Author Archives: Alison

No, there is another …

While I was mooching around the net, I ran across the assertion (but did not note the page) that Sam Gamgee was the only person to resist the lure of the Ring. Alas now that the film version has come out, that will probably be the way it is remembered. I thought the films were nothing short of brilliant, but there is a handful of things I do take issue with, and the biggest is the misrepresentation of one of my favourite characters:

“So it seems,” said Faramir, slowly and very softly, with a strange smile. “So that is the answer to all the riddles! The One Ring that was thought to have perished from the world. And Boromir tried to take it by force? And you escaped? And ran all the way–to me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune. A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality! Hah!” He stood up, very tall and stern, his grey eyes glinting.

Frodo and Sam sprang from their stools and set themselves side by side with their backs to the wall, fumbling for their sword-hilts. There was a silence. All the men in the cave stopped talking and looked towards them in wonder. But Faramir sat down again in his chair and began to laugh quietly, and then suddenly became grave again.

“Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!” he said … (JRR Tolkien. The Two Towers)

The BBC radio adaptation gets it right. No muddled temptation. No stupid cavalry charges. The radio adaptation also gets right the Paths of the Dead – it’s much, much spookier heard on the radio than seen on the screen, as a march in pitch darkness with a dead army following should be. And Robert Stevens’ (Aragorn) somber rasp has been fixed in my ear for years.

In his entry in the new Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Themes, Works and Wonders, Gary Westfahl offers this insight on the film:

The Lord of the Rings is unquestionably the story of Frodo, with the adventures of the other characters functioning as subplots, their battles and activities clearly labeled as diversions of only secondary importance. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and its sequels, as others note, seem more the story of Aragorn and other human and elf characters, with Frodo shifted to a subordinate role … while Tolkien primarily describes a quest, Jackson is primarily describing a war.”

Desert Island Books

I have been amusing myself making a list of books that I would take to a desert island (the reader’s version of the long-running BBC series Desert Island Discs, in which guests are asked to choose 8 records/CDs that they would take with them to a desert island). In no particular order, my choices would be:

  1. A blank notebook (and pen)
  2. My 1959 Chambers dictionary
  3. Barrayar (Lois McMaster Bujold)
  4. The Black Chalice (Marie Jakober)
  5. Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
  6. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula Le Guin)
  7. The House Tibet (Georgia Savage)
  8. My own Legacies

Some of them would be on my list of ‘best books’. Others might not. But if I were going to be stuck on a desert island with just 8 books and my imagination to amuse me, they are the books with the greatest imaginative resonance for me.

When I used to listen to Desert Island Discs you were also allowed to take a luxury item. Mine was always going to be an immense hunk of paramasan cheese. I like parmasan cheese. And having regularly set the fire alarm off in my grad student apartment while grilling provencale topping, I know it smokes very well too. Which, if you’re stranded on a desert island, is a consideration.

Don't diss my trash, darn't!

Through obscure channels, doing research for TSP (like every other writer on the planet, I too have The Secret Project), I came upon Break of Day in the Trenches, the weblog of Esther MacCallum Stewart, who does research on, among other things, the First World War and popular culture. She also teaches SF. In her March 2005 archive page, she has a letter to Women’s Hour (BBC) in response to a program on women in SF which dealt with the subject superficially and by embracing all the stereotypes about both SF and female SF readers.

Which brought to mind my reaction to a recent BBC7 offering, the futuristic thriller Cold Blood. There was nothing original in the plot, but I could live with that. I followed along fine until we came to the “scientific” explosition. The homicidal villain of the piece was a scientist who found a cure for leukemia and pretty much everything else in the biology of the icefish (see left). In the best pulp tradition he self-administered his elixir and began turning into a human-icefish chimera, developing extreme cold tolerance and a tendency to rip out his coworker’s throats. He needed the iron from their blood because his was losing its hemoglobin. Icefish have none: oxygen dissolves better in cold water than warm, so they can survive in very cold water. Now, so I could accept psychosis (though that is probably even worse misrepresented in popular fiction than are genetics and genetic engineering) – say, toxic effects of his elixir. I could accept aplastic anemia or severe red blood dyscrasia or hemoglobin gene expression being turned off by insertion of a bioengineered vector – again toxic effects. But throw in cold adaptation sufficient for long-distance travel across the Antarctic at night PLUS a miracle cure for everything and the suspenders on my belief go pop-sproing! I can’t imagine history being presented, even as escapist entertainment, with such gross absurdities. (Though I am not an historian, and I do not know what torments historians suffer.) Why should SF!!

Ursula Le Guin, Whalesong, and Sigmund Freud

I expect I betray a peculiar sense of humour, but this, from Ursula Le Guin’s “Collectors, Rhymesters, and Drummers”, had me giggling helplessly over pizza in Romeo’s restuarant.

As to why the whales sing, it is certainly significant that they sing the most, or the males sing most, in mating season. But if you can say a song lasting half an hour performed by a hundred individuals in chorus is a mating call, then you can say a Beethoven symphony is a mating call.

Sometimes Freud sounds as if that’s what he thought. If (as he said) the artist is motivated to make art by the desire for “fame, money, and the love of beautiful women,” then indeed Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because it was mating season. Beethoven was marking his territory.

It’s probably the image of the wonderful, but very brassy Beethoven Ninth as a mating call. I wonder what it would attract: something extrovert, no doubt, unlike the forlorn prehistoric relic of Bradbury’s “The Foghorn.” It’s hard to say what exactly is the subject of the essay, since from paragraph to paragraph it moves from the nature of beauty to rhythm in nature and art, and in her introduction Le Guin said she wrote it for her own entertainment – and it is fun.

Freud never did seem to have much time for artists, although upon a recent glancing enounter with him in last year’s history of modern Europe course, I decided that he was one. One of our assigned reads was a long passage of Freud’s about how he could not go to Rome, and his analysis of what Rome represented to him. Plainly, he was not going to just get over it and go to Rome (ie, do the experiment), until he had extracted the maximum possible creative juice out of not going to Rome. It’s one of those artist things: falling in love with unattainable people, and writing poetry about it, leaving home and yearning to return, and writing novels about it.

The Real Quicksand

A great movie cliche debunked. According to scientist Daniel Bonn in Nature, quicksand cannot suck you under. You will not sink out of sight. However, because the basement of quicksand is clay, you cannot simply be pulled out, either.

Note – the list in the first link is text, but given that quicksand scenes are frequently played for titillation, there is an 18+ warning on the visuals on the site.