Total Recall (1990) Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Total Recall (1990)

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Last year I talked about the drama on the set of Bladerunner, where crew struggled against the director, the director was locked in battle against his leading man and the leading man and lady loathed each other. Total Recall as far as I can find out was actually a fairly smooth operation when filming started. Getting to filming, on the other hand, was a long and rocky road. In 1974 Ronald Shusett, who among other things would become the writer of Alien, bought the film rights to We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Mr. Shusett re-titled it Total Recall and brought it to Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer who had been producing movies since 1946. In fact, between 1946 and 2007 he produced over 150 movies, among them The Serpent's Egg, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Flash Gordon (1980), King Kong (1976) and David Lynch's Dune.

Total Recall, however, took years to get to the filming stage and went through several directors, writers, and casts. First, they brought David Cronenberg (God I loved Scanners so much.), along with writer Dan O'Bannon to hammer out a full script. Mr. Cronenberg states that they went through 12 or 13 drafts before he gave up feeling that he was trying to make Philip K Dick's version, while the other writers wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark in Space. Some elements would remain however. It is from Cronenberg that we get the mutants of Mars, along with the character Kuato, the mutant revolutionary who dreams of a free Mars (Long live the revolution! May the sands run red with Earther blood A free mars is a red mars! Not rusty red or blood red, the other red, you know the one I mean! {Bro, you’re an Earther.}And? Just because I live here on the earth does not mean I cannot stand in solidarity with my oppressed martian comrades. {There are ways to do that without screaming for your own execution}). Mr. De Laurentiis then brought in director Bruce Beresford and contacted Patrick Swayze for the lead. Things went so far as to have sets being built in Australia to start filming when disaster struck. DEG studios, Mr. De Laurentiis company, collapsed due to debt. Part of it was that while a number of the films produced live on as cult legends (especially Dune) they were at the time very expensive box office failures (especially Dune). So it seemed that Total Recall would sink into the sands of time, but there was one more act left to play.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had read the script and loved it; and asked to play the lead but had been firmly rebuffed. I'm not going to go in-depth into Arnold Schwarzenegger here, I'm going to state at this point he was a Titan of the industry and nearly at the height of his popularity. With the studio in disarray, Arnold took his opportunity to convince Carolco, the company that had produced the Rambo films and Terminator 2, to buy the rights and produce the movie with him as the lead. Not only that Arnold got veto power over the selection of the cast, producers, and director effectively seizing control of the movie. Paul Verhoeven was brought in at this point, I hope y'all will forgive me but I'm not going into detail on him either. Sooner or later we are doing Starship Troopers after all (And you can imagine I will have a great deal of commentary on that book, and film, if he does both.{Oh it is on the list, that day will come and likely the review will end up the size of a small book from the brawling we do readers}). Mr. Verhoeven was coming off of Robocop and also riding rather high. Now at this point, the script was on its 42nd draft (Holy Shit) and still lacked the 3rd act. This did not deter either of them, instead, Mr. Verhoeven brought in his crew from Robocop and set to work making a movie. They made several changes, switching the lead from a government accountant to a construction worker, feeling that audiences could buy an alien terraforming machine on Mars but would balk at Arnold the Accountant (Yes. Very much so. He is far far too swole to be an accountant.). They also increased the action, focusing more on the thriller components and less on the paranoia and questions of identity (But the questions of identity are the fun part!). For the cast, they recruited talents like Michael Ironsides (Yaaaasss), Sharon Stone, and Ronny Cox and after hashing out the 3rd act filmed the movie in Mexico City. The original cut of the movie was rated X due to extreme violence because Mr. Verhoeven cannot conceive of holding back but with some editing by people who did know the meaning of the phrase 'that's enough,' they were able to get an R rating. The movie did rather well honestly making 265 million on a budget of 50 million and getting critical praise from Roger Ebert who gave it 3 and a half out of 4 stars. It was even nominated for a Hugo award and won an academy award for best visual effects. So let's discuss the film directly, shall we?

Doug Quaid is a construction worker (Who operates a jackhammer without ear protection. Where the hell is OSHA!?) with a heart-stopping lovely and loving wife named Lori. They've been married for 8 years (Or have they?) and have just moved to a new city. Recently Doug has been suffering from recurring dreams of being on Mars with another woman and has reacted to this by wanting to go to Mars. Lori doesn't care for this and keeps distracting him with different ideas and well, sex (In fairness, if I could distract 1980s/early 1990s Arnold with sex, I would totally volunteer as tribute.{I feel the same way about Sharon Stone in this movie so I’m not gonna judge here}). To be fair to Lori, Mars is in the middle of a brutal rebellion which leads to the government turning a blind eye to abuses of the population because Mars produces a mineral vital for the war effort (Which is separate from the Mars rebellion. And it’s nice to see that the working class, fighting off their bourgeois oppressors/foreign occupiers get called terrorists. The more things change the more they stay the same. Protip: If they are attacking military infrastructure or military personnel, it is not terrorism.{To be fair we do have one scene in the movie where a bomb goes off in a public space, or I’m assuming so since it’s right in front of a hotel with a bunch of working class stiffs standing about. That said, in rebellions like this it’s often hard to exercise control over everyone so I’m not blaming rebel central command just yet}). Just what war is open to question, Doug seems to live in a nation that is either called or part of an alliance called North Block locked in some kind of struggle with a South Block. It doesn't seem to be a total war though as there aren't any radioactive clouds on the horizon or its possible that the South Block cannot hit the North Block in its homelands (The Northern Block however does use orbital weapons against the South. So it could very well be total war, or escalate quickly to one. Once you have orbital weapons, you don’t need nukes. {Yes but I’m referring to what the South Block uses against the North Block, Doug’s life seems very divorced from any warfare}). Honestly, this kinda feels close to home since well... The US has officially been fighting a number of enemies overseas for so long now that soon people born at the beginning of the struggle will be old enough to drink, but you wouldn't know it walking around your average US city would you? (Nope. You wouldn’t. Which is one of the reasons it’s still happening, I think.) Sorry, back to the movie. Seeing a commercial for ReCall, a company that implants memories of ideal vacations for a price, Doug decides to try a compromise. He'll get some fake memories and hopefully, that will quiet the compulsion enough that he can focus on actually living his life. This opens a can of worms real fast though as Doug wakes up in a cab, confused and disoriented only to find his life is a lie (And he has a sassy non-sapient robot for a cab driver). Lori isn't his wife and they've only been together 6 weeks (Clever girl.). He's really a secret agent from Mars and following a trail of breadcrumbs that his alter ego Hauser has left him, he needs to piece together what's in his head and decide what side of the raging Martian revolution he's on (Free Mars!).

The secret in his head is a biggie, a vast alien machine was discovered in one of the mines and if it's turned on, it'll create a breathable atmosphere. Now Cohaagen, the boss of Mars, to put it bluntly, is utterly against that. Because he owns all the air (Fucking rent-seeking fucking shit capitalist fascist pig motherfucker {First of all he’s not rent seeking, he is rent collecting, second of all pigs are perfectly nice animals you leave them out of this.}). I find this honestly odd as Cohaagen is supposed to be running the Martian Federal Colony which suggests that he's a government employee. However, he's also spoken of as charging the people of Mars directly for the very air they breathe which honestly suggests terrible things about the government that Doug Quaid lives under if it will allow such brutal oppression of a group of vital specialists for the war effort (It is a fascist state. Period. You can see it. The state repression, the dehumanization of the Marsies, the apparent direct merge between the forces of Capital and the state. Likely also extending to the war with the Southern Block.{I don’t know about that, it lacks the cult of personality and propaganda state that are features of every fascist state, it also seems to lack the celebration of the military that is common as well}). Because the Martians are the ones doing the actual mining and mining is difficult and highly skilled labor especially if you're doing it on another planet! Not to mention one hostile to life! Simply treating the Martians as important labor due certain basic considerations like free air and water and proper protection from radiation would likely prevent this revolution from even occurring!  Frankly, if I was in charge I would be very tempted to hand the rebels Cohaagen's head on a platter and simply ask if we can sit down and hammer out a deal rather than fight a rebellion on another planet and a war on Earth but maybe I'm just insane (I don’t think any sane martian will ever accept Earth sovereignty at this point…{On the flip side before the end of the movie they have no way of sustaining their own lives without Earth. So I don’t feel independence is viable until they are self sustaining. That said give me the damn ore I need and I’m willing to hammer something out here.} Or you can… maybe see about ending a war in which you orbitally bombard brown people in the global south? {I would need more information on why we’re fighting and who we’re fighting, all we have from the movie is two sentences}). Anyways Doug has to figure out if he's on the same side as Hauser if he can work out what side Hauser was on in the first place and what he's going to do. Which is to turn on the alien machine and create a breathable atmosphere, we all know that's what he's going to do, I’m not even going to pretend and insult your intelligence dear readers.

Now I'm going to be honest, Total Recall is something of a blast from the past for me. I really enjoy it and that's likely to color my grade (I like the fact that it acknowledges the existence of gay people. I know that’s a really low bar but it was 1990 so that’s actually before it’s time for a major action film. Most current ones don’t even acknowledge that we exist.). But let me try to be objective here. First of all the acting, Schwarzenegger actually plays a bit against type here. Doug isn't a super warrior like Dutch from Predator, Conan from Conan the Barbarian. or the Terminator from T2. He is in many ways a confused innocent trying to navigate a system that is increasingly alien and hostile to his simple desires to know who he is and exercise free will. While he fights like a superhero, he doesn't act like one and that's the difference here. Now this being Schwarzenegger, his range isn't incredibly vast but I feel like he really pushed his boundaries in several ways and I can't help but think this film led to other roles where he tried to expand his talents and range and I like that. It helps that Arnold did a bang-up job of selling Quaid's confusion and frustration with the world around him even if by the 3rd act he's right back to a one-line quipping superman. Michael Ironsides was magnificent as Richter, one of the villains; his hatred of Quaid is perfectly understandable. He's involved with Lori and hates that Quaid spent 6 weeks banging his girl. I think most of us would be less than thrilled with that arrangement and Richter's eagerness to kill or hurt Quaid comes across as very human. This breaks down a bit in the 3rd act, as Quaid kills Lori and Richter doesn't even comment on that except to punch Quaid in the face but that might be a limit of the genre or an attempt to reinforce the dream aspect. Cohaagen is played by Ronny Cox who honestly seems to be enjoying himself by playing the biggest and most rancid Dick in the whole Solar System. Honestly, I'm kinda amazed that he's only dealing with a Martian uprising and not members of his own armed forces plotting against him. God knows we invented the term fragging for less than his shit.

The acting is really good in this movie, the writing is less good. Part of the problem is the movie makes several attempts to pitch the idea that this might all be taking place in Quaid's head but undermines itself quickly and mercilessly. For example, the scene where the ReKall employees decide to throw Quaid in a cab after realizing he was screaming about being a secret agent despite never having been implanted with memories? That kills the mystery by explaining how it could be real (They should have just deleted the scene. This seems like something that got confused on the editing room floor.). Remove that scene and suddenly you're left less certain. The movie tries to recover by becoming more fantastical but in my opinion, never does a good job of implanting enough doubt to make it work. Which leaves that whole element of the plot feeling like wasted space. It does, however, do a good job of creating an oppressive police state on Mars with the populace divided into a glittering upper class that keeps itself separate so not to confront the consequences of their lifestyle (Just like they try to do today.), a brutal police/military regime that acts without restraint or mercy and a downtrodden underclass that is increasingly radicalized into seeking more extreme means to get their least desires treated seriously (...I mean…). It does this very efficiently and by using the sets and extras as anything else. Which is good film work. The action is really good but I am going to warn you, this is Paul Verhoeven's violence (And his social commentary. A lot of his films are explicitly anti-capitalist, which I love him for.) so it gets messy and it gets everywhere. Although I wonder if it might be less shocking to a modern audience then it was at the time. I also have to roll my eyes at the bad guys' utter inability to hit anyone with any significance to the plot even if they're five feet away. On top of that, there are some science problems but I'm gonna let your editor discuss that (See the wall of text below). All in all, as a stand-alone film I'm giving it a B- as it is still very enjoyable and I never regret watching it.

However, this is an adaptation so it gets a second grade. This film has very little to with We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Some elements remain there; the ReCall Corporation, Mars, Quaid being a secret agent for a repressive government but it's drastically changed to fit in more action. Additionally, in the original story, our main character never went back to Mars. The Aliens have been mostly written out to have been here and left half a million years ago. Now the changes aren't all bad, Sharon Stone's character Lori is vastly more believable as a wife or secret agent trying to keep her asset distracted by using tools other than simply nagging. Additionally getting to see Mars is always a plus in my book! That said as an adaptation, it's at best a C-.  Because the grade is based on how faithful it is to the original. Well, next week we'll see how the remake does.

(Hello everyone. So in addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth communist, I am also a real-life working scientist who can do math. God, do you remember the days when I was a social democrat? {I remember when you were a libertarian (Blech! Don’t remind me! I try to forget!)} So the science I am going to discuss is in two scenes. The first is the very brief suite decompression scene at the very very beginning of the film. Vacuum - or near-vacuum - exposure does not work that way. If you are exposed to zero pressure, your skin is actually very good at keeping your insides where they should be, though there will be some bloating because of gases compressed in your tissues suddenly expanding. What will happen is that liquids like your spit will cold boil off your tongue and such. You will also start getting some blood coming out of capillaries in your nose, eyes, mouth, and any other highly vascularized surface tissues. That isn’t the part that’s dangerous. It’s the loss of pressure in your vascular and pulmonary system. Dissolved gases might start to come out of solution in your blood, giving you the bends. Additionally, there is now zero partial pressure of oxygen in your lungs, so instead of oxygen diffusing into your blood from your lungs, it goes the other way. Normally you can hold your breath for a while and there is enough oxygen stored in your blood to keep you alive. See free-divers as an extreme example, they do a lot of their work with little to no air in their lungs to prevent their lungs exploding on ascent. It’s actually your CO2 levels that cause you pain and anxiety. In vacuum, with every heartbeat, the oxygen leaves your bloodstream to go wandering in the void. In the end, you’ll have about 15 seconds of useful consciousness, and you’ll be dead in 90 seconds, with permanent damage possible after 30 seconds or so.
The other scene I would like to discuss is the Mars Dome decompression scene. I’m going to start by saying that I’m eye-balling everything so there is a lot of room for inaccuracy, I’ll run two estimates to illustrate the point. Estimate one, the room is 10x20x10 meters (W/L/H), so a total volume of 2000 cubic meters. A pane of glass gets blown out, looks to be at 3x3 meters or so. That means the room has a cross-sectional area of 100 square meters, with a whole of about 9 square meters. A person-sized object (65 kilos, cross-sectional area of .7 square meters) is going to experience a peak of around 500 newtons of force and be accelerated toward the hole at nearly 8 meters per second squared. In Earth gravity, you’d get knocked around pretty good by that (Rapidly accelerated to 28.8 kph). Now, here is the fun part. That’s just the room. Its air leaves first. If the room were sealed - and it eventually was - that would be the end of it. Literally. All the air would be gone in about 2.5 seconds and everyone dies.

The second estimate doubles the width of the room, which increases the volume to 4000 cubic meters. I also drop the hole size down to 6 square meters. Same person-sized object, and it’s only 200 Newtons, and 3.5 meters per second, which isn’t enough to overcome Martian surface gravity even if it were straight up. People get knocked around a bit, but not out the hole. Takes about 7 seconds for all the air to be gone and for people to seriously start dying.

But the whole thing was connected to the rest of the dome. You’d get the same burst of pressure loss and decompression, but instead of ending it would go on and on and on. People farther out wouldn’t experience the decompression as an explosive one, but as a leak, they wouldn’t even be aware of. Air pressure would start to drop. Assuming it went undetected and the dome is about half a km in radius - and using only the first estimate for the hole’s size - people would start to seriously notice after 5 hours, and they’d be in the Death Zone like the summit of Mt. Everest after about a day.

The long and the short of it is that the film does okay with this portrayal, depending on your starting assumptions. Larger estimate for the hole, and it works. Smaller and it doesn’t work.

Thank you for that science editor.  Ladies and Gentlemen, if you enjoyed this review and have ideas on what other books, graphic novels or films based on those you would like to see reviewed, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for just a 1$ a month on what reviews come up or what themes we tackle.  Next week we will be looking at Total Recall the 2012 remake and after that a quick look at Total Recall 2070.  Until then, thanks for your support and keep reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Space Adventure Cobra by Buichi Terasawa

Space Adventure Cobra

by Buichi Terasawa

Mr. Tarasawa was born on the island of Hokkaido, in the city of Asahikawa on March 30th, 1955. Ironically his start in comics was pure accident. Having failed his college entrance exam and looking for a job, his then-girlfriend mentioned an art contest. An art contest for Shoujo Manga with a grand prize of 1 million yen. Having some talent at art and thinking his odds were a lot better than entering the lottery he sat down, read some Shoujo Manga and started drawing in that style. He didn't win first place but he did win 150,000 yen (adjusting for inflation, that's about 2500$, which isn't a bad paycheck for a dude in his situation). Feeling cocky, since he was a 20 year old with 2500 bucks in his pocket, he wrote the magazine asking why he didn't win first place. The answer was that his drawings were good but he wasn't drawing from a woman's perspective and Shoujo Manga was for women (this was after all the 1970s). He decided that he should learn to draw and write Manga for men and boys, saw an ad for a job with Tezuka Production, and ended up working directly under Osamu Tezuka. If you're wondering who that is... Google Astro Boy. Mr. Tarasawa has been very clear that Mr. Tezuka taught him how to edit, how to put together a story and introduced him to Disney and other profound influences on his work. Mr. Terasawa must have been a fast learner because he came up with Cobra in 1977 only after working with Mr. Tezuka for a year. When asked how he came up with the idea, he admits that it's a fusion of a lot of ideas that were bubbling up in him and his biggest challenge was to combine them all into a whole. Mr. Tarasawa pioneered another frontier for manga when he started releasing works on CD and in 1992 released the world's first computer graphics comic book Takeru. But we're gonna focus on one of his greatest successes here which is Cobra.

The character of Cobra Johnson is canonically an American (as much as that matters in an interstellar civilization) but the book itself is more popular in France and Japan;though the series does have an American fandom. Cobra is a space pirate but he's one of those idealized pirates who spends most of his time preying on other rogues and villains rather than waylaying civilian ships. Cobra's biggest preoccupations seem to be questing for treasure, excitement, and the company of beautiful women. Which I'm honestly not going to criticize because I've heard of worse ways to live your life; at least Cobra is doing a public service by taking out all manner of villains, criminals, and corrupt officials while doing so, which honestly earns him quite a bit of leeway from me. The first issue of Cobra was published in November 1978 in the venerable Weekly Shonen Jump. I've discussed Jump at length in the past so I'm gonna breeze past it by just saying it's the biggest magazine in Japan. It ran for six years until November 1984 and the series sold over 40 million copies, often being compared to Star Wars and James Bond. It spawned numerous sequels comics, as well as two anime television series, two OVA series, a feature-length film, video games, audio albums and more. Bluntly, Cobra was and still is an entertainment empire in its own right. Calling it successful might be an understatement here, especially given that the folks who worked on Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, and Devil May Cry have all talked about being influenced by this manga. But we're reviewing this due to the Philip K Dick elements so let's be about it, shall we?

The story is about a man trapped in a dull, dead-end office job that pays rather poorly bemoaning the sheer amount of boredom in his life. Ben Johnson wants to get off-planet and experience some adventurers but after paying off all his bills and expenses, he can't even afford a ticket on a space cruise (See, this always drives me nuts. This is some artificial scarcity right here. It’s always boggled my mind! You have the resources and energy to regularly go into space for leisure and there are space-pirates, but you still have to pay rent? Jesus christ! Take the landlords out back and shoot them already! Make like Shia LaBeouf and JUST DO IT!{Given what I’ve seen in this manga the landlord might literally be Godzilla. So you know what? You go first, I’ll support you from behind..}). That said he isn't doing too poorly and is able to afford a nice apartment, a good car, great television, and a robot butler! Honestly, the appeal of a robot who will clean up after you and take care of the scut work is something that only increases for me. I can only imagine how the men and women who have to clean up after children and whole households must feel. Interestingly the robot butler seems to take an interest in its owner's psychological well being and suggests that Ben wanders on down to the memory clinic and have a fake memory of space adventurers implanted (Please please please tell me that this robot butler isn’t actually sapient. Because that’s slavery. Like, literally of the “Here, you’re downtrodden by the capitalist powers that be, but here is an underclass you can exploit into feeling better” form.{I can’t go into that without wondering into spoilers but the story is older than I am so… Screw it.  His partner, who is not a slave, is hiding inside the Butler Robot so it’s not a representative sample. For my part I don’t see the point in making a Butler bot sapient, there’s no need for that and it would be slavery.}). Because he'll feel better, I kinda wonder if this was programmed into robots as a means of keeping owners from ripping parts off in frustration or boredom. He asks to be a king of a harem and have space adventures because Ben is a fairly straight forward guy in what he wants. Instead of that, it awakens his real memories of being Cobra and leaves him very disoriented until he bumps into the space pirate who was hunting him. At this point, certain words and energy bolts are exchanged and we are off to the races. The rest of the volume quickly disregards any questions of memories or reality and gets down to the gritty business of Cobra hunting treasure, fighting bad guys and hanging out with capable women. (You know, this also always boggled my mind. The whole “denying information/erasing memories to protect you/myself” thing. No. If someone - especially you - is in danger from someone actively hunting them/you, forewarned is forearmed!{I can’t disagree because frankly it almost killed him right in this volume and it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t hidden the memories from himself. Although I’m asking why you would hide yourself in a life so utterly boring, at least give yourself an interesting job or something!})

Shockingly, considering how old it is, it stands up pretty well given the social and cultural changes since its first release. While yes, the series tends to have beautiful women with Cobra, in this first volume the lady in question was presented on equal ground with Cobra as an adventurer and capable fighter. Additionally, the manga avoids some of the... excesses that manga sometimes indulges in when it comes to its female characters sticking to fairly realistic depictions of what women look like, or at least as realistic as the male characters of the series. Now its influence from We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is rather... minimal if you ask me. Basically using the idea of wiping a character's memory and using a corporation meant to give people fake memories as a means of reactivating those memories as a good jumping-on point for the reader. Because Mr. Terasawa wants to get right into it with Cobra as an experienced and skilled rogue but doesn't want to just toss the reader in and scream “Sink or swim newbie!”. It's an effective device that serves as a good start point without having all the baggage of an origin story. Frankly, I was drawn in and enjoyed it, it's not a super deep story or complex but it is fun to read and after January I needed that. So Cobra Vol I gets B+ from me. It is hard to find though, at least in English and I ended up reading it on a free website. So if anyone figures out how to get a legal copy drop me a link.

Next week, we get our asses to Mars! Join me for Arnold in all his glory in Total Recall! Keep reading folks!

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K Dick

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

by Philip K Dick

Welcome to the first review in our month of Dick (YAY!), Philip K Dick that is! (Aww maaan!)In the month of February we take a work by Mr. Dick and look at the spinoffs, influences and impact it had on the media world. Now I won't talk too much about Mr. Dick, as I think my brief biography of him last year covers just about everything that could be said about him. So let's focus on the story in question, this month our ever-wise patrons voted for We Can Remember It for you Wholesale, a short story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1966. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was founded in 1949 by a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press as a companion to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which published crime drama stories. Unlike other magazines of the time, it had no letter columns, no interior illustrations and presented text in a single column. This gave the air of being a superior publication to the pulp magazines that dominated the market at the time. It was also known for publishing more literary material and a greater variety in its stories compared to the pulps, perhaps because of that it outlived the pulp magazines and continues to this day despite circulation having fallen to a low point. Still, it's hard to deny its legacy as this is where stories like Flowers for Algernon, Starship Troopers and The Dark Tower were all first published. Now, fair warning, I'm not going to worry too heavily about spoilers here (Seriously, it’s been long enough.).

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is the story of Douglas Quail, a downtrodden government clerk who dreams of the one thing he can't have... A trip to Mars (Don’t we all?). It's the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up, the last thing he thinks of before he drops to sleep and the one thing his wife keeps nagging him to forget about. The problem is travel to Mars is heavily restricted and as a mere clerk, Quail isn't gonna get on that list. So he decides that if he can't get to Mars in real life, he'll do the next best thing and calls on the Rekal corporation to create a false memory for him of a trip to Mars. Of course, he can't just go as a tourist so he spices it up with the idea of being a secret agent (which he is told is pretty normal). One of the interesting things here is that Rekal makes part of their service erasing the fact that you ever used it so you can be convinced as possible that your memories are real and actually happened. To the point that if you remember using them to implant the memories for you, they'll refund your money. They even provide physical artifacts of your trip, such as ticket stubs and souvenirs. Which makes it hard for them to build a business by word of mouth doesn't it? (It also gives them an incentive to kidnap you in the middle of the night and erase the memories of your remembering that you utilized their services -and the kidnapping - and reverse the refund. {Why haven't you written that dystopian novel yet?}) It also kinda brings up the fact that there are likely a number of customers walking around utterly convinced that they went on secret missions for the government, and such. One might think this would cause its own problems before too long.

Well in Quail's case the problems start before they can even implant the memories as the drugs they use to put people into suggestible states actually awakens his own repressed memories of actually going to Mars as a secret agent (LOL! Sauce for the goose, I guess. If this tech can be used recreationally it can be used to create sleeper agents! Wait. Are the memories implanted even false? I mean, this seems like a great way to recruit agents. No prior contact with the state, they go in and they come out with the memories they expect. Presumably they also have the skills they used in the Op through memetic transfer…{which would be of limited value at best, they don’t create muscle memory as far as I can tell and that’s really important for a lot of skills. Otherwise your head knows what to do but your body has no damn clue.} Except muscle memory isn't really a thing. It's just a very well-ingrained memory in the brain. The rest of the body doesn't know squat. So a sufficiently convincing memory is going to replicate that.{Okay, then go snap the neck of that Marine with your implanted memories and let me know how well that goes.} Most spies don’t do that sort of thing. We’re talking about field-craft and stuff like that. How to do a quick-change in a mall. But if you’re already altering memories, it should be totally possible to have a physical training regime hidden under an implanted memory of a training montage or however they do it But even that is different from the concept of muscle memory. That’s stuff like strength and endurance training. The well-practiced motion of the neck-snap is just a well-ingrained procedural memory. Physically being able to overpower the marine and break their neck is a separate issue {however procedural memory is a separate system then episodic memory and we have no evidence that they can access that} . It is, but they are connected. You can’t have a convincing memory without both. It would collapse into cognitive dissonance and the company would be making more refunds.{Not really, most people don’t actively access their procedural memories, hell they’ve done experiments with people who have memory loss problems, they can still learn and use new skills but have no idea where they picked up nor any memory of the training, which suggest to me that they’re not that connected} And they get confused about it. Probably confused about a lot of things - unless you remind them every so often that they have episodic memory loss. For a normal person, that creates cognitive dissonance.{Yes they get confused but they can still use the skill, quite frankly I would expect the human ability to rationalize things away to ride to the rescue here.}). This starts a rollercoaster of events as the enforcers of the government and the corporation’s representatives scramble to find ways to keep Mr. Quail in the dark (or in the government's case kill him to keep the secret hidden) which only leads to more secrets being revealed. Such as the fact that Mr. Quail stopped an alien invasion as a child and as long as he's alive the aliens have vowed to leave Earth alone. The story is rather brief and there isn't a lot of in-depth character work as Mr. Dick is more interested in exploring the idea of what effect memories can have on you, whether you remember them or not. The subject of identity and memory is one that Mr. Dick keeps going back to and despite the briefness, he does do a good job of showing the effects on Quail. Before recovering his memories he's rather downtrodden and woebegone. Afterward, he's harsher but more divisive and committed to taking action to advance his goal; which for most of the story is just basic survival but I can't blame him too much for that. It does show that Mr. Dick was wrestling a bit with the question of how much of you is based on your memories and if we change your memories, are you still you? How much of who you are is based on what you remember? If what you remember changes, how much do you change? Another theme that pops up is Mr. Dick’s dislike of wives and married life (Definitely a thing for him…), as Quail's wife, Kirsten only really appears in the story to nag and hector him to forget this Mars crap and promptly leaves him when he refuses to. For that matter, Quail doesn't seem all that attached to her and there is some suggestion that she was an agent put there to watch and divert him, but the story never really proves that one way or another. I will say if she was an agent, she was bad at her job as her antagonism would only goad most people into doing something to overcome it.

The story itself would be rather impactful, the first issue of the Japanese Manga Space Adventure Cobra basically lifts the first part of the story right out to use as an introduction to the series; although instead of Mars, it's the main character's desire to travel space in general. The story would also be the direct inspiration of the Total Recall movies and the 1980s Total Recall would be the inspiration for the Total Recall television show. All of which we'll be looking at this month. As for We can Remember It for You Wholesale, I do think the length and the sheer amount of twists Mr. Dick packs into it holds it back. There are so many repressed memories bubbling to the top here that we never really get to examine. That said the story is entertaining and rather thought-provoking even 50 years later. So I'm giving We Can Remember It for You Wholesale a B+.

Speaking of Cobra, that's gonna be our special extra review which will be posted Saturday night!  Don't miss it!  Now if you enjoyed this or if you preferred that we have looked at another Philp K Dick story, you should consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little a dollar a month gets you a vote on what books come up for review.  March's poll is up and running so feel free to join us!  As always thank you and Keep Reading!

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

Gun, with Occasional Music By Jonathan Lethem

Gun, with Occasional Music

By Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 19th, 1964. His mother was Judith Frank Lethem, a Jewish activist, who traced her family roots to Germany, Poland, and Russia. His father was Richard Brown Lethem, a Scotts-English Protestant, and avant-garde painter. Jonathan was the eldest of three children, His brother Blake became the graffiti artist Keo and is still active today training apprentices in the craft. His sister Mara Lethem became a noted translator of books from Spanish to English and a writer in her own right. All three of them grew up in a commune in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn and experienced a very Bohemian upbringing. When he was young his parents divorced and Judith passed away from a brain tumor when he was thirteen. Originally intending to pursue visual art styles like his father, Mr. Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont but realized that he would rather write and dropped up. After an epic bout of hitchhiking, he ended up in California and worked for used book stores for about twelve years before publishing his first short story in 1989 and novels starting in the 1990s. Gun, with Occasional Music, is his first novel published in 1994 by Harcourt, an American publishing company that was founded in 1905 and bought by Houghton Mifflin and re-branded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2007. The novel itself was well received and nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel. Let's talk about this book, shall we?

Everything dies and there are a lot of ways to die, some deaths are relatively easy and one could even say a good way to go (In this truth lies half the beginning of the Millennial Death Drive {that sound you heard dear readers was me rolling my eyes}). Others are at least quick and done with a minimum of mess. The society we see in Gun is not dying well, fast or with a minimum of mess (And this is the other half.{Oh please, compared to what people in the 1930s or 1850s had to deal with? Get a damn grip}). It is dying slow, hard, and ugly; and the people caught up in its death throes have no idea what's going on (My God. The author is prescient.{Our society is not dying, it’s having a nasty bout of generational battling}). Set in an alternate 2008 Oakland, Gun takes place in a world where almost everyone is taking drugs to deal with their lives, asking any kind of questions is at best borderline illegal, and humans have increasingly isolated themselves not just from each other but from themselves. Inquisitors have replaced the police and are the only ones really allowed to ask questions in this society. I'd like everyone to sit for a moment and think about what it means when only the authorities are allowed to ask questions. While Mr. Lethem doesn't explore that to deeply, he doesn't shy away from the implications either, showing us newscasts that have abandoned giving any narrative of the news instead using pictures and musical themes to communicate very basic propaganda and the Inquisitors abusing their authority with almost childlike disregard for any consequences (To the world is reduced to Fox News but worse… and the Inquisitors are basically… well the logical conclusion of police now. Gotcha!). After all, how are their abuses even going to be uncovered in the first place if no one else can ask questions? Those who do ignore the law and keep asking questions and acting in ways to disturb the “peace” are dealt with through the karma system, a system of government-issued points kept track of through a computer system and accessed through plastic cards. Acceptable behavior can get you more karma issued. Unacceptable behaviors get karma docked. Hit zero karma and the Inquisitors can come and take you away for any reason and put you in the deep freeze, a cryogenic prison. The only checks on this system seem to be the rapidly disappearing private inquisitors and few semi-honest men and women in the system trying to keep everything from going further off the rails. As you can guess these are rather ineffective checks. Further reinforcing the feeling of a society dying from internal rot is the utter lack of children except for animals mutated into anthropomorphic forms and intelligence, and the babyheads - mutated children,who have completely replaced natural children, and are supposedly more intelligent than their parents, The book provides little to no evidence of that intelligence, just that these children mentally develop faster into self-sufficiency and are borderline sociopaths in their behavior towards the adults (Where oh where did this shit go off the rails? I mean, the living Furries I get because anthropomorphic weasels and raccoons are adorable, but… why Evil Boss Baby? {I’m not sure, on the one hand some characters talk about it as if there was no choice in it happening. Others call it a giant mistake society made}). The remaining unmutated humans deal with this by taking government subsided and approved drugs that have such names as Acceptol, Forgettol and so on, which keeps them docile and in an easily distracted haze.

In the middle of all this works Conrad Metcalf, a private inquisitor. He was once a member of the government force but now plies the trade of asking questions for private citizens. Conrad is an interesting choice of main character. In some ways he's traditional, being a P.I in bad odor with the authorities caught between his idealism and cynicism as he works on the very edge of the law to try and ensure some scrap of actual truth is maintained in the process. He's a person on the margin of society but there because of his own beliefs and choices, not because he was born with the wrong gender or skin color or in the case of this setting species. He's sarcastic with a smart mouth that gets him into trouble and he depends on his wits and observational skills to get himself back out of trouble. In other ways, he's very non-traditional playing with the context of the setting itself. For example, Conrad is literally emasculated, having undergone a procedure where he traded nerve endings with an old girlfriend in what was supposed to be a temporary procedure, which became permanent when she promptly disappeared (Wait. WHY!?). This means while Conrad's equipment (if you'll pardon the euphemism) functions perfectly fine, he gets no real sensation from the function. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work but it colors his relationship with the women characters in the story as he varies from low-level hostile (which is pretty much how he deals with the male characters), to resentful towards desirable woman, to flat out anger and violence when a woman tries to use sex as a bargaining tool. His relationships with men honestly aren't any better with violence being a predominant theme of his interactions with human beings either implied through him coming in and asking invasive questions (which requires a license in this setting) or by him and the other characters trading hits throughout the decaying Oakland streets and parking lots. This gives us a picture of a man who is incredibly isolated and can't reach past his own anger and distaste for the world around him to end that isolation. It also seems to be the norm for his society as everyone else seems very isolated as well. This is vividly illustrated by the man who started this story, Dr. Maynard Stanhunt a former client of Conrad.

Dr. Stanhunt's murder is the event that kickstarts the story but the more I read the book the less sure I am that Dr. Stanhunt was a person. Dr. Stanhunt was estranged from his wife, had a very distant relationship with his medical partner and was so hopped up on Forgettol that his afternoon self had no idea what his morning self was doing. This is literal by the way, Conrad confirms this by telling us that when he called Dr. Stanhunt at the wrong time, the man had no idea who he was or that Conrad had been hired by him. If you're so divorced from your own life that you have no idea what you're doing from 7 am to 11 am and during those hours you don't know a damn thing about your life after 5 pm... Are you a real person at this point or just a set of discordant identities knocking about in the same body? (Two different people maybe?) Can you say you actually have a life or do you just fill up space like some sort of meat Popsicle? We never meet Dr. Stanhunt directly so we can’t really say if he had a life or not. It’s telling, however, that despite him being murdered, there doesn't even appear to be a funeral for the guy. None of the supporting characters ranging from the Inquisitors given the official case, to the doctors' ex-wife, the woman who lives in a nice house and seems to know the ex-wife and doctor well, and the angry kangaroo enforcer who wants Conrad to just go away and stop digging around none of them provide any answers into Dr. Stanhunt’s personhood or lack of it either. Nor do they seem to be mourning him. Conrad himself is more interested in figuring out who killed the Doctor to clear both himself and his new client than he is in answering any questions about personhood. To be fair, given that he is being paid to save his client from being imprisoned for murder so that's likely the priority. As Conrad works to unravel secrets that the doctor was keeping from everyone, including himself, he finds himself at the center of a spiral of crime, betrayals, and increasingly snarled relationships gone bad. In some ways, it mirrors a standard hard boiled detective story but in a lot of ways, it uses the science fiction elements of the story to explore just how easy it is to victimize and crush people when they're isolated and alone. It also gives us a glimpse of how the easiest way to isolate people is to convince them that they have no choice but to be isolated and that there's no way to fight that.

This is a very bleak novel in a lot of ways. I don't really like Conrad, even though he's the most likable character in the novel but I do find himself understanding him and approving of the lengths he goes to for a person he doesn't even like. I do feel Mr. Lethem kinda missed a few opportunities in this story due to his insistence of following the hardboiled format but what he does do, he does well. Do I like the novel? I can't say that I do. On the flip side, I read it twice and both times I read it in a single sitting so I can't claim that I hate the novel either (Maybe one of those things where it is objectively very good and pulls you in but… my god the author needs antidepressants? {That’s definitely a way to describe it!}). It's very well written, intensely in the first person from the view of Conrad and while the plot is a bit of a burning train wreck it's one you can't look away from. Part of the problem is the pacing, Mr. Lethem takes a lot of time to set everything up and illustrate the bleakness of his setting and ends up kinda rushing through the endgame. Additionally, a lot of the supporting characters are left kind of shallow and unrealized. Part of that is the weakness of going all-in on a single first-person narrative, you can only get so far into the other characters that way (Especially if the protagonist hates them and himself.). I would call it an uncomfortable novel but not one that makes you angry through ham-handedness or various other flaws but in how it makes you think. One repeating complaint I see in modern society is how people have fewer and fewer meaningful relationships. I see and hear people talk about how they don't have close friends and struggle to make any friends. I consider myself lucky in that I do have several people I would consider close friends that I can sit down with and talk about emotional issues or just shoot the shit about movies, games, or what have you (Hello! Otherwise why on earth would he put up with me...). I will say that if you're feeling friendless, the first step is to get out there and start meeting people. Join an activity, take up a group hobby, find my other readers and set up a book club discussing books I review. Do something to get into repeated social contact with people outside of your workplace, otherwise, you might end up doing the Forgettol and losing yourself. I'm giving Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem a B. It's a book that's gonna stay with me and gave me a lot to think about despite the flaws in its plot and pacing.

With this review done, loyal readers we head into February, where we discuss the works of Philip K Dick.  Our esteemed Patrons have voted that our focus for the next month be the short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, which most of you would know better under the title Total Recall.  So we'll be covering the story, both movies and even the television show!  Speaking our Patrons you can join their ranks for as little as a 1$ a month and get a vote on what books get reviewed as well as discussions on theme months or any other suggestions you'd like to make.  Just join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads.  Hope to see you there and as always, keep reading!

The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

Welcome back readers to the first review of 2020! (Insert Barbara Walters joke here) Let me start by chatting about our author. Brain Staveley is an American fantasy writer who currently lives in Vermont with his wife and young son. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and a Masters in Creative Writing from Boston University. He is also a veteran teacher, having taught courses in Literature and History at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School as well as Creative Writing and Medieval History for The Putney School in Vermont as part of their Pre-College Oxford and Pre-College Tuscany programs. The Emperor's Blades was published in 2014 by Tor books. Tor Books was founded in 1980 by Tom Doherty, who used to be a publisher for Ace Books. In 1987 Tor Books was bought by St. Martin press who was in turn bought by Macmillan Publishers. The Emperor's Blade did fairly well, winning the Gemmell Morningstar award for best debut novel and being nominated for Locus and Goodreads Choice Awards. So let's take a look at it.

The Annurian Empire is the most powerful state in the world, stretching across two continents and ruling millions of subjects. None of its neighbors are even close to its weight class when it comes to wealth or military power. The Annurian Empire however, has a problem because its Emperor was just assassinated (Gotta love a monarchical assassination. I know I do! Regicide! Regicide! {I don’t see the point in cheering, it's just replacing one monarch with an even bloodier minded one}). To compound the issue the heir to the throne is a young boy named Kaden, who at the age of seventeen isn't really set to take over anything (One of the perils of monarchy… feature not bug.). Worse, he's only half-trained at best having spent the last eight years at the edge of the Empire at a monastery being trained in mental and emotional discipline by a band of monks (Wait, what? I mean, that’s fine and all, useful even, but come the hell on! Leto Atreides and the Lady Jessica were able to train Paul in both the Benne Jesserit arts and the Mentat and he was all of fifteen! These guys are way behind the curve!) This means the heir has no idea what the current political, military or economic state of the Empire is and on top of that he's hideously vulnerable to his enemies because those monks are not a martial order. Instead they pursue a state of emotional detachment and emptiness that they call the vaniate (WHAT!? WHAT KIND OF SUCCESSOR GROOMING IS THIS!? HAS THIS IMPERIAL HOUSE FALLEN TO DECADENT NAVEL-GAZING? {There’s a reason for it, but they don’t explain it until near the end of the book, I'm going to leave it alone because it is a spoiler}). The vaniate heavily echoes Buddhist ideas of achieving enlightenment through emptiness to me and was fascinating to see how Mr. Staveley used the central idea but stripped out the Buddhist context to give us something incredibly specific to his world. As well as how he rooted it in the history and requirements of his world. Honestly I can see how being able to enter a state of emotional detachment would be useful to a ruler as well but I would think political and military training would be more immediately useful (Right! Because you never know when your Imperial Majesty is going to keel over and die! He could trip and break his neck getting out of bed, choke on a cherry pit, catch a disease or get murdered in the night by assassins! So you start training the kid in statecraft early and if you’re lucky you can train him in personal enlightenment when he’s ready to take the Golden Throne in a pinch! I am a freaking communist, I should not have to lecture the monarchists on these things!). Of course, there are other reasons why it's necessary that the Emperor be able to do this but that would require spoilers to get into. Interestingly enough Kaden is actually the youngest of his father's children. His elder sister Adare is disqualified due to being a woman, which has plenty of precedence but is honestly boring (Also stupid. Male-only primogeniture is always stupid. So many dynasties have collapsed because of that bullshit.{I don’t disagree, after all Elizabeth and Victoria were just as good as their male counterparts but it is common}), Kaden's older brother Valyn however is disqualified because of his eyes. Both Adare and Kaden have glowing eyes that mark them as descendant from a goddess and therefore having divine right to rule (I would quibble over why a woman with the blessing of a goddess can't rule but the Japanese felt the same way historically, as they believe the Emperor to be descendant from Amaritsu, the goddess of the sun). Valyn's eyes don't glow, therefore he can't take the throne, so they ship him to the Kettral, a band of special forces style lunatics who ride giant hawks behind enemy lines to perform Navy SEALS style missions (Wait. Hold the phone. If they are all siblings doesn’t it stand to reason that they are all descended from the same deity? What the hell is this. “Sorry kid, despite our best Imperial Inbreeding your eyes are not the right color, so you cannot be emperor.”? You know what? I’m done. Monarchy is so stupid that it basically covers any stupidity within the system itself.{It’s basically taken as the goddess annoucing that he’s not meant to rule.  Frankly?  I think the goddess made the right call.})

The Kettral are both a great and terrible part of the book for me. I love the idea of a corps of Hawk flying special forces manics operating behind enemy lines but the execution leaves me cold. A lot of pages are eaten up with Valyn's super hard training from hell, although we're only seeing the endpoint of eight years of training. Which Valyn started when he was 10, which just seems wildly unnecessary. I mean yes, you have knights and such who started training at a young age but a large chunk of an upcoming knight's training was social and political. Knights had to learn how to dance and play a musical instrument for example. While the Kettral are learning how to operate unconventionally, I’ve got to point out that it usually doesn't take the better part of a decade. On top of that, the structure and how the Kettral were run was a bit mind-boggling to me. For the most part, you don't take rookies fresh out of training and throw them together all on the same unit without a couple of veterans to provide a stiffening element. You definitely don't take a kid right out of training and give him command of a unit made of his training mates. You most definitely don't take any chummy social cliches (like say the training unit's noble-born sociopath and his followers) and make them a unit without any supervision! All of this makes me unsure how the Kettral avoids becoming an unholy mess of internal rivalries and backstabbing between units (That’s probably exactly what it is! Given the author’s knowledge specialty, he knows all this.{That’s certainly possible but he’s not really showing it well in the book}). There's a lot of potential in this idea and Mr. Staveley certainly hit on the right idea of having them be a special forces analog but the organization and logistics are gut-churning (Except that clearly this empire has descended into Imperial Stupidity.). This third of the plot is dragged out by Valyn not being to able to connect the dots as he becomes aware of a plot against his family and finds out a member of the Kettral may be in the conspiracy (Well of course not! He has no political training!). He also starts investigating the murder of a local whore who was killed by a member of the Kettral, to be honest, this is the most oblivious parts of the book and I actually talked myself out of the correct conclusion a few times because it seemed to bloody oblivious and told myself that I was missing something in the story. By the time Valyn caught up to the rest of us and figured out who his enemy was I was wondering if maybe some royal concubine had used his newborn head for a damn drum at some point (Is he even literate?). So I found myself rather frustrated here but it wouldn't be the only time I was frustrated with Valyn who honestly comes off as rather dim. His best buddy and sidekick La Hin was frankly more compelling than he was and I kinda wish their fates had been switched (No no! This is the point. See Valyn is Important with a capital I because he’s nobility and thus destined for great things, while his competent sidekick can never rise above being a sidekick due to the vaguarities of which family several units of time ago managed to call themselves demigods and have it stick.).

The majority of the rest of the book is focused on Kaden, as Adare doesn't get a lot of screen time (but I'll come back to this). Most of this is set up for the climax of the book, as Kaden tries to figure what is preying on the monastery’s goats and eating their brains. He's also trying to survive his new mentor from hell who thinks burying him up to the chin for 7 days is a good way to get results. Worse is that the mentor seems rather allergic to explaining what he wants from Kaden but expects Kaden to have already figured all of this out (This seems to be the sort of dickery unbecoming of monks who have mastered a state of personal detachment and emptiness.). This refusal to explain things to Kaden is a recurring theme in the novel as it's only towards the end that the monks bother to explain to Kaden why the heir of the Emperor is sent to a bunch of monks in the middle of nowhere. Now some of this part of the plot is rather interesting, as we learn more about why the vaniate is so important for the Emperor and the origins of the practice which is great reading. This is interspersed with what honestly feels like padding. It's possible that most of this was set up for plot elements in future books, which is fair enough but I have to go with just what is in this book and this part of the plot felt like it could have been half as along. Kaden himself is an interesting character as he struggles to piece together what everyone wants from him and just what he can do about everything that is going on. So I'm not as frustrated with Kaden as I am his older brother, although I am left somewhat irritated with his teachers (Just from this description, they are shitty teachers. So you should be.). Mainly because they only think to explain why it's so important that he learn the vaniate after trying to teach to him for seven bloody years. Now, I'm not monk, nor can I make any claim to enlightenment but I kinda think that if you're going to teach someone something, having them understand what it is and why it's important might be good steps to include early in the process.

Lastly, we have poor Adare, the eldest child of the Emperor with the right glowing eyes, who happens to have girl cooties so she can't sit in the big chair. Unlike her brothers, she was trained by their father in politics, economics and all those things that come up when you're running a country. She's also right there in the capital when he dies and is able to look into it straight away, aided by the fact that her father left her the position of Minister of Finance in his will. Adare doesn't get a lot of time in the book, most of it focused on her trying to bring down the priest who is preaching replacing the monarchy with a theocracy and who she is pretty sure actually killed the Emperor in the first place. However, we don't get to see her do a lot of political maneuvering. She keeps talking about how the other ministers hate her for being a girl (also for likely just being handed her position but I do think they would hate her less if she was a prince) but we don't see her attempt to make any allies or build any bridges. In fact, she mostly just holds herself aloof from everyone except the regent, who makes a big show of being a simple soldier. This frankly isn't a good way to play the political game, she's the minister of finance! She literally runs the money department now, let her blackmail people, or offer to help expand their budgets or the hundreds of other ways you can get people on side when you control the money! I do think some of the space given to the boys could have been handed to Adare without losing anything and honestly, she's the only one of the three I wanted to see more of by the time the book was over.

There's a lot of interesting world-building in this book and honestly, the minor and supporting characters are actually pretty interesting. Kaden is a good character but just needs more to do with the number of pages handed to him. On the flip side, the Kettral are a mess of good ideas and awful execution (Is it terrible execution in the sense that it’s actually bad writing, or is it terrible execution in the sense that the organization is internally rotten and dysfunctional? {I’m… Not sure.}). I know most readers won't care about it but I was groaning at parts of it and applauding at others. For example, the climax of the training is super dangerous and can cripple you for life even if you survive. One of those crippled survivors insists on coming out every year to warn the recruits of the dangers they're risking and encourage them to think twice. This is masterfully done! Of course, I also have to ask why you wasted time giving all of these people unneeded specialization training that they can't use and might even lessen their chance of passing the test? Seriously there's a reason why we only train people who have passed basic training in things like sniping and demolitions. It cuts down on the wasted time and resources to train someone who won't even make a decent line trooper. The Empire itself is interesting but we're given very little information. For example, I know there are noble houses but also Ministries where most of the officials rose by talent and they do the actual work of governing the Empire it seems? So I'm not sure what it is that the noble houses do except scheme and politically maneuver. This could have been answered if Adare got more time on the page I think. Additionally, the plot often hinges on Valyn being utterly unable to connect the simplest of dots and on people refusing to discuss things with each other and that's infuriating. This leaves a book that is in parts very good and then kind of a hot mess in other parts. All in all, it averages out to... Average. So I'm giving Blades of the Emperor by Brian Staveley a C. I honestly wish I could give a higher grade but then I would lying to y'all. Well, maybe I'll like the next book better.

Well everyone welcome back!  I hope you enjoyed this review, if you did and you would like to vote on upcoming reviews or make suggestions for theme month reviews or anything, please consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Where a vote costs as little as a dollar a month. Next week join us for Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem and in February Philp K Dick month returns!  Let's make this a good year folks, Keep Reading!

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

Rich Man's War By Elliott Kay

Rich Man's War

By Elliott Kay

the crewman shouted “I don't even want to be here! I only signed up for the college money!”

“Yeah?”Tanner huffed. “Me, Too.” page 411

Elliott Kay grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Seattle. Before becoming a writer, he served a hitch in the coast guard, earned a bachelor's degree in history, survived summers in Phoenix (What the hell is it with authors in this review being Phoenix connected? Does the Arrakisesque heat create transient delusions that turn into books? {Maybe all these science fiction and fantasy books started as heat caused fever dreams?}), was a substitute teacher (the poor soul) and managed to get married. If nothing else, I can see a lot of his life in this book series; from his experience in the coast guard informing the training, to his main character Tanner Malone having to put up with hazing, disdain, and disrespect despite just wanting to do his job and get to college. Let me explain, Rich Man's War, published by Skyscape books, an Amazon imprint for self-publishing authors, is the sequel to Poor Man's Fight. I reviewed that novel about a year ago and if you need a refresher there's a link at the bottom at this review. Rich Man's War was published in 2015 and continues the story. Let me touch the basics, quick warning though this is our last review of the year so I'm feeling lacking in restraint.

It is the far future, humanity has figured out a lot of amazing things; like Faster than Light travel and how to extend our youth and health for over a century. We've also managed to turn your desktop computer into something you can wear on your wrist but odds are most y'all saw that coming (I mean, barring a haptic interface and holographic display we can already kinda do that.). Humanity is in theory united under the Union, which is an incredibly weak central government that only exists because the various alien races of the galaxy got tired of dealing with dozens upon dozens of feuding human nations, tribes, and clans shotgunned across space. Because of this, the only real function of the Union is to provide a common diplomatic front to other sapient species and a common defense with everyone kicking in funds to build, man, and maintain the Union Fleet (Dear God, save us all from minarchy. {Well the Union is not a nation, so I figure it’s actually better than the UN and competitive with the EU… Although the EU has more corporate controls}) The Union has managed over time to win some power, such as setting up restrictions on the fleet size of members in order to, if nothing else, limit the amount of devastation that occurs when member states decide to go to war with one another (I cannot express to you how horrified this makes me.). Which can and does happen, because there are no rules against it and the interstellar corporations that increasingly make up a larger share of the Union's economy has worked hard to prevent any kind of court system that could work out issues between member states because if such a court system existed, the same Union members could sue the corporations and maybe even win! Imagine what that would do to their bottom line (I retract the previous comment. I am even more horrified of this.)

It's a vast bottom line too because the Union members are under restrictions over how many ships they can field and space pirates operate across the void the corporations make good money operating as mercenary security (Aw Hell Naw!). Thus they're able to legally maintain large fleets and armies. As if this wasn't a bad enough idea just about all the interstellar media is owned by these same corporations and they run the education system (Frigid. Get the diesel fuel. There’s a society that needs to be burned to the ground. This polity is worse than the EA.). So I'm assuming that Mr. Kay's thesis behind this setting is that as a species we simply do not learn from our own history. Well, the government of Archangel, a settled system with four planets and a good number of asteroid colonies have had enough of this crap. In the first book, they nationalized their education system and took over their own security arrangements (Good for them! They could do more, but that’s a good enough first step.). The Corporations did not take this well and decided to sic pirates on Archangel to bring them to heel. Enter Tanner Malone, a really smart kid out of high school who just wanted to go to college. Unfortunately, since the education system is completely privatized, that means everyone graduates high-school with a debt. Now while Tanner had a pre-test week straight out of hell and even worse day of the test, none of that matters because the test is bloody rigged. That's right, it's not enough that the corporations get to drain money from every human being in the galaxy, avoid the law of most systems by ensuring there's no place to take them to court and maintain fleets large enough that no one can pursue more kinetic options. They have to rig the bloody system because God forbid you little walking wallets walk away with any spare change. I really want to decry this as unrealistic but I just got done reading a follow up on Volkswagen’s years-long scheme to cheat on environmental tests and Nestle decrying the fact that American courts won't let them seize water sources from towns on the idea that their bottled water is a public service (Capital abhors a public good where there is profit to be made. The capitalists, driven by the logic of the capitalist system which forces even decent people to act like monsters to avoid being out-competed by the actual monsters, will inevitably create situations like this. That isn’t even me being left of Trotsky. It is the straight-line computation. They absolutely will privatize the air if we let them.{I was hoping you would discuss rent-seeking above, as it is a prime example of it} Rent-seeking is just a special case of this general principle. Find public good - the more necessary to life it is the better - find a way to own it. Charge out the ass for it, with little to no cost to you!). So the only way I could argue against Mr. Kay here is by turning this review into a fantasy novel in its own right. Getting back to it, Tanner joined the rapidly expanding Archangel navy to get food, lodging, and a source of money to pay off the very large debt that he earned for (And presumably also to strike back against the capitalist trash. Or at least that’s a side benefit! {Tanner isn’t filled with revolutionary zeal here, he just wants to go to college} Hence, the side-benefit.) the privilege of basic schooling. When all of his shipmates were killed in a pirate attack, he not only survived but managed to take out the pirates and become a massive hero. Tanner's firm hope was that the rest of his life would be quiet and people would forget about his actions letting him fade into the background. Unfortunately, Tanner Malone is going to learn that the universe is never going to be that kind to him (Poor Tanner.).

Because things are heating up between the Corporations and the government of Archangel who goes public with the proof that the tests are rigged and starts seizing corporate property within the Archangel system, expelling their executives and declaring the debts that Archangel citizens owe to them null and void (Yes! YES!). This is a disaster for the corporations who realize that they can't afford the hole in their budgets that losing the 9th largest economy in the Union creates, nor can they afford for other systems to start to get the same idea and they need to get the Archangel government on camera recanting their claims before people start taking them seriously. So the navy, which still has Tanner Malone on the rolls for the next three years, isn't gonna let him take a backseat now that they know just how awesome he is. So Tanner, after having undergone medical and psychological treatment, is sent back out into the void where he proceeds to get himself into and out of trouble with a furious combination of quick thinking, bravery, and refusing to second guess himself in combat. It's not all bad though, as Tanner also receives additional training and commits to a career path within the navy (Might as well turn into the skid! In his shoes, I’d do the same damned thing. Hell, if we had an actual void-navy… let alone one committed to smashing capitalist overlords…{Well Tanner is figuring that if the universe is after him, he might as well learn as much as he can to make it hard for the universe to get him}). This is good because while the Archangel navy is well trained, well lead, and willing to commit to insanity if it keeps them free of corporate serfdom... They're outgunned, outmanned and fighting against powers that can maintain safe zones for recruitment and rearmament outside of their strike range. That's usually a bad sign for you in a war. Now the CNO of Archangel Admiral Yeoh has a plan to try and maximize her advantages but she's gonna need all the crazy lucky awesome she can get to pull it off. Meanwhile, in the background, there's a lot of cloak and dagger operations going on as Archangel pulls any asset they can get a hold of to survive, even morally questionable ones (Well, yeah.). Meanwhile, the corporations are pulling together their own assets and making their own plans because if they want to maintain their position of dominance across human space, or even keep the company solvent, they can't let this stand. For both sides, this rapidly becomes a confrontation with survival on the line.

The first 300 pages of the book are a careful set up of why both sides are willing to commit to armed conflict and what's on the line for them. Mr. Kay does a good job capturing the feel of a car sliding on ice towards a deep hole as events sweep up everyone and push them towards armed confrontation. We get a sense of what Tanner is struggling with as he tries to bring a sense of normalcy to his life and move on even as the galaxy assembles itself into a giant tinder pile. That said there is plenty of action going on as well, as old villains with their own grudges are also operating in the galaxy as well as forces outside of Tanner's control. To show us this, the book spends more time in other character's viewpoints than the first book but I'm fairly okay with that as it gives us a look at the wider context of the situation. He also does a good job of showing the mass confusion and barely restrained panic of warfare. It's been said more than once (and Mr. Kay uses this line in the book) that inside every army is a mob waiting to get out and when the bullets are flying and everything is going down the sewer is when you're at the highest risk of the mob getting unleashed (History bears this out. Things get really bad when that mob is unleashed. Sometimes it happens intentionally like in Nanking. Sometimes less so like the Russian army moving through Germany. Sometimes it’s just the reality of war in a given time period and the mere threat of being sacked was enough to force a city’s surrender.). We also see that on a smaller scale as we see Tanner's reaction to being thrown into the thick of it again. Because none of the events of the first book have left Tanner unscarred. Don't get me wrong, in a lot of ways he's the same kid he was at the start of the series. He's a bit sensitive to emotional blows but brave and intelligent as well as very mature for his age. However, in the book we see him... He very clearly shuts a part of himself down completely when faced with a stressful situation like combat. Which isn't entirely wrong because if you don't you won't survive it. Combat is simply not the time to be processing your fear, grief, or anger. When I read Tanner in combat - especially the climactic battle at the end of the book - I've seen that before and all I can say is that Tanner is not okay but by the end of this book, no one is. Because this isn't a book about the glory of war, while there is a big fight at the end of this novel that would shame most summer blockbusters, it doesn't solve anything at the end. The war, like the vast majority of real wars, isn't decided by a single engagement and the loses that the good guys take are so grievous they may make their victories pointless. So our novel ends on a somber note, with neither side really out of the fight. While Archangel is fighting for the best of reasons, the plain fact is that this war is bringing pain and destruction on its people and the survivors are going to be carrying that weight for the rest of their lives. Not even victory makes that go away.

Rich Man's War brings us intrigue, diplomatic maneuvers, skulduggery, and action-packed military missions while showing us the costs of all of that on the ground. By letting us see what this does to Tanner and young men and women like him, Mr. Kay reminds us firmly that even a war with a clear moral component is going to kill a lot of people that don't deserve to die. This might seem a bit of a mood killer but I honestly think we should remember that while sometimes wars must be fought and some enemies can only be deterred with violence, that comes as a cost beyond any dollar amounts. Rich Man's War by Elliott Kay gets an A from me for being to tell such a tell while keeping it a page-turner and keeping me invested in the characters.

Welp, that's it for this year folks! We wrap up in what is our 250th post and I would like to thank everyone who has been a part of this and say that I hope that you will continue on with us next year. We will be returning January 24th with whatever novels win the now open January poll. Currently in the lead is The Emperor Blades by Brian Staveley. Now if you'd like to vote in that poll or in February's poll, feel free to join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Where votes are just a dollar a month. Until then, may you have Happy Holidays, a Wonderful New Year and above all else... Keep Reading.

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2018/09/poor-mans-fight-by-elliott-kay.html

As always, red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

Dr. Frankopan was born in the United Kingdom on the 22nd of March, 1971. His father, Louis Nicholas Anthony Doimi Frankopan was forced to flee Yugoslavia in 1951 by the communist government. This was due to the fact that Louis was an aristocrat and the communist government was seizing his lands (I am so spoiled for choice in terms of commentary here. I’ll leave it to the collective imagination.). Mr. Frankopan did manage to land on his feet (Understatement), marrying Ingrid Detter De Frankopan, a Swedish barrister and noted professor of international law (seriously she published almost a dozen books on international law). One of their daughters ended up marrying into the British Royal Family becoming Lady Nicholas Windsor (Damned monarchists). Dr. Frankopan himself attended Eton college (For those of you who don’t know, Eton college is one of the all-boys boarding schools where Rich Fucks send their children to be hazed and turned into Tories. Peak British Aristocracy. More than land on his feet, the exiled Yogoslav aristocrat managed to fall up the unearned privilege ladder if he can send his kid to Eton.) and then went to Jesus College in Cambridge where he met his wife Jessica (she was earning a degree in anthropology) and received a degree in Byzantine History. He went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford (basically one of the colleges that make up the University of Oxford) where he earned a Ph.D. He is currently Professor of Global History at Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre of Byzantine Research. He also founded and run a string of hotels with his wife Jessica, they live in Oxford with their children. His first literary work that I can find is a translation of The Alexiad for Penguin books published in 2009. His first history book, The First Crusade The Call from the East was published in 2012. The book we're looking at The Silk Roads was published in 2015, by Vintage Books. Vintage Books is an imprint founded in 1954, it was bought by Random House in 1960 and currently is a division under Penguin Books.

The Silks Roads is an incredibly ambitious book, where Dr. Frankopan seeks to argue for an entirely new look at history placing Iran and Central Asia in the centerpiece as the engine of human history. The title refers to both how and why he believes this region to be so vital to the course of human history. The Silk Road or roads was a network of trade routes that went through central Asia and Iran connecting China and India to the Mediterranean world. The trade that traveled through those routes was staggering even in the ancient world bringing eastern luxuries to the cities of Rome and bringing western goods to Eastern markets. This, argues Dr. Frankopan is where the root cause of many of history's grand moments and turns first came into being. To make this argument, he gives us a broad survey of history starting from the Persian Empire and moving forward from there at a rapid clip. Through the chapters, we see the effect that various groups have had on the Silk Road region and the effects that the Silk Road had on them. To do this Dr. Frankopan takes us on a long journey down the many centuries showing how the trade along the Silk Road or the lack of it affected human civilizations both in Asia and Europe. Interestingly enough from my view, he also makes the argument that everyone benefits when we all calm down and just be cool. For example, there are several periods of peace early in the book where wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice flow across the Silk Roads and promotes explosions of scholarly thought and artistic expression but someone always decides that this means they gotta try either expand their power or clamp down on their rivals and everything goes down the drain. This leads to a period where not much is done on the artistic or scholarly front. To be fair, it's hard to research or work on masterpieces if you're just trying to find food or if you need to devote your energy to dodging invading armies. I suppose if there's one theme that unites human history across all times and regions, it's the idea of “Everything was going great and all we had to do was be cool... But we were not cool. We instead decided to wreck up the joint.”

Now the book doesn't entirely focus on the silk road regions, because Dr. Frankopan decides to follow the money in this book. If you do that in world history that means sometime after 1492, you're heading to the Atlantic. Now it's here that I learned a couple of interesting tidbits that I hadn't picked up before. I knew that Christopher Columbus was looking for the eastern coast of Asia when he set off from Spain (And thought the world was smaller than it was, because he couldn’t math.), what I didn't know was that he was fully gripped by the idea that he could convince the Indians to march west to fight the Muslims in alliance with the European Christians. Making him one of those people who just cannot let go of the fact that Christians don't run Jerusalem on top of all of his other flaws and vices (Which were many. Holy Fuck.). It was, however, the Portuguese who would find a sea route to India by going around Africa, something that the Kings of Portugal would take great delight in rubbing in the faces of the monarchs of Spain... Until the New World Treasure ships started rolling in. Dr. Frankopan takes great efforts to map out the effects of the Portuguese trade and the New World's wealth being drained out to Spain had on the Silk Roads. It was one of the factors in a mass collapse of Venetian dominated trade as the Portuguese started undercutting them. They could buy Asian goods at the source and then sail them back to Europe paying no additional duties or taxes on them and the Spanish would simply bury them using mass amounts of New World Silver. New World Silver also fueled the European obsession with Chinese goods. The influx of looted silver was so massive that the price of silver simply crashed in Europe and the Near East but remained stable in China. Which cued up hordes of Europeans looking to take their silver where it had the most purchasing power. This fueled Chinese isolationism because they didn't have to go looking for wealth, it was fighting every obstacle to throw itself at their front door.

Dr. Frankopan traces this silver price crash as part of the reason the Spanish Empire began its collapse, buckling under the strain of bad policy and megalomania (And inbreeding). This lead to a shifting of the center of Europe to the North West, or to be more specific England, while leading to the staggering fall of southern Europe. We don't get very many details of the English Empire, to be fair we don't get to many details in this book as there's just too much to cover. Most of the focus is in the last decades of the English Empire, where Dr. Frankopan advances a different view of the British Empire in the last decades of the 1800s. That of an overextended, overburdened power living in fear of a rising Russia trying to punt the eventual reckoning down the road just a couple of decades in one bad decision after another (Isn’t that kind of the standard view? {Noooo. The standard view is Golden Britannia ruling the waves until the world wars destroyed it} My read of the history of Empire must be a bit closer than standard, then. Because none of this is unfamiliar to me.). Especially in English policy in regards to Persia. It's here where Persia retakes center stage of the book as we examine the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian oil company or as we know it today British Petroleum (A pox be upon it). Persia was the center of a competition between a newly expansionist Russia and the United Kingdom looking for a bulwark against further Russian expansion as the Foreign Office found itself having nightmares of the Russian Armies marching through Afghanistan into India. Meanwhile, they ignored the rising tide of anger and resentment rising in Iran. It's in this context that he presents the decision of the British Empire to pursue an alliance with France and Russia against Germany, another rising power that was wary of Russia. I have to admit this might seem strange to readers who were born after the 1980s and know Russia only as a nearly spent power grimly clinging to relevance due to past successes and nuclear stockpiles but I'll remind such readers that Russia was once a superpower capable of causing panic from Berlin to Washington D.C. Another strange thing is his presentation of the world wars as the beginning of the end for the west, casting the United States as the last vestige of Western Might in some ways as the European Empires fell apart in the aftermath of World War II. It's certainly different than how I was raised to look at events.

The last part of the book looks at the world wars and the rise of the United States and it's being pulled into the Middle East. I say pulled because Dr. Frankopan presents the US moving into Iran and the Middle East out a need for oil and a fear of the Soviet Union despite internal resistance to the idea of entering the world's biggest sucking sandpit (this might be my own bias emerging here, readers). Dr. Frankopan examines US policy and meddling throughout the cold war and the moves of the USSR, although vastly more attention is given to the US than the USSR. To be fair, we did win the cold war which makes our actions the more relevant of the two (Not really. If only because the actions of the US were in opposition to the USSR so both are relevant.), I suppose but the coverage still feels uneven. I'm not sure if this was his intention but the picture of the US that emerges is one of a nation capable of reacting quickly to changing situations and rebound quickly from setbacks but also one of a nation that so damn busy reacting to the situation that no one stops to consider the long-term results of those actions. Just trying to gain short term improvements in positions even if everything is on fire and falling apart. Which was kind of what was happening when the Iranian revolution happened and Saddam decided to break with the Soviet Union to attack Iran. This portrayal isn't super flattering I admit but it's better than the narrative of the US bumbling from one disaster to another that I often run into (Well if the shoe fits…{Except it doesn't Bumbling idiots don’t get to be superpowers. Plus the fact that the post World War II international system is basically an invention of the US State Department is a strong mark against such ideas}). In this read of the situation, the American government moves from one improvisation to another as things keep exploding and it works frantically to stay ahead of the fallout. Another interesting tidbit here is that the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan may have been fueled in part by the rumor being floated around that the leader of Afghanistan was considering throwing in with the Americans. The book ends in the post 911 era, which is full of mistakes galore but also notes a few we avoided; such as Dick Cheney’s constant calling for bombing the Iranian nuclear plants despite being told to his face by the military that this wouldn't work. So it's good to know that there are some bad ideas that we avoided.

I don't feel that the Silk Roads quite makes a convincing case that we should look to the Central Asian area as the ground zero of history. Part of that is because Dr. Frankopan tries to cover just to much history in a single book to make a convincing case. There are worse crimes than ambition for a book to have but here the history is spread too thin for any convincing analysis to be done. Additionally, there are issues of focus as we intensively look at English and American decision making and consideration but not Russian or Chinese ones. I'm going to argue that's looking at half the picture and presents a skewed view of events. To be fair to Dr. Frankopan I think the reasons for that is it is vastly easier for someone like him to get ahold of American and English sources than Russian and Chinese ones (This is true. I have a friend who studies the history of the USSR and she basically has to travel to the archives in Moscow to get the most basic documents. But because of this, I can play six degrees of Joseph Stalin.). To be fair, I'm not sure anyone could get a hold of any Chinese sources except the official party line, which always paints the party's decisions as wise and beneficial ones but that's a target to aim at another time. That said, I do feel the Silk Roads is valuable for the economic view of history it provides and the different narratives of certain historical events, which I don't think are necessarily wrong even if I don't agree with them. To steal from popular culture, sometimes it does depend on your point of view. Overall, however, I'm giving Silk Roads A New World History by Dr. Peter Frankopan a C+. It simply doesn't have the page count to make the case it wants to and cover the massive scale of history it wants to. However, it's still an impressive work for what it is and worth reading in its own right.

This work was chosen by our patrons for review.  If you would like to vote on what books and other works get reviewed, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads For a dollar a month you can vote on theme months, future reviews and more! Next week, we close the year with a book I've been wanting to get to for some time.  Rich Man's War by Elliott Kay!  Thank you for staying with us and as always Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders