Stromata Blog

Random Reading (2): A Distaff Shakespeare?

A perk of blogging is that one receives – frequently if one is Glenn Reynolds, every blue moon or two if one is me – unsolicited copies of newly published books. Thus Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? appeared in my mailbox some months ago. I had the good intention of repaying the author by reviewing it, but time slipped by and, though the book was read, the review remained unwritten. Then, a few days ago, I ran across a Usenet post commending the author’s thesis. That stirred my sense of responsibility, so here are my thoughts.

Random Reading: Saxons, Vikings, Celts – And Ice Cream Parlors

[First of an occasional series]

The wanderings of primitive peoples are one of the great romances of history, made more romantic and mysterious by the shortage of direct evidence. Somehow, somewhen the Indo-European languages reached points as far separated as the Ganges River valley and the British Isles, and the cultivation of plants spread from a handful of locations to the entire world. Other languages and technologies, too, wandered far from their birth places. No one recorded the ways and means. We do not know what to attribute to mass migrations, what to the travels of a few artisans, what to the adoption of techniques from neighbors, what to independent invention. Did agriculturalists and metal workers colonize new territories, driving out or exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants, or did such advances spread through peaceable interchange? Can we trace mass migrations in the prehistory of language, or only the success of an elite dialect or commercial lingua franca? Parallels in recorded history show that many causes can produce identical effects. English prevailed in North America and Australia, because the indigenes were overwhelmed by migrants, Latin in Western Europe because it was the language of the Roman conquerors, Swahili in sub-Saharan Africa because it was useful for trade.

Lately the ambiguous evidence of archeology and linguistics has been supplemented by DNA analysis, which offers insights into the direct ancestry of living humans. Geneticists can establish, for instance, that everyone alive today is descended from a woman who probably lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. (Those facts don’t, incidentally, prove that the human race originated at that time and place. Logically, we all must have a common ancestress. She might lived before homo sapiens existed as a distinguishable species or long after. There are, however, other reasons, notably the lack of diversity in the human genome when compared to other species, that lead to the conclusion that we are a very recent arrival in the biosphere.) Similarly, seven maternal and five paternal ancestors have been identified for the vast majority of Europeans. They are dated and placed variously, from 45,000 years ago in Greece to 8,000 B.C. in Syria, using methods that rely on an heroic assumptions, e. g., that the rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA was constant over the pertinent time periods. Still, despite all uncertainties, it is suggestive that one ancestress apparently dwelled in an early center of agriculture and that her descendants seem to have arrived in the various regions of Europe pari passu with neolithic farming.

Bryan Sykes, an Oxford professor and the founder of Oxford Ancestors, which ingeniously combines fund raising and research by selling individuals the results obtained by examining samples of their DNA, is one of the pioneers in this field. He has also written three books to explain it to the layman, the most recent of which is titled Saxons, Vikings, and Celts in America or, much more colorfully, Blood of the Isles in Britain.

Unhappily for such a promising topic, either Professor Sykes or his publisher has evidently decided that people who buy books about the scientific exploration of human ancestry know no history and want to know no science. Or it could be that the author has taken the human genome as a model: Most of the material in our chromosomes is “junk DNA”, serving no purpose but padding. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is padded like an insecure debutante: sales pitches for Oxford Ancestors, descriptions of the scenery of the Scottish isles, praise for the fine organization of British blood drives, reminiscences of professional colleagues, accounts of local folklore, even a recommendation for a particularly fine ice cream parlor in Lampeter, Wales.

The on-topic padding consists of potted history, mostly very elementary with little focus on population movements. In places, it is absurd. Do you think there is a direct intellectual line from Polydore Vergil’s denial of the historicity of King Arthur to the Nazi death camps? Professor Sykes does. He is also under the impression that the Arthurian romances were ecclesiastical propaganda that became outmoded after the Reformation, leading to Arthur’s eclipse as a British hero in favor of King Alfred. As a quick check on that thesis, compare the number of poems, novels, plays, paintings and motion pictures featuring each of those figures over the past few centuries. For everyone who can recount the legend of Alfred’s cakes circumstantially, a hundred can tell you about the Table Round, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Gaiwan, Mordred, the Sword in the Stone, and other tales of Camelot.

The second rate fustian squeezes out what is interesting in Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, namely, the evidence concerning the ancestry of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people. That is covered in a few bland pages, so devoid of details that it’s hard to figure out what the author has concluded or why. The scantiness of the presentation also makes it hard to judge whether he has taken all of the known historical facts into account. For instance, has he made allowances for the huge Irish immigration into England in the 19th Century? If not, his reconstruction is tainted by a very recent Celtic incursion and isn’t of much use in answering the vexed question of whether the Anglo-Saxons literally drove the Celts out of England or were, like their Roman predecessors, a relatively small ruling clique.

Historical genetics looks like a highly promising tool, but how are we to know if its practitioners are more interested in rating ice cream parlors than revealing the secrets of their art?

A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival

Two years ago, Robert Ferrigno published Prayers for the Assassin, a novel set in a Moslem-dominated United States a few decades from now. To summarize the plot may be a thought crime in Canada, so, lest I be forbidden to attend next year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I’ll just say that the book was a political thriller whose hero, in true thriller fashion, battled a shadowy, globe girdling conspiracy, the full extent of which became evident only at the climax. Also in thriller fashion, the villain, temporarily thwarted, escaped to plot again in the sequel. That sequel, Sins of the Assassin, has just gone on sale. A third volume will, the author tells us, complete the story.

In Sins, the scene of the action moves from the Islamic Republic to the “Bible Belt”, the section of the former U.S.A., roughly coterminous with the “red” Southern states, that resisted the Moslem advance. As the nickname suggests, it is modeled on liberal shibboleths about Christian fundamentalism, though the model is subtly subversive of left-wing conventional wisdom. Individualistic hyper-piety can lead to many bad things, but it is a poor foundation for an effective theocracy.

The Bible Belt that we see through the eyes of Rakkim Epps, a Moslem “shadow warrior” assigned to penetrate the top secret project of a charismatic warlord, is weak, backward, fragmented, superstitious, corrupt and in thrall to foreign powers, yet it is also freer, more tolerant and more hopeful than its Islamic counterpart. This difference is not exactly an ostentatious theme. It is never emphasized, and the hero doesn’t notice it. The reader must observe and ponder for himself. If the author’s intention was propagandistic, it is propaganda of the only kind suitable for fiction, where we are shown a variation on our own world and must tease out the implications for ourselves.

Regardless of the background, the thriller is the foreground. I’m not a great afficionado of the genre, but, so far as I can judge, this is a first rate exemplar. The plot moves twistily and rapidly. The hero receives a little supernatural aid but none from sheer good luck. The characters, while not realistic, are interesting and multi-dimensional. Even the secondary ones have memorable touches, like the grotesque pride that an end-times cult leader takes in having once been a tenured university professor. When the hidden hand of the archvillain is at last disclosed, the form that it takes is characteristic but unexpected. The prose is clear and energetic, albeit more telegraphic than I like. (Did the publisher ration the word “and”?)

From what one might call the Alexandre Dumas perspective, Sins is, I think, more successful than Prayers. It isn’t quite perfect for two reasons. First, and less importantly, the Big Secret proves to be a macguffin. Maybe Mr. Ferrigno will surprise us, but I don’t see how it can be of any actual use to the parties that have so desperately sought it. (Also, unless he springs a second surprise, it is scientifically absurd.)

Second, as the middle volume of a trilogy, the novel doesn’t come to a real end. True, the plot lines are tied up, which is better than many middles do, but the villains are left in a position of strength, from which the world needs to be rescued. Rakkim’s mission has ended in, at best, a draw. Meanwhile, the secondary narrative thread concludes with an effective, though invisible, coup d’etat against the Islamic Republic’s moderate governing authorities. Prayers ended more satisfactorily. While it left room for a sequel, none was urgently demanded. Sins, by contrast, will be less than half a book until the next volume appears.

The upside is that volume three, if Mr. Ferrigno goes on as he has begun, will be worth waiting for.

Noted in Passing

■ I promised not to fill this blog with blather about my recent travels, and I won’t, but I was interested to see that David Frum, in the course of writing about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sums up my reaction to Paris:

It is very weird to think that the Paris of 1831 [the year of Hunchback’s publication] looked much more like Paris of 1482 – the year in which the novel is set – than the Paris of today.

There was of course no Eiffel Tower, no Grand Palais, no Pont Alexander III. There were no Belle Epoque apartment houses, no Metro signs, no Opera, no Haussman boulevards. The Arc de Triomphe was begun - but abandoned unfinished.

Ile de la Cite was still a jumble of ancient houses and shops. The area around the Beaubourg, the old marketplace, was still one of the most densely inhabited in the city. Montmartre was a semi-rustic village, covered with vineyards and windmills. The Tuileries marked the westward end of the built-up city, with the Champs Elysees a long suburban promenade spotted here and there by palaces new and old.

The city would change more in the next 175 years than it had in the previous 350. . . .

It’s a very striking thought that a modern tourist can see much, much, much more of the scenes and surroundings of the American Revolution than of the French. The Bastille: gone. What was the National Assembly: gone. The Jacobins and the Cordeliers: gone. The prison in which Louis XVI was held: gone. The Champs de Mars: changed beyond all recognition.

You can stand where Patrick Henry gave his oration, visit old North Church, tour the hall in which the Constitution was written, and of course see the homes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and so many others. Let nobody talk of the European sense of history and American neglect!

■ I’m reminded, by his linking to one of my posts, that I ought to call attention to Nicholas Whyte’s series of reviews of works that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula. He is currently up to number 28 (Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag”) and has about 30 to go. It’s a worthwhile project, illustrating the breadth and vagaries of taste within the SF community, and Nicholas’ comments are readable and perceptive. In fact, he deserves a Best Fan Writer nomination for them.

As a completely separate interest, fantastical in its own way, Nicholas maintains a site devoted to election results in Northern Ireland from 1885 to the present.

■ Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story about a new twist in Koranic studies [link may work only for subscribers].

Before World War II, German scholars compiled a huge photographic record of early manuscripts of Islam’s sacred book, with the aim of bringing modern scholarly methods to bear on the text. The effort ground to a halt under the Hitler regime, which had other priorities for men who knew Arabic. Then, on April 24, 1944, British bombers devastated the Bavarian Academy of Science, where the collection was housed. Its custodian, Anton Spitaler, reported that it had been destroyed.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars – and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Since contemporary Moslem governments show little inclination to grant Western scholars access to documents, the rediscovered archive is a vital resource for Koranic studies. Not surprisingly, some Moslems feel threatened.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable.” . . .

In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.

Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran “didn’t just fall from heaven” but “has a history.” When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents,” read one letter to the Yemen Times. “Allah, help us against our enemies.”

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

For some perhaps fathomable reason, I suspect that there will never be much enthusiasm for finding layers of redaction in the Koran. The rediscovered archive is a valuable tool for scholarship, but tools are useless without the will to make use of them.

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

If mere cartoons can give rise to murderous rage, what will happen when and if the Germans produce “the first ‘critical edition’ of the Quran – an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature”? It’s hard to be extremely optimistic.

Trees with Maps, and Other Frivolities

“Ancient Trees Found Using 200 Year Old Maps”, says yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Okay, it figures that elderly trees might not have replaced the maps they used in their younger days, but what I don’t understand is, Why does a tree need a map? It isn’t going anywhere.

Or is this evidence that Ents still lurk in the English forests? I rather hope so.

Also in the Telegraph is a report on a scientific inquiry, published in the British Medical Journal, into the genetic basis of wizardry.

Based on an analysis of the Harry Potter novels, Sreeram Ramagopalan, Dr Marian Knight, Prof George Ebers, and Dr Julian Knight of Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, conclude that “magic shows strong evidence of heritability.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows provides a lot of valuable information about magical families that strongly suggests a role for genetic factors,” says Dr Knight, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

“For example, magic exists in at least seven generations of the Black family and at least three generations in others. We also see twins – the Patil and Weasley twins – with the same magical abilities.”

The new analysis is considerably more sophisticated than a predecessor’s simplistic model:

[I]n the journal Nature, Dr Jeffrey Craig, Dr Renee Dow and Dr MaryAnne Aitken claimed magical abilities depend on a recessive version of a gene: all wizards and witches thus have two copies of the wizard “W” gene, distinguishing it from the ordinary M, or Muggle, version.

Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom and Draco Malfoy are pure-blood wizards - with WW ancestors over many generations. Hermione Granger is a muggle-born witch (WW, with WM parents). . . .

But the team shocked Potter lovers by claiming it had uncovered evidence of “questionable paternity” in the case of Filch the caretaker, who is a “squib”, someone who has been born into a wizarding family but lacks full blooded magical powers.

If Filch had been the offspring of a witch and a wizard, he would have had to be a wizard himself, for the same reason that two blue-eyed parents can’t produce a brown-eyed child. Only lack of marital fidelity can explain his lack of magical talent.

An unpleasant corollary of this theory is that wizardly bigots are not irrational to stress purity of blood as a desideratum. Widespread intermarriage with muggles would lead to a steady diminution of the wizard population and ultimately make a separate wizard society impossible to maintain, thus leaving mankind open to the depredations of dementors, basilisks and other malign magical creatures.

Data from the latest Rowling opus convinced the Oxford scientists that the single-gene hypothesis was “simplistic”.

Rather than being all down to one gene, they believe enchanted skills can vary across a spectrum of strength, depending on the combined influence of a dominant gene for magic, which is turned on or off depending on epigenetic effects, and modified by the influence of a number of genes, along with the environment.

There appear to be three magical skills that are conferred by specific genes. “One of these is the capability to speak to snakes (parseltongue), known to be only a feature of those who are direct descendants of Slytherin.

Another is to be a seer; Sybill Trelawney, although not perfect, has this ability, and her great-great-grandmother was also extremely gifted in this respect.

Lastly, being a metamorphmagus (the ability to change one’s physical appearance) is an ability that Nymphadora Tonks passed on to her son,” says the BMJ paper.

There are even some candidate genes: given their reported association with speech and language, further mutations at the FOXP2 gene, already linked with Muggle language skills, could account for the rare magical ability to speak parseltongue while variants in a gene linked with hair colour, the MC1R gene, may explain Tonks’ hair-changing abilities.

All of these conclusions are necessarily tentative. If only England had the U.S. Congress, an earmark might even now be embedded in the budget bill to support further research.

Finally among these lighter items, I must call your attention to the best parody ad of the campaign season. The really amusing part is that Bill Clinton’s life-partner doesn’t realize it’s a parody.

Anti-Narnia on the Screen

Now that Philip Pullman’s imaginative, fascist-tinged Golden Compass is coming to theaters everywhere, I see that Tom Smith (the law professor, not the milblogger) has much the same view as I did a couple of years ago. In Professor Smith’s words,

The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis – a fair characterization of the book’s point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children’s literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman’s series.

To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let’s run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons – their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has – he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930’s.

I’ll be interested to find out how the producers of the movie have handled the last few pages of The Golden Compass, where Lord Asriel, sounding as megalomaniacal as an intoxicated gauleiter, advances his cause by torturing a small boy to death. At that point, the reader doesn’t know whether Asriel is a hero or a villain. The movie audience is unlikely to be in the same state of doubt. How will kids react if the counterpart to Dumbledore, Gandalf and Aslan speaks and acts like the Asriel of the book? I doubt that the film makers want to find out. Will Hollywood’s talents for sugar-coating and watering-down be equal to the challenge?

Hugos Come, Hugos Go

Since I’m vacationing at my mother’s, and Mother thinks that a dial-up connection is all the Internet anybody needs, I got my Hugo results early Saturday morning via Blackberry. As usual, the vox populi diverged greatly from my own, nowhere so widely as in the Best Movie Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category. None of this year’s nominees was, IMHO, of Hugo quality, but Pan’s Labyrinth wasn’t even worthy of a first year student project: tedious, ugly, incoherent – were I the Hugo dictator (“Hugo Chávez”, one might call me), anyone who ranked it above 10th place on the ballot would not be allowed to vote in this category ever again, or, alternatively, would be sentenced to watch it repeatedly until his aesthetic sense writhed in agony.

About the other winners, I have no complaints, even if they weren’t my own first choices.

Best Novel: Rainbows End is an enjoyable read, but it has the feel of having been constructed rather than imagined. One part terrorist conspiracy, because that’s in the news; one part Alzheimer’s recovery, because that’s been a big theme for the past few years’ Hugo nominees; one part massive multi-player role playing game, because lots of fans play them, or at least wish they had time to; one part book digitization, because it’s a big controversy among techno types. Stir, and blend to taste. I preferred Glasshouse, which presents the problem of how to break into, and then out of, a panopticon-like prison, and Eifelheim, in which the intellectual sophistication of the Middle Ages gets due respect (the serious side, one might say, of what The High Crusade treated lightly).

Best Novella: I expected “A Billion Eves” to win on the strength of its concept. I thought, though, that, like so many of Robert Reed’s other stories, the concept was superficially thought through. My pick was Paul Melko’s “The Walls of the Universe”, a romp through parallel worlds.

Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife” continues Ian McDonald’s tales of a near future, politically fragmented, cyber-sophisticated India, and I have nothing negative to say about it, though Michael F. Flynn’s “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” impressed me more. I suppose that the lack of a resolution to its mystery – a rip in reality in the middle of Puget Sound – disappointed some readers. The gravamen of the story was, however, how people react to the inexplicable, not to explain it.

Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” is sweet and poignant, and it must also have gathered a big movie buff vote. I went back and forth between it and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” before giving the nod to the Gaiman piece.

Best Related Book: I didn’t read the Tiptree biography, because I apprehend that much of it is about the subject’s mental illnesses, culminating in murder and suicide. For that sort of thing, were it to my taste, I’d pick up People in the grocery store. If others want to read and vote for it, that’s fine with me – no sanctions from the Hugo dictator here. I just regret that two less flashy projects, the Hugo GoH speech collection and Joe Major’s study of Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles, were left among the also rans.

I’ll pass over the rest of the ballot, except to note that John Scalzi’s (or his acolytes’) campaign to depose David Langford didn’t quite succeed. But it came within one vote of winning, so this is, so far as I can recall, the very first time that my very own vote has decided a Hugo (or probably any other) election. My thanks to Mr. Scalzi. As for what the outcome means, perhaps those of us who have an interest in fan writing should take to heart this lesson: It looks like the field has become so insular that a rather ordinary blog written by a well-known figure can outpoll first-rate fan writers of the traditional kind. It won’t break my heart if Best Fan Writer warps de facto into Most Popular Pro Weblog, but, before that happens, maybe an effort ought to be launched to make the works of Messrs. Hertz, Garcia, Silver et al. better known within the wider precincts of fandom.

The Ayatollah and the Philosophe

Well worth a few minutes of your reading time is David Frum’s review of a book with the unpromising title Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984, died of AIDS) was (and is) a leading light of post-modern, i. e., post-rational, thought discourse. He loathed Western civilization, bourgeois morality and, above all, the United States of America (except for the bath houses in San Francisco, that is). He was thus ready to fall in love.

French philosophers have a long and ugly history of apologetic for tyranny, from Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Frederick the Great up through the craze for Maoism that swept Paris in the 1960s.

But of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation. . . .

Foucault perceptively perceived that communism was fading as a challenger to the western liberal order he despised. Perceptively (indeed presciently), he decided that radical Islam offered the only effective challenge to western liberalism. He welcomed this challenge and published more than a dozen essays celebrating the Iranian revolution. . . .

Even after the Khomeinites began putting homosexuals to death, Foucault insisted that the sentenced men had been punished not for their sexual orientation, but for support of the shah, with homosexuality as a convenient excuse. (He may in fact have been right about this latter point – but it’s an odd defense to come from a man like Foucault: “Homosexuality was not the reason for murder. It was the pretext for murder. See – nothing to worry about!”)

The authors of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution find roots in Foucault’s theories for his Islamofascist nympholepsy. Whether they are right about that, I can’t say. (If I knew the Foucault oeuvre well enough to pass judgement, I would have been guilty of a plentiful waste of time in my earlier years.) What’s striking is how little Foucault is unique. Though not all share his puppy dog-like devotion to the Ayatollah, a vast number of intellectuals find excuses for preferring the terrorist perpetrators of medieval superstition over the contemporary West. The common denominator among them, Foucault and the Islamofascists is not homosexuality or post-structuralism or attitudes toward women; it is pure hatred of Judaism and Christianity, of American culture and of the Western tradition of individual liberty. Next to the diabolical George W. Bush, Ruhollah Khomeini – or Osama bin Laden – looks like a post-modernist saint.

Horcruxes and Hallows and Snape, Oh My!

In the Middle Ages, chess fanatics, thinking the regular game too short and decisive, expanded it by enlarging the board, inventing new pieces and adding ploys by which an endangered King could put off defeat. The end product of this evolution, shatranj al-Kabīr (“Great Chess”), was played on an 11x10 board, plus six “citadel” squares adjoining the field, with 17 pieces and 11 pawns to each side. The enemy King had to be checkmated three times to be killed, and one of the pawns had the ability, upon reaching the last rank for the third time, to turn into a replacement King.

The game is said to have been Tamerlane’s favorite. As a pastime between pillaging and rapine, it doubtless had its attractions, but do you wonder why it isn’t played any more?

Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows reminded me irresistibly of shatranj al-Kabīr. Harry, Hermione and Ron must destroy one by one the hiding places (“horcruxes”) among which the Dark Lord Voldemort has divided his soul. Their quest is prolonged by the need to find the weapons that will destroy the horcruxes and by the riddle of the “deathly hallows”. The author implies a promise that these adventures will have a decisive impact on the inevitable confrontation between Harry and Voldemort. But all that they do is postpone it. The key to the outcome is – the protective charm that Lily Potter’s sacrificial love placed on Harry just before the beginning of book one!

As a teller of incidents, J. K. Rowling is often splendid. Readers of Deathly Hallows will remember Bill and Fleur’s wedding, the infiltration of the Ministry of Magic, Xenophilius Lovegood’s bizarre house, the near-fatal visit to Godric’s Hollow, the escape from Gringott’s, the return to Hogwarts, Severus Snape’s autobiography and Harry’s last talk with Dumbledore long after they have lost track of who is the true master of the Elder Wand and why.

To my mind, the Harry Potter series resembles one of those English country houses that has been enlarged and refurbished and redecorated according to the whims of successive generations, until the ensemble can’t be looked on without inducing aesthetic vertigo. If one approaches fantasy novels with the expectation of a thoroughly worked-out setting, a linear plot that leaves no end untightened and an efficient storytelling technique, J. K. Rowling will never be one of your favorite novelists. Nor will you much like Le Morte d’Arthur. The standards of the “well-made” narrative aren’t what every reader is looking for. In fact, they are a fairly recent development in literary history and could fade away within a generation or two.

Television series are constructed in much the same way as Harry Potter, particularly where the individual episodes are fitted into an overall “arc”. In a show like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica (about which I claim no expertise, but think I know enough for these generalities), the addition of casual complexities to the story line is commonplace, with no premium on close-fitted construction. One way to understand the popularity of the Potter books, despite gaping plotholes, spur-of-the-moment alterations to the laws of the universe and occasional personality transplants, is to think of them as a TV program that had to be brought to a close after seven seasons. From that perspective, it compares quite favorably to Babylon 5.

Had I edited Miss Rowling, I would have browbeaten her into writing something completely different: The books would have stayed under 300 pages each; “laws of magic” would have been devised in advance and rigorously followed; no event would have been superfluous to the ultimate resolution; all foreshadowings would have led to substance; and every inconsistency would have been ruthlessly purged. To anyone imbued with the tastes of my generation, the result would have been a far more satisfying set of volumes. But would they have sold more copies than anything since the Bible? Of that I am not so sure. Shatranj al-Kabīr may be the next generation’s game.

Some Secrets Are Crucial – But Not Our Country’s

An NRO Media Blog reader on the New York Times review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

[T]here is more uproar over the Times’ review of this book before its “official” release than over the Times’ constant leaking of US government classified information. Moreover, it is ironic that the Times opted not to “spoil” plot aspects of the book, when they ignore how their leaking of classified information might “spoil” legitimate and valuable programs designed to protect their readership.

Of course, if the NYT readership, such as remains these days, is in accord with the Democratic Party’s views on protecting terrorists from snitches, it doesn’t want to be protected.

How Harry Potter Ends: The ONE, TRUE Spoiler

Missing the latest Harry Potter foofooraw isn’t so hard. You just have to be blind, deaf and fluent only in Algonquin. It helps to be dead, too. Brain-dead, though, isn’t good enough: Keith Olbermann has a theory.

Speaking for myself, I’m not terribly interested in either pursuing or avoiding clues to “Who Lives?”, “Who Dies?”, “Who Gets Married?”, “Who’s the Horcrux?”. After all, I’ve read Hamlet dozens of times, knowing on every occasion after the first who are going to wind up stretched on the Elsinore banquet hall floor. It’s my firm conviction that knowing how a good book ends doesn’t “spoil” it all. [And that is why you should sedulously avoid Deathly Hallows spoilers. – Inner Snark] (Ignore the bit in brackets.)

I do have a friend who is desperate for spoilers, because they will shape her decision on when to start reading. Her plan:

• If Severus Snape survives and is a good guy, she plunges in the instant her copy arrives from Amazon.

• If Snape survives and is evil, she waits a week.

• If Snape is good but dies while saving Harry, she waits a year.

• If Lupin dies, she adds two months to any of the above.

• If Snape dies and is evil, she returns the book unopened and demands a refund.

To keep her and a few million others on tenterhooks, Scholastic Press has reportedly spent $20 million on security, which doesn’t seem to be working.

Or is it? I happen to have an unnamed source (the only reliable kind, as we all know) who has revealed the true answers to all of the most asked HP questions:

Does Harry die? Yes.

Does Harry live? Yes.

Is Snape good? Yes.

Is Snape evil? Yes.

Do Harry and Ginny get married? Yes.

Does Harry dump Ginny for Hermione? Yes.

But how can this be, you ask? Is JKR so rich she can buy her way out of the Law of Non-Contradiction?

Not yet. She still has to finish paying off the mortgage on Scotland. And Deathly Hallows will rake in the money to do it.

For the Never Before Disclosed Secret is –

There is more than one book. J. K. Rowling has written multiple versions of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, all of which will be released, without advance warning, Friday at midnight. They are mixed together in the shipments to booksellers. No buyer will know whether she is getting Harry Live or Harry Dead – or even that, Schrödiger’s Cat-like, Harry could be either – until she reads her copy through and starts exchanging IMs.

By about 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, the Evelyn Wood alumnae will have figured out what has happened. Then will ensue the most profitable phase of the Potter Cycle. Every hard core Potterian will be desperate to acquire every single version (except my friend, who will scour eBay for the Good Living Snape one). Debates will rage over which is the true ending. Public pressure will force Congress to put surrender on the back burner while it investigates literary hype. (I hope that we don’t wind up at war with Scotland.)

Having been the first to reveal this covert intelligence, I expect a modest reward in money or glory. Appreciative donations may be directed to my PayPal account, unstinted praise to the Comments.

Update (7/19/07): My Snapophilic friend sends this interesting personal news:

Because of the links you sent me (and links within those articles), I was the first person on the spoiler community to present what I would consider irrefutable proof that the version of Deathly Hallows that showed up on the internet, known as the Carpet Leaks, is genuine.

Included in your information was a link (to a link to a link to) the book review that was printed in the Baltimore Sun. Although the reviewer said she wasn’t going to give out any spoilers, she describes quite well what the Deathly Hallows actually are, and it matches precisely with what is in the Carpet Leaks. There are lots of other little things that sound like it, but that is hard evidence.

And as back-up to the review, the newspaper described how they had gotten a copy of the book, and it matched precisely what Scholastic said in their statement has happened regarding books being sent out early by DeepDiscount.com. [Described first-hand by the VodkaPundit himself in “I Was an eBay Voldemort”]

This means that all the ridiculous stuff I said was in the Epilogue was actually written by JKR as the end of the Harry Potter saga. I cannot say the name Albus Severus Potter without laughing out loud!

Me, too. Happily, young A. S. is present in only one of the Potter alternate universes.

Watch Your Back!

John J. Miller notes that the narrative of The Puppet Masters, Robert A. Heinlein’s nearest approach to a horror novel, begins on July 12, 2007. I read the book as a teenager, missing all its potential political implications but taking away a habit, with me to this day, of occasionally patting my back to make sure that no slugs are attached.

A small budget 1994 movie, reportedly even more dismal than the travesty of Starship Troopers, was made from the book, or at least swiped its title. I’m surprised that a big studio didn’t try to do it right years earlier. After all, how often does the plot provide a good reason to display dozens of starlets in halter tops?

But maybe a flick in which hidden enemies are opposed by a super-secret government agency that finds it essential to strip away (pun intended) civil liberties isn’t what Hollywood is looking for these days – especially not when it ends with mankind taking the war to the mufsidun aliens.

What Robert Heinlein Got Wrong

Today the blogosphere will resound with praises of Robert A. Heinlein on the 100th anniversary of his birth (7/7/07 – did he plan it that way?). Though I adore Mr. Heinlein’s writings this side of idolatry, my additions to the general acclaim could only be otiose. For those who want to read a great deal more about the Master, let me recommend Heinlein’s Children by Joseph T. Major, a study of his “juvenile” novels. “Juvenile” belongs in quotes; the books fall into that category only because their heroes and heroines are young and stay out of each other’s beds. The pejorative connotations of the label – simplistic, naive, superficial – don’t fit at all. In his introduction to Mr. Major’s book, Alexei Panshin, himself a formidable Heinlein critic, writes thus about his own teenage reading:

Heinlein addressed serious subjects that the other SF books I read did not – economics, revolution, overpopulation – and introduced me to concepts I hadn’t previously encountered, even in the adult books I’d begun to read. I first ran into the word “ecology” in Farmer in the Sky and had to look it up. It would be years before I saw it anywhere else. . . .

There was a moral dimension in his work, too, that I valued and tried to apply – a sense that in the future as much as now life would present us with hard choices and what we chose to do would matter.

These brisk, finely crafted tales would be enough to secure any writer’s reputation, and a number of them – Citizen of the Galaxy, The Rolling Stones, Farmer in the Sky, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel – are among my favorites. Citizen regularly appears on lists of the greatest SF of all time. The rest of the Heinlein oeuvre falls into two camps, between which preferences tend to be sharply and radically divided. On one side are the novels and stories prior to Stranger in a Strange Land. They fall into the same tradition as the juveniles: scientific extrapolation, strong plots, economical storytelling and heroes who exemplify competence, courage and curiosity.

Set against these are Stranger and its successors. (The dividing line isn’t razor sharp. Work on Stranger was interrupted by the writing of Starship Troopers, the epitome of his first phase, and a few novels – Podkayne of Mars, Farnham’s Freehold, Glory Road – straddle the periods.) When I read this departure from the Heinlein I knew, I disliked it so much that I stopped ten pages from the end, saying to myself that I never wanted to have to admit to having finished the thing. It looked to me like my favorite author had taken up with the hippies: free love, smacking the bourgeoisie and “if it feels good, do it”.

That’s still the perception of many fans of Heinlein’s “second phase” and the reason why leftists and libertarians don’t unanimously excoriate him, but I now think that I was, and they are, guilty of misreading. The radical change was not in Heinlein’s opinions but in the context in which he placed his characters. Looking closely, one sees that they remain competent, courageous and curious. Now, however, they dwell in societies where those qualities are neither widespread nor admired. They are unconventional, because convention has rotted away, not merely because they want to “do their own thing”.

But I wasn’t going to run on and on about Heinlein’s literary merits. Instead, as adumbrated in this post’s heading, I want to call attention to a place where he was, sad to say, wrong, wrong and wrong.

The conquest of space was a subject about which the early Heinlein, at least, was an incorrigible optimist. In Space Cadet (1948), the first lunar landing is placed in 1955! The commemorative plaque at the Interplanetary Patrol’s academy bears this inscription:

USAF Rocket Ship Kilroy Was Here
FIRST TRUE SPACESHIP
1955 A.D.
From Terra to Luna and return – Lieut. Colonel Robert deFries Sims, Commanding; Captain Saul S. Abrams; Master Sergeant Malcolm MacGregor. None survived the return landing. Rest in Peace.

The fate of the Kilroy Was Here may seem like a dark touch, but it is integral to the optimistic perspective. Heinlein foresaw that men would die in space – but didn’t believe that the casualties would impede the journey. In “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947), he summed up what he imagined would be the character of the first generation of space travelers:

The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of the Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

Not quite prophecy. Oh, if you offered that wager to some of our astronauts, they’d probably take it, but then NASA would insist that they drop with parachutes into piles of feathers – and would call it all off as soon as a jumper sprained his foot.

This change in society, from “The impossible takes a little longer” to “Safety first”, started, or became visible, in the early 1960’s. That was also when Robert Heinlein’s heroes turned into outsiders. Perhaps it was not a coincidence.

Further reading: SF Signal has a big collection of Robert A. Heinlein links.

The Librarian Would Be Proud

Via the Daily Telegraph comes news of experimental proof that orangutans are unsung geniuses, as Terry Pratchett’s readers have known for years:

The experiment in Germany, described today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, details how one group of orang-utans had sufficient mental insight to “invent” the use of water as a tool to obtain a tasty treat.

Natacha Mendes, who undertook the study with colleagues Daniel Hanus and Josep Call at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, reports how five orang-utans at nearby Leipzig Zoo used water when they were confronted with an out-of-reach peanut floating inside a vertical, transparent tube.

To obtain the peanut, orang-utans had to collect water from a drink dispenser and spit it into the tube to raise the water level. For them to be able to reach the peanut, they had to repeat this three times. . . .

It took the apes about nine minutes on average to solve the problem. . . . “As soon as they saw the change in water level, they figured out how to solve the problem,” Miss Mendes added. . . .

“As far as we know,” Miss Mendes said, “no such flexible behaviour in the tool-use domain has been reported in other species, including corvids [crows], which have been challenging great apes’ performance in several aspects of problem-solving.”

Once the Global Warmingests persuade the human race to save the environment by exterminating itself, I look forward to the titanic struggle between the orangutans and the crows for control of the world.

The Hugo Ballot Sneaks Out

The alert and diligent Trufen.net informs us that –

What is to all appearances the official Nippon 2007 Hugo Nominees press release has been posted by Colin Harris on his LiveJournal. The text is reproduced here. . . . The unsolved mystery of how anyone would get the press release merely adds to the already considerable legend of Nippon 2007’s enigmatic Hugo administration. The worldcon’s own website – at this writing – has no working link to its own press releases, and displays only graphic gobbledygook on its newly-activated nominee page.

Very odd. No doubt this will become another Hugo legend. (I would hate to suspect Colin Harris of the most elaborate and pointless hoax in the award’s history.) At least, the presumptive ballot looks complete and accurate. Some of us can recall the unfortunate year when a prematurely released version was neither.

Scanning the nominees, I see that my endorsements had their usual nil impact, unless they pushed Heinlein’s Children and Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches over the top. The conventional wisdom is, of course, that the new biography of author/murderess Alice Sheldon will sweep the Best Related Book category. I haven’t read it yet but am sure that it won’t lack human interest – maybe more than a lot of fiction.

Interestingly, voters in the Best Novel category outnumbered Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) by a substantial 327 to 242. Perhaps the low turnout for the latter tells us something about the quality of last year’s SF/F movie output. Also noteworthy – and inexplicable to me – is the Best Novella total: only 167 voters, barely ahead of the traditionally light bottom-of-the-ballot categories. Substandard quality clearly can’t be blamed in this instance; at least three of the nominees would have been contenders in any year.

The biggest disappointment, from my PoV, was the failure of Tim Powers’ Three Days To Never to make the final ballot. The most pleasant surprises were the Best Book Editor nominations for Jim Baen and Ginjer Buchanan. It was also pleasant, though less surprising, to see John Hertz cop a second consecutive, much deserved Best Fan Writer nomination.

However untimely its begetting, the early appearance of the ballot should make our mandatory Hugo reading measurably less frantic. For that I am grateful. Further commentary to come in due course.

Update (3/31/07): The official press release is now on-line. Ballots will be mailed in late April and will be, but are not yet, posted on the Nippon 2007 Web site. The release doesn’t tell us the voting deadline. I hope that the administrators will eschew the precedent of the ultra-early nomination deadline.

Update (4/1/07 – for real, despite the date): As Kevin Standlee explained in a comment, the ballot was released one stage before the Final Level of Review. It turns out there was a reason why the concomm wanted that level. To elide a story that I’d rather not go into, voters who are interested in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category should rely on the current version of the official press release and resolutely ignore anything that came out earlier.

Having once been a Hugo Award administrator myself, and having presided over the Greatest Hugo Flub of All Time (still embarrassing after all these years), I have nothing but sympathy for my unlucky Nippon counterparts.

An Addition to Inklings Scholarship

A great deal of what is written about C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and the rest of the Inklings circle is amateurish in the bad sense: informed by much enthusiasm and little knowledge or judgment. Therefore, I was delighted to receive, and to have the opportunity to review, a volume worthy of its subjects: Diana Pavlac Glyer’s just-published The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community.

The book’s topic is a strangely neglected one: how the Inklings’ weekly gatherings, continuing for over 15 years, influenced them as writers. The conventional wisdom is that they paid almost no attention to one another’s comments and criticisms, the proof text being Lewis’s oft-quoted “No one every influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch”. The Company They Keep renders that view quite untenable. The evidence, while patchy, shows clearly that, had the Inklings written as individuals, their most admired works, if produced at all, would have been different and, for the most part, inferior. As Dr. Glyer says of The Lord of the Rings, “Without the Inklings, it is certain that we would have more details of Shire genealogies, more words in the Elvish vocabulary, and fewer stories of the Third Age of Middle-earth.”

Not everyone will be interested in the details, sometimes very fine details, of how a story is put together, and there is a very light patina of “literary theory” that may discourage some readers, though it can easily be set aside. On the other hand, for serious students of the Inklings and the type of literature that their leading lights produced, this is a foundational work.

BTW, Diana Pavlac Glyer is the only person ever to be married to two World Science Fiction Convention chairmen: the late Ross Pavlac (Chicon IV, 1982) and Mike Glyer (L.A.Con III, 1996). I’m not sure whether this fact affected her literary analysis.

An Early Start to the Hugo Season

For reasons that I don’t know but am sure are reasonable, the deadline for the 2006 Hugo Award nominations is earlier than usual: Ballots must be in the administrator’s hands by midnight, Pacific Standard Time, on Saturday, March 3rd. When I became cognizant of this fact a couple of weeks I ago, I started reading frantically but nonetheless am caught quite ill-prepared to cast an intelligent ballot – not that ill-preparedness will keep me from the ballot box! What good’s the right to vote if you can’t exercise it stupidly (as a hundred get-out-the-vote drives attest in every even-numbered year)?

Here, then, are a few scattered suggestions for worthy candidates. There are doubtless many others of equal or better quality that I haven’t yet seen.

Novel: No matter what else I read from the 2006 crop, I am confident that my first choice will be Tim Powers’ Three Days to Never, a wondrous blend of time travel, real history, fake history and tense adventure. Where else will you find Albert Einstein’s daughter, a blind assassin, an ancient conspiracy, a Mossad agent who will die if he hears the telephone ring and a lesson about improving the past? The only criticism I’ve heard of it is that it isn’t as good as Declare. That’s like scoffing at King Lear because it isn’t Hamlet.

Also impressive, though I haven’t finished it yet, is Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. Twenty years ago, Flynn wrote a Hugo-nominated novella with the same title, about a physicist and an historian who make a startling discovery about a vanished medieval village. The novel fills in the village’s point of view. As a recreation of life in the 14th Century Black Forest, it makes most historical novels look like juveniles. To that are added a truly alien alien race, as believable as First Contact scenario as I’ve ever encountered, a cast of odd but life-like characters, and, beneath the surface, a number of disturbing moral and philosophical quandaries. My only complaint is that the 21st Century sections, drawn from the original novella, show how much the author has progressed since 1986.

I’ll round off my nominating ballot with Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno (my review), Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell and Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

There are other books that, based on what I’ve seen and heard about them, I might well have nominated if I’d gotten around to reading them, such as Empire by Orson Scott Card, A Small and Remarkable Life by Nick DiChario, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

Short Fiction: Thanks to electronic books and the ability to subscribe to prozines digitally via Fictionwise, I’ve actually read quite a lot of short fiction this year. Alas, I neglected to make notes on worthy stories and must rely on a very porous memory. Standing out in recollection are Terry Bisson’s novella “Planet of Mystery” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January & February) and three novelettes: Jonathan Sherwood’s “Under the Graying Sea” (Asimov’s, February – a first sale!), Gary W. Shockley’s “The Cathedral of Universal Biodiversity” (F&SF, February) and Gardner Dozois’ “Counterfactual” (F&SF, June).

Related Book: Two works strike me as particularly deserving in this nebulous category: Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, edited by Mike Resnick and Joe Siclari, and Heinlein’s Children by Joseph T. Major, Jr. Both are “amateur” in the most praiseworthy sense of that word.

Other Categories: I must not neglect my annual plug for John Hertz as Best Fan Writer. Hey! He made the final ballot last year, so maybe I have more influence than I think.

Best Book Editor is a new category, one that is difficult to gauge because readers have so little information about what the editors of particular books actually do for them. Was the MS. a jumble that the editor artfully shaped into a masterpiece, or was it a pluperfect novel that inept editorial supervision reduced to merely good? We are unlikely ever to know – certainly not in time for the knowledge to affect our voting. So I have two not-quite-on-the-wall recommendations: Jim Baen, for whom this is the first and last chance at the honor, and Ellen Asher, doyenne of the Science Fiction Book Club, who has probably done more than any other single person to shape SF reading habits over the past quarter century.

Finally, it would be delightful to see Ray VanTilburg, whose paintings grace so many fannish t-shirts, receive a Best Fan Artist nomination.

In case you didn’t know, members of last year’s World Science Fiction Convention, L.A.Con IV, and this year’s, Nippon 2007, are eligible to nominate.

For more recommendations, vide the annual NESFA list.

Of Nietzsche and Shakespeare

Some years ago, Duke Law School professor James Boyle served as “defense counsel” in a mock trial pitting William Shakespeare against the numerous upstart claimants to his laurels. The event attracted attention, because three Supreme Court Justices (Brennan, Blackmun and Stevens) presided, and Justice Stevens became a convert to the anti-Stratfordian cause (to what should be the embarrassment of progressive lawyers everywhere).

Professor Boyle found the event fascinating, both professionally and otherwise.

I can say with complete truth that my first and only oral argument was in front of Supreme Court Justices, that my client was William Shakespeare, and that I have a perfect win/loss record. That was my introduction to the baroque and remarkable conspiracy theories that surround the question “who wrote Shakespeare,” theories that put The Da Vinci Code to shame, but which also struck me as novelistically interesting on a much deeper level.

The novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles, was begun almost immediately but, like many avocational belles lettres, took a long time to finish. That is why it is set in 1989 and blemished by the occasional anachronism. A good editor would have smoothed the chronology and caught a few other errors, but, whether by necessity or choice, the author chose to self-publish. If no commercial house was willing to take the book, that is another sign of publishing’s decay, for this dark comedy is fully worthy of a place on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Like Rodney Bolt’s History Play, it turns anti-Stratfordian fantasy into entertaining fiction.

The protagonist, Stanley Quandary, is a small-time English professor at a small-time college. In personality, he is one of those meek who may hope to inherit the earth but have no life estate in it. He’s the kind of man who regards service on the college snow days committee as an important challenge. In only two respects does he deviate from dreary normalcy. First, he was once married to a sexy, post-modern feminist, whom he predictably divorced after catching her in flagrante with the gardener. Second, he harbors secret doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare. Naturally, he has never voiced those heretical thoughts to anyone.

Then two events upend his routine. One is the attainment of tenure. The other is a series of dreams or, rather, dreams. Vivid scenes from the era of the first Queen Elizabeth haunt his nights. Slowly he deciphers them as glimpses of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the most popular, if scarcely the most plausible, alternative Shakespeare. The conviction grows on Quandary that these images confirm his long-held doubts. Ultimately, they tell him the whereabouts of the elusive, indisputable proof that the literary world has for 400 years been victimized by a titanic fraud.

Before that, tenure and the dreams work other changes in Quandary:

I am reborn. I am reborn in sin, cleansed in heresy, wrapped in iconoclasm. These are my chronicles. My old self would have found these words too showy, too redolent of religion, would have worried about being laughed at, would have dithered endlessly over nuance and punctuation. Now I simply write.

He also shaves his head, dons an earring, updates his wardrobe, trades in his clunker for a hot new sports car, boffs a slutty coed, and flaunts egotistic eccentricity. The transition from Quandary to Stanley Q is a midlife crisis on steroids. Soon he is off to England to unearth the evidence that will make him the most famous Shakespearean (or, to be accurate, Oxenfordian) scholar of all time. Along the way, he decides that he’d like to take up again with his ex-wife and revenge himself on her stuffy second husband.

Both the seduction and the vengeance are successful – for a time. Then nemesis overtakes the soi disant superman, and his quest ends in a farcical fiasco. In the last pages of the book, his literary executor, commenting on the journal that has been the vehicle for the narrative, reviews events from the perspective of an unperceptive dryasdust and fashions a rational explanation of the less believable aspects of the tale.

The story of Stanley Quandary’s rise, exaltation, overreaching and fall could have been constructed around a different mania: Atlantis or alien encounters or 9/11 conspiracy theories or the innocence of Alger Hiss. Still, the authorship heresy is more than a macguffin. There is a certain parallelism between Q’s willful o’erleaping of the bounds of nature and the anti-Stratfordians’ confident imposition of their opinions on recalcitrant evidence. The typical adherent of the cult is as timid as Quandary, but maybe a Q-in-waiting lies beneath many of those reticent exteriors.

While the book doesn’t pause to expound the cases against and for the “Stratford Man” (admirable self-restraint on a law professor’s part), it does offer what I believe is an entirely new theory (introduced a bit clumsily; here is a place where an editor would have been helpful) of Edward de Vere’s motivation for concealing his identity as an author. To avoid spoilers, I’ll not reveal it, but it won’t amaze me to see it showing up in anti-Stratfordian writings a year or two from now. If that happens, Professor Boyle will have unwittingly helped to make the folly a trifle more entertaining and foolish. Come what may, though, he has penned a work as full of oddities as, and far more readable than, anything conceived by Sobran or Stritmatter or Ogden.

Either the Funniest or the Most Clueless Amazon Book Review Ever

Surely everybody has read 1066 and All That, which collects all the memorable bits of English history into one breezy package. A 75th Anniversary Edition has now been published. John Derbyshire calls attention to this, er, remarkable review on Amazon, written by one David W. Groat:

Tries too hard to be funny

This book is one of those easy to read “for dummies” book[s] that condenses a huge and intricate subject into broad paintstrokes. But in the process it tries way too hard to be funny, and the labored jokes in almost every paragraph either fall flat or make no sense, and it got somewhat annoying after a while (calling the Mayflower the Mayfly? Is that a joke or a typo?). But it does serve the purpose of creating a bare skeleton of English history that the more curious can hang hunks of meat and flesh on with more detailed works.

I can’t decide whether this is the most clueless Amazon review of all time – or the all-time cleverest spoof of one.

Take That, Wesley Mouch!

While I never went through a period of teenage infatuation with Atlas Shrugged, one element of that bloated novel/tract instantly won my affection: its scorn for soybeans. The villainous bureaucrat Wesley Mouch advocates making soy the main constituent of the public’s diet. Thwarting his plans is one of John Galt’s many achievements (along with repealing the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Having from a young age been conscious of the odor of soybeans processing plants in rural Illinois, I regarded anti-soy sentiment as the most attractive feature of Objectivism.

Now comes news that medical science confirms my youthful prejudice:

At the very least, the journal of the American Heart Association reports, there is neither an indication that soy significantly lowers cholesterol, nor is there evidence that it mitigates the effects of osteoporosis or reduces hot flashes.

At the very worst, soy may do things like increase “toxicity in estrogen-sensitive tissues and in the thyroid,” according to FDA scientists Daniel Doerge and Daniel Sheehan. It could bind zinc and other minerals crucial to the body’s immune and autoimmune function, and increase inflammation and the risk of autoimmune diseases, according to NewsMax’s Dr. Russell Blaylock, author of the Blaylock Wellness Report.

In fact, the Royal Society report on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in 2002 stated that soy milk should not be given to infants, even when they had cow’s milk allergies, except on strict medical advice, according to the Guardian UK newspaper.

Dr. Mike Fitzpatrick, a New Zealand toxicologist estimated that babies fed a strict diet of soy milk “ingested the estrogenic equivalent, based on body weight, of five birth control pills a day.”

U.S. infants are at particular risk since 30 percent to 40 percent of them are sustained by soy, partially due to the fact that it is provided by welfare programs.

In the interests of honest reporting, I should note that NewsMax, whose e-mail newsletter is the source of this information, is vastly more reliable on politics than medicine. I’m not going to start a campaign against soy for infants on its say-so. Still, I hope that the Mouches of the world are a little less happy this evening.

Filling Out My Hugo Ballot: Best Novel

It’s that season when every true fan’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of Hugo Awards. So I’m going to post now and then about my progress in filling out this year’s ballot (due by the end of July). I’ll begin with what George R. R. Martin has memorably labeled “The Big One”.

Let me confess that I did not read two of the nominated novels to the end, though my failure to finish them doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on their merits.

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin is the fourth volume of his A Song of Fire and Ice mega-novel. When volume one, A Game of Thrones, appeared a decade ago, I bought it but resolved not to begin reading until the tetralogy (as it was then supposed to be) was finished. That way I wouldn’t have to face the annoyance of between-books forgetfulness of major characters and key events. I had no doubt that GRRM would produce a work that would reward my patience.

When this year’s list of nominees came out, I tried an experiment: I would plunge into the latest installment, without having read any of its predecessors, and see whether I could enjoy it, or, for that matter, figure out what was going on.

The answer was, sort of. The individual incidents are clear enough, and most of the characters are comprehensible without knowledge of the back story (albeit there’s a risk that what one thinks is comprehension may be riddled with misconceptions). What is not discernible is how the incidents and characters fit together. To the neophyte reader, the effect is like opening a detailed history of Medieval Italy without any prior knowledge of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Who are these strange people, I wondered, and why are they all trying to kill each other, and why should I care? The answers, I’m sure, are in the three previous volumes. So – back to my original plan and no expression of opinion on whether the crows should feast on a Hugo.

Accelerando by Charles Stross cobbles together stories that have appeared separately over the past couple of years. I’ve read most of them, thought that several were very good and didn’t actively dislike any. Nonetheless, the whole lacks the virtues of the parts. I couldn’t bring myself to go on after the first two or three episodes.

I have an explanation for this phenomenon. The stories rush along, hurling ideas right and left (er, left and lefter – nothing “right” about the anarcho-socialist Mr. Stross), leaving barely a moment for reflection. For a single sitting, this madcap narrative is highly readable. After a time, however, a flaw appears: The author is a screwball comedian without a sense of humor. Every wild-eyed concept, farcical disagreement among the bizarro characters and ludicrous concatenation of cyber-nonpossibilities is set down with utter, unsmiling seriousness. It’s as if Abbott and Costello delivered “Who’s on First?” in the tone of a metaphysics lecture.

Someday Mr. Stross may find the right pace and voice for a readable novel. So far, he is a great singles hitter who ought to know better than to swing for the fences.

Now for the three nominees that I have the right to judge:

1. Learning the World: A Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod is a First Contact novel in which the apparently backward aliens turn out to be superior to the technologically advanced humans who discover them. That isn’t a new idea. In fact, it equally well describes a Hugo winner of just a few years ago, Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, as well as many other notable SF tales. The theme of encountering alien intelligence holds out perennial possibilities, and a twist that puts the “primitive” culture on top has a perpetual ironic appeal.

Like A Deepness in the Sky, Learning the World tells two stories, one from the point of view of the humans who have come to colonize what they assume is a sapient-free solar system (just like all the others found to date), the other set on the system’s second planet, “Ground”, where a myotidoid (I think that means “bat-like”) species is in the throes of scientific and industrial revolutions. The latter is the better crafted and more interesting part of the book. The colonizing vessel, a gigantic, slower-than-light, sort of multi-generation starship, is a wonderful concept, mostly well carried out (as in the portrayal of a chasm-like generation gap) but is marred by unconvincing add-ons. In particular, the author, like many foggy-minded leftists, thinks of financial markets as a form of magical manipulation. Every time a character “launches a futures market” in this or that implausible commodity, I’m reminded of a nine-year-old writing about sex. It doesn’t help that the teenage protagonists remind me of Podkayne of Mars.

Yet even these irritating youngsters can be amusing, as in this imitation of Socratic dialogue:

“Consider this one. If humanity is to fill the galaxy, the human population at that time in the future will be many orders of magnitude greater than the present human population. Agreed?”

“OK.”

“Therefore the probability of being alive in a future galactic human community is billions or trillions to one greater than being born now, when humanity fills only a tiny fraction of the galaxy. But we are alive now, which is very unlikely unless there is no greater future human population. Therefore humanity will soon become extinct.”

I pounced on a too obvious flaw. “It might just stop expanding.”

Grant shook his head. “You still get far more future humans than present humans, even if you stay with the same population for say the ten million years it would take to fill the galaxy. And thus, the same desperate improbability of our existence among the first, unless we’re also among the last.” He looked around, his shoulders hunched. “Doom lurks unseen.”

Al Gore would doubtless agree.

If humanity expands to fill the galaxy, or merely endures for a great many tomorrows, the probability is high that there will be lots of SF novels better than this one – but not a large number in this year or decade.

2. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi likewise calls to mind award winners of the past, in this case Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Like them, it is a grunt-level perspective on high-tech, interstellar warfare. The key difference is that Mr. Scalzi’s hero doesn’t begin as a raw kid and mature in the stress of battle. As the book’s title says, this is an “old man’s” – and woman’s – war. Mankind’s distant colonies, beset by an array of fierce and fantastical enemies, recruit septuagenarians to do their fighting, equipping them with bio-engineered, green-skinned, super-human bodies that give them most of the capabilities of Heinleinian Mobile Infantry without the bulky suits. (Also included in the package is a raging sex drive; the author evidently believes General Patton’s dictum, “A man who can’t [you-know-what deleted – this is a PG-rated blog], can’t fight”. Alternatively, given how much trouble that kind of thing leads to in this story, he may be making a subliminal point against co-ed armed forces.)

After the hero, a mild mannered pacifist in his former life, joins up, he proceeds through an increasingly imaginative series of challenges, leading to unexpected discoveries and a strange reunion with his dead wife. It is all quite a satisfying read, but –

Why does the Colonial Defense Force sign up 75-year-olds? Ostensibly because it wants soldiers with judgment and maturity rather than the young hellions and “scum of the earth” who traditionally have filled the military’s ranks. That’s a fascinating idea, and I’d like to see how it works out. Old Man’s War doesn’t say. John Perry is bright and develops into an outstanding soldier, but, so far as I can discern, the only carryover from his civilian experience is uneasiness about militarism – probably not what the CDF was hoping to obtain. By the end of the book, when we learn about the origins of the Force’s secret elite, the entire rationale for the plot seems to have been forgotten. When I looked up from the excitement of battle, I was disappointed.

3. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson isn’t reminiscent of anyone but Robert Charles Wilson. Like Darwinia, The Chronoliths and Blind Lake, it features a mind boggling scientific anomaly with staggering global effects: Earth is cut off from the rest of the universe. The stars disappear, and, scientists eventually discover, time itself slows down. Outside the barrier, known for obscure reasons as “the Spin”, a hundred million years zip by for every one of ours.

There comes, alas, a point at which suspending disbelief gives you a broken neck. Spin gallops past that point as rapidly as its un-Spun Martian colony outpaces the static Earth. Making these impossible things harder to believe, before or after breakfast, is the author’s tendency to look to chicklit as his model for his characters’ personal relationships. The best that can be said is that he avoids the excesses of Blind Lake, which was a life-after-divorce novel with an alien invasion on the side. Still, there is much phony angst, and the hints of a Big Secret involving the hero’s and heroine’s mothers turn out to foreshadow nothing of any consequence.

Spin is not a bad book. It certainly tickles one’s Sense of Wonder, and its implicit solution to Fermi’s Paradox is clever, if not convincing. But it’s not a second Darwinia, much less a progression from Wilson’s earlier work.

If Vegas or Ladbroke’s made book on the Hugos, I would bet on Old Man’s War, which has plenty of favorable buzz. If it doesn’t win, Learning the World very likely will. Accelerando might also be a good bet, despite my misgivings. It may not win, but it’s bound to cover the spread. I doubt that either A Feast for Crows or Spin has a real chance, but the Hugo electorate has surprised me before. In fact, that seems to be its favorite occupation.

Westercon, For Good and Ill

Westercon is one of the oldest regional science fiction conventions, in continuous existence since 1948, and one of only two in the U.S. that imitates the Worldcon by traveling from place to place. (DeepSouthCon is the other.) Last year’s site was Calgary. This year the con moved to the opposite end of its range, San Diego (under the name “Conzilla”, perhaps inspired by the Artist Guest of Honor, Bob Eggleton). Next year will be in San Mateo (“Gnomeward Bound” – I haven’t a clue), marking the first return to the Bay Area since 1987. Shortly after that, Washington, Oregon and Canadian fen discovered that they could dominate the northern zone in perpetuity, always outvoting Northern California. Last year the zones were changed to break this stranglehold. Ironically, the 2007 site was chosen under the old system.

A consequence of moving about is that Westercons vary wildly in size. Many are like this year’s: smallish (about 600 warm bodies) but with a high density of familiar faces (familiar to me, at any rate). I recognized at least half the names and half the faces – not necessarily the same people.

Except for the much smaller Midwestcon and SMOFCon, there is probably no other con whose membership is so thick with Worldcon voters, so it was no surprise that all three of this year’s bidders were present with tables and parties. The real bidding excitement, though, was in the 2008 Westercon race, pitting Las Vegas against Phoenix. Vegas has obvious drawbacks for a gathering whose members tend not to enjoy spending, most less losing, money. On the other hand, Westercon has never been there, while Phoenix is familiar terrain. The lure of novelty led to a narrow Las Vegas victory: 113 to 90, with 16 ballots cast for write-ins or “No Award”. The Phoenix committee promptly announced a bid for 2009, which is at the moment unopposed.

As already noted, the Chicago, Columbus and Denver bids for the 2008 Worldcon all showed up to tout themselves at the last major convention before the decisive vote. There have been no startling scandals to change the complexion of the race. Chicago and Denver remain heavy favorites. Opinions differ as to which is ahead.

In a burst of energy, the Montreal in 2009 bid, generally rated as hopeless an underdog as Columbus in ’08, threw parties at both Midwestcon and Westercon, one-upping favored Kansas City (absent from San Diego).

The convention program struck me as exceptionally good, and I meant to see more of it (excuse for absence infra). My personal highlight was Bob Eggleton’s slide show, during which he revealed that among the most important influences on his own work was John Constable and that he greatly enjoys painting landscapes and clouds. So pay attention to the scenery behind those Godzillas.

Less of a high point, but worth mentioning for its curiosity value, was the panel on “Secret Histories”, which included Tim Powers, one of the great purveyors of mysterious explanations of the workings of the world. (His latest, after too long an hiatus since the marvelous Declare), is Three Days to Never, due out next month.) I was looking forward to hearing about how authors construct fictional conspiracies out of the rags and bones of fact. Unfortunately, one of the panelists insisted on regaling us with the Truth about contemporary American politics, which is that the Bush Family, allied, naturally, with Christian fundamentalists, has secretly taken control of the country for the purpose of hastening the Second Coming, to be accomplished by provoking wars in the Middle East. She has traced this plot back to 1980 (when, one presumes, George H. W. Bush cleverly schemed to lose the Republican Presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan in order to set the Grand Design in motion.) Mercifully, she was cut off (Tim Powers: “It must be a pretty crappy conspiracy if you know all about it”) before she reached the ritual denunciation of Zionist neocons à la Cindy Sheehan.

A more light-hearted sign of the existence of the Moonbat Fringe of fandom was a t-shirt in the dealers’ room bearing the slogans “One Nation Under Surveillance” and “George Bush is Listening – Use Big Words”. I was almost indignant, but, when one thinks about it, it’s amusing to have this evidence that left-wingers really do think that the President is the idiot savant of diabolical conspiracies. Besides, what harm is there if folks who wear that kind of t-shirt develop a phobia about talking on the telephone and sending e-mail? Hey, lefties! It’s All True. The NSA knows every word that you say or write. May as well give yourselves up now and save the Right-Wing Secret Police the bother of tracking you down.

And it was no doubt in punishment for such uncharitable thoughts that I suffered the loss of my faithful laptop, “786,432 Beneficent Pixels”. She had been acting a bit weirdly of late, e. g., losing Opera when I upgraded to version 9, and died on exactly the third anniversary of the day on which I ordered her, meaning that she was about 99 in computer years. There was a Best Buy a mile from the convention hotel, whose “Geek Squad” (awful name, but they were pleasant and efficient) confirmed the diagnosis of hard drive controller failure. This being the day and age that it is, I purchased a successor on the spot. You already know that I spent the same amount of money as in 2003 for twice the processor speed, RAM, hard drive capacity, etc. Ho, hum.

Also disconcerting – and less easily corrigible – was the loss, at least temporarily, of my Tucker Hotel bathrobe, which I’d bought from Scott and Jane Dennis only the week before at Midwestcon. It is heavy white terrycloth, which a maid seems to have mistaken for towels and taken to the hotel laundry. With luck I’ll get it back, but one hates to depend on the efficiency of hoteliers. [Update: In this instance, they were efficient. I got a call Friday afternoon, telling me that the robe had been found, as well as a stuffed dolphin from Sea World that must have been left behind by a previous occupant of my room. The robe is being shipped to me; I declined to take custody of the dolphin.]

While I was out of town and not particularly in touch, an asteroid missed the Earth by less than 300,000 miles, a space shuttle went up on the Fourth of July, the North Korean loonocracy launched a couple of ICBM’s as wayward as itself, and the Mexican election, after a hopeful beginning, went into overtime. It’s amazing how much happens when I turn my back for a few days.

Addendum: While talking about the (lack of) latest Worldcon bidding news, I should have noted that the Chicago in 2008 committee has published a bidzine, the first to appear in this race.

Distractions

While Glenn Reynolds occasionally frets at being thought of as a “public utility”, that problem doesn’t afflict those of us whose blogs go unread except by a handful of friends, relatives and chance arrivals via Google. Therefore, I don’t feel that I’ve left a duty unfulfilled by neglecting to comment on the events of the past week. It’s not that I had nothing to say or lost the impulse to say it. Instead, my free time was taken up by a useful project, one that I’ve contemplated for years but that the Internet has turned from a chore into – almost – an enjoyment.

Over the years I’ve accumulated books, enough that I don’t have even an approximate idea of how many. It must be more than a couple of thousand, but whether “more” is closer to five thousand or twenty I really can’t say. Nor can I always recollect whether I own a particular volume, which has led to the uneconomical acquisition of duplicates. A couple of years ago, a thoughtful niece offered to come to Chicago for the summer to catalogue the collection, in return for room and board (and mayhap the opportunity to meet eligible young men), but then she got a summer job and has now gone on to graduate school. My stabs at doing the job on my own have progressed no further. It’s easy to buy three-by-five cards or, in more recent times, set up a database program, impossibly hard to find the energy and leisure to fill them up with data.

Then, in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, I read an article about LibraryThing, an inelegantly named Web site for recording and organizing information about books. Its conceptual breakthrough is the elimination of typing. One can enter a book’s ISBN or Library of Congress card number, and the program will fill in author, title, date of publication, etc. It isn’t perfect. Amazon has typographical mistakes, a perfectionist will want to make sure to identify the correct edition of each book, and not everything that I own can be located. Nonetheless, the time savings are astonishing, and the system takes little effort to use. Searchable “tags” can also be added (e. g., “Shakespeare Authorship Controversy” or “Medieval History”) to make specific volumes easier to retrieve. In less than two days, I entered over 160 titles in my spare time, which I doubt that I could have done in less than a week by hand (and in any event wouldn’t have done, as boredom would have overwhelmed me first).

So that’s what I was doing while five Supreme Court Justices decided, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that (a) we aren’t at war, so the President can’t act like a commander-in-chief, but (b) we are at war, so al-Qa’eda terrorists are entitled to scrupulous treatment under the Geneva Conventions rather than the instant justice traditionally meted out to pirates and other common enemies of mankind.

My LibraryThing plan is to proceed at a sauntering pace, adding a hundred or so books a week until the task is done. It may take a year, or it may take a decade. It’s nice, however, to have the reasonable hope that it can actually be done without monopolizing my attention for half of forever. I can even take a few moments out to think about how to deal with terrorism in the legal world that Justice Stevens has made.

Battle of the Books

Via the ever helpful Cronaca, word comes of two extremes in writings for the young. First, the admirable: The Dangerous Book for Boys, which, according to a short review,

explains how to build a treehouse, fish, skim stones and make a catapult. There are also chapters on insects, pirates, coin tricks, marbles and dinosaurs.

[Co-author] Conn [Iggulden] said: “We wrote it to be a compendium of all the things we wanted to try and to know when we were very young. It’s the attitude that we wanted to recapture – when everything was interesting and danger was fun.

“You can’t stop boys being curious so they might as well have the tools and instructions to focus that curiosity.”

The book also includes stories of courage from historical heroes including Scott of the Antarctic, Robert the Bruce, Lord Nelson and Douglas Bader.

Conn added: “Their example is more important than ever. Not one of them would have understood the health and safety culture. If they had, Scott would have stayed at home and Douglas Bader might have kept his legs and lost the Battle of Britain.”

Excellent! Alas, my nephews are now grown, and my great-nephews haven’t reached the age for treehouses and slingshots. But I know what to get them on or about their eighth birthdays.

On the other hand, there are children’s books to be shunned like the pox:

There are few children’s books that I despise more than Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish. Encouraging sharing and openness is fine, but in its few short pages The Rainbow Fish manages to twist what ought to be a simple parable into something truly perverse, whose main message is that to be happy and accepted one should abandon all that makes one special and become just like everyone else. Forget respect for differences, forget appreciation of diversity: the lesson here is closer to the Japanese saying, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Appallingly enough, my daughter’s school has just assigned The Rainbow Fish as the centerpiece of their summer reading assignment for kids entering second grade – the theme for discussion being “friendship”. Yet there is no friendship in The Rainbow Fish, only conformity. No blame accrues to the fish who ostracize the Rainbow Fish, accepting him only when he gives them all that he has and all that they want (which ends up being the eradication of his individuality). You will look in vain for any suggestion that friendship is a two-way street, or that friendship can be mutually enriching, making the whole world a better place. The world of The Rainbow Fish is relentlessly zero-sum.

Lest that sound like the eccentric opinion of some right-winger, the Publisher’s Weekly description, excerpted by Amazon, is quite as damning:

Rainbow Fish, “the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean,” refuses to share his prized iridescent scales – which, indeed, flash and sparkle like prisms as each page is turned. When his greed leaves him without friends or admirers, the lonely fish seeks advice from the wise octopus, who counsels him to give away his beauty and “discover how to be happy.”

Ugh! From such seeds grows the world of Harrison Bergeron.

A Shakespearean Note

The University of Illinois Press has published an on-line version of one of the classics of Shakespearean scholarship, T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), a copious description of the curriculum and pedagogical methods of the kind of grammar school that the future playwright attended. The work is interesting for three reasons: first, as a reminder of how much less we demand of pupils than our ancestors did; second, as an aperçu into Elizabethan culture; and, finally, as disproof of the notion that a lad from a country town, lacking a university education, could not possibly have acquired the literary skills needed by a master of the English language. As Baldwin says in his conclusion,

The grammar school gave the linguistic basis of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The university perfected the logic, together with some rhetoric and made the application to the professions of physic, law, and divinity. The universities were professional schools.

If William Shakspere had the grammar school training of his day – or its equivalent – he had as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries. At least, no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that is required. The miracle lies elsewhere; it is the world-old miracle of genius.

Kudos to the Illini for making this publication freely available to the world.

The Hugo Season Begins

Word has just arrived, via the Interaction mailing list, of the 2006 Hugo Award nominees. An official announcement will, I’m told, appear on the L.A. Con IV Web site RSN. (I hope that I’m not guilty of breach of the Fannish Espionage Act.)

I’m particularly pleased to see that my friend John Hertz made the ballot for “Best Fan Writer”. For reasons why I think that John in a good choice, vide my review of his zine Vanamonde. He is, I realize, an underdog against the co-favorites, perennial winner David Langford (who also has a topnotch entry in “Best Related Book”) and up-and-coming Cheryl Morgan, who came close to ending the Langford string last year.

In the other categories, I’ve read or seen some of the nominees but not all, so I’ll forbear comment. My biggest disappointment is that Thud!, IMHO Terry Pratchett’s best novel since Pyramids, wasn’t nominated. Least surprising nominations, aside from the usuals in the Artist, Editor, etc. categories, are Connie Willis’ “Inside Job”, featured in my “Recent Fiction” sidebar on the left, Serenity and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which Famous Fannish Bookseller Larry Smith literally forced into my hands.

The “Best Interactive Videogame” category, which L.A. Con created as a one-off for this convention, didn’t attract very many nominations (to my complete non-surprise, though I tried to help by consulting 20-something friends and making the nominations that they recommended) and was dropped from the ballot. In a way that’s a pity, since familiarity with high-tech weapons systems instilled by hours of pointing, clicking and shooting in Quake, Doom, etc. is reportedly one of our soldiers’ big edges in Iraq.

In the “Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form”, “Best Professional Artist” and “Best New Writer” (Campbell Award) categories, ties resulted in more than five nominees.

The complete list of nominees appears in the continuation.

Where’s Judas?

Last Sunday the Daily Mail, a British tabloid with a circulation that makes American newspapers envious, ran a long article [sorry, I don’t have a link] on a “Gospel of Judas”, which the National Geographic Society will unveil to the world in early April. Since then, a majority of the visits to this site have stemmed from Google searches for information about this document, which I discussed briefly in the past (7/11/04 and 1/5/06). National Geographic, which will be pushing television specials and books just in time for the Easter viewing and shopping season, is to be commended on its marketing acumen. On the other hand, no one will ever again be able to regard it as a serious scholarly enterprise. It has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage (or perhaps, worse yet, for a pot of New Age message).

The new “gospel” is a 4th or 5th Century Coptic manuscript, discovered in Egypt in the 1970’s and sold to a dealer in illicit antiquities, from whom it made its way circuitously into the hands of a Swiss foundation. The Swiss formed a joint venture with the National Geographic Society to translate and, more important, exploit the economic potential of the work. The Mail quotes James M. Robinson, eminent for his studies of early gnosticism:

National Geographic acquired these rights after the Swiss owners of the manuscript finally realised they could not sell the actual object because it had been illegally smuggled out of Egypt.

National Geographic took the bait because they saw an opportunity to cause a sensation by coming out right around Easter and right before the Da Vinci Code movie with something that the pre-publicity implies is a new gospel from the New Testament, when in fact it is a copy of a book originally written well over 100 years after the death of Christ.

From the bits that have been leaked so far, it is a reasonable guess that “Judas” is a work described by St. Irenaeus in his Refutation of All Heresies (c. 180 A.D.). If so, its discovery is of considerable interest to specialists in early Christianity. It appears to emanate from one of the many groups that welded the person of Jesus to fantastical cosmological ideas. Most of what we know about them comes from their orthodox opponents, such as Irenaeus. An account of their doctrines from the inside is a valuable addition to historical knowledge.

Once upon a time, the National Geographic Society would have been content with that, but a sober account of a 2nd Century pseudepigraphion wouldn’t make much money (just as Professor Robinson’s forthcoming study is unlikely to be a best seller). Hence, “Judas” has been tarted up and made to look like a harlot who, in the word’s of the Mail headline writer, “could threaten the very basis of Christian teaching”.

Well, no. We already knew that some early semi-Christians taught that Judas was the hero of the Gospel story, carrying out his betrayal at Christ’s behest. Related sects went further, making the serpent in the Garden of Eden the servant of the True God, conceived as the enemy of the lesser deity who created the material world and was worshiped by the Jews. These concepts weren’t credible in the 2nd Century, which is why they died out, and gain nothing merely because one of their proponents’ compositions has survived to the present day.

It will be interesting, for those of us who are interested in such matters, to learn how the writer of the “Gospel of Judas” perceived the cosmos and where his teachings fit into the fragmentary skein of gnostic and early heretical ideas. Conceivably, there is information that will shed light on the strains of primitive Christianity ancestral to the Church of today. Therefore, I’m glad that these 26 pages of Coptic have belatedly come to light. Nonetheless, one is tempted to say that, by subordinating scholarship to opportunistic money making and giving the public a distorted picture of what it has found, both the owners of the manuscript and the National Geographic Society have played a role in relation to the “Gospel of Judas” not unanalogous to that of the real Judas in relation to Our Lord.

Update (4/8/06): The text of the new “gospel” has now been made public. FWIW, you can read my initial analysis here.

Imaginary Shakespeares

Though I pay quite a lot of attention to aberrant Shakespeare authorship theories, I can’t read everything that issues from prolific anti-Stratfordian pens. So I’m glad that David Propson, writing in the February issue of The New Criterion has spared me the trouble of slogging through the 600-plus pages of Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name. From what I had seen of Mr. Anderson’s work (e. g., his collaboration in Roger Stritmatter’s badly flawed dissertation), I had no expectation that the book would repay the time spent reading it. Mr. Propson demonstrates that I was right.

More recently, the beast [Shakespearean pseudo-scholarship] has birthed a faddish preference for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as true author of the works. . . . God willing, Mark Anderson’s infuriating new biography of the Earl may put an end to that. Tendentious and speculative, it is the preposterous apotheosis of the Oxfordian case.

Judging a Book by Its Title

There is, we learn from the Daily Telegraph, a Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. That’s book titles, not Canadian cabinet positions. Past winners include Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1994) and last year’s Bombproof Your Horse. The 2006 nominees are –

• People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
• Bullying and Sexual Harrassment: A Practical Handbook
• Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa
• Ancient Starch Research
• Soil Nailing: Best Practice Guidance
• Nessus, Snort and Ethereal Power Tools

Happy reading!

Update (3/2/06): And the winner is People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead. The publisher says that it welcomes the publicity and is considering following up with titles such as People Who Don’t Know They’re Stupid, which will be able to find many examples among the sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome.

A Glimpse of Islamic America

Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers for the Assassin is, on one level, simply a thriller with futuristic trappings. As is the wont of that genre, we are presented with superhumanly competent heroes and villains, beautiful women, stereotyped sidekicks, a megalomaniacal mastermind plotting to take over the world, a plethora of plot twists, and a conspiracy of intricate cunning that collapses just a trifle too easily. What makes Prayers worth reading is not the disbelief-stretching action (thought that is excitingly portrayed) but the credible picture of an Islamified United States in 2040 A.D., a quarter century after the turning point in the struggle between a decadent West and its self-confident enemies.

The Moslem republic isn’t a pure dystopia. The regime is moderate, with room for suitably discreet modernists and unbelievers. Extremists are noisy but dominate only enclaves like San Francisco (where the skulls of homosexuals decorate the General Masood Bridge). Elsewhere, the “religious police” are limited to harassing self-identified fundamentalists. Democratic government of a kind still exists. Despite America’s loss of its superpower status, its prosperity and a large share of its liberties, there is virtually no sentiment, even among the Christian minority, for a return to the days before the “transition”.

Why not? The pith of the author’s answer, conveyed unmistakably but without overemphasis, is found is a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir cited in his postscript: “One can abolish water, but one cannot abolish thirst.” What undermined the liberal order was its failure, indeed refusal, to accommodate the thirst for God. Although the Islamic victory is precipitated by a spectacular hoax, the reader is led to see that the way had been prepared by cultural success. When post-Christendom offered no more wine, the thirsty lapped up Mohammed’s water. On the other side, resistance to Islam is centered on the secessionist Bible Belt, run by what Andrew Sullivan would call “theocons”.

Of course, a novel isn’t history or sociology, but this one should at least give pause to the facile assumption that secularism is more attractive than faith and therefore is destined to prevail.

Mark Steyn recently published a much-noticed essay arguing that demography makes Europe’s conversion into Eurabia inevitable. The high birth rate of Moslem immigrants is, however, only half the motive force needed for a religious revolution. In the 19th Century, Irish immigrants to England reproduced much more rapidly than Protestant Englishmen. Had that factor alone been decisive, England would be a Roman Catholic country today. It isn’t, because the Irish-born’s children and grandchildren turned Protestant, and Protestantism then withered to a vague sentiment of religiosity.

What secularism prevailed against was a faith that doubted its own affirmations. Before the modernist tide swept through Christendom, gathering force after World War I, secularists were a tiny minority with little persuasive power. They overcame the most shriveled form of Christianity. Their prospects against militant Islam do not look so promising.

In Robert Ferrigno’s fictional future, a disillusioned soldier, a sexy sociologist, a fat Catholic cop and a Jewish computer nerd unravel and defeat a half-century old, world-spanning conspiracy. The tale ends with freedom everywhere sprouting through the cracks in the despotic concrete. In the real future, things may not be so easy.

Update (2/18/06): Hugh Hewitt recently interviewed the author. Here are a couple of notable excerpts:

[T]he premise of the novel is approximately 2010, the United States is in terrible economic straits, the political leadership is weak, there’s lots of dissention in the country, politically and socially, and over a period of time, the regular religious and social institutions are not able to deal with this. There is an increasing funding by Muslims, from Saudi Arabia particularly, building Mosques, doing good deeds, drawing converts, and there is a political and social shift where Islam becomes slowly more prominent, and there are mass conversions . . . .

I was one of the people who thought if 19 guys with box cutters and a rudimentary knowledge of Microsoft [Flight Simulator] can bring down two gigantic skyscrapers, it’s conceivable that we could actually lose. And I never thought we could lose militarily, but I thought when you’re dealing with an enemy who is utterly certain of their purpose, and you have a liberal democracy, in which all points of view sort of thrash it out, there’s a certain weakness inherent in a liberal democracy, in terms of dealing with an enemy that is single-minded. So that was sort of the groundwork for that.

And there’s also a very spiritual aspect to the book that, in my own case, I felt there was sort of a spiritual hunger in myself, and in the nation at large. And I thought the more I studied Islam, it is a faith with all the answers, and that’s very compelling for people. . . . [In France and Germany,] the number one religion people are converting to [is Islam]. And these are German, usually German college educated women, and not converting because they have a boyfriend. Der Spiegel wrote about this about a month ago, and they were surprised. They assumed it would be only women to please a Muslim boyfriend, and it is not the case.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (3): Filching from the Baconians

[Continuing my critique of Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein’s The Truth Will Out, a book purporting to prove that Sir Henry Neville was the real Shakespeare, this post examines the last of their claims of documentary evidence. Other posts in this series are –

1. The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu
2. The “Tower Notebook”]

The third of the documents in which James & Rubinstein claim to find proof of Sir Henry Neville’s authorship of “Shakespeare” has long been a staple of the Baconian strand of anti-Stratfordian argument. It consists of the first page of a 90 page manuscript volume. E. K. Chambers gives this description [II William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), p. 196]:

The MS., reproduced as a whole in F. J. Burgoyne, Collotype Facsimile and Type Transcript of an Elizabethan MS. at Alnwick Castle (1904), is imperfect, but still contains some essays and speeches by Francis Bacon, a letter by Sidney, and a copy of Leicester’s Commonwealth. On f.1 is the beginning of a list of contents, and the rest of the page has been covered by a second hand with scribbles, which include (a) the name of ‘Mr ffrauncis Bacon’; (b) many repetitions of the whole or part of the name ‘William Shakespeare’; (c) the titles ‘Rychard the second’ and ‘Rychard the third’; (d) an inexact quotation of [Shakespeare’s] [The Rape of] Lucrece, 1086–7; (e) the word ‘honorificabilitudine’ (in Love’s Lab. Lost, v.i.44, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’); (f) the title ‘Asmund and Cornelia’; (g) references to ‘Ile of Dogs frmnt’ and ‘Thomas Nashe & inferior plaiers’; (h) the names ‘Dyrmonth’ and ‘Adam’. . . . The date cannot be earlier than 1597, when Nashe’s Isle of Dogs was suppressed [this play, produced in July 1597 and quickly banned, is now lost] and Rich. II and Rich. III printed, and it is probably not earlier than 1598, when Love’s Lab. Lost was printed. Bacon, here ‘Mr’, was knighted on 23 July 1603.

The conjunction of Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s names is seen by Baconians as fraught with significance. J&R direct their attention elsewhere: The name “Nevill” appears at the top of the left side of the manuscript, and the Neville family motto, “Ne vile velis” (“desire nothing base”), is among the scribbles. J&R take it for granted that “Nevill” is their Neville rather than anyone else with that surname and that he was the owner of the manuscript. That is far from a necessary conclusion. The document was found in the archives of the Earls of Northumberland and originated during the tenure of the ninth Earl, Henry Percy (1564–1632, succeeded to the title in 1585). Percy, a noted bibliophile, was the son of Katherine Neville, daughter of John Neville, fourth Baron Latimer. That family connection is adequate to account for the “Nevill” references; there’s no need to drag in a distant cousin.

I Love – Whatever That Is

Melina Mercouri (1920–1994), a fetching actress, was a fervent leftist who served two stints as Minister of Culture in Greek Socialist governments. Via Cronaca, we learn of a new book, The Elgin Marbles by archaeologist Dorothy King, that gives a glimpse of Miss Mercouri’s qualifications for her position. As reported by Reuters:

Since its independence in 1832, Greece has repeatedly requested the return of the marbles [housed in the British Museum since the early 19th Century].

Recent attempts to get the marbles back, initially revived by Greek actress turned culture minister Melina Mercouri in 1982, have gathered support with such vociferous backers as Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave. . . .

In her book, King says Mercouri once turned up at the British Museum with a camera crew in tow.

Flinging herself to the floor in one sculpture gallery, Mercouri proclaimed her love for the Parthenon.

The dramatic impact was somewhat diluted when a museum curator whispered to her: “These are beautiful sculptures, Mrs Mercouri, but the Elgin Marbles are in the next room.”

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (2): The “Tower Notebook”

[Second in a multi-part series on Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out, which posits that Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. Part 1 was the first of three discussing James & Rubinstein’s claim that “concrete documentation” supports their theory.]

The “documentary evidence” that supposedly goes furthest to prove Neville’s authorship is an anonymous 196-page manuscript bearing the title, “Serieantiez of sundrie kindes, Namely, Personall Services appertaining to the thronne and kings of this Realme as well in tymes of warre as of peace and pastime, Especially at there Coronation, Copyed and collected out of the Recordes in the tower Anno 1602”. James & Rubinstein deal with only one page of this document, describing posts of honor claimed by various personages at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. This, they declare, “contains many parallels with the coronation scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, although Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, more than ten years later” [p. 44].

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu

Reviewing the newest tome in the Shakespeare authorship “controversy”, The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, is harder than I expected. This “case” for Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) as the real Bard of Avon is such a mass of howlers, begged questions and non sequiturs that one is at a loss to decide what a critique should bring to the fore and what should be omitted for want of space. What should I do, for instance, about this bizarre effusion on page 261?

Athena, bride [sic] of Apollo (the sun god), held a great shining spear, from which the light was reflected in such a way that three sections of sunlight were said to emanate from it. She is also known as the Tenth Muse [sic], whose qualities encompass those of all the others [sic]. Her name in Greek actually means ‘spear shaker’ [sic! sic! sic!].

That isn’t central to much of anything, but how can one pass it by in silence?

The book comes near to raising its own “authorship question”: Can a discourse this ill-argued and uninformed be from the pens of two academic historians, one of whom has respectable historical works on his résumé? It’s true that Professor Rubinstein’s expertise doesn’t lie in the pre-modern era, but moving to a different terrain ought not to have deprived him of all of his capacity to read and reason. The theory that The Truth Will Out was written by a precocious but too cocky teenager and then passed off as the product of more mature minds is highly attractive. Perhaps the True Author is someone like Prince Harry, whose royal position forbids his association with a thesis that would undermine the national faith in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Whatever the merits of that speculation, I’m going to try developing a full review by taking advantage of the blog format to examine various facets of the book in semi-random order. The first is a matter far more crucial than the etymology of “Athena”. James & Rubinstein (hereafter “J&R”) assert that Henry Neville is superior to all other Shakespearean pretenders, because there exists “concrete documentation” linking him to the works.

They proffer, in fact, three documents: a manuscript, dated 1602, summarizing “Personal Services Appertaining to the Throne and Kings of This Realm”, marginal notes in a copy of the 1550 edition of Edward Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, and a page of scribbles known as the “Northumberland Manuscript”, which has long been a playground for Bacon-is-Shakespeare promoters. Today’s topic is the second item, which, if one believes J&R, represents Henry Neville’s personal notes on one of the major sources for Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

Upton Sinclair’s Ethical “Quandary”

“This would have made my dad’s year,” writes Jonah Goldberg. The Los Angeles Times, not normally famous as a purveyor of historical truth, reports that a letter written by Upton Sinclair in 1929 reveals a long-kept secret: The famous author knew, even while he lionized them as innocent victims, that left-wing hero-martyrs Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty as charged.

During his research for Boston [a fictionalized account of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial], Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men’s attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore “sent me into a panic,” Sinclair wrote in the typed letter. . . .

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,” Sinclair wrote. “… He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”

Naturally, that information doesn’t appear in the novel, which is based firmly on the premise that all of the “framing” was done by the prosecution. Nor was Sinclair eager for the world to learn it. The last paragraph of the letter reads,

This letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.

And the missive remained out of sight for three-quarters of a century. The Times also quotes another overlooked letter, written by Sinclair in 1927:

My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book [Boston].

Of course, the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims.

The Times reporter, who insists, in the teeth of such revelations, “that prosecutors in the case were biased and shoddy, and that the two men failed to receive a fair trial”, characterizes Sinclair’s situation as an “ethical quandary”. From a leftist point of view, I suppose that it was: Does one go with the “fake but accurate” version of reality or utter unpalatable truths that may horribile dictu give aid and comfort to the Right? Sinclair doesn’t seem to have found the moral struggle all that strenuous. In that respect, he is not without followers today.

Prime Time Party Blogging (Part 3)

The three co-hosts met at 12:30 p.m., as planned, right after John finished his Art Show docent tour. We had to rearrange our itinerary, however. For the past few years, our menu has included a raw vegetable crudité from Bristol Farms (a high-end L.A. supermarket). I called the nearest store this morning to order one and learned that its catering department had taken the day off. Hence, we had to make arrangements with a more distant location. Despite the longer drive, shopping, at Smart & Final and BF took less time than usual, largely because we didn’t digress too far from our shopping list or reargue at length such perennial questions as whether to get soft drinks in cans or 2-liter bottles. Total purchases were a little over $400. I won’t bother to list it all but will report tomorrow on how much was actually consumed.

John is now off carrying out his Masquerade duties, leaving Becky and me to buy ice and a couple of other items at a nearby Ralph’s. After than comes setup.

I’ve been amusing John with the Neville theory of Shakespearean authorship. (Becky refuses to listen to such discussions.) He was much interested in James & Rubinstein’s “evidence” that Measure for Measure reflects Sir Henry Neville’s real life experiences. In his youth, it seems, Henry visited Vienna in the company of the savant Henry Savile and there met the imperial librarian, Hugo Blotius, a key figure in the history of the National Library of Austria. Herr Blotius was a Calvinist. Therefore, in J&R’s words (p. 166),

he was doubtless over-strict in some matters. Who but someone with first-hand knowledge of these facts could have invented the complex character of the Duke in that play? And who was better placed than a member of Savile’s circle to be able to set such a play in that particular city?

Obviously, only someone who had met a Calvinist in Vienna could have created a Viennese character who would enforce a law against fornication.

RSN, I’ll get around to a full review of The Truth Will Out. It isn’t as screwy as Brame and Popova’s Shakespeare’s Fingerprints but is still a worthy addition to the bibliography of cracked pots.

The Anti-Narnian

The University Bookman has a good article (Craig Bernthal, “Split Religion: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials”) about the children’s author who most appeals to politically correct cognoscenti. Philip Pullman is a left-wing atheist who frequently denounces C. S. Lewis for sexism and other high crimes. He is also the author of what is, from a strictly literary point of view, quite a good trilogy for young adults, collectively titled His Dark Materials (an allusion to a line in Paradise Lost).

Let me confess that both my praise and my censure suffer a defect: I have not read the entire trilogy. But there is a reason that is also an explanation.

At the end of Book One (The Golden Compass), one of the major characters faces an obstacle to his progress. He overcomes it by torturing a young boy to death. In Book Two (The Subtle Knife), it becomes clear, first, that this character, Lord Asriel, is the hero among the adults in the series and, second, that concepts like sin, contrition and redemption play no role in Mr. Pullman’s subcreation.

I am not normally squeamish about reading literature informed by morally dubious points of view (I treasure my set of the complete plays of Stalin/Mao apologist George Bernard Shaw), but there are limits. Siegfried was as amoral and theophobic as Asriel, but he slew a dragon, not a 10-year-old child. And many fictional heroes have done grave wrongs, then repented. To have a hero whose success is built on a feeble, cowardly act that is then simply forgotten – an egg broken to make the omelet of the “Republic of Heaven” – is a wholly different order of offense.

So I didn’t read the third volume, which was, I suppose, a narrow minded thing to do. I have no eagerness to tout my example to others. If one can suspend one’s indignation, the trilogy has much to recommend it.

Pullman writes with energy and at times, beauty. His imagination works on a grand scale. As we follow the quest of his two child protagonists, Lyra and Will, we meet gypsy boatmen, witches, armored polar bears, cliff ghasts, ghosts, spectres, angels, the tiny but deadly Gillevspian spies, a Byronic hero and his venomous wife, a cowboy balloonist from Texas, an arctic explorer, and hordes of ghoulish and evil priests, who, like the Nazis, are interested in human experimentation. In the process Pullman weaves together elements of modern cosmology, quantum physics, the I Ching, and especially, the Bible, for His Dark Materials is a rewriting of Paradise Lost in which “Lucifer” gets to win.

That last point is the most likely reason why the intelligentsia elevate Pullman above Lewis and Tolkien and Rowling and Pratchett. His universe is a kind of anti-Narnia, where God is a doddering phony. Dethronement of a simulacrum of the Christian deity is so attractive a proposition that it is easy to overlook the fact that the victor is a Nietzschean superman and his secular heaven a land beyond good and evil. A völkische mentality is strained through a sieve of political correctness.

Happily, there is little danger that kids who read Pullman will learn the lessons that the author hopes to instill. In his mind, Asriel and his allies assail Christianity, but the trilogy’s God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and its “Christian” church makes no mention of Christ. A committed Christian could, in fact, have written much the same story (minus the Nazi elements) as an allegorical warning against the consequences of worshiping a god of mere power in place of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. There are close parallels between Pullman’s vision of the “Church”, which carries out hideous experiments without regard for morality, and the N.I.C.E. (also worshipers of demiurges) of Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.

All in all, I think that the highest commendation and most crushing criticism that one can give to His Dark Materials is that it comes very near to being a first rate religious novel. All that it lacks is the realization that more stands in the way of Heaven than ancient superstitions and impotent tyrants. As Mr. Bernthal says,

Although there are evil men in HDM, there is no recognition of sin’s gravitic pull on the best of us, no recognition that people need to be redeemed, and therefore no significant conflict between good and evil within Pullman’s characters, who, delightful as they are, remain essentially flat. Humanism may seem a sober and bracing philosophy, but for fiction, it is deadly. Its sense of comedy reaches no higher than “zest,” and its scope for tragedy is correspondingly shallow. As human life and its portrayal approaches the extremes, humanism fails. While ambitious, HDM fails as an alternative to Tolkien’s “true myth.”

Arguing Further With Professor Rubinstein

William D. Rubinstein, co-author of The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, has offered a response (scroll down) to my most recent expression of skepticism about his efforts:

I would like to reply to some of the points made by Mr Veal in his posting about The Truth Will Out, both here and on his own website (Stomata [sic]). They are in error; readers will have to decide whether they are also a comedy.

It is of course possible that The Comedy of Errors was written before its first recorded performance on 28 December 1594, as Chambers suggests, but there is simply no evidence that it was performed before this and recent authorities do not accept that it was. For instance, Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells in their Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 2001) – a source hardly likely to be sympathetic to anti-Stratfordian views – state (p. 84) that “it is unlikely that the lawyers and students [of Gray’s Inn] would have hired actors to appear at a grand festive occasion with anything but a new, or at least current play…stylistic texts confirm a dating around 1594, with rare vocabulary placing it between The Taming of the Shrew [c1592] and Romeo and Juliet [c1594].” Two other points are relevant here. First, the Gray’s Inn performance was preceded by a series of masques which many scholars, including AL Rowse, believe were by Francis Bacon. Bacon was a close kinsman by marriage of Neville’s (Not a blood relative, as is sometimes stated) – when Neville's mother died, Neville's father remarried Bacon’s much older half-sister. Both were deeply learned university men and MPs. It is inconceivable that they did not know each other well, and presumably admire each other. Errors is about separated sets of twins. Draw your own conclusion. In contrast, what conceivable connection was there between Bacon and William Shakespeare? As well, Errors was not known to have been performed again until 1604. It was apparently not in the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire, which lends weight to the argument that it was written for a one-off ad hoc performance.

As to the date of the Greenwich performance, 28 December 1594 is what it says. Mr Veal would not dream of questioning it if some other date were specified, but would certainly accept it as valid primary evidence. He has done so here only because it is inconvenient to Stratfordian orthodoxy.

The most remarkable point about this rejoinder is that it all but ignores the major issue – whether, as Professor Rubinstein contends, Shakespeare and his fellows were demonstrably elsewhere when The Comedy of Errors was performed at Gray’s Inn – in favor of a trivial one: whether that performance was the play’s premiere. Then, having decided to fight on that ground, Professor Rubinstein reads far too much into the authority that he cites. As any reader can see, Dobson and Wells do not assert that the December 28th performance was the first, only that the play was new or current. Their disagreement is with those who date it to the 1580’s. What they actually say, as opposed to what Professor Rubinstein reads into them, is consistent with my contention that a date before July 1593, when the French civil war to which a joke in the play alludes came to an end, is most likely.

(Note: One of Wells and Dobson’s arguments strikes me as ill-founded. Do we know what sort of plays London lawyers wanted to see in 1594? Many audiences, before and since, have preferred revivals of old favorites over new productions.)

Nor can one infer, on the basis of the fact that only two performances are known from Shakespeare’s lifetime, that the play “was written for a one-off ad hoc performance” or “was apparently not in the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire”. Elizabethan theatrical records are extremely scanty. The great majority of known performances come from the Revels Office accounts, which do not give the names of plays during the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. Except for Philip Henslowe’s “diary”, which doesn’t deal with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and stops noting titles after 1597, our knowledge of what was playing in the public theaters is near to a blank. As I noted before, Professor Rubinstein seems to have a seriously mistaken notion of the quality and quantity of the extant performance evidence.

He next moves into strange territory. It is not true that “many scholars” believe that the masques preceding the Gray’s Inn performance of The Comedy of Errors were written by Francis Bacon. The most that one can say is that Bacon played some role in the Inn’s revelries over a period of many years. Documents show that he helped put on a dumb show there in 1588 and wrote speeches for an entertainment of unknown date (c. 1595). (Vide E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, III:211-14 (1923)). How much else he did in that line is guesswork. Whatever it was, I fail to see how his step-relationship to Henry Neville makes it more plausible that Neville wrote The Comedy of Errors. Does Professor Rubinstein picture Bacon as the Gray’s Inn gatekeeper, willing to admit only work written by his kindred? And what is the conclusion that we are encouraged to draw from “Errors is about separated sets of twins”? Is a half-uncle by marriage like a twin brother? Are we to suppose that the Antipholus twins are portraits of Neville and Bacon? (In his book, it appears, Professor Rubinstein sees Falstaff as Neville’s self-depiction, an idea that certainly is, er, original.) We are veering toward the same lee shore of the intellect as the Oxenfordians who think that their auctorial candidate identified himself with Hamlet.

After all that, how does Professor Rubinstein respond to my central argument? By ignoring it. The reason for doubting that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at Court on December 28, 1594, isn’t “because it is inconvenient to Stratfordian orthodoxy” but because the Revels accounts show two companies playing on the same day. Barring a unique double bill by the two leading London troupes, the date of one performance or the other must be wrong, and it takes no special pleading to assume that a clerk, making out the payment orders 2½ months after the fact, wrote “xxviii” where he meant “xxvii”.

In his own field of expertise, Professor Rubinstein wouldn’t tolerate the evasion of central issues, tendentious reading of authorities and odd divagations into hazy speculation that he adopts when discussing Shakespeare. His manner of argumentation is redolent of the classic crackpot, frequently encountered in anti-Stratfordian circles. It does nothing to dispel my expectations for his forthcoming volume.

More on the “New” Shakespeare

One must, of course, reserve judgement until the book appears, but nothing that I see about The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare (discussed in a previous post) encourages me to believe that its thesis – that the real Bard was Sir Henry Neville, a minor courtier, anti-Catholic zealot and quondam ambassador to France – has been baked until done.

The blog of the Social Affairs Unit, which I had hitherto thought of as a sensible right-of-center British outfit, today carries co-author William Rubinstein’s puff piece for the volume. It offers an argument for doubting Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship that is ill-grounded in the evidence and exposes a root inconsistency in Professor Rubinstein’s hypothesis:

To give one example of where legitimate doubts must exist, on the night of 28th December 1594 A Comedy of Errors was given its premier [sic] at Gray’s Inn before an audience of lawyers, an occasion marked by a drunken saturnalia which became known at the time as “the night of errors”. At precisely the same time, however, William Shakespeare and his entire acting company were known to be elsewhere, specifically at Greenwich Palace, performing before the Court. There cannot be the slightest doubt of this, since payment was specifically recorded to William Shakespeare (who is named) for the performance, dated 28th December 1594. Stratfordians have attempted to get round this contradiction either by asserting that the entry was misdated (for which, of course, there is no evidence) or that the performance took place during the day, and then Shakespeare and his company went on to Gray’s Inn (presumably without rehearsing) to give the premier of Errors on the same night. But, as E. K. Chambers pointed out in 1907, all Court performances took place at night, starting at 10 p.m. and ending at 1 a.m. In other words, Shakespeare and his acting company were known to be elsewhere literally at the moment when one of his plays was being premiered. Such anomalies as this one, of which there are many, are consistently swept under the rug in orthodox biographies of Shakespeare.

What Professor Rubinstein omits – through lack of reading Chambers thoroughly, I presume, rather than disingenuousness – is that there is evidence that the December 28th date for the performance by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was an error. The same Court records (set down 2½ months after the event) state that a different company, the Lord Admiral’s Men, was paid for performing on that same day. Since a double bill is highly unlikely, one company or the other was not at Court on the 28th. (E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV:164-65 (1923)) It’s not even a slight stretch to assume that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Queen on the 27th, then for the lawyers the next day.

There is, incidentally, no reason to think that the Gray’s Inn performance was the premiere of A Comedy of Errors. It is simply the first surviving mention of the play, which was almost certainly written earlier. It contains a reference to the civil war over Henri IV’s succession to the French throne (France “making war against her hair”, III.ii.126) that would have lost its point after the conflict ended in July 1593. There are also a couple of verbal echoes in books published in 1592. (E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, I:310-11 (1930)) While the point isn’t central to Professor Rubinstein’s thesis, his casual assumption that first mention equals mention of premiere suggests less than an intimate acquaintance with the available materials on the Elizabethan theater.

What is most interesting, though, and the surest sign of muddled thinking, is his failure to see that his anti-Stratfordian “evidence” contradicts his own theory. According to the “media pack” promoting his book,

a simple pseudonym could not provide adequate protection from the curious, and to ensure absolute anonymity [emphasis added] he [Neville] went one step further and employed William Shakespeare to stand in as the author of his works.

But if neither the “stand-in” nor his troupe showed up for the premiere of one of the plays, wouldn’t it have been obvious even to bibulous English lawyers that the authorship façade was a fraud? As so often happens with anti-Stratfordian fantasies, the web tangles itself into knots. Sometimes the secret is tightly hidden, other times known to the whole world. Professor Rubinstein is far from unique in overlooking his own contradictions.

Update (10/10/05): Professor Rubinstein has responded to this post (scroll down), and I naturally have a sur-rebuttal.

A New “Shakespeare”

It’s been 85 years since J. Thomas Looney concocted the last new contender for the honor of being the “genuine” William Shakespeare: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or “Oxenford”, as he called himself). Oxenford has become very popular among those who refuse to believe that a middle class lad with only a grammar school education could possibly have been a great poet and playwright. His ascendancy is rather puzzling, as he doesn’t fit the chronology of the plays very well (he was born half a generation too early and died before the generally accepted dates of a third of the Shakespearean works), and his 70-plus surviving letters and memoranda display not an iota of interest in literature or the theater. There is in some circles, however, such a strong will to disbelieve in the “Stratford Man” that this dubious alternative has a vocal following, productive of a stream of usually thick and always incoherent books arguing his cause.

Now Oxenford has a rival. An Englishwoman named Brenda James spent a spell of illness “deciphering” the dedication to the first edition Shakespeare’s Sonnets and discovered a secret message revealing that the true author was Sir Henry Neville (1561/2–1615), a diplomat, courtier and member of Parliament, best known for his fierce anti-Catholicism and fruitless place seeking, who has never, to my knowledge, been suggested before. Next month Miss James and William Rubenstein, a modern historian who wrote a run-of-the-mill anti-Stratfordian article for History Today a few years back, will publish The Truth Will Out”: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, which will lay out the case for Neville as the Bard. A “Media Pack” is already available. It coyly refrains from stating the pretender’s identity, but anyone with access to the DNB can figure it out in minutes. Judging by the advance propaganda, the tome is no more impressive than its Oxenfordian counterparts, though thin in comparison at a mere 352 pages.

Shakespeare Denial at the New York Times

Among the editors in the New York Times’ “culture department” is one William Niederkorn, who thinks that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon didn’t write the plays and poems that pass under his name. He is a regular speaker at “anti-Stratfordian” gatherings and has previously pushed his views on the pages of his paper. (Terry Ross has summarized his record, observing, “It is as if the Times employed a science editor whose occasional articles concerned biology and whose creationist leanings became a part of most of those articles.”) The latest Niederkorn flake appeared last week, under the headline “The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas From the Traditional Camp”:

The controversy over who wrote Shakespeare's works has reached a turning point of sorts. A new biography of the Earl of Oxford improves on the unorthodox argument that he was Shakespeare, while fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.

Upon reading further, one discovers that this exordium leads to a typical crank argument: “Orthodox” scholars disagree about various aspects of Shakespeare’s life and sometimes entertain speculative arguments. Therefore, they cannot rightly scoff at the utterly fact-free effusions of the anti-Stratfordians.

Quotes and Asides

■ Jon Henke:

In 1992, Al Gore questioned whether “a man who mistook Saddam Hussein for a docile ally” until it was too late should “have a second term as President of the United States?” Today, he and his Moveon.org crowd wonder why a man who decided not to make that mistake has a second term as President of the United States.

In 2002, Al Gore said he “felt betrayed by the first Bush administration’s hasty departure from the battlefield”. Today, Gore's Moveon.org crowd rally around demands that we pull another hasty departure from the battlefield.

An observation that applies to other pillars of the Left, too.

■ Far be it from me to get excited about “insensitivity”, but one of John Derbyshire’s correspondents has a point: “Derb – The Swaziland sex law article [linked in an earlier Derbyshire post: not what it sounds like] says the women were ‘feasting on slaughtered cattle.’ Really? I think we call that ‘eating beef’.”

■ In other Derbyshire news, his 12-year-old daughter has acquired a pet algae named “Kevin”. Livelier than a pet rock, I guess.

■ Fox News – you know, the Bushitler regime’s right-wing sycophant network – is featuring an article headlined “Military Academies Face Drop in Applications”. Leading are the awful-sounding statistics – applications down from 9 percent (West Point) to 23 percent (the Air Force Academy) – followed by ruminations on whether the cause is “extended military commitments”, “tapering of post-Sept. 11 patriotism”, reports of sexual harassment at the schools or, more benignly, the improving state of the economy.

It isn’t until paragraph 31 that we learn that –

Despite the drop in the number of applicants, SAT scores and the class rank statistics have either improved or remained steady at all of the academies.

Two paragraphs later:

Even though the academies are experiencing a drop in applications, most of the academies are back to their application rates before terrorists attacked the United States in 2001.

“I think what most people are seeing is that our application numbers are returning to the pre-9/11 numbers if you look eight or 10 years prior to 9/11,” [Col. Trapper] Carpenter [admissions director, Air Force Academy] said.

I think that I’ll worry about something else now.

■ Shakespeare biographer Park Honan’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, which has been forthcoming for too many years, is now near enough to publication for the PR campaign to start. I’m not too impressed by the opening volley. The Times of London carries this “revelation” about Marlowe’s murder in a tavern brawl:

Park Honan, a scholar and biographer, has unearthed a “crucial” document that reveals that the murderer, Ingram Frizer — a known conman who received a royal pardon just a month after stabbing the poet — was later rewarded with extensive property. . . .

Professor Honan — whose research is published by Oxford University Press in Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy on October 27 — believes that the document unearthed in the archives of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, in Leeds, shows that Marlowe was killed for financial reasons. The document records that [King] James [I] gave land to [Thomas] Walsingham’s wife [Walsingham was Marlowe’s quondam patron and apparently a personal friend], who leased it to Frizer.

Professor Honan said: “It had been known that Frizer had received money before, but not in such a large amount. He enjoyed prosperity as Thomas rose in the court. He later became business agent of Walsingham’s wife and enjoyed even greater prosperity.”

Ingram Frizer killed Christopher Marlowe on May 30, 1593. James became King on March 23, 1603. We aren’t told why Professor Honan believes that whatever largess the new monarch lavished on Frizer had anything to do with a decade-old manslaughter. I suspect that he doesn’t and that the Leeds discovery plays only a minor part in his book. I also wonder why anyone thinks that Marlowe’s biography needs more sensationalism.

The Potter of My Discontent

Frequent train rides while gallivanting about the British Isles gave me time to read the new Harry Potter book, on which let me be the last to comment. For the benefit of the three people who haven’t finished it yet, all specific information about the plot is in the extended entry, which I strongly advise against perusing prematurely.

The success of the first three Potter volumes didn’t surprise me, save in the trivial sense that all publishing mega-phenomena are unpredictable. That the series’ popularity has accelerated since then leaves me bemused. I suppose that it is proof that novels can be enjoyed obsessively without being outstandingly good.

The Philosopher’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban were excellent of their kind, reviving the moribund school story genre with an infusion of magic. If not in a league with Stalky and Co., they can hold their own against The Mudhen, early Wodehouse and most others. Hogwarts is an interesting little world, the juvenile protagonists are well individualized, and the teachers are suitably eccentric. The plots, emphasizing mystery and suspense, hold up under scrutiny, and the gradual development of the conflict within the wizard community keeps the stories moving forward.

With The Goblet of Fire, the author grew more ambitious. One intuits that she dreamed of crafting a great saga instead of merely entertaining pre-teens and young adults. The transition was not much more successful than Lewis Carroll’s from Alice Through the Looking Glass to Sylvie and Bruno. Miss Rowling has, I fear, lost control of her material: Her subcreation is no longer a coherent world but an assemblage of stuck-on parts, inserted for immediate convenience without regard to internal logic. Reflecting the incoherent background, her plots meander. If she can tie up the strands in the concluding volume, I shall hail her as a literary genius. That she isn’t up to that gargantuan task is suggested by the prophecy about Harry and Voldemart, revealed at the close of The Order of the Phoenix and central to The Half-Blood Prince, viz., “Neither can live while the other survives.” Say, what? Hasn’t the author noticed, or a brave editor whispered to her, that this oracle ceased to make sense once the Dark Lord was brought back to life? It doesn’t look like self-critical examination of her own work is a Rowling strength.

Worse yet, the post-Azkaban books move so slowly, scenes stretching far longer than their contribution to the plot warrants. Slowness is not inherently a vice in fiction; Dickens and Trollope don’t exactly sprint. A story with long intervals between incidents may redeem itself through character and setting. Those are wearing thin at Hogwarts. More often, the recent books rely on meaningless motion to keep the reader distracted until the next forward lurch, typically brought about by an overheard conversation, an accidental collision between characters or a revelation of facts that ought to have been known long before.

The continuation of this entry illustrates the preceding generalities. If you don’t already know what happens in The Half-Blood Prince, skip to the next entry.

And the Winners Are . . . .

This year’s Hugo Awards Ceremony finished in record time, one hour, 34 minutes by my watch, cutting three minutes off the previous record and reinforcing Interaction’s reputation for Scottish efficiency. The press release announcing the winners and detailed nomination and voting statistics appeared on the convention Web site before I got back from the post-Hugo parties.

My first choices won three of the four fiction categories: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Best Novel (Was Susanna Clarke excited over winning the Hugo with her debut book? – well, she clung to her rocket throughout the Hugo Nominees’ Party while carrying food and drink in both hands), “The Concrete Jungle” Best Novella (Charlie Stross accepted in a kilt, allegedly the forfeit for a bet lost to his wife) and “Travels With My Cats” Best Short Story (and Mike Resnick wasn’t on hand to accept in person, much to everyone’s amazement). I am quite pleased with the good taste of the voters, though I don’t quite understand how “The Faery Handbag”, my fifth choice, albeit fifth in an extremely strong field, carried off Best Novelette honors. (Kelly Link gave the impression, in her charming acceptance remarks, that she had never expected her story to win either.)

In the other categories, there were a couple of overdue victories: David Langford’s estimable and hilarious Ansible for Best Semi-Prozine and Plokta for Best Fanzine. Jim Burns’ Best Professional Artist Hugo could also be called “overdue”, save for the fact that he has won at three British Worldcons in a row, making him the U.K. analog, I suppose, to Michael Whelan and Bob Eggleton.

Perusing the nomination stats, I encountered perplexing news: Terry Pratchett declined a nomination for Going Postal, IMHO one of his best novels. No explanation was given, and I’m sure that this decision will be fodder for intense speculation among Pratchett fans.

I’ll write more about Interaction RSN. For the instant, let me conclude with an award-related anecdote. Saturday night I was house manager for the Masquerade. A couple of hours before opening, a German gentleman of somewhat advanced years approached me, asking about fan photography. He was obviously unaware of the convention’s carefully arranged fan photo ops. Rather than send him off in what might be a fruitless quest for the official information, I gave him a seat in the press section, which had good lines of sight to the stage, for which he expressed his gratitude.

He turned out to be Waldemar Kuming, one of the giants of German fandom, who at the Hugo ceremony received a Big Heart Award. “Angels unawares” and all that. . . .

Jotted While Trying to Pack

Being in the throes of packing for three weeks in the other hemisphere, I shouldn’t be spending time on blog entries. Nonetheless, a few jottings:

■ Andy McCarthy has usefully drawn attention to a succinct precis of the reasons why Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA was not a national security secret, to wit,

To the average observer, much less to the professional intelligence operative, Plame was not given the “deep cover” required of a covert agent. . . . She worked at a desk job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen traveling to and from, and active at, Langley. She had been presiding in Washington – not stationed abroad for a number of years. . . .

The public record provides ample evidence that the CIA was at least cavalier about, if not complicit in, the publishing of Plame’s name. Moreover, given [columnist Bob] Novak’s suggestion of CIA incompetence plus the resulting public uproar over Plame’s identity being revealed, the CIA had every incentive to dissemble by claiming that it was “shocked, shocked” that leaking was going on, and thus made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate.

These passages come from the amicus brief submitted by most of the country’s leading news organizations in support of Judith Miller and the New York Times. As Mr. McCarthy sardonically observes, what media outlets say to their readers and viewers differs toto caelo from what they say to the courts.

The brief makes one interesting point that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Having decided to send Joseph Wilson, husband of a supposedly covert agent specializing in nuclear proliferation to Niger to investigate suspicions of attempted nuclear proliferation, the agency didn’t bother to obtain any sort of confidentiality agreement, nor did it take any steps to prevent him from writing publicly about his activities. If it was important to keep Mrs. Plame Wilson’s role at the CIA secret,

Did no one at Langley think that Plame’s identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her subject matter expertise?

Indeed.

■ Little Green Footballs reprints a predictably stupid apologia by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for its refusal to call terrorists by their proper name. It’s mostly the same old Reuters-cloned nonsense, but one sentence caught my eye:

Rather than calling assailants “terrorists,” we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we’re sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun. [emphasis added]

You really can’t make this stuff up.

■ But you can make up spoilers for Harry Potter. Though I haven’t opened Half-Blood Prince yet, I have it on good authority that the big plot twist, which dismayed my informant, takes place on page 606. I asked not to be told what it is, then fell to speculating. From today’s review in the Wall Street Journal, I know that the book is “kissy”, our young Hogwarts scholars having reached the age for that sort of thing. Extrapolating from these clues (plus a crucial disclosure by Professor Bainbridge about the probable impact Alan Rickman’s career), I infer that Professor Snape knocks up Hermione about halfway through the volume and their offspring, the half-blood prince (Hermione, remember, is of pure Muggle descent), comes into the world on the 606th page. (Was it the 666th before a meddling editor made cuts?) Very daring for an ostensibly young adult novel, I must say – or is my saying that a sign of how out of touch I am with modern youth?

■ Finally, the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court makes me triply happy. First, lawyers whom I respect think highly of his judicial philosophy and intellect. Second, the inevitable Democratic filibuster will look so silly that it will be funny. Third, all of the leaks today named other candidates, furnishing a useful lesson in the unreliability of reporters’ unnamed “inside sources”. I suspect that the President is pleased for the same reasons.

The Hugo Season, Part III

I’ll run more rapidly through the Best Novelette and Best Short Story categories, partly because the stories are, after all, shorter and partly because almost all are too good to need accolades from me.

Best Novelette

In a weaker year, any of the novelette nominees would have an excellent chance at winning. It’s the bad luck of the slightly less good to face such stiff competition.

5. “The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link is a whimsical bonbon about young love, an eccentric grandmother and the perils of the Other Realm. Or it may be the elaborate daydream of an insecure teenager who can’t bear the thought of not getting her guy. Unusually, the story would be improved by an extra dash of ambiguity.

4. “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi is “The Faery Handbag’s” opposite, one of the grimmest, most horrifying visions of the post-human future that I have ever read. In a world where men have adapted to pollution and ugliness, three soldiers in a perpetual war casually adopt a dog, one of the handful left on the planet outside zoos. Surviving in the “normal” environment is scarcely possible without extensive bioengineering, so the animal is essentially helpless. Caring for it briefly humanizes two of the characters, but the moment doesn’t last. After finishing this story, I looked out the window and felt grateful for trees, grass and squirrels.

3. “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe takes us to a dreamland, the Voluntary State of Tennessee, where sentient cars are a form of agricultural produce, policemen soar on winged bicycles, people have names like “Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley” and “Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails”, garbage is collected by 40-meter-long bugs, and ultimate power rests in the hands of a soi disant Greek goddess, evidently the product of an AI experiment gone wrong. Soma, a naïve artist, suffers a series of misfortunes that put him in the hands of infiltrators from enemy Kentucky, undermine his faith in Athena Parthenus, and lead to the end of her reign. The rationalization of the dreamland is slightly muddy, but the romp is worth the puzzlement.

2. “The Clapping Hands of God” by Michael F. Flynn is the most conventional of this category’s nominees: a First Contact story with unusual characters and a twist at the end. The human observers are constrained, by both prudence and their orders, to keep out of sight of, and avoid interfering with, the aboriginal population. Trying to puzzle out the local mores, they grow fond of the aliens, whose technology has reached roughly the level of our Nineteenth Century and who are, to all appearances, enterprising, hard-working, rough-hewn folk. One explorer compares them to Americans. Then comes a shock: an invasion from another planet in the same solar system. As the offworlders’ superior armament overwhelms the natives, noninterference suddenly seems immoral. But how can eight scientists with almost no weaponry beat off a horde of lizard-like attackers? The conclusion is sad, yet altogether too truthful.

1. If “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum”, written by a different Benjamin Rosenbaum, must be engraved on this year’s award, the Hugo Administrator will need a supplemental appropriation; engravers charge by the letter. But the money will be well spent, for Mr. Rosenbaum’s story about the germination of Mr. Rosenbaum’s story, taking place against the background of an attempted assassination, a pirate attack, derring-do in giant zeppelins and the writer’s reconsideration of the fundamentals of his world view, is one of the liveliest, most original and at the same time most thoughtful tales that I have read in years. There is no cause to say more. Read it for yourself.

Best Short Story

5. “Decisions” by Michael A. Burstein is a platitude, unimaginatively presented and void of genuine conflict. Mr. Burstein can do better than this. In fact, he has. Vide his other Hugo nominee, “Time Ablaze”.

4. “Shed Skin” by Robert Sawyer is a good story, building up to a surprising but inevitable ending, if one accepts its premise: that a society able to upload human personalities into immortal cybernetic torsos would compel the organic originals to live the rest of their natural lives in isolation from the world. The problem is that the premise stretches credulity to the snapping point.

3. “The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly is a Last Man on Earth story, in which caretaker robots struggle to figure out what human beings need to be happy. The answer, emerging from a mixed-up effort to recreate Christmas, is simple and, I think, largely accurate.

2 and 1. Now we come to a pair of Mike Resnick fantasies that share a common concept: A life that seems at a dead end is renewed by an encounter with someone who ought not to exist. In “A Princess of Earth”, a recent widower, unable to adjust to his loss, receives hope from John Carter of Mars (but there should be a warning not to try this at home, kids). In “Travels With My Cats”, a lonely, middle-aged underachiever is visited by the dead author of his favorite book, a woman forgotten by everybody but himself. The consolation that he draws from this experience is not at all what one anticipates. On reflection, though, it is exactly right.

The Hugo Season, Part II

This year’s Hugo Award Best Novella nominees are a decent lot, all worth an hour of one’s time, none likely to be remembered as a classic. Charlie Stross has two contenders. Oddly enough, they are IMHO the best and the least best of the field. Starting at the bottom and working upward:

5. “Elector” is a chapter from Charles Stross’ newly published novel Accelerando, portions of which have now been nominated for Hugos four years in a row (“Lobsters” in 2002, “Halo” in 2003, “Nightfall” in 2004). This story is the longest of the series and the least entertaining. Three generations of the Macx family come together on Saturn, humanity’s place of refuge from the ongoing destruction of the inner Solar System. There they do nothing worth reading about. The formerly frenetic Manfred is a colorless shell. His daughter Amber is barely more alive – a relief in some ways, for she used to be the most irritating SF teenager since Podkayne of Mars. Grandson Sirhan spends the story sulking and feeling insecure about sex. Maybe the non-events recounted here fit neatly into the novel as a whole. Standing on their own, they do not add up to a narrative.

4. “Sergeant Chip” by Bradley Denton is at heart a Lassie story, though this Lassie is a cybernetically enhanced, high-IQ military canine. It reminds me of a book that I loved as boy, Sinbad of the Coast Guard, about a mutt adopted by sailors during World War II. Chip is in the Army and takes a more active part in the fighting than Sinbad could, but the spirit is similar.

The story is told from Chip’s point of view and is imbued with the doggish code of absolute loyalty to master and his friends. In this case, master is Captain Dial, an able, humane soldier leading a company in a war somewhere in the Middle East. (The externals fit Palestine better than Iraq, though the author may have no particular place in mind.) While chasing guerrillas who are trying to reach a refugee camp and melt into the civilian population, his troops fall into an ambush, and Chip is forced to make the transition from obedient follower to leader of his own pack.

What keeps “Sergeant Chip” from fulfilling its promise is the plot’s gradual lapse into paranoia. It is not enough that Captain Dial is ambushed; he must also be the victim of a ridiculous government conspiracy to cover up an atrocity committed by one of his subordinates, and the ending must show heroic Chip vowing vengeance against, apparently, the President of the United States. By the last few paragraphs, we no longer see an extraordinarily bright dog but instead a Michael Moore-grade ranter.

3. “Time Ablaze” by Michael A. Burstein recalls New York City’s single greatest disaster before 9/11, the fire that ravaged the excursion vessel General Slocum on June 15, 2004, killing over a thousand people on their way to a church picnic. The loss of life devastated Kleindeutschland, the city’s German-speaking Lutheran enclave, and led to years of heated controversy over where to place the blame.

The author makes a determined effort to recreate the time and place of the tragedy and succeeds in many respects. His heroine is “advanced” for her day but not a modern feminist, and her compatriots have a ring of authenticity. The same cannot be said, I fear, for the time traveler inserted into the community, a man whose motivations are unconvincing and techniques inept. Only a very dull girl would be unable to pierce his badly constructed façade.

Once the traveler’s secret is revealed, the story regains its footing, as the protagonists quarrel over the morality of letting the future take its course, while at the same time growing emotionally closer to one another. In the end, the General Slocum burns, as it inevitably must, but honor and hope stir the ashes.

2. Lois McMaster Bujold adds an episode to her popular, lately dormant Vorkosigan saga in “Winterfair Gifts”, which recounts Miles Vorkosigan’s wedding day and the ominous incidents that disturb it. There is a bit of a mystery – who tried to poison the bride-to-be? – but the real center of attention is the hesitant romance between a man and woman from the margins of Bujold’s aristocratic, elegantly ordered society. One is a lower class policeman hired to serve the Vorkosigans after a notable act of heroism, the other a bioengineered female warrior for whom love seems like a doomed dream.

Not being an afficionado of the series to which “Winterfair Gifts” belongs, I may not have appreciated it fully. On the other hand, I can testify that enjoying it does not depend on prior knowledge of the characters and setting. All the background that the reader requires is unobtrusively insinuated.

The tale’s only real weakness is the rather perfunctory nature of its detective elements. One wishes for better ratiocination and a villain with a more interesting motive. Nonetheless, character, atmosphere and skillful writing more than adequately compensate.

1. Charles Stross’ second contender, “The Concrete Jungle” displays the inventiveness and energy that “Elector” lacks. Appended to his novel The Atrocity Archives, it shares the same characters and mise en scène, a Lovecraftian world whose horrors are the product of a rational, internally consistent science.

The hero, nondescriptly named “Bob Howard” – no “Manfred Macx” nomenclature here – works for the “Laundry”, an undercover “anti-monster” operation that is part Bond and part Parkinson. A “matrix management” structure splits his attention between special operations, headed by a British James Jesus Angleton, and accounting, overseen by a scheming bureaucrat. Thus his two big concerns as the story opens are a mysterious incident in Milton Keynes, which he has been called out of bed at four in the morning to investigate, and a forthcoming software audit that his supervisor has stupidly failed to obstruct. These problems turn out to be closely related.

Actually, almost everything is related. In contrast to the haphazard construction of many of his other writings, Stross wastes almost nothing here. Even a preachment about the evils of the Business Software Alliance is not an irrelevant intrusion of political bile. Also remarkably, the female lead, a hard-headed provincial detective, is not a romantic interest; she has an off-stage husband and child, and the hero never thinks of making a pass. A minor point but surprising in the espionage-cum-horror context.

The Atrocity Archives and “The Concrete Jungle” diverge sharply from the rest of their creator’s oeuvre. They may, however, represent his truest strength as a writer.

The Hugo Season, Part I

This year I’ve managed to finish reading all of the Hugo-nominated fiction (exception noted below) in time to post my opinions before the ballot deadline, albeit not weeks before. My overall impression is that this was a good year for the shorter forms (novelettes and under) but rather ho-hum, though far from disastrous, for longer works. It was also quite a varied year, not one of those dominated by stories with similar tones or themes.

My first installment covers the Best Novel category, where I must begin with a confession. I did not read, and never gave a serious thought to reading, Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise. My excuse is that I couldn’t slog through his debut novel, Singularity Sky (a Hugo nominee last year) and have heard nothing to suggest that its sequel is any less ponderous, slow-moving and heavy-handed, notwithstanding the praise that it has garnered from readers whose views I respect. That the book may have virtues beyond my ken I cannot deny; what they may be, I do not know. Hence, this commentary is confined to the other four nominees, which I rank thus:

4. Iron Council by China Miéville was the greatest disappointment of my literary year. Its predecessors, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, were fantasy masterpieces in the unfamiliar tradition of Gorghemghast rather than the overworked Heroic Quest. Tolkien did everything worth doing with the latter; exploitation of the former has scarcely begun.

Iron Council returns to the world of New Crobuzon a couple of decades after the earlier books. The heroes are revolutionary terrorists, determined against desperate odds to overthrow the city government and institute a muddily envisioned regime of peace, harmony and good will. That they are genuinely the Good Guys must be accepted on faith, for they do, say and think nothing that leads the reader to expect that their ascendancy would improve on the ruling Fat Sun Party and its semi-democratic rivals. For many pages, I waited for irony to shine through the haze of earnest rhetoric. If it came, it was too subtle for me. Long stretches of the book read like a light fictionalization of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, as the various strains of the New Crobuzonite Left debate which tactics are properly deducible from ideological abstractions.

That is not to say that Iron Council is a dreadful read. Miéville is a verbal acrobat with a prolific (at times, alas, festering) imagination. His central conceit, a runaway railroad transformed into a revolutionary legend, has power in potentia. Only a fraction of that potential is realized and that fitfully. Yet when the author chucks aside the lessons in dialectic, he can tell a vivid tale. If only it were more easily extracted from the treatise in which it is embedded.

3. The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks takes the form of traditional space opera and pushes it past space operatic expectations. Its Mercatoria is no ordinary Galactic Empire and its non-human species no simple extrapolations from patterns found on Earth. The most important of the aliens – the gas-giant-inhabiting Dwellers – truly think differently from humanity, so much so that they often evoke laughter, yet without ever breaking one’s suspension of disbelief.

The hero, a human living in a solar system that has been cut off from speedy communication with Mercatoria for over two hundred years and lies under the threat of invasion by a particularly nasty and ruthless warlord, has made a career of studying the Dwellers. His life is scholarly, peaceful, detached from the approaching turmoil – until he is conscripted to track down a closely guarded (perhaps non-existent) Dweller secret that may hold the key to staving off invader.

The quest for the Dweller List is full of twists, turns and surprises, building toward an eagerly anticipated climax. Then – Well, it is bad enough that the author of a book titled The Algebraist seems to have an erroneous idea of what an equation is; he (or, I should say, his well-educated hero) thinks that an expression whose right term is zero must be meaningless. Worse than that, this discovery of a “meaningless” equation reveals that the whole quest has meant nothing. Fassin Taak learns one interesting but useless fact about the Dwellers. Otherwise, neither he nor the universe has changed an iota. The letdown is a shock, though it doesn’t utterly obliterate the merits of what has gone before.

2. Ian McDonald’s River of Gods undisguisedly aspires to be The Great Indian SF Novel, a near-futuristic rendering of the intricacies and incongruities of our planet’s most diverse civilization. Set in 2046, a hundred years after the subcontinent’s independence from Britain and twenty or thirty after its hypothesized breakup into rival polities, the novel follows ten characters – some rooted in aspects of Indian culture, others thoroughly alien to it – as they grope toward one another against a background of impending catastrophe.

Keeping a plethora of balls of different shapes, sizes and weights in the air simultaneously is an impressive feat. The protagonists range from a street thug to a tradition-bound Hindu policeman and his discontented wife to an artificial androgyne to a partially Westernized playboy abruptly given a lead role in his family’s business empire to a young woman with seemingly occult powers to a famous scientist seeking oblivion. Almost any one of them could sustain an entire novel on his, her or yts own.

The flaw, which some will regard as akin to a virtue, is that the balls spin too dizzily to let the story coalesce. I was disappointed to realize that, in the end, the actions of the well-drawn dramatis personae had not made much of a difference. The futility of human endeavor may have its attractions as a theological tenet; it does not lead to compelling fiction.

1. Five years ago, I would not have predicted a Hugo victory for Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but the electorate’s prejudice against fantasy is waning, and Miss Clarke’s first novel is an attractive, quirky exemplar of its subgenre. It falls into neither the Tolkien nor the Peake/Miéville mold. I would call it “drawing room fantasy”: polished, witty, elegantly working out the implications of its artificial premises, as much concerned with manners as with action. In the book’s alternative world, English Magic flourished for hundreds of years, beginning with Joseph of Arimathea, reached a peak in the High Middle Ages, then dwindled until, by the closing years of the Eighteenth Century, the reality of magic is gone. A few men call themselves “magicians”, but they dabble only in theory; the very idea of working an efficacious spell is repugnant to the fastidious.

The novel’s eponymous heroes are the exception: two true magicians bound together by their craft and separated by a complete absence of sympathy in temperament. Norrell, the elder of the two, is introverted, suspicious, ever fearful of the dangers that magic can wreak in the wrong hands (namely, any but his own). Jonathan Strange, whom he reluctantly accepts as his disciple, is self-confident, optimistic and flamboyant. The story traces the clashes of this mismatched team as they fight against the Napoleonic menace, threats from the realm of Faery and one another, eventually achieving a grudging accommodation that is not quite amity.

Embellishing the tale are a variety of subplots and numerous insights into the arcane history of Magical England, as well as Strange’s adventures in the war against Napoleon, but the effect is not at all like run-of-the-mill fantasy. Rather, this is fantasy as Jane Austen might have written it. There are stretches that call for an editorial scalpel. Nearly 800 pages is a trifle too leisurely and capacious to be wholly satisfactory. Nonetheless, Miss Clarke has penned a work that will last.

Reading Experiences

Jamming these two items into a single post is artificial, but I couldn’t resist juxtaposing electronic publishing with Sanskrit.

1. Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay (“The Ancient and the Ultimate”, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1973) demonstrating that the ideal futuristic book would be a codex printed on paper, i. e., what we have right now. He was right, for reasons that needn’t be reviewed in detail here. For both practical and aesthetic reasons, the book, whether handwritten or printed, has flourished with no important format change for 2,000 years since superseding the scroll.

Nowadays one can, of course, read documents on a computer screen. I spend a lot of time doing that perforce at the office, though I often cheat and make printouts, particularly if I want to formulate comments or expect to page back and forth between sections. For more important reading, the computer is not a mixed, but an incomplete blessing. I can download thousands of public domain books free from Project Gutenberg or conveniently packaged for a nominal fee from B&R Samizdat Express. Electronic versions of volumes in copyright are available from Fictionwise and many other on-line retailers. Thus my computer can hold as large a library as my bookcases. Unfortunately, there are many times and places where one can’t get use it. I should not care to boot up even a small laptop on the El.

The obvious solution is a small footprint, lightweight device stripped of all functions beyond reading e-books. My PalmPilot sort of fits that niche, except that it is a little too small: The screen displays only a handful of words, and my aging eyes grow weary of squinting at the minuscule type. From time to time, handier alternatives came to the periphery of my attention, but only a couple of weeks ago did I purchase one, an eBookwise-1150, offered by an eponymous Fictionwise subsidiary for $129.95.

The eBw-1150 has its kludgey aspects, most notably its elderly software (written for Windows 98 and not greatly updated since). It is not, I’m confident, what I’ll be using five years from now. Indeed, superior products already on the market may have failed to call my attention to themselves. Too bad for them; Emerson was quite wrong about better mousetraps. Nonetheless, despite its occasional flaws, I’ve swiftly grown fond of this gadget. It’s no harder to read while swaying on the El than a trade paperback and supports enough formats (not including PDF, alas) that I can figure out ways to get any electronically formatted text into its memory. All of the books that I’ve purchased from Fictionwise are readily transferable. Others can be downloaded using either a free service that I wasn’t able to make work properly or a $14.95 software add-on.

At the moment, I have in memory the last two issues each of Analog and Asimov’s, an issue of F&SF, seven Hugo Award short fiction nominees that I haven’t yet read and need to finish before the July 8th voting deadline, the first volume of A. H. Bullen’s collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, James Branch Cabell’s Gallantry, and three books that come with the device (A Princess of Mars, The Time Machine and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). That pretty much fills up the available 8MB of memory. More can be added with Smart Media cards (of which I have a collection, since my digital camera uses them), but that isn’t really necessary; it’s easy enough to swap between e-book and computer.

There are plenty of improvements that I’d like to see. It would be nice, for instance, to be able to display pages from two different parts of a volume at the same time (main text and footnotes or pertinent illustrations), and I’m starting to think that the 8 to 10 hour battery life is woefully insufficient. Oh, well, this particular technological application is in its primitive stages. Twenty years from now, I may think that Dr. Asimov was as wrong-headed about the future of the book as he was about daylight saving time (4/7/02).

2. Not modern or high-tech at all, but fascinating and decades overdue is a project, inspired, I suppose, by India’s increasing visibility on the world scene, called the Clay Sanskrit Library. Its aim is to publish new translations of Sanskrit classics in Loeb-type editions, with English and (transliterated) Sanskrit on facing pages. A hundred volumes are projected, including complete modern versions of the Mahabhárata and Ramáyana as well as other famous (Shakúntala and The Birth of Kumára) and lesser known (The Emperor of the Sorcerors and What Ten Young Men Did) classics of Indian literature.

Since Sanskrit was not inscribed on tablets, I presume that “Clay” is the surname of a benefactor who otherwise modestly chooses not to be acknowledged. He may be the “C” in the “JJC Foundation” that is listed as co-publisher with the New York University Press. The only such organization that I can find is the Joliet Junior College Foundation, doubtless a worthy enterprise but probably not the one involved here.

Having procured a couple of volumes, I have dipped into What Ten Young Men Did (Daśakumāracarita by Dandin), a seventh century novel recounting the wanderings of an exiled prince and nine loyal followers in tales that combine fantasy, eroticism, political satire and coming-of-age angst. It’s very different from what Europeans were writing in the same time frame. If we must be multicultural, works like this are a better starting point than anti-colonialist screeds.

Further reading: Bjørn Stærk, “In Reluctant Defense of E-Books”

Quote of the Day

M. J. “Simo” Simpson”:

Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do.

– From a review of the new movie version of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so negative that it makes Dr. Johnson on Ossian sound like unbridled praise, e. g.,

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really unfunny jokes . . . with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide without the jokes truly would be Hamlet without the Dane. I shudder.