Book Review: The Green Hills of Earth

I have 142 unread books on my shelves. And that doesn't include comics.

I am not proud of this, I only mention it because with only one Hugo novel left on my agenda I'm now tucking in to what I estimate at three years to read my own modest library. Faster if TV continues to be its usual monotonous drivel. Thundercats, indeed!

What happened to the nearsighted, antisocial boy I was who devoured books like it was going out of style?

It's books for me from here on out, yessir!
(Don't mind me, TV, nothing to see here.)

First up from a favorite author of mine, was 'The Green Hills of Earth', copyright 1951, by Robert Heinlein, a collection of some of his short stories. It's a swell book, and in no danger of leaving my library for trade value or donation.

Heinlein drew up a timeline to keep all his sci-fi stories straight, and it's included with most of his works. Good old uncle Robert postulated the half century between 1950 & 2000 as interplanetary expansionist, with thriving human colonies on the moon, Mars, & Venus, pioneering the mighty void of space with courage despite many grave accidents and disasters.

His future world is one of personal helicopters for all, and women dressed in six ounces of fabric! All very well, but those two elements alone seem designed for trouble:
(helicopter engine): wuwbwuwbwuwb...
Jones: Zowie, Harriman, how 'bout the propellant tanks on her?
Harriman: Hoo, hoo! I bet a dame like that would... LOOK OUT!
(helicopter collides with 3 other helicopters, explodes): KRAKABOOM.

Speaking of women turning heads, the first story in the collection; 'Delilah and the Space Rigger' takes a light-headed look at sexism in the space workplace. I maintain that although space stations aren't as commonplace as Heinlein hoped, he knew a metric crapload about how people behaved and still behave today. He saw the sexual revolution coming a mile off, and either regarded it as a change in everyone's best interests or knew womenfolk are impossible to hold back. If our kind goes out there, it'll be two by two, or at least shoulder to shoulder.

In 'The Long Watch' and 'The Green Hills of Earth' brave spacemen die horrible and heroic deaths by radiation to save their fellows. So far, there hasn't been much of this outside sci-fi, either. No atomic-powered spaceships means no blind accordion playing space jockeys. Knock on wood. Also commercial space travel is 60 years behind Heinlein's projections and is still little more than a novelty for the ultra-rich. But on the bright side, we don't have indentured slaves dying of fungal infections in the swamps of Venus, either. Well, maybe NEXT century. As long as we engineer the fungus ourselves, and also bring the swamps and slaves with us.

'We Also Walk Dogs' featured a global interconnected telephonic company called General Services whose multitudinous employees offer nearly anything, at tremendous speed, for a price. It may not be organized and driven enough to provoke reclusive scientists into spontaneously generating anti-gravity (as in this tale), but we've got that very connective technology these days. And, who knows? Link enough blogs together, sift through the gibberish and the porn, and, just imagine what all of us might think of... together!
Just keep your eyes on the skies when you're flying your cars, brothers.

Toon Review: Thundercats

By the Eye of Thundera, Teletoon Retro is the final bastion of TV entertainment on Third Earth! Well, no, not really, but damn, do I love cartoons so. I recently saw 24 episodes of a Thundercats marathon. Not all in one sitting, but STILL. I apparently feel THIS is what I should do with my time. And now I get to waste yours, too! So be it!

Produced by Rankin/Bass in 1985 and for several years afterward, Thundercats is Saturday morning fantasy fare chronicling the adventures of a handful of humanoid felines; alien survivors of the crumbled planet Thundera. Perhaps fittingly for a cartoon about space cats, the head writer was Leo Starr. Well, I thought it was amusing. He also wrote Little Orphan Annie and Morbius the Living Vampire, apparently. Appropriate for a program that fluctuates in tone somewhere between sweet and horrifying.

Despite the bizarre premise, the episodes I saw were played almost entirely seriously, very rarely for laughs. Perhaps that was the only thing stopping this from becoming the mega-hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soon would be. Still... four seasons, Marvel comics, awe-inspiring Halloween costumes, a CGI movie caught in limbo- somebody probably made out like a Plun-Darian mutant bandit!

It may do them too much credit to call them "characters", since the principal cast, charitably, are probably what my buddy Ron means when he says 'cartoonish' as though it was a bad thing.

Our hero is Lion-O, orphaned twelve-year-old prince-ling in a grown-up body thanks to the failure of his suspension capsule. He inherited the mystic Sword of Omens & is psychically guided by the spirit of a wise deceased warrior/scientist called Jaga. In other words, Lion-O is Luke Skywalker with a shaggy mane. I should say shaggy RED mane. NOW you won't mix them up.

Lion-O's fellow colonists on the strange world of Third Earth are brave, noble, stock types. Panthro is the gruff mechanic. Tigrra is the dashing architect. Cheetara is the speedy lady cat who hits things with sticks. Wilykit & Wilykat are inquisitive kids. And old Snarf "The Fierce" is the truculent house cat/tiny bearded dragon. They seek to build a mighty empire on their adopted world of Third Earth. If they (mostly Tigrra for some reason) can keep from being bamboozled, drugged, or stumbling into nets and deadly danger.

Like the Third Earth, this cartoon seems to have been made of little bits of everything else.

Like Superman, they were rocketed from their dying planet, with advanced technology, an ancestral guide, and inhuman powers to help them. Plus a pesky mineral from their home planet that weakens them (Thundranium, in case you're wondering.)

Like He-Man, they have a barbarian harness-y mode of dress, a life of unending quest and combat, and a skeletal sorcerer arch-foe who lives in a creepy ruined castle with his beast-men armies. Plus, they're very 'toyetic'! Although I, personally, skipped right over Thundercats, never seeing their show at the time and graduating directly from He-Man toys to Ghostbusters toys, I did get a Snarf one Christmas. (Heh. That sounds dirty.)

And like Star Wars... well, everything. The first ally made by the Thundercats is the Ewoks, oh, sorry, I mean the Ro-Bear Berbils, an agrarian tribe of helpful teddy bear droids who build them their Cat's Lair and spending the rest of the season getting captured and needing to be rescued. Frankly, between you and me, if I was one of only four males of my species with only one grown female between us, I'd be more in the mood to rescue the native girls than the teddy bears. But that's neither here nor there.

The animation is a jumbled mix of the very deft and striking and the very rushed and recycled. But what else can you expect if you make 65 episodes in one season! Snarf me!

It's all very silly and inconsequential, but even after 24 episodes I can't say it was getting easier to predict. Any given episode they might be rescuing unicorns from cyborg Vikings or in an undersea frog-mecha battling giant eels, or roaming back in time through the astral plane to free imprisoned alien wizards. Whatever Third Earth was, there was a LOT of it! It's either endearingly eclectic or just dizzying and annoyingly erratic.

Take, for example, the episode where the Thundercats discovered a cave that caused rapid aging, and a fountain of youth that could cure it. Cheetara's fleet feet could navigate both without consequence. So... nothing. When the immediate threat was over, nobody suggests Lion-O try to restore his true age. But... you guys just found the fabled well of immortality! You could... oh, never mind, there's space bounty hunters chasing trolls beyond the River of Despair, you'd better go hit them with sticks.

Would YOU like it? Are you a twelve-year old kid?

Do I like it? Yes.

As Marshall said of Ted on 'How I Met Your Mother', my heart is both drunk AND a kid.

The Hugos: A Canticle for Leibowitz

A tenderhearted pair of my co-workers rescued an abandoned young rabbit on the street today, which may be why Thumper's advice is ringing in my ears as I try to make this review: "If you can't say nothin' nice...don't say nothin' at all."
Sorry, rabbit. The sixties are underway and 1961's Hugo Winner by Walter M. Miller Jr. was not and never will be a favorite book of mine.
It concerns three events, each 600 years further into a very unfortunate possible future of war, atomic mutation, mass illiteracy, tribal conflict and suchlike. The events feature monks of the order of St. Leibowitz, copying, illuminating, embellishing, and preserving the personal effects, blueprints, relics, and grocery lists of the long-dead soldier Isaac Edward Leibowitz, debating their canonical value, reinventing the tech implied within, and eventually expanding the order's mandate to the preservation of all knowledge against human forces bent on self-eradication.
Today I bumped it up from the petulant 'no stars' I had written in my notes at the time, to one star out of four, still my most negative opinion of a Hugo so far. Yes, sadly, there's worse to come and I needed the 'no stars' rating for some others down the line.
'A C for L' is a classic. It is beloved. By other people. I admit this freely: You won't win me over by making me read Latin. Or by, seemingly, having a very low opinion of humanity.
What's worse is 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' seems like it might have inspired a sequence in my favorite episode of Babylon 5's fourth season ''The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". J. Michael Straczynski noticed that similarity halfway through writing it, I guess, thought about taking the bit with the undercover monk out or changing it, and left it in anyway. I'm glad he did. It was awesome and, unfortunately, said everything 'Canticle's' first two thirds said, only MUCH faster and less pretentiously.
I admire scholars. I do. My dearest friend is a librarian who probably fantasizes about working tirelessly in a post-nuke ivory tower, preserving the lone light of knowledge for the day the grubby masses will appreciate it once again. Probably. More likely his fantasies would make juicier reading than 'Canticle'. Maybe they'd have some romance and/or some zombie hordes.
I may have this unfounded hate on for classics of literature, which I know makes my reviews VERY suspect, but I'm damn thankful for people who write stuff down and work to preserve literacy. So, the scholar types in 'Canticle' who give their lives for over a thousand years are admirable, even if I didn't really like any of them. (Probably they were just too church-y for me.)
And, of course, unlike in Babylon 5, the overwhelmingly stupid bulk of the human race (or 'Simpletons', as many of them proudly call themselves after 'The Flame Deluge') never gets any better or smarter, finally using the technical knowledge the monks preserved to continue bombing each other to bits, alongside a REALLY AMAZINGLY DEPRESSING treatise on assisted suicide for a mutant woman with two heads.
Author Miller apparently did himself in just before the sequel came out in 1997. I don't plan to read it. It's probably a classic, too.
Old Misery-Guts Miller was one hundred percent a smarty pants. He deserved his Hugo. Especially in the 1960's. Anti-nuke fiction was a good idea. Still is. I'm all for not being nuked. So we should probably KEEP NOT NUKING EACH OTHER.
But until the human race stops doing kind-hearted things on the sly, like when I saw Kim and Rhianna caring for a lost rabbit this morning, I'm not going to give up on our species.

My Favourite Characters: Mysterious & Machiavellian

My tastes are simple. I enjoy sci-fi and superheroes. And other stuff, too, but outside of the fantasy genres I tend to get bored pretty fast. This is just who I am: realistic drama and drawn-out mysteries have to work extra hard to reach me, to allow me to identify with a character. My buddy Ron says I'm not hooked up right. I'm not unconvinced of that diagnosis.

And moreover, I like morally simplistic characters. All good. All bad. Like Superman or Darkseid. I'm oversimplifying this a bit, but I generally do have a hard time liking fictional characters of a more ambivalent kind.

So mad props to Robert Carlyle, for his portrayal of insane genius Dr. Nicolas Rush in SyFy's Stargate: Universe. This is a great new show, (o.k., it's no Defying Gravity so far, but then what is?) which my otherwise Stargate-loving friend Anthony was not won over by.

In tone, Stargate Universe is rather like the recent Battlestar Galactica, stark and relatively humorless in comparison to the earlier SG-1 or Stargate: Atlantis. Of course, it needn't stay that way indefinitely, the first half of the season has been a near-constant man vs nature struggle for survival. (With time-outs for Quantum Leap-style body swapping with less endangered Earth-type folks) I maintain that SGU could develop in various interesting ways, and I'm hopeful that it will not descend to the wrist-slitting tedious misery of Battleglum, or worse, Caprica. Well, I'm hopeful, anyway. It's good to hope things. It sure ain't as upbeat as Star Trek. But you never know.

Particularly desperate for a new sci-fi show to enjoy, with Doctor Who sparsely available in 2009, I latched onto Stargate Universe tentatively at first, but then when I FINALLY managed to see the pilot I was hooked. Granted, my favorite character was Eli. How could I not like Eli? (Pudgy, affable, computer gamer shown at right.)

But Rush is my favorite DUBIOUS character. My favorite SKETCHY character. I recently racked my brain for a guy who was neither a black hat, nor a white hat, but who I still really enjoy watching. And Rush is at the tippy-top of the list. No offense, Dr. House. Maybe if Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was on Neptune's moon Triton you'd garner more of my minuscule attention span...

But, seriously: I'm fascinated by this guy. Did he endanger 80-odd lives and strand them on a ramshackle barge on an endless drop into outer darkness just to further his career? Is he on a quest to better humankind and has just grown too obsessed to care about other people? What of his research into the Ancients of Earth, and their ability to ascend into a bodiless, immortal state?
Could he be suicidal, desperate and distracted over the death of his wife? Is he just in a prolonged state of coffee withdrawl? WHAT'S HIS DEAL?
Maybe this is how people enjoy Lost. The MYSTERY and DRAMA hook them. They get to ponder oblique motivations and discuss amongst their friends. They didn't need the rustling in the trees that first night on the island to be immediately revealed as a dinosaur or they'd get bored (like I did). They aren't afraid that 6 years of questions will end abruptly without satisfying conclusions. Or maybe they are. I sure was. But I don't need to wonder anymore. Now I have a Lost of my own... in space. Oh, that sounds terrible. Maybe Anthony was right all along.

I hate Glee! I don't see its appeal at all!

So spoke Community's Jeff Winger, weeping from his efforts to enjoy Glee, the Fox musical-comedy-drama mega-hit. As usual, I laughed very hard during Community, with complete sympathy and affection for its splendid cast of zany misfits. But THAT line made me laugh till I cried. Because I completely agreed with Jeff.

I TRIED. I tried so bloody hard. I really wanted to like this show. Know some things about me first, they might be relevant: I'm a guy. I'm straight. And I ADORE musicals, comedies, and musical comedies. It's just GLEE I can't abide.

I think it's called 'Glee' because 'Despicable Me' was already taken. Not very Gleeful. Try Hateful, hollow, and horrifying.

Executive producer and show-runner Ryan Murphy told Rolling Stone '[Glee is] four acts of darkness and two acts of sweetness'. Did my PVR cut off the last two acts? Where was the sweetness? I think he means the wearyingly repetitive slushies-thrown-in-faces gag. Slushies are sweet, right? I think Murphy may have some trouble identifying sweetness: these characters are too deeply cynical to be high-schoolers. And why are they so unattractive? I know, I know, subjective impressions of physical appearance aside: the men are doe-eyed, 'aw, shucks' goofball victims or total douche-hats, and the women are manipulative, evil shrews or crazier than shit-house rats. It's off-putting! I'd rather hang out with Sil from 'Species' than any girl on Glee. Who WAS I supposed to identify with or, god forbid, LIKE?

Now, to be fair, I remember the emotions were real-esque once when the gay kid's dad subverted my expectations by not freaking when his son came out. That actually seemed like a GENUINE moment of human feeling. And I'm told that when Will's horrible wife revealed she wasn't pregnant and had been stringing him along his reaction was VERY realistic, with shades of domestic abuse. Well, coin a phrase, duh! Screw a guy over in the most primitive possible way and watch the laughs keep on comin'!

It turns out people don't like discovering they've been lied to. Take me, for instance. Glee's pilot sold me on a premise: high school schlubs make good in glee club. Yay! Sounds like fine fare, musical comedy fun. I RAVED about that pilot. I looked FORWARD to it. I ENCOURAGED people to check it out when it returned. Then I let it slap my face for 10 episodes until I gave up.

There was no character development. No plot. Just miserable, auto-tuned, stereotypes unable to connect with my life experiences as an uncaring universe heaps torment and humiliation upon them. Whee!

'Glee' pretends to care about humanity, the pain of growing up, and the blight of high school, but I cannot feel its tacky happy endings. "Freaks and Geeks" was painful to watch, too, but at least it seemed more honest. I actually cared about THOSE characters and when bad things happened to them, I felt bad for them. That's how drama's supposed to work. I think. Or is there some way to loathe everything the characters stand for and just enjoy the juiciness as they stab each other?
It worries me how many viewers are probably doing just that. Glee oozes with all the shallow, soul-soiling unpleasantness of reality TV only somebody HAD TO MAKE THIS UP!

I know you love it. Plenty of people that I love, love 'Glee'. And now NPH and Joss Whedon are going to be stopping by, too. I LOVE THEM!

Sigh. I really wish I could start believin' again.

But I have the feeling Glee will continue to leave me as cold as a slushy and as heartless at that new ass-banjo Jesse St. James. Here's hoping!

The Hugos: Starship Troopers

Today I learned the meaning of the word 'polemic'. Let me share it with you: it's a reasoned argument presented in attack/defense of a concept or doctrine. Neat-o, right? It's good to learn new things!
The 1959 Robert A. Heinlein novel 'Starship Troopers' was called a polemic in a UK Sci-Fi mag I happened to skim through today, and once my friend Ron read me the definition you see above, I agreed.
The book wasn't a screed: that's the one-sided rants you'll often see here at Mike's Best Blog Ever, the kind that offer no room for argument; i.e. She-Hulk is the best Marvel Comics Super-hero. Full stop!
The doctrine in question in the novel 'Starship Troopers' is militarism. Robert Heinlein, (normally one of my favorite writers) in this novel reminds me of the televised exchange between 'Futurama's evil alien newscaster Morbo and Richard Nixon's thousand-year-old head:

"Morbo! How's the wife and kids?"

"Belligerent and numerous!"

"Good. 'Cause Nixon's pro-war and pro-family."

Heinlein, to be charitable, was not really pro-war. (When would Lazarus Long find time enough for love if he was always face-down in the mud of the battlefield?) But RAH sure as heck was pro-military.
Hence my ambivalence toward this Hugo winner: I have a personal philosophy of total pacifism honed in the fires of being a tremendously privileged doughy white coward who rarely had to fight for anything. Heinlein had buds who died at Pearl Harbor. So who am I to judge?

Starship Troopers tells the tale through long (but interesting) dialogues and classroom scenes, (without much in the way of actual combat sequences) of Juan Rico, Filipino soldier in the Terran Federation fighting in the war against the arachnids of Klendathu. The bugs in question are soulless commie drones, and the Rico in question is a brave and mighty democratic human individual who has earned the right to vote along with his willingness to die and kill to defend the Earth in kick-ass power suits dropped on enemy planets from orbit.

By the way, that dying seems to begin with about a 50/50 chance of dying IN TRAINING. Just in case you wanted to join up for the co-ed shower scenes like in the Verhoeven movie. 

It's not like that movie. 

Among other things, in the book 'Dizzy' Flores is a dude. And, no, Johnny and Dizzy probably don't bunk together in the book either, in case THAT got you interested! This is not a book of sex or romance, except maybe Heinlein's romantic feelings about his country and his military service. Pacifist and Dutch pervert Paul Verhoeven's awesome movie satirizes what Heinlein takes VERY seriously. Yet both book and movie were criticized for 'glorifying fascism'.

Controversial? Yeah. And RAH would have liked that. He was one smart guy. He loved his country and he was too sick to fight in maybe the only war the 20th century NEEDED to fight. I know that bugged him. Doughy, know-nothing socialists like me sitting on our butts out-gassing on topics our public schools and TVs barely prepared us to blather about on blogs all over the 21st Century probably would've bugged him, too. Canadians aren't commies, per se, but, well... I still would have liked to meet him. Don't know what we would have talked about.
He was seemingly fascinated by Mormons.
And until I reached the age of reason I was one of those... ah, it's not important now.
Maybe we'll meet in the waiting room in Mormon hell. I can tell him about the Verhoeven movie.

I gave this book 3 stars out of 4. Low for a Heinlein, but the thing is 'Forever War' and 'Ender's Game' prefer to show war in something of a different light. A nasty one. And I liked them better. They seemed more honest.

(Canada should be thankful I do not literally stand on guard for it. The bugs would probably roll right over me while I apologized and tried to see their point of view.)

What The... What?

She-Hulk. Gorgeous. Hella strong. Wicked sense of humor. Write her seriously at your own peril: her best superpower is her defiance of pessimism. Write her as a monster at your own peril: at heart she's just a good little girl who never let herself dance.

I wanted to call this last post of She-Hulk week "Whither Shulkie?" for added classiness, but experience tells me it'll probably be more like "wither". Lately I just can't afford to keep up with comics. Was "The Last Defenders" good? Or "Savage She-Hulks #1"? Maybe "Girl Comics #1"? I dunno yet. I think Jen Walters is fairly likely to disappear: but then again, you can't REALLY kill a superhero unless you wound the concept so badly everyone loses interest and stops buying it.

Media exposure might help, although Shulkie on TV is sparse and embarrassing ('Enter The She-Hulk' might be a stellar porno title, but the cartoon is just NOT as fun as it sounds). In fact, the TV She-Hulk to beat so far is the 1981 Benny Hill sketch and the Dan Slott-penned 'The Cure' episode of 'Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes'. The latter is not only notable as Jenny's best TV showcase so far, but also the best TV appearance of Squirrel Girl, auditioning for the mighty Fantastic Four.

Maybe it's high time for a She-Hulk live-action MOVIE. There are, however, some minor stumbling blocks. Like, in my buddy Ron's words: 'Unfilmable', 'Impossible', and I'm pretty sure he said 'Garbage' at one point there. For my part, I see three obstacles:

1. Please, Internet, STOP saying Megan Fox for She-Hulk! I need you thinking less Vapid, more Clever and Funny. Think Zooey Deschanel on the one side of thirty, Tina Fey on the other, with the reminder that Jen Walters has usually been depicted in her thirties, and that Shulkie should probably be CG rather than human, crafted by the horniest artists our decadent society has to offer. Think Sigourney Weaver's Na'vi Avatar only curvier, and obviously, more green.

2. Don't just throw it together- have a damn script first. Don't filter it through a committee. Too many cooks and all that. Dear lords of Hollywood, spare the children from any more 'Catwoman', 'Elektra' or 'Superman Returns'!

3. Don't make the mistake nearly EVERY writer who tells a 'Savage She-Hulk' story seems to make. This IS a superhero comic, BUT IT IS NOT AN ACTION FLICK. Not foremost. She-Hulk is first and foremost a ROMANTIC COMEDY. That's what makes it unique. That's the genre where it pops. On paper...

Add those three points together and you've got a box office risk so big it will almost certainly never be taken. Right, Nick Cage? Right, Disney? Huh? I double dare you...?

I will, as usual, have to content myself with 'Iron Man 2' and MAYBE, SOMEDAY, FINALLY a She-Hulk feature-length cartoon? I just beg for one more like Gail Simone's 'Wonder Woman' than the most recent sucktacular 'Dr. Strange' flick or whatever. Sorry, Marvelites.

And speaking of Wonder Women, I figured out the answer to the question I posed myself on Monday: Why is the She-Hulk my favorite over the likes of Silver Surfer or Mary Marvel? I like so many of these great and good bastions of four-color righteousness, I do, and I guess it's because they are pure in heart. She-Hulk is many things. But I wouldn't call her pure!
And who IS, really? We WANT to be. We often TRY to be. But few of us get to be grown-ups without some tarnish. And although, say, Wonder Woman is a great heroine, (and in the William Moulton Marston 1940's characterization was even a little kinky; making with the bondage games) I've got to side with the She-Hulk for having the edge in... naughtiness.

To that end, if I may, next week (or quite soon) I'll post my amateurish 2003 opus "Untold Tales of She-Hulk" over at deviantart.com It's a sort of women-in-prison sexploitation romp, may John Byrne forgive me. The Comics Code Authority surely would- it's approximately as tame as Marsten's stuff, I think. And, hopefully, as fun. Remember: "DON'T MAKE SHOWERING SHE-HULK ANGRY..."
Speaking of forgiveness, a smart husband would probably keep 'The Other Woman' on the down-low. I'm not sure what kind of husband that makes ME... But, hey, don't worry, Sweetness! She-Hulk's only real in some other Dimension! There's no need to turn Green with envy... unless... Wait! That might be GOOD!
As ever, for my flesh-and-blood Giantess. Thank you thirty billion times, luv, for marrying me despite my glaringly obvious character flaws.