Watership Down (Film) Directed by Martin Rosen

Watership Down (Film)

Directed by Martin Rosen

Martin Rosen was born in New York City in 1936 but would move to the United Kingdom with his wife while working as a theater agent and talent scout. Watership Down was the 3rd movie he produced, the first being a Canadian work A Great Big Thing in 1968, the second was Women in Love in 1969. He wrote the script for Watership Down and produced it. He also directed Watership when the original director John Hubley died. He also wrote and produced the 1982 adaption of Richard Adam's work Plague Dogs. Mr. Rosen would also produce the film Smooth Talk and the Watership Down cartoon series. He has since retired from active life.

The film itself was rather successful and was nominated for Hugo awards in 1978. It did well in the Anglo nations, Scandinavia, and Germany; but was less successful in Spain, where there were still a number of supporters of Franco's regime and in Japan which also has a complicated history with it's militarist government. What's best know about Watership Down is the fact that many parents doing no research into the matter thought that any film with cartoon bunnies were perfectly fine for small children (hehehHAHAHA BWAHAHAHAHA!). This wasn't helped by the British system declaring this film perfectly fine for anyone over four (Gotta love those anglo-sphere rating systems that disproportionately penalize sex over violence and give you a discount if the murder is animated.). I got a nephew who’s about five and I certainly wouldn't show him this film so... Way to drop the ball there folks. Anyways, that got the film a reputation as the film that traumatized an entire generation with scenes of blood, guts and bunny murder galore but does it live up to that reputation? Does this movie hold up 40 or so years after it's creation? As always I will be issuing two grades here. First how the movie stands on its own as a work and second how it stands as an adaptation. So let's discuss.

The movie like the book tells the story of Hazel and Fiver, who in response to Fiver's vision of imminent doom of their home warren, led an Exodus away from it to an unseen but promised land where they will live free and safe (Oh you sweet summer children…). The warren is somewhat oppressive, as the military caste has turned to bullying and stealing choice bits of food from the civilians; but hasn't sunk into a totalitarian state. Many of the rabbits who join Hazel and Fiver do so less out of belief in Fiver's visions and more for an excuse to strike out from a society that forcibly keeps them on the bottom rungs with no route of advancement (I see some prescient social commentary here.). However, they have to flee through dangerous territory braving predator-ridden woods and dealing with unforeseen dangers to do so. The movie does not pull punches about how dangerous this trip is for the rabbits, as they have to deal with rats, dogs, owls, hawks and more. Nor is it a trip without loss, as not everyone makes it the promise land. The main conflict doesn't really get going until the 2nd half of the movie when they have found their promised land and proceed to build a new warren. This is of course the conflict with the totalitarian warren Erafa ruled by General Woundwort. If the original warren was becoming hidebound, Erafa has become a full blown dictatorship where officers do as they please and everyone suffers as they must. The story mostly focuses on Hazel and Big Wig, with Fiver as a major character but taking a back seat to them in terms of characterization and screen time. The movie excels at using visuals to tell the story and set the scene, along with using music to reinforce both. We see the reality of Erafa shown to us in a short sequence that tells us everything we really need to know about such a society and why some rabbits would want to flee a place where they are safe from all predators... Well safe from all predators except their fellow rabbits. The stark contrasts between Erafa and Hazel’s group isn’t crudely hammered into but make completely clear just by seeing the two groups in operations. That said very little time is spent on developing Watership Down itself, part of this is due to the run time of the movie which is about an hour and a half. I kinda feel even another fifteen minutes would have been helpful on that front. It's also bogged down a bit by it's age. For example the extremely stylized scenes where they reveal the fate of the characters birth warren and Fiver's vision that leads him to Hazel come across as completely 70s to me. Clarity is thrown by the wayside in favor of animation sequences that seem to assume you’re using some sort of chemical assistance while watching the film. The scene where they reveal that the warren had been destroyed was fairly nightmarish yes, but so heavily stylized that I wouldn't be entirely sure what I was seeing without the voice over. Additionally replacing Fiver’s vision quest to find Hazel when he’s wounded with a musical dance routine with the bunny grim reaper wasn’t a choice I could get behind either. I can't help but feel that a modern remake would likely do a better job getting those scenes across to the audience. That said the movie isn't bad, especially if you're going to use it as an example of it's time. Watership Down the film gets a C+ from me.

It's run time is however a massive chain around the film's neck in regards to being a good adaptation. Entire subplots are axed and characters banished to oblivion. Big Wig's moment of glory, his undercover mission to Errafa is cut down quite a bit in order to have room for the main battle. Fiver's part in that battle is nearly written out entirely! For that matter Fiver is increasingly shoved into the background as the film goes on, his visions and spirit quests are mostly written out of the movie, which is frankly a shame as they helped give the novel a mystical quality. Strangely enough some of Hazel's moments are undermined ever so slightly to make Big Wig look stronger (as if he needed the help!). With the exception of the prologue of the movie showing the Rabbit Creation Myth and Fall from Grace, all the El-ahrairah are cut right out of the movie. Which is entirely understandable as you only get 90 minutes to tell the whole story so the myths are expendable, but man I would really like to see them all done on screen. As they're a great show of how storytelling mythology works in a non-literate society. The rabbits are also made more human, which I feel was unnecessary. Having the rabbits be noticeable less human and more rabbit would have been an interesting touch. Although I can understand why a movie maker wouldn't want to take that risk. Honestly if I was doing these reviews in the 1990s or early 2000s, it would get a high grade but adaptations have markedly improved in recent years so the standards have slowly climbed upwards and onwards. As an adaptation I have to give it a C-. In earlier darker times I might have given it a B or more but thankfully we are past that.

Well that's all done. Next week, we begin Solarpunk month! Join me for The Windup Girl and after that the Waterknife! Keep reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black is your reviewer, Garvin Anders

Watership Down (TV Series) Produced by Martin Rosen

Watership Down (TV Series)

Produced by Martin Rosen

Let it never be said I won't try to meet the requests of my readers. There were several requests for Watership Down (the novel) and out of those requests, it was mentioned that there was a cartoon series I should look at as well. So here we are. Reviewing a children's cartoon. Altered Carbon this is not (Few things are).

Watership Down the cartoon was a joint project between Alltime Entertainment of the United Kingdom and Decode Entertainment of Canada (with involvement by the Canadian Television Fund). It aired from for three seasons from 1999 to 2001, for a total of about 39 episodes. Which is about an average run for a cartoon series. While it was released on VHS and DVD in the United States, I could find no evidence that it actually aired in the US, though it did air in a number of nations, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Japan, South Africa and Portugal and of course Canada. The show is very British in its environment and characters, with Bigwig sounding like he should be leading an RAF wing against the Luftwaffe for example, but given that we are talking about a band of rabbits in England, this does make a certain amount of sense (It’s almost like they’re british rabbits being voiced by british actors or something insane like that). As usual for non-book reviews there will two scores given. The first will be of the series as it stands alone and the second scoring it as an adaptation of the book. I should note I only watched the first season because... Look folks, I am not watching 39 episodes of a children's cartoon. I'm just not, the books won't read themselves.

The cartoon cuts down the cast massively choosing to focus on 5 rabbits, Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, Blackberry and Pipkin; although secondary characters will move in and out of focus in different episodes. The series starts with them (along with Hawkbit and Dandelion) already having escaped from their old warren and being out in the open. The first season covers the story of our main characters encountering the warren of the shining wire (the warren where the rabbits are fed by a man so he can harvest them via snares) fleeing that warren and establishing Watership Down. It also covers their first encounter with Erafa and General Woundwort and the ensuing conflict. The series does a good job of moving the story forward, even if it does drag out some of the conflicts and keeps returning to problems that were solved last episode. So instead of a never-ending status quo, there's an actual story being told here. That said, the padding of things out by returning to old soup is a bit grating. We don't need the discussion of whether or not bucks should dig to drag out for three episodes, or Bigwig having to learn a lesson three times before it sticks. It gets tiresome. The show emphasizes using trickery and cunning to solve problems instead of violence, which is appropriate for the age range of its audience. It also leans on the idea that teamwork is important and you need to learn to work with the people around you. I don't disagree with any of these lessons but well... Children's cartoon. Even then there are some things I found highly puzzling, like who the hell locks their dog into their garden as a means of deterring rabbits. If I had done that, my dog would have dug up half the garden and saved the rabbits the trouble (My dog would have made friends with the rabbits). Also there's an episode involving the rabbits having to escape a greenhouse with a python hunting them... That just can't be legal! I mean who builds a greenhouse in the middle of forest and sticks an invasive predator in it!?! That's downright irresponsible and the kind of thinking that lead to foreign species practically overrunning the Everglades.

(Hi folks, I’m splitting this into its own paragraph. Now, this is the UK, so if they python gets out it will die but WTF!? Who does that? Who builds a greenhouse in the middle of the woods? Who puts a python in a greenhouse? Ok, I actually know some people who do that but at least they secure the greenhouse and it’s in a sensible place like their yard or something! I literally can’t even! I am professionally offended by this bullshit. At least in Redwall the snake is a native species and he’s free-range!)

As a cartoon... I'm not sure my grade is fair. I think five year old me would really liked this, but we're a good three decades away from five year old me. So I'll give it a C-. I wouldn't ever watch this again, unless I was being paid perhaps, but I didn't loathe it or anything...

Now let's talk about it as an adaptation, because wow there are a lot of changes from the book! First, Blackberry is now a girl. This doesn't bother me all that much because the book was a bit of a boys only club. While it does mean making a large number of changes down the road since the root of the conflict between Watership Down and Erafa was that Watership Down needed does because as an all buck warren they were kinda doomed to population collapse. Making Blackberry a girl and reducing the starting cast from 16 to 7 kinda means it harder to use that line (Also: Holy Inbreeding, Batman! They’re grandkids are gonna be like a spanish Habsburg!). I can't criticize them to harshly for this since “We need girls to make babies” isn't a plot line I would trot out to entertain 5 year olds either. (That is where we differ! I would use it as a teachable moment in operational sex ratios, inbreeding depression, and life history theory. Likely until The Children(™) concussed themselves on the walls!{This is why we don’t let you produce, write or direct children’s cartoon Doc}) What is interesting is how they made the conflict more ideological; with Woundwort not being able to stand the idea that Hazel was leading a warren that didn't operate like his. Which is another change. In the book Woundwort is totally focused on Bigwig and doesn't even realize that it's Hazel that is his main adversary. This helps underline the blindness of the system that Woundwort has created, as it is completely unable to understand other methods of authority and leadership. In the cartoon, while Woundwort isn't happy with Bigwig, it's Hazel he's focused on. This is a change that does rob a bit of subtly from the story. The story itself is greatly extended as well partly as a result of the cast being so greatly pared down. The great escape from Erafa isn't ten does, it's one doe named Primrose and a single buck (This isn’t Britain anymore… THIS IS ARKANSAS!). Because of things like this the story drags out longer but feels smaller in scope. The change that stuck the most in my craw was the fact that there are only two stories told about El-ahrairah! With the mythology of the rabbits being one of my favorite parts of the book, I was not happy with this change. To be honest the rabbits are greatly anthropomorphized compared to the book  as well and I was left thinking I could have easily been watching a story about hunter gatherer humans in some ways. As an adaption I have to give the cartoon a D.

So that's the cartoon! To which we're never going back! However, I do have surprise for y'all. Join me this Sunday for a review of the movie that brought trauma and fascination to a generation! That's right, we're doing the movie. Because y'all can't stop me. After that we're embarking on month long examination of an emerging genre, in August, we're going to be asking and hopefully answering the question of what the hell is Solarpunk! We start with the book The Windup Girl.

Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor, Dr Ben Allen. 

Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.

Watership Down By Richard Adams

Watership Down

By Richard Adams

"You needn't worry about them," said his companion. "They'll be alright - and thousands like them."

Richard Adams was born May 9th in 1920, in Wash Common near Newbury, England.  He attended Bradfield college from 1933 to 1938, moving on to Worcester College in Oxford to study modern history.  In 1940 he was drafted into the British Army, and served in Palestine, Europe, and the far East as a member of the Royal Army Service Corps (which served as the logistics wing of the British Army) but saw no direct combat with Axis Powers.  After being mustered out in 1946, he returned to Worcester College and earned a Bachelors in 1948, and an MA in 1953. In 1949 he married his wife Barbara. After gaining his Bachelors he went into the British Civil Service and started writing in his spare time.  His first book, the subject of our review, was released in 1972 after several rejections (let that stand as a reminder to keep trying young writers!) and received immediate acclaim. Mr. Adams would go on to have a long successful career as a writer. He would pass away on Christmas Eve 2016 (Damn you 2016!), and is survived by his daughters, grandchildren and great children, as well as the books he left behind for all of us.  There are worse legacies to have.

Watership Down actually started as a story Mr. Adams told his daughters in a car ride, this was before you could hand your kid a phone or tablet to keep them busy on long rides and fathers were obliged to entertain their children before they found their own entertainment.  The story was good enough that his daughters insisted that he write it down and wondrously enough he did. The book would earn a number of rewards, winning the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association and in 2003 was voted 47th best book of all time. It would have a sequel released in 1996, Tales from Watership Down and has been made into a film, a cartoon series, and this year will be made into a miniseries by Netflix.  The movie is well known for being marketed as a children’s film and having cute bunnies killed all over the place and being a bit disturbing if you're a young child; especially once the main villain shows up (I think there could be a sort of meta-story about this.  A children’s book titled “Little Timmy’s First Childhood Trauma” or something along those lines; about a six year old watching Watership Down.). Still not a bad run for a car ride story.

Watership Down is a story about a band of rabbits fleeing the foretold destruction of their home and attempting to build a new life for themselves in a hostile and dangerous world.  The story manages to mirror elements of both the Aeneid and the Odyssey. This is done both with the set up; a vision of coming destruction compels a young leader to gather followers and flee into the wilds, and the plot itself;  the characters have to resist temptations and dangers both hidden and overt in a long journey home. This is reinforced by the characters who match a number of archetypes. Hazel is the clever and wise leader who uses his quick wits and the ability to manage his rabbits abilities to solve their problems.  Fiver, the rabbit who gives the prophecy that starts the whole thing is the adviser with one foot in the spirit world. Big Wig is the large, strong, brave hero, confronting the dangers of the world with grit and pure raw force; being willing to fight cats, stoates, and other predatory creatures (Which totally breaks my suspension of disbelief because if you’ve ever seen stoates go after rabbits, the one thing you can hear in your mind from the other rabbits is “better you than me, buddy!”).  We also have rabbits like Blackberry whose ability to understand and grasp concepts that other rabbits can't is very helpful; and Dandelion the story teller who provides us a number of tales within the tale.  There are in fact a good number of characters in the story and if I'm gonna be honest, there might be too many characters, because a good number of the rabbits start blurring together after a couple of chapters.  That said there are rabbits that stand out like the ones listed above, but they don't get as much time on center stage as I would like so outside of Hazel and Bigwig, they seem a bit underdeveloped. However, the interactions between the rabbits and their shared struggles does help cover for that and carry the book forward.

What sets it apart from many other stories is the attention to detail to the cultural life of the rabbits and their religious and social beliefs.  In short the rabbits don't feel like humans wearing fursuits. While they're presented as close enough to human that we can understand and sympathize with them, they’re different enough that you are constantly reminded that these characters are not human and you shouldn't think of them as human.   This is partly done by the stories told within the story of El-ahrairah, whose name literally means prince with a thousand enemies. El-ahrairah serves as a rabbit folk hero, role model, and figure of hope and deliverance. The book is peppered with small tales of El-ahrairah battles with foes both supernatural and natural as he attempts to provide for rabbit-kind and show proper rabbit behavior.  He does this by out racing and out-witting his many enemies. Because if they catch him, they will kill him, but first they must catch him. We also see in the story that El-ahrairah is the combination of all heroic rabbits, as we see the actions of mortal rabbits woven into El-ahrairah tales. In this way El-ahrairah becomes the promise of immortality for rabbit-kind, while Hazel and Big Wig themselves may die and even be forgotten, their deeds will live on as part of El-ahrairah.  This is even referenced in the rabbit's creation myth, which states that while individual rabbits may die, as long as they are cunning and alert, they can never be destroyed. So even if individual heroes may be forgotten, their actions remain remembered through El-ahrairah (I’ll admit, I kinda like this).

There's a fair bit of social commentary of a sort buried in the novel as well.  We are presented with four different rabbit warrens with different cultures, structures, and mores.  For example in the first warren, the one that Hazel and Fiver led the flight from, there is a fair amount of freedom but creeping inequality and an increasingly settled social structure means that Fiver finds a ready audience for his pronouncements that they must leave.  With the exception of Big Wig and Silver, most of the rabbits who follow him and Hazel are rabbits on the margins of that society. Refusing to listen to the rabbits on the margins spells doom for that warren as it is destroyed to make way for human development. The next warren is one that has traded freedom for safety and as Ben Franklin noted lost both; it's a warren that is being... Farmed by a human being.  He leaves food for the rabbits and kills off their predators but also leaves snares about the warren to kill a portion of their population for their meat and skins. Because food is left for them, the rabbits have a lot of spare time and have developed music, poetry, and art. However because they know they live in a giant trap their art has grown depressed and morbid. This warren comes off as a combination of the Lotus Eaters of the Odyssey and the Eloi from the time machine (with the human farmer as the Morlock).  If I’m being honest, I think the growing horror of the situation is very well done (And so are the rabbits.  Mmmm rabbit stew.).  The third warren is a dystopian police state run by General Woundwort and his hand picked officers.  Using the threat of discovery by humans, they force the rabbits living within to live lives of extreme regimentation.  Feeding and emerging from their burrows in shifts and divided into sections run by officers who dictate every facet of life within the warren.  This warren is presented as a short term success of sorts; it's suffering from overpopulation. In a normal warren this would be solved by some of the rabbits going off and forming their own warren but our power mad general will not allow a single rabbit to go beyond his ability to control them.  In addition to that he even grabs any rabbit he finds and press gangs them into his warren. It's this that generates the main conflict of the novel as the fourth and last warren, the one founded by our main characters, is an egalitarian warren. Hazel is chief rabbit not because he's the biggest and strongest or because of family connections but because everyone agrees he's the right rabbit for the job.  General Woundwort cannot allow such a warren to exist and present an alternative to his paranoid prison of a society so he must destroy it, especially after the rabbits under Hazel's command successfully defy him. For that matter it isn't strength that defeats the General but cunning, trickery, and good old-fashioned teamwork.

It's another piece of commentary that the main villains of the piece aren't stoates, hawks, cats or even foxes but other rabbits.   Despite being surrounded by creatures that literally want to eat them alive, they simply cannot stop fighting each other. General Woundwort would say that he offers total safety from the creatures that would endanger rabbit-kind but he does so by imprisoning the rabbits he says he would lead.  Hazel does not offer safety but freedom and trusts in not just his cunning and skill to maintain the rabbits in his charge but in the combined efforts of his rabbits. An extra bit of irony is the fact that General Woundwort never really understands that it's Hazel who is his main adversity here.   Because General Woundwort is so focused on physical and military strength, he fails to understand the nature of his enemy and that ends up being his greatest weakness. It's an honest point that unfree societies often do not and cannot understand free ones. To use real life examples, the Soviet Union never really understood the United States and it's internal workings despite their many espionage successes.  In one piece of history I read, Soviet agents were sure that the result of Nixon's impeachment would that a Democrat from the Senate would be installed as President and were flabbergasted when Ford actually succeeded to the office. For that matter their greatest danger before running into General Woundwort was the Lotus Eater Warren, where they were almost tricked into certain death by the rabbits here, who invited them in cynically knowing that having rabbits unused to being snared would increase their own odds of survival (That sounds more like real rabbits to me).  While Predators are present in the world of Watership Down, they aren't the main danger to rabbit-kind, instead it's the dark side of their own natures that often present the greatest of dangers to them.   

As for humanity, we're presented as a cross between fey creatures and ogres.  A rabbit cannot hope to fight or bargain with us so it is best that rabbits avoid us entirely.  Our technology is beyond their ken and our motives are senseless and gross to them. All rabbits know is that we do as we wish and they suffer what they must from us.  There's a bit of an environmental message buried in the book and Mr. Adams was known for his support of environmentalism and animal rights throughout his life (he was even the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from 1980 to 1982).  That said, the book doesn't beat us over the head with it and does make a point to show humanity's capability of benevolence towards animals as well. So the rabbits and their struggles remain very much the centerpiece of the book without veering into a polemic about the evils of humanity.  I found myself really enjoying rabbit culture and different societies presented in the book and I found the characters who were developed quite enjoyable but like I said earlier there are too many characters to develop them all and that means that some areas are not explored. For example Fiver's visions or spirit quests are something I wish could have been explored a bit more.  Additionally no female character gets much time or attention, making this a very male centered drama. To be honest I don’t see anything wrong with a male centered story or even a story made up of just one gender or another. But the female characters that do exist here are shown mostly as objectives for the male characters or as a means to an end. Most of the female characters aren’t allowed to have their own agendas or characterization; which frankly drags the book down.  This might be a reflection of the time the book was written in or may be a consequence of the already massive cast but it’s still not a great way to write female characters. So it drags down the story, otherwise it’s a good story with plenty of adventure if aimed at a younger audience then usual for this review series. I'm giving Watership Down by Richard Adams a B.

Next week, because you lot asked for it, we look at the cartoon series.  Season I. Keep reading.

Shadow of an Empire by Max Florschutz

Shadow of an Empire

by Max Florschutz

This isn't Mr. Florshutz’ first appearance in this review series, back in April of 2017, I reviewed his cyberpunk novel Colony (link at the bottom of this review). Mr. Florschutz was kind of enough to offer me a free copy of Colony, which I appreciated. Shadow of an Empire was not a free copy; Mr. Florshutz offered but I honestly wanted to support a talented writer. That said, what follows is my honest opinion of the work.

Shadow of an Empire is a Western (in the literary not geopolitical sense) style fantasy novel, set in a world recovering from a civilization-ending apocalypse. A world where people and animals have been strangely affected by this Armageddon but have managed to rebuild civilization and achieve a level of industrialization. Before I get into that though, let me talk about the western a bit. The Western is an incredibly American setting and style of writing, rooted in what is in many ways a unique historical experience. Despite that or perhaps because of it, it has drawn a lot of attention internationally, from the Spaghetti Westerns (western movies directed and produced by Italians, which also launched Clint Eastwood to megastardom) to Japanese anime. I think part of it is it's a style of writing and setting that seems to translate well to fanastic settings. You don't have to set your western in the United States of 1800. You can set it on a science fiction colony world in the far future, you can set it on some fantasy world with magic and elves, you can set it on an alternate earth or a post apocalyptic wasteland. The elements you need are easily recognizable and fairly distinct. You start with a stark, harsh but beautiful land with an unforgiving climate, then you add native cultures in conflict with more technologically advanced newcomers who represent the leading edge of an expanding empire or nation. Plant rugged self-sufficient characters, some of whom have a questionable relationship with the law but most of them with a firm sense of right and wrong (although you can successfully dispense with that in some cases) as the center of your narrative. These characters must struggle against their environment and fellow men. Ensure that the expanding nation's grip is loose and it's government distant. Apply a healthy topping of violent problem solving, traditionally with rifles and revolvers. With this you have the basics of a western story, but just like cake is more then a list of it's ingredients, a genre is more then it's setting elements and themes. Let's talk about this specific story and see what kind of cake Mr. Florshutz has to offer us.

Shadow of an Empire is set in the Outlands, a remote and arid wilderness that’s sparsely settled by tough independent folk who prefer to be left alone by a government that stays distant. It exists between two heavily settled coasts ruled by the Empire, an expanding industrial civilization knit together by steam engine trains that run through the Outlands. The Empire rules the Outlands with a light touch because there's not much out there justifying a heavy presence and the folks who live there are quiet. That light touch is personified in our main character Salitore Amazd, imperial adjudicator. Adjudicator's are lawmen with broad but limited powers who seem to serve the same function as US marshals. They track down criminals at the behest of the peacekeepers and local governments of the land and deliver them back dead or alive as needed. Salitore is a veteran of the job, being able to survive alone in the harsh conditions of the Outlands, track his targets and trade unkind words or if needed bullets with those same targets. It's a life that keeps him on the move and with few close friends but it's also a life that Salitore loves as he spends most of his time under a wide open sky doing work that matters. It's also a life that is under threat, because down-at-the-heels nobleman turned-petty-criminal named Nirren has decided to jump to the big leagues. Nirren makes his jump from petty criminal to most wanted man in the Empire by staging a jail break, breaking out thirty-seven of the most dangerous killers, rapists, and thieves in the Empire from a train meant to take them to the Empires hardest jail. If that wasn't enough, Nirren also sent a letter to all the major newspapers declaring he had done so to liberate the Outlands from the rule of the Empire, claiming that the prisoners were just the first in a wave of revolution. Worse than that however? Nirren also claims to the newspapers that Salitore Amazd is in on the scheme. So to protect the people and the land that he loves, Salitore has to figure out just what Nirren is up to, track him and his band of cold blooded killers down and figure out how he's gonna take them out when he does so. It might have been easier if he had just stayed out in the desert honestly.

Luckily Salitore isn't alone in this;  he has the help of Meelo Karn, imperial inquisitor. Inquisitors are not religious figures here but law enforcement officers who have the authority to go anywhere and use any resource while investigating or attempting to stop a crime. They're kinda like an turbo charged FBI. They mostly operate in urban environments but for a threat like this, well sometimes you gotta leave your comfort zone. Meelo Karn is a capable young lady who is a rising star in the Inquisition, being the youngest person ever promoted to her rank, she is, as you might guess, a driven professional who wants to make the world a little safer for other people. While she's not an expert in dealing with wilderness conditions, she can handle herself in a fight and is a skilled investigator. A lot of the book rests on the interaction between Meelo and Salitore; luckily the two characters play off each other rather well. In a kind of a break from modern convention, there's not a lot of quipping humor here but instead straightforward conversation and professionalism carry this relationship. Additionally what personality clashes there are get solved in a reasonable adult manner. This might not sound like a lot but after watching a number of writers drag out interpersonal drama for the sake of padding the story? I kinda enjoy it. It shows that you don't need artificially generated drama and angst to tell a good story. Mr. Florshutz manages to write Meelo and Salitore without making them into unconvincing idealists or turning them into jaded cynics. So instead we get a pair of people who know that there's a lot of bad in the world but there's plenty of good people and good things worth defending and taking satisfaction in their ability to do so.

Meelo's also got her own nemesis in Lady Varay, a crazed serial killer who targets men and carries a grudge against Meelo for catching her and getting her locked away in the first place. Giving Meelo a personal enemy in the group was a good call because it adds a personal element to the struggle. The story is told entirely from Salitore and Meelo's point of view and we never really get a first hand look at the insider of the villain's head. This helps preserves the mystery of what Nirran's plans are and what he's doing but it runs the risk of making the conflict between him and our heroes abstract at times, as they're mostly opposing each other on the grounds of one of them being a pair of law enforcers and another being a career criminal. This could have been a weakness of the book but instead it gives the plot an air of mystery as Salitore and Meelo struggle not just to chase down Nirran and his crew, but to figure out just what it is they think they're doing and how they're going to stop them while outnumbered about twenty to one. Mr. Florshutz also uses a good amount of action and suspense to avoid that, giving both our main characters secrets that they are holding but that he hints to throughout the book using the reveal of each secret to best effect.

The world itself is an interesting one as well. This is a world climbing back from the depths of a dark age so complete that few people remember the past at all. It's a world where people display strange abilities and powers, like being to absorb light and generate it, or sound, or heat, or kinetic energy. Nor are humans the only ones who are developing powers beyond the norm. Creatures like the Chort use their ability to absorb light and sound to aide in their hunting of the native cattle of the Outland, huge creatures that can have up to three pairs of horns and grow larger than a wagon. Mr. Florshutz also does well in showing how such powers would intertwine with technology by giving us steam trains that can run longer and further then they ever could due to men and women called boilers for their ability to absorb and redirect heat. This is taken to extreme degrees with the creation of the gray knights, steam powered one-man mechanical suits that are only made possible by the pilot being a boiler.

There are events outside the immediate story that are commented on and allowed to run alongside the main plot until they pay off. For example we have a running political thread of noble houses feuding with each other in the story taking up space in the newspapers, and the growing rift in the Wander tribes. Natives to the Outlands, some of them are willing to coexist peacefully with settlers like Salitore but others are choosing more violent reactions to the encroachment on their traditional lands. Mr. Florschutz avoids infodumping, instead just seeding information into the story, letting it come up naturally through the plot and having each revelation feed into the next. By building up on each revelation, the reader is able to get a good feel for what is and what is not possible in the world and isn't bogged down by paragraphs explaining details that we don't honestly need to know. The result is a setting that draws you into the story and becomes a character in it's own right.

In Shadow of an Empire, Mr. Florschutz creates a tightly woven story with gun battles, fist fights, and death-defying rides; all in the service of solving a mystery while on horseback. He does this against a background of a harsh but beautiful environment under a hot sun. Despite the temperature change I can't help but feel that much of this is pulled from his earlier life in Alaska, which remains the last bastion of the American Frontier (speaking as an Alaskan… yes.  Yes it is.). There were a couple plot reveals that didn't quite work for me but they didn't bog down the story too much, and I won’t say which ones because I don’t want to spoil the story. For the most part the secrets that are revealed are decently foreshadowed so they don't feel like solutions pulled out of nowhere but aren't so heavily foreshadowed that you find yourself wanting him to just get on with it. It's a very different book from Colony and shows that Mr. Florschutz is capable of a good amount of flexibility in his writing and I look forward to seeing what else he can bring to the table in the future. I will note that Shadow of an Empire is a good bit shorter than Colony and they are both only available on Kindle at the moment. Hopefully we can see him arrive in print someday. Shadow of an Empire by Mr. Florschutz gets an A-.

Next week, upon your request readers, the book that led to many a childhood trauma. Watership Down. Keep Reading!

If you would like to see my review of Colony by Max Florshutz click the link below!

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/04/colony-by-max-florschutz.html

1776 By David McCullough

1776

By David McCullough

Perseverance and Spirit have done wonders in all ages.

General George Washington.

We've reviewed books about the American Revolutionary War before on this series; in 2016 we reviewed Fullisers (recommended to me be a reader of this review series!) and back in 2015 we reviewed George Washington Military Genius (another recommendation!). This year, given the difficulties the country seems to be facing, I thought it right to review a book detailing perhaps the single hardest year of the nation's life. That being the first year of 1776 when the nation was officially born and nearly strangled in its crib. Let me talk a bit about David McCullough first.

Mr. McCullough was born in Pittsburgh Philadelphia in 1933, on July 7th, so first let me wish him a happy early birthday. He began attending Yale University in 1951 and graduated in 1955 with a degree in English Literature. He harbored ambitions of becoming a playwright or fiction writer and served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency and American Heritage and was eventually hired by Sports Illustrated. During this period he married his wife Rosalee, who he met when they were 17, they are still together and have five children and nineteen grandchildren. Mr. McCullough, at this point working for American Heritage, was writing in his spare time (for three years) and his first book the Johnstown Flood was published in 1968 to high praise. He decided to become a full time writer and we have all reaped the benefits ever since. Mr. McCullough has received the Pulitzer prize twice, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and more awards than I could really list in this review without sacrificing space for the book. All in all Mr. McCullough has contributed greatly to people's understanding of history through his writings and for that I am thankful. Now let's get to the book.

The book as you might imagine covers the year of 1776, for those of my readers not from the Anglo-sphere, that is the year that the United States of America declared its independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Before then the original thirteen states of my home nation were colonies ruled from London. I won't go into the arguments that compelled my founding fathers to rebel against King and Country, save to say that they were hotly debated issues in America and England and provoked powerful emotions. Powerful enough that certain words that couldn't be taken back were exchange and on the heels of those words, we began to exchange bullets. The British Government led by King George III resolved that what was needed was to use armed force to hammer the rebels back into line, feeling that to compromise at this point would only inflame greater demands. In addition was the belief that if a show of force wasn't made right then, that there would be a fight later as groups like the Sons of Liberty would continue pushing for independence. The Continental Congress was resolved that while they didn't want a fight, if it meant protecting their natural rights as free men, they were gonna fight. The British Army started out the year in Boston, and as if summoned out of the aether by magic, armed rebel companies gathered to put the British redcoats to siege. The Battle of Bunker Hill had just happened and emotions are high but emotions alone don't win wars.

Mr. McCullough takes some time to review the nature of the armies present here. The fact that the Rebel army, not quite yet the Continental Army of legend and near myth was made up of mostly New England volunteers and basically a collection of amateurs is fully displayed here. Most of them were volunteer companies who simply showed up for the siege of Boston. They had elected officers and no supply chain, and were organized by colonial origin. So you had companies from New York, brigades from Delaware, platoons from Pennsylvania and so on and so forth. Additionally Mr. McCullough takes pains to point out that while most of the British Troops were not yet combat veterans at this point, they were still professionals. They were uniformed, well armed and by the standards of the day very well trained. On top of this they were led by a professional officer corps, many of whom were veterans with experience in war. In short everything the American army wasn't. While George Washington had been appointed in command, he had not been a soldier for years and even then his record, while not awful, wasn't anything stellar either. General Washington's officer corps was also made up of men who for the most part had never fought in battle. Mr. McCullough is careful to introduce us to the officers on both sides as these are for the most part the men who will be either creating the Continental Army, slowly forging it into an instrument that while maybe not the tactical equal of the British will be at least capable of fighting the British Army and achieving victories in the field at the end. On the other side are the men who were fighting at the end of an extremely long supply chain in a foreign land, and were charged with the difficult task of ending the rebellion and returning British rule to the 13 colonies without starting a cycle of constant uprising and insurgency.

The book covers the Boston campaign, where the Americans and British would each in turn besiege and occupy Boston. It's during this we meet men such as Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene, as well as officers that you likely never heard of in your history class. That said, I think Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox make good examples of the general run of colonial officers. Both these men were still young men, with no experience in warfare or in commanding large groups of men. Despite that they are able to rise to high rank and high responsibility based on their willingness to work and sacrifice to get that work done. Course they had to do a lot of on the job learning which led to spectacular successes, driven by the fact that no one told them what they were trying to do was impossible. As well as rather obvious failures, also driven by the fact that they weren't entirely sure what was possible and what wasn't. We're given a good example of this in Henry Knox, whose family situation also serves as a microcosm of what America as a whole was going through. Henry Knox was a self made man, the eldest son who when his father died turned to working to support his family at the age of twelve (this is a common refrain in the colonial ranks, including George Washington's father, who died when the General was eleven). He worked up to owning his own book store which ended up being a fashionable hang out for loyalist Americans and his wife was the daughter (Lucy Flucker) of a noted Loyalist family. His brother in law served in the British Army and after the war, his in laws fled to England and never returned. Henry Knox's fortunes were sealed by his expedition to Ticonderoga. On Henry's suggestion George Washington sent him to steal some cannons from a pair of British forts and bring them back to Boston. In the dead of winter. Using wooden, ox drawn wagons and sleds. The cannons weighted 60 tons and the distance was 300 miles. If you're not sure why this is a big deal, I invite you to load down your car with as many heavy objects as possible, drive it off road and then try to push it uphill for 3 miles.

The battles for New York and Long Island are also covered. More attention is paid to the American side of things than the British side but there still plenty of care put on both, detailing things such as on the British side General Howe and General Clinton's inability to get along. There's also some social gossip such as General Howe's supposed affair with Mrs. Elizabeth Loring. It's here that we see how much George Washington had to learn as frankly the American forces are shown being outsmarted, out-maneuvered and out fought by the British. General Washington's forces weren't just pushed out of New York without putting up much of a fight, they were also chased clear across New Jersey by the British without managing to win any major battles and losing the vast majority of the minor ones. Mr. McCullough doesn't try to marginalize this, he is very clear in showing just how vastly superior British Arms were in 1776. At this point it shouldn't be a surprise though. While modern Americans may be justly smug in their claim to having the best logistical system on the planet and honestly pretty much of all of human history; in the Revolutionary War our logistics, that is the system of getting supplies to soldiers, was so awful that the British were getting their powder, uniforms and weapons shipped across an ocean and they were still better supplied than us. So the American Troops were clothed in rags, had next to no ammo, a shortage of weapons, boots, firewood and basically a shortage of every needed supply except enemies. Add in that many troops had only volunteered for short periods and hadn't been paid for a large chunk of their enlistments. The fact that Washington held the army together as an operational force, while constantly avoiding contact with a better supplied and trained army, in the middle of winter in New England and New Jersey.... Well despite having constant tactical loses and failures, General Washington still comes out looking like an amazing leader of men.

That said the book does end on a high note if you're an American Patriot, with the battle of Trenton. Needing a victory, after being chased out of two colonies and having lost Boston and New York City Washington elected to attack across the Delaware river on Christmas striking at an isolated post of Hessians. Hessians were German mercenaries hired by King George III to help bring his armies up to strength. The book discusses them in greater length but I will note for the record that the Hessians were not popular with the Americans and often accused of war crimes (most often of killing surrendering rebel troops, which the British do seem to confirm, if not as commonly as Americans accuse). For that matter British officers were also prone to accusing the Hessians of war crimes, especially when parts of New Jersey went up flames and was looted by the British forces. Anyways Trenton helped maintain faith in the Revolution at a time when everything seemed grim and Mr. McCullough walks us through it and the aftermath of the battle.

The book only focuses on a single year, so if you're looking for a general text on the Revolutionary war, this isn't it. It does however give a good look at what may have been the grimmest year in our history and lets us see how close we came to having the Republic snuffed out in the very year of its birth. It's an appreciation for the challenges we've faced in the past I find that helps us maintain faith in the future. If you're looking for a book that focuses on part of the Revolution or you're interested in seeing the first brutal lessons that shaped the Continental Army and George Washington... Then this is the book for you. 1776 by David McCullough gets an A from me.

Next week we return to fiction. Keep reading.

Other reviews about the Revolutionary War:

 http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2016/05/fusiliers-how-british-army-lost-america.html

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2015/07/george-washingtons-military-genius-by.html