vintage desk model with a rotary dial. When Meg’s older brothers watch television, it’s a western on an old-fashioned console TV with lines of static on the screen.

Technology in the Murry household (70, 80)

But she’s willing to diverge from the source when the needs of adaptation require it. L’Engle gives this description of the newspaper boy’s vehicle on Camazotz:

a machine that was something like a combination of a bicycle and a motorcycle. It had the slimness and lightness of a bicycle, and yet as the foot pedals turned they seemed to generate an unseen source of power, so that the boy could pedal very slowly and yet move along the street quite swiftly.

This distinction between how quickly the boy is pedaling and how fast his cycle is moving is something nearly impossible to illustrate in comics. Larson’s solution? Give the boy a hoverbike. Simple and effective, it keeps the encounter other-worldy and science-fictional, while still working within the medium of comics (193–196).

When I first became aware of Hope Larson’s art (I think it was around 2004), she had a very controlled line and a somewhat abstractedly geometric approach to form, resembling vector artwork. Here’s a panel from “WeatherVain,” her piece for the second volume of the Flight anthology series, published in 2005:

“WeatherVain” from Flight #2, 2005

Her art in her adaptation of Wrinkle is generally warmer-seeming, with a more hand-drawn look. This seems appropriate for a story that vilifies the planned and orderly; it might also be more kid-friendly and approachable than Larson’s early work. But it (like Meg) has its clumsy, awkward moments. Larson doesn’t convey motion very well, and since 2005, she seems to have forgotten how to draw hands:

Meg confronts her principal, page 44

Larson depicts the world of Wrinkle in two-color line art, black and blue, generally using solid regions of blue for shading. There’s one exception, though: To depict the Black Thing, the interstellar darkness that surrounds Camazotz and taints Earth, Larson uses a fine-grained, graduated tone which I suspect is either dry brush or a grease pencil (or a digital emulation):

The Earth is touched by darkness (154)

Aside from the Black Thing, there is only one other place that Larson uses this technique: the bruise on Meg’s cheek, the one she got from fighting with her schoolmate who insulted Charles Wallace. The bruise is present from when we first see Meg (11) to when Meg is touched by Aunt Beast (313) who cures her of the effects of passage through the darkness. Clearly Larson means us to see the bruise as a way that the Black Thing touches us through anger and violence. She even shows us the bruise in close-up as we’re first being shown the Black Thing.

Meg is touched by darkness (132)

Larson’s basic comics-artist skills are all good: she generally composes panels well, and can guide the reader’s eye around the page. She balances lights and darks and chooses her depicted moments so as to convincingly convey the action. Her characters have wide, manga-style eyes but with actual noses and mouths and with distinct faces. Even if she’s clumsy at depicting motion, that’s not much of a problem for Wrinkle, which isn’t a fight-filled action adventure. Emotion is more important here, and Larson’s faces carry that well. She frequently adds in the little symbols that cartoonists use as shorthand indicators of emotion, but she has the skill to get by without them.

You don’t need that dagger to see that Meg is angry (41)

I’m not sure if that dagger is there for the benefit of readers less adept at reading facial expressions or if Larson included it for the fun of it. (Also, props to Larson for fully rendering Meg’s eyes and glasses. You wouldn’t believe how many modern cartoonists have trouble drawing glasses, and just drop part of the glasses’ frames out where it gets in the way of the character’s eyes.) She playfully crosses the line between depiction and representation several times in the book. On page 11, we see “wssh” lettered within a cloud, to convey the windy noisiness of a hurricane but written in script with a line that makes it seem like a part of the cloud, rather than an accompaniment. On page 191, nosy neighbors on Camazotz eavesdrop on a conversation; we see them emit word balloons containing ears, inverting the usual meaning of a word balloon to represent attention instead of speech.

Larson is good with homey, cluttered, and organic spaces—the Murrys’ kitchen and living room, the interior of Mrs Whatsit’s house, the wooded area around them are all great. But she’s weak when it comes to urban architecture—the capital city on Camazotz is less convincing than an old Star Trek set, and many of her fine details are wrong or unconvincing.

For instance, we see the Murrys’ kitchen on page 20. It’s a pleasant, inviting place. Look at that old-fashioned toaster on the counter—the Murrys even leave it unplugged when they’re not using it, like my parents used to when I was a kid! But that dog doesn’t really look like he’s lying on those tiles, and there’s no way that table will stay standing unless it’s attached to the floor.

The Murry kitchen is charming, but the details don’t work (20)

Still, these quibbles of mine are unlikely to make a difference to the book’s target audience. As a child, I didn’t notice Star Trek’s cardboard-and-balsa-wood environment; a young reader is unlikely to care about the Murrys’ kitchen table.

All in all, this is a faithful, respectful adaptation of a classic novel, with a lot of visual charm, one that occasionally makes use of the comics medium to express the fiction in ways the prose did not.

Avram Grumer lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Works Cited

- Larson, Hope. “WeatherVain.” Flight volume 2. Edited by Kazu Kibuishi. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2005. 178–186.

- L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time (1962). New York: Yearling Book, 2005.

Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens
starring Erin Treadway; produced by Incubator Arts and Loading Dock; St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, New York
reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld

Onstage, science fiction tends toward Flash Gordon parodies or po’-faced post-apocalyptics. But Spaceman, a short drama that played briefly in downtown New York, attempts something rare in live sf. Though it rides a rocket from Earth to Mars, it has none of the romance of Bradbury’s Chronicles or Burroughs’s Barsoom; though it’s about a mission to colonize the Red Planet, it ducks the terraforming heroics of Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Instead, Spaceman treats its audience to an evening of diamond-hard science fiction.

Playwright/director Leegrid Stevens (aka Steven Gridley) presents space travel as a journey of existential proportions. The conflicts of his drama are those of space flight: the physical and, more importantly, the psychological effects of a manned trip to Mars. With breathtaking realism, he focuses tightly on the sole crewmember of a Mars-bound space capsule: one set, one actress, 100 minutes.

After seven months alone in her space capsule, Cmdr. Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway) is nearing Mars but she’s also nearing a breakdown. Mission Control is on a ten-minute delay, a preprogrammed “mission buddy” fails its Turing Test within seconds, and the only other living thing within light-minutes is her pet plant. To fend off despair, Gennis sings her flight-check list absent-mindedly; she recounts memories to her late husband; she stares off into space; she gets into morbid depressive ruts.

With respect to action, Spaceman resembles the slower stretches of 2001 or Dark Star: interplanetary travel as dull routine in a confined space. To represent the capsule, Stevens and set designer Carolyn Mraz rigged a metal scaffold with monitors, keyboards, and hard drives. The blocky utilitarianism implies NASA’s pre-shuttle era but also visually suggests the boredom of spaceflight. Surrounding these cramped quarters is a wide expanse of darkness. Most of the stage is empty space, dark and unused, a void that underscores the astronaut’s precariousness and isolation.

That deliberately low-tech design and unbusy plotting starkly contrasts with Gennis herself, a marvelously lively character. Demonstrating extraordinary range and stamina in the role, Treadway rides a harrowing emotional seesaw while holding the audience’s focus confidently. Her performance leads the audience to experience some thrilling tensions. One such scene, maybe the show’s high point, comes in second half. Her character has inexplicably slumbered for 18 hours and now faces a psych test from Houston. Gennis barrels through it, delivering confident answers to increasingly surreal questions. Finally, she hears “We Are the Champions” and hoots in triumph.

At that moment, the audience realizes that the staging has shifted at least partly to represent the astronaut’s perspective. Gennis snaps to, horrified at her cracked psyche, then remembers that NASA can recall the capsule remotely. Should she sever her ship’s communications link so she can reach Mars, alone and perhaps deranged, or allow the mission to be aborted and return to Earth a broken failure? When she does cut the wires, she confirms her madness, but her fortitude also renders her decision heroic.

Moments like this display a confident sense of theatrical craft. Stevens draws a multidimensional character and sets up complex psychological quandaries, but he also deploys his themes deftly. His vision of space flight offers a witty critique on the nexus of science, economics, and politics. To fund the mission, NASA has arranged for sponsors to place their logos on Gennis’s flightsuit, like a NASCAR uniform. With this intrusion, isolation becomes more ambiguous, since it provides a defense against humiliation.

Spaceman especially shines, however, in its treatment of belief. Though its protagonist is a scientist and atheist who struggles with her mother’s religiosity, she’s also a young widow. Her loneliness and grief instills her expedition with a deeper resonance, turning her mission into an journey to the underworld. Take this example, a short speech which has Gennis listing nearby heavenly bodies off her computer:

Have you looked at the names of these asteroids? They’re all over the place. That was Nyx. Next up is Ishtar, then Quetzalcoatl, then Don Quixote! Get your mythologies straight, guys. Roman gods please. Jupiter, Saturn, Venus. Nice and neat. Oh, here we go. Listen to these! We got Magellan, Pocahontas, Dionysus—of course—Seneca, Nefertiti. Ha! There’s one named Pele! Uh, Krok, “semi-mythical fifth-century Slavonic prince of Bohemia.” Nice. Bruce Murray! Go ahead, Bruce, name that asteroid after yourself! Tanith—Carthaginian lunar god. Bivoj—legendary Czech hero. McAuliffe. . . .

[pause]

I know that one. Christa McAuliffe. From the Challenger.

[She looks out the window]

It’s like a graveyard out there. Dead gods and old, faded heroes. This is where they all end up. Floating tombstones. Wandering around the banks of River Styx. Sometimes colliding. Smashing to bits. Waiting for the ferry to carry them over the black waters.

This marvelous setpiece, one of many, gives something of the flavor of Spaceman: the character’s sporting chatter with absent colleagues, her curiosity and intelligence, her genial laughter at “Bruce Murray,” her mercurial moods. Additionally, it discloses her state of mind, since her late husband, also an astronaut, died in space’s vacuum. And then under that character work lies foreshadowing and a mythic sensibility.

Stevens, Treadway, and their collaborators produced their grand, intimate drama with consummate skill. Designer Driscol Otto, for example, stripped away the lighting until the only lamp visible belongs to a spacesuit helmet that illuminates the astronaut’s face. Stevens, in addition to writing and directing, designed the show’s rich soundscape, stuffing the capsule with pings and hums. The sonic element is so artfully subtle, it’s a surprise to note that it features a dozen voice actors. Mission Control, the onboard computer, radio interviews, and messages from home: despite being effectively a one-woman show, Spaceman isn’t a monologue, and its world is rounded out well by the terrestrial characters offstage.

Perhaps it’s a flaw then that late in the show, another actor enters. The careful reader may guess this late arrival’s identity; his appearance has likely been calculated for dramatic effect, but arguably it undercuts the show’s hard-won sense of loneliness too greatly. Likewise, a chance meteorite collision violates the realistic portrait of space travel. A solar flare, later on, feels more organic to the show’s sensibility and has thematic as well as narrative effects too valuable to lose. But two moments of jeopardy gild the plot too much, since its simplicity is part of its genius. The show’s conflict is and should be almost entirely internal.

In this respect, Spaceman is a masterpiece of science fiction. It avoids the frippery of space adventure while conveying the heroism of space travel. Its blurring of objective reality with its protagonist’s mind-state lifts the show above the strained asceticism of Mundane SF, a subgenre whose rules it otherwise follows with impressive fidelity. Finally, it imparts that classic sense of wonder, marveling at humanity’s potential and the courage that drives our endeavors. This is a work of compassion, humor, and keen insight. Its simple staging should transport easily; with any luck (and extra funding), Spaceman will visit small venues and theater festivals around the US. If it should come to your city, see it.

Aaron Grunfeld lives in New York City.

Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway)

Above, Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway); below, Molly and the set of Spaceman

Read This
recently read and recommended by Richard Kellogg

The Answer by Philip Wylie

Philip Gordon Wylie (1902–1971) was one of those rare writers who was comfortable writing about a wide variety of topics. From the 1930s until his death in Miami in 1971, Wylie produced hundreds of novels, short stories, magazine articles, and philosophical essays. He excelled at writing mysteries, romances, science fiction, and exciting tales of high adventure. During his lengthy literary career, Wylie ranked among the wealthiest and most prolific authors in America.

Philip Wylie is best remembered today for his achievements in the world of science fiction—Gladiator, an inspiration for Superman, Doc Savage, and other superheroes; When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934) (with Edwin Balmer), a gripping saga about a cosmic disaster; and The Disappearance (1951), in which males and females are suddenly and mysteriously separated from each other. Toward the end of his life, Wylie penned two futuristic stories of environmental disaster. Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 appeared in 1971 and The End of the Dream (1972) was published a year after Wylie’s death. His final two books depict a dying world and a bleak future for mankind. Wylie prophesies that our environment will be destroyed by the combination of advanced technologies and corporate greed.

Even Wylie fans, however, may be unaware that this author wrote a short novella (about 15,000 words) during the Cold War which ranks among his best efforts in science fiction. The Answer (1956) appeared initially in the May 7, 1955 issue of the Saturday Evening Post and was released in hardcover the following year. Although largely overlooked today, the fantasy was lauded by such luminaries as Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, Milton Eisenhower, Carl Sandburg, and Norman Vincent Peale. Wylie had previously written about the horrific consequences of nuclear war in Tomorrow! (1954). The Answer helped to further establish his reputation as “the oracle of the atomic age.”

The main character in The Answer is Major General Marcus Scott of the Eighth Air Force. He is stationed aboard the ship Ticonderoga to monitor American H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Scott is a brilliant West Point graduate who has a literary bent and likes to read Thoreau.

The bomb is dropped on the target by a B-111 in Operation Bugaboo of Test Series Avalanche. The mission appears to be a success but General Scott is informed that the blast may have caused a casualty on nearby Tempest Island.

Upon arriving on the island by helicopter, Scott is horrified to discover that the “casualty” appears to be a beautiful angel. The body had been found by Reverend Sims, a missionary on the island, and his son, Ted. The Reverend Sims, in a state of hysteria, asserts that the corpse is that of Gabriel, the angel of the Lord. Sims is convinced that the atomic testing will bring about the end of the world.

Young Ted actually witnessed the angel’s fall to earth. The boy reports that before its death the angel was crying and saying, “I was a little too late.”

General Marcus Scott, fearing universal panic will result from this tragic event, contacts the president of the United States. Arrangements are made to fly the angel’s body to Washington aboard a B-111 aircraft. However, the plane never reaches San Francisco and is presumed to have crashed into the ocean.

Shortly after that bizarre episode at Tempest Island, the Russians test their own nuclear devices in the wilds of northern Siberia. After one of the bombs detonates, a rural peasant discovers the remains of an angel near the target area. Russian soldiers immediately shoot the peasant, and the Russian premier is summoned from Moscow to inspect the angel. The Russian leader is terrified that public knowledge of the angel could inspire a religious revival and lead to the end of communism. Accordingly, he orders that the angel’s body be destroyed by attaching it to the next bomb scheduled for testing.

The story reaches a stunning conclusion when General Scott returns to Tempest Island at Christmas to prepare for additional atomic tests. He encounters Ted Sims, the son of the clergyman, and learns that Ted’s father has gone insane. The mission school on the island will soon be closed. Ted finally admits to the general that the angel was delivering a small golden book to the earth when it was knocked out of the sky by the bomb blast. The boy had concealed the book under a rock with plans to later retrieve and sell it.

Ted agrees to take the general to the spot where he had hidden the precious book. The book contains only one message written over and over again in many languages. The message reads simply “Love one another.”

According to Truman Keefer’s 1977 Twayne volume on Wylie, the inspiration for The Answer came suddenly to Wylie while on a visit to Colorado in 1954. He was fascinated by the premise that an atomic explosion could actually blow an angel right out of the sky. Would the destruction of an angel cause the superpowers to suspend their nuclear arms race? In a state of excitement, Wylie returned to his summer home in Rushford, New York, and wrote the entire story in only two days.

It is somewhat ironic and counterintuitive that Philip Wylie chose to write a powerful fable about the existence of angels. After all, he was the iconoclastic social critic who attacked the churches and questioned religious dogma in books such as Generation of Vipers (1942). Wylie was never considered to be a friend of religious institutions.

However, it may be relevant to note that Philip’s father, Reverend Edmund Wylie, was a prominent Presbyterian minister and a staunch prohibitionist. Philip, whose beloved mother, Edna, died when he was only five, found his father to be cold and distant toward his children. Even though Philip was estranged from his father and his father’s church for much of his adult life, all those early years of church attendance and Bible reading must have made some impact on his belief system. In The Answer, he considers the possibility of angels appearing on earth and stresses the role of spiritual values in reducing the risk of nuclear war.

In sum, The Answer is a one of Philip Wylie’s most eloquent works of speculative fiction. He points out that technology by itself cannot resolve all human problems. Scientific advances—especially in military weaponry—can go terribly wrong when humans take action without using such basic emotions as tolerance, compassion, and love. The best solution to resolve conflicts is quite obvious: “Love one another.”

Philcon, November 2012, Cherry Hill, New Jersey

Gardner R. Dozois

Lobby, the morning after

Lobby, the night before

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

“Christmas,” said Doctor Drinkwater as his red-cheeked face sped smoothly toward Smoky’s, “is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn’t seem to succeed the days it follows, if you see what I mean.” . . .

“I mean,” Doctor Drinkwater said, reappearing beside him, “that every Christmas seems to follow immediately after the last one; all the months that came between don’t figure in. Christmases succeed each other, not the falls they follow.”

—John Crowley, Little, Big

This has been quite a year, he said with some substantial understatement. I am writing this less than a week after the Newtown massacre, the fifth mass shooting in the US in the last six months. Two months ago, a late-season category 1 hurricane collided with an early winter storm at spring tide and did an estimated $100 billion in damage to New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut; entire towns along the ocean shore were drowned, or burnt, or left empty for months. The American government is on the verge of implementing austerity through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, racing to copy the second-stage recession that is busily destroying the entire social safety net of the United Kingdom.

I have long felt that one of the underdiscussed reasons that “science fiction has lost the future” is that the biggest problems facing the world—in the west, in the emerging economies of China and India, in Africa and South America—are political, not technological or scientific. This is not to say that scientific discovery and technological advances don’t have roles in solving the problems, but that discovery and advance can’t change the world in isolation from the political structures of the world.

The creators of science fiction are not, generally speaking, any more politically savvy than the average person. For every [feel free to insert a name here—oh, what the hell, let’s say Bruce Sterling again] Bruce Sterling, trying to grapple with the simultaneous rise in global temperature and advent of 3-D printing, there’s a gold-bug arguing that fiat currency is the ultimate cause of all mankind’s woes. If science fiction is going to continue to play a role in the world of ideas, it has to get a lot smarter about the interplay between scientific and technological change and the processes by which change spreads throughout the world, and what forces promote and retard those changes.

Well. Just had to get that off my chest.

You might not be able to tell, but I’m quite a sentimentalist about Christmas. I have various rituals (mostly revolving around music) and I’m a sucker for Santa Claus, the great secular god of good for goodness’ sake whose day we celebrate. I love the lights—I live in neighborhood where holiday decoration is an open sport. The shopping I can do without; it’s one of my points of pride that I never buy anything other than lunch on Black Friday. But I do buy gifts for my nearest and dearest and for anyone for whom the mood strikes. Christmas, the end of the cycle, is the pleasant shutting down of the inevitably overwrought year.

And then immediately after comes the Big Reset, the accident of the calendar which still encourages us, liberates us, to begin again.

Santa bless us, every one!

So, onward.

Bookkeeping matter: If you had a subscription to NYRSF through either the IAFA or SFRA and haven’t received your issues in a while, please let me know at kjm@panix.com. We know that there are still a fair number of former subscribers who haven’t migrated to Weightless Books.

Hey, have I mentioned recently that we have nearly every print issue of NYRSF still available? Check out the index and drop me a line and let’s make a deal.

On that note, have a good one. See you in the new year. Stay warm and dry and above all, don’t get killed.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

Table of Contents

- Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers

- The Politics of Roadside Picnic

- God and Tesseracts: Christian Love in L’Engle’s Time Quartet

- Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit

- The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

- New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws

- Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel

- Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens

- Read This

- Philcon, November 2012, Cherry Hill, New Jersey

- The Hopes and Fears of All the Years