Tag Archives: etc

World of Mars

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews John Carter: World of Mars [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Peter David, Luke Ross, & al.

David Ross Burroughs John Carter World of Mars

This “Official Prequel” to the Disney John Carter movie collects the four issues of the Marvel comic John Carter: World of Mars. It is only indirectly rooted in the Burroughs stories; it is very faithful to the Disney screenplay and visual designs. In a frame story narrated by John Carter (who is thus only pictured in cover art and the opening pages of issue #1, along with the final panel of #4) this book provides back-stories for Tars Tarkas, Dejah Thoris, and Sab Than — the last of whom is presented as even more of a sociopath and tyrant than in the movie. Peter David’s story works pretty well, and the Luke Ross art is effective enough. Anyone who liked the movie (I did) should be able to enjoy this little graphic novel. 

The book is padded out at the end with some design sketches and the complete typescript draft of the first issue, effectively appending “roughs” from both the artist and the writer. I find design sketches an interesting addition to a volume like this, but the script just seems like an indulgent waste of paper that added nothing to the final content. 

Since the book is really fixed in the movie continuity, it actually doesn’t connect very smoothly with the other Marvel title John Carter: A Princess of Mars, which is more of an adaptation of the Burroughs book, albeit with some anticipation of the Disney treatment.

Weird Worlds

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: Weird Worlds [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library]  by Marv Wolfman, John Byrne, Murphy Anderson, Gray Morrow, Sal Amendola, Joe Orlando, Howard Chaykin, & c.

Burroughs Wolfman et al John Carter Mars Weird Worlds

Well, despite being nonplussed by the recent Barsoomian offerings from Marvel Comics, I admit they do improve on the crude Tarzan and Weird Worlds DC material of the early 1970s collected in this trade paperback from Dark Horse. Writer Marv Wolfman shows an appropriate level of humility about his wooden writing when reflecting on it in his 2010 introduction. 

The best art of the volume is in the single issue by Gray Morrow, which — if nothing else — relieves the reader from the goofy goggle eyes that Murphy Anderson bestowed upon his version of the Tharks, subsequently taken up by Sal Amendola. In fact, some of the better art in the whole book is in a trio of cover thumbnails (7), showing work by Joe Kubert, Michael Kaluta, and Howard Chaykin. (Wouldn’t you know it, Chaykin manages to have a Barsoomian babe in manacles and fishnet hose on the cover of Weird Worlds #7!)

I don’t know how well the four-color style hues in this book track with the original comics, but there is some obvious difficulty with Martian skin tones. The Red Martians are often as white as John Carter. (Exhibit A is the book’s cover, showing the palest Dejah Thoris ever.) Morrow dissents from the other artists on yet another issue of Thark anatomy: he only gives the females two teats (20), contrasted with the four afforded by Anderson and Amendola. 

The book in hand covers the full run of DC Barsoomiana, which amounts to adaptations of A Princess of Mars and Gods of Mars with a very little other material mixed in. I’m happy to have it in my library for comparative and historical purposes, but its value pretty much ends there.

Too Like the Lightning

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Too Like the Lightning [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Ada Palmer, book 1 of the Terra Ignota series.

Palmer Too Like the Lightning

To begin at the end: this book is far from a standalone novel, and I would only recommend it to those with a reasonable expectation of continuing to the later numbers of the Terra Ignota tetralogy. It opens a variety of plots and questions, but it supplies very little closure. Mostly, this volume accomplishes the presentation of a future world society and the definition of key characters within it.

The setting is a 25th century that I found a little improbably optimistic in terms of the perpetuation of our contemporary civilization, although there are increasingly explicit references to upheavals that have happened in the interim. The questionably reliable narrator is a sort of public slave (“servicer”) with intimate connections to the global elite, and his conscious efforts to supply historical perspective mostly reference the 18th-century Enlightenment. It has really been a joy for me to read sf that is in overt conversation with Voltaire and de Sade!

Ada Palmer’s future world supposes a formidable transportation network that makes the whole planet local. Ethnic phenotypes and nationalities have become merely ornamental, while public expressions of human gender are socially discouraged. Religion has been actively suppressed by universal legislation, with individual spiritual needs ministered to by non-prostelytizing “sensayer” professionals. The largest polities are a handful of Hives which adults join voluntarily.

The Hive with the greatest population is that of the Masonic Empire, distinguished by–among other features–its official and social use of Latin. This detail reminded me at once of the Martian language in the Church of All Worlds in Stranger in a Strange Land. The connection is more than incidental. Like Heinlein’s touchstone work, Too Like the Lightning also concerns itself with sex and religion, and suspends much of its plot from the advent of a child with miraculous powers. In fact, there is an explicit allusion to Valentine Michael Smith (267).

The style here is however more Wolfe than Heinlein, where the fictional narrator’s exposition assumes a hypothetical audience whose needs are different than those of the 21st-century reader. Palmer cleverly highlights this fact with a device that has apparently irritated some reviewers: The reader is conscripted to protest elements of the narrator’s presentation, and given the actual verbiage of doing so, with these interjections distinguished by italic type and archaic diction.

The book is an ambitious and intricate start to a work I will certainly continue reading.

The Sandman: Overture

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Sandman: Overture [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Neil Gaiman, J H Williams III, and Dave Stewart, with Todd Klein and Dave McKean.

Gaiman Williams et al The Sandman Overture

The six-issue Sandman: Overture comics series was the last to be created for the title character. It was published more than fifteen years after the seventy-fifth and last number of the original Sandman title, which had in its day been fantasy writer Neil Gaiman’s largest and highest-profile comics work. As “Overture” suggests, this later sequence supplies a story set immediately prior to the main series, anticipating its themes and forms.

Although I was an active comics reader during the heyday of the lauded former serial, and it certainly fit my general tastes, for whatever reason, I haven’t read it–even though it has remained in print in trade paperback collections ever since. It has new currency now with the release of the big-money-small-screen version from Netflix. So when I considered reading some of the comics this summer, I decided to start with Overture. After reading the copious creators’ notes and interviews in this volume, I realize that the intended audience for Overture were really longtime fans and knowledgeable readers of Sandman. Oh, well. I didn’t find it difficult to follow, although I suppose it would have been a richer read if I had been familiar with the other work.

The art in this book is outstanding, with the lines and shades by J.H. Williams III (of Promethea fame) and amazing colors by Dave Stewart. Another key contributor, who doesn’t appear on the cover but still features among the creative personnel interviewed in the end matter, is letterer Todd Klein. Perennial Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean also provided cover art for the series.

Among comics, I was most reminded of the Eternity story arc from 1970s Doctor Strange, although Williams and Gaiman in their remarks refer to Jim Steranko rather than Gene Colan as a visual comics influence. In literature generally, Gaiman’s “Endless” characters reminded me most of Tanith Lee’s “Lords of Darkness” in her Tales from the Flat Earth books. They are not mere personifications of abstract concepts. It might be more accurate to call them hypostases of cosmic principles–but ones that somehow elicit the reader’s human sympathy.

Declare

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Declare [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tim Powers

Powers Declare

I came to Tim Powers’ Declare on the strength of a friend’s recommendation, and also Charles Stross’ comparison to his own work in The Atrocity Archives. Although the subject matter of espionage plus supernatural elements was certainly similar to Stross’ “Laundry” novels, I was surprised to find myself comparing Declare to a very different, and altogether more popular book: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Both are bulky, character-oriented novels rooted in the socio-political frames of particular periods; both are self-consciously English; both have emotional depth; both mix in some real historical persons as characters; both introduce their central supernatural elements in a gradual manner; and in both cases those elements are anchored in archaic intelligences and their complex relations with humanity. I would even compare the narrative role that Powers assigns to T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) to that occupied by the Raven King in Clarke’s book. And both Powers and Clarke are performing a comparable sort of transcendent pastiche: adding magic to the LeCarre spy thriller on the one hand and to the Austen saga of realist satire on the other. Powers gets more points for fidelity to history, Clarke for verisimilitude of magic.

Comparisons aside, I did very much enjoy Declare. It was not a flawless book. There was a certain attribution of supernatural efficacy to Christian piety and sacraments that was never properly justified, and I occasionally found a sentence in laughable need of easy repair. (An example of both from p. 486: “He opened his mouth to speak the first words of the Our Father, but realized that he had forgotten them.”) But there is a healthy and profitable use of dramatic irony — attentive readers can stay a half-step ahead of the central characters — and Powers manages to instill a real numinosity into the higher orders of espionage that he invents for World War II and the Cold War. The psychology of double-agency is a long-standing interest of mine, and Powers makes it central to his novel in a way that I appreciated. The recruitment and induction of spies (“agent-runners”) is presented through an explicitly initiatory framework that should be accessible and engaging to those who share those interests with me as well.

The Past is Red

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Past is Red [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Catherynne M Valente.

Valente The Past is Red

This book reprints the story “The Future Is Blue” from the Drowned Worlds anthology, and follows it with a further novella “The Past Is Red.” The latter was written about four years later for the author Catherynne M. Valente (in late 2020) and ten years later for her protagonist Tetley Abednego (sometime after 2133).

Tetley is an irrepressible survivor and an unreliable narrator who hails from Garbagetown on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, evidently one of the largest of remaining human communities in the 22nd century. The first story accounts for her becoming a hated outcast by age 19, and the second gives the saga by which she matures into a “trash Plato” (138) in her third decade.

The Garbagetowners have an ambivalently hostile envy for their antediluvian ancestors (i.e. us), to whom they consistently refer as “Fuckwits.” In light of the current situation in US society, it’s not hard to read this sentiment as the Millennial/GenX view of Boomers writ large.

Valente herself compares Tetley to Voltaire’s Candide (148), and there’s a little of de Sade’s Justine there as well. But the tone here is not so satirical, and the concerns of the parable are remote from those of the philosophes. The afterword and the acknowledgements claim an independence for Tetley, whom her author has gradually come to know, and the character does have an engaging voice to draw the reader into and through her world, which is enchanting to her, and ultimately, only differently horrible than ours.

The whole book is wonderfully weird but sadly feasible cli-fi that I read in about three sittings: a speedy read and a satisfying one.

More personal than any article of clothing. More private than any diary. Every page stained with a sorcerer’s hidden character, their private demons, their wildest ambitions. Some magicians produce collections, others produce only a single book, but nearly all of them produce something before they die.

Scott Lynch, In the Stacks [Amazon, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Lynch In the Stacks more personal more private sorcerers hidden character demons wildest ambitions magicians produce collections single book something before they die

Rose

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Bone: Rose [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Jeff Smith, a prequel to the Bone series.

Smith Bone Rose

This “prequel” to the Bone comics series is focused on a particular stratum of the layered story that Jeff Smith had composed in the original comic. It is entirely trained on the intrigue between the royal princesses Rose and Briar. There are no Bones from Boneville in this story, and the closest thing to comic relief is provided by Rose’s two dogs, with whom she has frequent conversations. But, especially at the end, these aren’t comic at all. 

Although far more intricate and poised than Smith’s drawings in the original series, Charles Vess’ art is wonderful and well suited to the subject matter. Smith’s characters are very recognizable, even in their decades-younger forms and in a far different style. The dragons are all appropriately awesome.

The lettering actually put me off a little. It is a sort of unical script with little highlights in each letter, which seemed too busy and distracting for my taste. The word balloons for the dogs (and for Rose addressing them in their ‘speech’) were blue instead of white, which was a very efficient convention for indicating linguistic difference.

On further reflection, it occurs to me that Rose follows a sort of rough Star Wars episode 3 plot trajectory with respect to the Bone series as episodes 4-6: think of Gran’ma Ben as Ben Kenobi and the Hooded One as Darth Vader. (But it’s something of a stretch to think of Fone Bone as Luke Skywalker!) The Lord of the Rings comparisons that seemed so obvious early in the original run of Bone have no place here.