Dissing on The Dispossessed

I’m not going to snark on the book itself here, only the covers. But in doing so you’ll learn a fair amount about the book!

First of all, this one, which to my mind is the classic one.

It’s grand, sweeping, colorful, exciting. It boils the tale down to its basics: two worlds, very different, close but not touching. One is blue and green, lush, parklike. The other is a cratered red moon, which, though it looks uninhabitable, has an oxynenated atmosphere with white clouds. Purple and blue swirl between the two like auroras. Alex Ebel, the artist, has literally incorporated all colors of the rainbow. The tilted typeface adds to the dynamism.

Though it looks real enough to be literal, it’s representational. The landmasses of Urras, the lower world, do not correspond to Ursula K. LeGuin’s map of the planet, and the surface of Anarres doesn’t either.  Like the novel itself, it’s meant as an allegory of the Cold War, the division between capitalism/West and communism/East. It’s an Atompunk novel through and through in how it examines ideologies and allegiances and what happens when a groundbreaking scientific discovery shakes things up.

As such, the technology of The Dispossessed lies firmly in the Atompunk age. Though there are spacecraft capable of interstellar travel, they are limited to the speed of light and take years to reach other systems. On-planet, there are no cell phones or widespread computer use. The lifestyle on Urras, the Earthlike world, is that of Western Europe in the 1970s. Travel is by train, there are still quaint chocolate shops and mountains like the Alps where sheep are still herded by villagers, as well as political riots and revolution in the “African” country of the opposite continent. This isn’t quite a failure of imagination on LeGuin’s part, as the whole novel is allegorical, in a sense.

The planet of Urras. The only map I could find was in Spanish.

There’s also an amusing depiction of a college faculty party the hero of the novel Shevek, the physicist inventor of the ansible (basically, a real-time interstellar radio) which skewers the various “types” one might see at such a party, and at which Shevek thoroughly embarrasses himself by vomiting into a tray of hors deuves after being led on by his patron’s hot-to-trot sister, Vea. Le Guin spend more than a little time in acadamia, remember, and the novel also works very well as a send-up of two different university systems.

Anarres, also in Spanish.

Anarres has more land than water, so  it is more arid. Despite this, the Russian feel to it is very strong. When a famine hits, it reads like a Gulag run by the prisoners. Anarres tries to be independent of its parent planet, Urras, but for things it can’t produce itself, it trades metals and minerals from its mines. No one owns property on Urras. No one even has the concept of owning property, as when the settlers left, they invented a whole new language which struck out the words for it. There’s no marriage and children are raised in a kibbutz system. (Hmm, come to think of it, it’s more the early days of Israel than the glory days of the USSR.)

Anarres also is limited to 70s era technology. As in the movie Colossus, there is a master computer system that helps run things, such as assigning work and allocating resources. The computer also gives children their names, simple, randomly-generated words of five or six letters each. It’s not explicitly stated by LeGuin, but the reader can assume that for an anarchist, non-governed society, an impartial AI is the way to go over humans with their powerlust and egos.

This later cover has the same design as the Alex Ebel one and captures some of its vitality, but the palette is blah and so are the planets. This Anarres doesn’t even have an atmosphere, and where are the seas? It looks like Earth’s cratered, gray moon. And what what’s that red shadow, a coming eclipse? That wasn’t in the book.

(Actually, Anarres and Urras were described as “The Cetians” — because their star was Tau Ceti —  with the implication they were a double planet system that revolved around a common center of gravity known as a barycenter.  Though one planet might have seemed like a moon to someone on it opposite. In the novel Anarres is repeatedly referred to as “the moon” which, while not incorrect, isn’t really technically correct either.)

This cover is one of those WTF ones that has nothing to do with the contents of the book. I suppose the artist was told it contained Machiavellian political machinations, so he or she depicted literal Machiavellis in a psychedelic Peter Max style. Whatever.

Needless to say the characters in the book didn’t dress like Medieval Italians in floppy velvet hats and embroidered tabards. Anarres has no fashion at all, that concept having been eliminated with the concept of property, and I can’t even recall LeGuin even wrote what people wore there.

Urras fashion, at least in the nation of A-Io where the action takes place, is described as being very different than Earth’s, both for contrast with Anarres and to add a touch of exoticism that lets the reader know this is an alien society. Both sexes shave their heads completely and women wear long, pleated skirts with bared breasts, which they cover up with a shawl when in public. Makeup, high-heeled shoes, and jewelry are also feminine attire — gemstones in navels and magnetic gems which stick to the skin. (In LeGuin’s later short story “The Day After the Revolution,” also set in A-Io, the attire of Mand, another kingdom of Urras, is stated as long kilts for men and wide trousers for women. ) Anyway, the only thing I see on this cover related to what’s in the book are a computer and a bald-headed person, but one has nothing to do with the other.

Now if you want fashion, here’s fashion.

This Romanian cover depicts Vea, the bored sister of one of Shevek’s Urrasti patrons who tries to seduce Shevek at a cocktail party. Alternately, she could be a representation of the whole “decadent” society of Urras. The artist correctly depicts her shaved head, bared breasts, and shawl, but livens them up with clunky jewelry to look more exotic. She’s posing before a… well, I don’t know what it is. Maybe an ansible, the device Shevek invents. There’s the prow of a Viking dragon-head ship in the background as well as a spacecraft. This certainly livens up the text.

This cover is equally wacky, coming across more like Dune, with a blimp. In fact dirigibles are mentioned as being used on Anarres, but only in a throwaway line in one paragraph. I suppose the man is supposed to be Shevek, the book’s physicist hero, but he looks more like Stillgar with his stillsuit and noseplug that’s flying loose.

A much better depiction of Shevek, plus the maps! Shevek looks a lot like tortured proto-punk singer Iggy Pop here, but with a monastic feel as he looks skyward in trepidation. Nice job.

There’s a whole bunch of covers like these which are plain dull, consisting of a planetscape, sun, and moon. There’s not much to be said about them except they are all typical of this one. I bet it took all of two minutes for the art director to create.

This cover tries to connect a piece of common street graffiti to the novel. But the anarchism in the book, and the anarchism espoused by street artists, are two very different concepts. It seems like a ploy to lure readers in, frankly.

This Spanish cover has the same urban feel but it’s miles more effective. It depicts the novel’s ending line, “… but his hands were empty, as they had always been.” The open hand, unclothed male torso, and blue chalky strokes create a melancholy but powerful image.

This Turkish cover also does a fine graphic job, depicting a variation on the twin planet theme by depicting an anthropomorphized sun face with a whimsical moon looking back. But it doesn’t quite fit the mood of the book.

This French cover is… uh… another Viking ship, this one with a naked lady prow, and she’s wearing a horned helmet? The spacecraft behind it sports some kind of solar sail, which is mentioned fleetingly in the book, but overall, this image is just inexplicable.

I’ll close with this piece of fanart by Melissa Elliott.

Click to see larger

 

 

 

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/21/21: Fill Your Bookshelf

The Bodleian Library at Oxford University

Sometimes when you DM or write fantasy, you need to list books in a character’s library.  Books that sound obscure, magical, historical, singular. Tolkien has his imaginary Book of Redmarch, Lovecraft his Necronomicon and Pnakotic Manuscripts. Here’s a randomgenned list of some more.

 

Library Books, Fantasy Style

A Man’s Tome of Migford

Four Books of Uvasus

Violet Libram of the Albino

The Dracburn Grimoire

Tome of Command

Whistler’s Almanac of 1032

The Rhondash Encyclopedia

The Blue Book of Scarplum

The Book of Graylion

Whipping Bible

A Chanting Guide to Salgain

The Rejuvenating Omnibus of the Monks of Kessinweep

Book of the Becalmed

The Lovewood Guide to Canine Behaviors

The Brisingap Album

The Fifty Books of the Jinsingramin

Green Almanac of the Dwarf

Book of Bright Stars

Falgar’s Nine Folios of Evil and Corruption

The Unfinished Manuscript of Clanverloss

Myrlandra’s Book of Spycraft

The Clytebant Folio

The Scarlet Text of Ruddinester

Impal’s Almanac of Illusory Substances

The Well-Read Spellmaster’s Book of Advanced Fabrication

Lovedark’s Monograph

Treatise on Drunkeness and its Relation to Small Insects

The Caratheon Book of Legendary Heroes

The Nine-form Ledger

Eugata’s Treatise on Advanced Geometry

Tome of Greenglaze

The Dark Book of Nunsark

The Iplan & Fess Guide to Illusions

The gaming site DndSpeak has a list of more (admittedly on the parody side, such as Alice’s Adventures in the Underdark).

Buttscratcher

Even barbarian heroes get itches in the most private of places.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/14/21: The Best of Twittersnips (Animals)

What would you call this little critter that looks to be part tiger, part squirrel, and part pussycat?

I’m sure there are similar undiscovered species lurking somewhere on this earth or another.

These names are culled from my Twitter feed, from the years 2017 – 2020.

 

Imaginary Animals

Mammalian predators
Gray-marbled Tigral
Bat-Eared Leopard
Lynxion
Zoyojhe
Birds
Mute Amethyst Parakeet
Emerald-Capped Tumcan
Double-Eyed Widgetoot
Black-Chinned Macaw
Poisonous snakes
Calico Desert Viper
Blue Island Krait
Copper Mulgaska
Scarlet Machete
Fish
Gumbalunga
Spitjenny
Bubbletooth Sculpin
Maiden Crab
Pink-lipped Flounder
Peahead Bream
Large herbivores
Rhinocitor
Aguacorn
Chelthant
Maszitar
Sprinzbeek

Skele-pops

These candy-colored lollipop skeletons would make any human drool.
(Artwork by Jason Limon)

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/7/21: Atompunk Computers

Atompunk computers deserve their own nomenclature. Running on vacuum tubes and early transistors, and programmed with miles of magnetic tape and punch cards, in the media they were mostly objects of menace. Many classic SF stories of the age revolve around artificial intelligence taking charge of humans and becoming their overlord.

In the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, pictured above, a computer programmed to safeguard the U.S.A.’s nuclear weapons develops sentience and manages to take over the world. Released in 1970, but set in the late twentieth century, the designers obviously took care with the machine’s design, basing it on the computers used at the time. Still, to today’s audience, it looks like nothing more than a bunch of colored buttons set in a wall, monitors based on microfiche readers, and a few teletype machines.

Interestingly the movie depicted several women and a POC man as scientists who run the machine (with the aid of those trimline phones in the background, I’m sure.)

A year after Colossus was released came a nifty made-for-TV movie called Paper Man, which starred perennial actor Dean Stockwell. A group of college kids use a computer called Q-7 to create a “paper man” — a fictitious human being with all the right stats that exists only the database. They use it to apply for credit cards and the like, but the computer winds up killing them. The promo commercials imply the murderer is an actual robot-like being made of paper that walks around.

As a child I watched the whole thing, winding up disappointed that it wasn’t a Frankenstein for the computer age. I vaguely recall the computer builds the paper man only at the very end, only for Dean Stockwell to knock its flimsy self down. Or maybe the computer spat out a series of punch cards at him. I’ve heard the whole movie is available on Amazon Prime, so I’ll have to watch it again to find out.

The computer Q-7 itself is correctly depicted as being in a campus basement, but still seems too photogenic for the time with all its flashing lights.

Here’s a pic of an early IBM model at Iowa State University for comparison.


If you need a villanous computer of your own, here’s a randomgenned list.

 

Computers of the Atompunk Age

Turboscholar

Cyclogenius

Intelli III

Mentat 9

The Iron Scholar

Alphawizard

Dr. Astro

Telethinker 5000

Sim-Wiz 87

Simscholar

Mechano-Wiz

Delta Sage Mark II

Encyclo-WIZZ

Mentastic

SMART-O-VAC

Intellithink

Transintellivac V

RAMiac 6

Sola-Brain X

Ceregram

Sea Serpent

Arthur Rackham’s version of a sea monster featuring some very wild dentition.

Secret Agent [Reading Challenge 2021]

Secret Agent
Britain’s Wartime Secret Service

by David Stafford
BBC Worldwide, 2000

[Challenge # 12 : A book featuring spies or espionage.]

Super-spy shenanigans, the kind we’re familiar with from James Bond movies and Cold War espionage novels, began in WWII — in the offices of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, a secret agency separate from the regular spy agency, the SIS. The SOE dealt with the dirtier aspects of the war, like destroying enemy infrastructure, working with resistance groups inside Nazi Europe, assassination, and propaganda. This book, written in conjunction with a BBC TV documentary series that came out in 2000, acts as both an accompaniment and extension of it.

I have to say I learned a lot, but also that it was kind of dull. This was probably because the book was designed for those who had already seen the documentary and wanted to go more in depth on the subject matter. But it didn’t help that the more exciting SOE episodes from the war, such as the destruction of a heavy water plant in Norway that foiled Nazi Germany’s plans for an atom bomb, were rendered lackadaisically. I know this wasn’t supposed to be a thriller novel, but I just didn’t feel the danger and risk.

It didn’t help that a lot of the reminisces of the folks who actually worked in the SOE during the war were along the lines of “Captain Jenkins was a rough and tough jolly sort of fellow who knew his P’s and Q’s.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but it did seem that was all most of them had to say. The book and documentary came out in 2000, so I’m sure many of those folks have passed by now.

(That brings up a haunting point: within my lifetime, all of the people who had first-hand memories of  WWII will be gone, victims to fighters to perpetrators.)

Another fault of the book is that it barely mentioned the most spectacular of the SOE’s successes, the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich.

The book did have some interesting parts, such as the dangers of the radio operators, who accompanied the teams of agents on enemy territory. The operators were a must-have as they were the only means of communication with the agency. The messages were heavily coded, and went first to a human radio operator in England who transcribed them, then on to a decoder who resolved the actual message. Radio technology being what it is, they were often heavily garbled. But there were no international phone lines or internet back then. The radio sets were a little larger than what might fit in a cigar box, and transmission was very risky as the Nazi occupiers had means to sniff out locations. For safety’s sake the radio operators were always on the move.

Other interesting parts dealt with a branch of the SOE that made forgeries and primitive James Bond-like gadgets, such as an exploding rat. Seriously.

I also learned some things I’d rather not know, such as the fate of several women SOE agents, who captured and executed at a German concentration camp — injected with Phenol (phenolbarbital) and shoved into a cremation oven still alive, though presumably unconscious. The incident so traumatized the Nazi guard that did the deed he ran away from the camp and never went back.

I have to say the book did inspire an interest in the time period for me. I’ve watched several good movies and documentaries on Nazi Germany and also on the Mossad, who was responsible for bringing Adolf Eichmann to justice.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/31/21: Atompunk Robots

Tobor the Great, from the 1954 movie of the same name

Atompunk robots (those in media from 1945 – 1965) tend to have the same sort of names. Short ones like Gort, cutesy ones like Robbie or Tobor (“Robot” spelled backwards) or functional ones combining scientific terms with letters and numbers. That’s the sort I was after here with this randomly generated list. These names showed up most frequently on toys, models, and illustrations, perhaps inspired by early names for computers and rockets. As always, some silliness was generated.

 

Robots of the Atompunk Age

Urani-33

Cyber N-48

Colossus 1

Turboman

Centauriton

Cryptino

Tetrabolt the Invincible

Cometsprocket

Unit X-55

Magna 51

Ovibot

Meteor 5

Unit Centauri

The Iron Colossus

Turbo-One The Indefatiguable

Automaton Z-945

Crypton 58

Gigantino

Atrius

Symano

Atom-3

Servantmech 963

Unilino

Sparkov

Motorius

The Iron Terror

Red Unit E-35

Roto 42

Masero The Indomitable

Botimus

Gog 4

The Iron Defender

Astroton

Omni 5

Getting Around in the Atompunk Age

 

One of the futurism themes of the post-WWII era was transportation. This makes sense. Innovations in manufacturing and aircraft design,  the growth of large cities, and the need for improved highway systems and vehicles  all came together in a magic moment, in the Western world at least. Germany had its Autobahn, Britain the M- series of roads, and the US the Interstate system of super-highways. All of these promised a world of speed and possibilities.

Illustration by Arthur Radebaugh

The Bohn corporation only made alloys, but you’d never know it from their series of ads depicting exotic vehicles in the early years of the Atompunk age. None of which were ever built. But this twin-rotor helicopter has a distant military cousin, the Boeing Chinook.

A French company promised a future flying in doughnut-shaped coléoptère aircraft, which had the ability to take off and land on its tail so long runways were not needed. But the technology just wasn’t there yet, prompting problems with controlling the ungainly beast. There was also the problem of how to load passengers.

The Vanadium Corporation of America muscled into Bohn’s act, touting not only a Cadillac-like milk delivery truck, but also an underslung monorail.


These small monorail cars must have been inspired by Disneyland’s Peoplemover, long lost in the Steampunk revival of Futureworld. Slightly larger versions now shuttle passengers around airports.


How’s this for a wild ride? It’s hard to say if this two-story train and its rail is sailing off into the sky or tethered by those horseshow-shaped pylons to the earth. I say it’s sailing off, the horseshoes containing an antigravity function.


This institutional ad featured a real-life flying saucer car, like that seen on the cartoon show The Jetsons. Interestingly Mom is driving it with ease, a paper sack of groceries in the seat beside her as there’s no trunk. The Pointer dog apparently came along for the ride.


The US Airforce came out with a whole zoo of exotic jets during this time. This one is a follow-up to the A-12 / SR-71 Blackbird.

Not to be outdone, the US Navy came up with this long-necked ekranoplan design which ran on skis. Did it have its own nuclear reactor on board? Of course!