More on...

...The Passage.

For the much-ballyhooed "vampire novel of the summer" -- it was a real let-down. Coming in at under 1,000 pages but solidly above 500 -- Cronin resorts to more cheap tricks in the last 100 pages than a dime-store romance novelist. Barbara Cartland at her best at least never tried to pretend she was doing anything other than what was right on the page. Cronin is always trying to pretend he's doing something he isn't: the more he gets into what should be solid horror novel territory, the more he backpedals and tries to head back into modern lit-fic. If you're gonna do it, do it. If you're not prepared, don't show up.

So, with as few spoilers as possible (and I do apologise for not putting a proper spoiler warning on my previous post about this book), lets get into a little hack-job reviewing, shall we? It's the middle of the work week after a long holiday weekend -- at least in the US it is; since I've no idea where you might be reading this from, I can't speak for your personal experience! -- and we're all a bit bitter about going back to the office right now, yes? Good. I thought so.

After the first 250 pages -- pretty good -- and the second 250 -- derivative, but okay -- we reach the last 300 (plus or minus) (checking the library cataloging record, I see that the book clocks in at 766 pages. It feels longer, believe me).

We have established the "vamp" apocalypse and waded through a writer's workshop exercise in worldbuilding. I think this is part of the problem: Cronin is fascinated by the idea of creating the post-apocalyptic world -- but it simply isn't very believable and, once having made it, he doesn't want to break it. Or ding it. Or mar it in really any meaningful way.

SPOILER WARNING


Cronin posits that, in the final days of the "vamp"-pocalypse when the infection is coming, the infected are spreading, people know enough to try to get the fuck out of Dodge. The government arranges evacuation trains -- but only for children. Okay, fine. So people get their kids on these trains and they're sent away to various secluded, well-protected colonies. Also fine. Good idea, really. The kids arrive at these colonies -- and are left. No adults. No care-takers. No Army -- "the Army" has later become a kind of short-hand both for the adult world that will come and rescue them -- and for the adult world that abandoned them when they were children. (Interesting thoughts both; don't get attached: they go nowhere.) Obviously, the colonies live and thrive and work out a way of being in the infected world that involves big lights and tall walls and lots of security and a fair amount of paranoia.

This is all well and good -- skipping past the last days of the apocalypse is an okay plot trick. It moves us on, lets us get some perspective -- all right. The problem here is that, in order to give us all this information, Cronin resorts to using a series of quoted diaries and letters from people who survive. And who survive not only the initial apocalypse but all these events he is now busily and minutely telling us about. To top this? Cronin heads his chapters and sections with long quotations noted as being from an academic conference being held to examine all these events!

So what was that noise at the back there?

Yup, that was tension just walking out the door right there. Hear the slam? Yup -- gone forever.

There is no doubt here. People will survive 'cause -- well, we're just awesome that way. Despite the mammoth numbers of genetically mutated humans who glow in the dark and can spring 50 feet straight into the air and are ungodly strong...yeah, we're just that fucking cool. The flip side to that, of course, is that the infected are just that dumb. Okay, if you must have stupid undead hordes, you must, but-- Cronin posits "vamps" hooked up psychically to some kind of uber-vamp-mind controlled by the first baker's dozen of the infected who are, in turn, being infected by "the Babcock." (And here's a suggestion: if you're going to have an evil psychic uber-vamp who is determined to make the world play out on a large scale his suffering as a psychotic child abuse victim, don't give him a name that's reminiscent of a Woody Allen accountant. It just sounded like a worse joke every time it got repeated.) And this is another cool idea -- that goes nowhere. The "vamps" are getting into people's dreams, controlling them like blood-bonded servants without biting them. That is just made of awesome -- and it goes nowhere.

Okay, so problem number one is, really, the post-apocalyptic world. It doesn't work. It's isn't believable. The children who were evacuated are meant to range in age from about two to thirteen or fourteen. At that age, kids know how the world works and some of them -- most of them, I'd say -- are pretty damn invested in seeing that it stays the same damned way. And the idea is that kids from all over, all classes, all sorts of families, all kinds of areas, are just mixed together in these trains and then in these Colonies. Some of these kids are going to be freakin' married to the status quo, particularly in a time of upheaval, change, fright, and despair as they have to leave their families. What are they going to want when they hit this Colony? Things to be just like they were before. Or -- maybe just a little difference. So 90 years on? Yeah, I imagine it would look a little freaky-deaky -- but rather like the "real world" slipped out of focus, or moved a few feet off its base. Like watching a 3D movie without the glasses.

But apparently these children took the world they remembered, crumpled it up, threw it out, and began again with some kind of weird-ass Lost-meets-Lord of the Flies scenario. Children are kept secluded from all adults except "The Teacher" until they're about nine -- and don't tell me that isn't just a tad bit weird -- and then reintroduced into the community. There are grades or guilds of workers in the Colony: guards, technicians -- and then kind of vast mash of "everyone else."

And from this mix of people, Cronin posits a world that's kind of like Roland of Gilead's Mid-World, except not as complete and not as well-thought out. These are the kind of settlements the slow mutants put together -- or the infected "greenies" out in the desert wastelands. The Colony we are concerned with is a group of about 500 people, adults, adolescents, and children at this point, in a small "town" area. They've walled it in and installed huge klieg lights which scare off the "smokes," as the "vamps" are called for no particularly evident reason. (Another problem -- Cronin assumes vocabulary shifts, naturally enough, but neither explains them, nor allows his characters to explain them for him. Tanith Lee in Biting the Sun, he is not.)

It just doesn't work. And I'm not entirely sure why: part of it is that in other post-apocalypse stories I've seen that I buy into -- The Road, Mad Max and The Road Warrior, the Dark Tower series -- there are bits and shards of the "old" world still around: books, toys, machines, video-tapes, jewellery, for God's sake! and here there's nothing. There are some machines that the technicians -- and only the technicians -- understand how to work or repair (and they're slowly breaking down), but that's it. No-one has so much as a ball-point pen.


And it's only been 90 years! It isn't like the infected destroy materiel -- they just take people. There's nothing in the "before" story that says "And then the Army set fire to cities" or "And then there were riots that took out every town between the Pacific and Atlantic."

The evacuated children would remember their parents, other siblings who didn't make it, friends, teachers -- and all of that just went "phut" when the gates closed on the Colony? Some of them brought stuff with them -- that all just vanished? Yeah, there's this thing called "sharing" where the supplies for the Colony are put in a central location and, literally, shared out and that makes total sense -- high-end recycling -- but people always -- and I do mean always -- sneak personal stuff with them. Watches, pens, books, photographs, CDs, glasses, rings, bracelets -- there is no way to make a new grouping of people this clean without a lot of planning and searching. It doesn't even work with prisoners except at seriously high-security facilities.

So there's that.

Of course, the Colony has to go. Any idiot can see that. So our little group of semi-intrepid semi-heroes sets off on the classic "trek to find the truth." All this is spurred by the arrival at the Colony of Amy, the 14th person to get infected by the virus back 90 years ago. She may or may not be infected, doesn't seem "vampiric," and seems more than mildly psychic. Oh, and she doesn't talk, but she does have a radio transmitter in her neck which is continually receiving a message saying "If you find her, bring her here" and a set of coordinates.

Thus, the trek.

Which takes forever and is unbelievably predictable. There are the large ruined cities -- courtesy of Resident Evil 2 and 3; the attack when the group is bivouacking in the city -- courtesy of 28 Days Later, The Stand, and pretty much every other zombie movie ever made; the colony of people in the middle of nowhere who are doing suspiciously well and are suspiciously welcoming of everyone, particularly the women -- courtesy also of 28 Days Later, The Road, Mad Max, and so on and so forth.

And then there's the line that lets you know who have just slogged through nearly 600 pages of material for no good end. One of our noble little crew has been kidnapped by the "vamps" and then returned -- unharmed, just a pointless plot cul-de-sac, folks, nothing to see here -- and another character asks her what happened. She can't remember and, in reply, he says, alluding to other people from his community who have been taken and returned and cannot remember what happened: "The trauma was simply too great."


No. 


Wrong answer.


You are a horror novel. I don't care how many awards your author has for doing other things where phrases like that are acceptable. In this case, they're not. You are about trauma. All the nasty shit other genres don't deal with? That is your stock and trade: blood, rape, murder, death, mayhem, betrayal, angst, pain, anger, hatred, incest, fear, agony, pain, disgust -- all of that. It doesn't have to be explicit: you don't have to splash blood up the walls or hang guts from the ceiling; you don't have to have genetically mutated octopi crawling in the windows or giant spiders in the cellar; nobody's head needs to spin around 360 degrees and there is no need for pea soup (unless you want these things, of course.) But you never get to say, "The trauma was too great."

And on that note, we cue the music, folks.

Oh, I could go on.

There's the wretched character death -- and rebirth -- in the last 50 pages; the meaningless pregnancy and birth; and the completely awful deus ex machina on the last page -- but it isn't worth it.

To my mind, once that phrase "The trauma was simply too great" has been uttered, all bets are off, clean the tables, time to turn out the lights.

We're done.

Photos Galore

Well, ok, possibly not quite "galore," but you get the idea.

Full points to the person who spots my technical error!

Really happy late marigolds.	Part of my grandparents' neighbor Estelle's garden...	...ditto...
...ditto...	Holly berries.	More holly.
Estelle's lower garden.	Treeline.	Possibly the creepiest grave decoration in all of South Cemetary.
South Cemetary road.	Ditto, stone wall.	The most zombie-friendly sign ever.
Is one of them moving? Over there on the right?		South Cemetary headstones.
	First name? Last name? Who knows.	Walden Pond
...ditto...	Thoreau would never know what to do...	This is our group photo from Walden Pond.

Didja see it? Yeah -- it ain't November. *sigh* This is what happens with the "push random buttons you haven't tried before and see what happens" approach.

friday fun times

Can you explain it? I can't.

And because that's just totally baffling and weird and...did you recognize the voice? Yeah, full points if you did. Bet you'll never look at I, Claudius the same way again.

So in light of all my professional affiliations -- both library and archives -- here's a short, very neat little Second Life (I always want to call it Half Life but that's a totally different idea!) video for Banned Books Week:

Bigger on the Inside...

I'm glad you're all coming with me on this, to borrow a phrase from Eddie Izzard.

So lets get right to it.

Tom Baker and Anthony Ainley
in the Pharos Project.

Keeper of Traken and Logopolis (1980-1981). I have to say, for the dedicated Tom Baker fan -- I must raise my hand here -- these episodes are about as much fun to watch as nothing at all. But they are great season enders, great "era of show" enders, and pretty solid DW into the bargain. Possibly Traken more than Logopolis which gets a bit sketchy towards the end but has pacing and story elements that Russell T. Davies would recognize and, I'm sure, applauds, particularly the end of Logopolis which has a rather Davies-style dirty trick in it. There is a companion in here -- Adric -- who is introduced earlier in the series in Full Circle. Circle is also a good story but...I've never really liked it because a major story element are these fruits that harbor giant spiders that leap out and bite you. This is not something I'm a fan of. So, yes, watch Full Circle to get Adric's intro story but be prepared for the small scuttley things. Both on DVD and I'm pretty sure Logopolis is on Netflix insty.

Cybermen confer.

Since I'm on an Adric kick for a moment, I want to mention Earthshock (1982), Adric's last story. This starts out...weird, and then turns into a nice sound Cyberman story. Not the dorky new series fully-converted Cybermen who can't move above a slow march, but old-school "scary as hell" Cybermen. This isn't the most outstanding Cyber-story ever -- see Revenge of the Cybermen or Tomb of the Cybermen or something along those lines for that. But it's good; Matthew Waterhouse puts in a terrific performance as Adric and everyone else backs him up. His last scene with Peter Davison is great stuff. DVD and I think on insty...?

Autons in the High Street.

Spearhead from Space (1970). Jon Pertwee's first episode as the Doctor. Pertwee was told to come to his audition with any costume ideas he might have; he went into his attic and found a trunk of his grandfather's old clothes: velvet jackets, patterned trousers, old elastic-sided boots, and opera capes. A personality followed on naturally: flamboyant, dramatic, occasionally given to bouts of introspection or introversion, given to the grand gesture -- which doesn't always work but almost invariably good-humored about it. Pertwee's doctor was also action-oriented, in direct contrast to Patrick Troughton's predecessor who had been more inclined to run than to engage in fisticuffs. Pertwee's Doctor was an expert in Venusian aikido as well as pretty good at the odd straight right. Spearhead from Space is a great establishing story and it'll give the new series entrant some background on the Autons. DVD and possibly insty.

The original one-take effect!

Tomb of the Cybermen (1967-1968). There are lots of gaps in the Hartnell and Troughton episodes; the BBC wasn't the best at looking after its films and, frankly, no-one thought there would be much interest in the shows after they were aired. Reels of film disappeared off in briefcases and bags and have been found as far from home as a church steeple storage space in New Zealand (unless that was a missing Z-Cars episode I'm thinking of, but you get they idea. They wandered far and wide is the point I'm trying to make.) So for some "foundational" episodes, all we have are novelizations or scripts. Tomb isn't one of these, but I'm saying all that so you can see why I'm not putting on earlier Cyber or Dalek episodes: they might not exist, or only in bits, and they can be hard to find. This one is readily available on DVD (and insty, I'm pretty sure). Tomb is a fun Cyber-sode, gives a lot of background info about the Cybermen and their planet and their general antisocial tendencies, and has a great dribbling villain. Oh, and you get to see Cybermats. :)

Anthony Ainley and Peter Davison
consider the wall decorations.

Castrovalva (1982). Peter Davison's first episode as the Doctor. I have never really...found my stride with Davison's Doctor. I've watched quite a few episodes but...they never really work for me. However, Castrovalva is awesome DW from pretty much any standpoint. It starts with something freaky and gets weirder from there. There are three great companions -- Tegan, Adric, and Nyssa -- and Davison turns his natural fumbling at trying to follow an act like Tom Baker (who had been in the part for seven years and, for many people, was the Doctor) into a more tentative, thoughtful, sensitive vision of the Doctor than had been around for awhile. And the whole storyline is about the power of narrative and free choice: how can you not get into that? Also available on DVD -- er -- I think. :)

Louise Jameson and Tom
Baker in the Tesh base.

The Face of Evil, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and Horror of Fang Rock (1977-1978). Okay, three last thoughts and then class is dismissed. We're back to Tom Baker -- I said I was a fangirl! -- and these are the first and two outstanding episodes with my favorite companion, Leela. (I have to say, there may be a tie for "favorite" here -- there's Leela, there's Sarah Jane Smith, and there's Donna Noble. I thought this was a pretty solid original series list until Donna came along.) Face of Evil is Leela's first episode and since she starts off the whole shebang by being on trial in front of her tribe for public blasphemy against their god -- denying his existence in fact -- you know you've got a fairly definite personality on your hands here. Leela's tribe has been going into battle periodically to try and save their god from a rival tribe; nothing ever happens except Leela's people are getting systematically slaughtered. The Doctor arrives -- fresh from the horrors of The Deadly Assassin and having to leave Sarah Jane behind which is just heartbreaking in light of School Days in the new series -- and may have a solution. Or may just make things worse. Weng-Chiang is campy, Sherlock Holmes-inspired Victoriana, including a giant rat and some painfully bad Chinese accents; try not to think about the Orientalism too much and just enjoy the show. Fang Rock is a closed-room murder mystery and incredibly claustrophobic and quite scary. Scared the hell out of me when I was a kid anyway!

There are others, of course; I've left off Image of the Fendahl, The Green Death, The Romans, The Daemons, Masque of Mandragora, Inferno, The Mind Robber, Time and the Rani, The Twin Dilemma, and so on and so on and so on. But I was asked for my recommendations and here they are! (With lots of omissions.) 

So from here....

...to  here...

...I still think I agree with Stephen Fry that there is no sound more indicative of approaching enjoyment than the opening notes of that theme. :)

"I'm the Doctor."

So last week a request was relayed to me via Anna from one of her coworkers who has been watching the new Doctor Who series and now wants to get into the original series.

:)

This makes me happy. I am an old-school fan; the very first episode I can remember seeing I was too young to remember the year or to understand what was going on but it was Planet of the Giants (a rerun, obviously, from 1960-some-odd) and it scared the hell out of me. My dad tried again with Robots of Death in...ooh, the late 1980s sometime? and that was all she wrote. Been hooked ever since. At my peak fandom, I could recite all the companions -- 1963-1989 -- forward and backward, character names, occupations, and actors; all the Doctors, ditto (naturally; that's easy! There are fewer of them!); main villains; and a good whack of episode titles, even those I hadn't seen because, of course, I owned nearly all the companion books. So I could also recite all kinds of miscellaneous facts like that K-9 was largely held together with sello-tape and hatred because, apparently, the dog "puppet" was such a pain in the neck.

I can't -- quite -- do all that any more: if nothing else, I almost always forget Paul McGann and elide the space between Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston, making Eccleston 8 and Tennant 9 and then I get very confused about Matt Smith. Anyway, my point is that I'm still good enough to remember enough titles to come up with a pretty good "intro fan's guide" and that's what this is.

In no particular order -- certainly not chronological or "best to worst"...and, sadly, may include things that are a little tricky to find. And I discovered while making my list that I had far too many recommendations for one post, so we're going to have a rather Whovian week here, folks, and enjoy, Tracy; you have some sweet viewing in front of you!

Tom Baker and Mary Tamm
contemplate the Key
in The Armageddon Factor

The Key to Time series, made up of The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, Stones of Blood, Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll (my personal favorite), and The Armageddon Factor (1978-1979 -- the whole season). The last may be one of the weakest in the series, sadly. The writers and director wanted to make a big splashy season ender, forgetting that DW -- at the time -- wasn't a big splashy kinda show. It did better with small and solid as exemplified here in the excellent Ribos Operation, an absolutely unarguable "stop the crime" story-line with a great introduction for Mary Tamm's Romanadvoratnalundar. Last I checked, all of these shows are available on Netflix insty; barring that, they're all on DVD so should be available through regular ol' snail mail Netflix.

Jacqueline Hill, William Russell,
William Hartnell, and Carole Ann Ford
in the TARDIS in An Unearthly Child.

An Unearthly Child. The first episode. November 23, 1963 at 5.20 p.m., thank you very much. (I've heard different ideas about the time, but I'm fairly sure I'm right; I checked with my father and he's reasonably sure he watched it at the time. :)) If anyone wants the explanation for why the new series Doctors -- particularly Eccleston -- aren't "nice" all the time, here's your answer. William Hartnell's Doctor was short-tempered, irascible, selfish, snarky, and prone to emotional blackmail and manipulation. Sounds like fun, yeah? Well, it is. If that isn't enough to excite your interest, there's also Jacqueline Hill's Barbara, William Russell's Ian, and Carole Ann Ford's Susan -- the Doctor's granddaughter, one of my favorite companions. The story isn't anything to write home about -- a simple trip back in time to prehistoric earth -- but watching the roots of the show emerge is worth the clunky -- even for Doctor Who! -- effects and occasionally dull dialogue of the cavemen: "Za will make fire!" "I say Za will not make fire!" "Za will do what he says!" I think this is available on DVD?

William Hartnell and William Russell
threatened by the Daleks on Skaro.

The Dead Planet (1963-1964). Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! They were at it right from the beginning -- everyone's favorite thing to hide from behind the couch. And the Daleks were there from the start, too, appearing as the main villains in the second show (I'm going by joined-up episodes here; technically, the shows in the original series were divided into multiple parts that aired over a number of weeks.) Planet is long, I won't hide it from you; it goes on a bit, but it sustains interest through having good solid characters -- the Thals who are the "nice" native tribe on the planet that the Doctor, Ian, Susan, and Barbara end up trying to help -- and there's some good debate about whether or not the Doctor and his companions should help: is it right for them just to land on the planet, have a cursory understanding of what's going on, and plunge right in up to the elbows? just because the Daleks attacked them, sort of, should they leap in on the side of the Thals? I think this one also is on DVD...or coming soon?

Sylvester McCoy and Anthony Ainley
face off.

Survival (1989). *sigh* The last episode of the old series. Features one of my other favorite companions, Ace, and a great "villain" in the form of the Cheetah People. There's also the Master -- the second one, Anthony Ainley -- and some creepy ideas about environment forming personality. There's also a very new series-style moment with the Doctor forced to choose whether or not to employ a violent solution. If he does -- well, bad things happen including, possibly the end of the world -- but...it would work. And he really wants to. May be one of the first DW episodes to deal overtly with a real-world problem -- episodes like The Sunmakers before dealt with actual events in a kind of backhanded manner -- but Survival, in so many words, takes on youth violence which still seems to paralyse and stun Britain in a weird way. And John Simm can probably thank the writers of Survival for the fact that he had the opportunity to create his magnificent turn as the Master in The End of Time. On DVD.

Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen
discover the secrets of
the Wirrn.

Robot, Ark in Space, Sontaran Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen (1974-1975). Another whole Tom Baker season but is there a better way to spend your time? It could be argued that the answer is yes, by watching whole Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, or Jon Pertwee season, but it'd be a close call. This is Baker's first season and it's amazing. He takes control of the role from the start, making a complete, clean break from Pertwee's action-happy dandy with his opera cloak and velvet smoking jacket and turning the Doctor into a thoughtful Bohemian -- with an occasionally nasty temper. He looks silly -- but isn't. There's a lot of David Tennant's performance in here, one way or another.

Tune back in for Part 2 on Wednesday!

friday fun times

I want one!