Review - Conquerer: A Novel of Kublai Khan by Conn Iggulden

Short review: Under three different Great Khans the Mongols expand their Empire sending Hulegu into the Middle-East and Kublai into China. Then, civil war breaks out and it is Mongol against Mongol for the first time in three generations.

Haiku
Gyuk, then Mongke,
Then war with Arik-Boke
Kublai is Great Khan

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Conqueror: A Novel of Kublai Khan is the fifth and final book in Conn Iggulden's Conqueror series, picking up right where Empire of Silver left off. Just two generations after Genghis united the Mongol nation under one banner and set about conquering the world, the empire he forged is already beginning to fragment. After the death of Ogedai Khan, his son Gyuk moved quickly to consolidate power under himself, but as the novel opens, it is clear that he is probably not up to the task of ruling the vast domains of the Mongol nation. In Conqueror, the Mongol nation reaches its greatest heights which paradoxically are the very things that will destroy it. In the book, the stories of four Great Khans unfold, three revealing lessons that the Mongol nation is simply unequipped to learn, and the fourth giving the reader a glimpse of the final undoing of everything that Genghis had wrought.

The Mongols were history's ultimate wild card coming out of seemingly nowhere to establish the largest empire in history. But within just a few generations, their empire was just a bad memory,  a time of misery and suffering for their neighbors that had come and gone. And in Conqueror, by showing the Mongols at the height of their power, Iggulden illustrates why this is the case, revealing that for all their power and cruelty, the empire they established was little more than an empty shell. With nothing holding their nation together but oaths and the promise of wealth gained by conquest, the Mongols' unity was fragile at best. And lacking in any cultural gifts beyond that of the horse, the bow, and a ruthless approach to warfare, the Mongols had to borrow from those they conquered to control their empire, ceding the running of their conquests to those they had conquered. And in this regard, they are sort of like the prizefighter who has won lots of money by fighting, but then turns over the responsibility of managing that money to accountants and lawyers without any real understanding of what they are doing on his behalf. Or what he presumes is his behalf.

At the outset of the story, Gyuk, with the assistance of his mother Torogene, has planted himself at the head of the Mongol nation. But it is clear that Gyuk, trained exclusively in the direct brutality of Mongol warfare, is entirely unequipped to engage in the delicate political maneuvering required to maintain the loyalty of the various factions within the nation he aspires to lead. Gyuk does not learn the important lesson that rulers must learn: your power is not absolute unless you can command the loyalty of those who you would command, and attempting to assert your absolute authority over them against their will is hazardous. And Gyuk's reign is challenged almost immediately by the non-appearance of Batu, who simply did not appear at the ritual oath swearing, and has instead ensconced himself in the forests of Russia. It is here that the story shows both that holding an empire is much different from conquering one and the most valuable possessions that an empire has are its own constituent parts. As Gyuk leads an army to bring Batu to heel, Kublai begins almost unknowingly to sow the seeds of his own rise to power.

And the resolution of Gyuk's campaign against Batu reveals yet another weakness of the Mongol system: by creating a political structure dependent upon personal loyalty to one man, it is possible to disrupt the actions of that structure merely by removing that one man. And as a result, the entire nation grinds to a halt and goes into reverse whenever power changes hands. And after Gyuk's undistinguished turn at the helm, power transfers to Tolui's line and Mongke takes control of the nation as Great Khan. And Mongke's instinctive answer to the dissolute nature of Gyuk's reign is to try to return to the ways of their forefathers and rule from the saddle. However, unlike Gyuk, he is clever enough to realize that he cannot simply leave the administration of his domains to the Chinese servants, but he does send his brothers Hulegu and Kublai to expand the dominions of his suzerainty - giving Kublai strict instructions that he must give up his "soft" adoption of Chinese customs and prove himself to be a true Mongol Khan.

The contrast between Hugelu and Kublai makes clear exactly why the Mongol nation's influence on history is so ephemeral. Hulegu is sent west, to Persia and Arabia to seek his Khanate among the Islamic nations, while Kublai heads east, to carve out his own fiefdom from the domains of the Chinese emperor. In one case, the Mongols operate according to the "old" ways - treating their invasion much like a giant raid seeking riches and revenge. Hulegu's goal, it seems, is to try to extract as much gold from Baghdad and the surrounding cities as possible and cart it away. Nothing else about Baghdad or its people interests Hugelu - not their knowledge, their achievements, or even what they might produce in the future. He starves the city, disarms it, ransacks it, and destroys much of its populace in a wasteful orgy of slaughter. Hulegu also exposes the weakness that will doom the Mongol political system: despite the oft repeated boast that a Mongols' "word is iron", he feels no remorse over repeatedly breaking promises made to al-Mustasim. And alongside Hulegu's petty lust for gold, is his petty lust for revenge as he seeks to bring to a close the unfinished business between Genghis' family and the cult of Assassins, expending an enormous volume of manpower and effort on the vendetta, to the point where the success of his military campaign is jeopardized. The lesson Iggulden drives home with Hulegu's campaign is that despite their glorious victories, despite their ruthless conquests, the Mongols are little more than bandits who can lay siege to cities. And because of this, once their victims have weathered the storm, they will be essentially unchanged by the passing horde.

But on the other side of the continent, Kublai reveals the other side of the coin: the "new" ways adopted from the Chinese via his mentor Yao Shu. Perhaps because he faced an enemy that outnumbered him so immensely, perhaps because he absorbed the "soft" lessons of civilization from Yao Shu, or perhaps because he figured out that a populace hard at work is more profitable than a populace decimated and terrorized, Kublai adopted a policy of not turning his men loose upon conquered cities to loot, rape, and pillage. And this leads Kublai to have to pay his men, which means he has to find a source of bullion, which constrains his actions. By seizing towns rather than destroying them, by making the populace his subjects rather than his victims, and by trying to rule a functioning economy rather than acting as a parasite, Kublai transforms the Mongols he leads into something more, but he also makes himself vulnerable in the same ways that the Mongols themselves exploited when conquering their enemies. In effect, to have any chance at conquering China, Kublai has to become Chinese, and therein lies the seeds of the Mongols' destruction. Because they have no cultural achievements of their own, they have to borrow them from those they conquer, and in doing so cede their own nature, trading their identity for that of their subjects. In a way, Kublai is as trapped by his Mongol heritage as Hugelu, and his actions are just as futile. The only change that the Chinese will feel is the identity of the men giving the orders, but their way of life will go on unchanged.

Finally, when Mongke dies unexpectedly, it precipitates the final lessons as to why the Mongol empire faded so quickly. First, the Mongols' have to learn the lesson that all empires eventually learn: before too long, the most valuable prize to be had is the empire itself. And when both Arik-Boke and Kublai claim the position of Great Khan, the Mongols face their most dangerous foe when they turn against one another. Paradoxically, though the novel is named Conqueror, presumably in honor of the final victor in this conflict, the only land that he conquers in this volume is the Mongol nation itself. But this internal conflict reveals the inherent weakness of the Mongols - when Kublai must secure the loyalty of Alghu, the Mongol ruler of Samarkand who had already given his oath to Arik-Boke he says that as the true Great Khan he can relieve Alghu of his oath to the false one. And to save himself, Alghu assents to this and changes his loyalty from one brother to the other. But this reveals that the Mongol oaths are meaningless except when backed by force, and if someone else shows up with more force, then those oaths can be cast aside. And by highlighting this, Iggulden is exposing the Achilles heel of the Mongol political system, because it relies upon the strength of personal oaths, and once it is revealed that those oaths can be cast aside, the nation is on the path to disintegration.

In Conqueror, Iggulden shows the Mongol empire at the height of its power and influence.  But he also skillfully shows the reader that the nomadic tribesmen that leapt to world dominance from the cold steppes of Mongolia were uniquely suited to conquer the world, but remarkably ill-equipped to actually rule what they had gained. By the time the events in this novel had rolled around, the rapid ascent to power had sown the seeds of the empire's own destruction. By showing us the Mongols as they were and showing them on their own terms, Iggulden shows us why they were a force that stood over all of Asia, but also shows us why they swept over the world and left a legacy that is remarkable only for its paucity. Conqueror, with a cast of interesting and well-drawn characters, contains a strong story set in one of the most turbulent periods in history and brings to a close the fascinating journey Iggulden crafted that took the reader on a guided tour of the rise of the largest empire in history.

Previous book in the series: Khan: Empire of Silver - A Novel of the Khan Empire

Conn Iggulden     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - No Easy Way to Say This by The Doubleclicks

This week's Musical Monday song answers the question of how a nerdy girl gets out of a date she doesn't want to go on: She transforms first into a vampire, then into a zombie, and finally into the tentacled Elder God Cthulhu. Given the volume of romantic and semi-pornographic tales involving sexy vampires, it seems unlikely that telling an ardent suitor that you are turning into one is likely to deter them very much. In fact, it might make them more interested, at least if the True Blood "fangbanger" community is anything to go by.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen a "sexy" zombie story, so that will probably do the trick of putting off any overly ardent Don Juan. And even though I know a fair number of people who are perfectly willing to be Cthulhu cultists, I don't think any of them would be particularly interested in a romantic rendezvous with the tentacled one.

On a final note, this song is a bit unusual for the Doubleclicks, because Angela performs it solo without accompaniment by Aubrey on her cello.

Previous Musical Monday: Wheel in the Sky by Journey

Subsequent Musical Monday: Roll a d6 by Broken Record Films

The Doubleclicks      Musical Monday     Home

Review - Slant of Light by Steve Wiegenstein

Short review: An idealist with no real skills in running a community establishes a Utopian society on a riverbank in Missouri as the U.S. Civil War looms. And then the war comes and everyone has to choose sides.

Haiku
Utopian ideals
Meet cold and hard reality
During a harsh war

Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Slant of Light is a work of historical fiction that highlights two areas of history that seem to be not as well known as they should be: the bitter conflict between pro- and anti-slavery forces that bubbled beneath the surface in Missouri and other western states in the antebellum period which finally erupted into a dirty guerrilla war once the U.S. Civil War commenced, and the optimistic idealism that resulted in the establishment of Utopian communities that dotted the western landscape amidst the burgeoning strife. In the story, James Turner, having written a novel about a fictional South Pacific community that lives a simple, peaceful lifestyle of shared labor and shared wealth, finds himself heading to Missouri to launch a colony based on the principles outlined in his book, despite having no particularly useful skills for such an endeavor.

This contradiction in Turner's character sets the tone for the book: Although Turner has written a book that espouses high ideals and has sparked the imaginations of many people who yearn for the life that he describes in his text, he seems remarkably ill-suited for actually making the dream he spun into a reality. In addition to his lack of practical farming skills, which one would assume would be critically useful when establishing an agricultural colony, Turner seems to have few abilities other than being a competent writer, typesetter, and compelling speaker. And, it turns out, that despite being charged with founding and running a colony built on idealistic principles, Turner is unable to actually live those idealistic principles, paralleling to a certain extent the experiences of Thomas Jefferson. Much like Jefferson, Turner finds that he enjoys democracy in principle much more than he likes it in practice. Much like Jefferson, he finds himself opposed to slavery in principle, but accepting of it in practice. When confronted with the inherent unfairness of male-only suffrage in the colony, he balks at allowing women to vote in colony matters. In large part, the story of Slant of Light is the collision of soaring idealism and crushing reality.

And the experiences of the colony of Daybreak seem to reflect the experiences of Missouri, and indeed the entire nation as a whole. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the personage of abolitionist Adam Cabot, who is tarred and feathered and narrowly escapes being lynched for his political activities in Kansas and is persuaded to travel to Daybreak by Charlotte Turner, James' pretty and down-to-Earth bride. Eastern born and educated, Cabot exposes the same weak adherence to ideals that the pro-slavery forces in the West share with Turner: they want democracy, but only so long as their own viewpoint wins. Any other result is unacceptable. Cabot is the idealist that Turner pretends to be, and every time that Turner stumbles and falls short of the principles he espouses, it seems that Cabot makes the morally correct choice. This contrast between Turner and Cabot, two men so similar in so many ways, and yet so divergent in others, is the most interesting element of the book.

And further contrasting Cabot's idealism is his fellow abolitionist Lysander Smith, who appears to be an abolitionist in name only. Born and educated in the East, just like Cabot, Smith comes to Daybreak as a result of a deal that Turner makes to secure cash for the money-starved colony. But Smith appears to regard his endeavors to be something of a lark or an adventure of no consequence to enjoy before returning to the real world of Philadelphia and home. But in this, Lysander has made what turns out to be a fatal miscalculation, which makes Turner's more practical approach to living in Missouri seem prudent. In the end, Smith's fate, and ultimately the resolution of Cabot's personal story seem to be contrasting, albeit in some ways aligned commentaries on the dangers of holding, or even merely falsely espousing, ideals that others might not agree with.

And even further contrasting Cabot is the man who adheres to no ideals: the sour and shiftless backwoodsman Harp Webb, who holds a grudge against the Daybreak colony due to the fact that it is founded upon land that his father George had gifted to Turner, and which Harp considers to be his rightful inheritance. In some ways, Harp is little more than a plot complication, existing in the story primarily to hang a cloud over the title to Daybreak's land, but in others, he represents the forces of indifference and conservatism that would hinder the development of an alternative way of life. But in the end, Harp's story is the story of the dedicated bystander who is caught in events larger than himself and swept along anyway. Once again, the story of the individual - Harp - is reflected in a way in the story of the community, as Daybreak also tries to shy away from involvement in the fight over slavery, but finds itself reminded that when all of your neighbors are at war, eventually the fight will show up on your doorstep.

But in Missouri, the Civil War wasn't a matter of vast armies fighting each other using modern weapons and outdated Napoleonic tactics, as brutal and horrific as that form of was. Instead, the war in the West was largely a darker, dirtier matter of midnight murder, thievery, and rape in which one is as likely to be brutalized by those who are on that same "side" as you ideologically as one is likely to be victimized by the enemy. This was a conflict in which ambushing an unsuspecting rider in the woods in the dark and beating them to death with an ax handle became not a crime, but rather a duty. And a conflict in which you had as much to fear from the people you pass in the street on your way to buy flour as you had to fear the soldiers in the armed camp outside of town. Through the book Wiegenstein makes good use of this chaotic background to create an unsettled atmosphere and a sense of danger that hangs over the Daybreak community almost from the very outset of the story.

It is this layering of the story in which the personal, the local, and the national events reflect one another as each person is faced with choices that test them on every level and test their commitment to their own ideals. Even Turner's own personal betrayal stemming from his personal ambivalence towards his own ideals, which forms one of the central plot developments of the story, is, in a sense, reflected in the larger conflict as Missouri tears itself apart from within as a result of the ambivalence many Americans feel towards the ideas their nation was founded upon. As Turner seeks forgiveness for his actions, one can see the glimmer of hope for a reconciliation between the various factions struggling for control of Missouri, and for the warring components of the United States as a whole. By creating flawed, but ultimately compelling characters and setting them against one another in a conflict in which there are varying degrees of right and wrong on most sides, Wiegenstein has produced a novel that opens a window on an era of American history and gave it the human face necessary to make it seem real for the reader. Put simply, this is a strong piece of historical fiction that allows the reader to get inside the issues and beliefs that drove the people to make the decisions that resulted, in a small way, in the country that emerged from the Civil War.

Steve Wiegenstein     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Follow Friday - The Aliens Say They Are Hiding Conspiracy Theorists in Area Fifty-One. Or Was It the Other Way Around?

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Hesperia Loves Books and Novel Days.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Have you ever looked at book’s cover and thought, This is going to horrible? But, was instead pleasantly surprised? Show us the cover and tell us about the book.

Book cover questions are always difficult for me to answer because I usually don't pay much attention to book covers. For me, the book cover is mostly just something that gets flipped past on the way to the story. Sometimes a good cover will make an impression on me, but in the science fiction and fantasy genre there are so many cringeworthy covers that another one rarely makes an impression. I also know that most published authors have almost no say in the design of the covers that go on their books, and the art may be done by someone with only the most passing familiarity with the contents of what they are illustrating, so a bad cover isn't really the author's fault much of the time.

But just to pick something out of the hat (and something that has bothered me), I will say that the covers of Catherine Asaro's books that feature people always look odd to me. It is only the books that feature people as a prominent part of the artwork, and they just look wrong to me somehow:


The odd thing about this is when the covers of her books don't feature people, they look pretty good. As examples, here are three books from her Skolian Saga series:


I don't want to be seen as picking on Asaro's books: I loved them all. And the books of hers that I singled out are by no means the only science fiction books that have odd looking artwork on the covers. But I had to pick something, and these were the most memorable books with art that I thought was substandard.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Fifty Years Is the Traditional Length of a Jubilee

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: If You Drop a Deck of Cards You Can Play Fifty-Two Pick-Up

Follow Friday     Home

Review - CassaFire by Alex J. Cavanaugh

Short review: A pilot haunted by his past. A planet with alien artifacts. An exotic alien beauty with unexpected talents.

Haiku
A weary hero
Fly to an alien world
But there is danger

Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: CassaFire is the sequel to CassaStar, continuing the story of Byron, telepathic pilot and hero of the Vindicarn War. Set twenty years after the end of the war that made him a hero and killed his closest friend Bassa, this book finds Byron working as a pilot on the exploration vessel Rennather, both fulfilling his promise to Bassa and hiding from his war-time legacy. The book focuses on the Rennather's mission to Tgren, a planet inhabited by a non-starfaring culture upon which ancient alien artifacts have been found. Full of telepaths, ancient alien technology, and star travel, the book seems reminiscent of the style of Andre Norton's work, and if the name on the cover were changed from Cavanaugh's to hers it would not seem entirely out of place filed in the "N" section.

The central plot element of the book is the Cassan discovery of alien ruins found on the planet Tgren. The Rennather has been sent to explore these ruins, and, cementing this book firmly in the category of space opera, recover any advanced alien technology that they find. Somewhat complicating matters is the fact that Tgren is inhabited by a comparatively primitive culture that has only barely discovered flight and among whose populace telepathic powers have recently begun to manifest. This last point is as important as the alien artifacts, as Cassan space travel technology is heavily reliant upon the abilities of the telepathically inclined, making the Tgrens a potentially valuable ally for the Cassans. Unfortunately, to provide a plot complication, we are told that the culturally conservative Tgrens are both resentful of outsiders, and are disturbed by the existence of "freakish" telepaths among their own people. Sadly, this conservatism on the part of the Tgrens never really seemed to manifest until the very end of the story other than a collection of dire warnings from local politicians.

Although Byron is "only" a shuttle pilot on the Rennather, he is also one of the two men who pilot a Darten, the light and quick fighter that is used to defend the larger ship from hostile encounters, and this leads to him being assigned to train the best Tgren pilots. In addition, as Byron is a skilled telepath, he is assigned to train the best telepath the Tgren have to offer. Coincidentally, the best telepath and the best pilot on Tgren happen to be the same person. Even more coincidentally, this person turns out to be Athee, a very attractive woman and the niece of the local political power broker. This, of course, puts Byron in the middle of all of the back and forth between the Cassans of the Rennather and puts him front and center to become the object of Athee's affections, setting up the will-they-won't-they romance that forms the core of much of the story. The only oddity relating to Athee is the well-developed nature of her psychic powers - if the Tgrens have only recently seen the emergence of such abilities among their populace, her extraordinary aptitude, which rivals even that of a Cassan who is near the top of capabilities of the telepathically gifted Cassans, seems to be an almost unbelievably rapid manifestation.

And to connect Byron to the archaeological end of the story, Byron befriends an extremely young linguist named Mevine who is participating in the excavation of the alien site. Mevine also brings up Byron's past as a Cosbolt pilot in the Vindicarn War, and the loss of his navigator Bassa (which presumably makes up much of the plot of the book CassaStar) which pulls Byron's own insecurities to the fore in the form of survivor guilt that is revealed when Mevine is unable to recall Bassa's name. And with all the pieces in place, the story proceeds at a fairly swift clip: Byron shuttles people around, gets maudlin about the war, trains Tgren pilots, trains Athee to tap into her psychic gifts, deals with local politics, resists falling in love with Athee, and eventually and inevitably gives in. Though the story is in many ways predictable, it is comfortably so and well-written, making it an enjoyable ride.

In the end, all the disparate threads come together in a dramatic ending, and although the ending does have something of a twist, it is a fairly standard style twist. CassaFire seems like it could have been written in the 1950s, with all the familiar cadences of Golden Age science fiction. And this gives it a familiar feel that makes the book seem like an old friend, even though it is new. If you are looking for a new space opera story with a thread of romance, then CassaFire is the book you are looking for.

Alex J. Cavanaugh     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Nemesis by Isaac Asimov

Short review: A dissatisfied orbital colony figures out how to leave the Solar System and then discovers alien life as well as a threat to all humanity.

Haiku
Leaving Earth's orbit
Bound for a secret planet
Alien algae

Full review: In his later years Asimov spent most of his time writing mediocre sequels to his Foundation series and clumsily trying to connect them to his Robot books. Once in a while, however, he got a little bit of his old inspiration and went off in a different direction. Nemesis seems to be the result of one of those moments, and is a reasonably interesting, although not particularly spectacular stand-alone science fiction novel that raises the interesting questions of socioeconomic conflict, the advance of technology, and the collective intelligence, but doesn't really follow-up on them to any extent.

Nemesis posits that in the future, wealthy orbital colonies and a comparatively impoverished Earth will be at loggerheads, constantly fighting with one another. Nemesis follows a breakaway orbital colony that leaves the solar system using "hyper assistance" (allowing them to travel at the speed of light) to a nearby red dwarf star (that is named Nemesis) and a marginally habitable planet. Internal politics of the colony make settling the planet less than a priority, and eventually humanity catches up with them - by developing superluminal flight.

At the same time, one of the young members of the breakaway colony discovers that the bacterial life that covers the planet forms a single collective intelligence. It is also discovered that Nemesis itself threatens all life in the solar system because it will disturb the orbits of the planets, killing everything. With the help of the collective intelligence, the threat is averted. And that is pretty much all that happens in the book. And this is why the book is decent, but not more than that. Despite several developments that should be individually substantial enough to have huge implications for human civilization - the establishment of the first human colony around a different star, the discovery of alien life, the discovery of intelligent alien life, the discovery of superluminal flight, and so on - and yet just when these elements are set to have an impact, the story wanders off into an engineering problem and then ends.

As noted before, this is one of the few novels Asimov wrote in his later years that could work as a stand alone effort. There is a clumsy effort to tie it into the Foundation chronology, but that can be safely ignored as irrelevant (it is implied that the collective intelligence found in the book forms the basis for the Gaia of the Foundation sequels). Because of the interesting issues it raises, the book is slightly above average, better than most of the later Foundation-Robot prequels, sequels, and crossovers, but because it really never goes much of anywhere with them, it is not as good as Asimov's earlier works.

Isaac Asimov     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Wheel in the Sky by Journey

The Musical Monday song for today is Wheel in the Sky by Journey. This is a song that pretty much has nothing at all directly to do with anything geeky. It doesn't really have geeky lyrics. It isn't on a geeky topic. It isn't sung by a geeky band. It wasn't used as a the theme song for a geeky movie or video game. There is nothing actually geeky about this song at all. So why is it being included as a Musical Monday song?

This is why

In 1981, Nicholas Correia wrote and directed what was for the time a fairly high budget fantasy adventure, which was clearly intended to be the pilot of a television series named The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire. The hero, Toran of the Hawk Clan, is the son of the murdered king of the plains nomads who has been framed for his father's death and gone on the run. He has to find the sorcerer La-sa-sa in order to clear his name and regain the throne all the while pursued by the dreaded snake warriors of the Drakon Empire. To aid him in his quest he has the magical Heartbow, which makes arrows explode when they are fired from it. For companions he picks up a sneaky fellow named Slant and a scantily clad woman named Estra, who is the daughter of a goddess and holds a grudge against La-sa-sa for unspecified crimes against her mother. The whole movie, with exploding arrows (and eventually, a corresponding evil glove that makes weapons used by its wielder explode as well), bad acting, cheesy dialogue, and a hackneyed plot, is pretty awful, even by the standards of the day - one has to remember that both Dragonslayer and Excalibur were released in the same year as this movie, and both were leaps and bounds better in pretty much every way possible. But it was fantasy, and for a D&D-playing 12 year old, it was the source of endless ideas to be ripped off and copied for campaign elements.

But why does The Archer result in Wheel in the Sky being featured as my Musical Monday selection? After all, the song has absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Because the plains nomads revere a deity named Oman who apparently has a wheel that represents it vicissitudes of fate, and one of the sayings that is used more than once in the movie is "Oman's Wheel will turn", meaning that no matter how good or bad things are right now, the current condition will not last forever, so be prepared for change, either good or ill. And so, because of Oman's Wheel, the song Wheel in the Sky has become permanently intertwined in my mind with the crappy 1980's fantasy movie The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire.

Previous Musical Monday: Sisters of the Moon by Fleetwood Mac
Subsequent Musical Monday: No Easy Way to Say This by The Doubleclicks

Journey     Musical Monday     Home

Review - The Demon of Renaissance Drive by Elizabeth Reuter

Short review:  Annabelle is a succubus. She's also bored so she rescues a damned soul on a whim. Then things get interesting.

Haiku
A bored succubus
A whimsical decision
A lot of trouble

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: I have to admit that this book was not exactly what I expected when I picked it up. With a succubus for a protagonist and what seemed like a gritty urban setting, I more or less assumed that this would be a sexy, dark adventure with lots of romance and erotica. The actual book is not quite that, although it is set against a gritty urban backdrop. Instead of romance and erotica, this book delivers some adventure but also a lot of fairly thought provoking questions about morality and punishment.

The title character, Annabelle, is a succubus. In traditional terms, she is a sex demon, but in this book it would be more appropriate to call her a breeding demon. This is because, like all other succubi, Annabelle gets pregnant every time she has sex. And most other female demons are effectively barren. At the start of the book, the demoness is approximately six thousand years old and has birthed approximately one million baby demons in her lifetime. As there are only seven succubi left in Hell, and Annabelle is apparently of a noble lineage, she is in high demand as a brood mare, and is showered with gifts and attention from the powerful inhabitants of the nether world for her services. And she simply doesn't want to do it any more.

One can kind of sympathize with Annabelle's position once the story gets around to a sequence in which she does get pregnant and have a child. But the only key element at the beginning is that she is bored and looking for something interesting to do. And one day, while out traveling through Hell, Annabelle happens upon another demon with a collection of damned souls in his charge and, on a lark, she decides to rescue one of them from the impending horrific punishment imminently to be imposed upon him. This decision, made on a whim, drives the rest of the plot of the book. By stealing a soul Annabelle has committed a grave offense against the established order of Hell, and in order to protect herself and her newly adopted pet, she has to flee to Earth, which is probably a more critical issue for the lords of Hell. After all, they have millions of damned souls, but only seven breeding succubi. It is an interesting decision, because it casts Annabelle in the role of the rescuer, and the rescued man in the role of the damsel in distress. But the role reversal is deeper than a mere gender switch of the traditional roles: she is a demon, supposedly a creature without pity or remorse, and even though he is in distress, as a damned soul, one assumes that the distressed is justified by his crimes. In short, the primary point of the story revolves around mercy being granted by the merciless to a criminal who is being punished for crimes he did, in fact, commit.

The strange thing about Annabelle's decision is that she's not even sure why she rescued this particular damned soul. She isn't particularly romantically interested in him, and she clearly has no real plan for what to do with him or for him. And given that when she acquires this soul he is catatonic from the massive trauma of being systemically tortured nonstop for however long he has been in Hell. Even "Harry", the name initially used for the soul, is one that Annabelle picks at random, because Harry cannot speak, and when he does speak, he cannot remember who he was before he died. And it is at this point that one begins to wonder about the justness of the order that Hell enforces: Is infinite punishment for finite crimes truly just? No matter what Harry did, is it bad enough that he should be perpetually tortured in such gruesome ways that he even forgets his own identity? And once he has forgotten his crime, and forgotten everything else about himself, what is the point of continuing to punish the shell that is left? Yes, it is the same soul that (as we find out later) engaged in some undeniably heinous acts, but once all memory of them has been erased by years of unending torment, is what is left still deserving of punishment? This also points to the question of redemption: Once Harry's memory has been destroyed, not only does continuing to torment him seem pointless, but also wasteful. And when Harry's memory does return after therapy later in the book, the form of punishment he suffered has clearly altered his thinking to the point that he no longer harbors the beliefs that led him to be condemned to the infernal realm to begin with. Consequently, while Harry is clearly not innocent, it seems gratuitous that had Annabelle not rescued him, he would have been subjected to an eternity of excruciating penance even when it served no purpose whatsoever.

And of course, once one's mind is sent down this path, one wonders about the nature of a system that condemns the demons who inhabit Hell to their bleak existence. In the classic Miltonian formulation, demons are those angels who followed Lucifer into rebellion against divine authority and were cast down for their defiance. One can quibble with whether such a crime would merit being cast into a lake of fire for all eternity, but at least there is some justification for their torment. But in The Demon of Renaissance Drive, there are millions of demons who are subjected to the delights of Hell for no reason other than the misfortune of having been born. Even Annabelle herself was born into a life as a demon, and not only that, a life as a succubus, which entails the repeated harrowing experience of enduring all the pain of pregnancy and childbirth in a single day a million times over. And of course, she is depicted (at times) as an inhuman monster. But after living for thousands of years under the conditions of Hell, how could she be otherwise? And what had she done to deserve this treatment? It is one thing to have injustice in an uncaring universe, but when there is presumably a supernatural ranking of right and wrong and corresponding rewards and punishments, having an entire class of creatures born into an eternity of misery with no apparent fault on their part seems to be an interesting subtext of the story, especially when humans who willingly align themselves with the powers of Hell show up in the form of the Satanist leader Douglas Crane.

But this points to one of the problems with the book, and one of the problems with books that include inhuman characters: despite being described as an evil being from the depths of time, Annabelle is remarkably human in her wants, needs, and desires. She steals Harry on a whim, and throughout the book she is not sure why she cares for him - spiriting him out of Hell, securing the services of a psychiatrist named Jimmy to help heal the broken parts of Harry's mind (and reveal that "Harry" is in fact Steve), and so on. But to the reader it is fairly clear: Annabelle is experiencing compassion for Harry/Steve. In fact, all of the demons presented in the book seem to be very human in character. This is not a criticism of Reuter's abilities as a writer, but is rather the observation that creating characters that are both inhuman in outlook and which the reader can identify with is extremely difficult. When Annabelle is acting "demonic", she is unsympathetic and mostly uninteresting. When she is acting more human-like, she no longer seems alien and diabolical. And this effect does not apply only to Annabelle. All of the demons portrayed in the book seem remarkably human in their desires: Belial desires children, Avaira his wife feels jealous over his tryst with Annabelle, the dukes of Hell all desire heirs (although one has to wonder why the immortal rulers of Hell find it critically important to secure legitimate heirs), and so on and so forth. Hell, it seems, is more or less populated by humans with weird shapes and supernatural powers. Of course, in a book in which the existence of Hell is confirmed, certain theological questions come to mind as a result, and Jimmy, having been apparently raised in an ardently religious family, beings to ask them once he unravels what Annabelle and Steve are. But Annabelle (and Reuter) steadfastly refuse to answer these questions, creating an unusual ambiguity in the story insofar as everyone involved is certain the Hell is a real place, with real demonic denizens, but Heaven and God are hazy and indistinct uncertainties.

Despite the theological ramblings the characters engage in through the book, the main plot is more or less a sequence of chases, as Annabelle tries to prevent the Lords of Hell from discovering that she absconded with Harry/Steve and later, once her theft has been discovered, her attempts to evade capture. Along the way, Annabelle makes deals with powerful demons, but also engages in the mundane tasks of working at a fast food restaurant, renting a cheap house, and illegally purchasing a handgun. It is this combination of the fantastic and the ordinary that makes the book interesting and brings the philosophical questions to the fore. Juxtaposing the politics of Hell with the lives of ordinary humans serves to take the wind out of the sails of the demons. For all of her posturing about how boring, simple, and petty humans are, all of the demons who appear in the book are at least as boring, simple, and petty as the humans they disdain. In a similar way, though this story ostensibly is large enough to shake the very political foundations of Hell, much of it boils down to a very small story of a trio of individuals trying to avoid a regime that each of them for their own reasons finds intolerable. And even the philosophical conflicts ultimately boil down to the very personal: even though Jimmy knows Annabelle is a demon, and thus an embodied agent of evil, he is more disturbed by Harry/Steve and the very human crimes he committed before he died that led to his condemnation in this life and further punishment after death. The horror of dealing with a demon is not particularly bothersome for Jimmy, but a neo-Nazi murderer is. Until the crime is made human, it is simply not cognizable. And the same is true of the story: until the story is brought down to the level of borrowing cars and hiding out in hotels, it doesn't seem real. But when the ordinary is mixed in with the fantastic, everything ends up working.

As with most good fiction, The Demon of Renaissance Drive raises many question, and like most good fiction, it doesn't directly answer them. Why are there only seven succubi? What is the purpose of the punishments of Hell? Why is it critical that no souls ever get lost? Is Hell just? And does it matter? How is it that a demon can exercise more forgiveness than a supposedly empathetic human trained to treat people with mental illnesses? And so on. And the reader is left wondering about the characters too - as the story ends on something of a cliffhanger, one has to wonder how, now that the tables have been turned, a pair of more or less ordinary men plan to rescue a demon taken to face judgment for her transgressions. As this book's plot had been driven by actions that are reversed from what one would expect, it seems that the continuation of the story will probably feature another kind of reversal as the powerless attempt to rescue the comparatively powerful. This book, loaded with subverted expectations (starting with a sex demon who only has sex once in the book), is both an enjoyable adventure, and is both more substantial and more thought-provoking than one might expect.

Elizabeth Reuter     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Follow Friday - Fifty Years Is the Traditional Length of a Jubilee

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Mercurial Musings and Owl Tell You About It.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book would you love to see made into a movie or television show and do you have actors/actresses in mind to play the main characters?

I don't think that it should come as a surprise to anyone who has read this blog that I love Samuel R. Delany, and that my favorite book of his is the cyberpunkish space opera Nova (read review). A star-spanning rivalry fueled by commercial requirements and personal animosity drives the hero Lorq von Ray and his antagonist Prince Red to search the galaxy for a star that is about to go supernova and dive through it, collecting the bounty of heavy elements that the massive stellar explosion will spew out and giving their corporation an unassailable edge. It is dark, gritty, full of interpersonal conflict and heavy on space travel. It would be a beautiful film.

I have no idea who should play the characters: Lorq von Ray, Prince Red, Ruby Red, Mouse, and so on. Nova is also the only book by Delany that I have read that is translatable to the screen: Triton, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and Dhalgren (read review) are probably all just too weird to be put on the screen.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Forty-Nine Is Seven Squared

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Aliens Say They Are Hiding Conspiracy Theorists in Area Fifty-One. Or Was It the Other Way Around?

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Captured by Julia Rachel Barrett

Short review: Mari is captured by aliens who think humans are animals, but her captor thinks she's interesting. She falls in love with him and then there's lots of sex. Lots and lots of sex.

Haiku
Abducted from Earth
A captor she entices
And then there is love

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: I am pretty sure that I am not the target audience for this book. This fact, however, did not prevent me from enjoying it quite a bit. An erotic science fiction romance in which a human woman is abducted by an alien slave trader and then seduces him into removing her from the auction block and is in turn seduced by him into falling in love.

The book opens up in media res, with Mari, the female protagonist of the story, waking up to find herself in a cage on board a ship full of other abducted human women on her way to parts unknown. After some confusion, she sees her captors: cruel yellow eyed aliens who regard her and all other humans as nothing more than beasts, not even fit for clothing. It is in these early sequences establishing the initial relationship between the feisty redheaded Mari and her captor Ekkatt that are probably the most critical and the most dangerous for the story. Unless Barrett is able to define the extreme distance between the two characters, then their later journey towards a loving relationship would be less effective. On the other hand, the danger is if Ekkatt's point of view is not explained well, then he can become a character too abhorrent for the love story to be accepted by the reader. After all, Ekkatt's job is to travel to alien planets, abduct their women, and then profit from selling them to be used as sex slaves or to be killed for meat. Fortunately, Barrett is able to walk this fine line, and although Ekkatt at times seems just a little too able to empathize with his quarry to be in his profession, the initial animosity Mari displays towards him makes up for it.

Mari strikes up her relationship with Ekkatt purely out of a sense of self-preservation. Having woken up unexpectedly while all of the other abducted women are still unconscious, Meri finagles her way into being allowed to stay awake for the duration of the trip, insinuating herself into Ekkatt's frame of reference out of a sense of self preservation. In short, Mari has to try to cajole Ekkatt into seeing her as more than simply a beast in order to survive. An interesting point about the story is that even though Mari is the protagonist and viewpoint character, the character with the most interesting personal arc is Ekkatt as he struggles with a lifetime of prejudices and is forced to confront the horror of what he has done. While Mari does everything she does driven initially by a desire to not be made into a dinner entree - making her character motivation crystal clear, Ekkatt's motivations are a little more opaque, attracted seemingly to her feisty nature and the dragon tattoo on her back, but he does eventually see her as a thinking being, and then eventually as someone to be respected, and finally a companion.

Given that I described the book as an erotic science fiction romance, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Mari and Ekkatt eventually become lovers. The book contains plenty of intense interspecies sex as Mari and Ekkatt consummate their relationship in a variety of steamy scenes. Leaving aside the moderate absurdity that an alien would be sexually compatible with a human at all, the one element that really demonstrates (to me at least) that I am not really the target audience for this book is the somewhat idealized nature of Ekkatt as a sexual partner. He is tall, lean, well-muscled, and well-endowed. He is also, gentle, caring, and, in the heat of passion, animalistic, but only in a way that is erotically arousing for Mari. Although Mari is described as an attractive fit and sexy woman with an independent streak, she is ordinary enough in some ways that a female reader could put herself in Mari's place and enjoy the fantasy almost from a first-person perspective. Although this comparison may seem juvenile to some, Mari's attraction to Ekkatt seems to me to be drawn from the same sort of impulse that makes Jean Grey lust after Wolverine in the X-Man series, although in this story there is no counterbalancing "good guy" Scott Summers for her to be committed to. Instead, the choice given to Mari is essentially between the Wolverine stand-in Ekkatt and Pana, who seems much more like Sabretooth. In short, her choice is between the "bad boy" and the even worse boy, and isn't really a choice at all.

As Mari is essentially an escaped slave, there is conflict in the book, and this is the element of the book that I wish had been developed more. Through the book there are essentially only five characters, one of which is the villain in the piece, who is dealt with in an almost perfunctory manner. And this brings me to my only real criticisms of the book: I wanted there to be more of it.  As an erotic science fiction romance, the book focuses primarily on the relationship between Mari and Ekkatt, and of course the sexual encounters between the two, but I wanted to see more of Ekkatt's world, and more time devoted to the hunt for and pursuit of Mari by the slave traders. As it is, the book feels too short, and the life changing decision that Ekkatt makes to avoid the religiously driven prejudices of his home world seems to come too quickly and easily. In the end, although the development of Ekkatt and Mari's relationship was more or less complete, I wanted to story to go on to explore the new life they had made for themselves. As a general rule of thumb, wishing that a book was two to three times as long as it actually is is actually a good sign, and this book is no exception. When an author leaves you wanting more story, as Barrett does with this book, that is a testament to the quality of the writing.

Captured is an excellent science fiction romance that is only marred by the fact that it should have had a more extensive story. With a pair of interesting and ultimately sympathetic characters, a well-written romance, lots of intense sexual encounters, and a fairly interesting (although too cursorily fleshed out for my testes) fictional world, this book is a very enjoyable read. As with most truly good books, this one left me wanting more, and my only complaints are that there wasn't enough time spent exploring the world, and that the story ended too soon. But if you want some science fiction mixed with eroticism, this is definitely a book to read.

Julia Rachel Barrett     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Sisters of the Moon by Fleetwood Mac

In the days before the internet, the range of music available as nerdy inspiration was more limited. Today, one can simply go out and find Jonathan Coulton, Five Year Mission, The Doubleclicks, Tripod, or dozens of other performers with catalogs of geek related songs. I'm certain that there were geek related groups performing back then - filk is a well-established part of science fiction fandom. But to have access to filk and other geek music, one had to be able to travel to science fiction or gaming conventions. And as I was living in Africa for a substantial chunk of my youth, and boarding school for my teen years, attending conventions was never an option. So, when I was younger, I took inspiration where I found it, even when it hung on fairly slender threads.

One of those slender threads was the Fleetwood Mac song Sisters of the Moon. Yes, it almost certainly isn't about anything even remotely science fiction or fantasy related, but the Celtic inspired imagery (and my adolescent crush on Stevie Nicks) was more than enough to set my brain wandering. It is probably because of Stevie Nicks and her ethereal lyrics that I began reading Welsh and Irish mythology and incorporating their influence into my gaming campaigns. More directly, every role-playing game campaign setting that I have ever designed, no matter the genre, has had an organization in it called the "Sisters of the Moon". So, for inspiring me to read the Mabinogion, the Táin bó Cúailnge, and a myriad of other tales of mythology, and for showing up in all of my game settings, I'm including Sisters of the Moon in Musical Monday.

This performance is from the 1982 Tusk tour. In the middle of the song, Nicks leaves the stage and fellow band mate Lindsay Buckingham sings one verse. This was somewhat unusual, and has been attributed to the heavy emotional burden that Nicks was under at the time due to the recent death of her best friend Robin Anderson. It is likely because of this, however, that the rest of Stevie's performance here is so visceral and powerful.

Previous Musical Monday: The Presidents by Jonathan Coulton
Subsequent Musical Monday: Wheel in the Sky by Journey

Fleetwood Mac     Musical Monday     Home

Review - Tintin and the Picaros by Hergé

Short review: Tintin and Captain Haddock return to San Teodoro to rescue Bianca Castafiore, Thompson, and Thomson from the regime of General Tapioca. Along the way they help restore General Alcazar to power. Tintin does no reporting.

Haiku
Petty dictator
False charges lead to a coup
But no real changes

Full review: The Tintin series returns to the Banana Republic politics of San Theodoros and meanders to a somewhat pointless end in Tintin and the Picaros. Having made a practice of recycling material from earlier books, Hergé continues this by recycling the location of the adventure, as well as numerous allies, villains, and supporting characters in a story that more or less goes nowhere. As a Tintin story goes, this volume is not particularly bad, but as a finale for a long running hero, it is simply anticlimactic.

From The Red Sea Sharks (read review) on, the Tintin series had been living on reused characters. After bringing back the bulk of the characters developed in the early books in the series in The Red Sea Sharks, Hergé then brought back Chang Chong-Chen in Tintin in Tibet (read review), Bianca Castafiore and her entourage in The Castafiore Emerald (read review), and Allan and Rastapopoulos in Flight 714 (read review). Hergé even began recycling characters of more recent vintage, with Jolyon Wagg making several appearances over the last handful of books in the series, and Skut, first introduced in The Red Sea Sharks, making another appearance in Flight 714. Although the early part of the series had some missteps, it had been on a steady upward trend in quality through the two-part series of Destination Moon (read review) and Explorers on the Moon (read review) and the tense espionage drama of The Calculus Affair (read review), but after that it seems that the series simply ran out of steam as Hergé ran out of ideas and had to resort to pulling old plots, characters, and gags out of mothballs and reusing them. Sadly, Tintin and the Picaros continues this trend, and is a fairly bland story with a cast of characters pulled from earlier, better books going through the motions in an uninspiring plot.

The book opens up with a pile of exposition as the characters bring the reader up to speed on recent developments: Bianca Castafiore, accompanied by her maid Irma, accompanist Wagner, and the detectives Thompson and Thomson, is touring South America and is due to perform in San Theodoros, currently ruled by the authoritarian General Tapioca who overthrew Tintin's old friend General Alcazar with the help of the Bordourian dictator Kûrvi-Tasch. At the same time, we learn that Captain Haddock seems to have acquired a distaste for whiskey. After setting up the background, the story proceeds quickly as when they get up the next morning Captain Haddock, Tintin, and Professor Calculus learn that Bianca and everyone traveling with her had been arrested by General Tapioca for plotting against his government. Soon, the plot thickens as Tapioca accuses Captain Haddock and Tintin of masterminding the alleged conspiracy from Marlinspike Hall, an accusation that is hotly denied by Haddock when reporters show up on his doorstep. Of course, Professor Calculus amusingly seems to confirm that he is part of a plot to overthrow General Tapioca, but this is the result of his mishearing everything that is said to him. The back and forth between Haddock and Tapioca is fought out in the newspapers in a series of sensational headlines until finally an incensed Captain takes up the General's offer to come to Tapiocopolis for discussions. This whole sequence is kind of silly, as it seems a little ridiculous that a sitting head of state would pick a public fight with a minor celebrity in a distant country for no apparent reason out of the blue. However, without this public fracas, none of the rest of the book would have a story, and this is less artificial a setup for the plot than the wild coincidences of some of the other stories. Another fairly glaring oddity in this portion of the book is the fact that despite the dust-up between Tapioca and the trio of heroes being front page news, Tintin never seems to even consider doing any actual reporting on the matter. This shouldn't really be a surprise because the series hasn't even made a nod in the direction of Tintin's supposed job for several books, but when reporters play such a prominent role in a story the boy hero's lack of attention to his ostensible occupation is all the more apparent.

Haddock and Calculus head off to San Theodoros, with Tintin steadfastly maintaining that Tapioca's invitation is an obvious trap and refusing to go (which seems decidedly out of character for the usually rash Tintin, who in previous books would frequently rush headlong into obvious danger). When their plane is flying into Tapiocopolis, we get some quick scenes of the city, first the prosperous downtown, and then the wretched slums patrolled by soldiers. After Haddock is met at the airport by General Tapioca's aide-de-camp Colonel Alvarez we learn some interesting details: first that Calculus is a man of strong principles, second that Alvarez is unable to recognize Tintin by sight, and finally, San Theodoros is imminently hosting the celebration of Carnaval. Soon, Haddock and Calculus are whisked away to their quarters and soon learn that although it is quite comfortable and everyone they encounter pretends they are guests, it is a prison cell nonetheless. We also encounter Colonel Sponsz, Tintin's old nemesis from The Calculus Affair, who is quite frustrated by Tintin's refusal to take the bait and travel to San Theodoros. It seems that the entirety of the conflict between Tapioca and Haddock was engineered by Sponsz in order to exact petty revenge upon the trio. As usual for Tintin villains, Sponsz is willing to go to great lengths in order to accomplish trivial goals. Fortunately for Sponsz, Tintin inexplicably changes his mind and shows up a day after Haddock and Calculus, putting his head into the lion's mouth.

All seems well when Pablo, the man whose life Tintin saved in The Broken Ear (read review), shows up with news that General Alcazar has a secret plan to break Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus out of their gilded cage. After a brief action sequence in which our heroes wind up in a truck driven by the General-in-exile, and are off to meet up with the "Picaros", the name given to the rebels who support Alcazar's return to power. Of course, since this is a Tintin book, there is no avoiding recycling characters, so in addition to the return of Pablo and General Alcazar from The Broken Ear, we also have to run across the English explorer Ridgewell and the Arumbaya tribe from that same book. Ridgewell soon reveals that the Arumbayas have taken up heavy drinking as a result of airdrops of whiskey that the government has been raining down upon the jungle in an attempt to incapacitate Alcazar's Picaros. And we soon learn that Calculus is up to something, as he drops some pills into the Arumbaya cooking pots. Before too long, Tintin, Haddock, Calculus, and Alcazar are guests at dinner with the Arumbayas, and after eating some exceedingly spicy food, the affliction that has rendered alcohol undrinkable for Captain Haddock seems to have spread to everyone else as well. This surprises everyone except Calculus, giving the reader some inkling of what the Professor is up to. Interestingly, for this sequence, Haddock has been knocked on the head and has temporarily lost his mind.

And Calculus' current project becomes critically important to the plot as it turns out that the members of the tiny band of Picaros have become similarly addicted to alcohol, and as a result, their campaign against General Tapioca's regime has ground to a halt. Despite the fact that his followers number only about thirty men, Alcazar asserts that he could overthrow Tapioca during the upcoming festivities of Carnaval After learning that Calculus has come up with a formula that, once ingested, makes alcohol extremely unpleasant tasting, Tintin goes to Alcazar and offers to help cure his men of their love of liquor, but only if Alcazar agrees to make his coup d'etat entirely bloodless. After some protests, Alcazar agrees, and Tintin goes to put his plan into action. In an interesting twist, he is obstructed by Captain Haddock, who makes a fairly strong case for the primacy of personal autonomy, although Tintin sweeps those concerns aside, which is unsurprising given Tintin's previous actions to manipulate his friends in earlier books whenever he thought it was useful to do so. And this makes clear that although Tintin is supposed to be a hero, and is for the most part a hero, he is a fairly duplicitous and underhanded one.

The scenes in the Picaros camp that develop Alcazar's character into more than a caricature of a deposed tinpot dictator, although only barely. it turns out that Alcazar is a henpecked husband, with a domineering wife named Peggy who complains about living in the jungle with Alcazar's guerrilla army, which leads to a scene of Alcazar in a pink apron washing dishes. It is also at this point that Alcazar begins promising to reward people by making them members of "the order of San Fernando", with various varieties of honorary titles being bandied about - a subtle commentary by Hergé on the value of honors received from petty regimes, and in a larger sense on the value of these sorts of petty regimes at all. The sort of free hand with which Alcazar hands out memberships in the order of San Fernando is a marked contrast to the honor bestowed upon Tintin at the end of King Ottokar's Sceptre (read review) when he becomes the first non-Syldavian ever to be made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Pelican. In a not particularly subtle manner, Hergé seems to be commenting on the worth of Latin American countries in a way that contrasts them quite unfavorably with more traditional Balkan monarchies.

After a show trial in which Castafiore, Thompson, and Thomson are all convicted of conspiring against Tapioca, the two detectives are condemned to death while the Milanese Nightingale is sentenced to life imprisonment. At this point, because once isn't enough, Jolyon Wagg makes his second appearance in the book, arriving with a group set to perform at the Carnaval celebration, which causes Tintin to hatch a plan for Alcazar to seize power. Before too long, Alcazar is handing out dubiously valuable honors and the Picaros along with Tintin and Haddock are off to Tapiocopolis in a borrowed bus disguised in silly jester costumes as Jolyon's troupe the "Jolly Follies". Once again, Hergé throws in some commentary on the politics of San Theodoros by including a letter from Alcazar to Peggy that reveals that the General is at best semi-literate. Because Tintin is on his side, Alcazar's plan goes off like clockwork, although he and his men do look ridiculous storming the palace in multicolored tights, green hoods, red hats with puffy yellow, blue, and pink feathers, and goofy-looking masks. Once again, it seems that Hergé is making a statement about the politics of the region by making the ostensible "good guys" look ridiculous. It is also somewhat ironic, although predictable for a Tintin adventure, that had Sponsz and Tapioca not attempted to execute a scheme of petty revenge against Tintin and Haddock, Alcazar would have never been able to depose the Tapioca regime and seize power. As usual, the villains' clumsy plotting proves to be their own undoing, and if they had just left Tintin alone, their plans would have gone off with a hitch.

Once Alcazar takes control, he informs Tapioca that he will not be executed, which incenses the now deposed dictator. It seems that the brutality of politics is not only expected, but if it is not implemented those who are to be subjected to it feel slighted, as if they weren't worthy of reprisal. However, Tintin has to halt an execution, and Thompson and Thomson are to face the firing squad. Worked in among the action and comedy involved in getting Tintin and a squad of soldiers across the city in the middle of Carnaval is what seems to be a very interesting revelation about the two detectives. Throughout the series Thompson and Thomson have been inseparable, dressing alike, completing each other's sentences, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to one another. They quite clearly establish that they are not related, partially due to the different spelling of their names, but also because the two detectives say so on more than one occasion. But it is in their final scene in the final book of the series that we get a little light shed on their actual relationship when asked to come up with some last words, Thomson says "Kiss me, Thompson, will that do?". Did Hergé intend to imply with this that Thompson and Thomson were lovers? It is a very thin thread, but given the fairly rampant speculation that has surrounded the relationships between Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus based upon nothing but their close friendship and shared living quarters, it seems possible that he was responding to this by giving a very small hint that maybe, just maybe, the speculation should have centered on the detectives.

In the end, all of the action of the book adds up to nothing at all. In the final scene in the book, we get a shot of the plane that Tintin and his friends are on to leave San Theodoros flying over a slum that looks remarkably like the slum that Haddock and Calculus flew over when arriving in Tapiocopolis near the beginning of the book: the only difference is that the billboard now says "Viva Alcazar" rather than "Viva Tapioca" and the uniforms of the patrolling soldiers are different. In short, despite Tintin's influence in forcing a bloodless coup, nothing of importance has changed. In some ways, this seems to be a metaphor for the entire Tintin series: Tintin is, for the most part, an agent of the status quo. While he does solve some crimes, as in The Black Island (read review) or The Crab with the Golden Claws (read review), for the most part he acts merely to restore the world to the state in which it was when the story began, as in The Broken Ear or King Ottokar's Sceptre. I think it is no accident that the best stories in the series are ones in which Tintin does actually accomplish something, such as the two part stories of The Secret of the Unicorn (read review) and Red Rackham's Treasure (read review) in which Captain Haddock acquires Marlinspike Hall, or Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon in which the characters all go to the moon and back, but all too often the results of the stories are forgotten as soon as the characters move on to the next book - except for the villains who are always remembering that Tintin foiled their schemes and plotting revenge.

But as the series draws to a close, it becomes apparent that for all of Tintin's efforts the world is essentially returned to the status quo ante, a point made crystal clear by this book in which despite all his actions, nothing really changes. Sure, Tintin saves Bianca, Irma, Wagner, Thompson, and Thomson from execution or imprisonment, but they were only threatened as a means of extracting petty revenge upon Tintin to begin with. And San Theodoros is essentially the same as when he arrived, just with a change of names at the top. And as a result, the reader is left feeling entirely unsatisfied with the end result of the story in this book, unsatisfied with this story as an ending to the series, and in some ways, unsatisfied with the series as a whole.

Previous book in the series: Flight 714

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Follow Friday - Forty-Nine Is Seven Squared

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Oh! For the Love of Books! and Ezine of a Random Girl.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Activity!!! Take a picture or describe where you love to read the most.

I don't know if I have a single favorite spot to read, because I read pretty much everywhere I go. But if I had to pick the spot where I do most of my reading, it would be on the subway and the bus during my daily commute. I travel about an hour and a half each way every day, and although I frequently sleep some of the way, I usually get an hour or more of reading done during each trip. It may not be the most ideal reading situation, but it does mean that I do read on a more or less regular schedule. However, as I do not own an e-reader, and don't really have any plans to get one any time soon, this does mean that I don't really have the means to read e-books. This might change someday, but for now I'm a paper and ink reader for the most part.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Julius Caesar Defeated Pompey in Forty-Eight B.C.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Fifty Years Is the Traditional Length of a Jubilee

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Review - Flight 714 by Hergé

Short review: While traveling to Australia, Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus run into Skut, hitch a ride on a billionaire's plane, get hijacked, and are saved by aliens.

Haiku
Chance meeting with Skut
A billionaire kidnapped
Alien rescue

Full review: After experimenting with a plotless story in The Castafiore Emerald (read review), Hergé seems to have decided that was a bad idea. Well, half a bad idea anyway, as Flight 714 more or less has half a story and then takes a massive left turn when it meets a deus ex machina that appears out of left field. This is easily the most outlandish of Tintin's adventures, and the one that fits most firmly into the science fiction genre. As typical for Tintin stories late in the series, it is also full of inside references and recycled characters, although it does bring the character arc of a handful of long-running characters to a fairly definitive ending.

The book opens with Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus changing planes in Djakarta on their way to Sydney, Australia for the International Astronautical Congress where they are to be honored for being the first men on the moon. Oddly omitted are Thompson and Thomson, who also made the journey to the moon despite the fact that their trip was accidental. Due to the structure of the story, their absence at the opening means that they play no role in this book. Although the bumbling detectives are missing from Flight 714, the Estonian pilot Skut, last seen in The Red Sea Sharks (read review), shows up now employed by the eccentric millionaire Lazlo Carreidas, who also happens to be on his way to the International Astronautical Congress. Carreidas is "the millionaire who never laughs", and is so gloomy and unassuming that Haddock initially mistakes him for a vagrant down on his luck, which sets up a sequence in which Calculus accomplishes the impossible by making Carreidas laugh. Carreidas finds Calculus' hearing impaired cluelessness hilarious, and immediately offers to take our heroes to Sydney in his private plane. In a strange twist, this means that no one actually flies on Flight 714, as this is the plane that Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus were going to catch in Djakarta, but forewent in order to hitch a ride with Carreidas.

This turns out to be a fortuitous turn of evens for the millionaire, because Carreidas' private secretary Spalding, along with most of the plane crew, has become embroiled in a plot to try to steal the millionaire's fortune. The plot doesn't materialize until after Carreidas proves himself to be a petty crook by cheating at a game of Battleships against Captain Haddock. However, he also proves himself to be an aviation pioneer as his aircraft is a shifting wing design that allows the plane to function better at supersonic speeds. This technological tidbit is a reminder of how long-running the Tintin series was: the series started with pre-World War II propeller driven fighter planes and now features supersonic passenger planes. After some in-air action, including an attempted rescue by Tintin that Carreidas manages to mess up, everyone reaches the secret island the hijackers have prepared for them and we learn the identity of the mastermind behind the plot: the recurring villain Rastapopoulos and his sidekick Captain Allan both last seen in The Red Sea Sharks, adding to the list of characters recycled from that book alongside Skut. Clad in a bright pink shirt, cowboy hat and cowboy boots, Rastapopoulos strikes a fairly silly looking figure now, a development that starts to make sense once one realizes that without characters like Thompson and Thomson or Bianca Castafiore, the evil mastermind and his sidekick Allan serve double duty in the book as both the villains and the comic relief, which Rastapopoulos starts off by messing up an attempt to stamp on a spider. This character element gives the adventure portion of the book something of a slapstick feel, and reduces Rastapopoulos and Allen from being serious threats to being nothing more than cheap cartoon villains.

The book then lurches back and forth between action sequences as Tintin, Haddock and Skut try to figure out a way to escape from the clutches of Rastapopoulos and rescue Carreidas and silly comic interludes as Rastapopoulos and Allen prove to be remarkably incompetent at being criminals: Rastapopoulos gets stuck with Doctor Krollspell's truth serum he is attempting to use to get Carreidas to reveal his Swiss bank account number and reveals that he is planning on double crossing almost all of those who are in his own employ. But this is not before Carreidas, under the influence of the truth serum, reveals every moral failing on his part, large and small, to comic effect. In a classic Bond-villain form, Rastapopoulos is planning on killing off Doctor Krollspell and the Sondonesian rebels he had recruited to aid him by destroying their ships with mines so he doesn't have to pay them off. One has to wonder who Rastapopoulos is planning on having mine the Sondonesian ships, since the Sondonesians appear to be the bulk of the manpower he would have available to mine the ships, and it seems implausible that they would mine their own ships for him. The only other alternative would be for Allan or the conspirators from Carreidas' flight crew to do the job, and a shady merchant captain, a pilot, a navigator, and a private secretary don't seem very likely to have the appropriate skill set in their repertoire.

These details aside, the book meanders back and forth with Tintin and Haddock evading Allen and the Sondonesians while rescuing Calculus, Skut, and Carredias. As has become de rigeur for the series, there is a joke involving sticking plaster and Captain Haddock, but the sticking plaster humor expands to also include Carreidas, Rastapopoulos, and Krollspell. Interspersed with the dramatic gun play and fisticuffs is a running gag involving heaping inadvertent abuse upon Rastapopoulos as he is hit on the head by a broken rifle butt, runs headlong into a tree, has most of his facial hair pulled off with sticking plaster, gets blasted by a stray grenade, hit in the face with an elbow, and knocked on the head by a falling chunk of stalactite. Through his travails, Rastapopolous' appearance becomes more and more haggard as the abuse takes its toll. But this highlights one of the problems with making your primary villain into your comic relief: it transforms them from a menacing figure into a subject of mockery and pity. This point becomes very clear late in the book when Allen, having been dispatched to obtain dynamite to blow up an obstacles, returns to Rastapopoulos having had all his teeth knocked out and his skipper cap knocked off (revealing a bald spot on his head), morphs from a cruel villain into a pathetic toothless old man. One might suggest that this sort of treatment is poetic justice for characters that have been a thorn in Tintin's side for several books, but at a certain point poetic justice becomes overkill, and the reader begins to have sympathy for the villains. And although Rastapopoulos and Allen are greedy unrepentant criminals, Hergé  manages to cross that line, making the two of them, and especially Allen, seem sympathetic rather than loathsome.

After seeming to have written himself into a corner with his plot, Hergé has the book take a giant and unexpected left turn into science fiction when Tintin begins hearing a voice in his head that guides him and the rest of our heroes to safety. After winding through several underground caverns worked filled with strange looking stone statues, the characters meet up with Mik Kanrokitoff, who we are told is from Space Week magazine, and who informs the travelers that he has been guiding them with telepathy. And, it turns out, that he is on the island for his twice yearly meeting with extra-terrestrials. This rescue comes entirely out of the blue, with no groundwork laid in this book or any earlier Tintin books for the character of Kanrokitoff or alien activity on Earth. The Tintin series is full of plots driven by coincidence and serendipity, but the development that leads to the last portion of Flight 714 is nothing more than a deus ex machina in which the aliens literally come down from the sky, rescue the heroes from impending doom, sweep up the villains, and transport the protagonists to safety, and carry the evildoers away to parts unknown. This set of plot twists turns Tintin, Captain Haddock and the rest of the central characters into passive bystanders. Instead of acting to save themselves and foil the villains, the heroes and their foes are literally reduced to hypnotized zombies carried along by events to the resolution of the story. As a result, while this installment of the series does give closure to the story of Rastapopoulos and Allan, it is an unsatisfying end, because Tintin really didn't have anything to do with bringing it about.

Overall, Flight 714 is a strange and ultimately frustrating book. It starts off with a complex villainous plot involving two recurring villains, escape attempts, and action, and then it devolves into everyone standing around while godlike aliens fix all the resulting problems. With villains reduced to buffoons as a result of doing double duty as comic relief and a plot that resolves without any real effort on the part of the heroes, the book seems like Hergé was more or less out of story ideas and was more or less just mailing in his efforts. Although the book does have some interesting visuals, and half of a good story, this is simply not enough to raise it to the standards one would expect out of the Tintin series. In many ways, the book is so disappointing that even a late appearance by the annoying insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg passes by almost unnoticed. Possibly the most disappointing element of the book is that at the end, Hergé effectively pushes the reset button by having everyone forget most of the events that transpire in the book, leaving only a strange piece of metal in Calculus' possession and Snowy's intact memory as evidence of the kidnapping or the subsequent strange happenings on the island. With no real foundation for the plot twist, and a complete lack of follow up in subsequent adventures, Flight 714 is a moderately fun story with an ending that is likely to leave most readers feeling unsatisfied.

Previous book in the series: The Castafiore Emerald
Subsequent book in the series: Tintin and the Picaros

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