Review: Vixen 03, by Clive Cussler

New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 364.

The real point of transition in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series from the small-scale novels of the early years (like The Mediterranean Caper and Raise the Titanic!) to the large-scale plots of his later books (like Sahara) was Deep Six, but the much earlier Vixen 03 still represents a tentative step in that direction. It is much more compact, but has something of the later book's divided plot structure, starting with two different threads that eventually tie together - Pitt's happening upon mysterious aircraft wreckage while on vacation in Colorado's Sawatch mountains with his girlfriend Loren Smith (introduced here for the first time); and the battle of the South African government against African-American expatriate Hiram Lusana's anti-apartheid guerrilla group African Army of the Revolution, in which each seeks the support of the United States.

The story has its share of implausibilities, particularly at the levels of geopolitics and technology. The D.C. hijinks, a frequent weak point of technothriller writing, have members of the House of Representatives making American foreign policy in a simplified, sanitized near-vacuum. (The soap operatic sleaze of the blackmail attempt against Loren merely underlines the absence of the real sleaze of practical politics from Cussler's portrait of the Beltway.1) The prospect of the U.S.'s supporting Communist-backed South African guerrillas against their government in the midst of the Cold War seems more like a rightist fear of radical (or radical chic) influence over American foreign policy than a plausible extrapolation. (We see Hiram Lusana lobbying in D.C. - with the help of Hollywood starlet Felicia Collins - but no Jack Abramoff-type making Pretoria's case, with the help of the Hollywood connections that brought us Red Scorpion.2) The Quick Death virus that ends up playing a key role in the plot is a rather convenient and casual creation, as its very name indicates. (It kills exposed humans in minutes, and renders infected areas uninhabitable for centuries - but while being unkillable by anything else, is totally and instantly neutralized by immersion in water.)

In fairness, though, authorial rigor in these areas (let alone insight into the great affairs of the day) is rarely the attraction of the Dirk Pitt novel. Rather what compels is the adventure Cussler spins out of them, and this book certainly provides its fair share of undersea exploration, nautical mystery and over-the-top action. It is the South African plot line which initially supplies the last, but the relatively tight writing and fast pace soon enough bring on the convergence. And this culminates in a climax that may have lost something of the retro appeal it had at the time of the book's publication, but which is sufficiently intricate, inventive and spectacular to remain one of Cussler's more memorable thirty-five prolific years on.3

1. One can also see the blackmail plot, like the heavier accent on sex in Cussler's '70s-era work, as a concession to the fashions of the period (and perhaps, the influence of a certain British predecessor), preceding our era of celibate action heroes.
2. It is worth remembering that Vixen 03 appeared the very same year as Graham Greene's classic spy novel The Human Factor, which offered a very different, and much more realistic, take on the situation.
3. This would be a matter of certain Defense Department procurement decisions which will be immediately apparent to any reader familiar with the 600-Ship Navy program initiated in the 1980s.

H.G. Wells' "Digression on Novels"

H.G. Wells was quite frank about the fact that when writing he was more interested in the broader "scene" than in the figures within it, and in a "ventilation of the issue" at hand than Flaubertian technical niceties--in the wide world, and considerations of it, than the "turns and tricks" of character and form.

That he worked in this way as a writer got him attacked by, among others, Henry James (in "The New Novel"), by Virginia Woolf (in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"), by that key figure in the development of the "New Criticism" and wrecker of quite a few literary reputations, Mark Schorer (in his essay, "Technique as Discovery"), all of whom had quite different ideas about just what makes literature worthwhile.1

By and large, those who wish to appear reputable stand with James, Woolf and Schorer, on this and many another point, with the result that Wells is far less reputable than he used to be. Still, it seems to me that it was those writers most attentive to scene and issue who were the first to make strong impressions on me as a reader, and have continued to make the strongest impressions--be they nineteenth century Balzacs and Tolstoys, twentieth century Lewises, or writers in that scene-and-issue-oriented genre to which Wells contributed so much, science fiction (even after I have become more appreciative of the view of James and company). And much as Wells may have failed to win the critics over to his way of thinking, I can think of no other who has made as strong and clear a case as Wells did for it in "The Digression on Novels" in his Experiment in Autobiography.

1. Besides Wells, he did a good deal of damage to the standing of Sinclair Lewis with a notoriously unflattering biography.

The Hikikomori and the Lost Decade That Never Ended

Many years ago Welcome to the N.H.K. introduced me to the term "hikikomori."

Much as I enjoyed the show, looking back later I noted that it lacked a particular virtue in its treatment of its issue--what one might call a social vision. Certainly Tatsuhiro Sato's problems were explained in terms of personal psychology--and rather quirkily, too--so that while his story sheds light on what they are going through, it does not say very much about why they are going through it.

Still, some have tried to explain the matter, often interpreting it as a type of social withdrawal. Quite often commentators link it to the transitional years of the '90s in Japan's economic history, which badly damaged the conventional path to "success." Certainly not everyone who went to school got into a competitive college, and went from there to a lifelong job with a prestigious company and a comfortably middle-class standard of living in even the most prosperous years. Far from it. However, the realities of credentialing crisis, higher structural unemployment, contingent employment and generally stagnant incomes and decreasing job security, made both the goal and the means for attaining it seem much less plausible than before--and retreat a more attractive option.

However, such writers rarely seem to delve very deeply into those troubles. This makes their discussion less persuasive because what happened in Japan also happened pretty much everywhere else.

Still, it may be that the shock was sharper in Japan's case. To go by the data, it may be said that the post-war boom that came to a halt in much of the world in the early '70s lasted two decades longer there.1 And on the whole the change in incomes and living standards was larger. Where per capita income in the U.S. doubled between 1945 and 1991, it rose fourteen-fold in Japan during those same years.

This was in part a reflection of the fact that Japan was so much further behind the wealthiest nations at the start of this period; and of the fact that where the U.S. had boomed during World War II, Japan was devastated, per capita GDP in 1945 reduced to about half the 1940 level. Still, the longer duration of the boom years, and the more dramatic expansion of prosperity, doubtless had an effect on expectations. So did the massive stock-and-real estate bubble of those last years of the boom, which likely made things seem even rosier than they were (even if it was mainly a case of the rich getting richer).

And just as the period of growth was more dramatic, so was the stagnation that followed it. The "lost decade" of the '90s never quite came to an end, growth in the last two-and-a-half decades consistently feeble, even when measured by the common experience of other industrialized nations.2

In short, the boom in Japan was longer and more spectacular than in just about any other industrialized country, followed by a seemingly overnight transition to stagnation that was lengthier and deeper than in just about any other industrialized country, almost as if a switch had been flicked. The inflation and puncturing of a historic bubble amplified the effect. And so hard enough as the shift from boom to bust was elsewhere, one may imagine that it was even harder here.

Making matters worse, it is not the middle-aged Company Man but the new job-seeker just out of school who is most exposed to the shock, so that they feel it all that much more--and get that much less understanding from their elders. The difference in personal experience between one generation and another likely meant that when the son or daughter was in the unenviable position of answering the question "Why don't you have a job yet?" mom and dad were much less likely to get it--especially with the Japanese media breathlessly stigmatizing and scapegoating "freeters," "NEETs" and others who, for whatever reason, do not conform to societal expectations, a tendency which did not change in line with the new economic realities.

Does that explain everything about the situation? Of course not. But the more extreme pattern of the boom-and-bust, and the inevitable lagging of social attitudes behind it (which would seem commensurately extreme), does seem something to take into account when talking about how the economic situation contributes to a pattern of social withdrawal.

1. According to the statistics at the Maddison Project, between 1973 and 1991 American per capita GDP grew at the rate of about 1.8 percent a year, but the rate was 3 percent a year in Japan, more like what the U.S. had in its boom years.
2. The Maddison data indicate that per capita income growth in Japan was 0.7 percent a year--compared with 1.5 percent a year in the U.S..

Thomas Piketty and Pop Culture

Most reviewers (at any rate, those who do not instantly react with hostility to the mere idea of the project) seem to agree that Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is hugely impressive as a round-up of the available data on the subject of inequality.

It has been more vulnerable on the question of its analysis of that data. (James K. Galbraith had the measure of its weaknesses in his review.1)

However, the book is nonetheless packed with interesting and at times quite persuasive observations and arguments.

One surprise was the attention Piketty devoted to cultural depictions of wealth. Certainly his most extensive discussions of this type are of novels by Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac (particularly Sense and Sensibility and Pere Goriot). However, he also pays attention to more recent work--perhaps appropriately turning his attention from novels to American television. As he notes, explicit monetary reference has become less common as a result of inflation confusing the significance of numbers over even short periods of time.

More significantly, he notes that rentiers have been less common. Instead inequality is consistently presented, and justified, as a function of "disparities with respect to work, wages and skills . . . based on merit, education and the social utility of elites."

Not only does it often seem as if "everyone" in television dramas a member of a prestigious profession, but they tend to be at the top of that profession--a top litigator at a blue-chip firm, or a celebrated surgeon, for example. Corporate gods and tech billionaires are a dime a dozen. And their status is always made out to be a reflection not of the advantages of privileged birth, familial connections, school ties, mealy-mouthed careerist conformism, old-fashioned corruption, or sheer good luck, but their extraordinary personal excellence, first, last and always.

Indeed, "everyone" constantly name-drops the elite institutions with which they have been affiliated, on the basis of pure merit, it would seem, since "everyone" was first in their class, wherever it was they went. "Everyone" with a fortune is self-made, through extraordinary entrepreneurship, and very likely also the extraordinary technical skill that enabled them to invent something. And as if their career accomplishments are not enough, "everyone" speaks a dozen languages, plays the piano like a virtuoso, fences like Cyrano, fights like Bruce Lee, pilots their own plane and recites Shakespeare from memory (never mind when they would have had the time to learn all this), all while being immaculately groomed and unfailingly articulate in a way that somehow real-life CEOs, billionaires and chief executives (a Donald Trump, a Silvio Berlusconi, a Taro Aso) never seem to be.

Indeed, Piketty observes that "It is not unreasonable to interpret such series' as offering a hymn to a just inequality." And I suspect how one responds to such a hymn might be a factor in how we respond to such shows. Might it be that being beaten over the head with this "hymn to inequality" is a factor in the boredom or resentment so many feel toward Mary Sue and Gary Stu characters, unacknowledged in any explicit way because of a reticence to talking about inequality or class? It seems an idea worth considering.

1. The most important of these is that Piketty's book is "about the valuation placed on tangible and financial assets," rather than capital, as well as the distribution of those assets through time, and the inheritance of wealth from one generation to the next"--and that while it mostly covers this well, it is a more limited thing than the work's apparent "ambitions," or its "title, length, and reception" suggest.

Remembering the Battle of Britain

Along with the fall of the Third Republic and the founding of Vichy, July 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain--which is, of course, being commemorated in quite a different fashion.

I was recently surprised to read that half (or more) of Britons aged 18 to 24 surveyed did not know what the Battle of Britain was.

Perhaps it was a surprise because, while in the U.S. we hear such stories all the time, we are less used to such news from other countries.

However, it may also be a matter of the impression we often get in the U.S. of the attitude toward history in Britain--in particular, that while Americans are uninterested in, British society is utterly steeped in the memory of the past, and not least that of World War II.

I think, for instance, of Simon Winder's book The Man Who Saved Britain, and his recounting of his childhood, which seemed utterly saturated with the war.

Of course, Winder (born in 1963) belonged to a different generation which, if it did not actually experience the war itself, was still surrounded by people who had been deeply affected by the conflict.

After all, Britain fought the war for six years--much longer than, for example, the United States did. Not only did some five million Britons served in uniform, but the civilian population was subject to extended periods of aerial bombing, which killed tens of thousands, and destroyed the homes and disrupted the lives of many more, so that a good many of them were driven to live in air-raid shelters. (Some people were even born in air-raid shelters. Jerry Springer was one of them.) U-boats stalked the surrounding seas, making even the food supply precarious. Between bomb damage and sunken ships, between the running down of the country's plant amid an all-out production effort and the sell-off of foreign assets, the country lost a quarter of its wealth (according to the official report, anyway), amassed vast new debts, went bankrupt. The result was that its people were subject to rationing, not just during the war, but for many years afterward.

And as one might expect from such a conflict, it had profound consequences: the end of world power status, and empire, and the old world order. It meant a change in the old order at home, too--Labor Britain, the post-war consensus. Some didn't much like this. (Ian Fleming was of them.) Others, more numerous one imagines but less privileged and so less likely to be heard, were more sanguine. But in either case this meant a very different world, and these events not the sort quickly forgotten.

However, today one would have to have lived beyond the usual life expectancy to have a memory of having held any position of real, official responsibility during the war. Anyone under seventy-five has no personal memory of the war years whatsoever. Anyone under sixty cannot even remember rationing or conscription.

The result is that the war, and even its aftermath, have long been receding beyond the mental horizon of most of those living now, in and out of Britain. Increasingly become the sort of thing one knows not firsthand, or even secondhand from the people around them, but only from history class, material learned for the test and then promptly forgotten, unless one particularly cares to remember--a thing that even the presence of such events in film and on television (say, Spitfires shooting it out with Daleks on Doctor Who) may obscure.

Just like the Battle of Waterloo, about which even fewer people know, to go by a survey for the 200th anniversary of Waterloo.

A lot of people seem to think that one's simply an Abba song.

Review: The Collapse of the Third Republic, by William L. Shirer

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969, pp. 1082.

Discussing William Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry Into the Fall of France in 1940, it is difficult to avoid comparing it to his better-known book on Nazi Germany. Indeed, the book's jacket encourages it, the hardcover edition describing Collapse as a work which "complements and completes the dramatic story of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

In fairness, Shirer's focus here is narrower--not the rise and fall of an empire, however short-lived, but an examination of a single military defeat and its aftermath, that of the French in May and June 1940, an event now taken for granted, and even regarded as all too predictable, but which at the time staggered observers. (Indeed, one reason the Germans had no plan for invading Britain was that the speed and degree of Germany's success took Berlin completely by surprise.) However, as the sheer size of the book (1,082 pages) suggests, Shirer plunges fairly deeply into French history for his answer, The Collapse of the Third Republic actually beginning with the troubled birth of the Third Republic. Additionally, he devotes more time to the broader situation. While too good a historian to overlook the larger context, Shirer's account in Rise and Fall was tightly focused on the principal players, particularly Hitler and his collaborators, and their machinations. Here, one gets a broader vision of the seven-decade life of the Republic.

In Shirer's account the early decades of the Republic's history saw France emerge--or more properly, reemerge--as a modern industrial power, and leading light of world culture. However, they were also a period of bitter struggle between republican and royalist, state and Church, worker and bourgeois, which time and again pointed up the republic's weak foundations. Almost as if the Old Regime were only a recent memory, aristocrats and churchmen wished to see a king on the throne again, and for the religious orders to have the run of the schools. The great mass of working people had little say in political life, and little share in the country's material progress, the country a laggard in areas like the recognition of organized labor or the organization of a welfare state. (Indeed, Shirer terms the French working class the most alienated in Europe, which is really saying something.) And even the bourgeoisie which did so much to establish republicanism in France, and did very well for themselves out of the new order, were little more attached to it, certainly not enough to pay taxes for it, or make slight concessions to the less privileged majority, preferring instead to look to potential dictators as soon as the lower classes got troublesome. Thus the country went from crisis to crisis--Boulanger, Dreyfus, fiscal policies and financial scandals that even in this age can scarcely be believed--while getting new governments with alarming frequency. (In about seventy years there were eighty-five Prime Ministers, or about one every ten months.)

Still, important as events inside France were, there was also the importance of larger, thoroughly international events--World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, all of which reacted upon France's own internal politics, which in turn reacted upon those events. The wartime experience created widespread pacifist sentiment, and drove French military practice away from extreme fixation on the offensive to equally extreme fixation on the defensive. The Russian Revolution increased the right's anxieties about the left—and especially when the Depression deepened the clash of classes, made it more dubious about the Republic, more conciliatory toward Hitler, less willing to ally with the Soviets. For its part, the French Communist Party's adherence to Moscow's shifting line (especially after Molotov-Ribbentrop) put it in opposition to confrontation with Germany. And all of it combined to make consensus impossible year in, year out, helping to create the geo-strategic situation the country faced in 1939--as well as determining the way in which the French army ended up fighting its war, and the French polity dealt with the subsequent military defeat. Indeed, by page two hundred the worldwide economic and political crisis of the '30s already prevails over the more narrowly domestic developments, and the broader effort of the great powers to check Hitler is at the center of the narrative, the decisions taken in Britain, Belgium, Poland, the Soviet Union increasingly driving events.

This attention to three-quarters of a century of history, and the broader international scene, gives Collapse an undeniable sweep, combined with intricate detail--arguably a greater concern for the casual reader than it was in the case of the comparatively voluminous Rise and Fall. Where the essentials of Nazi Germany's history are likely to be well-known to even the general reader of history in the English language (that book is unlikely to be the first time they have heard of the name "Hitler," or even the Beer Hall Putsch or the Reichstag Fire), the history of France in these years is rather less likely to figure in their general knowledge--the names, the events comparatively unfamiliar. (I have to admit that my own knowledge of, for example, the February 1934 riots in Paris was fairly scanty.)

Of course, as Shirer leaves the more narrowly national history behind for the broader international situation, the outlines, at least, become more familiar. However, in the book's second half, as the war begins, we increasingly get densely written operational history--a torrent of names of commanders, units, sites of battles and movements, with much reference to "flanks" and plenty of maps with arrows on them pointing this way and that. This sort of thing can be difficult enough to follow when what is described is an eighteenth century battle fought over the course of a day in the space of a field between two armies numbering in the thousands. It is far more difficult when, as in the chapters describing the Battle of France (Chapters 29 to 32), what is discussed is a collision of millions of soldiers in hundreds of divisions organized in multiple armies in a weeks-long campaign ranging over a large portion of northwestern Europe--and when the situation is so confused on one side as it is on that of the Allies, French commanders time and again issuing orders to whole armies that had ceased to exist. Comprising a fifth of the book, it was at times overwhelming (even though I had read several accounts of this campaign before, if mainly from the British or German perspective, rather than the French). The final chapters, which turn back to the machinations at the very top of the French government after the rout of its army (the mismanagement of the final resistance, the decision to pursue an armistice rather than fight on from North Africa), are nearly as involved.

It all makes for a lengthy and demanding read, perhaps too much so to be very helpful as an introduction to this subject, but it does add up to a fairly comprehensive picture of the factors (domestic division, strategic blunders, outdated military doctrine, etc.) that combined in France's, and the Allies', rapid, ignominious defeat, and the formation of the subsequent armistice. And if the detail gets very thick in places (as in the more purely military history), it also enables Shirer to rise above vague generalities to offer the nuts and bolts of how the weaknesses of the Third Republic's strategic situation, internal composition and army led to cascading, concatenating failure. Along with the fact that Shirer writes not just as a historian sifting through archives and conducting interviews after the fact, but also as a journalist who covered many of the key events (he was there in Paris during the 1934 riots, there in the audience as Hitler speechified, there with the German Sixth Army as it rolled into Paris, there when the Armistice was signed), it also provides him many an opportunity to lend color, nuance and interest to the account that it might not otherwise have enjoyed.

Consequently, almost a half century after Shirer wrote the book, The Collapse of the Third Republic remains an illuminating account not just of a crucial period in French history, but a crucial juncture in world history. The fall of France, after all, by leaving Germany without continental opposition in the west, enabling it to besiege Britain and, later, turn east against the Soviet Union; by bringing Italy into the fight on Germany's side; by making the European empires in Asia appear vulnerable to Japan in a way they had not just a short time earlier; and compelling increasingly open and large-scale American intervention; was what made a limited European war the totalistic world war of 1939-1945, the consequences of which we are still sorting out today.

Germany in Japanese Culture: Bernd Martin's Take

Watching anime, it can often seem that Germany and German culture are a rather significant presence--much more than an American might expect, at any rate, be it in Japanese steampunk (as with a number of Hayao Miyazaki movies), or Western characters in contemporary-set anime (a surprising number of them being German or part-German).

Interestingly, despite the oft-cited parallels between the two countries (whether as rising powers of the late nineteenth centuries, revisionist and fascistic powers in the 1930s, allies in the Axis of the 1940s, post-war scenes of American occupation, or much-hyped economic superpowers in the 1980s), not much has been written about the relationship between the two countries. A rare exception is Bernd Martin's fascinating book Japan and Germany in the Modern World--a collection of that scholar's previously published articles about the subject.

In the long article, "Fatal Affinities: The German Role in the Modernization of Japan in the Early Period (1868-1895) and Its Aftermath," he offers his fullest treatment of the subject. During these years, he notes, Japan's leaders, in the midst of the Meiji Restoration and strenuous, top-down efforts to emulate Western nations, considered several models--the United States, Britain, France, Germany--and found Germany the most attractive.

This was, in part, a function of Germany's successes these years--Germany's defeat of the highly regarded French army in the Franco-Prussian War, its revolutionary advances in science and technology (e.g. the modern chemical industry), its rapid rise to the status of industrial superpower, for example. However, as Martin notes, other factors were involved. One was that in contrast with the United States, which had sent Commodore Perry and his "black ships," and imperial Britain and France (which had only recently attacked China in the Second Opium War), Germany seemed less threatening to Japanese independence than the other Western nations, and potentially an ally in its efforts to assert its own sovereignty (an area in which Germany never quite lived up to Japanese hopes).

The other, even more important factor may have been that not just German political ambitions but the German social model seemed less threatening. Japan's revolution, after all, was an intensely conservative one, the country's leaders intent on preserving the traditional social structure--because, above all else, their concern was for the preservation of the privileges that structure afforded them. In comparison with republican America and France, and the liberal constitutional monarchy Britain presented, Germany's more authoritarian, militarized political and social order--centered on the imperial ruling house of the Hohenzollerns and its associated, feudalistic aristocracy (the Junkers) behind its pretense of constitutionality--seemed to hold out the hope of reconciling that structure with Industrial Era economic and military power.

Perhaps the most conspicuous expression of this was Japanese reformers patterning their country's new constitution ob the German model. However, it also manifested itself in subtler ways. Japan did not get very many more of its foreign advisers from Germany than it did other Western nations, but those advisers did have more influence--for instance, in their role in the founding years of Tokyo University. The country's reformers were also more inclined to send their nation's young people to study in Germany than elsewhere, thinking it a culturally "safer" environment. Additionally, after initially opting to emulate France's army, civil service and education system, or America's schools, the reformers later turned to the German model in all of these areas. Unsurprisingly in the wake of all this, German philosophies, theories and practices enjoyed commensurately greater currency in Japanese intellectual life than those of these other Western nations. German political economy, for example, encouraged a more statist economic model aimed at maximizing national power, with foreign policy successes substituting for domestic freedom, general prosperity or popular sovereignty as a source of legitimacy for the rulers.

Bernd regards the choice as a fateful one, setting the country on an undemocratic, imperial and militaristic course that led both Germany and Japan directly to the catastrophe of 1945, and the demise of that social structure they had sought to preserve.

As Martin owns, his research has some limitations--not least, his lack of access to Japanese sources, which is grounds for some caution. Additionally, Germany can hardly seem the sole foreign influence on the development of Japanese imperialism--this, after all, having been a period where this was the practice for every major power, even among much more liberal nations. Indeed, as a resource-poor island nation off the coast of Eurasia which built up a large navy and pursued colonies on the mainland, its situation evokes Britain much more than Germany--and the fact remains that Japan did emulate Britain when building up its navy (if only because Germany had virtually no navy to imitate until the late 1890s). Still, it is an interesting thesis with considerable explanatory power, not just for Japan's history over the last century and a half, but for what we see in its popular culture today, Germany's presence a legacy of that earlier period.

Preview Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry

My new book, Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry, is now available for sale at Amazon in electronic and print editions.

It is also live on Google Books, where you can also check it out.

The American Box Office, First Half of 2015

As far as the performance of the top-grossing movies at the American box office goes, this year has been considerably better than the last. The highest earner of 2014, American Sniper ($350 million), actually got its wide release on January 16, 2015, and made its money afterward, while it has already been outgrossed by three still higher-earning movies--Furious 7 (by just a hair), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($454 million), and Jurassic World ($558 million), which is shaping up to be one of the biggest hits of all time.

Avengers, admittedly, did not do quite so well as had been hoped in light of the original's mammoth gross, but even today no one can really be too disappointed with $450 million in the bank (let alone the $1.4 billion it has taken globally), while the new Fast and Furious and Jurassic Park films both performed way, way above expectations. (Furious 7 has to date made more than the hugely successful fifth and sixth installments in the series combined, while Jurassic World has already outgrossed the original Jurassic Park, at the time the biggest ever moneymaker, in inflation-adjusted terms.)

Interestingly, it has also been a good year for the R-rated movies that, in this century, have only infrequently numbered among the big hits. Besides American Sniper, there has been Fifty Shades of Grey, which also has the distinction of being the first real sex-based blockbuster since the days when Sharon Stone and Demi Moore were headlining feature films. Max Max: Fury Road has been another kind of recent rarity, the successful R-rated action movie, and while they will almost surely not retain those places at year's end, for now they occupy the #8 and #10 positions on the Box Office Mojo list. Doing only slightly less well are two more R-rated films--incidentally, both of them spy-themed action-comedies, Kingsman and Spy (the #13 and #14 hits, respectively).

Still, even if this year has had its share of high earners and above-expectations performances, it has also had its disappointments. Most were relatively low-budgeted, low-profile releases (Aloha, Unfinished Business--I barely even knew they existed), but Jupiter Ascending was a nearly $200 million production that failed to gross its budget (which leaves a movie just halfway to making its budget back), killed off the prospects of the once-planned trilogy, and dealt the once celebrated Wachowski name another blow.

Less dramatic, but similarly telling, was the mediocre performance of the Entourage movie--a reminder that the phenomenon was less popular hit and more monument to Hollywood's colossal self-absorption (and in this case, Mark Wahlberg's colossal self-absorption). The result was that, rather than letting the audience live out a Hollywood fantasy, it was what Josh Krup rightly called

the most taunting show in TV history. Shallow Hollywood jagoffs can get all the free booze, drugs, and booty they want, simply because they’re either good looking or once starred in the 1988 remake of The Blob, while the rest of us Joe and Jill Student Loans have to pay for bad beer and even worse sex. "Entourage" shows us what we’re missing, and rubs our faces in their asses that have never felt the horrific touch of $.69 toilet paper.

And it was badly, obnoxiously written to boot.

Thus far, Ted 2 has not been doing as well as the original (just $58 million in the till after ten days of release, about half what the original had). And to go by this weekend's results, one also cannot expect very much for Terminator 5 (aka, Terminator: Genisys), which has just $44 million to show for the first five days, and does not seem likely to have legs. Indeed, it seems likely to be this year's answer to Die Hard 5--another classic '80s action series that hung around for at least one installment too many. Still, even if the American gross will be less than overwhelming, the foreign earnings (already about twice what it's made in the U.S.) are likely to keep the movie from being in the red when all is said and done.

On the whole, though, this is not a summer which will end with the entertainment press tearing its hair and gnashing its teeth about slow ticket sales the way they have done in so many recent years--though the quality of the films may be another matter . . .

Meet Malcolm Hulke

As a relative latecomer to the Dr. Who franchise, most of what I know about its pre-2005 revival, on and off-screen, comes secondhand from what others have written about it.

Freelance historian Michael Herbert recently made a contribution to this body of work with Dr. Who and the Communist, in which he wrote about series' writer Malcolm Hulke, whose career as TV writer and novelist included a lengthy and prolific association with Dr. Who. Hulke scripted over fifty episodes of the series, and has credits on a good many more thanks to the revival's recent use of his creations, the Silurians. In discussing the show, io9 lists episodes from three of the serials on which he worked ("The War Games," "Doctor Who and the Silurians" and "Colony in Space") among the series' top twenty all-time best cliff-hangers, while also remarking Hulke's "penchant for three-dimensional villains who think they're doing the right thing," specifically noting that it "adds a lot of life to General Carrington, especially in the later episodes" of the James Bondian "Ambassadors of Death" arc.

Hulke also wrote seven of the tie-in novels, which have also been well-received. Indeed, io9's epic post "Every Single Doctor Who Story Ranked From Best to Worst," rates Hulke's novelization of "The Colony in Space" as "way, way better" than the episode "because it fleshes out these one-dimensional characters who keep getting locked up and escaping on television." (That particular book can be hard to track down, but thanks to a Kindle edition, those curious to check out Hulke's novel-writing can easily lay their hands on Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters.)

You can read more about Hulke's career, and Herbert's writing about it, in Herbert's guest blog post over at Bernadette Hyland's Lipstick Socialist, the Dr. Who news, opinion, reviews and podcast site Kasterborous, and of course, over at the web site of the volume's publisher, Five Leaves.

Reading H.G. Wells' The Outline of History

Readers familiar with H.G. Wells' later writings will likely know what to expect from The Outline of History. Wells' study of world history is, much like what he offers in comparable passages in The Shape of Things to Come, a progressive tale of the triumph of reason over superstition; of the ideas of service and community over self-seeking and privilege; and of human dignity and freedom over ignorance, want and tyranny. This is, Wells informs us, above all a history of the development of human thought, and in particular the development of three, generally rising trends:

1. The rational, systematic pursuit of knowledge about the world, and the application of this knowledge in similarly rational and systematic fashion. (This can be thought of as the story of philosophy and science, of figures like Herodotus and Aristotle, Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon, and the "mechanical revolution" that remade everyday life.)
2. The recognition that all of humanity comprises a single, universal community, the members of which are all equals and for whom the true "good life" lies in service to that larger community. (This is the ethical revolution wrought by religious traditions like Buddhism, Taoism and the Abrahamic tradition, as well as secular philosophies like Stoicism.1)
3. The interaction of the principles of the "community of will" (exemplified by the freedom-loving nomad) with those of the "community of obedience" (exemplified by the settled, hierarchical inhabitants of the early civilizations) to produce a higher sort of community of will. (The reacting of one on the other is for him the story of democracy, from Greece and Rome to the Magna Charta to the Enlightenment.)

Nonetheless, in line with his science-minded outlook, Wells begins well before one can properly speak of such things, at the birth of the planet Earth, and the earliest development of life on it, a part of the tale that he tells at unusual length for a work of this type. We are already on page 68 before "the first men like ourselves" appear, and on page 127 before he turns to the very first civilizations, roughly an eighth of the main text already behind us.2

After this point the book becomes more conventional in its choice of subject matter, relating the rise of the first recognizable polities in Old World river valleys (the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, the Yellow River, the Indus), the intellectual stirrings and empire-building of the ages that followed (the Dharmic and Abrahamic religious traditions, the earliest philosophies of Greece and China; Sargon and Cyrus, Asoka and Alexander, Qin Shi Huang and Caesar), and the long crawl toward modernity (Dark Age and Renaissance, the Tang and Mogul dynasties, the voyages of discovery, the scientific, industrial and mechanical revolutions, the American and French Revolutions). Still, Wells' principal interest is in tracing the trends with which the book is concerned through these movements and events, determining what he does or does not choose to emphasize.

The progress of those trends--the increasing recognition of the liberating potential of the sciences, the oneness of the human community, and the ideas of equality and freedom--had advanced to such a point by the eighteenth century's end that they thrust to the forefront of political thinking three old problems that might be thought of as issues of their practical implementation: property, currency, and the conduct of international affairs.2

The solution to these problems, it seemed to him, lay in "a world unification based on a fundamental social revolution" (916). However, the ending to that story had yet to be written--and did not seem a thing to be taken for granted. Indeed, it may be the discussion of this possibility that constitutes the most dramatic difference between one edition and another. The original 1920 edition, following its discussion of the First World War, concludes with some optimism about the diminished prospects of another, comparable conflict, and closes with a forward-looking chapter titled "The Next Stage of History," detailing a possible path toward a united world, and what the Modern World State might look like.

In their place in the 1961 edition are two chapters on "Twenty Years of Indecision and its Outcome," and "The Aftermath of the Second World War." "Indecision" offers an appropriately grim assessment of the superficial or illusory reforms, broken promises and missed opportunities of the interwar period, and their implications, not least that the outcome he hoped for seemed increasingly uncertain, and likely to come at the cost of "incalculable further depletion in waste and suffering," such that "our species may stagger half way to its goal and fail" (916).3 The book subsequently moves on to a chronicle of the major events of the Second World War, and the years that followed, the element of advocacy much diminished.

As one might guess given the book's age it has dated in ways small and large, from its adherence to hyperdiffusionism, to its assessment of pre-Meiji Japan. However, there are many respects in which Wells' historiography not only remains compelling (like his account of Rome's rise and fall), but seems surprisingly of our own time, like his critiques of academic specialization, or Eurocentrism. More importantly, nearly a century after the publication of the book's first edition, and three-quarters of a century after the last edition on which Wells personally worked, the book remains very effective in making its key arguments. Additionally, in its sweep and great readability, its breadth of vision and multitude of insights, it remains compelling as a piece of historiography, all the more valuable for the ways in which its rationalistic, humanistic and progressive vision of history has come to be unfashionable. The result is that while Wells' Outline is relevant to an understanding of the vision that produced his fictional output, its significance is hardly limited to those with such an interest. Indeed, the tendency to overlook this book, just like the tendency to overlook all his writing apart from his handful of classic scientific romances, is a thing to be regretted.

1. One may be surprised to find Wells attributing a positive role to religion. His position is that beneath the encrustations of superstitious doctrine and ritual, these religions offered a recognition of the existence of a single human community, and of "the good life" as one in service to it, rather than the pursuit of the advancement of oneself or some smaller fragment of humanity; in short, early intimations of the World State for which he called.
2. I am citing the 1961 Doubleday edition of the volume, which was revised and brought up to date by Raymond Postgate. (The last edition on which Wells worked was published in 1939.)
3. Wells' efforts on this score are, of course, imperfect. The fact remains that where space and detail are concerned, the study remains overwhelmingly devoted to the accustomed subjects of traditional Western history. However, this appears to reflect the material then available to him, and he is more successful in his effort when he is in his analytical mode, as when writing of the significance of Buddha and Asoka, or putting the rise and fall of the Roman and European colonial empires into a longer-ranged and global perspective.

Eugie Foster, 1971-2014

Nebula award winning-author Eugie Foster died on Saturday.

She was forty-two.

I knew her from my time reviewing for Tangent Online and The Fix, where she worked as an editor.

Eugie was one of the very first people I became acquainted with in the world of science fiction fandom, and the first with whom I actually worked in it.

She was always kind, considerate, patient and supportive.

The world is a colder place for her no longer being among us.

However, her work does remain with us. If you are not familiar with it, I urge you to check it out for yourself.

Telling Lies About Tolstoy's War and Peace: The Short Version

My recent post on Tolstoy's War and Peace has been getting a lot of hits lately, and so I thought it worthwhile to write up a quick summary of my thoughts on the book.

Exactly what I had to say about the book is the following.

The length of the book; its crowding with a huge cast of at times confusingly named characters; its loose, even plotless structure; and its frequent digressions into lecturing about ideas which are in some cases abstruse, in others deeply against the grain of twenty-first century attitudes; make it a challenging read.

It must also be admitted that the book has its limits of perspective. Tolstoy is in the main focused on Russian aristocrats here, and takes little interest in the strata below them, or in the modern, urban side of life. He also subordinates the variety, balance and color of his tale to his expounding of certain ideas about life and history. Unsurprisingly the story often seem sanitized, poorly paced and even dull in places--the contrast with his contemporary Dostoyevsky, for example, quite marked--while his relation of his ideas gets repetitious.

Still, along with its challenges and its arguable defects, it has very real strengths. Tolstoy's eye for detail, and the vividness this often gives his characterizations and scenes, often elevates the interest of his material beyond what might be expected from its limitations. As one might hope from he title, he is particularly good at writing about war (and as it turns out, especially the fog of war), and while his presentation of his ideas is one-sided (and frequently self-contradicting) the ideas themselves have enough interest to engage a reader ordinarily disinclined to consider such views.

The result is a book that may not necessarily live up to the claims made for it as the greatest novel ever written, but which remains deservedly a classic, and which I found worth my while.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Box Office in Summer 2014, and The Movies of Summer 2015

A summer exceptionally short on megahits came to an end this Labor Day weekend.1

This season, only one movie crossed the quarter-billion dollar mark. By contrast, three or more has been the norm since about the turn of this century, with a few exceptional summers scoring as many as five (2007, 2009, 2010), and last summer seeing four.

The biggest hit was Guardians of the Galaxy, just shy of $300 million at the time of writing. By contrast, 2013 had Iron Man 3 with $409 million, and Despicable Me 2 with just a little less (some $391 million). The preceding year was even more impressive, with Avengers taking in $623 million, and The Dark Knight Rises pulling in another $448 million.

Overall, the earnings during the summer season were down almost 15 percent from the preceding year.

Of course, that is not really grounds for panic. The slow ticket sales do reflect a number of exceptional factors, like the fact that last summer's earnings had set a new record, and so skew the perception of the average; and that the bumping of a number of "tentpoles" (like Jupiter Jones) over to later release dates, and the fewness of big, family-oriented, animated films (no Pixar, etc.), meant fewer of the kinds of movies most likely to be big money-makers.

Still, the long-term picture looks worse when one thinks in terms of tickets sold rather than monetary grosses, as a quick glance at the data on Box Office Mojo shows.2 The fact that the top films in particular were such a letdown can be taken for a reminder of the limits of the blockbuster, "event movie" strategy--its high-risk nature, and the reality that one can only have so many successful releases of the type in any given period. The distribution of success and failure during the season also implies that not only critics, but audiences too, are weary of the kind of fare being served up. The films that did perform relatively well were the fresher and riskier releases (Maleficent, Edge of Tomorrow, Lucy, Guardians of the Galaxy), rather than the remakes and sequels of May and June that seemed such good bets (Spiderman 2, Transformers 4).

Will that fact make Hollywood a bit more adventurous in its future offerings? Perhaps, perhaps not (more likely not, given how few seem to be saying this), but 2015, at least, will come along too early to reflect any such change, and that year at least seems to be much in line with this one, with movies like Avengers 2, Mad Max 4, Jurassic Park 4, Terminator 5. A reboot of the Fantastic Four, remakes of Poltergeist and Point Break. Movie versions of Entourage, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Assassin's Creed. The Despicable Me spin-off Minions, and a sequel to Ted. More Insidious and Sinister, and more Melissa McCarthy in Spy. Another Marvel superhero franchise in Ant-Man . . .

Reviewing the list I still wondered if maybe there would nonetheless be material for another post like the one I wrote in 2013 about this summer's films ("And Now For Something Slightly Different (Maybe)"), and simply didn't see it, so I'll content myself with making guesses about how this crop will do.

As it seems to me, with even a steep drop from the earnings of the previous film, Avengers alone should be adequate to ensure one mega-hit for the summer of 2015. And there's no reason to think Marvel's luck is running out just yet, so Fantastic Four and Ant-Man have a shot at being decent performers.

Despite the flopping of Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West (yet another reminder that Westerns don't do well in summer, as if one were needed), I expect that there's enough goodwill left toward Ted to make Ted 2 a success--just as Minions will probably be a success.3 By contrast, the very hard push made for Melissa McCarthy seems to be running out of steam if Tammy's anything to go by, and Spy seems likely to suffer accordingly.

It has been a long time since either Jurassic Park or Terminator were on the big-screen, and when they did put in their final appearances, those franchises were well along a path of diminishing returns (though I personally liked the lean Jurassic Park III better than the lumbering The Lost World). That will work against them, and so will the ex-California governor's awful track record at the box office this past couple of years.

The idea of a new Mad Max film at least seems more relevant, but this franchise has been off the screen longer (thirty years!), was closely identified with a star no longer attached to it (and whose star is far from what it once was), and was never a big money-maker in the States. (Mad Max 3 made $38 million in '85, which even after inflation still isn't blockbuster money.) I'm not sure there are grounds for expecting this to change now.

I don't have much idea as to whether Man From U.N.C.L.E. will be another Mission: Impossible-like blockbuster--or an I Spy. Equally, Assassin's Creed may be the breakthrough Hollywood's been waiting for with video game-based movies--or it may be another Prince of Persia-style disappointment (though in fairness, a movie can do a lot worse than Prince did).4 And the decision to remake Point Break seems just plain incomprehensible.

This seems to imply a good many gambles--but not necessarily the kind of gambles likely to pay off. Rather than serving up something a little less conventional, it looks like a great deal of effort at squeezing exhausted properties (Terminator, etc.). And so I won't expect that 2015 will shift the talk from dismayed reactions to hopes for endless boom times.

Still, even if that summer ends up with another load of underperformers, Hollywood will not necessarily see it as reinforcing the disappointing signal from 2014, especially with foreign markets continuing to blunt its worry over the trend at home (and few in the industry seeming to worry much about intensifying competition for markets like China's and Japan's)--and in fairness, the absence of any clear alternatives that the studios might plausibly find attractive. So industry-watchers will once again talk about how something must be done, while business goes on as usual.

1. This was underscored by the following weekend being the weakest the industry has seen in thirteen years--with the last such low point due to highly exceptional circumstances simply not comparable to the events of September 4-6, 2014.
2. 2013 may have been a record year in terms of dollars earned, but ticket sales were down 15 percent from 2002, and was actually the fourth lowest year for ticket sales this century. This year seems likely to be worse than that. All the same, when the numbers are crunched at year's end, it remains more than likely that theatergoing in 2014 will be found to have been within the normal range for recent decades--4-5 tickets per capita for the twelvemonth.
3. Even before MacFarlane's film, the list of such flops was already quite long, with Jonah Hex and The Lone Ranger recent memories.
4. Despite its reputation as a flop, Prince still made $91 million at the U.S. box office, $336 million worldwide--more than any other video game adaptation to date.

Reading Literary Classics, Again

Time and again I have been struck by the difference between people how are supposed to read literary classics, and the far less inspiring way they actually experience them--a combination of unthinking respect for their Authority, and equally unthinking boredom with the actual stuff of them.

As it happens, this is not a new situation at all.

Oscar Wilde summed up the situation almost one and a quarter centuries ago in similar terms, when he remarked that:

In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.

Certainly where Shakespeare is concerned, it seemed to him "quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays."

Moreover, he took the view that this tendency "does a great deal of harm," the public "mak[ing] use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities."

Some decades after, H.G. Wells observed in The Outline of History that it was "a pity that the ridiculous extravagances of scholastic admirers . . . speak of [Homer's Iliad and Odyssey] as supreme and unapproachable and so forth," for these attitudes had left the general reader's response to these worthwhile works an "awe-stricken neglect."

And so it went with every other writer enjoying a company of "scholastic admirers" prone to "ridiculous extravagances" of this sort, who insured that that part of the public which did read fiction gave their attention to figures like E. Phillips Oppenheim instead. So it still goes, long after Oppenheim himself became obscure, while his heirs advertise their novels on television.

Incidentally, I expect to have more to say on Wells' Outline in upcoming posts.