The Wheel of Time, Season 1 [Review]

 

Finally got around to watching the first season of The Wheel of Time, the 2021 Amazon production based on the fantasy book series by the late Robert Jordan. The first book was published in 1990 and last, number 14, in 2013, finished by author Brandon Sanderson with the approval of Jordan’s widow (who really deserved co-writing credit on the whole thing.) As a young’un I had made it up to book six before pooping out. Unlike the Dune series, which spanned centuries, The Wheel of Time chronicles only a few years, but there was a LOT going on in those few years.

Thinking about it gave me a Mandela Moment. I was so sure I had read it in the 1980s, in college, when I was going to SF conventions with my cousin and sewing costumes for them; but no, the first book came out two years after I’d moved to the West Coast to make a life on my own. My confusion came about because it’s such a prototypical 1980s fantasy. Fantasy series published then tended to be of the Tolkien mold: quests with wizards, elves, goggle-eyed farmboys, and a mysterious, incorporeal baddie. The Sword of Shannara (1977) was the first of these; another influential one was David Eddings’ Belgariad series, the first book of which was published in 1982, followed by the first Discworld book in 1983. The Dragonlance books, darker, cheesier, and more baroque, continued the trend in 1984. There were other types of fantasy around, of course. But while series like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were critically lauded, it’s the lighter, sillier ones that today’s adult fans remember and have affection for.

The Wheel of Time, when it began, had just the right recipe: immersive, character-driven fantasy that was new, but not too new. Jordan’s world was a mix of European settings with Asian philosophies, with a Dune-like hunt for a Kwisatz Haderach in the person of The Dragon, an all-powerful warrior who will either save the world, or end it. The story begins when Orc-analogues called Trollocs attack the village of the three main protagonists and their love interests, causing them to flee with Moiraine, a member of the Aes Sedai (a Bene Gesserit-like society of women) who knows the three are important to “the weaving of the pattern” – that is, major players in whatever conflict to follow – and must protect them, because one might be The Dragon.

On the journey to the city of the Aes Sedai things go wrong, then wronger, as the friends are broken up, reunited, and break apart again; one of the main pleasures of the plot, as with any good soap opera, is seeing who winds up with who, romantically. Jordan began his writing career by doing Conan novels, and those lessons show in WoT: an episodic structure; elements that are novel, yet familiar; a European fantasy world full of past glories, now pulling itself back together.

This was huge project to adapt, more so than anything by Tolkien, just because of the many characters and wandering plotlines, which is likely why it appealed to Amazon programmers looking around for the next Game of Thrones. Its popularity couldn’t have hurt, either.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/7/22: Galaxies

Spiral galaxy airbrushed on the back of a custom van.

Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools and no mess.

Now, all you need is a text prompt and an AI art engine, as I’ve discovered with these depictions of Jadis/The White Witch and unknown Narnian monarchs. As depictions of humans, they are far from perfect, and you’d never publish them professionally (unless you’re really, really stupid.) But galaxies are less complex than the human figure, and they don’t vary as much. There are no green or purple galaxies, for example, and they are always depicted against a background of black with white stars. You don’t find them laying on the lawn or in a basket of fresh laundry. Plus, there are tons of galaxy photos available online for the AI to learn from.

Left to right: Rearing Cobra Galaxy, Cheerio Galaxy, Swirling Tricycle Galaxy.
(Note: I did have to do some Photoshop fiddling with them to look more realistic.)

The prompts I’ve used here are from the list of imaginary galaxies below, all randomgenned from the typical names, locations, types, and characteristics of galaxies that already exist.  If you are writing any kind of SF, or creating any kind of SF game, and need a galaxy to stick in somewhere, try one of these.

(If you don’t know anything at all about the different types of galaxies, start here.)

 

Galaxies

Alpha and Omega Galaxy, located in Orion. A large attractive spiral, seen at a 60 degree angle, that has four loosely structured lanes. A starburst galaxy generating many hot young stars.

Black Pizza Galaxy in Chamaeleon, 304 million light years away. A large irregular galaxy that is very luminous, but cloaked by several large dust clouds, one of which appears as the dark triangular “slice” that gives the galaxy its name. This galaxy appears to be forming arms but has no nucleus.

Capricornus NGC4569, a medium-sized spiral galaxy with tightly wrapped arms. Due to a passing encounter with an ultradiffuse dwarf irregular galaxy it has a long tidal tail full of metal-rich stars. Part of the Local Group.

Caterpillar Galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way with a fuzzy, stretched-out appearance.

Cheerio Galaxy: Located in Antlia, 57 million light years away. A ring galaxy with a chubby appearance. Its small nucleus is full of supergiant stars.

Chromosome Galaxy, two colliding galaxies seen edge-on and touching so they look like a chromosome or the letter H.

Eta Indi 29, also known as the Orchard Galaxy. A small flocculent spiral galaxy with indistinct arms.

Huygens 255, a distant spiral with a doubled ring structure from a past merger, from which it received a second nucleus and a short tidal tail.

Musca 9, also known as the Fish Galaxy. A medium sized spiral with multiple arms. Though it contains many old red stars it is very luminous due to its overlarge nucleus.

Norma 819, a giant Grand Design spiral galaxy with multiple arms.

Northern Kraken Galaxy in Ursa Major, a large, loose spiral galaxy with arms that look like the tentacles of its namesake. A Seyfert galaxy that is also a strong gamma-ray source.

Rearing Cobra Galaxy in Virgo, a small, loose barred spiral galaxy with two arms that is part of the Local Group. Named for its distinct shape.

Sagittarius 41, also known as the Heavy Hubcap Galaxy. A giant-sized spiral with a weak inner ring structure and bright, well-formed outer rings.

Small Eridanus Galaxy, 574 million light years distant. A small elliptical galaxy that has no nucleus and contains old red stars.

Swirling Cyclone Galaxy in Indus, a medium-sized spiral with two tight, compact arms and a dust lane that is especially dense and dark. A starburst galaxy that has a large halo and at least three hundred globular clusters.

Swirling Tricycle Galaxy in Canis Major, a medium-sized, very perturbed galaxy that resembles its namesake. Merging with another galaxy known as Flamsteed’s Anomaly.

Turtle Galaxy, an ultradiffuse dwarf that has been severely disrupted by the Andromeda Galaxy of which it is a satellite.

Volans Object, 19 million light years distant. A large ring galaxy with a bright center that looks like it is becoming undone, with a long tidal tail of stars on one side and a short tail on the opposite side. Both tails are forming new stars. The entire galaxy is sending off gamma and radio waves.

Unicorn in the Woods

Now that’s one funny-looking unicorn!

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 [Review]

 

Gil-Galad, King of the Elven nation of Lindor, knows something’s up with Sauron.

Much has been said about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon Prime’s new series set in the Second Age of  Middle Earth. Some fans are enthusiastic about the idea, others skeptical. (I can understand the latter after recently watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies.) Even before it was released many fans damned the series as a money-grab by Amazon. The reasoning being that it was not based on a work of fiction, but the Appendices found at the rear of The Return of the King, which was basically a series of reference articles for the trilogy that had hints of stories in them. It was this material, purchased separately at a 2017 auction, the producers intend to flesh out, which has purist fans up in arms.

It’s certainly not the usual way to create a fantasy series, especially one by Mr. Tolkien, who was, when he was alive, adamant that LoTR not enter cinematic territory. (The much-ballyhooed Beatles version that never came to fruition happened because Tolkien reluctantly sold the rights to fulfill a tax bill.) Tolkien was even unenthusiastic about the children’s stage versions of The Hobbit that took place in his lifetime. He was not alone in this; peers P. L. Travers (the Mary Poppins series) and C. S. Lewis were also resistant to having their books commercially adapted. His ideas about the sanctity of his creation, echoed by his son Christopher, carried over to many fans.

The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the multi-volume History of Middle-earth were not part of the deal, even though the Appendices included some of their material. Then again, all of the former are appendices of a sort, or were, until edited by Christopher into a more coherent form from his father’s sometimes-conflicting notes. (Christopher Tolkien has passed away in 2020, so what will happen with that material now is up for grabs.) Tolkien always considered the Appendices an integral part of LoTR that added to and enhanced the work. They weren’t something stuck in just for padding, so any arguments that the Appendices aren’t viable  enough for adaptation are just wrong. The Rings of Power fleshes out that material, using a team of writers to create an overarching plotline and new characters.

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The World of the Castrati
[Reading Challenge 2022]

 


The World of the Castrati

by Patrick Barbier
Souvenir Press, 1998

[Challenge # 32 : A book taking place in Europe or is about Europe.]

I got this book from one of my favorite places to get free reading material, my neighbor’s Little Free Library which has rarely failed me. I’d enjoyed both the movie Farinelli and the Anne Rice historical novel about castrati, Cry to Heaven, so when I saw this book there I decided to learn more about the topic. For my reading challenge, it fit into the “European” category because castrati were a singularly European phenomenon.

Though it looked like it would be scandalous and juicy (as the movie Farinelli was) the execution was on the dry side. I think someone would need a grounding in the history of opera seria (Italian opera) first to really “get” it. Certainly they’d need to be familiar with the Italian musical terms used to describe operatic singing. Though I picked up these from the text, it was a struggle for me not knowing what the singing the author was describing sounded like, or was meant to sound like. Which is of course true, as there are no castrated men singing opera today and making recordings for listeners to hear them. But even a glossary of terms would have been nice. The author is a professor of the history of opera so why he didn’t, I can’t guess.

I don’t think the overly academic approach helped the subject matter either. He divided the book into chapters based on a castrato’s life: childhood castration, conscription into an Italian music school, early performances, performing at the opera, etc. and then he would give myriad examples of how all the major castrati went through these passages. The problem with that it was very easy to get all these singers mixed up so they became a castrati zupa. I’d rather he’d just concentrated on a few singers to go in-depth on and make anecdotes out of all the others. What worked with this method, though, was describing the background history, and some of that was very fascinating, like how it was customary for Italians to talk loudly, eat, and socialize as they watched that week’s opera with no regard for the performers.

A Baroque opera with a stage showing forced perspective, a common trick of the era

Everything about that world of the 1600s and 1700s was so dramatic and colorful, it seems a shame more pictures weren’t included to make it more of a coffee-table book.

The entire era was a glorious yet disquieting one in European music, for the boys who were castrated to feed the mania had no choice in the matter, and of course some of them died from the operation or never developed decent voices even after many years of grueling schooling. And grueling lessons they were, concentrating on breathing and developing the lungs, larynx and ribcage to the hit the supernaturally high notes so beloved of the Italian public. These singers were truly athletes; in the days before electrical amplification voices had to reach into the highest seats of the theater, the upper recesses of the church. Though they were the cossetted pop stars of their day they were produced in a manner similar to the endless stream of boy bands coming out of the US or Korea, created to fill a need that, even at its height, was always questionable, and questioned, for reasons of taste and morality.

In the end, I enjoyed did enjoy learning about early opera but, being there are no castrati around today who can recreate those sounds, the whole book was like a what-if.

The End of Another Summer of Narnia

King Peter hunting the White Stag, from the 1979 animated TV special.

Looks like we’ve come to the end of another Summer of Narnia. I thought that this would be the last one, but there’s yet plenty more material to be mined, depictions to critique, maps to draw and characters to analyze. Before I ride off to hunt the White Stag, I’ll say it’s been fun!

The Problem of Susan and Other Stories [Review]

The Problem of Susan and Other Stories

by Neil Gaiman (writer);  P. Craig Russell (art and adpatation); Scott Hampton (art);  Paul Chadwick (art), Lovern Kindzierski (art); Galen Showman, Rick Parker, Gaspar Saladino (lettering)

Dark Horse Books, 2019

Finally, after  2 1/2 years, I’m getting around to writing a review of this book.

For those who are not familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia and how it has been analyzed by fans and literary critics alike, “The Problem of Susan” refers to how, in the last book, she is revealed to be “no longer a friend of Narnia” because she no longer believes in it and is more interested in the adult world of “invitations, nylons, and lipstick.” For the young, first-time reader, it comes as quite a shock that she’s dismissed it all as a childhood game, because she’s always been such an integral part of it. Of course, this means that at the end of the book she lives, while everyone else who had a connection to Narnia dies in a horrible train crash. But it also means she has lost her entire family. As far as I know, Lewis never brought up this rather cruel point. He did tell a young fan in a letter that he is sure Susan will eventually find her way back to Aslan and Narnia and invites her to tell that story herself, which is kind of sweet. But it doesn’t answer the question of how Susan deals with the enormity of the tragedy she suffers, and if, given how she has turned her back on God (Aslan/Narnia), it is even fair.

(It was only as an adult fan that I considered this. It was one of those things that goes over a child’s head as most have no conception of such a tragedy.)

As with the stag hunt that returns the Pevensies to England, many Narnian fans have turned to fanfic to make sense of this disturbing concept. Others who were fans as children turned violently against the series as adults. J. K. Rowling and Phillip Pullman are two of Narnia’s more vociferous critics, as well as being writers of YA fiction themselves. I’m not going to go into their views here; they are available with an internet search if anyone is curious. But it’s clear to me neither one had re-read the book before spouting their claims.

Neil Gaiman is another author, and fan, trying to make sense of Susan’s exclusion. In 2009 he wrote a short story about it, titled, well, “The Problem of Susan.” Being as Narnia is still under copyright, he had to nip and tuck the subject matter a bit to avoid legal problems with the Lewis estate, and by some accounts, he just barely skated by. However, it was very clear who the story was about and why she was hurting. (If you haven’t read the whole of the Chronicles of Narnia… and are not acquainted with TPoS… you’d likely be completely baffled.)

From that short story, this graphic adaptation was created. It’s a gorgeous work, and a very disturbing one, which was why it has taken me so long to write this review. Because of my own puzzlement with it, this review is going to take the form of a recap in which I critique it as a whole and not split it between story, art, and overall design.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/31/22: Monarch Portraits of Narnia (Narnia XLIII)

I’m going to do something different for this post of WW. I’m going to post AI-created portraits of randomly generated Narnian monarchs using StarryAI. (Starry-Eyed, get it?)  These monarchs are intended to be used in Narnian fanfics, but they could be used in any work of fantasy fiction as well.

First, Queen Thuma of the Seven Isles.

This piece of almost-random art says so much about her character! She’s dark-skinned, joyful, wears a rich gold satin gown, and is holding a banner with a coat of arms on her lap. We can guess the crest belongs to her line; it looks like a golden wave.  Her crown is… well, it looks like it’s made out of woven grass, topped with some sort of wild-growing cacti. (Though she is a great Queen, still she wears the traditional headdress of her ancestors.) In the background is a ship, the sea, and part of the dramatic rock formations of her kingdom. A bunch of horsemen and soldiers, some with plumed helms, mill around as well. Might the portrait commemorate some battle won?

And now on to another mighty monarch, King Virigo of the Wild Lands of the North. Sadly, his back is to us, and he’s taken a quick dip in one of the pools in his palace garden. Or, perhaps he’s fallen while admiring those two fountains in the background. He’s not as young as he was. Note his rich blue velvet jacket, the scabbard of a sword across his back, his black hat with white embroidery and feather decorations, as well as a gilded tree branch or antler.  He’s a great huntsman, but also enjoys the intrigue of Court, by his white powdered wig. I think the artist might be some alternate-world version of Velasquez.

Now I’ll move on the NightCafe, which has added more features since the last time I used it. This is Prince Petronus of Archenland.

This time I used the prompt “Official portrait of Prince Petronus of Archenland” and look what a difference it’s made! It wouldn’t put an actual artist out of business, but it does create a vivid personality, even if his clothing looks, ah, randomly put together. The surprise here is his shapely bald head and, by his ‘stache and slight beard, he was a redhead. I like it so much I’ll go ahead and generate another one.

Moving to the south, here is Queen Kufarra of Calormen and the Flaming Mountain of Lagour; except, there is no Flaming Mountain, just her attendant in a flaming red dress. Other than that, the AI got the desert setting right, the opulent clothing and throne, and the cruel, regal nature of a Calormene Queen, which is mighty impressive. Her head is cut off at the eyes, but we can see enough to tell she’s wearing sunglasses.

The same wonkiness that occurs around clothing and arm positioning in Petronus’s portrait is echoed here. But enough exists to inspire her character. That’s what it’s all about, right?