Solaris 1972 Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Solaris 1972

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Soviet cinema is a different beast from the capitalist cinema that I grew up with. Where as in the western world, film companies are private entities striving to capture large masses of an audience on an increasingly international stage for profit. Soviet cinema was a government enterprise and considered a very important one at that. Lenin would argue that film was the idea medium and art form to spread the Soviet message and ensure the masses received the right ideological education. In 1924, the State Committee for Cinema (also called Goskino) was founded and it would exist in one form or another, with many name changes over the years right up to 2008. It's purpose was to not only create and fund Soviet movies but to ensure the right kind of movies were made. Now the level of censorship and control would wax and wane over the the years, the Stalin years saw a tight grip being used while in the 1960s and 1970s, controls were looser. Directors, actors and other staff were basically government employees but often were allowed to present ideas and write their own scripts for approval. It was in this environment that Director Andrei Tarkovsky decided to create the 2^nd film version of Solaris.

Andrei Tarkovsky was born in 1932 and had an eventual and if we're going to be honest an unstable childhood. Not only did he have to evacuate ahead of Nazi armies, his father would leave the family and he would suffer through a year long bout with tuberculosis. In school he was a bit of troublemaker and considered a poor student. Despite this he still graduated and enrolled at the Oriental Institute study Arabic but dropped out after a year to become a prospector for the Academy of Science. During this he participated in a year long research expedition into the wilderness, where he decided he would study film. He was admitted into the film directing program in 1954, in the same class as his first wife, who he would divorce in 1970. His first film Ivan's Childhood was released in 1962 and achieved acclaim. His second film would run into a lot of trouble as he would struggle with the censors but eventually a cut version was released. Solaris was his third film and while it also would have some trouble with censors (who wanted among other things to edit out all references to God or religion in the movie but he resisted them. Let's go ahead and discuss the film.

Solaris the film takes place on Earth and in the orbit of the planet Solaris. Like the book it is about Dr. Kris Kelvin's experiences on the station orbiting Solaris. It's a long movie, with the first hour honestly being the slowest paced of the film (Mr. Tarkovsky stated this was on purpose to get the “idiots” out the theater) and it's about 3 hours long. Events pick up rapidly once Dr. Kelvin reaches the station with the movie doing a good job of showing the surreal atmosphere of the place and what's it like to walk into an insane situation. The other scientist are shown as being under amazing stress, often acting erratically. At first Dr. Kelvin is critical of their behavior but with the appearance of his dead wife Hari, he swiftly becomes stressed and emotional himself. This often results in clashes with the other 2 scientists, especially Sartorius, who repeatedly insists that Hari isn't real. This provoked some discussion among my friends who were kind enough to watch the film with me. My own thought was that Hari clearly wasn't human, not in the biological sense but that was frankly irrelevant to the fact that she was a person. Like in the book, Hari is an independent agent, she has no idea why she has been sent here or what has sent her. Only that she is here now with memories and emotions of her own and the ability to grow in her abilities. Given her awareness of herself, her ability to have thoughts, emotions and desires her origin doesn't matter to me when we are determining if she is a person. Let me explain there a bit, when I say person, I mean a thinking (sapient), feeling being who deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. Someone deserving of rights if you will. Currently that really only applies to humans but I think we are being arrogant if we proclaim that all persons must be human. An artificial intelligence, would be a person, as would an alien, as long as they were sapient. The cinematography is often amazing with many well framed shots and interesting if slow pans across the scenery. The result is a slowly paced, philosophical film that lets us watch Dr. Kelvin slowly fall apart as he struggles to reconcile his guilt over his wife's death, his love for the Hari on the station and his fear of losing her.

Now as usual I am going to give two grades to the film. The first is the grade as an adaptation and the second as a stand alone story. As an adaptation I have to point out the many changes made. In the film a much greater focus is given to Dr. Kelvin's feelings and the psychological elements of the story, where the novel devoted a good deal of space to discussing the scientific history of the research into Solaris, the film glosses over it. Addition changes are made by adding scenes on Earth and examining Dr. Kelvin's relationship with his father, who will likely die while he is in space. The space station is used to present a view of the impact of space exploration on the human psyche. In fact the original draft of the script had two thirds of the film happening on Earth, which made Lem furious. The film still has a good chunk of the first hour taking place on Earth. A much greater focus is given to Hari, letting her argue her case that she is a person even if she is not human against the disbelieving Sartorius. Now, most of these changes are to make it a better film but they are still really deep changes, so I have to give Solaris a C- as an adaptation. That said as a stand alone film, Solaris while long and slow is a thoughtful movie that tells the story of the novel in a way that works much better for me. I didn't expect to like the film more then the book, so I'm giving the 1972 Solaris film an A.  This movie isn't going to be for everyone, there's no action, it's in Russian and 3 hours long.  But if you're willing to try it out, you might find some surprising food for thought. 

Next week we're going non-fiction with Judith Herrin Byzantium, the Surprising life of a Medieval Empire. Keep reading.

Sidebar VII: Death of the Author or The Dead Writer Sketch

Sidebar VII 

Death of the Author or The Dead Writer Sketch 

Before I launch into this, let me tell you a story that illustrates what I'm talking about here.

Issac Asimov comes upon a group of fans in a convention and they're all going a mile a minute, in a in-depth discussion about one of his stories. One of the fans was holding forth about subtext and allegories present in the story and what they mean. Asimov cuts in and disagrees, telling that his ideas are interesting, but the story isn't about that at all and there was no such subtext. The fan in question turns around looks down his nose and assures Asimov, that he has been English professor at a prestigious university for many years and has made a study of literature for even longer. So he knows what he is talking about. So how could Asimov know more then him? Asimov replies he knows more because he wrote the damn story in the first place. The Professor replies:

“So? Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you know anything about it?” 

As the story shows, Death of the Author is a tool of literary criticism where you disregard the author completely and attempt to grapple with the text without using the author's life or views to provide any context. The idea being that not even the Author of a work can really speak with authority on what the story means or all the hidden themes within the story. Therefore it falls to the individual reader and critic to tease out the meaning of the story through study and examination. Now the rub here is without a singular figure to speak on it, it's entirely possible to have conflicting interpretations of the text and have them all be equally valid. Now the name of this comes from an essay written in 1967 by French Literary critic and theorist, Roland Barthes in which he argues that the author should be more considered more like a parent to the written work. In that yes, the author created the story but the story, like a child, has a separate and equal existence to the author. That means it can be considered completely independent of the author after it's written. This is supported by the fact that most stories outlive their authors. Authors are mortal human beings and stories last as long as someone is willing to read pr tell them. Therefore a reader shouldn't have to be constrained in what they see in a story by someone whose been dead for 402 years or so. In fact many of the classical stories, like Shakespearean plays often adapt new means and overtones according to the time and place they're being performed in. In short it's the affect of the story on the reader that is the primary determination of what the story means and the subtext, or if there even is any subtext in the first place. While I'm here let me define subtext and text real quick.

Text is the original writing of the work, the actual words of the story if you will. Subtext is any underlying message or theme that is not explicitly written into the story. For example if an author were to write a story about a person wrestling with a bout of depression and place them in a room with blue curtains and wall paper and when that person had fought their way through that depression. Wrote that they had changed the curtains and wallpaper to some other color. The text would be, this room is blue. The subtext would be, the blue is an expression of the depression this person is feeling. That's a really simplistic example but I think y'all get what I'm driving at here. So let's get back to Death of the Author.

Death of the Author in many ways removes the hope of an objective, definitive view of any work. If the affect on the reader or the meaning ascribed to it by others is what's important, then that meaning is going to be constantly changing as the society and people reading the story in question change. It also dismisses the idea that understanding the author can help you understand the work. I have issues with that, my own stance is that understanding the context and environment of which a story is created can be pretty damn important to understanding the story itself. Furthermore it simply isn't fair to expect writers from the past to accurately guess what will work in a 100 years after they've been laid down to rest. Finally, any decently written work has a chunk of it's writer in it, in my view. The author's world view and emotions are going to be imparted into the story. Now this doesn't mean that an author who writes about a fascist society is a fascist but his own views on fascist are gonna influence the work. A skilled writer will find ways to communicate the feelings and ideas they want to an audience that is removed from his own situation, even if good number of the details get lost in translation. We see this in works that make cultural leaps from one culture to another, whether it be a novel from Poland or a Japanese comic. A well told story can bridge gaps between cultures or generations. However, that doesn't mean that both sides of that bridge will agree entirely on what they're seeing. Which is why in my view understanding the other side of that gap can give you a deeper and more vivid picture of the story itself. Now, Death of the Author isn't a universal embraced position, there has been and is pretty of resistance to it. There have been entire books written in defense and against the theory and the debate continues even to this day. I'm not going to get to in-depth into this because I lack the interest and honestly I don't think to many of my readers are all that enthralled with digging into the knife fights of literary academia.

My own feelings on Death of the Author are honestly complicated. I feel it's often used as an excuse to ignore the author when they turn out inconvenient, or as an excuse by some critics to try and outrank the author if you will. Which doesn't sit well with me. On the other hand, as I noted an author is a human being, a fallible mortal and as such is full of unrealized bias and influenced in ways they don't realize by their culture, experiences and environment. These bias and influences will find their way into the story and the author may not notice them. but that doesn't mean a reader or a critic is wrong when they do. Additionally, an author may have different opinions over time. If a writer says one thing about their story and a conflicting thing 10 years later... Which statement is the true one? Lastly the author may be untrustworthy (some writers do enjoying trolling their readers or prefer to have the readers come to terms with the work on their own) or even flat out dishonest. If an author were to write a fantasy novel where tall blond, steely eyed men in white robes saved their nation by laying waste to hordes of monsters with... Darker skin tones. It doesn't take a big leap to realize that this person is either incredibly dense or an outright liar when they say there's not meant to be any racial overtones or praise for certain terrorists groups implied. In such cases you kinda have to stand up and point out that the emperor is buck naked, just because the author of a given story says something about it doesn't make it automatically true or right.

That said you can't really separate a story from it's author either. Anymore then you can pretend that a child stops being influenced by their parents when they hit 18. That said, the story can also to a certain extent speak for itself and not even the author outranks the story, so to speak. Th author does have a privileged position when it comes to discussing the story they wrote however. To give a pair of examples, I would argue that when discussing Lord of the Rings, we should certainly take J.R.R Tolkien's word over that of some first year college student who has recently discovered allegory and thinks he's clever. At the same time if George Lucas gives conflicting stories of meanings in Star Wars, we should considered looking at which account has the most evidence outside of Mr. Lucas' word. So Death of the Author is something I would argue should be used sparingly and with the full knowledge that when we use it, say to suggest that a 57 year old Polish novel about a group of astronauts dealing with a power outside their understanding might be a metaphor for people's struggle with mental and emotional illness, we should be aware we are likely adding that layer of subtext ourselves and it very possibly doesn't actually say anything about the story. In fact when you use Death of the Author, you might very well be talking about yourself and your own bias and experiences more than you are the actual story. That's always something to be careful of, because you don't want to let yourself get between you and a great story.

Thank You and Keep Reading.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Solaris

by Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem was born in Lwow, Poland in 1921, to illustrate how much change he would have seen in his life, the city of his birth is now Lvov, Ukraine. It was annexed into the USSR in 1939 in the aftermath of the Soviet-Nazi invasion of Poland and became part of the Ukraine in 1991 upon the breakup of the USSR. Lem would not be outdone by his birth city. The son of a doctor and a housewife, Lem was raised Roman Catholic but would attend Jewish religious studies in school and converted to atheism later in life. He was refused entry into Lwow Polytechnic due to his “bourgeois origin” as was standard for the USSR in the early years to refuse higher education or government employment to people from the wrong class. However his father maintained connections and got him into Lwow University to study medicine in 1940. This was interrupted when the Nazi's broke the treaty with the Soviets and invaded the Soviet Union. His father was prepared with forged papers to cover up the families Jewish ancestry so they were able to avoid the ghettos and the camps. Under Nazi occupation he worked as a car mechanic and a welder, stealing German munitions to pass to the Polish resistance when the opportunity presented itself. After the Soviets threw back the Nazi war machine, the Polish citizens of Lwow were resettled (whether they liked it or not) in Krakow. Once there, he attended Jagiellonian University, he completed his studies but refused to take the final exams and graduate to avoid the compulsory military service required of medical graduates. He did find work in a maternity ward where he learned something very important, he utterly hated the sight of blood. That led him to quit medicine.

Throughout the 1950s he would write, although many of his books didn't make it past the Soviet censors. It's only after the Polish October and the resulting Destalinization that he would really be able to explore the themes and ideas that he wanted to (Thanks Kruschev!). Even then he chose to work in science fiction, because the censorship was lightest in that area. He published Solaris in 1961 and it would become his most famous novel. To date it has been adapted to Opera four different times, turned into play twice and been made into film three times; the most recent being the 2002 version with George Clooney. You can also see its influence in a large number of science fiction and horror works, for example the Silent Hill 2 plot has many of the same elements and themes running through it. It has been translated into dozens of languages but unfortunately the English translation is considered one of the worst, perhaps due to the reality of the Cold War. The English translation isn't a Polish-English translation, it's a translation of the French translation of the book which according to Lem leads to a number of subtle distortions and some ideas not quite getting through the way he would like. One of the not so subtle changes is two characters flat out having their names changed, the engineer Snaut becomes Snow and the main characters girlfriend goes from Harey to Rheya. Since most of my readers are English speakers I'll be using the English names to avoid confusion, even if I can't find a single reason for the names being changed. Legal issues however prevent the publishing of a better translation, which is currently published by mariner books, owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company. Let's actually get to the book shall we? Quick note, there may be some spoilers here but come on the book is older then you are (well... Most of you).

Solaris takes place in the far retro-future, humanity has spread across the galaxy seeking new worlds and strange new civilizations. While it seems they have not yet made contact with an alien intelligence, they have found marvels and mysteries as they reach across the stars. One of those is the the planet Solaris. A planet orbiting twin stars, it immediately grabbed Earth's attention by having an orbit that defies our understanding of gravity and orbital mechanics, always maintaining a stable, uniform orbit (It isn’t impossible for this to occur if I recall correctly. There are a lot of exoplanets in binary systems, but the perturbation dynamics get complicated and a lot depends on your definition of a stable orbit). When the first manned mission arrived they found another impossibility, the planet save for a few barren rocky isles is covered in some sort of semi-liquid gel. An entire ocean of the stuff. An ocean that seems to respond to outside stimuli and create structures randomly. This creates a scientific firestorm of debate and argument and the creation of an entire scientific discipline centered around the study of the planet and it's ocean sized inhabitant, although no one can agree if the damn thing is even alive or what it's made of let alone if it's sapient or if we can communicate with it. Still, generations have tried and as the fervor died down in the face of no results, the science remains and a few men still doggedly continue studying and probing in an effort to figure something - anything - out about the planet. A permanent station was built to hover in the upper reaches of Solaris atmosphere but over the decades the crew has dwindled in number and resources as a result of flagging interest back on Earth.

Our main character Dr. Kris Kelvin is a psychologist who arrives on Solaris station following a call from his mentor from university (You know, if Jürgen put such a call out for me, I’d go). For Dr. Kelvin this is the result of years and years of work and sacrifices, some more intense than others. However when he arrives, he finds an outpost in shambles and the last two scientists working on the station reduced to paranoid and deeply anti-social men, one of whom refuses to venture out of his lab or allow anyone into it. The other one, Dr. Snow is a rambling wreck of a man who is barely coherent. It is here that he learns the man he came to see, Dr. Gibarian committed suicide, injecting himself with a poison and spending his last moments hiding in a locker in his quarters. The only warning that Dr. Kelvin gets about the strangeness of his situation is when Snow warns him that if he sees anyone besides himself or Dr. Sartorius he should not react or interact with the person he sees (Oh no. Ooooh Noooo). Things start to go surreal on us when Dr. Kelvin is approaching Gabarian's quarters and finds himself being passed by a half naked black woman who promptly disappears. Disturbed by this and his investigations turning up nothing - as he's a psychologist not a criminal forensic scientist after all - he barricades himself in his quarters and gets a very fitful night of sleep. Which is going to turn out to be his easiest night on the station because when he wakes up, sitting right next to him is Rheya, his girlfriend...Who’s been dead for years, because she killed herself when he left her (Woah there! Talk about mentally unbalanced ex girlfriends, holy crap!).

Dr. Kelvin then finds that each member of the station also has a “visitor” as they call them and although they don't seem hostile, they do insist on having “their” scientist in view and within earshot at all times. If their scientist retreats out of view, they flip out and proceed to utterly destroy any obstacle between them and the scientist in question. Whether it be doors, walls... You get the idea. They are made up of subatomic particles they call neutrinos too small for earth microscopes to see, as they can only see to the level of atoms (I’m just gonna leave this alone…). Frankly there's only one place that the visitors could come from but why? What caused Solaris to send phantoms pulled from the heads of it's researchers? Why is it sending these phantoms? What are the scientists and Dr. Kelvin suppose to do about it?

It doesn't help that Rheya herself is completely unaware of the motives and processes behind her apparent resurrection and her appearance is enough to throw Dr. Kelvin out of balance as he starts to slowly wrestle with his guilt and remorse over the original Rheya's death. This makes his investigations haphazard and somewhat sloppy, although to be fair he is operating far outside of his field. He's a psychologist not a physicist or biologist so his knowledge regarding how to investigate such a thing is going to be limited. Meanwhile Rheya starts to have her own suspicions that she might not be who she thinks she is. Dr Kelvin's reaction is one of utter dread; he worries what she might do with that realization and the possibility of losing her all over again. The struggles and worries of our other two scientists are only vaguely illustrated and their own visitors are never shown. On one hand it works amazingly well as a metaphor for how we never really know or understand the demons and struggles of others around us. Snow and Sartorius own manic efforts to hide their visitors from each other and Kelvin and their utter and complete refusal to even discuss it certainly could be used to illustrate how we often draw a veil over our mental scars and emotional troubles. Especially in the time when the book was written when it was common to completely refuse to discuss mental illness in any meaningful fashion; except behind closed doors and closer company. Dr. Kelvin is the odd man out in refusing to hide Rheya, instead he’s willing to fight tooth and nail to keep her with him even in the face of the discomfort and disapproval of his fellows. I could even argue for Solaris being a stand in for our own unconscious mind; vast, unknowable in many ways and always moving, creating and destroying without any real recognizable rhyme or reason (Then why are you pointedly not arguing that?) It smacks of Death of the Author however for me to take that stance and frankly without Lem giving any statement that I could find to support that... I am very loath to project the thoughts and feelings of a 21st century American on the writing and creativity of mid 20th century Pole. I’m arrogant enough to review the book but not arrogant enough to claim I understand it better then the author is what I guess it comes down to. As for what Death of the Author is and my ambivalence towards it, I'll be discussing that in a sidebar so stay tuned.

The bulk of the book, which is a slim 200 pages, is taken up by Dr. Kelvin's turmoil and his own exploration of the science of Solaris and the debates between different schools of thought and theories of what Solaris actually is and what to do about it. Lem honestly seems more interested in using the book to show how he thinks scientific thought and theory work out in a social setting with academic conflict then addressing the various questions he raises in his story. This is a bit hampered by the fact that he is showing us the finest retro future he can. For example his station's library is a mountain of books (heavy books, that would have to be shipped out of a gravity well) while any person born after 1980 would expect the library to be digital. This shouldn't be held against the book and doesn't affect its grade, as asking Lem to accurately predict the future from 1961 is unfair. The President of IBM famously failed to foresee the miniaturization of computer technology for example and one would expect him to have some knowledge on the topic. That said the text makes it very clear that not answering the questions is part of Lem's point. I can understand his desire to write a story where he makes the argument that not all things can be known and that contact with an alien mind may in fact be utterly impossible. He does this masterfully as well, the book is so well written that I can see the craft and skill even through a second-hand translation. I am however utterly frustrated by the lack of catharsis in the book (Come on, the author is from Eastern Europe. What do you expect?), things build up and build up only to slide away without a final confrontation with the mystery or even a real grapple with it. We are left like the main character on the shore of a vast alien ocean, staring out over it with no real solution in sight or even a better understanding then we started with. Lem instead builds up the mystery and then turns away from it to focus on other things. Which leaves me a bit frustrated. I have to be honest and say I struggled with the grade for this book for days after finishing it. Solaris could also be called “Questions Without Answers” or perhaps “Expectations Without Hope”. That said, Solaris is going to stay with me for a quite a while and the questions it raises aren't ones that can be easily answered and they are presented with a fair amount of skill. I find myself thinking this is a book that should be read, but I can't promise you'll enjoy it. Solaris gets an A- from me. It's earned its place in science fiction but I can't say that I like book.

Join me Saturday for a sidebar on Death of the Author and Sunday we'll be looking at the 1972 film of Solaris. Keep Reading.

Red is of course your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Foundling by D.M. Cornish

Foundling

by D.M. Cornish

David M Cornish was born in 1972 in Adelaide Australia. He would study illustration at the University of South Australia and up stakes a year after graduating and head to the great city of Sidney for nine years. After that he traveled through the United States, visited London and Paris, and arrived right back where he started from in Adelaide. He got a job illustrating children's books, and one day was sitting around shooting the breeze with his editor when a notebook labeled 23 fell out of his bag. His editor swooped upon it like a starving woman on her favorite meal. Mr. Cornish had to confess that it was the notes and scribbles of the people, places, and creatures of a fantasy world he had been laboring on for ten years. She swiftly demanded he write a book about it. Foundling, the book that resulted from that demand was published in 2006 by Firebird Fantasy, an imprint for teenage/adult fantasy novels under Penguin books which is owned by (say it with me) Random House. Seriously I'm gonna find a way to start playing the imperial march every time they come up here (And I’m going to find a way to use Necromancy to resurrect Theodore Roosevelt). Anyways, enough comparing a publisher that publishes over half the books in your book store to evil empires, back to the book.

The humans of the half continent share their world with a wide variety of creatures that they refer to as monsters. Most of them are sapient, although some of them are not and even among the sapient ones there are a great many malevolent creatures who view humanity as nothing more than a source of meat and leather. Humanity or everymen as they are called in the book have adapted their society to protect themselves from these creatures and fight them for land and resource in a number of ways. They live in fortified settlements with armed guards, constantly patrolling their lands for incursions, and maintain great roads lit by lamps even in the darkest nights. The majority of human settlements are unified into the Haacobin Empire (named after the current ruling dynasty), it's not a very centralized empire though and is divided into semi-autonomous city states not unlike the Holy Roman Empire. Each city state has its own armed force, its own laws and policies and its own ruling family. Although they all owe allegiance to the Emperor. Humanity has also created an organic technology that exists alongside technology that we would recognize (like flintlock pistols and cannons), these organic creations provide their users with abilities like being able to see in the dark or provide power to more mundane objects like river boats. They also employ specialists to combat the monsters, one group being called Skolds. Skolds are a kind of combat chemist, who using their understanding of chemistry to create various potions and brews that serve as anti-monster weapons, repellents, and for medical purposes. So skolds are also a kind of medic on the field of battle as well. Lately they have been overshadowed by a second group of monster hunters known as lahzars but I will return to them later. Both Skolds and Lahzars and other specialists are referred to as teratologists or monster hunters. Monster hunters are considered a glamorous, scandalous lot; living lives of adventure, glory, and hardship and as often as not, dying alone in some benighted wasteland to have their flesh devoured by their enemies.

Our main character Rossamund isn't a monster hunter. He's an orphan boy with a girl's name being raised in the Madam Opera's Society for Foundling Boys and Girls, an orphanage run by and for the ultimate benefit of the navy. The children of the society are raised and trained to the various skills and duties of sailors and the Navy gets first pick of all the orphans. Rossamund himself thinks that being a sailor or a vinegaroon (the oceans are referred to as the vinegar seas because of a collection of exotic salts that create a multi-colored ocean that will kill any unprotected human swimming in it within 90 minutes) is the highest calling that a he could achieve.. As one might guess, Rossamund isn't recruited into the navy but is instead offered a position in the lamplighters. The lamplighters are a branch of the army stationed along lonely roads in wild places to light, protect, and maintain the lamps that help keep the roads from becoming ambush zones for various monster tribes. It isn't glamours work, but it's vital and well paying. Rossamund accepts the offer and for the first time in his life sets out alone into the world. For him it's going to be one hell of a trip as everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Whether it's running into river pirates, monster bandits or having to care for an injured and potentially murderous lahzar able to shoot electricity out of her body or figuring out how to replace his ruined paperwork, Rossamund has a lot to deal with.

Now I’ve got to be honest, in the grand tradition of young protagonists everywhere, Rossamund comes across as not too bright and having a lot of growing to do. On the flip side, he's a brave young man. He’s decisive and his willingness to commit to a imperfect plan and swiftly execute it can make up for a lack of a lot of things. While the book starts him off in the orphanage he grew up in and shows him as a by nature rather timid and reserved boy, he rises quickly to events and learns to deal with things as they come. I also like that while lamplighter isn't Rossamund's first choice of a career, he doesn't mope and whine about it but sets out determined to do the job he was hired for. Rossamund comes across as determined even in the face of understandable immaturity and discomfort in an adult world he doesn't quite grasp. So I find myself liking the kid and cheering him on, even has he does things like jumping off a boat into a monster filled river in the middle of a firefight, or dragging a fully grown but injured woman several miles in the dark to an inn. He is able to accomplish things that men twice his age wouldn't but still acts and feels like a young boy who hasn't even started shaving yet. He's got grit and that's worth a lot. Now, let's talk about that lahzar...

Lahzars are men and women who have had their bodies surgically altered. In a process that is illegal and unknown except in one far away city state, alien (most likely monstrous) organs and glands are implanted into the body of the volunteer. It's an expensive process that can take days of being strapped to the operating table and over a year to recover from. If you survive however you will wield power beyond what any other individual human can whether it be to attack with electricity or invisible force. The price isn't just measured in money however, the human body does not kindly to having strange, alien bits and pieces shoved into it and constantly works to reject them. So there is a constant dull ache and you are forever dependent on taking regular drafts of a potion known as a draft to keep organ rejection at bay. Lahzars are also known to have mood swings and even psychotic episodes as a result of the constant struggle their bodies are undergoing. Miss Europe, a woman who finds Rossamund and elects to bring him along since their journeys are heading the same way, is one of these people. Miss Europe is a mystery to Rossamund, as she is often swinging from nearly affectionate and friendly to stand offish and sullen. While at first she seems rather glamorous, the downsides to her life make themselves rather self evident to Rossamund to his eternal disillusionment. In a lot of ways Miss Europe seems less mature than Rossamund as she simply doesn't deal with people very well. She is however very brave and sure of herself and won't put up with being looked down on. She's better at dealing with people then her servant, factorum and Leer Licurius. Now a Leer is a person who has undergone training in focusing their senses on noticing small details and remembering what they have seen. They have also undergone treatments to their eyes to greatly enhance their vision. They also use organic technology in the form of sensing organs in special boxes that strap on their faces. Licurius is frankly someone on the verge of going insane and Miss Europe is too dependent on him to notice.  While the relationship isn't something that the book goes deeply into, it's an interesting peek at how even a platonic relationship can led you to make excuses for someone you care about and avoid confronting the truth. 

Mr. Cornish creates a very realistic society that reads like something out of Charles Dickens, but with monsters and surgically altered super-powered fighters. That said I do think that Rossamund and Oliver Twist for example would get along with each other just fine. As one might imagine, this society is deeply riven with class differences, one example that really drives it home is when an innkeeper wants to eject Miss Europe from a nice room in her inn under the fright that no one of “quality” would ever want it again if they knew someone like Miss Europe had slept there. I have to admit that hit a bit home for me as it was a rendition of the same old song of being good enough to fight and die for you but not good enough for you to treat as if I was a worthwhile person. I think just about anyone in uniform has at least one story along those lines, even in the United States where things have tended to swing the other way. Sometimes a bit too far but that's another subject. Foundling provides an excellent and distinct fantasy world populated with memorable characters and a likable protagonist serving as our guide to the world. The pacing is wonderful and I love the fact that there's an appendix at the back of the book where it bloody belongs! I do encourage readers to go through it as it is great reading all on it's own. Foundling by D.M. Cornish gets an A.

Next week, we go east to look at a Soviet classic that has managed to cross the iron curtain and have a lot of influence on western entertainment. Next week, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.  Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

The Dark Paladin By Rex Jameson

The Dark Paladin 

By Rex Jameson

I've covered Dr. Jameson and the publishing last week, so let me just say that, The Dark Paladin was published in 2018. Before I continue, a warning: this review has massive spoilers for The People's Necromancer. You have been warned. Now let's jump right in.

Ashton Jeraldson was a nice kid, happy to spend his days with his best friend Clayton, struggling to learn how to become a decent smith. That was then, now he's a necromancer and wanted all throughout the Kingdom of Surdel for rising an army of the dead and attacking the Mallory Keep, the fortress of his feudal overlord (Workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains!{I would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor}). Of course, Ashton was raising his friends and neighbors who were murdered by bandits hired by competing lords looking to cause each other hell in a cut throat political feud. That detail is however overlooked by the great and good of the Kingdom of Surdel in the rising panic, a panic not helped by Ashton accidentally summoning a demon when trying to raise his long absent father (Opps). A demon that killed the beloved Crown Prince and caused the death of the tolerated Lord Mallory. Ashton has bigger problems than his king declaring his life forfeit (Although I am left to question if killing someone who raises the dead is really a good idea? Do we really want to see what happens when you throw someone with the power to cross the boundary of life and death into death?). Ashton, has found himself on a much bigger game board facing much more dangerous players then the King of a rather out of the way nation. Because Ashton is now dealing more than bandits and struggling with the ethics and practical limitations of necromancy; but literal Lords of the Abyss and the legions of world-ending demons and abominations. What may be even worse is that he's also attracted the attention of a creature older then those lords and likely much, much more dangerous. The self styled Queen of Chaos and the being who claims to have created the demonic races in the first place. When one of those Demon Lords reaches the surface and begins raising his own undead army of a size and scale that puts Ashton to shame, he begins feeling the clock ticking. Worse is the fact that he's been kidnapped, you see the Crown Prince wasn't the only loved figure that was killed in the fighting. A young man name Frederick, one of the best young knights of his generation was also killed trying to fight off the bandit army. The big issue is the that Frederick was the son of the King's General, who has grabbed Ashton and is willing to do anything to force him to bring his son back. Even risk loosing another demon within the very halls of the King's palace itself. Of course Ashton can get himself out of this. All he has to do is accept the Queen of Chaos' offer. Become her general, do her bidding, save his world and possibly lose his soul in the process.

Interestingly enough, while the Queen of Chaos will bargain with Ashton, try to seduce him, bribe him, threaten him and more; she doesn't seem to lie to him, or at least everything she tells him is true up to a point. She does feel perfectly free not to volunteer information however and to try getting out of telling the whole story though, so I can't say she's perfectly honest. In fact I'm pretty sure I wouldn't trust her or take everything she says at face value, but throughout the story she makes it a point not to directly lie to the people she speaks to and lives up to the terms of her bargains to the letter and in some ways to the spirit of the bargain as well. So while the other Demon Lords want to pull Ashton's world to the Abyss and turn it into a miniature hell for their own gain, I kinda believe her when she says that she has no such interest in this world and in exchange for helping her find the things she's looking for, she get rid of the Demon Lords and simply leave. Of course I'm also thinking that she may have engineered the whole situation so that everyone would have no other option but help and support her. Bluntly she is not a good or benevolent force and is perfectly willing to let good or innocent people die to get what she wants. She is however also willing to give the mortals in this story what they want to get what she wants. We get a sense of what being in a Pact with her is like because Ashton isn't the only character she's involved with.

Cedric Arrington is a paladin, a warrior who wields the power of light to defeat the undead and demons menacing the people of the land. Now in most fantasy stories paladins serve a god/ess of light and order and go forth to smite evil from temple fortresses. Cedric's order has been outlawed and reduced to a couple dozen families huddled in the forests around a mountain where demons appear regularly (in a world without cars you want to be able to walk to work after all). Cedric's order also isn't in the service of some great divine being of light and order. Instead their Pact is with the Queen of Chaos, or as they call her when discussing her with outsiders, The Holy One. Interestingly enough the name isn't entirely a lie but something that the demons call her, as they credit her with their creation. The Pact is pretty simple, kill demons, obey her in all things, keep the Pact secret and bring your sons to take up the oath when they are old enough and she'll empower you and your weapons with the ability to smite demons and protect your world, when you die, you will be welcomed into the afterlife she keeps for all her faithful servants. Break the Pact and she destroys every member of your family down to the tenth degree and fling your bleeding soul into the abyss to suffer for eternity. Dr. Jameson shows us this by taking us back to when Cedric swore the oath and lets us feel the shock and horror that Cedric feels when he realizes that instead of swearing to a Holy Goddess, he's made an oath to a creature that is just as indifferent to life and justice as a demon. We also met Cedric's family; his wife and children as well as his father in law and see his motivation for continuing even as he feels he has made a bad bargain (see kids this is why you have to be careful with your soul, it's hard to get it back once you've sold it). Dr. Jameson however, provides a counterpoint in Cedric's wife, Allison, who is also a paladin. Allison while having made the same oath at the same time as Cedric, sees the Queen of Chaos as the best possible hope for her world and doesn't feel like she was trapped into the oath. If anything she feels the opposite that she would have still chosen the Pact with full awareness of the Queen's true nature.

The Queen of Chaos isn't the only one recruiting however. A Demon Lord named Orcus has escaped to the surface and is unleashing his own army of the undead on the world. To counter the Queen of Chaos' recruitment of champions, he goes hunting for his own lieutenants. Orcus offers those who would follow him a dark bargain, follow him, abandon all morality and empathy, and he will give you power and eternal existence as a remorseless predator on those you used to love and cherish. As Pacts with forces go, it's fairly standard (I’ve always wondered who takes these bargains…){Generally people who are dying or have a dying loved one, or people so backed into a corner that they don't care}. Which brings us to why I've been using the word Pact to describe the relationship between the Queen of Chaos, Orcus and the mortals they bargain with. An Oath is a solemn promise that doesn't have to be a two way street. I can swear an Oath to someone to do something without an expectation of payment. However the oaths the Paladins swear, the deal Ashton makes, and the bargain that Orcus all offer the same thing. A formal agreement between at least two parties. In this case it's a formal exchange, the Queen and Orcus get servants that can carry out their agendas and plans without needing their constant attention and supervision. On the flip side the mortals get the power needed to carry out their own goals.

Cedric and Ashton are the main character focuses of the book here, with Allison and the returning Dark Prince Jayden mainly playing supporting roles to give us a better look at their characters. I would like to note that the magic items that we see Prince Jayden using, a whip of plasma from a far off star and a hilt that generates blades of ice from a far off world are amazingly creative. In the last review I mentioned I didn't feel like we got a real look at Ashton, in this book we get a better look at his character. Out of all the characters in this book, he's the one who puts up the most resistance to forming a Pact with a greater power, to the point of forcing the Queen of Chaos to basically lay everything out for him in black and white with no quibbling. He doesn't do this by being especially clever but by being wise enough to realize that he can't in good faith make a deal without vital information and doggedly clinging to that point even when his life might be at stake. Even when he caves, I got the feeling he did so because he couldn't figure out a better way to save his world. Not out of any self interest. Ashton is in a lot of ways the most selfless character in the story and the story does a good job of showing us how even being selfless can lead to you being hated in extreme circumstances. Cedric is also a selfless character, he's willing to risk his life for people who hate and fear him after all. He does so in a battle that in many ways seems hopeless, there are only maybe 2 dozen paladins left in his order against an endless sea of demons all looking for a way out to the surface. What makes Cedric different is that he is way more sure of his place in the world and his sense of pride, which is deeply injured over having made the Pact with the Queen of Chaos. His pride causes him to constantly wrestle over it and makes him believe he is damned no matter what he does. This makes his insistence on fighting to protect the people around him more heroic honestly at the same time this does blind him to certain things that are going on around him.

The characterization and worldbuilding have been expanded in this book, aided by the fact that it's a direct continuation of The People's Necromancer. It also manages to tell a complete story in it's own right. That said entire chapters are also devoted to planting seeds for the next book with no pay off in this book. I think that is going to affect how much you enjoy the story. I’m also disappointed to see Clayton drop out of the story, although I did enjoy seeing what the undead that Ashton had already raised were up to. I have to say that The Dark Paladin is an improvement over The People's Necromancer but there's still issues with plot pacing and spending time sequel baiting that I'm not a fan of, although there is less of it. I'm giving The Dark Paladin a B. I should mention that I am onboard with the next book and you should expect to see it reviewed here at some point.

Next week, we hit the Monster Blood Tattoo series with Foundling. Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

The People's Necromancer By Dr. Rex Jameson

The People's Necromancer

By Dr. Rex Jameson

Dr. Rex Jameson was born in Alabama, near the beginning of the 1980s. He was raised in the Mt. Juliet area of Tennessee and graduated high school in 1999. He then attended college looking to get a degree in Computer Science but left after a year to get a job in a software startup in Minnesota. However after the dotcom bust in the mid 2000s he moved back to Tennessee and enrolled at Middle Tennessee State and finished his Computer Science degree. He would proceed to Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee to get his masters and PhD focusing on operating systems and AI. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and works with Research Stall at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote the Primal Patterns series and The People's Necromancer (By the way, I am really liking the title for obvious reasons) is the first in a new series of books; with the first installment being self-published. Thus bridging our theme of last month with more self published work and bringing us something a bit spooky for Halloween.

The Kingdom of Surdel has had it relativity easy all things considered. While there are orcs on the borders, they are held off by the armies of feudal lords in alliance with the local wood elves. The Dark Elves are allied to the Kingdom but heavily focused on their own affairs in their last city of Uxmal. While there are great empires to the south doing mighty deeds and using fell magics, the Monarchs of Surdel have had to deal with smaller scale struggles between their feudal lords, easily solved disputes with their allies and tribal level raids and invasions by the above mentioned orcs. The easy life is over however and things are about to get worse. This is because things aren’t as nice as they seem; the Dark Elves of Uxmal are focused on holding back a demonic invasion and bluntly... They're losing. Meanwhile unaware of what's cooking beneath their feet the blood feuds and quarreling of the nobility is about to explode as two noble families using bandit armies to wreck each other’s land are about to tear open a box they can't close again. (This seems like a very stupid strategic move for the Dark Elves. Shouldn’t they be sending an ambassador up screaming bloody murder about a demonic invasion?)

Meanwhile Ashton Jeraldson is having a bad day in a bad life. It's not enough that his father disappeared on him as a child, his mother died, and that he's struggling as a blacksmith's apprentice. Ashton's best friend Clayton is dead too, killed when he was run over by the local lord's carriage without so much as an Ooops from said lord. In fact the book opens with Ashton attending the funeral with Clayton's widow Riley, a woman who has been rendered heartbroken by her loss. Ashton isn't much better and finds himself at Clayton's graveside screaming at him to get back up, because he's still needed. Ashton's bad life is about get even worse, because Clayton is doing exactly as he’s told. This kickstarts Ashton entry into a much darker and confusing world of competing supernatural beings, strange mystic rules and of course, power politics. Because Ashton, whether he likes it or not, is a necromancer. Ashton has to figure out how and on whose behalf he's going to wield a power that is widely feared and considered evil. He doesn't have a lot of time or space to do his figuring however, as his fellow villagers react to the idea of a necromancer among them by embarking on a witch hunt. The wild lands aren't safe either as a bandit army gathers, one that is capable of destroying entire towns and putting their populations to the sword. Ashton has to answer the question of whether he can he be a force for good and aide his fellow man; or is he doomed to a dark path where he becomes a plague and terror upon the innocent?

Now necromancy was originally believed to be the art of summoning the spirits of the dead in order to find out information and divine the future. By the time of the Medieval era, it was widely believed that necromancers were tricksters as only God could resurrect the dead or summon forth their spirits. Therefore it was widely believed that necromancers were summoning demons from hell to take the form of the dead and lure the unwary into damnation. In the modern era, the necromancer has been tied into the zombie (which actually comes to us from Haitian beliefs, which were in turn derived from beliefs from west and central Africa... Isn't a globalized mythology fun?) and turned into a figure that violates tombs and cemeteries to raise armies of undead monsters as his slaves and soldiers. I should note however that there's been a modern move to give zombies more depth then just mindless slaves. You see this in TV shows like Izombie for example. Ashton seems to raise both types of zombie. For example Clayton and at least one man he raises at the request of the man's young daughter, are sapient. They can speak, think and operate independently of Ashton, they have separate desires. Others seem more mindless, driven by Ashton's call for vengeance for their own violent deaths and the deaths of other common folk at the hands of forces beyond their control (So… they ARE killing the nobility and the class traitors!?<Editor Laughs in Communist>). That said both Clayton and the mindless horde seems to share a taste for human flesh. Clayton murders and devours bandits trying to kill Ashton, while the horde destroys the army that killed them in the first place. Dr. Jameson also weaves in medieval beliefs about necromancy, while Ashton has the ability to bring back a person's soul into their dead body... He can call something else into a dead body if he isn't careful. I won't go to far into it as we run the risk of spoilers but suffice to say necromancy in Dr. Jameson world is a dangerous occupation, not just to you but to everyone around you. So it's no surprise the first reaction people have is panic and terror.

Dr. Jameson’s characterization of Ashton is interesting as he's a basically a nice person who wants to be helpful. There's not really much else there I could grab onto in the story however. So Ashton comes off as a nice young man who is devoted to his friend and has some unresolved issues over his absent father but... There's not a lot else. A lot more effort is put into Julian the noblemen who actually killed Clayton and kick-started this whole thing in the first place. Julian is a the heir to the Mallory lordship, which is locked in kind of a on again-off again feud with the Vossen noble family. Both sides have turned to using bandits as disposable assets in causing damage to each other but it's mostly the common folk getting damaged. This is one of the better done parts of the book, it displays a level of political backstabbery that is believable, without getting so complex that you don't start wondering why the the plans don't collapse under the weight of all the moving parts. Julian has mixed feelings about unleashing bandits on people but is mostly focused on hiding a secret from his father. He’s also dealing with the guilt of killing Clayton, as he had intentionally sped up the carriage not because he needed to but to give his half sister Julia a thrill. Julia unfortunately doesn't really get a lot of time on scene. Her role seems mostly to tempt Julian into doing things he shouldn't. Julian doesn't come across so much as evil but as morally weak really. He’s unable to resist temptation and despite feeling guilty for his mistakes and misdeeds, he's unwilling to stop doing them. We also spend a bit of time with Prince Jayden, the prince of the Dark Elves who is desperately looking for some means to save his people from the endless onslaught they face. Jayden comes across as a man who is caught in quicksand, knows he's caught in quicksand and is begging for a rope but everyone keeps throwing him bricks while screaming about how they're helping. Dr. Jameson does a good job letting Jaydens tightly controlled frustration leak through here and there while having him maintain a diplomatic front.

The world building is fairly simple, if solid. In short if you've read fantasy or played dungeons and dragons, you kinda know this world. Part of that is the fact that book clocks in at 220 pages and is trying to cover a lot of ground, which doesn't allow him to get too deep into depth on any one thing. I kinda feel like there were parts of the book that could have cut or moved to the second book without hurting the plot and leaving more room to focus on Ashton so the readers could get a better sense of the protagonist or focus more deeply on the world. As it stands are there are a lot of secondary plots that get rolling in this book but aren't completely resolved. This leaves the book feeling like something like a prologue as there are a lot of set ups that do not pay off in the book. That said none of this is done poorly, it's just not done enough for my taste. I do also want to mention that the battles are well written, with Dr. Jameson showing among other things why a fully armored knight is a very scary thing to face if you're not a well armored and armed man and why you should never remove your helmet until you're out of a combat zone and I'm not kidding about that. For anyone in our armed services, take this tip from an old Corporal, keep your helmet on until you are out of the combat zone. The skull you save could be your own. I honestly feel that most of the issues I have with the story come from Dr. Jameson trying to cram in so much into so few pages. That said he presents an interesting view of a young man grappling with powers we normally reverse for the villains of our stories and trying to turn it around and do good for the people around him. I'm giving The People's Necromancer a B-. I have high hopes for the next book though, so rejoin us next week!

Because next week we tackle the sequel to The People's Necromancer, The Dark Paladin!