Found this by searching for 'airship' on Project Gutenberg, where the full text is available for download. Written in the midst of The Great War, it iFound this by searching for 'airship' on Project Gutenberg, where the full text is available for download. Written in the midst of The Great War, it is a fairly standard example of Invasion Literature, featuring a dashing young aviator and inventor, his girlfriend, and his best mate trying to single-handedly fight off the dastardly German menace nightly loosing bombs over London....more
This one didn't hold up very well for me. Moorcock's update of the idea is a much more enjoyable read. Griffith's approach is just so juvenile much ofThis one didn't hold up very well for me. Moorcock's update of the idea is a much more enjoyable read. Griffith's approach is just so juvenile much of the time--which isn't to say childish, it's more of a young man's immaturity.
The whole premise: that a powerful terrorist force is trying to destroy all world governments is somewhat uncomfortable for a modern reader--and the fact that the terrorists are meant to be the heroes brings it to another level. However, their rebellion is a vague, nonsensical thing. The idea seems to be to destroy society, and not to worry about what the next step is until later.
I guess they've never heard of the 'baby with the bathwater' problem. I mean sure, society has lots of problems, but if you don't have something better to put in its place, then tearing it down is not going to solve anything--it's probably going to make things pretty shitty in the meantime. But then, it strikes one as being typical of a man in young adulthood: irate with the horrors and inequalities of the world, rebelling against anything society has to offer without really understanding why things are the way they are.
But conveniently, everyone just signs up and agrees that this is a great plan. There are no ideological disagreements or concerns about where this whole thing is going--everyone is stalwartly devoted to the undefined cause, and willing to die for it (whatever it might be).
There are actually a few members who betray the cause, but they always do it out of mere greed, not because this whole 'terrorism' things seems kinda shaky. They also rebel despite the fact that the terrorists have an infallible network of assassins, the only airships in the world, and a leader who can literally control men's minds with a thought. All betrayers die the same chapter in which they commit their betrayal.
I mean, I understand that this was a serial, but the fact that every problem gets solved as soon as it's introduced means that the whole thing doesn't have as much continuity as it might. Indeed, for the whole first half, they're just hanging around, waiting for things to happen, not even putting their plan into action.
Now, if this had been juvenile in a sort of fun, adventure way, that could have been enjoyable, but it's clear that Griffith is taking it a bit more seriously than is warranted. It's never a battle with a fleet of ships, it's always two destroyers, five torpedo boats, a complement of three thousand men, &c. Then there are all the wire telegrams and news stories that repeat information we already know, or just talk about various battles and parts of the war that don's seem to matter much to the story.
Then, of course, there is the titular 'Angel of the Revolution' herself, a totally gorgeous teen girl who all the terrorists want to marry, but whom they respect too much to romance overtly. She's also a crack shot, and utterly loyal to the cause, even if it means (horror of horrors) marrying someone she doesn't love. Our superscience hero, of course, does everything he can to get her, until she finally tells him that the best way to get into her pants is to destroy society and create eternal peace. Sexy.
Once again, what could have been a passable adventure story is ruined by the author's inane attempts to make it 'realistic' and fill it with all sort of unrelated details. It doesn't take much seriousness to ruin the guileless charm of a pulp romp....more
And so the adventures of Oswald Bastable continue, thrusting him yet again through the barriers of time and into a strange Earth at once familiar and And so the adventures of Oswald Bastable continue, thrusting him yet again through the barriers of time and into a strange Earth at once familiar and disturbing. The themes and characters we explore are similar to the first volume, featuring at the center yet another Nemo-esque warlord whose methods give our narrator uneasy pause. By the end, we find ourselves liable to agree with Mr. Bastable's suspicion that time is having a laugh at his expense, forcing him to experience history as 'variations on a theme', and not a theme he appreciates reliving.
Usually, describing a book like this as 'alternate history' is a malapropism, since 'alternate' means to shift back and forth between things while 'alternative' means 'of a different sort'. So, if we described wind power as an 'alternate energy' to coal, that would mean we would be constantly switching between wind and coal, not replacing one with the other. But in Moorcock's case, both terms are actually applicable, which must be a boon to sci fi fans that have trouble keeping words straight.
So, if our theme is 'world-shaking war', the variation here is 'global politics of racism'. There is a certain tension throughout the book because Moorcock presents a lot of genuinely racist characters of different stripes and degrees, and even lets prejudice slip into his narrator's mouth. It's clear that the violence and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Era tickled Moorcock's unyielding imagination, so we get quite a few powerful (and somewhat unsettling) scenes charged with the complexities race dynamics.
Moorcock also seemed to take a bit more time with his narrative as compared to the last book, and didn't rely quite as much on bare exposition to carry the story along, which was nice--but as usual with Moorcock, it was a fairly straightforward adventure with some interesting concepts driving it along throughout, but lacking polish and care.
Reminds me of this charming episode of Neal Degrasse Tyson's StarTalk where sex researcher Mary Roach talks about the fact that long-term couples experience better sex because they tend to take their time and get lost in the moment, whereas newer couples are often 'going through the motions' of what they think should work. It's the same with writing books, people: don't just go through the motions when you should be in the moment, taking the time to give your narrative the attention it deserves....more
As ever, Moorcock is a wry, clever author full of ideas and insights, but he ends up rushing from one moment to another when I wish that he would let As ever, Moorcock is a wry, clever author full of ideas and insights, but he ends up rushing from one moment to another when I wish that he would let his stories play out. The characters and their relationships were intriguing and promising, but Moorcock tends to fall back on exposition instead of showing the development of his characters and plot through interaction and carefully-constructed scenes. The scope of his tales rarely seem to match the length of his books.
I have great appreciation for the freedom he allows his imaginative drive, so that he has no compunction about sticking a bit of inexplicable Lovecraftian time travel in as a framing story for his zeppelin combat narrative. That sort of pulp zaniness combined with an authorial voice that can be subtle and clever and precise will keep drawing be back to Moorcock's writing--indeed, he is an inspiration for authors of speculative fiction, if only he'd spend a little more time polishing up.
Some of his political satire was a bit rough, lacking in the precision that makes satire truly effective, but other sections showed a much lighter, knowing touch. Likewise, there were errors in his structure, particularly the killing off of a certain character in a large battle that seemed entirely unnecessary--there was no apparent reason that he needed to be sent into sudden danger when he was, especially as the conflict could have been (and eventually was) resolved by a much simpler method. It seemed he was only thrown to the wolves to procure a bit of drama, which seemed rather cheap to me.
Hopefully as the series continues Moorcock will take a bit more confidence in his voice and let the story play out instead of interposing interesting scenes and rather more bland exposition....more
A fairly common mistake made by authors is failing to be familiar with their genre. They end up retreading old ground and relying on long-dead clichesA fairly common mistake made by authors is failing to be familiar with their genre. They end up retreading old ground and relying on long-dead cliches because they aren't aware of what's already been done. So, it behooves an author to get some familiarity with the genre he intends to work in, to ensure that he isn't just writing the same old story over again.
In that spirit, I thought I'd check out this award-winning early piece of Steampunk. It was a rough start. One of the first red flags in an author's prose is how often they use 'almost', 'seemed' or worst of all 'almost seemed' in their descriptions and metaphors. Such words are meaningless filler, and are usually a sign that the author is not comfortable with his own figurative language, or is trying to seem mysterious without really knowing how to do it.
We're barely a page in before Powers gives us 'a musty fetor . . . almost shockingly incongruous when carried on the clean breezes of Hampstead Heath'. Almost shockingly incongruous, but not actually shockingly incongruous. But, if it isn't actually shockingly incongruous, why not tell us what it really is like? Why use a phrase that almost describes the situation, but not quite? What is the benefit to this imprecision?
Of course, in most cases, it is just 'shockingly incongruous', and the 'almost' just happened to slip in there for no reason at all.
From there we move on to the conflicted metaphors:
"His cloak flapping behind him in the wind like the wing-case of some gigantic insect"
'Like some' is another meaningless phrase to look out for in figurative language. It's meant to sound mysterious, but really, it's just filler. Beyond that, to anyone actually familiar with insect wing-cases, this metaphor just doesn't make sense, because wing cases are rigid and held out steadily from the body during flight. They don't flap. In the case of the scarab, which I assume Powers is trying to evoke here in his Egyptian magic story, they're also shiny.
Also, why does it have to be a 'gigantic' insect? Because he's a person, and people are bigger than insects? Figurative language already has that covered. If you say 'his gaze darted about like a viper's', you don't have to continue 'but a viper with hair, and external ears, and lacking scales, and also much larger than a normal one, and with limbs and no tail, and without the capacity for natural poison'. There's a reason that explaining a metaphor that way is often done as a joke--it's simply not necessary.
Here's another one:
"[The tent] looked, thought Fikee, like some huge nun in a particularly cold-weather habit, crouched beside the river in obscure devotion."
Can you picture that? Does that produce a clear and effective image in your mind, or a rather confused muddle? For me, it was definitely muddle. These two metaphors appear on the same page, along with another one about a smile being 'like a section of hillside falling away to expose old white stone', which isn't so bad, but that's a lot of trying-too-hard similes to cram on just one page.
Next page.
"Romany intoned, his voice becoming deeper as though trying to wring an echo out of the surrounding carpets"
'As though' is another vague little bit we want to be careful about when we write. I don't think the verb 'wring' works there at all. Are you imagine someone twisting carpets (with their voice) in order to try to squeeze some extra echoes out of them, because that's what this description paints into my mind, and it is not remotely working.
A few pages on, and we break suddenly into a long stretch of story exposition straight from the narrator about all this stuff that happened before, to set up the story. So, why start off with a mysterious intro where your characters are mumbling odd references to events, if you're going to explain them all a few pages later? That's a pretty quick way to kill all the mystery you had just been trying to build up.
Then, the characters themselves start delivering long pieces of story exposition to one another, even though they all know these things already!
"I'm sure you haven't forgotten how you suffered after playing with the weather at the Bay of Aboukeer three years ago."
So yeah, that's definitely enough of this book....more
My Shakespeare professor was ravishing: clever and ebullient, and never to be found without knee-high leather heels. I drew playbill covers while she My Shakespeare professor was ravishing: clever and ebullient, and never to be found without knee-high leather heels. I drew playbill covers while she lectured, and gave them to her at the end of class. One day I went to her office hours and there they were, all arrayed upon the wall above her desk. Life is the better for beautiful, passionate people.
One day, at the end of class, she beckoned me over: "Are you going to turn your next paper in on time?"
Of course, I answered, non-chalant, with a crooked smile--why wouldn't I?
"Because you turned the last four in late."
Crestfallen, I merely nodded, the chastened acolyte, vowing that I would do better, next time.
It was my habit to sit in my little apartment, a few blocks off campus, late into the hours of the night, not writing papers. I watched old BBC series, worked on my own little projects, and visited this site, to read about Victorian London.
There I discovered Henry Mayhew, founder of the era's most successful and brilliant satirical publication, Punch, who spent his free time wandering the slums and carefully cataloging the lives of the poor. While considered an eccentric waste of time by his peers, his London Labour and the London Poor is a groundbreaking work of social research, and filled with the most fascinating and unbelievable details of life, some horrible to tell, others uproarious, and all the sort of thing which make any aspiring writer throw up his hands and cry out "imagination is a fool's crutch, which never could pretend to depict the world half so rich or unusual as it truly is!"
I delighted likewise to read of Isambard Kingdom Brunel--and not merely for his fantastic name--but because he contrived to build a shipping tunnel beneath the Thames in 1825--and succeeded. Then there are the innumerable pieces of erotic fiction that flourished in the upright, proper age, an amusing reminder that there is no new act or desire under the sun, as plentifully evidenced by curious work of one mysterious 'Walter', a man of the upper middle class who wrote an extensive, rather unflattering memoir of his own sexual escapades, My Secret Life, which is at turns amusing, disturbing, unbelievable, and often, altogether too human.
I can still remember the night when, up late with a paper to write, I stumbled across a growing subculture in California, 'Steampunk', whose devotees dress themselves in top hats, cutaway coats, and other such fine style, drinking Absinthe, and hearkening back to that sophisticated age. My interest was piqued.
I traced the movement back to this book and picked up a copy, used. Of course, I already knew Gibson and Sterling as the innovators of the Cyberpunk subgenre, so I was excited to start. A half-chapter in, I decided I should probably know more about the Victorian before I tried this book again, and so it sat on my shelf for long years. It isn't that the story cannot be enjoyed simply as an adventure, but without prior knowledge I worried I'd miss the subtext.
I looked more into Steampunk and found that its adherents didn't know much about Brunel, Mayhew, Walter, Ada Lovelace, or Disraeli--let alone more obscure figures. They knew Byron, Keats, Shelley, maybe Blake. They were mostly music scene kids with money who wanted to show off, though even their knowledge of the fashions tended to be sadly spotty and incoherent.
Perhaps the most telling thing about the movement (and the many books that have sprouted up since it became popular), is the fact that while the genre is called Steampunk, taking place in an era when economic inequality exceeded even the modern day, when anarchists, terrorists, nihilists, utopianists were bombing cafes to protest classist, top-down governance, when native peoples were rising up against the brutalities of industrialized colonialism, when the women of London were learning Jujitsu so they could fight off policemen while organizing to get the vote--yet all these cosplayers and writers focus on wealthy dilletantes, scientist inventors, the landed gentry, and nobility. They ignore all of the battles for equality and rights so they can instead play at a history of white, upper-class power (the same reinvention of glorious white history offered by most genre fantasy).
So it's curious that this book, one of the starting-places of the movement is so obsessed with precise knowledge and references to the period. It is not a reconstruction--it presents an alternate history, so all the characters we see are different than we would expect them. It's amusing to watch these familiar personalities in unfamiliar, yet fitting roles.
Likewise we have a mix of periods clashing together, since the whole concept is that Babbage's Difference Engine, the first computer, was actually built when he designed it, and not a century later. It's always a curious question to ponder: what if Archimedes early explorations into Calculus had been widely known instead of lost for millenia? What if the Greeks had realized the steam dynamo could be more than a toy?
Playing with these ideas can provide a lot of fodder for writers, looking to the past in the same way Welles and Verne looked to the future. Many of the most amusing moments in The Difference Engine are throwaway references, such as Ada Lovelace asking if there might be some future in 'the notion of electrical power', hinting at the fact that electric power progressed from theory to practice quickly in the real world, while the computer languished, but it need not have been so.
But as I said, the central story is not overly concerned with in-depth knowledge: terms and references are thrown around constantly, but none are required in order to comprehend what's going on. The MacGuffin is a MacGuffin--more interesting if we understand why, but hardly necessary for the plot.
The structure of the story is unusual, and often, the book feels more like an intellectual exercise between the writers than a streamlined story. There is a commitment to verisimilitude, realism, and historicity throughout, so that things are never tied up neatly; there is no single, easy end, and we get three related stories which, as a whole, tell a larger story, but there is guesswork in the gaps between them.
We even get a short section of 'related documents'--newspaper stories, letters, speeches, and such things which many Victorian writers (prominently Stoker) used to spice up their works and play with the narrative voice. It's a useful structure for authors, since it allows them to dole out information in pieces without suggesting an absentmindedly omniscient narrator.
Yet it is certainly possible to carry verisimilitude too far in the name of realism. A story which painstakingly described every detail and moment, went off on digressions about every tertiary character or bit of fluff about the world, used realistically fragmented, stuttering dialogue, and killed off or abandoned characters at a moment's notice, all without a thought for how it would effect the structure or the story, would be very unpleasant and rather pointless reading.
So we must ask: where to draw the line? When does detail and allusion simply bog down the story? When do sudden character exits make the story incomplete? It's hard to find a rule of thumb, but we can say that any piece of information the audience likely already understands need not be made explicit, any detail which does not build mood, character, or plot can be safely left out, and a character should get some kind of complete personal arc before being unceremoniously dumped.
And in those regards, this book almost entirely succeeds. Each individual story doesn't quite stand on its own, and together, they do not elevate the book--there are too many spaces left unfilled--but they do coalesce into something more-or-less solid, something which we have experienced fully, and can walk away from having had our character arcs, and a very complete world.
The writing is also mature and carefully-considered. We can see the authors making numerous deliberate choices about what their world is, who their characters are, and who they aren't. There are, as expected, some sparking moments of hot, flash prose (probably Gibson's) which illuminate moments here and there, as well as the overwhelming press of humanity: the characters are all tactile, all pained, all reaching for release.
Of particular effect is a lone erotic scene, hearkening to illicit publications like The Pearl and to Walter's unpretentious confessional. It is not pornographic, though it is undeniably of the flesh. When it lingers, it does not do so to titillate with some overblown poetic ideal, but to send us back down to earth, to some awkward moment of recognition, some fleeting scent, interrupting that triumphal chariot ride to whisper an unwelcome memento mori.
The confusion of desires, anxieties, and all those compounding, competing thoughts paint such an evocative picture of the characters, in all their glory, fumbling but too filled with anticipation to really care. Too often, authors give us a celebration of something inhuman, something untouchable, rather than a celebration of a moment of true humanity.
Victorian poetry is an unabashed exultation of the impossible, always recalling to me Edith Hamilton's observation in The Greek Way that a Greek paramour would no more have said his love were 'beautiful as Venus' than she would have believed it. 'Beautiful as a roadside daisy' is more than enough, and has the added benefit of being true.
As I read along, I found myself comparing it to my own , earlier attempts to write in the subgenre (which I've subsequently expanded into my upcoming novel). As usual, it only goes to show that if you don't read a genre before attempting to write in it, you're bound to cross familiar territory. Happily, I started on a rather different tack, so no complete rewrite is in order.
This is not an easy book to simply rate. I enjoyed it, but to what degree, it's harder to say. In the end, I'm undecided whether this experiment ever exceeded its curious exploration to become a lasting story. As a vision, as a collection of ideas and characters, it is beyond reproach, but there is some faltering in the structure, a lack of cohesion which sometimes proves charming, and other times tiring.
But for all its flaws, at least it is something new, something daring and, if somewhat too large for its confines, at least not too small for them. Odd that, procrastinator that I once was, here I am, late at night, writing a review for no reason at all--and yes, I did get my Shakespeare essay in on time....more
J.G. Keely
>
Books:
steampunk
(10)
Loading...
