Posts Tagged ‘Mars’

We’ll Always Have Paris

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

The stories in this collection were created by two people: The me who watches and the me who writes.

Both of these creatures inside myself have lived under one sign, which has hung over my typewriter for seventy years: Don’t think, do.

I haven’t thought about any of these stories; they are explosions or impulses.  Sometimes they are big explosions of ideas that cannot be resisted, sometimes small impulses coaxed to grow.

*  *  *

So here you are with the works of the two people living inside my skin.  Some may surprise you.  And that is good.  Many of them surprised me when they came to me and asked to be born.  I hope you enjoy them.  Don’t think about them too much.  Just try to love them as I love them.

- from the Introduction

We’ll Always Have Paris is not Bradbury at the pinnacle of his short game – but then, neither is the bulk of the stories he wrote after 1970.  There are gems in every Bradbury collection, though, and those herein do sparkle: a must for fans, a maybe for semi-fans, not recommended for newbies (for whom I’d suggest seeing how the ’50s stuff treats you, if possible, in autumn in Western Pennsylvania in your childhood).

4/5 stars

If it’s futile to strive for objectivity in reviewing any book, it’s doubly futile when the book in question is by Ray Bradbury.  Chronicles twice in a row blew my mind at age nine, then Fahrenheit, Something Wicked, R is for Rocket, S  is for Space and so forth kinda chronologically, Death is a Lonely Business, some plays and poems and Zen and the Art of Writing shy of catching up to Bradbury by the end of the 20th century.  It’s safe to say that Bradbury has inspired me to a degree and in a basic way few other fiction writers have, but I long ago realized what I dig most about his stuff is only partly the rhythms of his prose (which stumble onto their faces at least once per story, even the best ones), only partly the concepts (which range, by story, from awesome to pretty lame), but mainly the goofy enthusiasm that suffuses even his creepiest and most melancholy stuff, conveyed (and often as not undermined) by gollygeewhizdamn ejaculation-prone characters (Bradbury, to my knowledge, has never written a genuine sex scene – anybody?) and, more to the point, sensorium-bursting evocations of the stuff happening around them in dynamic, living environments.

For what it’s worth, I felt that weird fire blazing from all 21 stories (there’s also the introduction and a poem) of this new collection.  The few I thought were outstanding in terms of concept and execution were “The Visit,” “Arrival and Departure”, “A Literary Encounter”, “If Paths Must Cross Again” (though this otherwise lovely story has some errata it blows my mind nobody at HarperCollins picked up on: a diner called “Mick’s” on pg. 190 has become “Mike’s” by the bottom of the page, and remains so), “Pater Caninus” (Bradbury writes, as ever, charmingly of priests and dogs [I dare say, from experience, even if you're a heathenistic cat person]), and a Mars story, “Fly Away Home”.  Here’s a bit, though, from my (and Bradbury’s) favorite in this collection, a story about a guy he used to know called “Massinello Pietro”:

And he saw all the faces, the looking faces.  And he saw the silent houses, with their silent people.  And, in his singing, he wondered why he was the last one singing in the world.  Why did no one else dance, open mouths, wink, strut, flourish?  Why was the world a silent world, silent housed, silent faced?  Why were all the people watching people instead of dancing people?  Why were they all spectators and only he the performer?  What had they forgotten that he always and always remembered?  Their houses, small and locked and silent, soundless.  His house, his Manger, his shop, different!  Filled with squeaks and stirs and mutters of bird sound, filled with feather whisper and murmurings of pad and fur and the sound that animal eyelids make blinking in the dark.  His house, ablaze with votive candles and pictures of rising – flying – saints, the glint of medallions.  His phonograph circling at midnight, two, three, four in the morning, himself singing, mouth wide, heart open, eyes tight, world shut out; nothing but sound.  And here he was now among the houses that locked at nine, slept at ten, wakened only from long silenced hours of slumber in the morn.  People in houses, lacking only black wreaths on door fronts.

Sometimes, when he ran by, people remembered for a moment.  Sometimes they squeaked a note or two, or tapped their feet, self-consciously, but most of the time the only motion they made to the music was to reach in their pockets for a dime.

Bradbury can still pull rabbits from his hat, just not as many, not as quickly, which is what it is (dude is pushing 90), but the rabbits that do pop up in this collection are fun to watch manically gambol through fields of adjectives…  if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing.

We’ll Always Have Paris is available at the Carnegie Library.

Happy reading and cuídate.

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The Empress of Mars

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

For five years now it had stood defiantly on its rocky bit of upland slope, the very picture of what a cozy country tavern on Mars ought to be: squat low dome grown all over with lichen patches most picturesque, except on the weather-wall where the prevailing winds blasted it bald with an unceasing torrent of sand, so it had to be puttied constantly with red stonecast leavings to keep it whole there.  Mary swapped resources with the clan, with the laborers, with even a few stealthy British Arean Company personnel for fuel and food, and an economy had been born.

***

Barsoom Day came but once a year, at least for those colonists using Earth’s calendar; there was an informal arrangement wherein the twelve Earth months, cropped here and there to balance out, were repeated twice within the Martian year.  The years in which December generally fell in summer were called Australian years, and the others weren’t.

This meant that sometimes the annual gathering under Settlement Dome took place at the height of Martian summer, with a pale-blue sky smiling Outside and hardly any winds; sometimes the shrieking gales of winter almost drowned out General Director Rotherhithe’s celebratory speech, and the luckless Hauler chosen to carry a pouch of water out to the original site of the first manned landing arrived there with a lump of ice to set before the commemorative plaque instead, and himself frozen too unless he dialed his psuit’s temperature up as far as it would go.

But Haulers were for the most part durable Outside, and who especially wanted to hear General Director Rotherhithe’s speeches anyway?  The cramped Martian gravity cricket match (IT versus Clerical), squeezed in under Settlement Dome, was moderately fun to watch; though nobody really played very well, the betting was energetic.  Afterward all parties who were still in a mood to celebrate tramped up the Tube to the Empress for a few pints and the closing ritual of the day.

Like Burroughs, Bradbury, Benford, Bear, Bova, Brackett, and even people whose names don’t start with ‘B’ like Kim Stanley Robinson, before her, Baker has planted her authorial flag on the red planet.  The Empress of Mars is straight-up majestic.

5/5 stars

The Empress of Mars tells the tale (expanded from Baker’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated 2003 novella of the same name) of the titular (and Mars’s only) tavern.  With a conversational, tongue-in-cheek omniscience, Baker shapes the intertwined lives of the Empress’s proprietor, ex-xenobotanist Mary Griffith, her three daughters and their lovers, the cook (a heretic hiding out from the neopagan Ephesian Church), and patrons of the establishment (which include those stranded on Mars after the first colonization bubble, pumped up by the British Arean Company, deflates, and subsequent arrivals) into a rollicking frontier epic.  The Griffith fam and their closest neighbors, Clan Morrigan of the Celtic Federation, are believable and sympathetic, and even nemeses like BAC bureaucrats and Ephesian Church Mothers Willow and Glenda, though cruel and obnoxious, aren’t monsters (as Baker reveals in this interview, the most sinister character in the book, Nennius, is a time-traveling cyborg from her rad-sounding Company series).

What really set The Empress apart for me, though, is this: if there exists a funnier Mars novel, I haven’t read it.  Baker leavens the high-tech, high-stakes frontier drama with hilarious set-pieces and asides to the reader: Mary receives a notice of excommunication, “her name printed on the front in bloodred letters in the Font of Disfavor”, Nennius walks in on the Director General of the settlement jacking off to S&M holoporn (he later hears in Mother Glenda’s voice “the subliminal crack of a whip”), an Italian actor-turned-diamond prospector projects tumbleweeds and other “Wild West” cinema tropes onto the landscape around him, lots of heavy drinking goes on, and paragraphs like this abound:

Before her was Dead Snake Field, a stretch of rock distinguished by a cairn marking the last resting place of Cochevelou’s pet ball python, which had survived the trip to Mars only to escape from its terrarium and freeze to death Outside.  Initial hopes that it might be thawed and revived had been dashed when Finn, in an attempt at wit, had set the coiled icicle on his head like a hat and it had slipped off and fallen to the floor, shattering.

Yet for all its zings at corporatism and organized religion, all its silliness and clever dialogue, The Empress, like the best Mars stories (or SF for that matter), is ultimately about transformation both personal and planetary.  My first time Outside with Baker left me reeling with sense-of-wonder, craving more.

When I hit up a Company novel, or one of Baker’s other stand-alone Mars stories, as I plan to do soon, I’ll let yinz know how it treats me.

The Empress of Mars is available at the Carnegie Library.

Happy reading and cuídate.

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Happy 89th, Ray Bradbury!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Ray Bradbury turns 89 [17] today.  Almost two decades ago, he turned my tender mind on to Mars and Venus, Poe and Melville, and various occult and paranormal subjects.  In recent years, Ray has continued to crank out quality works: so far this century, Ray has dropped 11 story collections (most recently We’ll Always Have Paris, review forthcoming), 3 novels, 3 essay collections, 2 poetry collections, a children’s book, and 9 volumes of supplemental miscellany.

To celebrate, my pal Dana and I read and discussed “Usher II” and “Ylla” from The Martian Chronicles in Mellon Park.

Thanks for all the words and worlds and feliz cumpleaños, Ray!

Play and cuídate.

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Tubilustrium 2009

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

- attributed to Patrick Henry at St. John’s Church in Richmond, VA 3-23-1775

The fifth and final day of Quinquatria was also Tubilustrium.

The ceremony of the Purification of the Trumpets, held on 23 March, was repeated on 23 May and in both months the following day was marked in the Calendars as QRCF (Quando Rex Comitiavit Fas). A note in the Praenestine calendar records that 23 March was called Tubilustrium because during it ‘the trumpets used in the sacred rites are purified in the Hall of the Shoemakers’ (in atrio sutorio lustrantur, quibus in sacris utuntur); a ewe lamb was sacrificed. The site of the Hall is not known. The note further describes the Tubilustrium as a festival of Mars, thought Ovid attributes it forti deae, namely Minerva. John Lydus, who mentions the Salian priests, says that the worship was paid to Mars and a goddess called in the Sabine tongue Nerine; she will be Nerio, the alleged wife of Mars. Thus the Tubilustrium developed in the same way as the Quinquatrus.
The nature of the trumpets (tubi) is not clear. They are generally taken to have been ritual instruments (like the sacred ancilia) for use in summoning the assembly on the following day, but presumably the ceremony also involved a symbolic purification of the trumpets of the whole army. Whether any actual military instruments were used or representatives of the army (as the tribuni at the Quinquatrus) were present, we do not know. Another suggestion is that ordinary trumpets were used which then became purified, that is when Ovid says ‘lustrantur purae…tubae’, the purae is proleptisc. In any case the ceremony was designed to help to make the army fit for war, and many Romans who did not attend it would be reminded of the occasion by seeing the Salii dancing through the streets of the city.

- Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic by H.H. Scullard, by way of a 3-23-03 post at Nova Roma’s forum

Having once been displaced by Minerva, Nerio vanished from the calendar, and with her that special aspect of Mars – whatever it may have been – which the name was intended to express.  The five days, 18th to 23rd, became permanently associated with Minerva.  The 19th was the dedication day of at least one of her temples, and counted as her birthday: the 23rd was the Tubilustrium, with a sacrifice to ‘dea fortis,’ who seems to have been taken for Minerva, owing to an incorrect idea that the latter was specially the deity of trumpet-players.  She was no doubt an old Italian deity of artificers and trade guilds; but the Tubilustrium was really a Mars festival, and Minerva had no immediate connexion with it.

- The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic by William Warde Fowler

On 3-23-1919, El Duce laid out the principles of Fascism, and on 3-23-1933, von Hindenberg signed the Enabling Act (or “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation”), taking Hitler from Chancellor to Führer with a flick of the pen. On 3-23-1983, Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” program, and on 3-23-1989, Pons and Fleischman announced they’d achieved cold fusion at room temperature.  In the following months, the Power Elite (on which note, seasons 1 and 2 of the BBC’s The Tripods dropped today on DVD) employed folks like Steven E. Jones, who’s been pushing the thermate-driven collapse of Towers 1 and 2 red herring for the past several years, to launch a coordinated assault on Pons and Fleischman’s research, effectively discrediting claims of excess heat.  On 3-23-06 the Federal Reserve announced it would no longer bother to publish the M3 report, and so forth.

Today, my war trumpets were purified in that I vanquished a sore throat; and, though I didn’t personally sacrifice an ewe, I did eat a gyro.

Today also kicks off the five-day Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and I suspect that combat is central to most of the games being developed.  Alaska’s Mount Redoubt also erupted five times between last night and this morning; the volcano was apparently confused, as the May 23 Tubilustrium is the one dedicated to Vulcan.

Happy birthday to H. Beam Piper, Akira Kurosawa, Wernher von Braun, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the other El Duce (the one from The Mentors) and, to all  yinz all, cuídate!

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Ron Paul Over the Rainbow to Mars

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

On August 3, 2007 I hit up a Ron Paul rally at the Four Points-Sheraton in Mars, as mentioned on Granny Miller’s blog and in this CP article.  My pal John Allen and I arrived an hour into Greentree native Paul’s campaign speech and flipped through pamphlets, which, unlike typical campaign lit, made direct and disparaging reference to something called “The New World Order.”  After Paul’s speech, I asked him if he knew about Project HAARP, which he claimed he didn’t, then got him to autograph the Modern Library Classics edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which has an introduction by Ray Bradbury comparing and contrasting Oz with Wonderland.  Paul seemed a bit put off by my request, but if this video is dated correctly, the Paul-Oz connection was already well-established before I sprung it on him.

Paul’s statements regarding 9/11 have been tame, lame, or noncommittal, to the point of throwing the 9/11 Commission Report at Giuliani during the second debate.  If you encounter Paul, dear reader, and the spirit moves you, bug him for a statement about HAARP, 9/11, chemtrails or whatever and film it, as I was unable to do.

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