Saturday Supplemental: A Brief History of Star Wars

Well, the time has come at last. I’ve said before that there is a trinity of franchises that set the style for popular science fiction today. First, in 1963, there was Doctor Who. In 1966 came Star Trek. And in 1977…

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Star Wars, now known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, was the brainchild of special effects wizard George Lucas. He made it as an homage to pulp sci-fi of his childhood, and it was a classic revisitation of the Hero’s Journey, arguably the oldest trope in existence.

Of the three great franchises I’ve done the history of, Star Wars is probably the one whose behind-the-scenes history I know the least. That said, I’ve gleaned a certain amount of lore from my parents, who remember seeing them when they first came out.

Star Wars’ saga of the Skywalker family’s quest to master the ways of the mystical Force that permeates the the galaxy and overthrow the evil Galactic Empire and its ruler Palpatine is a perfect illustration of the idea that there’s no such thing as an original story, only fresh versions of old ones. The Hero’s Journey is so basic, and yet in the cladding of Star Wars became one of the biggest deals in pop culture in the last half-century.

If you have infinite time to waste, you can check out the fascinating ‘History of Hollywood‘ series of articles on the TV Tropes wiki. From that, the Star Wars movies were one of the cutting-edge contributors to the concept of the blockbuster film, along with the work of Lucas’ friend Steven Spielberg of the same period. It was a massive hit for all ages (per that wiki, family entertainment had been the exclusive preserve of Disney before then) that seemed to come completely out of nowhere.

Probably the most talked about innovation of the Star Wars movies is in the area of special effects. In space movies prior to this, you moved a model spaceship across a background in a way that made it very obvious that they were subject to Earth gravity and made of plywood – see the old Doctor Who series. Lucas was the first one to keep the model in place and move the camera, resulting in much smoother motion. This innovation was the launching pad for one of Lucas’ many companies, Industrial Light and Magic, still the name in special effects. Only Weta Workshop has, to my knowledge, approached it in prestige since.

Star Wars was and remains a visual feast, from the locations, to the ships, to the aliens, to the action. It runs on raw emotions of exhiliration, awe and suspense. For the more intellectual viewer, it was rife with callbacks to classics like Flash Gordon and echoes of things like samurai legends. Thematically, it’s so universal that people all over the world have gotten into it.

Actually, despite its standing in pop culture and in relation to Doctor Who or Star Trek, there’s an argument to be made that Star Wars isn’t actually science fiction, but like Saga, is fantasy that just happens to take place in outer space. Science fiction is sometimes defined as being about what might happen, but Star Wars is clearly in another galaxy far, far away. That said, the aesthetic, if not the concept, had a big impact on science fiction from that day forward.

The 1977 epic was followed up with the Empire Strikes Back, a significant change in tone that included one of the most famous twists in movie history and, unusually, a situation where the bad guys kind of win.

Return of the Jedi rounded out the trilogy with a resolution of the threads laid in the previous movie and massive all-round epic conclusion that would stand the test of time for twenty years.

It must be said that all of this took a lot out of Lucas, and he defied a lot of convention in doing it, becoming a free agent auteur in the process.

Star Wars was also a pioneer of another, arguably less awesome area: merchandising. Star Wars doesn’t just make money from ticket sales, or video and DVD sales. It spun itself out into a huge market of collectibles like models, toys, posters and so on.

In addition, Star Wars has (or had, at least) something unique in its time: the Expanded Universe. With an entire galaxy to play in, the franchise ballooned into spinoff books and comics, covering the events after Return of the Jedi, before A New Hope, and spaces between, and following the exploits of our heroes and even the most briefly-glimpsed side characters.

This is what set Star Wars apart, I think, from Trek fandom or Whovianism: more than the other two, being a Star Wars fan became a lifestyle unto itself. Star Trek licensed materials were never as cohesive or interconnected, and Star Trek merchandise, in my experience, is harder to find and a lot more downmarket. Doctor Who is moving more in the Star Wars direction since the 2005 reboot, but it has a lot of catching up to do. Besides which, Star Wars, similarly to Warhammer 40K which came after, is a universe so big you can just about live in it full-time, and it’s an ideal breeding ground for Ensemble Darkhorse-type characters like Boba Fett.

It was something only possible because Lucas, having broken away from the Hollywood establishment, had pretty much total oversight of the franchise. In contrast, Gene Roddenberry, for better and worse, was still answerable to a studio. Until the sale to Disney, you could depend on one guy signing off on every little thing.

Which, it must be said, did backfire in numerous ways. Personally, I could never see myself getting into the EU because what little I gleaned always came across as overstuffed. Whether that’s fair or not I don’t know, but what I do know is that after a while Lucas’ creative monopoly started to show its drawbacks.

The most obvious one, and the one even Lucas himself has been known to joke about, is that Star Wars dialogue is as campy as it comes. Everybody gave him hell for that, from Harrison Ford to Sir Alec Guinness, and it’s been a part of the franchise from the word go. Coupled with this is the way he gives characters names that either sound like the babblings of toddlers, or that are hit-you-over-the-head goofy sounding, like the obviously sinister pseudonyms used by Sith or (and this is the one that makes me want to throw something at the screen every time) the portly X-Wing pilot in Episode IV named ‘Porkins.’ The Force Awakens is, for some reason, continuing this tradition in the person of Supreme Leader Snoke.

Before I go on, I should make this clear as it is a point on which I might diverge from a lot of readers. I watch campy franchises like this in spite of their cheesiness, not because of it. I will never understand the logic of watching something to enjoy its flaws. For me, camp is sometimes an historical relic that is acceptable in that context, like the original Star Wars, or something I tolerate because the story is worthwhile anyway, as in the case of something like Tomorrowland. It’s why I never watch things like the Family Guy Star Wars parody (well, that and a general dislike for Seth MacFarlane) or, on the Trek front, Galaxy Quest, because the conversation is going to be them saying, “Hey! Star Wars did something stupid and cheesy!” And me replying, “Yes, I know. Now will you shut up, I’m trying to enjoy it over here!”

Which is why, like a lot of people, my favourite Star Wars movie was Empire Strikes Back, because Lucas merely took general charge of the production and left the dialogue and other fine details up to colleagues. Didn’t improve the Imperial Stormtrooper’s aim much though.

Star Wars was ambitious in having a saga across multiple movies – grabbing us early on by inexplicably calling his first movie “Episode IV” – but it’s clear that Lucas was playing things a little more seat-of-the-trousers than he might have wished us to believe. I particularly remember watching Empire Strikes Back with my Dad as a kid. In one scene Leia kisses Luke – mainly just to tick Han off – and my Dad remarked, “She’s gonna to feel funny about that later.” Leia also discusses in Return of the Jedi what little she remembers of her birth mother, but Padme dies in childbirth in Revenge of the Sith. And there are little early oddities like Vader shouting at Leia in Episode IV, whereas, ever after, his calm stoicism is one of his best assets as a villain.

Another thing Dad pointed out to me over the years is that oftentimes Lucas couldn’t seem to make up his mind who his target audience was. The violence and crises of the movies are pretty mature stuff – I remember being quite shocked as a child by how many of the good guys get shot down in Episode IV. And it was many years before I could get through Return of the Jedi because despite the cute kid-friendly Ewoks this movie also contained the Emperor himself – who I will remind you, looked like this:

Bit much for a seven-year-old to take, really.

Which brings me neatly to the Prequel Triology. I’m probably the oldest generation for whom this was a part of my growing up: the new trilogy of Episodes I, II, and III, beginning in 1999 with the Phantom Menace. This trilogy follows the rise of Anakin Skywalker through the Jedi ranks and his eventually succumbing to the Dark Side and becoming Darth Vader. And, at this point, you will be hard pressed to find anyone over the age of twelve willing to defend it.

Lucas was back in the driver’s seat for this one, as he had been for Return of the Jedi, and unfortunately, due in part, seemingly, to tribulations in his private life, his worst bad habits seemed to get the best of him.

Now, there are legions of articles, comment threads and videos discussing the shortcomings of the Prequel trilogy. In general, another of Star Wars’ dubious distinctions is being one of the first franchises to exhibit a voracious yet unpleasable fan community. If you can stand his interminable videos and obnoxious voice, then the YouTube critic Confused Matthew probably does as thorough a job as anyone of dissecting them.

Among the most common ones were the sloppy and vague background to the conflict – taxation of trade routes, etc. – making it seem arbitrary and hollow; making one’s Jedi potential based more on a blood test than on the content of your character; a plot that barrels ahead leaving hole after hole in its wake; a lot of prophecy and Chosen One talk in a franchise that has never used it; accusations of racist stereotyping; enemies that flip-flop between being funny and scary and failing at both; and of course the most ham-fisted love story ever seen on screen.

That’s not to say that they had no virtues: Episodes I and II in particular had great action, visuals, music and casting, and the fight at the end of Episode I was a masterpiece of choreography. But then Anakin took centre stage and it went downhill fast.

Anakin Skywalker is so arrogant and abrasive you’d think he’d already fallen to the Dark Side! His come-ons to Padme in Attack of the Clones were my younger self’s master class in how never to treat a woman, and he regarded the world through what I’ve since dubbed the ‘Anakin Skywalker Serial Killer Glare’ (see also Jace in City of Bones and the teen big brother in Jurassic World). Beyond that, Lucas’ dialogue got worse and worse, and the battle droids and Jar-Jar stood for Star Wars’ inability to keep a consistent tone.

What always gets me about the Prequel Trilogy is that it contains a terrific story about Anakin’s downfall, but that Lucas doesn’t appear to have noticed it. A lot of aspects of the story that exist as plot holes would have worked if strung together differently. I thought, during Attack of the Clones, Anakin was going to be given legitimate reasons to be disillusioned by the Jedi; the fact that the ‘guardians of peace and justice’ do nothing about slavery in Episode I, their callous attitude toward Anakin’s mother in Episode II, the inflexibility of their code, and the implication in Episode II that there were corrupt Jedi masters involved in instigating the Clone Wars, were, I assumed, setting up the Jedi Order as being in decline, and Anakin’s frustration turning him to a side that promised decisive action. The Seperatist movement could have been a group with legitimate grivances that got coopted by evil. Instead, we get this.

Part of the problem is that worldbuilding in Star Wars has always been a little slapdash: the sheer size and openness of the universe also results in it being quite vague. Sometimes this helps imply a larger world, like C-3PO’s brief line in Episode IV about the Spice Mines of Kessel. But sometimes it undermines the story: at no point does anyone explain in the Prequels what a Sith is or what they want revenge for. What the Seperatists want, their ‘demands’ as Count Dooku puts it, are never shown. The specific remit of the Jedi is never clarified. Most frustrating of all, as I said in my article on the Force Awakens, the Force is never given clear rules as to what you should be able to do with it, at what stage of your training, so that characters tend to find new powers and forget old ones when the plot requires it.

George Lucas’ talents lie squarely in high concept, special effects and production oversight. Despite everything above, though, I don’t mean that as damning with faint praise. Lucas is really, really good at those things. Despite what he makes his characters say sometimes, I’ll also credit that his casting is never less than spectacular. His first ‘Special Edition’ of the first trilogy also made the most of new developments – and more money – and for all the subsquent remasters have contained some questionable decisions, you have to respect Lucas for going outside the system and trying new things. Pity more people in Hollywood don’t try that.

Star Wars is flawed – badly flawed – in myriad little ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s a write-off. It still stirs real emotions in its fans, and taps into very basic elements of storytelling that speak to anyone and everyone. It didn’t become the massive phenomenon it is because of hipster-ironic snarking at its expense. The trappings are strikingly original, the action is exhilirating, and it will be a dark time for the Rebel Alliance indeed when composer John Williams is no longer around to write the stunning scores for these movies. When the hamminess does work, it really works, too – there’s just something about the phrase “you are in command now, Admiral Piett!” The Force Awakens is showing some signs of upping Star Wars’ game in the diversity department – in which it was already fairly strong – and shaking off a bit of the camp, while still retaining its Rule of Cool ethos. As enthralling as Star Trek, as timeless as the Lord of the Rings, and almost as quotable as the Princess Bride, it well deserves its place as one of the cornerstones of geek culture.

May the Force be with you.

 

Cosmos: the Journey Continues

A while back, I did a roundup of some of the great documentary programs. The greatest, for my money, was and remains Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: a Personal Journey.

It represented a vast, scientifically accurate and humanistic and empowering vision of science, history and the Universe. It was presented by Carl Sagan with a kind of serene pleasure that was both childlike and oddly transcendent. As I said before, its scientific accuracy has held together incredibly well considering how old it is. Its visual effects have that old artistry I’ve always liked, with the talents of astronomy artists like Rick Sternbach and Adolf Schaller behind it, and the music of Vangelis and many Classical and Electronic artists besides.

I love the classics like this one, and so my first reaction to hearing there was to be a remake of the series was one of dread. I thought remaking Cosmos would be like remaking the Lord of the Rings or Forbidden Planet or Lawrence of Arabia: they pretty much nailed it the first time.

What made it even worse was that I learned that one of the motive forces behind this new Cosmos was Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad, and all-too-recently Academy Awards host – a man who combines juvenile vulgarity, shameless misogyny and a terminally boneheaded sense of humour into a toxic swill that always has me staggering away to throw up somewhere.

Admittedly, there was some good news: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, host of this new Cosmos, distinguished astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, is a well-respected public science educator, and advisor to presidents on scientific matters though one wonders as to the point when the president in question was George W. Bush. He is also a huge fan and – although I didn’t know this until I watched the new Cosmos‘ first episode – protege and friend of Big Carl himself. Tyson is well-known as articulate, passionate in a excited-little-kid kind of way, and shares Carl’s understated but unyielding adherence to science and disdain for superstition.

So, he’s a worthy successor to Sagan’s legacy. And as I sat down to watch the first episode at last, I was relieved to see that MacFarlane was credited as ‘executive producer,’ which could mean he could be kept at a safe distance. Equally, the fact that Anne Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow and banner-carrier of his legacy also had the executive producer credit meant that the project had, at least, her blessing.

On with the show, then. It didn’t take long before my fears began to ease. The first episode of Cosmos II is much like the first episode of the original: a guided tour of the universe to put humankind and the Earth in their proper context in time and space. It revives two of the standbys of Cosmos I: the Cosmic Calendar – condensing the history of the Universe into one year to provide perspective – and the Ship of the Imagination, a framing device Carl used to allow the viewer to ‘visit’ various cosmic phenomena. The ship looks good. A bit underwhelming but sleek and understated.

And the CGI, in the Calendar and elsewhere looks…good. Cosmos I didn’t have the option, and used bluescreen backgrounds of models and matte paintings. I like that old style of practical effects, and Cosmos II uses high-quality CGI that looks real and rich and artistic, which is still altogether too rare for my taste. Dr. Tyson also does a better-than-average job of acting like he’s really there.

In addition, Cosmos II does something neat with regards to dramatizing historical events and characters. Cosmos I used live actors in small vignettes to introduce the viewers to characters like Kepler and Tycho Brahe. II’s first episode relates the tragedy of Giordano Bruno using clips of a stylized animation. It looks like the same style used to good effect in the History Channel series Ancients Behaving Badly and it looks nice – expressive and neat to watch.

It’s not perfect; being broadcast on network TV instead of PBS means the episodes are shorter than the original Cosmos, and there are moments where it seemed like they were trying to cram too much info into what was essentially a guided tour of the Universe – this also makes me suspect there are going to be fewer episodes. And what the point really was of using Bruno as the ‘martyr’ of early science instead of Galileo is unclear to me. Dr. Tyson therefore sometimes seems as if his monologue is getting digressive and too wordy. That said, you could have said something similar about the first episode of the original Cosmos. Carl spent a lot of it trying too hard to sound poetical.

The other thing I was worried about was that this was going to be a ‘fan’s’ version of Cosmos, the same way the new Star Trek or Doctor Who look beside their predecessors. But Tyson gets it right. His first episode begins and ends on the same seaside cliff where Carl Sagan began and ended Cosmos decades ago, and he doesn’t let you forget that the original Cosmos was great and important, and that Sagan himself was one of the giants of popular science. Tyson’s recollection of meeting Sagan actually made me tear up a little, as did the genuine love for science you can hear from him as he speaks. He also uses many of the same turns of phrase that Sagan used – the most classic being ‘we are all made of star stuff’ – and not trying to invent new ones for their own sake.

What we have here isn’t a remake so much as a successor to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the right host, and with Sagan’s widow Anne Druyan, Trek veteran Brannon Braga and composer Alan Silvestri behind him, this promises to be a wonderful new incarnation of that voyage. I was wary of the fact that this was going on network rather than public TV, but given the decline of educational network TV, it needs a shot in the arm, and it hasn’t compromised any of the convictions or principles of science or Sagan and Tyson’s views on the matter, as far as I can see. If anything Tyson’s a lot more clear about the dangers of superstition than Sagan was.

So, let’s go again, shall we?

 

 

Raising Steam: the Close of Discworld?

In 2010, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of forty Discworld novels, supplementary materials, and multitudinous other works, was diagnosed with Post-Cortical Atrophy, an unusual form of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Besides having come out swinging as an advocate for sufferers of dementia, his creative output has not visibly flagged.

Discworld’s great virtue is that for all its immensity, you can, with little difficulty, experience it in any order, and have several more-or-less independent casts of characters to choose from. I’ve never been able to muster the energy to tackle the continuous epics like Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire, so Discworld’s more open structure, to say nothing of its eclectic intelligence, and utter hilarity, is a very fine thing indeed.

Sir Terry has long foreseen the end of Discworld as when it reaches the point of having run out of room for more stories. And that time must neccessarily be nearly at hand. My holiday reading included the newest Discworld novel, Raising Steam, the fortieth, which, though it may not, could well serve in the office of the final Discworld novel.

In the city of Ankh-Morpork, a young up-and-comer brings a new development: a steam-powered locomotive. He seeks investors and gets Harry King, waste management tycoon, and Moist von Lipwig, the city’s Postmaster General and de facto Chairman of the Royal Bank.

As his invention spreads across the continent, interconnecting cities and beginning an economic revolution, the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, has a crisis to resolve: the dwarfish community in the mountains is threatened by a fundamentalist faction that is sabotaging the railway and semaphore networks, and murdering its workers in an attempt to start a holy war with the human/multiracial community of Ankh-Morpork who has ‘contaminated’ their traditions with modern and liberal values.

Moist must join forces with Commander Vimes of the Watch and the young engineer to use the railway on a mission to maintain international peace and keep innocent people safe.

This book is weird; it doesn’t chime with the Pratchett ambiance. Usually, a central character – be it Moist, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, Rincewind or whomever, plus their comrades – engages in a personal adventure, with attendant introspection, leading to a resolution of the personal aspect of a larger problem of magic, politics or crime.

The striking thing about Raising Steam is that it isn’t structured like that. It reads more like a political thriller. Like the later-period Honor Harrington novels (albeit far better-written) it intercuts between characters: Moist is the main point-of-view character, but his wife, Adora Belle, Commander Vimes, Lord Vetinari, William de Worde, Archchancellor Ridcully, the King of the Dwarfs (Pratchett is unusual among fantasists in that he doesn’t use Tolkien’s plural ‘dwarves’) and his confidant Gragg Bashfulson all get scenes, along with a number of minor characters often introduced just to have something horrible but instructive of the larger situation occur to them.

Moist has some character development, but his total POV time is relatively small, so that he, as well as Vimes, start as they go on.

This bears on the other odd thing about Raising Steam: for all the political goings-on and characterization to make much sense, you really need to have read, at minimum, Going Postal, Making Money – Moist’s first two books – as well as Thud! and Snuff, the two latest Vimes-and-the-City-Watch novels as well. Reading Unseen Academicals, Men-at-Arms and the Fifth Elephant wouldn’t hurt either. This isn’t usual for Discworld books: I read the Watch sub-series almost exactly backwards and had no significant trouble with it, but that wouldn’t work here.

Given that one of Pratchett’s great strengths is his vibrant and memorable characters, their deployment in a mainly action-driven story that skips over months at a time as the plot requires, it seems oddly flat in the personality department. The plot itself feels a little bit like two books smashed into each other; there’s a real sense that the plot vacillates between the special magic of history and animism the Discworld embodies with regards to the new invention (much as happened in Men-at-Arms and the Truth) on the one hand. On the other, the political landscape and the themes of progress, tradition and pluralist society that inform a lot of Watch books periodically takes over, so that neither one seems to be the main point of the story.

And while intensive plotting is a great speciality of his, this one’s exceptionally dense compared to a lot of his recent stuff. The way the character moments seem rushed or painted on the plot, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much editorial input Sir Terry had – indeed, is capable of having. For a while, the title promoted for this book was Raising Taxes, and the end of Making Money foreshadowed Moist’s next adventure being to work over the Ankh-Morpork tax service the way he’d done for the Post Office and the Bank. This, rather late change suggests that Pratchett has skipped ahead, creating this rather skimmed-over feel in the book, possibly in recognition that he’s running out of time…

To all appearances he’s still relatively healthy, though. Thus the other construct I can put upon this is that Raising Steam is intended as at least part of a conclusion. There was none of the fanfare you’d expect had Raising Steam actually been meant as the last Discworld novel. It could, however, stand as the last Ankh-Morpork novel. Granny Weatherwax, Susan Sto Helit and her grandfather Death, none of whose stories are particularly dependent on Ankh-Morpork’s setting, could yet have some more adventures in them. Possibly Rincewind could too, though he does appear very briefly in this book also.

For Ankh-Morpork and its colourful cast, this seemed like an all-in wrapup. Almost every character in the Moist and Watch novels plays some role, and his two most central characters, Moist and Vimes, join forces. Vetinari, the borderline omniscient Patrician, faces a genuine challenge to his plans. The decay of the traditional ‘medieval stasis’ of Ankh-Morpork, overseen by Sweeper the History Monk, seems to have peaked with the arrival of the trains. The political and social conflicts that have run through most of the Watch books (where geopolitical issues have the most significance) see some genuine resolution. It’s almost too tidy at the very end, which is startling given the lighthearted cynicism Sir Terry usually expresses.

On a similar note, there’s a hardness in some parts of the story which, likewise, is a little shocking from Sir Terry. Moist at one point is moved to use deadly force against the fanatics attacking the railway workers, astounding, and a little hard to accept from the nonviolent showman. All sense of absurdist comedy or humanist regard for even the most deranged enemy goes out the window at a few points in the plot and it becomes a kill-or-be-killed conflict, which is very unusual for Sir Terry to do without at least some twist or subversion. The loathsomeness of the ultra-traditional dwarfs isn’t spared. Sir Terry, like Phillip Pullman, is highly critical of religion and superstition and that forms a theme of several of his books. Maybe he’s taking the gloves off while he has the chance, but this seems uncharacteristically hardline

For worldbuilding, Raising Steam is a triumph, tying together swathes of threads from across the Discworld canon. But it is a peculiar change of the style, suggesting, to me anyway, a slightly rushed search for closure. The characters are taken for granted as being developed and are simply sent into action, in a plot much bigger in scope and timeframe than is normal; it reads a bit like a dramatized history book. If Discworld’s conclusion is at hand, this is a fine way to bring it about, but it is trying to do an awful lot all in one book. And it’s still hard to shake the sense that he’s relinquished a lot of editorial control over this one and that other hands have gotten hold of the text. Still, at the end of the day, it’s Pratchett, it’s Discworld, it’s historically and politically resonant. And to see all these characters come together is like one last get-together with old friends before saying goodbye.

I wouldn’t mind if this wasn’t goodbye quite yet, but it was one heck of an adventure…

 

Time Snatchers and Found: Teen Time Double Feature

I’ve always found it fascinating – and occasionally rather distressing – the way that a smash hit can open the market for lots of stories with similar themes. Vampire fiction had a high point in the last decade. Pity it can be traced to Twilight. CSI kicked off the modern police procedural.

A recent chance discovery at the library makes me wonder whether Doctor Who isn’t going to have a similar impact. I was poking around the young reader sections – where, let’s face it, a lot of the really good books are to be found – and discovered two novels – Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar, and Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix – both of which deal with adopted youths whose lives are affected by time travel.

Haddix’s Found is the older of the two, published 2008. Jonah is in seventh grade, dealing with the usual issues of tests, his annoying little sister and his boring parents. He isn’t particularly hung up about being adopted, apart from enduring a certain overweaning curiosity from his best pal, Chip. Except that he and Chip start receiving strange, menacing letters about their being ‘one of the Missing’ and ‘they are coming for you.’ At first sure it’s a prank, Chip’s sleuthing leads him to discover he is also adopted, which his parents, unlike Jonah’s, have kept from him.

Chilled, Jonah asks to know more about his adoption. His inquiries lead them, unexpectedly, to a threatening confrontation with an FBI agent, a disgraced airline worker and a mysterious janitor who seems to appear at the strangest moments and do impossible things. Through further sleuthing, it is revealed that Jonah, Chip, and dozens of other babies adopted in the area were plucked from the past by a decadent adoption agency of the future, got stuck in the Twenty-First Century and are the objects of a contest between the forces that want to exploit the past and those who want to mend it – at any cost.

Time Snatchers, published 2012, features Caleb. Living in 2061 New York, he is a thirteen-year-old Snatcher. He is one of several adoptees of Uncle, the eccentric and sinister mastermind who holds a time travel technology and sends his ‘children’ into the past to carry out contract thefts. Just as Caleb begins to long for a real family and life out from under the manipulative thumb of Uncle and the bullying of his rival Frank, he’s horrified that Uncle intends to start recruiting more, younger snatchers from throughout history, whether they want it or not. His partner Abbie and he begin a game of cat-and-mouse through history to save Uncle’s victims.

Despite the common theme of adoption gone wrong, neither book seeks to bash adoption. Uncle in Snatchers is clearly exploiting the institution, and it’s implied that the US government, including Social Services, has decayed badly by 2061.

In Found, Jonah is typically angsty for his age, but at no point is it suggested that there’s anything false about his family life. Indeed, Haddix brings across very well that under his adolescent frustration with his parents’ touchy-feely fussing and his sister’s snark, Jonah loves them very deeply, and they him. The story does seem to object to not telling your kid they’re adopted, though. All the same, Chip’s increasingly conflicted home life seems to have more to do with his parents being under-involved and/or in denial than the simple fact of his adoption.

Likewise, neither book treats blood relations as being the ideal to aspire to. Caleb doesn’t have any kind of family, and is delighted to be accepted into the home of one of Uncle’s abductees. He just wants somewhere where he belongs and is genuinely loved, regardless of his relationship to the people in that place. Jonah and the other Missing were all stolen from other points in history and adopted by various American families, but when a kind of ‘temporal conservationist’ movement tries to take them back to their original points in history and their blood families, it’s made clear that for many that isn’t going to be the better option (and may in fact be a death sentence for some) and Jonah stands firmly against being taken from who he sees as his real family.

Found seems like it has more to say of a political nature. The two sides of the conflict over the adoptees are Interchronological Rescue, which brings children of the distant past forward in time, de-aging them and giving them a new start in (from ours and Jonah’s point of view) the future, and what appears to be an activist or oversight group trying to stop the damage to time this is causing. All this seems allegorical of the scandals that come up in international adoptions and the trafficking and corruption that can run through them. In Time Snatchers, it’s mostly just a framing device for Caleb’s quest for justice, freedom and love.

Being both time travel stories, the matter of how they treat Time and the effects of moving through it are a big part of their effectiveness, and on this score Found has the better part of the argument, thus far. It is mentioned that Uncle in Snatchers has to be careful about selecting his new recruits, carefully checking their family trees to minimize changing history. But it all seems a bit out there. The amount of detail he seems to have on the geneaology of ordinary people from centuries ago is, to someone with a background in history at least, a bit of a stretch. Caleb creates a big scene in the middle of the 1967 Montreal Expo during a mission, and this doesn’t seem to have any impact on history at all, undermining the drama. Indeed, the rules of the ‘snatches’ are mostly things like how to dress, how to act, and not being seen. If your profession is theft, it hardly takes time travel to make that good practice. Even the phenomenon of ‘time fog’ after spending too long out of your own time is suddenly waved off partway through. The only aspect with much time (ha, ha) spent on it is the different cultures experienced on each trip, which is indeed fascinating. Even so, predictions for the year 2061 seem a bit generic and unimaginitive, but then our hero isn’t a politico, so he simply might not be noticing.

In Found, time travel forms a much more active plot element. Some of the rules, like the de-aging effect of time travel only affecting children, are a bit arbitrary. Others are vague. Only at the cliffhanger ending to we get to learn about the dangers of time paradoxes and causality ripples, and damage to time that restricts when you can travel to. These are not clearly defined, but they cast a mystique and sense of danger over the proceedings. Crucially, where Time Snatchers builds a story based on people who, historically speaking, won’t be missed, Found gains more punch by building a time continuum in which nobody is unimportant.

Jonah in Found definitely seems more like a person I can understand; the author captures the psychology of a kid his age deftly. Caleb in Time Snatchers’ journey is a little more idealistic, more generic. He’s still a good person in a bad situation, with issues and horomones, but Jonah seems a little deeper. Of course, Caleb’s life and background are far more unusual than Jonah’s, but he seems oddly self-aware, commenting on the workings of his own mind in a way that takes me out of the moment on occasion.

I couldn’t stop thinking as I read that the Doctor would come down on either Uncle or Interchronological Rescue like a ton of bricks. Funnily, Time Snatchers includes a memory-wiping drug suspiciously similar to the Retcon drug in Torchwood. Both books tell some fascinating stories of suspense, adventure and coming of age. Both have well-written if slightly generic everyman main characters. Time Snatchers subverts my hated love triangle by making the leading lady a cunning, even devious but still steadfast good guy. Found goes more for the Harry Potter dynamic of a boy and his best pal and his sister – albeit more literally than in Hermione’s case.

Found treats Time as a force of the Universe, whereas Snatchers defines it mainly by the contents of history books. The psychology of the characters is very believable and the stakes are genuinely disturbing. It wouldn’t take much for Found to become a horror novel. Although a very dark thread moves through the premise, Time Snatchers is a little more fantastical, archetypal and smaller in scope. It does have the slightly jingoistic upside of being written by a Canadian, and a title that actually sounds like a title, as opposed to a single, rather ordinary word.

Having expected to choose between them, I think I’ll try to read both books’ sequels – Ungar’s Time Trapped and Haddix’s Sent, to start – while Haddix’s is a bit higher grade, both are good stories with imagination, good writing, and that element of darkness that only the really good kids’ books have.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

 

Saturday Supplemental: A Brief History of Star Trek

Since I put my cards on the table in my review of J.J. Abrams so-called Star Trek film Into Darkness, I feel that, as a fan, I should explain for those only broadly aware of Star Trek where I’m coming from and how we got here.

Star Trek is so ingrained into the popular consciousness that you can ask someone to draw the starship Enterprise and they probably can even if they can‘t remember ever seeing it. Along with Star Wars and Doctor Who, it is one of the benchmarks of popular science fiction and has a storied history behind it.

In the mid-1960s air force and LAPD veteran Gene Roddenberry presented Paramount with a new, idealistic vision of the future, reflecting both the sky’s-the-limit spirit of its time and the grand adventure of Flash Gordon or Horatio Hornblower.

And so was born Star Trek, which, while the first series had its intended ‘five year mission’ cut short by executives, proved a late bloomer in popularity and has since swelled into a franchise incorporating twelves films, five television shows, and a vast range of paperback novels, comics and video games.

The shows that form the core of it proceeded thusly:

Star Trek: aka Star Trek: the Original Series or TOS was the first, obviously. In the 23rd Century, the Enterprise is a starship of the United Federation of Planets, dedicated to exploring unknown worlds, making contact and forming good relations with alien civilizations. Captain Kirk, Science Officer Spock and Doctor McCoy form the core of a diverse team who tackle the dangers and wonders of these discoveries. Often, they play the tense games of a Cold War against the militaristic Klingon Empire.

Star Trek: the Next Generation, or TNG skips ahead 70 years to a new crew on a successor Enterprise, led by Captain Jean-Luc Picard to continue the mission of their predecessors, confronting personal conflicts and political puzzles, as well as new tensions with the sly Romulans and fascistic Cardassians, while far beyond the Federation, the implacable Borg Collective threatens sentient life as they know it.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or DS9 overlaps with TNG, taking us to a remote outpost, the space station Deep Space Nine, where world-weary widower Commander Ben Sisko leads the Federation efforts to help reconstruction and integration of the people of Bajor, lately freed from oppressive Cardassian occupation. Selected by the alien energy beings who are as gods to the Bajorans to be their emissary, Sisko pulls together dispirate elements of Bajor, the Federation and the station community to set an example for cooperation, even as a shadowy new power, the Dominion, creeps into their affairs and threatens to make Bajor the centre of a war that will engulf the galaxy.

Star Trek: Voyager features Captain Katherine Janeway of the starship Voyager and her ad hoc crew. Sent in pursuit of a group of anti-Federation colonists, both groups are swept up and carried to the Delta Quadrant, seventy years distance from home. Pooling their resources under Janeway’s leadership, both crews begin to integrate and begin the journey home. As they go, they make new friends, new enemies, fight the Borg on their own turf and challenge the limits of Starfleet ideals as they face these obstacles alone.

Star Trek: Enterprise is a prequel series. Captain Jonathan Archer leads the first crew to go on a mission of exploration. As they do so, they learn the basic principles which will someday drive the Federation, learn to fight and to be at peace as needed, and become the wild cards in a fair few interstellar conspiracies.

The great thing about Star Trek in most every form it took was that it embodied a progressive and positive vision of humanity and its future. This is most obvious in the Original Series, where, among other things you have a crew of senior officers including a Russian, an Asian and a black woman. This seems quaint now but at the time their mere presence was revolutionary. Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, was so revolutionary that, when expressing an intent to leave the show, was talked out of doing so by none other than Martin Luther King! Her example inspired Whoopi Goldberg (who famously screamed to her entire household ‘come quick! There’s a black lady on TV and she ain’t no maid!’) to enter acting. Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, likewise took inspiration from Uhura.

TOS and TNG both used analogies for current poltical issues like the Cold War, displaced peoples, cultural meddling and personal liberties. These dilemmas were almost never a case of shooting the bad guy. Wits, not weapons, were the choice tools for many situations. When fighting did take place, it was usually when no other choice was at hand (although it might explain why Trek battles often seemed dreadfully stilted). TOS episodes like “Let That Be Your Last Battelfield,” “Errand of Mercy,” “Day of the Dove” and “Balance of Terror” are among my favourites and all cover different angles on this.

The sad thing about TOS, alas, is that all anybody remembers about it is stuff like this:

TOS was born in the midst of 60’s camp culture, and a lot of the ways it tells its stories arouse contempt today. A principle gripe I, my fellow WordPress blogger Lady Geek Girl, and others hold is that Abrams’ films seem to be building on the pop-culture stereotype of Star Trek, not on actual Star Trek.

Enjoy or ignore the camp as you please, but you can reliably find the point they were trying to make about peaceful coexistence, futility of conflict, or any of the other Star Trek morals. From a historical perspective, it’s now a fascinating look into the culture and ideas of the period it came from. Crucially, the friendship dynamic of Kirk, Spock and McCoy carried the series through deep analysis of what being human meant, a dynamic recreated time and again in later series.

TNG brought things up into the 80s-90s and continued the tradition of challenging and cautionary tales, interspersed with rollicking adventure and comic relief. The concept of the Prime Directive of non-interference was brought to the fore and used to create a moral dilemma that resonates with a globalizing world to this day. Whereas TOS lived in a black and white age and was determined to paint some grey on it, TNG explored various shades of grey in a post-Cold War period.

Up to this point, Star Trek was doing well but was in definite danger of stagnation. The series’ episodic structure limited character development and forced a certain shallowness on the setting (although this improved later in TNG). The writing had evolved a lot by the time TNG ended in 1994 but could still be a little pretentious and certain plot-convenience fallbacks like the holodecks were beginning to get a little too frequent. Still, it did introduce Q and the Borg as recurring villains, which drove some of the most memorable stories like “Best of Both Worlds,” and the performances of a well-balanced cast led by Patrick Stewart secured its widely-held status as the best Star Trek series.

Deep Space Nine represented a change toward a darker and more cynical spirit. It started out with a TNG leaning toward political intrigue, and put a twist on by keeping the show in one place and making an ongoing arc. By going out to the Federation’s frontiers, it started deconstructing a lot of the utopian vision of Star Trek, both showing that there must always be exceptions and compromises, and suggesting that the Federation has gotten a bit cocky about its own wonderfulness. DS9’s female characters also achieved new heights. TOS and TNG had tried at that, but a certain chauvinism still haunted them. The fact that Counsellor Troi was arguably TNG’s least-well written (and, for no apparent reason, least-dressed) main character reflects this. While TNG is often regarded as the best series, Deep Space Nine produced a number of Star Trek’s best-regarded episodes.

Its main failing was that its writers, keen to give their show the cutting-edge morals of its predecessors, started tackling religion seriously for the first time, but often muddled it a bit, due to either timidity or ignorance. Still, it had shown the best character development, the dialogue became more naturalistic and it brought in a Captain of colour to Star Trek’s roster.

Voyager had a lot of potential to challenge Federation ideals further, throwing a Starfleet crew and a group of rebels together in a near-hopeless situation. It was a series with a million good ideas but a return to episodic format and inconsistent writing kneecapped it almost immediately. When Voyager was good, it was very good, but it wasn’t good often enough. Characterization was either hopelessly static or all over the place. The introduction of the first female captain was undercut because the writers couldn’t get straight what kind of person she was. Her actress, Kate Mulgrew, has remarked that she often thought Janeway seemed to be mentally unstable. Several other actors in the series also voiced dissatisfaction with the writing. The aliens encountered got quite bland after a while, and the Borg, once the shadowy menace from beyond, devolved into a common and easily-evaded nuisance. The introduction of Seven of Nine, a liberated Borg, represented a new exploration of the human condition in the tradition of Spock and Data, but it kept getting snarled up in the agenda of showing off the actress’s cleavage.

I didn’t stick with Enterprise for long. After four previous series it seemed very by-the-numbers; the Captain had gone back to being an all-American white guy and a few quite interesting stories early-on were outnumbered by numerous frantic attempts to recapture the glory days, goofing around or playing to the cleavage-seekers. It got worse when the second season introduced a massive attack on Earth and our heroes rush off into the galaxy to seek the evildoers. This was a couple of years after the World Trade Centre was destroyed, keeping in line with the popular spirit of the times. But Star Trek is supposed to examine and even subvert the popular spirit. After an attempt to reinvent itself, Enterprise quietly passed away.

In fairness to those who thought Trek a bit tacky, some signs of rot were showing early on. Being the work of many hands, Star Trek had trouble staying consistent. In world-building details like the exact logic of the Prime Directive, the cultural minutiae of the Vulcans or Klingons, and how exactly Federation society and Starfleet protocol work, the writers couldn’t seem to make up their minds. TNG started to show the first signs of pushing morals that the story writers didn’t think through properly, or else were ham-fistedly executed. Increasing reliance on techno babble and recycled plots like holodeck and transporter malfunctions began to look pretty absurd, and there‘s only so many times you can do aliens who look exactly like humans with weird foreheads. Oh and I might add, civilian clothing in Star Trek always looks bloody ridiculous. With Enterprise they even started ignoring their own canon and coming up with events that didn’t gel with the other series.

And sadly, after a while, the commentary at the heart of Star Trek started to fizzle. The marketing image of a sci-fi fan as a sexually repressed male meant that profound stories of the human condition occupied the same space as a lot of fan service, the plots and morals started to repeat themselves to the point of meaninglessness, and TNG, DS9 and Enterprise brushed up against LGBT issues but never seemed to work up the nerve to tackle them head-on.

I stand by what I said before, that the Star Trek reboot is futile if it doesn’t maintain the franchise’s original mission statement; let me amend by saying that I think rebooting Star Trek is futile anyway. It’s not because Star Trek isn’t worth it. It’s because Star Trek is over. It’s run its course. There’s no place left to boldly go. It did great and memorable things but eventually ran out of steam. Anything it couldn’t do (or didn’t do properly) has been left to others. A lot of the potential Voyager in particular had was achieved later by shows like Farscape and Firefly.

I love Star Trek. I miss the days when an optimistic vision of the future was the going thing. But it told its stories, it made its mark. Rather than trying to resurrect it incompletely, better to remember it for everything that made it a classic and bid it a respectful farewell.

“I have been, and ever shall be your friend. Live Long, and Prosper.”

 

The Whale Road: Regret on the High Seas

I fondly remember an archaeology seminar in university wherein half the people in the class, in the course of the discussion, came out officially as Viking enthusiasts, myself included. Theirs is a faraway memory of adventure, action and life on the edge.

That being the case, the draw of a title and cover like that of the Whale Road by Robert Low was a powerful one to me. The fact that it has been praised by Bernard Cornwell, whose Saxon Stories series have set the style for Viking yarns, was a promising sign.

Hard to argue with that image!

The Whale Road features Orm, living in a village in Norway, who has recently distinguished himself by being lucky enough to slay a bear. His father Rurik has recently returned from years at sea, under his captain, Einar. Impressed by his good luck and the omens of his deed, Orm is brought to join Einar, Rurik and the other Oathsworn, who wander the sea – the Whale Road – raiding distant lands for relics sought by one of the great trading cities of the Eastern Baltic. But Orm can read Latin, and reads in some of the relics they steal signs of what they all add up to: a story that tells the location of the lost treasure horde of Atilla the Hun!

Moving through the great trading centres of Eastern Europe, the Oathsworn follow the obsessed Einar as they face competitors, strange omens and each other’s own demons and agendas on the way to find this treasure, and whatever doom it might bring with it.

Now, from a summary like that, you’d assume that it is an incredibly lively and gripping epic, and indeed I’m sure there is one in here somewhere, but it’s extremely hard to see. The writing is quite dense with prose and exotic names, to the point that it becomes hard to follow. I’m still unclear about just what happened with Orm and the bear at the beginning, and near the end, the Oathsworn are suddenly a part of a medieval Russian army besieging a rival city, and I have literally no idea how they got there or what it had to do with anything.

Characterization is weak, so that I had a great deal of difficulty at times remembering who was who. I actually forgot for long stretches what the main character’s name was and I had to look up the other names I mentioned above before I could add them to the review, and I finished this book about an hour ago.

Orm himself doesn’t have much to distinguish him; in fact, he seems to be more of an observer than anything else. He’s a bit like Ishmael in Moby Dick, but Low keeps giving him various life-defining experiences as befits an active protagonist. And then, of course, I stopped thinking about him while he focuses on everybody else, so that they didn’t have lasting impact. For a kid living in the back of Norwegian beyond, he also seems bizarrely knowledgeable about the politics of 10^th Century Europe. It reminded me of Merlin in the CrystalCave, but Merlin was living in a royal court, not a quiet village.

As an expose on the Viking era, its politics, beliefs, its material culture and its living conditions, it is quite magnificent. The set pieces and behaviour that characterize the time and place are certainly very vivid. It harkens back to a time when the world was still very big, and the exotic nature of goods from afar give it a vibrancy difficult to imagine today – which was always my favourite thing about history. Seeing into that era, particularly the bloody and gruesome options for dying and the horrific existence of exploitation experienced by women are like getting smacked in the face. However the story that runs through it is not as strong as it could be. The writing is murky, motivations unclear, the themes are vague and the ending a bit predictable.

All in all, it was something of a disappointment. Low definitely knows his history, and he cares passionately about it. I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise. I actually regret not enjoying his book more, but I feel as though he spends too much time showing off the history and not enough telling a story. Bernard Cornwell has the same virtue of research but his storytelling style is the other way around; the story is informed by all the history, but the history is secondary.

If you are interested in the Viking era, by all means have a crack at it, but Cornwell’s Saxon Stories are as well-researched and also much more fun to read.