All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE TITANIC: THE END OF A DREAM by Wyn Criag Wade:
You might think that the story of the Titanic wouldn't need yet another book, but Wyn Craig Wade's THE TITANIC: THE END OF A DREAM spends very little time on the disaster itself, and focuses on the aftermath, and particularly the aftermath. He spends most of the book on the hearings held regarding what had happened, but puts it in the context of the time, looking at the differing British and American perspectives, and covering the major changes in maritime law and policy that came about because of the sinking. Maybe all this is not as romantic as "The Heart of the Ocean," but it's definitely more interesting historically.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2008]
We have been watching TITANIC and the various extras on the DVD, and this led me to read more about some of the controversies, and about some of the real people. There are two things I want to comment on.
One was the claim in one of the DVD extras that while in first class, women and children were more likely to get on the lifeboats without their husbands or fathers, in second- and third-class people were traveling as families moving to a new home and were more likely to insist on staying together. And in fact, the statistics seem to bear this out. According to Wyn Craig Wade's THE TITANIC: END OF A DREAM (ISBN-13 978-0-140-16691-X, ISBN-10 0-140-16691-2), the casualty percentages are as follows:
Women/Children Men Total
First 6% 69% 40%
Second 19% 90% 56%
Third 53% 86% 75%
Crew 13% 78% 76%
While the first class passengers clearly had the best of the deal (a man in first class had a better chance of surviving that a woman in third class, "women and children first" notwithstanding), the difference in survival percentages for men in second and third class was not statistically significant, while that of the women and children was.
The other thing is what happened to Second Officer Charles Lightoller. During Dunkirk, when he was 66 years old, the Royal Navy requested the use of his yacht for the evacuation. He insisted on sailing it there himself (with the assistance of one of his sons and two crew members). In spite of the fact that the yacht had never held more than twenty-one people before, Lightoller loaded 130 soldiers on it and managed to dodge German shelling and get them safely back to England. I cannot prove it, of course, but I am sure in my own mind that when he was loading the yacht at Dunkirk, he remembered all the half-filled lifeboats of Titanic, and how many people died because of that, and loaded as many men as he possibly could.
To order The Titanic: End of a Dream from amazon.com, click here.
A BETTER WORLD'S IN BIRTH! by Howard Waldrop:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/26/2003]
The "something new" was Howard Waldrop's A BETTER WORLD'S IN BIRTH! (The exclamation point is part of the title.) The premise of this alternate history is that Communism takes hold in Europe in 1848 rather than later. As usual, Waldrop manages to write something good, but based on history so obscure that most readers won't follow it, and then publish it in a chapbook where most who could won't find it.
To order A Better World's in Birth! from amazon.com, click here.
CUSTER'S LAST JUMP by Howard Waldrop et al:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/22/2006]
CUSTER'S LAST JUMP by Howard Waldrop and a variety of co-authors (ISBN 1-930846-13-4) is a collection of Waldrop's collaborations with other authors. They are in general good, though I prefer Waldrop's solo works as being having more of that distinctive Waldrop style.
To order Custer's Last Jump from amazon.com, click here.
DREAM FACTORIES AND RADIO PICTURES by Howard Waldrop:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/16/2008]
DREAM FACTORIES AND RADIO PICTURES by Howard Waldrop (ISBN-13 978-0-972-05474-4, ISBN-10 0-972-05474-X) is a collection of Waldrop's stories about movies and television. Waldrop once responded to Barry Malzberg's comment that Malzberg's early ambition was to make a living as a science fiction writer--and he failed. Waldrop said, "I'll go him one better. I tried to make a living in science fiction writing short stories." As a short story writer, Waldrop is first-rate; it is just the economics of the market that keep him (or almost anyone) from making a living at it.
To order Dream Factories and Radio Pictures from amazon.com, click here.
GOING HOME AGAIN by Howard Waldrop (St. Martin's, ISBN 0-312-18589-8, 1998, 223pp)
Back in 1979, Baird Searles and friends wrote a book titled A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, the main part of which consisted of short biographies/descriptions of science fiction writers, each ending with a paragraph saying, "If you like [this writer], you should also try [these other writers]." At the end of R. A. Lafferty's section, they said, "There is no one who writes like R. A. Lafferty, so if you like one of his books find some more." If Howard Waldrop had been included in that volume, that's what they would have said about him as well.
For example, "El Castillo de la Perseverancia" is about Mexican masked wrestlers. (Note: It was written three years before Jesse "The Body" Ventura put wrestling on the front pages.)
"Flatfeet!" has the Keystone Kops careening through the major events of the twentieth century, perfectly oblivious to them. Even his "straight" alternate history stories ("You Could Go Home Again," "Household Words; Or, the Powers-That-Be," "The Effects of Alienation") focus on people like Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, or Peter Lorre rather than Hirohito or Hitler.
"The Sawing Boys" is Waldrop's retelling of the Grimms' Brementown Musicians, a story that goes nowhere. "Why Did?" has its source in the "Little Moron" jokes that used to make the rounds, not exactly obvious material for a science fiction story. "Occam's Ducks" is about shooting "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" as a race film. (I suppose I should say that "race film" here means an all-black film for black audiences, of the sort produced into 1920s and 1930s, and not a film about horses. With Waldrop you could never be sure.) And lastly is "Scientifiction," which I am at a loss to describe.
Waldrop also includes lengthy afterwords for each story, and a complete bibliography of his work. He writes an introduction which follows one by Lucius Shepard. Even if you had all the stories (and given that one appeared in a World Fantasy program book and another is original to this book, that is unlikely), the book would be worth it for the supplementary material.
I have no idea why this got its first publication in Australia, but now that it's available in the United States, Waldrop fans here have no excuse for not buying it.
To order Going Home Again from amazon.com, click here.
HEART OF WHITENESSE by Howard Waldrop:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/30/2005]
HEART OF WHITENESSE by Howard Waldrop (ISBN 1-59606-018-2) is a limited edition collection of Waldrop's recent stories (1997-2003). Waldrop is one of my favorite authors, but his stories are hard to find (although recently scifi.com is a fairly reliable source for them). So this is a particularly welcome collection, even if a bit pricey at $40. (Luckily, my library seems to have decided it was worth getting a copy.) Without giving too much away, I can say that the first story, "The Dynasters", could be considered a companion piece to his classic "The Ugly Chickens". The second, "Mr. Goober's Show", uses a classic Waldrop theme, childhood pop culture. Then there's a Christopher Marlowe story, and an alternate Charles Lindbergh story. In fact, in some sense all of the stories posit an alternate world to ours in one way or another. There's no author quite like Howard Waldrop, just as there's no author quite like Jorge Luis Borges. (Not that they are similar, although there's something slightly Waldropian about "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".) In addition to the stories, Waldrop gives lengthy afterwords for each in which he talks about the writing of them or some of the ideas in them. Highly recommended if you can find it.
To order Heart of Whitenesse from amazon.com, click here.
"The King of Where-I-Go" by Howard Waldrop:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
"The King of Where-I-Go" by Howard Waldrop (SCI FICTION, Dec 7, 2005) is one of the last stories published on that web site before the Sci-Fi Channel shut it down (right after Ellen Datlow won a Hugo for editing it--go figure). It has all of Waldrop's usual pop culture references, but none of the convoluted weirdness or literary history aspects of a lot of his work. It is just a pretty straightforward time-travel story, with a lot of fishing thrown in.
THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/06/2007]
Our discussion group last month read THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker (ISBN-10 0-671-72779-6, ISBN-13 978-0-671-72779-6). Enough has been said about this by others, so I will just note that this time through I caught a reference I had not noticed before: one person is described as attending Wilberforce College. It was only with this year's celebration of the bicentennial of the passage of Wilberforce's British anti-slavery bill that I heard that Wilberforce was what is now called "a traditionally black college".
To order The Color Purple from amazon.com, click here.
THE FOUR JUST MEN by Edgar Wallace:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/20/2006]
THE FOUR JUST MEN by Edgar Wallace (ISBN 0-486-24642-6) is another attempt at a larger mystery, though in this case the focus is on a single crime planned by a group engaged in righting wrongs around the world: The Four Just Men. Far more interesting than what the murder plans are, though, is the whole issue of vigilante justice. (One could see "The Four Just Men" as a team of super-heroes whose powers are intelligence and guile.) Wallace does not spend much time on this, though. (This was his first novel and released without its final chapter, and the gimmick of a prize to the readers who could figure out the ending. The Dover edition includes the conclusion from a later edition.)
To order The Four Just Men from amazon.com, click here.
THE GREEN ARCHER and THE MURDER BOOK OF J. G. REEDER by Edgar Wallace:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/16/2007]
Edgar Wallace is considered a major mystery writer, but Martin Gardner has said that THE GREEN ARCHER by Edgar Wallace (no ISBN) is really his only novel that could be considered a classic. So I read it, and I am not sure I would agree that this is a classic. It is okay, but does not compare (in my mind) with contemporaneous authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Dame Agatha Christie. (Okay, so Christie was slightly later.) I then tried his short stories in THE MURDER BOOK OF J. G. REEDER (ISBN-10 1-417-91483-1, ISBN-13 978-1-417-91483-8), which again are just okay. It is far too evident in many of them that Wallace came up with a very elaborate crime, and then had the detective figure it out without much evidence--or at least evidence that the reader is given. Reeder seems practically omniscient--then you discover that he had gotten some critical pieces of information that the reader was not told about until the end, or that he knew some arcane and unlikely piece of chemistry, making for a very unsatisfactory story. (In fairness, I guess that not every detective story has to be a "puzzle story" in which the reader has all the clues, but frankly I think most aficionados expect it.)
To order The Green Archer from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Murder Book of J. G. Reeder from amazon.com, click here.
KING KONG by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/16/2005]
In preparation for this small independent film that was coming out soon from some New Zealand director, I read KING KONG by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper (ISBN 1-887-42491-1). This was (I believe) a novelization written at the time of the 1933 film and as such it is fairly close to that film. There are differences, though. Some make little sense (in the book the ship is the Wanderer; in the movie it is the Venture). Others were either toned down for the movie, or "embellished" for the book, and many of these were racial elements. In the book, for example, Kong is destroying the native village, but Denham does not want to use the gas bombs yet, because "the huts might stop the drift of the gas cloud." He doesn't seem to worry too much about the natives. And there are several passages such as: "The last pin had fallen from her hair and it foamed down her back in a bright cascade made more bright by its contrast with Kong's black snarl of fur. One sleeve of her dress had been torn, so that her right shoulder was bare. The soft, white rondure made another, more startling contrast with her captor's sooty bulk."
Wallace's science is a bit shaky as well. Describing a Triceratops, Denham calls it "[just] another of Nature's mistakes, Jack. Something like a dinosaur. But with their forelegs more fully developed." (Oh, he also spells it "Tricerotops" and calls an individual animal a "Tricerotop".) 1) A Triceratops *is* a dinosaur, and 2) any species that survives seven million years is not exactly "one of Nature's mistakes."
The book is interesting only as an adjunct to the movie. I suspect that Edgar Wallace has written better, just as Isaac Asimov wrote many better books than his novelization of FANTASTIC VOYAGE.
To order King Kong from amazon.com, click here.
BEN-HUR by Lew Wallace:
A question asked on rec.arts.movies.past-films led me to read Lew Wallace's BEN-HUR. The question was about the chariot race and its outcome. The answer is, "No, in the novel Masala doesn't die." What's more interesting, though, is that in the novel it is Ben-Hur, not Masala, who uses the spiked chariot wheels. The book is nowhere near as long as people seem to think--at 561 pages in my edition, it's certainly shorter than Tom Clancy's doorstops-- but it is written in a nineteenth century flowery style that makes for slower going. There is also a love triangle (or perhaps even a quadrangle) involving Gaspar's daughter and a lot more about a planned uprising of the Jews against the Romans. If you can cope with the language, it is worth reading if only to compare what Wallace wrote with what Hollywood did with it.
To order Ben-Hur from amazon.com, click here.
FARTHING by Jo Walton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/01/2006]
FARTHING by Jo Walton (ISBN 0-765-31421-5) is an English country house murder mystery set in an alternate history in which Hess's mission to England succeeded, and England and Germany signed a peace treaty early in the war. The primary suspect is David Kahn, a Jew who has married into an old established family, but is resented by most of them. Readers of this column will know that the anti-Semitism of 1930s England came as no surprise to me, although several reviewers seemed to think this was quite a revelation. For example, Lisa Goldstein wrote, "[Walton] deals with prejudice and class in ways Sayers and Christie never dreamed of." I think a large part of this is how we are reading it differently, not that Walton is writing it differently. I thought the book worked well as a mystery, but there seemed to be some heavy-handed parallels being drawn between the society and the government in the book and our present day.
To order Farthing from amazon.com, click here.
HA'PENNY by Jo Walton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/14/2008]
HA'PENNY by Jo Walton (ISBN-13 978-0-7653-1853-4, ISBN-10 0-7653-1853-9) is good, but it suffers from being the middle novel of a trilogy. It takes place after the events of her earlier novel FARTHING: Britain has signed a peace with Hitler, but not everyone thinks it is a good thing, and the British government has adopted increasingly fascist tactics to combat "terrorism". Many reviewers have said that the parallels between the Britain of HA'PENNY and the Britain (and United States) of today are not heavy-handed, but I am not sure I would agree. In addition, the book consists of alternating points of view, one of the actress Viola Larkin (told in the first person) and the other of Police Inspector Carmichael (told in the third person). This results in a somewhat choppy flow, with the times seeming not always to be in sync. It also seems as if a lot of the action is happening off-stage--not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it does mean that you are being told what happened instead of "seeing" it yourself.
I really liked the first novel in the series, but I found this one a let-down. It is possible them when the third (HALF A CROWN) comes out in August, they will all form a unified whole.
(Oh, the titles are basically puns. The first book, FARTHING, is named after the estate where the peace was drawn up, and the second, HA'PENNY, is a reference to the ha'penny seats in the theater. It would not surprise me if HALF A CROWN follows this trend.)
To order Ha'Penny from amazon.com, click here.
BAD PRESS by Laura Ward:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/13/2006]
BAD PRESS by Laura Ward (ISBN 0-7641-5539-3) is a collection of quotes from bad reviews--that is, reviews that are negative about their subjects, not reviews that are badly written. It is similar to Bill Henderson's ROTTEN REVIEWS and Andre Bernard's ROTTEN REJECTIONS, though much longer, and includes not only books, but also media, music, and food and drink. (However, art is not covered. Maybe Ward decided that there are far too many negative reviews of art--especially modern art--to choose just a few.) I have come to two conclusions.
The first conclusion is that people wrote much better negative reviews in the past. Compare, for example, one review from early last century to one late last century. Katherine Mansfield said in 1917, "E. M. Forester never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea." Now compare that with this quip by Anne K. Mellor from 1990: "[FRANKENSTEIN] is a book about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman." (I realize that one could claim I had selected these quotes specifically to prove my point, but I really do find the vast majority of the older entries to be far better constructed and more eloquent than the newer ones.)
My second conclusion is that Dorothy Parker is the master (mistress?) of this form. Indeed, of all of the quotations in this book, the only ones familiar to most people will be hers, Oscar Wilde's, and Mark Twain's. (Actually, for Twain, Ward includes Twain's own introduction to THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, which could hardly be considered a bad review.) I think there was a desire to make a longer book with more reviews, some of them reviews of works with which the average modern reader might be familiar. He has reviews of recent movies rather than older books, for example. As a result the overall quality of the reviews is lower than it might otherwise have been. But there are still enough good bad reviews to make it worthwhile.
On the other hand, the book does omit several of my favorites. It does not include Newton Minow's 1961 comment on television in general: "But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you-- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."
Nor does it quote Rod Serling on television: "It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
(Since the book does include David Frost's statement, "Television is an invention that permits you the be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home," Ward seems to have decided to include reviews of an entire medium, not just individual works.)
And it omits that most famous review of a review by Max Reger: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me." (This insult is so famous that it has been used by others and attributed to still more, but I think Reger gets the credit for originating it.)
To order Bad Press from amazon.com, click here.
GORGON by Peter D. Ward:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2005]
Peter D. Ward's GORGON: THE MONSTERS THAT RULED THE PLANET BEFORE DINOSAURS AND HOW THEY DIED IN THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE IN EARTH'S HISTORY (ISBN 0-14-303471-5) is definitely in the running for longest title. Ward writes about his experiences in researching the Permian/Triassic (P/T) boundary and the cause(s) of the Permian extinction, the biggest mass extinction on earth. I gather that the cause(s) are still a subject for debate, but what there can be no debate about after reading this book is how unpleasant paleontology can be. Ward describes days of heat stroke, poisonous snakes, ticks carrying deadly Lhasa fever, civil unrest, and crime rates that meant no one ever went out after dark. That anyone stays in this profession is surprising. (Then again, Mark reminded me that Garrison Keillor talked about how we know so much more about the natural history of the Bahamas than of Antarctica because the scientists would much rather do research in the Bahamas than in Antarctica.) It's a fascinating book, even if you end up thinking that Ward must have a streak of masochism in himself.
To order Gorgon from amazon.com, click here.
MOCKYMEN by Ian Watson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/12/2004]
Ian Watson's MOCKYMEN has gotten a lot of good reviews. I found the first part (about ancient Nordic rituals) enthralling when it appeared in INTERZONE, but I found the rest of the story, dealing with aliens who give us mind-altering drugs in exchange for the use of the eventually used-up bodies as receptacles for their disembodied minds, a bit too much of a change of direction. The whole mix of fantasy, horror, *and* science fiction seemed a bit much, even though I could appreciate Watson's skill.
To order Mockymen from amazon.com, click here.
DOUBLE FEATURE CREATURE ATTACK by Tom Weaver:
RETURN OF THE B SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR HEROES by Tom Weaver:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/25/2005]
I have in the past talked about how expensive McFarland books are for the general reader. (For example, the CHRISTOPHER LEE FILMOGRAPHY by Tom Johnson and Mark A. Miller costs $55.) But McFarland has a program to print some of their older titles, often in omnibus editions, at much more reasonable prices. So, for example, Bill Warren's classic work on Fifties science fiction films, KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES, cost $35 for each of the two volumes in 1982. Now they are available as a single volume for just $40, which after you consider inflation makes it even more of a bargain.
Two such omnibus volumes are Tom Weaver's DOUBLE FEATURE CREATURE ATTACK [containing ATTACK OF THE MONSTER MOVIE MAKERS (1994) and THEY FOUGHT IN THE CREATURE FEATURES (1995)) (ISBN 0-786-41366-2), and RETURN OF THE B SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR HEROES (containing INTERVIEWS WITH B SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR MOVIEMAKERS (1988) and SCIENCE FICTION STARS AND HORROR HEROES (1991)) (ISBN 0-786-40755-7). Weaver has been called "The King of the Interviewers" and these articles are collected over his many years of interviewing actors, directors, producers, and other filmmakers connected with classic science fiction and horror films. These are all pretty much "grab-bag" collections rather than by theme, so if you are interested in people who worked in Roger Corman films, for example, you will find them spread over all the volumes. On the other hand, if you are a fan of classic (and not-so-classic) science fiction and horror films and the people behind them, these are for you.
One theme running through many of the interviews, by the way, is that of the actor who wants to be taken seriously and who thinks of a particular role in a science fiction film as just another job to pay the rent, and then discovers twenty or forty years later that that role is what they are most remembered for. Most are pleased that they are remembered, but the pleasure is often tinged with sorrow for lost opportunities if that casting led to them being consider "only" a science fiction actor (or in the case of Eugene Lourie, a "dinosaur director"). Boris Karloff always talked about how grateful he was to the Monster for making his career, but he had made eighty films before that without "hitting it big". For an actor to be typecast before he feels he has had a chance is a different situation. In any case, some of the actors do make appearances at conventions and such, but few are actually science fiction fans. I find it interesting that Jane Wyatt seems to be much more in demand by "Star Trek" fans for appearances and autographs than Joseph Pevney. Who, you're probably asking is Joseph Pevney? He wrote the episode, "Journey to Babel", in which Wyatt appeared.
To order Double Feature Creature Attack from amazon.com, click here.
To order Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes from amazon.com, click here.
SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT TEARS by Margaret Webster
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/15/2006]
As it is described on Amazon, in SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT TEARS by Margaret Webster (ISBN 0-486-41097-8) "...a prominent producer- director of Shakespeare's plays writes with wit and verve about the Elizabethan theater and subsequent modifications in theatrical practice, differences between actors and audiences in Shakespeare's day and ours." The book is fifty years old, and does not therefore address any of the recent (or even not-so- recent) innovative stagings of Shakespeare. Yet Webster's observations about the plays and how producers, directors, actors, and set designers approach them are still pertinent.
For example, Webster addresses the question of Shylock: how did Shakespeare intend him to be interpreted, and how do various ages (re-)interpret him? She notes (on page 120), "For instance, the 1st Quarto of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE is subtitled with 'the extreame crueltie of Shylock the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant in cutting a just pound of his flesh, and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests.' The Jew was evidently represented as the villain of the piece and not as its tragic hero." She later (page 193) writes, "Sir Henry Irving played Shylock for all the pathos of the despised and downtrodden Jew, with the dragging, broken exit from the Trial scene which is so enormously effective. and so great a distortion of Shakespeare's intention."
Webster also feels that KING LEAR, while great on paper, is virtually unplayable. As she says (page 221): "The magic of the theater is a duality. It can evoke and sustain illusion or it can be as revealing as a microscope or an X-ray photograph, searching and merciless. The bedrock substance of an acted play is the basic stuff of its human characters. If you overload them with more than they can contain, if you overload the actors with more than flesh and blood can convey, then you overload, in turn, the capacity of an audience to absorb or ultimately to believe."
And there is even a science fiction reference. On page 290, Webster says, "There is a German play in which Goethe, reincarnating himself as a college student about to take an examination on Goethe, fails hopelessly to answer the questions put to him. Either he does not remember at all incidents, or his replies run directly counter to the textbooks of accepted criticism." This is, of course, the same plot as Isaac Asimov's "The Immortal Bard" from 1953, which post-dates the first edition of Webster's book (1942--mine is a revised edition from 1955, and I do not know if the reference to the play about Goethe was in the first edition). I do know that Asimov wrote a massive book about Shakespeare's plays, so he was probably familiar with the Webster book. The play, by the way, is actually a very short playlet titled "Goethe" by Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar. (Since Friedell is also the author of THE RETURN OF THE TIME MACHINE, a sequel to the Wells novel, it would not surprise me to discover that Asimov was familiar with the play as well.)
Some of Webster's observations have a much wider application than just producing Shakespeare: "The difficulty is not that nobody remembers anything, but that everybody remembers, with wholehearted conviction, totally different and conflicting things." (page 120)
One of my favorite exercises is noting anachronisms in Shakespeare. So when Webster quotes from CYMBELINE ("Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust."), I find myself thinking, "Did they have chimney sweepers in Cymbeline's time [1st century Britain]?" (I am not alone in this exercise, of course. Chapter 3 of Phyllis Rackin's STAGES OF HISTORY: SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH CHRONICLES has been recommended as specifically addressing anachronisms in the histories, such as a character named "Pistol" before the invention of pistols.)
To order Shakespeare Without Tears from amazon.com, click here.
THINGS TO COME by H. G. Wells:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/25/2007]
We recently watched THINGS TO COME, based on the novel and screen treatment by H. G. Wells. The miniature of Everytown at the beginning is really marvelous, even though it is only on screen for a few seconds. It incorporates aspects of many British towns (e.g., St. Paul's from London, Arthur's Seat from Edinburgh [I think]) to create something that was truly "Everytown". And there are other touches: all the children's Christmas gifts at the beginning are martial. The Boss is obviously intended to be a negative character in a fascist mold; he dresses like Mussolini and says things like, "You are warriors. You have been taught not to think, but to do--and--if, need be, die. I salute you--I, your leader." But the technocracy Wings over the World brings does not look much better to our eyes. They show up in Everytown, announce that they are taking control, and say things like, "Now we have to put the world in order," and "first, the round-up of brigands." (Interestingly, Wells has them "settle, organize, and advance" first, then round up the brigands, while the film has the brigands rounded up first.)
And what do they do? Well, Cabal announces, "We shall excavate the eternal hills," and then we see massive strip-mining operations and huge factories, apparently fairly polluted, since all the workers are wearing full body suits and helmets. When Theotocopulos cries, "Stop this progress before it is too late!" we are likely to agree at least somewhat with him. (And how do Theotocopulos and Cabal project their voices in their debate across about a half-mile of distance without any microphones or speakers?) In spite of all this, this is a film that cries out for a good restoration--I wonder why no one has done one?
THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells:
With H. G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE, it's possible that the George Pal film is as good as the book, though very different in tone. (I haven't seen the new version, but rumor has it that it comes in a poor third.) And if the length of the previous two books is daunting, this is perfect. (By Hugo standards, it is actually a novella rather than a novel, being about 32,500 words.)
To order The Time Machine from amazon.com, click here.
THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/28/2003]
And there was H. G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE, read for my library's science fiction reading group. I can't recall if I had noted before that it appears that Wells originated the idea that the elite would live on the surface and the workers underground, and then Fritz Lang may this visual in METROPOLIS.
To order The Time Machine from amazon.com, click here.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H. G. Wells:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/01/2005]
H. G. Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (ISBN 0-812-50515-8) was this month's selection for our science fiction discussion. Rather than rehash what has been said a zillion times, I'll note two things. First, even H. G. Wells can write an ungrammatical sentence: "No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible and improbable." What is obviously meant is "No one gave a thought ..., [or if they did, they] thought of them only...."
Second (and I know I'm being to sound like a broken record), some of Wells's more bigoted comments have been bowdlerized in later versions. In chapter 16, "The Exodus from London", the original describes the scene after the bag of coins breaks as, "The Jew stopped and looked at the heap," and later says that the brother was "clutching the Jew's collar with his free hand." In later editions, the man (who has been described as "a bearded, eagle- faced man", is referred to only as "the man." And the "Jewess" in chapter 22 disappeared in a major re-write of everything after the death of the curate. (I believe that this rewrite was the conversion of the original magazine publication to book form.)
One line which appeared almost verbatim in Jeff Wayne's musical version was "'The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one,' he said." Wayne changed it to "'The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,' he said." Timothy Hines keeps it precisely verbatim in his direct-to-DVD three-hour H. G. WELLS' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. (Steven Spielberg never mentions Mars.)
And since I have mentioned the Timothy Hines version, I might as well say a couple of things about it. It is extremely faithful to the novel, with almost all of the dialogue taken verbatim from the novels. There are a couple of minor differences (the extortionate newspaper cost is one pound, rather than four pence or a shilling as in the book, and the brother finds the bicycle on the street rather than taking it from a shop window).
Yes, the acting is not naturalistic. But it's the same style as the way the Jane Seymour character acts on stage in the Edwardian period in SOMEWHERE IN TIME. Yes, the image compositing has flaws; so does the compositing in the Paris flashback and other scenes in CASABLANCA. Yes, the effects look non-realistic at times, but if you like the visual effects and style of such movies as SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE or SIN CITY, this should present no problems.
The Hines/period version is available on DVD for $8.42 at Wal- Mart, or $10.49 from amazon.com. Considering how much movie tickets for the Spielberg version cost, this is cheaper than two matinee tickets. I really hope that people would give this one a chance.
To order The War of the Worlds from amazon.com, click here.
To order the film H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds from amazon.com, click here.