Nostalgic, Prescient (and very, very memorable) Science Fiction

Somehow, without me noticing, the science fiction writers I remember from magazines of the early-2000s appeared on my bookshelf again.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been on a mission to find copies of the first SF stories I can remember reading—two of them I knew for sure came from an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine; two of them might be in one of a number of old anthologies of my grandfather’s; and one of them might just be from a dream I had years ago and inflated into a dystopian epic (it happens).

In any case, after diligent Google searching and telephone inquiries with a used bookstore in Oregon, I was able to get a listing of the titles and authors of short stories in Asimov’s from 2002 to 2005.  The problem was that it’s a monthly magazine, and I couldn’t remember if my subscription had begun when I was a freshman in high school, or when my older sister first brought back those QSP-issued order forms for the annual magazine drive.

So: after nearly 7 years, I couldn’t remember the authors, or the titles (shoot, I couldn’t even remember the year).  This may have something to do with the fact that back in those halcyon days of yore, I was a very sweet, very impressionable middle-school girl who found herself horrified by the lurid cover illustrations and pulp fiction content of the publication—a semi-nude, iridescent faerie was not, after all, what Dune and Contact had prepared me for.

I read no more than two or three issues, tossed the rest out, and did not renew my subscription.  I would stick to the classics, I decided.

But for 7 years I’ve managed to vividly remember two stories—or at least, bizarre details from two stories—from one of the few issues I’d read.

The first was about a woman with some sort of genetically-engineered pets franchise: they had a strange name (ploompies?  ploofties?) and were globular, translucent, pulsing masses of the buyer’s own DNA.  And somehow, these creatures were so appealing that the owner could hardly help but bite into them—and get a taste of something sharp and metallic (in my orthodontics-oriented middle-school mind, that jagged pain you get from biting down on a piece of tinfoil with a filled tooth).

The second story had something to do with a girl and her dog; they lived in the “real world,” or rather, the physical world, because when she grew up, she would have to abandon her body and lived in a completely virtual world, like the Internet.  Some accident happens to the girl, and her body is lost—she herself is just barely uploaded in time, but the dog can’t be saved.

This isn’t much to go on.  But paging through lists of titles online, I spotted one called “Junk DNA.”  Alarms went off in the brainpan.  I bought a used copy of the January 2003 issue of the magazine, and checked my PO Box daily until it arrived.

The first story, about the bizarre pets (Pumptis, as it turns out), was indeed “Junk DNA,” by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker.  And here’s the passage that had so stuck with me:

In a dizzying moment of raw devotion, Janna suddenly found herself sinking her teeth into the unresisting flesh of the Pumpti.  Crisp, tasty, spun-cotton candy, deep-fried puffball dough, a sugared beignet.  And under that a salty, slightly painful flavor—bringing back the memory of being a kid and sucking on the root of a lost tooth.

Why that particular imagery was so memorable, I don’t know.  More interesting is the fact that the genre of the story is one I’ve been raving about for the past few months:

“Junk DNA” is science fiction story about a business venture and all the backroom politicking that goes along with economics, invention, and the market.  Sound a bit like…?

(My post on) Cory Doctorow and Makers, his very recent epic of robotics, business, and the “New Work” (like the New Deal, but way more free market);

(My post on) David Louis Edelman and his Jump 225 series, for which “cyberpunk” hardly does justice as a classification—the corporate intrigue behind Bio/Logic and MultiReal (and how could there not be corporate intrigue with sociopathic entrepreneur Natch at the helm?) is just as intense as the science;

Charles Stross and Glasshouse, which won the 2007 Prometheus Award for “libertarian SF” (This, friends, is my life goal), or The Atrocity Archives, which is something of a spy thriller with a science fiction element closer to Lovecraftian horror than anything else (take a look at the January 2003 cover illustration and you’ll see where I’ve found a connection with Lovecraft).

Even one of the authors, Bruce Sterling, will be appearing on my bookshelf when The Caryatids arrives in the mail in a couple weeks.  And the last page of the January 2003 issue is a sort of preview of coming attractions feature, listing authors and stories for the next issue—one of them, by the way, is Charlie Stross).

To think, I thought these were new discoveries.

Mystery Story #2 also happened to be in the Jan. 2003 issue—“Pick My Bones With Whispers,” by Sally McBride.  This was a major lucky break, as I would never have remembered that the second story imprinted on my malleable brain had been the winner of the Pretentious Title Award for 2003.  (Is McBride trying to be ironic?  I sincerely hope so…)

And once again, the topics that fascinate me today, I discover, are absolutely nothing new.  The research I recently did on the millennial generation’s changing conception of the Internet (or, for them/us, Cyberspace)—from a tool to a place that has been increasingly explored since childhood—is all there in the saga of Lizbeth and her faithful virtual pup, Fritz:

Though I’m twelve, there’s still a lot I can’t do in the children’s Net areas, even if Fritz was letting me in deeper and deeper all the time.  There were dark places I couldn’t go, forbidden subjects I couldn’t get data on, tantalizing things I couldn’t see or join or do.  Sometimes it was humiliating to be a flesh-and-blood person.

This sounds so much like one of the responses I got from an interviewee for my paper that it’s almost shocking.  She doesn’t use the Internet to the same extent of her peers—and so (like Lizbeth, albeit less dramtically) resists absorption into Cyberspace.  She told me:

“Everyone talks about how big the Internet is, and I know, because I can go on for hours and hours and still feel like I’ve never gotten into the core of it.  If the Internet was real life, I would be non-existent.”

This interviewee in particular doesn’t care for science fiction—she enjoys borrowing my DVDs of Firefly, but that’s about it.  No 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction for her.  And still, she easily could have spoken those lines from McBride’s story.

This—like the theme and subject matter of recent novels by authors like Stross, Edelman, and Doctorow—tells me that there’s something in the culture today stories like “Junk DNA” and “Pick My Bones With Whispers” (I’m sorry, I still really can’t type that without cracking up) picked up on in 2003: the increasing interconnectedness of technology and economics, and the transformation of the Internet into an environment rather than just a tool.

Getting that old magazine in the mail today was like a wave of nostalgia, but after reading through those stories again, the sentimentality was gone—the things I missed and remembered for 7 years are mainstream now.

V 1.03: Killing with Kindness

One of the biggest dangers the humans of ABC’s V might face this season is the cliché.  Alien invasion stories, after all, are nothing new.  Neither is the priest whose own doubts give him trouble handling the problems of his flock.  But three episodes in (and even if three weeks doesn’t quite constitute a hit), V hasn’t gone stale, a necessity in a season when networks are axing new shows that don’t deliver almost faster than they premiere.

Here’s hoping to a long shelf life.

The opening minutes of last Tuesday’s episode, “A Bright New Day,” were possibly the sweetest I’ve seen in the show yet—and no, they don’t involve Erica’s idiot son and his simpering space princess (he annoys me so thoroughly, you might have gathered, that I’m not even bothering to learn his name).

The show opens with Jack (Father Landry, to the faithful) sweating and fidgeting in his confessional as various parishioners file in or out, in torment or rapture, variously.

“Are the Vs demons, or angels?” one woman asks.

“Who am I to question the Pope?” says another man.

In the past few episodes, shifts in who you can trust and who count as authority figures have been major themes—here they are again, notably, in questions posed to a very human man with neither.  And he looks so uncomfortable trapped in that stiff collar and tiny room that we’re left wondering who he can talk to about these questions.

“I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them God loves them, everything’s going to be fine.  How can I tell them that?  I don’t even know what to tell myself anymore,” he insists.

And here’s where ABC defuses the cliché: Jack’s sentiment might not be original, but most priests don’t ask their advice from FBI agents investigating sleeper cells… of aliens.

So much for prayer.

Erica and Jack’s conversation is particularly touching because, in a world where everyone has two faces (and for some of them, I mean that literally), this bizarre pair trusts each other completely.  Shoot—Erica leaves him alone in her house paging through the FBI database.  National security breach?  Too late for that.

And you have to admit that Erica’s game plan is a lot more practical than saying two Hail Marys and a Glory Be.

“Whatever their plan is,” she says of the Vs, “They need us for something.  And until we find out what that is, we need to fight them the same way they’re fighting us.”

In other words: pretend to play nice.

If there’s anyone I can see going head to head with Anna and winning, it’s Elizabeth Mitchell as Agent Evans.  Even as she assists V security in identifying a death threat against one of their officials, Erica demonstrates the skills she’ll need to build a resistance: brilliant observation, something close to photographic memory, and absolute control over how she allows others to perceive her.  Sound like any particularly conniving alien woman we know?

In the long run, it doesn’t matter that the whole shooter/assassination/death threat thing was a set-up: we already knew the Vs were sneaky, and the would-be rebels knew it as well.  In “A Bright New Day,” it’s the Vs who are out of the loop for once, and the great thing is, they don’t even know it—

By saving Anna’s slimy advisor Marcus, Erica gains his trust, as he assumes she saved him out of the same devotion most humans display.  Painful and seemingly-counterintuitive though this rescue must have been, Erica keeps her head and shakes his hand.

Infiltration doesn’t have to be one-sided.

With the return of Richmond Peck as George “it’s Georgie” Sutton (organizer of the ill-fated warehouse meeting in episode one), this becomes even more clear.  While well-meaning Jack (once again) demonstrates his blatant lack of street smarts, Peck portrays a sapient homo sapiens who knows how to survive and outlast anyone (and when it comes to his family, tragically, he has).  The team is beginning to shape up.

Though “A Bright New Day” hints that there’s another V in the FBI (I’m guessing Erica’s boss Paul—he’s the one who let the Vs take custody of the “shooter,” after all, and seemingly without a fight), we also meet a traitor in a very high place, the New York Mothership (and I was cheering by the end of that scene, by the way).  Add into the mix the mysterious John May-or-may-not be a myth, and the rebels might just stand a chance.  Or, as the veterans call them: The Fifth Column.

More hope lies in the new knowledge that not all of the Vs are committed to the program of human destruction: Ryan Nichols’s old Fifth Column buddy Cyrus tries to turn him in, but only because of something he speaks of incoherently a “the Bliss.”

“The Bliss?” Ryan scoffs.  “The Bliss is how she controlled us, Cyrus.  Just like junkies, man.  And that’s what you are, you’re nothing but a junkie.  Just like the rest of them.”

Killing with kindness?  Anna’s killing with ecstasy.

But Erica’s “fighting them the same way they’re fighting us” now, remember, and that could make all the difference this time, in what’s shaping up to be the second rebellion.  We don’t know much about the first, but having Georgie Sutton around gives us some useful clues—

After 1.03, his emotionalism in the pilot’s warehouse scene is even more understandable (not that aliens overhead is something not to get upset about): the Vs murdered his wife and kids.  And like we treat most adults ranting about aliens in our own society, Georgie’s community stigmatized him.

“He went a little crazy,” one of his neighbors says, of the murders.  “He said aliens did it.”

Turns out he wasn’t crazy after all, but as Anna teaches us every Tuesday, perception is everything.  He didn’t look credible, however good his information was.

And as good in his role as the impassioned, almost-fanatical, and kind of ruthless survivor (he holds a gun to the head of a priest) as Mitchell is at playing cool-and-composed, Peck’s Georgie is as much the counterpart to Erica as is Jack Landry, and just as important to the growing resistance.

Erica and Jack—an FBI agent and a Man of God—are the poster children of model citizenship, but Georgie Sutton and Ryan Nichols know the rules of the game.  And this time, they’re going to play nice.

For now.

Genghis Khan in Fiction and Film, Part 3 of 3

Military prowess ranks among the chief virtues of the fictional, and very likely the historical, Chinggis Khan — and so in The Blue Wolf as he undertakes successive campaigns in pursuit of wolf-like fierceness, Chinggis appropriates the military technology of newly-subject peoples without compunction, ignoring other aspects of alien culture.

Describing the invasion of the Naimans, The Blue Wolf provides a litany of the cultural achievements of these people beyond the Altai Mountains: musical instruments, temples with ornate altars for ritual ceremonies, a written language, and perhaps strangest of all, “homes that were fixed to the ground and did not move” (Yasushi 117).  Yet among all this, Chinggis Khan sees only one thing: “We shall pacify the Naimans,” he tells his men, “and make use of the new weaponry they possess as our own” (Yasushi 117).

In the novel, this dichotomy between military and cultural triumphs is concretized in the tension between Chinggis Khan and Yelu Chucai, a Khitan advisor to the khan.  “Military force can only hold down an opponent,” Chucai insists on multiple occasions, “To the extent that they do not yet have a high level of culture in their own land, Mongol officers cannot fully rule the state of Jin” (Yasushi 204).

Time bears out Chucai’s predictions — while militarily the “Oceanic” Khan reigns supreme, the cultural flow between the Mongols and subject peoples travels only in one direction.

What should be a triumphant return home to Mount Burqan after years of military campaigns becomes instead bittersweet for Chinggis, who experiences a wave of nostalgia for the old, lost, ways:

“I alone have the characteristics necessary to be greeted by women on the Mongolian plateau,” he says, only half-joking, as truly “he alone was wearing Mongolian clothing and shoes, and he alone knew what it meant to live according to Mongolian custom” (Yasushi 256).

An innovator in military technique and statecraft, the first conqueror to “succeed in holding both the Inner Asian steppe and the neighboring sedentary lands simultaneously” (Morgan 5), Chinggis Khan’s relentless drive to convince himself he is a true Mongol, according to Inoue Yasushi, ultimately results in the erosion of the very values he pursued: a wolf, but alone.

This in-depth treatment of motivations presented in Mongol and The Blue Wolf, possible in the realm of fiction, film directors, and novelists, presents more of a challenge for historians, who need evidence before they can play the psychologist — to understand an historical figure, scholar David Morgan writes, “we need some insight into his state of mind at the time; but he is not available for our analysis” (Morgan 69).

The mindset of as singular a man as Chinggis Khan may be the most attractive topic for an exploration of his life, but something as intangible as personal motive — whether love or obsession — leaves little evidence.

Restricted to a more carefully circumscribed narrative, Morgan postulates a political theory for the Mongols’ expansive conquest which, while perhaps drier than love or blood, stands on a firmer foundation:

Newly unified under Chinggis Khan in 1206 CE, the Mongol “military machine would soon dissolve into quarrelling factions again” (Morgan 63) if not used for some decisive, concrete purpose: war, only now against an outside enemy.

Even today, Chinggis Khan — while perhaps dividing academics — continues to serve, as he did historically, as a unifying force in Mongolia.  After the chaos and upheaval following the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Chinggis Khan returned not in a physical sense but as a symbol to unify the country and restore a sense of nationalism, grandeur, and even stability to an independent Mongolia” (May 146).

Perhaps this grants the khan one of his final wishes — In 1221 CE, contemporary Chinese histories report, an interesting event took place, what Inoue Yasushi describes as “the meeting between the famous Daoist master Changchun and the great mass murderer Chinggis” (Yasushi 275).

The records observe that Chinggis, realizing his age was progressing faster than his desired military conquests, inquired as to the existence of a medicine many ambitious men throughout history have unsuccessfully sought: an elixir of immortality.

But whatever his motivations — whether emotional, a desire for more time with his beloved Borte; or psychological, driven yet by mental turmoil over the circumstances of his birth; or strictly political, in an attempt to hold together the unified Mongol state by continuing to turn his pack of wolves against external enemies — the Mongol khan may have achieved his most elusive goal:

Recreated in film and fiction, pored over by historians, and shaped into a new national symbol for a modern Mongolian state, Chinggis Khan ranks among the historical figures whose legacy rightly gives them claim to the title “immortal.”  Both traditional khan and creative leader, if Inoue Yaushi’s and Sergei Bodrov’s portrayals touch close to life: having proven himself a wolf, Chinggis finds himself, for better or worse, apart from the pack.

 

This is part 3 of 3 of a slightly re-tooled version of an paper I wrote for an Asian Civ course in Fall 2009.  Feel free to use or abuse it—just cite your sources, and my sources, which are these:

Lane, George. Daily Life in The Mongol Empire. The Greenwood Press “Daily Life Through History” Series. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.

May, Timothy Michael. Culture and Customs of Mongolia. Culture and Customs of Asia. Hanchao Lu. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2009.

Mongol, DVD. Directed by Segei Bodrov: Picturehouse and Sony Pictures, 2007.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. The People of Europe Series. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1986.

Onon, Urgunge. The Secret History of the Mongols. Abingdon, Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon Press, 2001.

Yasushi, Inoue. The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan. Joshua Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Genghis Khan in Fiction and Film, Part 2 of 3

Throughout the film, a motif of loving memory sustaining husband and wife during successive separations develops, the last line spoken in the movie being Chinggis’s promise that: “I have to finish what I started.  You’re a good wife, Borte.  You know I’ll always come back” (Mongol).

This idealized picture of timeless true love, however, has little basis in fact, with “no evidence of any romantic love between Chinggis and his chief wife Borte”  (Lane 234) extant today.

Bodrov’s compassionate characterization of the notoriously brutal Chinggis Khan, then, appears to be an attempt at fitting the historical couple into a more modern conception of romantic love and feminine independence — in Mongol, the betrothal of the two is seen not only as a free, unforced choice on the part of Temujin, but also made at Borte’s own insistence: “I chose you,” she later reminds him.

Modern audiences expect a bold female lead, but in reality, the khan and his wife’s relationship likely lacked the sentimentality.  Mongol women not only worked tirelessly in the hardscrabble environment of the steppe, but in marriage often occupied a similar position as the livestock they tended — status markers.  Higher-ranking men “acquired wives as they might horse or cattle, and the richer and more powerful the man the more wives he would have” (Lane 227).

Chinggis’s own domestic life only provides a more magnified example: as his army grew and state expanded ever-outward, marital alliances became increasingly important, and women as plunder increasingly common.  The Chinggis Khan of Yasushi’s novel appraises the role of his wives and consorts perhaps more realistically than the romanticized man of Mongol: “Impregnate them and make them give birth to Mongol children,” he advises his brother, “Do women have any other purpose?” (Yasushi 121).

But while Mongol probably overemphasizes the role love for Borte drove Chinggis to survive to fight and conquer, The Blue Wolf, contrarily, ignores the contributions another strong woman made to Temujin’s upbringing and protection — his mother, O’elun.

Yasushi depicts the family after Yisugei’s death and their later abandonment as an autocracy under the eldest son.  “When it came to the business of running the household, he allowed her no voice at all,” he writes of Temujin, speculating that “without the approval of Temujin, she could not so much as move some bedding around.”

Academic histories suggest, however, that it was O’elun whose “tenacity and perseverance held the family together during those hard and, for Temujin, formative years” (Lane 234).  Even The Secret History of the Mongols is in agreement on this point, describing the redoubtable O’elun’s constant struggle to provide food for herself and her children from what little she could forage — “with wild onions and garlic, the sons of the noble mother were nourished until they became rulers,” the translation reads, “the sons of the patient noble mother were reared on elm seeds” (Onon).

Though wild roots and seeds make for a paucity of sustenance, the passage indicates that O’elun was held in high regard for her indefatigable work on behalf of her children.  When in Mongol O’elun tells her daughter-in-law “I like you: you’re strong, like me” (Mongol), the characterization might not be far off.

And as the film points toward Borte as her husband’s central driving force, in The Blue Wolf Chinggis’s motivation for conquest surrounds O’elun, particularly the uncertainty of his paternity which arose from her abduction by the Merkids.

Unable to know for a fact whether his father was truly Yisugei of the Borjigin — and thus whether the blood of the distant Mongol ancestor, the blue wolf, heats his heart — Chinggis suffers a doubt so heavy that he is depicted as experiencing relief at the death of his long-suffering mother: with a strange sense of “expansive freedom” at the departure of “the one person on earth who knew the secret of his birth” (Yasushi 153), Chinggis at last could imagine himself heir to the blue wolf without O’elun as a living reminder of his doubt.

But imagination is not enough: “He was unable to have peace of mind unless he was back on the field of battle, or failing that, moving with his yurt,” Yasushi writes, revealing not only the great magnitude of Chinggis’s internal discord but also the solace he found in traditional culture.

A blue wolf, the passage suggests, was not only ferocious in battle, but adhered to the customs of all the generations before, much as Yisugei said in the film Mongol; deviation would turn the world upside-down.  And so throughout the novel, while Chinggis uses battle and conquest as a means of proving he is a true Mongol wolf to the only critic that matters — himself — his single-minded focus on military prowess leads him to neglect the second part of the equation: traditional lifestyles.  Ironically, it is this single-minded effort to prove himself a Mongol that ultimately opens the steppe to foreign cultures, alien peoples whose goods, values, and own traditions will undermine the lifestyle at the heart of Mongol identity.

 

This is part 2 of 3 of a slightly re-tooled version of an paper I wrote for an Asian Civ course in Fall 2009.  Feel free to use or abuse it—just cite your sources, and my sources, which are these:

Lane, George. Daily Life in The Mongol Empire. The Greenwood Press “Daily Life Through History” Series. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.

May, Timothy Michael. Culture and Customs of Mongolia. Culture and Customs of Asia. Hanchao Lu. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2009.

Mongol, DVD. Directed by Segei Bodrov: Picturehouse and Sony Pictures, 2007.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. The People of Europe Series. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1986.

Onon, Urgunge. The Secret History of the Mongols. Abingdon, Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon Press, 2001.

Yasushi, Inoue. The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan. Joshua Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Genghis Khan in Fiction and Film, Part 1 of 3

Ghengis (or Chinggis) Khan’s father-in-law was particularly insightful:

“This boy has fire in his eyes and light in his face,” he said (Onon 57) — or so states The Secret History of the Mongols in an early characterization of Temujin, the kid who would become Chinggis Khan.

The work’s date and author remain unknown; its phonetic transliteration from the original script into Chinese may have distorted some meaning; and the very content of its early legends and myths throw doubt on its accuracy as an historical document — nevertheless, The Secret History of the Mongols still remains one of the most substantial sources of indigenous history from the period of the Mongol Empire.  And though contemporary chronicles and accounts, modern historical analyses, and fictional reconstructions of the life of the great, if brutal, warrior often present conflicting narratives, all agree on the significant point best put by the anonymous author of the Secret History: the boy was driven.

This question of motive — what incredible mission or ambition propelled the young Chinggis Khan to unify and establish the greatest land empire in world history? —  forms the foundation of two recent depictions of the boy Temujin and the man Chinggis: Sergei Bodrov’s film Mongol and Inoue Yasushi’s novel The Blue Wolf.  Though the director and author take liberties with historical evidence in drawing their portraits, both works still reflect the personal and political tensions inherent in the clash of cultures the Mongol conquests catalyzed.

Life on the Central Eurasian steppe during the time of Chinggis Khan was dominated by a pattern of pastoral nomadism, defined as a “planned migration so as not to exhaust the pasture,” (May 33) a pattern necessary in an environment of little rain and a culture lacking the technology to cut and store feed for livestock.  Mongol life was thus dominated by constant movement, herding, and — most importantly — horses.

Holding an “honored status” (May 34) among the steppe tribes, the quantity and condition of a family’s horses could mean either prestige or ruin, something both Yasushi and Bodrov suggest in their works.

In the novel, a young man named Bo’orchu selflessly agrees to accompany the teenage Temujin in tracking down the horse thieves who had plundered his already-impoverished family’s yurt — Bo’orchu’s willingness to risk his own life for a stranger’s benefit not only guaranteed that he would become one of Chinggis’s closest companions, but also indicates the level of value the Mongols placed on horses: theft is worth losing one’s life over.  Mongol further emphasizes the important horsemanship by equating it with the fundamental Mongol identity: a young Jamugha laughs incredulously at Temujin’s confession that, with his family abandoned and suffering dire economic straits, he doesn’t have a horse — “But a Mongol has to be on a horse,” Jamugha insists (Mongol).

In this way, the film suggests Mongol identity as being inextricably tied up with the traditional nomadic lifestyle, a theme strongly reinforced in Yisugei’s death scene: though suspecting foul play, Temujin’s father accepts the offering of a drink from members of an enemy tribe.  “If I, the khan, start breaking the customs,” he says before drinking the poison, “the world will turn upside-down” (Mongol).

As Bo’orchu risks his life to preserve traditional values, Yisugei gives his for the sake of upholding custom.  Mongol, however, frames Chinggis as a rebel throughout.

Given the opportunity to avoid a battle by leaving the families of his warriors behind, Chinggis, though hopelessly outnumbered, refuses to abandon innocent women and helpless children — encouraged by his wife to “do as all Mongols do,” Chinggis nevertheless rejects traditional practice:

“Not me,” he replies (Mongol).

Unlike his predecessor, the new khan is shown to be willing to turn the world upside-down — at least for the sake of Borte, whose abiding love motivates Chinggis throughout the movie.  One scene even suggests that their connection is strong enough to transcend the farthest distances: Chinggis, enslaved by the Tanguts, entrusts a small carved bird to a Buddhist monk, hoping he will find Borte and give it to her as a sign that, though imprisoned and far away, her husband yet remembers her — though the monk dies on the journey, Borte sees his location in a dream and so finds Chinggis’s symbolic message.

 

This is part 1 of 3 of a slightly re-tooled version of an paper I wrote for an Asian Civ course in Fall 2009.  Feel free to use or abuse it—just cite your sources, and my sources, which are these:

Lane, George. Daily Life in The Mongol Empire. The Greenwood Press “Daily Life Through History” Series. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.

May, Timothy Michael. Culture and Customs of Mongolia. Culture and Customs of Asia. Hanchao Lu. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2009.

Mongol, DVD. Directed by Segei Bodrov: Picturehouse and Sony Pictures, 2007.

Morgan, David. The Mongols. The People of Europe Series. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1986.

Onon, Urgunge. The Secret History of the Mongols. Abingdon, Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon Press, 2001.

Yasushi, Inoue. The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan. Joshua Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Even non-Objectivists can be objective

A couple weeks ago, I posted a response to a New York Times review of a new biography of Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.  I was not impressed.  But after reading a more recent interview with the author, I’m glad to say that my disdain extends only to the reviewer (and Ms. Heller might just get another book sale).

Inc. magazine describes the biography as “surprisingly lurid,” but in the interview itself Heller comes across as level-headed and balanced at the NY Times book reviewer was sensationalistic.  This time, I’m impressed.

Here’s my favorite passage:

Among people who write and publish serious biographies, Rand had not even been thought of. She is considered a writer of unpleasant, anticommunist potboilers. I belong to a biographers’ group, and some of them were under the impression that she represented a “greed is good” philosophy and a Darwinian social code. I told them that I found her thinking more complex and challenging than they were giving her credit for. In any case, I wasn’t promoting her or her ideas. I was writing objectively about her life and work.

Even in dealing with some of the more scandalous aspects of Ayn Rand’s life, the tone of the interview remains just as Heller wants to be: objective.

And that’s something Rand would appreciate.

To err is (still) human, circa 10,000 BC

Movies aspiring to epics invariably begin with some sort of dramatic voiceover—10,000 BC doesn’t fail, but filmmakers might have done better to listen more closely to their own narrator: if “only time can teach us what is truth, and what is legend,” as the film begins, centuries of modern archeological research should have taught the creators of this prehistoric melodrama at least a few basic facts about early human life.  Considering the sheer number of anachronisms, my suspension of disbelief had snapped long before D’leh and his loyal “spears” arrived at the pyramidal Mountain of the Gods.

10,000 BC came out in 2008, so I realize I’m a year late on this one, but my archeology class, it seems, is behind the times—and since the film itself is set at the end of the Pleistocene, I’m not going to worry about it.  Besides, (pre)historical accuracy never gets old.

Fundamental to the plot is the long trek of D’leh, a self-doubting young man of the hunter-gatherer Yagahl, mountain-dwellers whose way of life hunting the “manak” (a not-so-subtle corruption of “mammoth” in the Yagahl’s astounding English) has become less and less sustainable.

This much, at least, could actually be plausible—megafauna such as the woolly mammoth may have begun to die out in Eurasia between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE from a combination of human hunting pressure and climate change during the glacial retreat.

But even the most extraordinary changes in environment and vegetation following on the heels of the Holocene could not account for the radical topographical diversity D’leh encounters on his journey to fulfill the prophecy surrounding “the child with the blue eyes,” his beloved Evolet.  Taking us from mountain blizzards to steaming jungles, the grasslands of North Africa and the banks of the Nile (and all this in disorientingly little time), D’leh’s odyssey makes absolutely no geographical sense.

Add to this an African tribesman’s use of chili peppers—domesticated in 6,000 BCE and not exported beyond the Americas until the voyages of Columbus in the 15^th-century—and his gift of corn and beans, similarly New World foods, and it would seem that the filmmakers expect audiences not to wonder why their silver screen Pangaea failed to break up all those 250-million years ago.

But all of this is adiophora compared to the absurd treatment of ancient Egypt in the movie’s second half.  Not only does 10,000 BC have the pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza under construction millennia before their time, it also suggests a labor force of slaves (which, Prince of Egypt notwithstanding, is patently untrue) and domesticated mammoths (making the film’s advancement of horse domestication by 6,000 years look almost reasonable).

Most far-fetched is the identity of the mysterious ruler and commissioner of these massive projects, a so-called god whose origin is as shrouded and veiled as his face—“some say they came from the stars,” one of the Yagahl men explains, “and some say they flew across the water when their land sank into the sea,” a comment which leaves audiences to postulate either space aliens or Atlanteans as the primogenitors of the pharaohs.  (It’s things like this that bother me the most—I’m inclined to think human beings can be way more bizarre than anything conspiracy theorists could cook up.  Stranger than fiction and all that.)

If 10,000 BC captures anything of the changes in human lifestyles that began around the titular time period, it’s the profound spiritual connotations the Yagahl attach to their transition into a sedentary lifestyle.  D’leh’s entire journey represents the fulfillment of a prophecy promising new life for his people after the last hunt of the mammoth has ended—agriculture.

While I’d be shocked if evidence for a transmigration of souls as happened in the movie surfaced in Neolithic archeological sites, early temples such as the stone circles at Gobekli Tepe do suggest a less sensational spirituality.  A megalithic site predating Stonehenge by 7,000 years, the elaborately-carved stone pillars of what may be the world’s earliest temple encircle a space believed to have been used for animal sacrifice and other ritual activities by its architects—nomadic groups like the Yagahl whose religious complexity developed during this pivotal shift in social patterns.

For my part, while I’m clearly willing to throw stones at the writers and directors who signed off on so many bizarre anachronisms, I can’t entirely avoid imagining myself hurling spears alongside the hunters of 10,000 BC, at least so long as the film is rolling.

The saving grace of 10,000 BC—and the only reason a stickler for historical accuracy can still enjoy the story—is the filmmakers’ successful creation of complex characters who are as recognizably modern in their motives and emotions as any human from 2009 AD.  D’leh, far from being a two-dimensional caricature of a “primitive” man, is introspective, compassionate, and rather unfortunately tormented by self-doubt—his mental demons proving a greater challenge than the four-legged demons who ride off with Evolek.

Glaring mistakes abound in 10,000 BC, but they don’t completely blind this viewer, at least, from appreciating the sensitive treatment the film gives the Neolithic men and women we often think of as less than human.

V 1.02: What part of ‘don’t trust anyone’ don’t you understand?

ABC’s V sets up a scenario that should be an intergalactic politics nightmare:

Alien spacecraft darken the skies over the globe’s major cities, world governments debate establishing diplomatic ties with the non-human intelligent life, and, as it turns out, the so-called “Visitors” don’t plan to leave any time soon—in fact, they’ve already been here for years (at least).

And yet, we haven’t seen a hint of the president, or any world leader for that matter.  This is definitely a departure from the traditional alien invasion and/or disaster movie, in which a tortured president generally plays a clichéd, but prominent, role.

Personally, I like this model better.

As it stands after episode two, “There Is No Normal Anymore,” the (human) power-brokers on Earth aren’t anything like conventional authority figures.  We have—

FBI Agent Erica Evans: determined, observant, and unbelievably cool under pressure (it’s all that practice lying to Ben Linus, honest), she’s shaping up to be the natural leader of the incipient resistance movement, but has nothing in the way of institutional clout (except what FBI documents she can steal, of course);

Father Jack Landry: a Catholic priest who’s doubtless used to being told the truth (in confession and otherwise), Jack’s noticeably new to the subterfuge game.  Still, he’s not naïve, and in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to trust anyone, being a Man of God can’t hurt;

Chad Decker: Ambitious and slightly amoral, Chad’s psychology seems simple enough for Anna to manipulate—in 1.02, though, the glib news anchor puts an uncharacteristic look of shock on the usually-blank face of the alien High Commander with his unwillingness to act the docile mouthpiece of the Vs.  And with significant influence over public opinion, Chad Decker might be the most powerful man on the planet—God help us.

It’s this motley crew (and a couple V defectors, if they can ever trust each other long enough to get together) standing against an extraterrestrial force with surveillance capabilities that make wiretapping look like child’s play.  Here’s another example of bringing contemporary issues up for discussion in a theoretically non-politicized venue (who ever said science fiction was escapist?).  Modern technology makes an omniscient centralized government closer to science fact than fiction—it just looks a lot more disturbing when set on an alien mothership: because really, if you can’t trust your 9-1-1 dispatcher, who can you trust?

The answer Erica and Jack grapple with throughout the episode is: absolutely no one.  That’s one frightening world to live in—and the worst part is, it’s one we can readily recognize in modern America.  First lesson in primary school isn’t phonics anymore—it’s Stranger Danger.

Even Vs have trust issues—

Ryan Nichols, a “traitor” V who’s set up a comfortable life with a human woman he loves and plans (well, planned) to marry, struggles with the fact that his entire life is based on a lie.  And considering just how big that lie is, it’s unlikely he and Valerie could just kiss and make up if he ever told her.  But with Nichols convinced that he needs to get back into the resistance, he faces the choice of breaking both their hearts or putting Valerie in danger.  Tragic.

The major plot point here, though, might just be V medical technology.  Taking back up the rebel standard, Nichols suffered what a human might be a fatal gash down the arm—for a V, however, ‘tis but a flesh wound.  An potent injection (nanotechnology?) knits up a cut which had revealed his true scaly self up in literally seconds.  Little does Agent Evans know that it’s probably this very technology bringing back her ex-partner Dale up in the mothership, after she’d thought she killed him—with a stake through the heart, no less.

But even first-aid man (really a V) Angelo Russo, drugs Nichols and skedaddles after patching his old rebellion buddy up because, quote, “I’m sorry man.  I can’t trust you—I can’t trust anyone.”

It’s a line echoed throughout the episode by humans too: Jack, Nichols’s fiancé Valerie, Erica’s boss Paul, and Erica herself on multiple occasions.  In one memorable scene, she breaks her composure and shouts viciously at Jack—“What part of don’t trust anyone don’t you understand?”

I only wish the FBI agent would take her own advice. Erica, who’s borderline-paranoid (and who could blame her?) still trusts her son, who’s out daily frolicking with “space girls.”  Earth to Agent Evans: parents should never trust their teenage kids, not even when there aren’t alien invaders in the sky overhead.

Oh, the irony.

But human beings are never fully consistent, and contradictions are what make a complex character—the last thing we want out of Elizabeth Mitchell is a two-dimensional Rebel Leader.  That’s one thing V seems to be doing excellently, even so early in the season: casting and character development.

Morena Baccarin as Anna is an immediate standout.  She’s already mastered the (lack of) expression necessary to convey an identity as some type of reptiloid in utterly foreign human flesh.  With this unearthly schizoid impassivity as a backdrop, even the subtlest change in expression or tone of voice is clear as ice, and generally as chilling.

Too bad she’s evil.

Cory Doctorow’s Makers predicts the present

I finished Cory Doctorow’s latest novel last Sunday, at a commercial break during the season finale of Mad Men.  Notable for portraying a Don Draper losing his cool, one scene has the frustrated ad man shouting:

“I want to work!  I want to build something of my own.”

In the context of having just read Makers, that’s a telling line.  But I’ll explain—

Twice the size of Eastern Standard Tribe and absolutely dwarfing his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers is an epic of economics, technology, corporate psychopaths, and people who “just want to make things.”  It isn’t Homer, but there’s definitely something Greek about the fates of a number of central characters—fatal flaws, tragic irony, all that—and by the time I logged out of Preview and filed Makers away on my desktop with the other PDF copies of Doctorow’s books, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, but I was sure that Doctorow had succeeded in capturing and articulating something significant in the culture.

Here’s why:

Makers tells the story of the birth and untimely death of an economic movement reporter/blogger (and initial protagonist) Suzanne Church calls the “New Work,” aimed at turning ancient, lumbering “dinocorps” into flexible teams of innovators.  In the words of Tjan, one of the “suits” who works with the original New Work team of Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks (an eccentric pair of hacker-inventors who act more like an old married couple than a business partnership), the purpose of the New Work is this:

“We’re going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn’t been imagined a year before.”

And when reporter Suzanne questions the stability of that sort of system, he argues passionately for his idea—

“That’s a functional market,” he insists, going on to deliver a free market sermon that made me want to stand and applaud:

“If you want to make a big profit, you’ve got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. It’s how we got here, you see. It’s what the system is for. We’re approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easier—it’s producing a kind of superabundance that’s amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers…”

It doesn’t sound like stereotypical science fiction—alien invasion, cyborgs, and omnipresent governments of a nightmarish dystopia.  It’s our world, the world today, with bloggers outstripping traditional print papers and corporate bureaucracy doing its best to smother fluid, mobile models of small groups of innovators under the weight of its own inertia.  It’s at once the “weirdest and best time the world has yet seen.”

But Dickens and faux-Chinese proverbs will have out—if it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and everyone knows that to live in interesting times is a curse.

That’s something Doctorow’s characters learn the hard way.

For the sake of saving the plot for the readers, I’ll just say this: the brilliant whirlwind of creativity we find in Part I isn’t the end—Parts II and III take us from this dizzying height to a doldrums of frustration and stagnation.

It’s what our high school English teachers would call a “chiasmus,” a crossing of paths or slopes or fate lines, with characters selling-out or buying in or suing or countersuing each other so fast that I can’t tell who to root for anymore.

But if one thing is clear, it’s this:

The title of the novel could apply to literally every character in the story, all of whom express at some point or another a deep desire to make/do/create.  But their hands are tied by red tape, or they’re strangled by lawsuits, or their fate lines are snipped off with the shears of the bureaucratic Atropos: inertia.

“All he wanted was to have good ideas and make them happen,” Doctorow writes of Sammy Page, a Disney dinocorps executive trapped by the rigid structure of the company.  “Basically, he wanted to be Lester.”

But the politics engulfing Lester’s once-happy life as an inventor selling his creations on eBay make it so that even Lester can’t “be Lester”: “Why couldn’t he just make stuff and do stuff? Why did it always have to turn into a plan for world domination?” he thinks.

Sound something like Don Draper?  (or maybe Howard Roark?)

Cory Doctorow writes on his blog that his science fiction represents “radical presentism,” a prediction of the present rather than the future—meaning that in Makers it’s our world today he’s looking at, probably the reason the novel’s so unnerving.  Doctorow creates a cognate of modern America, a place in a frenzy of invention and creativity—until the idealism dies.  The tragedy is that the frustrated desire to just make stuff doesn’t die along with it.

AMC, at least, is catching on to the cultural drift—if a little after Doctorow—and I have to say, the Mad Men finale is a bit more optimistic than the fifteen-years-later epilogue of Doctorow’s epic.  The smaller, more flexible new agency of Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Price, after all, is staffed completely by makers.

V: Take Me to Your (Ratings) Leader

I’ve never been so excited about the end of the world.

Most people probably think it’s an earthquake—the rumbling and shaking that rocks the planet for a few moments as massive spacecraft enter the planet’s atmosphere.  But, as the pilot’s opening questions make clear (Do you remember where you were when JFK was assassinated?  On 9/11?), the arrival of the “Visitors” in ABC’s new sci-fi drama V isn’t going to be mistaken for a relatively harmless natural disaster for long: in terms of “flashbulb memory” potential, first contact with an extraterrestrial species (genus, family… kingdom, domain, life) wins hands down.

The only question for us viewers is whether this remake of the 1980s miniseries is going to be memorable too.  As a rabid science fiction fan looking for a Lost replacement, I’m going to give an enthusiastic yes, and I’m not alone—the V pilot’s viewer numbers rank it as the best debut for any new show this season.

Of course, avid sci-fi (should I say SyFy?) fans could get excited strictly on the basis of casting.  Morena Baccarin of the ill-fated cult hit Firefly features as a sinisterly serene alien named Anna, along with another Whedon veteran, Alan Tudyk, whose role—I don’t want to give too much away, but…—might bear closer resemblance to Dollhouse’s sociopathic Alpha than the joke-cracking Wash.  And because no new series this fall could be complete without including an ex-cast-member from Lost, Elizabeth Mitchell stars as a (rightly) skeptical FBI agent with a smart-ass hormone-crazed son (honestly—could you really not find a human girl to date?).

Now I realize that alien invasion scenarios have become one of the tropes of science fiction over the last century (yes, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was published in 1898), but if the End of Days arrives any time soon it’s likely to have more to do with the Maya than the final frontier.  In other words: V will to stretch our suspension of disbelief, but that’s not a bad thing.  Science fiction has always been more about revealing something about the present than predicting the future—there’s a reason the 1980s Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired terror with the Borg Collective.  Captain Picard, taking the Cold War to the Neutral Zone.

And for millennial viewers V has already done an excellent job taking newsworthy issues from today’s headlines and applying them to a situation completely alien to us (cue groan).  A couple brief examples—

Technology and its frighteningly-fast advances:

When Anna is questioned by a gaggle of reporters on some of the V tech, citing human scientists who claim it’s impossible, she replies: “Our scientists can explain it.”  “That’s not an answer,” a reporter quickly rejoins.

And it’s true, it’s not an answer.  But most of us can’t keep up with human technology at its current pace, let alone extraterrestrial—there’s a certain point when technology looks a lot like magic, and we don’t need to wait for the Singularity to get there.

Terrorism:

Sleeper cells of extraterrestrials stockpiling C-4?  Nothing highlights the concept of enemies among us better than aliens wearing cloned human flesh.  Anyone who flies regularly probably doesn’t think twice anymore about walking barefoot a yard or two in the middle of an airport (who knows what you can hide in the soles of those flip-flops), but all that means is that we’re getting very used to uncertainty.

Government Expansion:

Remember the boom and bust of “compassionate conservatism” two election cycles ago?  Both major parties today seem locked in battle trying to prove who cares the most.  The victor?  Anna.  (Shoot—“universal healthcare” is mentioned by name as a system the Vs can make available to backward humanity.)

But that’s not as positive as it might sound; we may not know their complete plan for homo sapiens sapiens yet, but the Vs are portrayed as thoroughly dangerous characters with a suspicious desire to hide their true motives:

“Just be sure not to ask any questions that would portray us in a negative light,” Anna tells her bewildered interviewer.  And when he insists he won’t work with (for) them again, the ambitious reporter is told that “compromising one’s principles for the greater good isn’t a shameful act—it’s a noble one.”

Government programs are growing almost as rapidly as technology today, and it’s immeasurably more difficult to comprehend—but one thing politicians make perfectly clear is that we should sacrifice for the common good.  Maybe someone trades in their gas-guzzler for a hybrid, and maybe the rhetoric goes in one ear and out the other, but it all sounds a lot more sinister coming from a smooth-talking extraterrestrial PR agent.

But what excited me most about V is how quickly the pilot moved into the actual storyline.  Alien arrival itself is a concept that could take up forty-two minutes easy, but already we’re shown the wheels turning, and already the Vs are (spoiler alert!) revealed—at least to a select few—as vicious reptilian beasts bent on the destruction of humankind.  Well, excepting another select few.

I fully expected that revelation to come two or three episodes in (if that), but the quick pace of the plot was a very welcome surprise.  The secret meeting of the “resistance” was chilling, and the brutal attack of the Vs and their superior weapons is shocking.  And it just makes you think—if the skies did darken with alien spacecraft, who would run in terror, who would fight back, and who would applaud?  V depicts the whole gamut of reactions, but as for me, I’m just looking forward to Tuesdays.