Hulu Recommendation Friday: The Brain That Would Not Die

Need I say more?!

Where "Dollhouse" Went Wrong

In his Entertainment Weekly column on Monday, Marc Bernardin asks the question "Where did 'Dollhouse' go wrong?" His article, in short, is an expression of his concern that the show will soon be canceled because its ratings (that's the number of people who watch the show) are on the decline. He mentions a number of contributing factors to the show's decline: Whedon's tendency to have strong finales and week starts, the "Friday Night Death Slot," poor advertising, and bad lead in programming.

I have another explanation, one that Bernardin overlooked. I think it is odd that Bernardin overlooked it, as we generally have very similar tastes when it comes to the pop culture/mass media menu, but he overlooked it none the less.

In a nutshell, it's because "Dollhouse" never gave me a reason to CARE about what was going on. Certainly, there were entertaining episodes that were filled with Whedonesque action and humor. And it would be unfair to say that I didn't care about any of the characters on the show. I worried about Echo's (Eliza Dushku) safety. I also enjoyed the portrayal of the FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) and Echo's handler Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix). In fact, Lennix's portrayal of his character's conflicts are one of the strongest elements on the show. As a fan of 'Angel,' I was pleased to see Amy Acker working again in the roles of Dr. Saunders/Whiskey.

In fact -- I'll just put it out there -- I liked all the characters and actors on the show. Their performances were strong, especially the aforementioned Lennix and the unmentioned Alan Tudyk (who is always awesome), and I always felt like I was watching "real" people in a "real" universe.

Yet I still didn't care.

Why?

Because Whedon and crew never made it clear to me whether I should support or hate the human trafficking organization at the root of the show. Is the "Dollhouse" supporting some amazing philanthropic work that is threatened by the outside world, or are they just an organization that wipes people's minds in a kind of "forgotten" indentured servitude? Are they just an immoral human trafficking company that happens to have employees that I find pleasant?

If that's the case, and it seems to be, then there is little stake for me as a viewer in the narratives that Whedon and crew offered as a story arc. If Echo is trying to bring down the techno-brothel (where the doll's have no say in what they can/will do and won't remember anyway), I have a stake. Given the presentation of the Dollhouse so far, the only character I could really root for is Alpha (Alan Tudyk), but he's dead now having failed in his mission to defeat the Dollhouse and attain apotheosis. Sure he was crazy for the desire to become a living deity, but he was perfectly right in seeking to bring down the Dollhouse -- as it has been presented to us.

I could write at length about Whedon's seeming obsession with brothels/prostitutes as manifest in this show and Firefly. But at least the "courtesans" of Firefly seemed genre appropriate, possibly even inspired by C.L. Moore's Minga maids from her Northwest Smith story Black Thirst. Given that Malcolm Reynolds is the closest approximation of Northwest Smith to appear on any screen, I wouldn't find it surprising if NW were the entire inspiration behind Firefly, but you can read more about Firefly and Northwest Smith in a future "Blogging Northwest Smith" post (you can read the first one here). The dolls of Whedon's "Dollhouse" universe don't seem to be deeply rooted in the needs of the universe Whedon has presented in the series. In Firefly the courtesans also doubled as spies and were an integral part of the social dynamics of the 'verse. Last I checked, there was no equal need in the modern world unless your last name is Mitterrand.

Why should I desire the continued existence of the Dollhouse in the "Dollhouse" universe? There are a couple of hints, like with the Mellie character, but never any concrete reasons given. Unless I'm just supposed to think that human trafficking to fulfill sexual (and other) fantasies is unquestionably a moral virtue. Which I don't.

The reason the show is failing is because while Whedon has given us an emotional stake in the dolls, he has failed to give us a positive emotional stake in the Dollhouse.

In Memoriam Eleven Years Later: Eugenie Lela-Ilsa Johnson 05/04/1952 - 10/07/1998

Those of you who have been long time readers will have to forgive me once more for my annual "repeat" post. Today is a day that I often don't feel like posting about popular culture. Today is the eleventh anniversary of my mother's death, and I always feel a need to share on this day. I thought about writing something entirely original, but then I reread what I wrote in 2004 and it captures most of what I want to say. So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I will post the contents of a prior entry. Before you move on to the piece, I'd like to make two comments. I have added some sentences (I also updated my age and the length of time since my mom died), they are in italics, and my statement below that my mother will never get to meet her grandchildren has come true. My mom will never get to meet her lovely granddaughters Nora Thekla Lindke and Clio Millie Lindke. I don't often include photos of family on this blog, but I'll make a rare exception today.



Here are Nora and Clio. Do you see how much they look like their grandmother?

This is a picture of my mom in 1971, that blob on her lap is me.

Here is another picture of Nora and Clio.



A Day to Listen to the Velvet Underground

I am only 38 years old, but today marks the end of my first eleven years without a mom. That is an awkward sentence, but it best captures my sentiments. I am not an orphan, I still have a father. In fact, I recently had a wonderful, but too short, visit with him and my sister last week. Yet a part of me is still very much missing, a large part. October 7th, 1998...10,7,98...those numbers loom large and ominous in my heart and this is the first year I am not completely overwhelmed by them.

My wife and I have intimate conversations often, it is one of the joys of marriage, and she and I were discussing death the other day. Her grandmother had just died at the age of 92. My wife explained it this way, "When someone dies, the world feels a little less complete. Bird songs aren't as joyful, and sunrises are slightly less beautiful." Displaying, as she often does, the magnificence of unedited, awkward, and spontaneous verbal poetry. She was also correct. C.S. Lewis opens his book A Grief Observed with another observation about death:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

I still feel this way, not everyday...today.

There are two things that are still difficult for me to do seven years after my mom died when I was 27 (she was 46).

I have a hard time remembering truly happy moments with her...on command. Happy moments enter my consciousness at random moments and seldom on the anniversary of her death. Glimpses of her nymph-like smile...brief auditory illusions of her laughter enter my mind. But the majority of my memories are neither happy nor sad, they are the memories of everyday activities, evening dinners and the question which ever looms over the head of a teenager, "Have you finished your homework?" I remember watching videotapes with her on many occasions, though none as awkward as the time we watched The Hunger, just the two of us and an erotic vampire film. I remember feeling both uncomfortable being aroused by the film, in my mom's presence, while at the same time finding the situation hilarious. This moment just came to mind. There are many more like it, I just can't remember them on demand. In all honesty, I remember my mom as a happy person, a person who added joy to the world. Which is why I have my other difficulty.

I can't understand my mom's addiction, and eventual death due to how it ravaged her body, to heroin. I try, by reading/watching/listening to and about other addicts. I know the narrative of my mom's addictive cycle, I can see each step of her hopeless journey. That's not what I can't understand. I know the things that led to her addiction. What I can't understand is the overwhelming power of it, how addiction stole my mom from me...day by day. Oddly, some really shallow things help. They are a poor substitute for true knowledge, and seem trite when I think hard on them, but they help. These things include the music of the Velvet Underground (in particular, you guessed it, Heroin) and Iggy Pop, the films Permanent Midnight (which I saw just after her death) and Trainspotting, the book and film versions of Razor's Edge, and the writings of C.S. Lewis among other things.

I am the only member of my immediate family I know of who attends church. I was raised secularly. Strange as it sounds my mom found comfort in, though she was baffled by, my belief. She once asked -- before I was a regular church attendee -- if I believed in God, expecting me (the first college student in my family) to laugh at the absurdity of the question. I told her I did and her response lingers with me to this day, "Really?" Her eyes looked at me...proud, confused, unbelieving, yet hopeful. I never was able to tell her that hope was what faith was all about ("Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen" Hebrews 11:1). It isn't about "knowledge," little of life is about actual knowledge. This is why the Oracle at Delphi asked us to know ourselves, that is a difficult enough task. Let alone the ability to acquire actual knowledge of something else.

I was notified of my mom's death by answering machine. I was in classes all day and didn't have a cell phone. A series of messages of an ever-worsening condition. Seizures...followed by emergency medical action. The voices of my father and sister becoming more and more desperate as they couldn't reach me in person. My wife and I later read the medical records to piece together a time line, to see if there was an heroic effort to save my mom. There was. It is not the best way to be notified of death, answering machine, I think it is the worst. I also wish that my mom had been buried not cremated, I would have liked to have had the chance to speak, to say my own words. A dear friend of mine died of cancer two-and-a-half years ago and her funeral approximated what I would have liked for my mom. There is a tangible closure in the physical act of burial. It is still a sad event, to be sure, but there is emotional power in the ritual.

Instead, I will share the two poems I think best capture the way I feel. One is gender confused (for my situation not its own) and the other is written from an older generation to a younger one, but they will have to do. In addition I would like to add a part of Philip K. Dick's author's note from A Scanner Darkly.

The first poem is by W.H. Auden (and yes it's the poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral but the scene it is in is one of my favorites in all of cinema).

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The second poem is by Wordsworth:

SURPRISED by joy--impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport--Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?--That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Wordsworth wrote Suprised by Joy (C.S. Lewis titled one of his autobiographies after this poem), for his daughter Catherine who had died at the age of four. This poem masterfully captures the grief I feel over the loss of my mom. Every time I have wonderful event in my life, I want to call her and share the news. That can never happen and it brings the event of her death immediately to mind and my sorrow and feeling of loss are renewed. Every time...without fail. My mom missed my graduation, my wife's master's, my acceptance to graduate school, my wife completing her MFA in film at USC. She will not be there to see her first grandchild, or any of the joy that her grandchildren will bring into the world.

As I stated before, I have continually looked to fiction and biographical narrative to understand my mom's addiction and that is why I am including the following by Philip K. Dick.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one another of them being killed --run over, maimed, destroyed -- but they continued to play anyhow...

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving care. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory..."Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit is a whole lifetime...

If there was any "sin" it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far to great...

I don't entirely agree with P.K. Dick's statement above. Certainly I agree that "the punishment was far too great," but I disagree with his statement that "drug misuse is not a disease." I absolutely believe that an individual has some -- though not always complete -- control over the initial decision whether to use or not use a drug initially. Some people are self-diagnosing their psychological state and self-medicating to heal themselves, others are being "happy now because tomorrow they are dying."

It does not matter why a person first used drugs, whether for "happiness" or to feel normal, there is a point in the addict's life where the drug takes over. The addict's brain chemistry is altered and they begin to experience the disease that is addiction. I firmly believe that addiction is a disease. Drug use? Not necessarily, but addiction is. When you've seen addiction in one person, you begin to recognize it when you witness it elsewhere. It is an eerie phenomenon to see the addicted personality because no matter who the addict is, no matter what their personal pain or prior life, no matter that every person is unique, the addicted personality is strikingly familiar.



When my mom first told me of her addiction to heroin she expected me to be angry. A lot of my family was, I think the thought of my mother using heroin was too alien to them to even imagine. I think they viewed her use as somehow a failure on their part. I didn't, I only wanted to know if she was okay. By which I meant was she okay at the time she told me. My mom thought that heroin could make life more pleasant, for her it wasn't a selfish desire for more fun than anyone else was having, because she felt empty and sad on a regular basis. Heroin made her feel happy, like she could live life. But in making her think she could live life, heroin took life from her.

I don't "forgive" my mom for dying, I have never thought there was anything to forgive. I miss my mom and wish she were here. I love her and knowing that makes the missing part not so bad, because (as C.S. Lewis would say) the pain we feel now is a part of the love we have.

Hulu Recommendation Friday (on the following Tuesday): Steel Dawn

The 70s, 80s, and 90s were the heyday of the Post-Apocalyptic narrative. From movies to video games to role playing games there was an explosion of Post-Apocalyptic entertainment available.

One the movie front, we had quite a variety in quality to choose from. My favorite Post Apocalyptic film lies somewhere between Logan's Run, Escape from New York, and The Planet of the Apes. Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and The Quiet Earth were some of the shining stars of the film releases. Zardoz and Tank Girl were two of the weirder and less coherent entries. Jean Claude Van Damme's Cyborg fell somewhere in the middle of entertaining and mind-numbingly horrible.

On the gaming front, the post-apocalyptic role playing games varied from the systemically complex Aftermath to the wildly imaginative Gamma World. Aftermath always seemed to me to be a simulation of "what would happen if," which meant that most characters die in horrible fashion -- at least they did after some complex mathematical equations were applied to a couple of die rolls. Twilight 2000 was a representation of "what was going to happen." T2000, like Aftermath, featured complex rules systems with realistic representations of radiation poisoning. Nothing more fun that calculating "rads" and their very real affects on your character. Gamma World was a pure "what if" that included everything from serious speculation to mutant plant/rabbit fusions. Gamma World was the most intriguing of the games, but it also had the disadvantage of multiple editions with incompatible rules sets. I would be remiss if I left out the ultra-enjoyable Car Wars game by Steve Jackson Games...cars with machine guns and rocket launchers...mmm...fun.

As for video games...Wasteland is one of the classic computer role playing games and the ancestor of the excellent Fallout series of games.

In the middle of this Cold War inspired Post-Apocalyptomania, in 1987, came a film starring one of Hollywood's biggest stars. Fresh out of successful films like Red Dawn (itself a Post Apocalyptic movie in its own way), Youngblood, and Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze entered the medium with an entry that fused narrative elements from the Post Apocalyptic, Western, Sword and Sorcery, and Planetary Romance genres. Steel Dawn was directed by Lance Hool (Missing in Action 2) with a screenplay by Doug Lefler (director of The Last Legion). In addition to Swayze, the film stars Lisa Niemi (Swayze's real world wife) in the "romantic" role of Kasha and b-movie stalwart Brion James as Tark "the romantic rival."

The outline of the story is essentially Shane. A wanderer comes to town and helps a family who is being pressured by a land baron to give up their water to the land baron. Like most adaptations of Shane, the film understates the dangerous nature of the wanderer and overstates the relationship between Shane and the mother of the family under "siege." Alan Ladd's Shane is too friendly, the book's character is more akin to the Jack Palance character. Jean Claude Van Damme's Shane clone encounters a single mother and can thus become the romantic interest. Clint Eastwood's Shane translation is the hand of god working vengeance against an unjust man. Swayze's Shane is a former soldier who wanders into town with the goal of, temporarily at least, taking the place of a "Peacekeeper" who is murdered at the beginning of the film.

Swayze's arrival throws a wrench into the plans of the land baron, and into a burgeoning romance between Tark and Kasha. His skills with a sword spark the imagination of Kasha's son Jux and are what eventually allow Swayze to challenge the local land baron and avenge the death of the prior "Peacekeeper."

The swordplay, use of meditation, and moral clarity of the hero echo the narrative tropes of Planetary Romance -- the reason this film was recommended this week. The inclusion, at the beginning of the film, of weird horror in the form of sand-dwelling mutants, the aforementioned swordplay, and the lone walker nature of Swayze's character fall nicely in the Sword and Sorcery genre. The setting is definitely Post-Apocalyptic with a nuclear blasted landscape with enough history that their have even been Post-Holocaust wars that resulted in the creation of Post Apocalyptic super swordsman like Swayze and Sho -- the warrior hired by the land baron to defeat Swayze. And the story is a pure translation of Shane, but lacking in Shane's adulation of the father figure.

I have always found it interesting that the father, who is so strong in Schaefer's book Shane, is emasculated in favor of the Shane figure in film representations of the tale. Shane is a dangerous man, a gambler and murderer akin to Doc Holliday. Shane is a villain who becomes a hero when he encounters the civilizing influence of a family. Had Shane stopped in town, instead of the farm, he would have quickly become the villain of the story. A key scene, in most representations, demonstrating the difference in focus from father worship to rogue worship is the scene where the father gets into a fight in the local tavern. The book makes it clear how powerful the father is and how he is holding back to save his son, the movies make no such concessions and Steel Dawn is no different. Tark is not the young boy's father, but he is a capable farmhand who has been in the father role for some time. He is quickly displaced by Swayze, even when he is a fairly competent defender in his own right -- he's just not a sword jedi who meditates while standing on his head like Swayze.

The film is enjoyable, though very campy, and it is largely due to Swayze's extraordinary charisma.

Indie Game Designer James Maliszewski Interviews Role Playing Founding Father Ken St. Andre

The Role Playing Game hobby is approaching its 40th anniversary. Like any phenomenon that has been around for any good length of time, the hobby is beginning to see the passing of its founders. Over the past couple of years, several of the founding fathers of role playing have passed away: Gary Gygax, David Arneson, and Tom Moldvay to name just a few.

It is odd that Cinerati did a blog post for both Gygax and Arneson, but not for Moldvay. It is true that Gygax and Arneson invented Dungeons and Dragons, and thus the RPG hobby, but it was Tom Moldvay who made the game fun to play and was among the first designers to show me that D&D could be about more than "kick down door, kill monster, loot stuff, repeat." His design work on Isle of Dread too the adventure out of the dungeon and into the world, it also added more "story" to the experience. Then came Castle Amber, maybe the single most important module in D&D history. Without this module, there would have been no Ravenloft and Mystara would be a much less interesting world. Moldvay used the works of Clark Ashton Smith as an inspiration for the module and demonstrated completely how a module could be used to tell stories. Player's of the module are even treated to a nice "Fall of the House of Usher" moment. Moldvay's career in gaming was an important one, to the hobby in general and to me in particular.

It was an oversight that I didn't blog a nice obit for Moldvay, it is unforgivable that I never wrote any posts praising his work -- a situation that will be corrected soon enough. We too often forget to write about those who work in the gaming industry while they still live -- I have yet to find a recent update or post on the internet regarding J. Eric Holmes who wrote the first Basic Dungeons & Dragons book. In today's information age, it is baffling that we don't keep better track of gaming's founding fathers.

This is what makes James Maliszewski's recent interview with Ken St. Andre for Escapist Magazine such a treat. Where Gygax and Arneson are the founding fathers of the tabletop roleplaying hobby, Ken St. Andre is arguably the founding father of the roleplaying game industry (a title he likely shares with Rick Loomis). His Tunnels and Trolls was the second roleplaying game published and its publication turned rpg gaming from a monopoly into an industry -- that's quite an achievement. St. Andre's Tunnels and Trolls has, like D&D, gone through a number of editions. While it has never achieved the popularity of the flagship of rpg gaming, T&T still has an active and loyal group of followers -- many of whom meet up at Ken's Trollhalla website to chat about gaming, play online games, and generally geek out.

Ken St. Andre is still very much with us, though he did just finish a series of treatments for prostate cancer, and will likely be around for years to come. This is great for the members of Trollhalla, like me, but it is articles like Maliszewski's that expose more gamers to the thoughts of Ken St. Andre. I don't agree with all of Ken's design philosophies, but he is certainly one of the game designers whose contributions I return to again and again.

Blogging Northwest Smith: "Shambleau"

Cinerati recently featured a post discussing the differences between Sword and Sorcery tales and stories of Planetary Romance. According to the post, a couple of the key differences were the moral clarity of Planetary Romance tales and the inclusion of "Weird Supernatural" elements in Sword and Sorcery tales. In response to the post, Blue Tyson, posited that I had left a "Northwest Smith" sized hole in my argument.

Having read Catherine Lucille Moore's Jirel of Joiry tales, but not her Northwest Smith stories, I was intrigued by the statement. I have decided to read C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories and to do one blog entry per story as I read them. I will be using Paizo Publishing's excellent Planet Stories edition of Northwest of Earth, which contains the complete stories of Northwest Smith (including "Nymph of Darkness" a collaboration with Forrest J Ackerman and "Quest for the Starstone" a collaboration with Henry Kuttner), as my reference during the discussion.


For those of you who are unfamiliar with Northwest Smith, he is often discussed as the fictional character who is the inspiration for George Lucas' character Han Solo. Any need to point out similarities between Northwest Smith and Indiana Jones seems unnecessary, as the names themselves speak volumes about that connection. According to John Clute's Encyclopedia of Fantasy, "Through Smith, CLM helped revamp the formulae of both space opera and heroic fantasy. Smith's introspection and fallibility give him a more human dimension than his predecessors in heroic fantasy, and the depiction of his sexual vulnerability represented a psychological maturity uncommon in the field."

I think it bears mentioning that Stephan Dziemianowicz, who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia, makes no mention of Planetary Romance in the Northwest Smith section and focuses on Smith's importance in space opera and heroic fantasy. I mentioned in the prior post that Planetary Romance was a sub-genre of heroic fantasy, but then again so is a great deal of fiction that no one would ever imagine being classified as Planetary Romance.

If "Shambleau" is any indication of the direction that future Northwest Smith tales will wander, Moore's tales of Smith belong firmly in the genre of space opera and completely outside the bounds of Planetary Romance. Though the Smith tales' inclusion of imagery associated with "Weird Fiction" marks them as stories that extend the boundaries of the traditional space opera tale.

In support of the Smith stories falling into the sub-genre of space opera -- a genre that some argue includes the Planet Stories tales of Leigh Brackett, though I believe that classification lacks specificity and makes space opera too broad a category -- I looked to David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's The Space Opera Renaissance for a working definition of space opera. They offer two early definitions of the genre. These early definitions are most useful given the publication dates of the Smith tales, newer definitions bring to mind epic tales like Iain Bank's "Culture" stories or Asimov's "Foundation" due to the expansion of the use of the term space opera.

According to Hartwell and Cramer, the Fancyclopedia II had the following definition:

Space Opera ([coined by Wilson] Tucker) A hack science-fiction story, a dressed-up Western; so called by analogy with "horse opera" for Western bangbangshootemup movies and "soap opera" for radio and video yellowdrama.

Hartwell and Cramer are quick to point out that this definition is actually a watered-down version of what Tucker actually said in his fanzine, which wasn't to actually equate Westerns and Space Opera as telling similar tales. But the connection had been made and by the early 1950s, Galaxy magazine was firm in its use of space opera as "any hackneyed SF filled with stereotypes borrowed from Westerns." The definition of what constitutes space opera has since expanded significantly since the 50s -- it has come to be so broad as to include both Planetary Romance and the "Culture" stories which is almost too broad -- but the connection between the Western and space opera seems particularly significant in the case of Northwest Smith. I would not call Moore's writing hackneyed, but "Shambleau" could easily be rewritten as a Western with only minor cosmetic changes.

"Shambleau," which was Moore's first published story, was published in 1933 during the height of the pulp era. The shelves were filled with a wide array of writing of various qualities, but it is easy to see why Moore's piece was selected for publication in the November 1933 edition of Weird Tales. The piece could also be used as a demonstration for how to mold a work of writing to suit a particular publication. It isn't hard to believe that Moore actually started this as a Western and then adapted it to better suit the tastes of Weird Tales.

"Shambleau" opens with a prefatory paragraph which sets the tone of the tale, establishes a sense of history and place, and gives readers some foreshadowing regarding the turn the tale will take. The paragraph is reminiscent of the paragraphs Robert E. Howard used to open his Conan tales. Where his paragraphs represented excerpts from the fictional Nemedian Chronicles, Moore's resemble the careful tone of a campfire tale. The paragraph is different in tone from Howard's, but serves much the same purpose.

It begins:

MAN HAS CONQUERED Space before. You may be sure of that. Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which come echoes of half-mythical names -- Atlantis, Mu -- somewhere back of history's first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house its star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues--

One might believe after reading this paragraph -- especially since the place names for Mars and Venus used later in the story are those used in this paragraph -- that he or she is about to read about Space travel in this time before time. This is not the case. References to "New York roast beef" and a "Chino-Aryan war" leave any speculation that this tale takes place in a forgotten time behind. No...this tale takes place in our future, after mankind has once again conquered Space. The sense of the mythical is used in order to make the twist of the story plausible and ensures that the twist falls well within a reader's suspension of disbelief.

We know that our tale take place at some time during mankind's Space conquering future, but what kind of future is it and what kind of man is our protagonist? Apparently, the Mars of the future is a lot like Virginia City.

"Shambleau! Ha...Shambleau!" The wild hysteria of the mob rocketed from wall to wall of Lakkdarol's narrow streets and the storming of heavy boots over the slag-red pavement made an ominous undertone to that swelling bay...

Northwest Smith heard it coming and stepped into the nearest doorway, laying a wary hand on his heat-gun's grip, and his colorless eyes narrowed. Strange sounds were common enough in the streets of Earth's latest colony on Mars -- a raw, red little down where anything might happen, and very often did.

Moore gets us into the action quickly. After a prefatory paragraph that sets the tone and place, she launches us straight into a dangerous situation. It's like reading the scrolling preface before a Star Wars film and then being thrust right into the action. In this case, the action of the tale is simple enough. A wild mob is shouting for the death of a woman, whether "Shambleau" is her name or the name of her people has not yet been made clear, and Northwest Smith takes it upon himself to calm the mob and save the girl. It is only after saving the girl that Northwest Smith comes to understand why the mob was after the woman in the first place -- to tell you more about the girl would be spoiling the fun, but it would also be unfair to leave out further discussion of our protagonist.

We know by his introduction, and his hand on his heat gun, that Northwest Smith is a dangerous man. We come to find out that his saving of the woman probably had little to do with chivalry, but more to do with "that chord of sympathy for the underdog that stirs in every Earthman." This chord of sympathy must stir strong in Smith, because the mob is pretty persistent and Smith -- like Han Solo after him -- isn't the kind who wants to get too involved in this kind of action. Smith's business is usually of a different sort:

Smith's errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith's living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun only. It is enough to say that the shipping-port and its cargoes outbound interested him deeply just now...

Apparently, Smith is a blaggard whose day to day business is so unseemly that Moore refrains from sharing it, likely because the audience would lose sympathy with our protagonist. It is easy to see how Smith became the archetype that anti-heroes would be based upon for decades to come. He's a cautious man, who pulls for the underdog, but who participates in business best left unspoken. Sounds like Han Solo to me...or Wolverine.

"Shambleau" is a fun tale with a nice twist, a twist that is fairly obvious after the prefatory paragraph. One can see illustrations of "Shambleau" by Barbarella creator Jean-Claude Forest at this fairly NSFW link if you don't want to wait to find out the surprise. I recommend waiting. Read Moore's prose first. Moore incorporates classic mythology into the Science Fiction narrative smoothly and dramatically. Her writing is addictive and she manages to take a classic monster and turn it into something really weird.

Hulu Recommendation Friday: Buck Rogers

Given the recent discussions of Planetary Romance, it is natural to recommend the 1979 Buck Roger's television show starring Gil Gerard. The TV series falls somewhere between Space Opera and Planetary Romance. I'll leave it for you to decide exactly where. Many of the plots in Buck Rogers are similar to PR stories, but the emphasis on space fighter battles makes a good case for Space Opera. Regardless, the show's first season had a two part storyline entitled "Planet of the Slave Girls." The episodes aired back to back, if Hulu's airing dates are to be trusted, on September 27, 1979 and Buster Crabbe (the original Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon) made a cameo appearance.

And no one would argue that Buster Crabbe, who played both Flash Gordon (a Planetary Romance classic) and Tarzan (a character created by the father of the field) doesn't belong in a discussion of the genre.