Gurglings of a Putrid Stream

John Norman's Priest-Kings of Gor is about a Hero whose city has been destroyed, whose friends and family have been scattered and isolated one from another, and who knows exactly who to blame for it. The responsible parties are the planet's alien overlords, the Priest-Kings, whom the Hero, Tarl Cabot, has hated since first learning of their existence. So it follows that Tarl will travel to their mountain domain and kick the crap out of them. That's the way these stories go.

But it isn't quite the way this one goes. Part of the reason for this is that the Priest-Kings don't act without reason, and if they allow Tarl to enter their domain, which they do, it is because they have a plan for him. Another part is Tarl himself, who never kills anyone if he doesn't have to. He talks a good game, and he's certainly got the skills and the strength to back it up in most cases, but when push comes to shove, he's more likely to bloody a nose than pull an Ender Wiggin and utterly destroy his opponent. He's reasonable that way.

Priest-Kings is the most overtly science fictional of the first three Gor books and it is because of the Priest-Kings themselves. They are aliens possessing a high technology and an insectile physique. They are the gods of Gor, and how humbling for mankind that their gods live in a nest. And that they enslave humans to work it. Where the previous books were all about swordplay and archery, this one substitutes blast rays and flying disks.

And it works. While these books are classified as science fiction, I think it's fair to say that they are sufficiently hybridized with fantasy to cause a certain confusion on the part of prospective readers (and a number of reader-critics). What makes them science fiction, though, isn't the space-age trappings, it is the point of view. Norman has more on his mind than heroism and high drama: Gorean philosophy -- and that includes that of the Priest-Kings -- is what interests him. How else to explain a scene in which we find our muscle-bound hero enjoying grooming an insect?

That's another thing: the Gor books are funnier than I've seen anyone give them credit for, and a whole lot smarter. Norman, of course, is partly to blame for this, with his abiding fascination with gender roles, and particularly the subservience of women. But even here, from what I've read so far, he hasn't said much beyond what I see on the covers on hundreds of romance novels. Women prefer dominant men. Stop the presses. Or, rather, don't, for that would eradicate an entire literary genre.

Three Gor novels so far, and each one has been better than the last. It's a progression Norman can't possibly maintain, but I will say this to anyone on the fence about reading these books. These first three form what is almost a trilogy, and their reputation has yet to catch up with them. If the adventures are of interest, treat yourself and give these a read.

Then tell me if you agree that Orson Scott Card must have done so.

Good fun - 3
Sexist sadomasochism - 0

1. Start on Page 1. I mean, of course, that the first page of the story should start on Page 1. Front matter can be numbered with Roman numerals or, for all I care, with negative numbers counting up to one. But the story should start on Page 1. I like to be able to look at the last page of a book and know how many pages there are, without then having to consult the first page and subtract 9 (or whatever).

2. Chapters should start on right-hand pages, and chapters should never flow one into the next on the same page. Granted, the accuracy of the total page count increases as the empty space between chapters is reduced, but I find that I enjoy being able to jump ahead, as it were, when chapters don't fill all the available page-space. Makes me feel like I'm making more progress.

3. Chapter titles should be at the top of every right hand page. The book title may appear on the left, but honestly, though I frequently forget the title of a chapter while I'm reading, I don't believe I have ever forgotten the title of the book I am reading. Even if I did, it's much simpler to flip to the book's cover than to page back to the beginning of the chapter.

4. Inner margins should be wide enough so you don't have to break the damn spine to read the book. Making them equal to the outer margins may satisfy some weird urge for symmetry, but it really makes no sense in a bound book, where curved space becomes a factor.

5. Introductions should become Afterwords, especially "scholarly" introductions. Not all introductions reveal more than I think they should about the book, but enough of them do that I almost never read the Introduction (if I read it at all; it depends) until after I've read the book.  They should be put at the back.

Michael Crichton published ten books -- five before The Andromeda Strain and five after -- under pseudonyms, eight of them as John Lange. Thanks to Hard Case Crime (and Crichton himself), the Lange books are available once again. Binary is the last of them. Being the last, I don't know if it is also the best, but reading it was such a pleasure that I can assure you I intend to find out.

It is, according to other sources, the book most like his more famous works, and it's easy enough to see why this may be so. It begins and ends with excerpts from government documents, it plays as a race against time (the hero has 12 hours to solve the case and save the day), and the case itself begins with a techno-scientific premise: a radical who aims to kill the President (and countless innocent bystanders) through the combination of two chemicals to produce a deadly nerve gas. Why, then, didn't he publish it under his own name?

Despite the similarities, Binary is Crichton lite. In his case, that has nothing to do with his characters or the complexity of his plots; it's simply a matter of research: how much he did and how much of it ended up on the page. For this reason, this stripped-down thriller might actually be preferable to some of his readers.

I wouldn't go that far myself, but I will say that if you think Crichton is a quick read, you'll be amazed at how blazingly fast Lange is. Binary is nothing deep, nothing even terribly memorable, but it's exciting, and Crichton makes it all seem absolutely effortless, like eating cotton candy.

*****

A note on the cover: Hard Case Crime is bringing back the pulp-style covers some of us dearly miss, whether we were alive during their heyday or not. Sometimes those covers are really quite clever. Like this one. The girl (in pulp, attractive women are always "girls") isn't the least bit literal. Combined with the tanks in the background, however, she is certainly incendiary.

Here is the original cover, which I also like:

Reading the back half of Zoo feels like being pelted by something from the back end of a chimpanzee. Repeatedly. Its a devolution to all the implausibilities and tired stereotypes that are present in the first half, but overshadowed by the development of the plot. Its overriding theme -- that of the basic stupidity of mankind -- might not be so bad, except that, by continuing to read, you feel as though you're living proof of it.

The story, by James Patterson and/or Michael Ledwidge (I'm sick of these star/no-name "collaborations"), isn't even what it pretends to be. Ostensibly, it's about the mammalian branch of the animal kingdom suddenly rising up against mankind. In reality, the authors turn all those dogs, cats, lions, bears, and monkeys into large furry insects. It was either that, I guess, or make them smarter. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This is one of the new breed of books that ironically provides a high number of stopping points with its many bite-sized chapters, yet, because you know you can put it down at any time, keeps you reading addictively. The downside, if you pause long enough to think about it, is a sense that the whole thing has been dumbed down to a child's level. Or that it was specifically written for the ADD crowd. But in this case, it's the authors who seem unable to stay on point.

One particularly funny example has them telling us on one page how citizens have begun boarding up their homes as if there were a plague afoot. Two short pages earlier, however, we read about women attending yoga classes and children going to school. Be careful walking to school, Timmy.  Don't get mauled by any wild dogs.

The larger world is a real problem for Patterson and Ledwidge, who seem to believe it's still 1950 and the government can squash any story it doesn't like. All across the nation, let alone the world, men, women, and children are being killed by a vicious potpourri of animals, but the press and the people remain clueless. Until they don't. Then, remarkably, they are clueless again. If ever a book by multiple authors read like a book by multiple authors, this is it.

No better is the smaller world inhabited by our hero, Jackson Oz. He's a brilliant scientist who never obtained a degree because he got sidetracked by data suggesting that animal attacks on humans are increasing at a startling rate. He tries to raise the alarm, but is largely ignored. Why? Well, he believes it is because, in the scientific community, he is merely "Mister" Oz. But I think it may be because he goes by the name of a character from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. A werewolf, no less.

We know, of course, that sooner or later he must be heard, but any hope that this will serve to settle the story down is quickly dashed. His new scientist buddies exist simply to validate him and his theories, his government contacts are all dumb bureaucrats, and the military is overrun with arrogant fools who think they can bomb the animals back to the twentieth century. His only real consolation is a gorgeous French scientist he meets in Africa who falls in love with him right after his pushy American girlfriend dumps him. Serendipity in the Serengeti. Or something like that.

Zoo is well named, but the literary conventions on display are as frightening as any wild animal.

Outlaw of Gor begins with hero Tarl Cabot on a mission and it ends with the same mission looming before him. This book, then, is nothing but a long distraction. But it is a clever distraction, an adventure more enjoyable than his first.

Indeed, the gravity of his quest -- to confront the dreaded and feared Priest-Kings of Gor -- benefits from this sort of anticipatory development. The likelihood of his death (from his perspective, if not the reader's) is very high: no one who has ventured into the mountains of the Priest-Kings has ever returned. That's enough to give a man pause. But Tarl, whose courage is unquestioned, will not willingly hesitate when his mind is made up. So John Norman holds him back himself, with an adventure Tarl cannot possibly resist.

Not that he has any choice, at first. When he discovers that his Gorean home city has been wiped off the face of Gor, that his friends and family -- his wife -- have been scattered to its four corners, all courtesy of the Priest-Kings, he sets off for the mountains in search of whatever retribution he can exact. On the way, he enters Tharna, a city unique on Gor, for it is ruled by women. There, he is betrayed, arrested, and sentenced to death.

This, of course, is just the beginning, and it's fun to watch as Tarl, eager to get to the mountains, keeps finding that all roads instead lead fatalistically to Tharna. We are told that the Priest-Kings, who are the gods of Gor, don't do anything without a reason. So it follows that if Tarl was brought back to Gor, it was to serve a purpose. But if he is a puppet of the gods, he is also a slave to his own sense of justice. A small nudge from the gods and Tarl is off risking his life again.

Norman's prose flows smoothly and confidently, as if, with this second book, he is more comfortable on Gor and with Tarl and his other characters. It helps, too, since these books are a one-man show, that the story is more localized. Norman had a lot of ground to cover in his first book; here he can focus his (and Tarl's) energies on the fate of a single city.

As you might expect, this installment has more to say about women and their place in Gorean society than the last one. But if you think, because it features a city ruled by women, that it is more fair-minded, you'd better think again. Tarl himself, being a man from Earth of the late 1960s, is all about women's rights (up to a point, anyway), but on Gor, free love means buying a slavegirl.

Tharna itself is a dismal place, where women wear long robes and silver masks (the ruler, or Tatrix, wears a golden mask). Men of Tharna, who aren't allowed to touch the women, are considered beasts. As Tarl observes, turnabout is fair play, but either way it makes for a dysfunctional society.

Who, then, can blame him if his prefers to be on top? So far, there's nothing in these books to warrant their reputation.  But I've a long way to go.

Good fun fantasy - 2
Sadomasochistic sexism - 0

Zombie

The dialogue with which I began my review was not part of the original script. Not if the script online is accurate. Makes me wonder if was ad-libbed at some point and added later.

The cocktail referred to had only become well-known in 1939 -- at the New York World's Fair, of all places. I've never had one, but, being a rum man, I'm now curious. Here's the closest thing to its original recipe:

"Juice of 1 lime, unsweetened pineapple juice, bitters, 1 ounce heavily bodied rum, 2 ounces of Gold Label rum, 1 ounce of White Label rum, 1 ounce of apricot-flavored brandy, 1 ounce of papaya juice"

Zombie, indeed.

Oh, and by the way, whatever happened to World's Fairs?


Ritual

I'm always impressed when native and/or ritual dances in movies look more than cursorily choreographed. That is the case here. I have no idea whether this makes them more or less authentic, but I certainly appreciate them more. The one here is delightfully synchronized, and the more powerful for it.


Donovan's Brain

My books are everywhere, stacked and piled and overflowing. I find books because I typically have a picture in my mind of where they are. Donovan's Brain, however, has stymied me. I wanted to read it not long ago, but the picture in my head, while it lead to another book by Curt Siodmak, proved false. I find this upsetting, but even worse is that several searches of the most likely places it could be have all turned up negative. Where is my book?!

Betsy: But I don't know about zombies, Doctor. Just what is a zombie?

Dr. Maxwell: A ghost, a living dead. It's also a drink.

Betsy: Yes, I tried one once, but there wasn't anything dead about it.

I Walked with a Zombie is a short film with many charms. It's director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton's follow-up to Cat People, made the previous year. It may be the best zombie movie ever made.

Of course, we're talking old school zombies here. The story takes place on a small Caribbean island, where the descendants of African slaves practice voodoo. It is told by Betsy, the nurse who comes to the island to care for plantation-owner Paul Holland's ailing wife, Jessica. Jessica, we discover, lives in a semi-comatose state: though she can walk and follow simple directions, she has no will of her own.

The story, written by Curt Siodmak (Donovan's Brain) and Ardel Wray, is one of surprising depth. There's the double-backstory, for instance -- of the island's history and the history of Paul and his family -- the atmosphere, and the detail of the voodoo rituals. Layered one atop the other, what emerges is a portrait of a family torn apart by dark forces and passions.

Relatively early in the film, Betsy and Paul's brother sit down for a drink at a local bar. Their conversation is interrupted by a calypso singer, telling the story of the Holland family. The words provide backstory, the style a Caribbean atmosphere, and the title, "Shame and Sorrow," the theme of the entire picture. A short film this may be, but it packs a lot into 69 minutes.

One of its charms, though, is that it is, like Cat People, an ambiguous tale, one in which the supernatural and the psychological vie for supremacy. It provides no easy answers. And isn't that ultimately more terrifying than a bunch of bumbling brain-eaters?

Items I couldn't work into my review.


Favorite Quotation:

"...Bond was hiding a grin at the memory of having read somewhere that hatred of tobacco was a common psychopathic symptom, from which Hitler among others had been a notable sufferer."

Psychopathic sounds about right. Especially these days. Several months ago I applied online for an administrative job at a major hospital. I had to go through screen after screen of questions, upload my resume and cover letter, only to submit my application and face the final question: Are you a tobacco user? If so, the screen said, we won't hire you. You can die here, but you can't work here.

Given how prejudice breeds lack of concern, I must wonder seriously if smokers could possibly receive equal care in such a facility.



In the running for worst book cover -- ever:



Shouldn't this have been the cover for John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novel One Fearful Yellow Eye?



The Media and Sex

I suppose this one contains a spoiler. Read at your own risk.

In my review of Stephen King's 11/22/63 I pointed out a stupid scene in which the hero slathers over the naked body of his girlfriend -- while she may be dying. As I mentioned at that time, this sort of foolishness is not uncommon. I've encountered it in books, movies, and TV shows. But never has it been so outlandishly over-the-top as in Colonel Sun.

The problem is that writers are pushing the idea that sex transcends everything else. No matter what the situation, the thought of or the possibility of having sex instantly wipes the mind clean, an idea so primitive it isn't even rape, it's instinct. They, the writers, might spend hours telling us how human their characters are, only to dash it all to smithereens with something like this.

In Amis' book, Bond is tortured by the one-man yellow peril that is Colonel Sun. Excruciating doesn't begin to tell the tale of Bond's pain. When he is near death, Sun decides that Bond must feel another pain, that of the loss of his greatest pleasure in life, the joy of sex. So he orders a beautiful young woman to dance naked for him, to "caress him very lasciviously." As if Bond, in his condition, could possibly respond.

I don't think scenes such as these are mere fantasy, the disconnect from reality is too great. I think they are madness.

Kingsley Amis, writing as Robert Markham, produced this, the first James Bond book written after Ian Fleming's death in 1964. Published in 1968, it sent the franchise into a 13-year coma, until John Gardner's License Renewed in 1981.

All right, it isn't that bad. But it isn't that good, either.

It is, in fact, superior to Gardner's early books (I haven't read them all) both in terms of the quality of the writing and in not having been influenced by the movies, with all that technological "gimcrackery" that so impressed Gardner. On the other hand, Gardner was occasionally rather fun, and this novel is...not.

It starts off well, with Bond playing a round of golf, unaware he is being watched by a killer. At this point, the plot could have gone anywhere, and almost anywhere would have been better than where Amis sends it. Within a few pages (and presaging the movie Skyfall), M is kidnapped and Bond narrowly (conveniently) escapes the same fate. But (unlike Skyfall) M's capture isn't personal: the Chinese want to use him (and Bond, if they can get him) in a plot to discredit the British government.

To say that Amis has turned Fleming's spy thrillers into his own political thriller would be to imply that Amis does more than nod in this direction. The politics of this book can be simply summarized: Chinese, bad; British, good -- with a few equivocal Russians thrown in for good measure.

One of those Russians isn't a Russian at all. Most of the novel takes place in Greece or on one or another of the Greek islands. Ariadne Alexandrou is a Greek citizen working for the Russian G.R.U. She's young, she's gorgeous, and she's clever, too. Bond falls for her almost as fast as she for him. But in the non-Fleming world, they both know that love leads no further than the nearest bedroom. Which makes them ideal allies in the fight against Colonel Sun Liang-tan, with his pedestrian plan to disrupt a high-level international conference hosted by the Russians.

At any rate, that's the plan stamped onto his marching papers. But it's of as little interest to Amis as it is to his readers. What Amis appears to really care about is the psychotic Sun's secondary goal: personal growth through torture. Sun, building upon a couple of quotations from everyone's favorite sadist, the Marquis de Sade, goes on and on about the supposed mind-and-soul-expanding benefits of torture -- for both perpetrator and victim. Naturally he wants to test these theories on Bond. As improbable as this sounds, it is reason itself next to its eventual resolution.

Colonel Sun is weak tea next to Fleming's books. The plot, it's periodic disentanglements (except one, involving an innocent man caught in the crossfire), and Bond himself all fail to satisfy. Bond here is more self-reflective, but the clouds in his intellectual mirror hide anything deep or meaningful. His early, almost childish, celebration of physical activity later becomes a superficial distaste for the violence of his profession. Much less self-reliant, he is now a man who needs all the help he can get -- from circumstance, his allies, and from total strangers.

Until today, the thought of TCM and nudity meant pre-Code silents like D. W. Griffith's decadent Intolerance. Such thinking, I've just discovered, belongs to pre-Code TCM. Bloody Birthday is an 80s slasher in their "underground" series, and it features the disrobing of not one or two but three young women. Not everything has changed, however. Midway through the movie, we hear a man on a police radio saying, "We have a expletive deleted suspect."

Now, this is important -- the nudity, not the poor guy running around without his expletive. Before I get into that, though, let me tell you what this little gem is about. It's about three 10-year-old kids -- two boys and a girl -- born to different mothers on the same day in 1970, during a total solar eclipse. This, combined with a further astrological mishap, caused each of them to be born without a conscience. Now, 10 years later, they begin killing everyone in sight.

These are some badass kids, to be sure. They kill for revenge, for fun, and for no reason at all. They're resourceful, too, choosing weapons as diverse as a shovel, a hose, a car, and a gun -- the Henry Lee Lucas approach. No one is safe, not even their own parents and siblings.

Lori Lethin plays the Jamie Lee Curtis role of the good girl whose armor of virginity protects her against psychopaths.

Bloody Birthday has a cult following, and if I can extrapolate from a couple of other reviews, the kids are the reason. They were what came to my mind early in the film when I was trying to figure out how this ever showed up on TCM. They aren't like the typical slasher villain (if, indeed, that's the right word). Other killers have something that motivates them (moral outrage, perhaps, or a hyperactive sense of vengeance), but these kids lack something. This gives their murders, even when planned, a feeling of randomness that's as scary as anything else in the film.

The trouble is, this isn't a scary movie. The concept is frightening, but the execution -- i.e., the direction, by Ed Hunt, and the screenplay, by Hunt and Barry Pearson -- is slack and amateurish. Which brings us back to the nudity.

I contend that the nudity is the glue that holds this movie together and that accounts for its cult popularity. It works as fantasy for the younger crowd, nostalgia for the older, and as pornography for everyone. Without it, Bloody Birthday would be little more than a bad memory.

Significantly, it has an arc all its own. First we see a girl with her shirt unbuttoned, then another girl dancing topless, and finally a boy and a girl making it in a van. It's more logical and makes more narrative sense than anything else in the film. (This is a film, after all, in which a driverless car actually turns in order to follow an intended victim. And, no, the car isn't named Christine.)

Even so, it might not have been enough. But the girls are all willing and eager, and Julie Brown, the stripper-in-training, is sexier than most of her counterparts in other, much better films.

To be fair, I rather liked the performances of Julie Brown and Lori Lethin. Others have praised the kids' performances, as well, but I suspect that's just obfuscation on their part. They're kids. In a movie. And you never really forget that.

Everyone wants to find their own Peeping Tom, an unfairly overlooked movie worthy of serious consideration. But those movies really are rare. And they generally have something Bloody Birthday completely lacks. It's not a conscience. It's style.

The Most Dangerous Game is, of course, based on the 1924 short story of the same name by Richard Connell. The story is iconic, and if this film was the first adaptation, it was hardly the last. The concept -- human beings hunted for sport -- has been used time and again, in film, literature, and TV. And in real life, unfortunately. The Zodiac killer referred to it, and Robert Hansen lived it, kidnapping women and hunting them down in the Alaskan wilderness. Which is sadly ironic, in that the story is a classic example of escape fiction, and was never intended to be taken seriously.

This film, at least, is pure escape. It was made by many of the same people and at the same time as the original King Kong. Kong's Ann Darrow and Carl Denham are brother and sister here, two of four surviving members of a shipwreck that has cast them on an island ruled by General Zaroff, a Cossack and big-game hunter who has grown bored with hunting animals. When the story opens, the two other survivors have already gone missing, after having been shown Zaroff's secret trophy room.

This is all quickly revealed after Bob Rainsford's own ship wrecks on the reefs surrounding Zaroff's island. In the story, Rainsford improbably loses his balance and falls overboard. Later, Zaroff reveals false lights he uses to steer ships onto the reefs. In a nice bit of adaptation, screenwriter James Creelman collapses these two elements and ends up with a more believable scenario for getting everyone where he wants them.

He had more people to worry about. Neither Fay Wray nor Robert Armstrong (the brother-sister tandem Eve and Martin Trowbridge) appear in the story. But this is a movie, and a love interest was needed. Not that love, exactly, is what Zaroff has in mind for Eve. He says things like, "As you know the saying of the Ogandi chieftains: 'Hunt first the enemy, then the woman.'" And "One passion builds upon another. Kill, then love! When you have known that, you have known ecstasy." Refreshingly, Rainsford doesn't take Eve with him out of love, either. Though clearly interested (he's a man, after all), he really knows only that he can't leave Eve alone with "that savage." "Not a chance," he says. (In Kong, having hero Jack Driscoll fall in love with Ann was integral to its weird "love triangle" plot. Here, it's unnecessary, and the filmmakers show admirable restraint in leaving it out.)

So the movie isn't without its virtues. At 63 minutes, it might as well be an extended TV show, a level on which it is engaging enough. But it isn't clever or surprising, and the excitement it generates is purely situational: you either get into it or you don't. Robert Armstrong overplays the drunk routine as Eve's brother, fortunately annoying Zaroff as much as us. When Zaroff invites Martin to his trophy room, it's really a blessing. Yet it's a good adaptation, proving that a short story -- even one as simple and direct as Connell's -- contains just about all that's needed to create a passable movie.

For the serious cat lover.  (You'll see what I mean.)

I think it would have been fun writing in the early part of the last century. At least, if you were writing for the pulps. It was a time, after all, when a guy like Ray Cummings could churn out roughly 750 novels and short stories in a 35-year career, with about 350 of them coming in the 7-year period from 1935 to 1942 (which, if you're curious, works out to an average of one per week -- for five years!). And Cummings is a man whose best-regarded work, The Girl in the Golden Atom, was his first published story. Well, I don't know about that, not having read Atom, but, if true, what a whip!: having to read that prodigious output only to find out that the best thing he ever wrote was the first thing he ever wrote.

A Brand New World is from 1964, according to the disingenuous copyright notice in my edition. In fact, it was first published as a six-part serial in Argosy in 1928. It appears to have made its first appearance as a novel in 1942, but I have no idea whether any updates were made to it at that time or later. I'm left wondering about that because on more than one occasion Cummings mentions a human weapon too terrible to use against the story's alien invaders; too terrible because of what it would also do to the remaining human population. Which sounds a lot like the atomic bomb. And if Cummings predicted that in 1928, that's not half bad.

Much better than his idea of a planet wandering through space for millennia, complete with a living population of humanoids.

This planet, dubbed Xenephrene, enters into an orbit around our Sun, passing fairly close to Earth every 17 months. Close enough that its initial passage causes Earth to tilt on its axis, disrupting weather patterns and making much of the planet uninhabitable. If that isn't bad enough, while humankind scrambles toward the relatively hospitable climes of the equatorial regions, the aliens, armed with their superior "infrared" weaponry, begin an invasion against which Earth appears all but defenseless.

Meanwhile, our hero, Peter Vanderstuyft, falls in love with an alien girl named Zetta.

Metaphorically, the aliens are the Enemy du jour, and this is one of those funky utopian novels in which millions must die in order for human beings to see that they really aren't so different, after all. If people are that stupid, though, then "utopia" isn't oneness and peace, it is war and wasted lives. Peter may see hope in the way the world's nationalities unite to fight the invaders, but I see only an ad hoc coalition destined to crumble the first time someone screams "democracy" or "God."

Literally, the aliens are rather disappointing, being chiefly different from humans in their weight. They look just like us, but for some reason they weigh much less. Zetta, if I remember correctly, appears to be a normal woman, but weighs only 18 pounds. (Well, at least she and Peter can effortlessly enjoy the Clasp.) Otherwise, they are, like us, ruled by greed, jealousy, and the lust for power.

It wasn't always that way. The aliens used to be a peace-loving race. But, writes Cummings -- in another of those remarkable statements for 1928 (if indeed that's when it was written) -- one man changed all that, through the eloquence of his oratory. "It is a frightening thing," Peter's father says, "what one evil man can do."

That the problems of the world are only temporarily forgotten is evident in the novel's one real claim to "alienness": man-sized multi-legged insects that the aliens use as guards and cannon fodder. Combine the two worlds and the insects are second in intelligence only to men. Yet Peter isn't fascinated by them; he is repulsed by them. So much for tolerance and equality.

Cummings is by no means an exceptional writer and A Brand New World is by no means a good book. But it is competent, on the level of pulp. And I doubt many people read old science fiction for the quality of the writing. Personally, I was hooked by the blurb: "Xenephrene...made a pretty vision in the evening sky -- until flying things and strange visitants appeared. Xenephrene was inhabited...and its inhabitants had discovered Earth." I was half hoping for an atmospheric first act full of mystery and menace. Of course, at the time, I'd forgotten the story had started its life as a serial and that there was clearly no time for that.

Still and all, I suppose it isn't too bad for a week's work.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Many more or less random thoughts about Jurassic Park, book and movie. Rife with spoilers, including the ending. Intended for people who have read the one and seen the other.

1. Book/Movie Difference. The screenplay was written by David Keopp, but based on the book and an adaptation written by Crichton and Malia Scotch Marmo. So it shouldn't be surprising that the basic structure is the same in both. In both, the first major plot twist occurs when the kids arrive on the island, the midpoint is the first Tyrannosaur attack, and the second major plot twist (the fuzziest of the three) shifts the focus from the Tyrannosaur to the Raptors. In that sense, the movie is quite a good adaptation. The details, however, make it interesting.

2. The wonder. The book has no real corollary of the scene in the movie when Grant first sees living dinosaurs. This is one of the movie's best scenes, capturing bone-man Grant's amazement at seeing flesh-and-blood dinosaurs for the first time. Crichton tells us that every kid loves dinosaurs, but has Grant, all grown up now, react to them in a much more matter-of-fact manner, which is both unrealistic and less than enthralling. Overall, Grant has less personality in the book.

3. Grant. When the Tyrannosaur tosses the land rover with Tim inside into a tree, Movie Grant climbs up and helps Tim down. Book Grant is absent during this entire episode, and Tim gets down by himself. This small change is indicative of a much larger one. In the movie, of course, Grant doesn't relate well to children, and his growing paternalism is a theme of the story. In the book, he likes kids. True, Grant's nervousness around kids is an awfully convenient trait in the movie, but it serves two purposes, neither of which is evident in the book: it stacks emotional drama on top of the action and it provides an avenue for humor. Jurassic Park -- the book -- is all but humorless.

4. Ellie. As I recall the movie, Ellie is Grant's colleague, and between them exists a certain sexual tension. Not so in the book, where another opportunity for emotional drama is ignored. Book Ellie is Grant's student, and she's engaged to a doctor in Chicago. (I find myself torn in a right-brain/left-brain sort of way regarding Ellie and the kids. On the one hand, Crichton's depiction is more realistic, or at least more likely, but Koepp's is decidedly more entertaining.)

5. The kids. When does "convenience" become "contrivance"? Regrettably, both book and film answer this question. In both, Tim is a miniature Dr. Grant, who loves dinosaurs and knows a lot about them. This is convenient, but acceptable, simply because it isn't so egregious as to pull us, scoffing, out of the story. That doesn't happen until the third act, when (in the book) Tim is able to figure out a complex computer system, a feat that (in the movie) his "hacker" sister, Lex, duplicates. The book scenario is absurd because Tim supposedly learned about complex computer systems at his dad's workplace. In both book and film, Tim and Lex's parents are in the process of a divorce. In the book, it's made clear that Tim and his dad don't really get along. So we are asked to believe not only that Tim's dad would take his son to work on a regular basis, but also that he would do this when he can't even relate to the kid. And then, of course, that Tim could pick up anything of value just from occasionally watching his dad's co-workers using computers. The movie doesn't improve on this scenario. It's one thing for one of two kids in a movie about dinosaurs to be a dinosaur nut, but quite another for the other (in a movie about dinosaurs, remember) to just happen to be a computer hacker when exactly that skill and knowledge is required to save their lives. In the movie, Lex is Tim's older sister; in the book, she is even younger than Tim, and (thankfully) isn't forced to justify her existence by being "useful."

6. Malcolm. The biggest difference between book and film is that, in the former, Malcolm dies. It's a relief, really. This is one of those examples of messy adaptation. In both book and film, Hammond dislikes Malcolm, and in the book it's easy to see why. Malcolm is a fashionable blowhard. Yes, he disagrees with Hammond, but he is so arrogant and holier-than-thou that one suspects Hammond would dislike him anyway. Some of this translates to the film, but nobody counted on Jeff Goldblum's characterization, which is so twitchy and fun that Malcolm takes on the aspect of an endearing eccentric, and his preachiness is easier to take.

7. Chaos Theory. According to Wikipedia, Crichton "uses the metaphor of the collapse of an amusement park showcasing genetically recreated dinosaurs to illustrate the mathematical concept of chaos theory and its philosophical implications." Given Crichton's use of "iterations" for "chapters," this may, indeed, have been his purpose. But if so, it ends up as so much gobbledygook. For all I can tell (from either book or movie) chaos theory boils down to this: "shit happens." Which is where just about every story in the world begins.

8. Gennaro. Gennaro is the lawyer. In the movie, his character is combined with that of another man, which is to say that in the book, it is this other man who, during the Tyrannosaur attack, bolts from the land rover, leaving the kids alone, and gets eaten for his cowardice. In the book, however, Gennaro survives. But Crichton totally blows his character. Because he is a lawyer, everybody hates him from the get-go. Then Crichton spends a large portion of the book "rehabilitating" him: the lawyer chooses to accompany the big-game hunter, Muldoon, on a number of dangerous missions. All this, only to have Grant, Muldoon, and the others turn on him in the end -- without ever showing us any reason for the change in attitude. It's as if Crichton suddenly remembered Gennaro was a lawyer and lawyers, of course, are weak-kneed weasels. (In fact, it's particularly funny in that Crichton tells us at one point that Grant finds Gennaro in a camp vehicle, where he took refuge from a bunch of small dinosaurs. Later, with just a sentence, Grant recalls how he found Gennaro "huddled and terrified" in the truck. From sensible to pathetic in three words. And it's all b.s.)

9. The ending. A dumber ending Crichton has never written. At the end, Grant decides that he simply must track down the raptor nest. Originally he wanted to do this to prove that the animals were breeding. That is proven earlier, though, so now he needs a new reason to be an idiot. According to him, allowing the Costa Rican military to blow the island to hell is insufficient; they must first account for every animal born on the island. The reason for this is unclear, and the plan is foolish on its face: they only have time to inspect one nest, and that only if they can find it in time. Naturally they do, where we learn the stunning fact that raptors migrate, or would if they could. Knowledge like that shocker is worth the stupidity, I guess.

10. The book. Jurassic Park has become Crichton's "signature" book, and that's a shame because it is one of his worst. The characters are dull, the narrative logic is poor, and the science (apart from the scientific premise) is meaningless. It's greatness lies only in having inspired a movie that is better in every way.

The reputation of the John Norman Gor books, as put by The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: "extremely sexist, sadomasochistic pornography involving the ritual humiliation of women." Pretty serious stuff.

This reputation, however, derives from the "later volumes." Tarnsman of Gor is the very first novel in the series, published in 1966.

The series -- so far -- consists of 33 books. At what point, in such a lengthy string, do the "later" volumes begin?

I wonder because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but when I picked up Tarnsman, all I knew was the reputation. I assumed it applied equally to all. Nor did I know just how many of these books there are.

Tarnsman, as it happens, is a pretty decent fantasy adventure set on a world in which technological progress is controlled by unseen entities known as Priest-Kings. The Priest-Kings evidently enjoy close combat, so in terms of weaponry the inhabitants of Gor must make do with swords, knives, and, for grander campaigns, catapults and ballistae. But they aren't confined to land and sea. Men with sufficient strength and skill can ride tarns, huge birds specially trained for war. Thus, our hero: Tarl Cabot, a man with the requisite abilities, who, after being abducted from Earth and taken to Gor, becomes a Tarnsman -- just as hostilities break out between his city and that of another warlord. That isn't the story, though. The war is merely the device that brings Cabot in contact with Talena, the warlord's daughter, with whom, of course, he falls in love. And it is what ultimately separates them, forcing Cabot into action.

Gor is, in many ways, a primitive world, and slaves are ubiquitous, particularly female slaves. Running counter to the reputation, Cabot doesn't derive any pleasure from this; in fact, if it were up to him, he'd free the slaves and, for the most part, emancipate the women. I guess Norman eventually realized that teenage boys are less interested in equality than power and easy sex.

But here, in Book One, power is something to be distrusted. One of the unfortunate aspects of the novel, to my way of thinking, is Cabot's distaste for the Priest-Kings, who substitute for Earth's religions. Cabot takes an immediate dislike to the Priest-Kings. In context, it makes sense: they are puppet-masters and he and everyone else on Gor are their puppets. Taking the larger view, Norman (or John Lange, as he signs his checks, the professor of philosophy) clearly opts for the now-tired view of religion as inherently evil. Yet this is a tiny portion of the book, though one obviously designed to take center stage at some point, perhaps by Book Three, titled Priest-Kings of Gor.

As for the sexist porn? Book Eleven is titled Slave Girl of Gor. That sounds promising.

I wonder what "freedom of speech" means when any time someone says something that people find objectionable, that person is pressured to apologize for it. The latest incident, of course, involves John Grisham and his statements to the effect that punishments for viewing underage porn do not always fit the crime. Wouldn't that be a shocker if it were true? I mean, no one who ever got busted for marijuana possession has received a stiffer sentence than they deserved, right? American law and its courts are always just and fair -- just ask Randall Dale Adams.

What brings all this home to Goodreads and BookLikes is comments like these, which I've lifted from CNN's story about Grisham's apology.

"The day that you came out in an interview and said that watchers of child porn get too stiff of a penalty for it (you said 10 years was too much) makes you someone that I cannot support nor no longer want to read," a reader named Kendra Benefield Lausman shared on Grisham's Facebook page; another posted that she's taken her entire Grisham library to her "burn barrel" with the intent to set the books on fire.

"How do you think child porn is made?" a poster named John Kelly asked on Grisham's page. "Someone is still getting hurt you imbecile. I'm sad to say that I will never purchase, nor consume, one of your books ever again. I am disgusted."

Sound familiar? It certainly should, as many times as readers have posted similar comments about whatever author has most recently pissed them off in some way. Invariably, the defense goes something like this: "Oh, sure, he has a right to his opinion, but I have a right not to support him, too." Or, more clearly, I have a right to grandstand for a cause I believe in.

Because that's all it is, grandstanding. I think we all know that if the Shadow accompanied us through life, telling us of the evil lurking in the hearts of all the men and women we "supported" in one way or another, we'd box ourselves out of our right to pursue happiness. Unless, of course, our happiness is not dependent on frivolities like food, fuel, entertainment, and a house to live in.

And don't tell me that what you don't know doesn't hurt you. You do know it. You know it very well. You know it because you're a human being and you understand that human beings are not all sweetness and light. You know that the people who brought you the computer or smartphone on which you're reading this aren't all saints. You are absolutely positive that some of them harbor thoughts much worse than the one John Grisham voiced. And yet you aren't smashing the computer, you aren't trashing the phone. Even though your knowledge of this goes far beyond reasonable doubt, that it is, in fact, a certainty.

Can it be simply that, to your knowledge, the geeks aren't making their views public? I hope not. For here's something else you have no doubt of: if the geeks had as many microphones shoved in their faces as Grisham, they'd eventually say something objectionable, as well. In the real world, that kind of potential is indistinguishable from the actual.

It's one thing to disagree with what someone has said, and quite another to make ridiculous threats about withholding "support." For one thing, the story changes -- and not in a good way. Grisham's comments should have made people think about our laws and sentencing in child porn cases, but instead it's now all about Grisham's bottom line. Psychologists call that deflection, and, as we all know, deflection is a problem because it turns our attention away from the real problem, whatever it might be.

As a society, we condemn others for restricting the free exchange of ideas. Which is a wonderful policy, even though we should be condemned ourselves for our hypocrisy.