Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

It’s been ages since I last read the original, and two days before Christmas I wanted a break from Toilers of the Sea, so I figured I’d pick it up again yesterday. And yeah, the story holds up. The emphasis on kindness and charity and human connection makes it timeless, beyond the specifics of poverty in England during the early Industrial Revolution or 19th-century Christmas traditions.

Dickens as narrator is more cheerful in “A Christmas Carol” than he is in heavier works like Great Expectations (though even that has its moments of levity), even when describing Scrooge’s cruelty, the Cratchets’ poverty, or the black market pawn shop where items stolen from his corpse are sold off. The Cratchets making the most of what little they have is of course part of the point, but there’s a sort of perverse he-had-it-coming-to-him glee in the latter scene.

The trickiest part is making Scrooge’s conversion believable, and while I think some screen versions fall into because-the-theme-demanded-it territory, the original makes it work. The spirits cover all the bases of persuasion, sometimes hinting, other times bluntly throwing Scrooge’s own words or actions back in his face. You see just enough of his youth to believe that he could still have some compassion and capacity for joy somewhere, buried deep down, slumbering where they might be rekindled. And you see hints of it beginning as early as Christmas Past. Even if it takes a bunch of ghosts traumatizing him to do it.

Of course, just about every adaptation I’ve seen popped up in my head while reading it, starring everyone from George C. Scott to Mickey Mouse. Patrick Stewart used to perform an amazing one-man stage show that I was lucky enough to see back in the 1990s.

And yet after all this time, it’s still not clear what’s so particularly dead about a doornail.

An intricate novella about the middle generations of a multi-generational spaceship, those with no memory of Earth and no chance of setting foot on the target planet. A few generations back, a religion started with the belief that nothing outside the ship matters, but you have to keep the ship functional and traveling. By now it’s become the belief that nothing outside the ship exists at all, that the home they left was a myth, and that their destination is a myth too, and only the journey is real.

What happens when that ideology takes hold of the ship’s leadership? And navigation? And education? After all, why teach children about animals, or forests, or how to farm on a planet? They’ll never see one.

And what happens when that ideology faces proof that the destination is real?

On one hand, it’s a classic case of dogma vs. science, or humanity’s insistence on ignoring slow, long-term crises like climate change. On the other hand, it’s not as if there’s a way for most people on the ship to prove the existence of planets anymore. They just have to take the word of their ancestors that their world existed. The destination world is as unknowable as an afterlife.

So it becomes a matter of trust: do you believe the religious teachings that match your experience, or do you believe the historical and scientific teachings that don’t? And if you do have the knowledge and resources to check scientifically, do you accept or reject what you find out?

“Paradises Lost” was originally published in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories), and is also collected in The Found and the Lost.

Echoes

There are a zillion stories about generation ships. But I see echoes of the story in Czerneda’s The Gate to Futures Past, with the people trapped on a space ship and facing the question of what’s real about their existence…in Burke’s Semiosis, where the later generations of colonists have a completely different outlook from the first generation who came from Earth…and in Heaven’s Vault, a game in which an archaeologist seeks out the history of the nebula she lives in, even though the learned believe time is a loop, and the idea of coming from somewhere is unfathomable to them.

And of course we see that question of competing worldviews in the real world, as science and technology become too complex for casual understanding and pundits peddle “alternative facts” while discouraging people from checking up on them.

I don’t know how I missed a time-travel comic book published by DC (through its short-lived Helix imprint) when it was new, but apparently I did. And I didn’t stumble on it over the next ~30 years until I read about the crowd-funded hardcover re-release last year.

Time Breakers flips the familiar time-cop trope on its head: Instead of protecting time from paradoxes, the protagonists are trying to create more paradoxes, convinced that the very existence of life depends on it.

The main characters are intriguing, as are the ever-more-convoluted tangles of timeline dependency loops, but the villains don’t have much in the way of depth, and I can barely remember them even after a second read.

Weston’s art is detailed, bringing to life the settings and costumes of different eras ranging from prehistory to the near future.

The story feels a bit choppy and unbalanced, spending more time on setup than I’d expect from something this length, and diving into the resolution faster than expected. It makes me wonder if it was originally intended to be a longer story, or an ongoing series that would allow more room for characters, and then shortened to 5 issues.

The 2024 hardcover collection includes a new cover and commentary by Weston, along with two earlier commentaries by Pollack (who died the year before, and to whose memory this edition is dedicated) from 1997 and 2017.

Regarding Helix Comics

Helix was a science fiction imprint that DC used for a couple of years in the mid-to-late 1990s. Its best-known title, Transmetropolitan (a futuristic take on Hunter S. Thompson by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson), moved over to Vertigo after the label was retired.

I only remember picking up a couple of them at the time: Sheva’s War because of its painted artwork, and The Dome: Ground Zero for its early computer-generated art. A few years later when I finished reading the main Elric books I picked up the collection of Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, and I eventually got around to reading most of Transmet. One of these days I’ll read the rest of it. There were more, of course, but Cyberella is the only other title that rang a bell when I read that list.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I skipped most of the Helix line. I was reading a lot of comics (mostly super-heroes, but some media tie-ins), and I was reading a lot of science-fiction books, and I was obviously aware of Helix…so why didn’t I check out more of the science-fiction comics? I can only assume that most of them just didn’t grab my attention enough to look more closely. Even the one about time paradoxes.

Incredibly good ice cream with flavors and combinations not usually found here in the US. The Ube malted crunch and Vietnamese coffee rocky road (which doesn’t have nuts, so I can actually eat it!) are my favorites of their standard flavors, and I always make sure to try some of the seasonal flavors when I’m in. The Japanese neapolitan (matcha/cherry blossom/Hokkaido milk) is a reliable standby as well.

I’ve only been to the Venice (California) location, but they apparently have several other locations around the Los Angeles area, and are opening one in Torrance soon.

The second book in the series is a decent adventure story from the anything-goes era of science fiction. Like book three, it handles Native Americans better than I would expect from its contemporaries. (Though I did cringe at the two white guys and modern Apache being spray-tanned to pass as prehistoric Native Americans.)

About a third of it is a quasi-military time travel mission to retrieve an alien spaceship that crashed in the distant past, before it decays to ruins. Mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, volcanoes, etc. That part goes by too quickly, because Norton is using it to pivot from time travel to space travel. The rest is an outer space adventure as the team is dragged around the galaxy by the ship’s autopilot…in the present day…after the civilization that built it has been dead for millennia.

There’s a lot of improvising and jerry-rigging, with a crew stuck in a spaceship without sufficient provisions, not sure how long they’ll be up there. At times I was reminded of Apollo 13, which of course hadn’t happened yet when Norton was writing this in the late 1950s!

It drags after a while, though. With the ship being on autopilot, it feels like the characters are just along for the ride. They can’t even explore too far when the ship stops along its route, because they can’t be 100% certain when it will lift off again.

Reading Order

I ended up reading the Time Traders series out of order for the simple reason that books 1, 3 and 4 have passed into the public domain, but this one hasn’t. Despite the drastically different circumstances, each gives you enough information that you don’t need to read them in order, though it does help to start with book one, since the rest of the series hinges on the plot twist near the end.