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Archive | 2007

Two Mad Kings

By on November 18, 2007 13

I could swear that I’d linked to these two marvelous lefty anti-authoritarian short stories before, but I can’t find any reference to them on my website, so maybe not.

every inch a king The first, a brief La Boétiean fable titled “The Actor and the King,” is by the enigmatic German anarcho-individualist novelist B. Traven a.k.a. Ret Marut (1890?-1969), best known today as the author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and the Jungle novels. The second, variously titled “A King’s Lesson” and “An Old Story Retold,” is by the English art designer, fantasy novelist, and libertarian communist William Morris (1834-1896), best known today for News from Nowhere and The Wood Beyond the World. Enjoy!

We Apologise for A More Stressful Than Intended Marooning Experience

By on November 17, 2007 1

Currently in DC Comics’ Salvation Run event, which is part of its bigger Countdown to Final Crisis event, a secret government agency is rounding up supervillains without trial and relocating them on what the agency mistakenly believes is a safe and pleasant planet. (The agency has been duped by two figures we’ve only seen in shadow, though they look like Darkseid and Desaad to me.) In fact the planet is a hellish place where the supervillains have to fight a constant battle for survival. I’m betting that at some point they come back to Earth a trifle peeved.

Jules Verne - The Mysterious Island It’s rather odd timing for DC to be running this story, since it looks like a blatant rip-off of Marvel’s recent Planet Hulk story (with a dash of Civil War for the secret-supervillain-prison element). In Planet Hulk, a secret group of superheroes decides the Hulk is too dangerous to be allowed to roam the Earth freely, so they kidnap him and send him to what they mistakenly believe will be a safe and pleasant planet. Through some sort of glitch, the Hulk instead arrives on a hellish world where he has to fight a constant battle for survival. Plus he gets married, only to lose his wife to an explosion for which the superheroes who exiled him are made to appear responsible. Needless to say, the Hulk eventually makes it back to Earth a trifle peeved. (Of course the Hulk’s angry return, chronicled in World War Hulk, came just shortly after DC’s Black Adam’s angry rampage, likewise over a slain wife, in World War III; both were announced well ahead of time so I’m not sure who’s copying whom on that one.)

But both these stories are arguably drawing on an earlier Star Trek storyline, one that began in the original series episode “Space Seed” and was later continued in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Captain Kirk exiles genetically enhanced supervillain Khan Noonian Singh and his followers (veterans of the Eugenics Wars, which were initially supposed to be conventional wars in the late 20th century, then were retconned into being conventional wars in the 22nd century, only to be re-retconned into being covert struggles in the late 20th century ….) to what he mistakenly believes to be a safe and pleasant planet. Shortly after Kirk departs, an unforeseen astronomical catastrophe transforms the planet into a hellish place where Khan and his people have to fight a constant battle for survival. Khan even loses his wife, and when he finally gets off the planet he’s a trifle wrathful.

But maybe Jules Verne got there first. At the end of The Children of Captain Grant (better known to American audiences as In Search of the Castways), the novel’s chief villain, Thomas Ayrton, is exiled on a desert island. We meet him again later in The Mysterious Island (which serves as a sequel both to Children and to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), where we find that those who marooned him have underestimated, not the physical harshness of the island, but its psychological harshness; Ayrton has gone cuckoo from isolation. Once rescued and reassimilated into society, however, Ayrton turns out to be reformed rather than revengeful – so the parallel’s not especially close.

Ice Ice Beowulf

By on November 17, 2007 3

Beowulf Animated Epic I’m looking forward to the new Beowulf (which I’ll have a chance to see locally in 3-D), but I still have an unquenchable fondness for this beautiful 1998 animated version. Admittedly it’s just half an hour long and massively overpriced, but it’s more faithful to the original in both letter and spirit than any other version has been, and clearly more so than the new one will be. The new one is Robert E. Howard’s Beowulf, as it were, but the 1998 version is Tolkien’s Beowulf. (Or to put it another way, the new movie – with its “I am ripper, tearer, slasher, I am the teeth in the darkness, I am Beowulf!” business, has the roaring, swaggering feel of an Irish saga like Táin Bó Cúailnge, while the older version has the grimmer, more somber character of an Icelandic saga. An Icelandic hero wouldn’t say “I am ripper, tearer, slasher!”; he’d say something more understated, like “you’ll receive small thanks here.”)

In related news: for an mp3 of Tolkien reading his poem “The Hoard,” inspired by the Beowulf story, go to this page and choose the third file.

Isabel Paterson and Talbot Mundy?

By on November 16, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Against all fear; against the weight of what,
For lack of worse name, men miscall the law;
Against the tyranny of Creed, against the hot,
Foul creed of priest, and Superstition’s maw;
Against all men-made shackles, and a man-made Hell –
Alone – at last – unaided – I REBEL!
– Talbot Mundy

I’m pleased to see that Talbot Mundy’s excellent historical fantasy novel Tros of Samothrace, about 1st-century BCE Celtic tribes defending themselves against Roman invasion, is available online (though only in ASCII text – and, for copyright reasons I suspect, only on an Australian site). The book’s savage portrait of Julius Caesar is especially memorable. Robert E. Howard is known to have been influenced by Tros, but Mundy’s protagonist is considerably more complex, and his moral code more severe, than is generally the case with Howard’s heroes. (Mundy himself was an interesting character; check out his Wikipedia bio.)

The Dying Gaul Another writer about whose possible dependence on Mundy I wonder about is Isabel Paterson. In 1930 she released The Road of the Gods, the final entry (though first in fictional chronology) in the trilogy of historical romances that began with The Singing Season (1924) and The Fourth Queen (1926). The trilogy traces the adventures of a pair of lovers as they are reincarnated in different guises, names, and contexts across the centuries, from medieval Spain to Elizabethan England (though in fact it’s not clear whether Paterson planned all along for these to be the same characters reborn or whether this theme developed only with the third book). The Road of the Gods, like Tros of Samothrace, deals with the struggles of Northern tribes (Germanic rather than Celtic this time) against Roman expansion in the first century BCE. Although Tros wasn’t published as a book until 1938, it appeared in serialised form in 1925, so influence is possible – and Paterson would certainly have appreciated the novel’s anti-imperialist message and even its opening epigram, a spurious quotation from Taliesin:

These then are your liberties that ye inherit. If ye inherit sheep and oxen, ye protect those from the wolves. Ye know there are wolves, aye, and thieves also. Ye do not make yourselves ridiculous by saying neither wolf nor thief would rob you, but each to his own. Nevertheless, ye resent my warning. But I tell you, Liberty is alertness; those are one; they are the same thing. Your liberties are an offense to the slave, and to the enslaver also. Look ye to your liberties! Be watchful, and be ready to defend them. Envy, greed, conceit and ignorance, believing they are Virtue, see in undefended Liberty their opportunity to prove that violence is the grace of manhood.

Of course Paterson didn’t necessarily need to have been inspired by anyone else; still, the subject matter was unusual enough in that era (Stephen Cox, Paterson’s biographer, calls the choice of topic “unlikely” and “extraordinary”), Mundy was sufficiently widely known, and Paterson was sufficiently widely read, that a connection does not seem improbable.

Admittedly Paterson might instead have been influenced by William Morris’s much earlier treatment of these matters in his 1880s novels The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, but stylistically Paterson seems much closer to Mundy than to Morris. (The real influence of the Morris books was on Tolkien, but that’s another story.)

Hold-fast Is the Only Dodd

By on November 15, 2007 1

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

In tonight’s Democratic debate, when asked which should take priority, national security or human rights, Chris Dodd said something like the following: “National security, of course. When the President takes the oath of office, he swears to do two things: to protect the Constitution, and to protect our national security. So clearly national security is number one.” Later on in the debate he repeated the first half of this odd claim, saying something like: “The President doesn’t swear to protect the country or protect the Constitution, he swears to do both.”

Chris Dodd Now even if it were true that the President swears to do both those things, it’s hard to see what would entitle Dodd to conclude that the second one must take precedence over the first. But in fact there’s nothing about national security in the presidential oath of office:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Now perhaps someone might argue that protecting national security is involved in “faithfully execut[ing] the Office of President of the United States.” But in the Constitution’s listing of presidential duties, the only presidential function that has anything to do with national security is serving as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States.” And who determines when or whether the army, navy, and/or militia are to be “called into the actual service of the United States”? The Congress. The President is not supposed to be proactive in military policy; he’s supposed to lead the troops against enemies of Congress’s choosing, at a time of Congress’s choosing, for a duration of Congress’s choosing. There’s no way of construing this modest assignment into some sort of sweeping license to suspend constitutional rights in the interest of national security.

So either a) Dodd is lying, or b) he doesn’t know what’s in the oath he’s so desperate to take or the Constitution he’s so eager, or c) he thinks protecting the Constitution just means protecting “it” from foreign invasion and not, say, protecting the rights enumerated in its text.

Now I, obviously, don’t think that protecting the Constitution and protecting human rights amount to the same thing, and I don’t much care about presidential oaths one way or another. Still, it’s clear enough that the function of Dodd’s surreptitiously slipping the presidential oath’s actual requirement (protecting the Constitution) into second place behind its invented requirement (protecting national security) was to downplay the importance of rights, and to lend colour of law – or colour of presidential oath, anyway – to such downplaying. So, for the record: the presidential oath clearly places constitutional rights above national security. If you don’t like those priorities, then for God’s sake stop running for the job that requires you to swear to uphold them.

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