The Avengers vs. The Batman

The title, of course, is a tease, because in any actual showdown between anybody and Batman, Batman wins. Unless he's fighting Joel Schumacher, in which case he, along with everyone else, loses.

No, I'm talking about the two movies released in the summer of 2012; The Avengers at the beginning of the blockbuster season and The Dark Knight Rises towards its end. I've seen quite a bit of ink, digital and actual, devoted to each movie: Investigating their complexities, digging for meanings, discussing the themes, and so on. And since I'm a sucker for peer pressure...

HOW WE GOT HERE, PART 1

The Avengers can be traced straight back to a little post-credits sequence in 2008's Iron Man. Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., pops in on Robert Downey's Tony Stark and name-drops something called "the Avenger Initiative." Over the course of the second Iron Man movie, Thor and Captain America, the backstory of the leads as well as some of the details of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s creation unfold. Finally, under the leadership of Joss Whedon, The Avengers hit the theaters in May.

Although a blockbuster of extraordinary magnitude and well-received by most critics, a lot of what I've read about The Avengers suggests it's just a big, shiny toy. A common theme seemed to be that the writer didn't think much about the movie or what it said once they left the theater. Whedon had made a great slam-bang piece of entertainment but it had no depth. Serious "film" watchers, the theme ran, were waiting for the more thoughtful Mr. Nolan to wind up his trilogy of Batman movies with The Dark Knight Rises.

HOW WE GOT HERE, PART 2

In 1989, Tim Burton was given the unenviable task of rescuing the image of the Caped Crusader from Adam West's goofy legacy. His at-the-time weird casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne as the Batman was not seen as a good sign, even though he had the world's most natural fit for a role by making Jack Nicholson the Joker. Burton's Batman was a critical and commercial success, with a look that influenced not only the movie, but also nearly 15 years of animated adventures of Batman and other DC superheroes. Burton held it together for half of Batman Returns but hared off on his own dizzy vision for the second half of that movie.

Then the aforementioned Mr. Schumacher took over with Batman Forever and made a clumsy lurch back towards the camp of the late 1960s TV series, helped by Jim Carrey's insane scenery-chewing as the Riddler and a criminally under-utilized Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. He followed that with one of the worst super-hero movies ever in 1997's Batman and Robin, a dud so dud-ly that it more or less killed any ideas Warner Bros. had for continuing live-action Batman movies. In 2005, Christopher Nolan rebooted the franchise with Batman Begins and continued it with the 2008 The Dark Knight. Buoyed by a story that wasn't afraid to tackle big ideas and motivations, as well as the lauded performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, The Dark Knight was a major critical and commercial success in a way not seen since Burton's first movie. Nolan wasn't certain about continuing it after that point, but eventually decided to conclude it with The Dark Knight Rises.

TDKR seems to have been a letdown for many of the people who had such high praise for TDK. People willing to overlook TDK's evidence of just how undisciplined a plotter Nolan can be (Hong Kong sequence, anyone?) found themselves shoaling and sinking fast when that same evidence was even more evident in TDKR.

WHAT MY BIG MOUTH SAYS

I really don't know how fair it is to compare the two movies. The Avengers was far more finished, while TDKR suffers from a host of editing and plotting problems that make me think a few more months working out the script or a few more months deciding on footage could only have helped. The confrontation between Alfred and Bruce oozes artificiality, and since it's also designed to set up the first confrontation with Bane it leaves that conflict staggering out of the starting gate as well. The scenes with officer John Blake are meant to tell us that the story of the Batman continues, but they're no smoother and feel no more natural. Jim Gordon is apparently the only cast member who has to be told Bruce Wayne is Batman, so you might wonder why he leads Gotham City's police.

The Avengers does really need you to rely on knowledge of the earlier individual movies to get the full story, but it can stand by itself and Whedon has a much better sense that his story is supposed to go from "once upon a time" to "the end" without wandering around so much. All of the story elements work to carry the tale forward in addition to whatever other role they may have.

For example, if you watch his short-lived show Firefly and the sequel movie, Serenity, you can tell Whedon believes the major struggle in the world is between people who want to tell others what they have to do and people who insist they have the right to determine their own destiny. For him, that is the root of all conflict and his villain, Loki, is just a part of that. He could, of course, give one of his characters a speech that says so, but instead he sets up the initial confrontation between Loki and two of the people who will be the Avengers in Germany, where Loki outlines his scheme of dominance and how it is natural for people to kneel to a greater power. An old man stands -- an old man in Germany, so we know what he has heard and what he may have seen with his own eyes when he was younger -- and says, "Not to men like you." Loki counters: "There are no men like me." The old man, sad and with memories of unholy history showing in his eyes, replies, "There are always men like you." (And kudos to Kenneth Tigar, whose two lines should earn him a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination because the way he delivers them sets the movie's moral core on firm concrete).

Contrast that to the message Alfred tries to give Bruce about why he should not confront Bane. It comes in a back-and-forth conversation in which the older man, who raised Bruce since his parents died, wants to convince his surrogate son that he is simply not ready as Batman to deal with the power and purpose Bane represents. As Bruce Wayne, his weapons can be the boardroom and the power of the purse, but as Batman he can only counter Bane physicially -- which Alfred says he can't do. At least, I think that's what Nolan wants to get through, but there are so many leaps that have to be taken from point to point I have no way to be sure.

In fact, I have to confess I don't really know what Nolan's intended message is. He may want to say something about how existence in an essentially lawless society can drain life of its meaning, but his story posits such a ridiculously short time needed for the poor and middle class of Gotham to turn into Robespierran mobs there isn't any soil in which that message can root.

But The Avengers throws out a baker's dozen of interesting themes with which one may grapple. Although super-powered or otherwise augmented, each of the Avengers is a flawed being -- flaws which will be overcome, but not until they exact a high cost. Once acknowledged, the flaws actually help the team gel and fight Loki's army. What can we do together if we acknowledge our flaws and rely on those strong where we are weak? I've already mentioned the ongoing struggle between those who would control and those who resist it, and there are others. I personally believe anyone who claims this movie gave them nothing to think about simply wasn't trying very hard.

TDKR, it seems to me, operates its mythos at one remove from the audience. By that I mean that, in order to explore the symbolism Nolan infuses in Bruce Wayne and the Batman, we need to see it in the context of the movie's world, especially Gotham City. Nolan's caricatured sketch of Gotham in TDKR, wherein its citizens overnight transform into the Paris Mob, hunting down its rich and bringing them to a mock trial before Jonathan Crane, is one of the movie's flaws. Gotham's nature was essential in the first two movies, but it's just a foil here and really doesn't offer anything that gives Batman's decision to seemingly sacrifice himself on its behalf any weight.

In The Avengers, though, the super-rich man who puts on a costume also has to risk himself to save a city -- midtown Manhattan -- from a bomb. Whedon's story doesn't fuss with the worthiness of those being saved. Tony Stark's decision to get rid of the bomb has to do more with what kind of person he wants to be. He's the guy who can get rid of the bomb, so he will. You don't have to be a super-hero to resonate with or draw inspiration from that story; almost everyone has faced situations where they did what they had to do, nor do you have to be a city's savior, like Batman is for Gotham.

You could probably say that Batman has a similar motivation, but Nolan leaves it harder to find and not nearly as clearly drawn.

In the end, my vote goes to The Avengers. I'll probably watch The Dark Knight Rises again if I see it on TV, but I'll be laying out some of my actual cheapskate cash to pick up a DVD of The Avengers. Nolan's ambitions may have been higher, but in the end he has an ambitious miss instead of a hit. I think Whedon's ambitions were high as well, and he did a much better job of hitting the target.

Giant Size

James Hogan took a bet, and so we have one of the more interesting hard science fiction trilogies of the last 40 years...and two additional novels in the series that aren't really worth the look. This entry is replete with spoilers, read no more if you wish to learn of the Lunarians and Ganymeans and such in the manner which the author intended.

In blogging Saturn's Cradle, I mentioned that this series of Hogan's novels, usually called the "Giants series," was a better example of how he used a significantly different history of the solar system to make his story work. Inherit the Stars, the first book of the series and Hogan's first novel, happened because a friend bet him 50 pounds he couldn't get a science fiction novel published. He took the bet, got the novel published and won it, and began a writing career that lasted until his death in 2010.

Inherit introduces us to Victor Hunt, a scientist who works for a major corporation in the late 2020s that has developed a neutrino scanner that can produce detailed images of things x-rays can't. Vic is called to a Houston office of the United Nations Space Arm (UNSA) to use his scanner on a most unusual corpse -- a man in a space suit who's been on the moon for 50,000 years. The dead man, dubbed "Charlie," is as human as you or I but shouldn't exist, because 50,000 years ago human beings didn't travel through space, use spacesuits or have technological equipment in some cases more advanced than what exists in Hunt's time.

Much of Inherit reads like a mystery as Hunt leads a team of scientists who try to puzzle out the riddle of Charlie's existence. Some scientists, led by biologist Christian Danchekker, refuse to budge from what they know about evolutionary biology and insist Charlie's genetic link to Earth life means he evolved on Earth and is from there. Remains of his civilization must exist somewhere and have yet to be found. Hunt and others, though, don't think that a civilization that could put a man on the moon would have left absolutely no trace of its existence, no matter what might have destroyed them. Hogan, obviously, is writing before Jersey Shore was created.

Finally figuring out Charlie's language allows the teams to decipher his diary, but its information only muddies the water because it introduces yet another planet into the mix, which the scientists call Minerva. Charlie was clearly on Minerva's moon when he described a gigantic battle, but he just as clearly is on the Earth's moon when he dies. The travel times don't match.

Then another ancient race is discovered on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. They are obviously not human, but their incredibly advanced ship dates from twenty-five million years ago. It's also got a cargo of genetic material and preserved species from Earth dating from that time. Hunt and Danchekker are sent to Ganymede to see what they can learn from this new discovery.

Hunt eventually figures out that Minerva was a planet in between Mars and Jupiter that was destroyed in a gigantic "nucleonic" war. Its remains can be found in the asteroid belt and in the form of Pluto. Minerva's moon, shook loose of its orbit by the catastrophe, wandered inward until it was captured by the Earth's gravity and became Earth's moon. Human beings evolved on Minerva after the Ganymeans abandoned the planet 25 million years ago when its carbon dioxide levels rose, and they grew from some of the specimens taken from Earth to Minerva, like those on the wrecked ship. Those same humans made it back to Earth in the aftermath of Minerva's explosion and became modern humans, replacing the human species that had been evolving on Earth itself.

Hogan wrote Saturn's Cradle mostly to illustrate the bizarre catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky. The divergent story of the solar system drives the action, which is secondary to it. Inherit the Stars, on the other hand, starts with a mystery -- an ancient spaceman's corpse where no ancient spaceman's corpse should be -- and proceeds to solve it using the evidence uncovered as the story moves forward. Hogan does tend to infodump into his characters' speech, but not much more than the average mystery writer does in explaining the significance of a clue. This infodumping just happens to be full of biological and astronomical terms.

A year after succeeding with Inherit the Stars, Hogan returned to the Giants' world with The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, in which we meet that long-vanished race and learn some more about how their history intertwines with ours. As mentioned before, the Ganymeans were facing the problem of rising carbon dioxide levels on their planet, Minerva. Because of their evolutionary path and the changes they had made in their own bodies when their science advanced far enough, the elevated gas levels would prove fatal to their race. They plotted several solutions, and one involved altering the Sun to help Minerva's ecology keep carbon dioxide levels low. An experiment testing this hypothesis goes wrong, and the Ganymean ship Shapieron flees with its hyperspace drive only partially operational. They can speed up, but they can't slow down, meaning the drive will have to wind itself down, a process that will take 20 years. But since they will be in their time-dilated hyperspace mode, their 20 years will be 25 million years in the normal universe.

The Shapieron detects a signal when Earth scientists try to figure out the equipment of the wrecked Ganymean ship they discovered in Inherit. When the Shapieron investigates, its crew meets humans for the first time and seem to be puzzled that there is intelligent life on the third planet. We'll learn why later.

Hunt and Danchekker, by now friends, help lead some of the contact between humans and Ganymeans, and help fill in some of the details of the story they had roughed out in the previous book. They work with Zorac, an artificial intelligence that runs the Shapieron, to learn the language and customs of their visitors and allow the Ganymeans to learn theirs.

Eventually the Ganymeans decide to visit Earth and spend some time there before mysteriously announcing they're leaving. Careful inspection of the wrecked ship on Ganymede and some of the most ancient records of the Lunarians represented by Charlie suggest to them that their people decided to flee the Solar System for a new world to survive the carbon dioxide danger, and the crew of the Shapieron want to find their people. But the real reason is that the Ganymeans have figured out that their people's experiments actually created the modern human race, and they don't know how humans will respond when they learn that.

Ganymean life evolved without any carnivores, so the competition for survival that was a feature of Earth life never happened among them. They believed that the competition-based ecosystem of Earth would never produce intelligent life, so they didn't think twice about what might happen if they included some of the primitive hominids of 25 million years ago in their specimen harvesting. Those hominids did develop intelligence and became modern humans. Although the Ganymeans depart only wondering if their people traveled to the distant star, a message comes to Earth after they've left from their descendants, welcoming their return.

Giants is easily the best book of the original trilogy. Hogan includes a moving scene where the Shapieron crew buries their dead on Pluto, the largest piece left of their original world -- keeping their promise to bring them home. He's pretty deft at showing how Zorac's understanding of human speech evolves over time, starting simple and concrete and becoming complex and abstract. Although the solution to the mystery isn't as central as it is in Inherit, it's strong enough to maintain the book's pace and makes a good frame for the story of the first contact. The science is basic enough to be understandable and flows with the narrative more smoothly than the first book.

Hogan didn't return to the Giants universe until 1981, after he'd published his well-recieved tale of artifical intelligence, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, and the physics/suspense/time-alteration novel Thrice Upon a Time. Although still a better read than the fourth and fifth books of this series, Giant's Star feels rushed and pasted together, rather than developed out of whole cloth.

In the months following the Shapieron's departure, officials in UNSA and some governments have opened communications with the descendants of the Ganymeans, who did reach another planet and have flourished since then. But some of the signals seem strange, and it's almost as if the humans are communicating with two different groups. Neither group has an accurate picture of what Earth is like now, and Hunt is brought in to try to help UNSA and the diplomats break through the wall of misinformation to communicate directly with this new group of Giants.

He and Danchekker succeed, and direct links are established with the group, now on a planet called Thurien. They learn that another group in Thurien society, on a planet called Jevlen, have been giving misinformation to the Thuriens that shows a heavily armed, warlike society dominating Earth and preparing to attack Thurien. The Jevlenese turn out to be humans, more descendants of those who had lived on the destroyed planet Minerva. The Ganymeans rescued large numbers of humans before Minerva was destroyed, but put members of one warring nation on Earth and brought the other one to Jevlen.

Natural catastrophes wiped out the memory of Minervan origins for the humans on Earth, but those on Jevlen remember and are holding a serious grudge. They plan to attack both the Ganymeans and the Earth humans, their ancient enemies. Hunt, Danchekker and the UNSA group lack the arms to fight the Jevlenese, so they have to work with the Thuriens to trick their enemy into disarming and hold off the attack. This attempt succeeds, but the Jevlenese warlords escape. A glitch sends them 50,000 years into the past at Minerva itself, starting the whole cycle all over again.

Star suffers from a load of implausibilities, like the aforementioned time loop, and Hogan's lapse into frequently preaching damnation to the evils of superstition and exaltation to the rationalism of science. The Jevlenese used their advanced technology to foment anti-knowledge and mysticism on Earth to insure Earth science didn't progress as fast as Jevlen's did. The Jevlenese leader is a buffoon villain, although he's amusing when his supercomputer, Jevex, succumbs to manipulation from the Thurien supercomputer, Visar.

And Star has plenty of Hogan's wry humor sprinkled here and there, as the humans learn how their bodies cope with the virtual reality network of Visar and as Jevex insists nothing's wrong even though it has been taken over by the other computer. But on the whole it would have been better off either not written or left to cook a little longer so Hogan could integrate his story better and slough off some of the preaching and silliness. Even so, it's the second best place to end the series -- the first would have been after Gentle Giants. The virtual reality tale Entoverse and the time travel Mission to Minerva adventure that sketches how the Minervan super-war came to be add little to the Giants' story and seem more like attempts to capitalize on a brand name to make a paycheck.

As mentioned in the Saturn's Cradle note, Hogan in later life held to some strange ideas like the Velikovsky theories and some ugly ones, like questioning the extent of the Holocaust. He has yet to make such ideas public during the Giants series, if he holds them, so they don't really affect the initial trilogy. He does some interesting predicting, especially for the late 1970s, offering virtual reality, neutrino scanning, the Internet and e-commerce in recognizable formats even if they don't quite match what we have seen actually develop and they've developed earlier than he thought. His characters still smoke -- even on spaceships! -- and he seems to hold that society will continue the kind of laid-back swinging 70s vibe it had in 1977, when Inherit was first published.

The most fun aspect of the Giants' universe is the presence of human beings throughout the solar system. Permanent bases on the moon and Mars, scientific outposts on Jupter's moons, manned exploration of Saturn's moons and the asteroids are all a feature of life in the late 2020s and early 2030s, a perfectly reasonable expectation in 1977 that's proved problematic only because politicians suck, especially when it comes to space.

Hogan does attach all of this work to the United Nations, perhaps somewhat reasonable in 1977 before that body started doing idiotic things like putting Iran on its women's rights council or the Sudan on its human rights commissions, or having officials who ran profiteering schemes off humanitarian efforts in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He suggests that the world's superpowers aimed their competitiveness elsewhere than conflict when weapons were invented that could guarantee the earth's total destruction, and terrorism and conflict died out when people began to have access to energy, food and other resources. That part of his vision's a mixed bag on the accuracy front so far.

In all, though, the Giants' trilogy is a well-thought-out, well-executed story of plausible science, careful reasoning, logical mysteries to be solved and believable characters dealing with the new world they're discovering. It doesn't suffer from too much technobabble, even if it skirts that a couple of times, and it lacks the embarassingly bad sex scenes that ruin a lot of otherwise interesting hard science fiction. It represents what Hogan should have tried to do with Saturn's Cradle but also serves as a reminder of how badly that novel stumbled.

The Dark Tower VIII: The Wind Through the Keyhole

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven eight books, each of which I read at different times in my life. These are some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-) 

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

Well, well, well. We meet again, Roland Deschain.

A couple of years have passed since I journeyed through Mid-World along with the Last Gunslinger as he made his way to the Dark Tower, the hub of creation endangered by the chaos-loving Crimson King. Roland was the central character of the seven volume "The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King, and his quest for the Tower spanned 30 years of King's career. When he finished the series with The Dark Tower, King seemed to have closed the covers on Roland and his ka-tet of fellow seekers, leaving the grim knight-errant on yet another iteration of what may have proven to be an eternal quest. His own personal hell, perhaps, condemned to suffer over and over again receiving exactly what he most desired and learning how much smaller it was than the sacrifices he had made for it, how cheap it was compared to the price in his blood and the blood of so many others.

Then, a couple of years ago, King said he'd had an idea of another story in Roland's world. Not one that bore directly on the quest for the Tower, but one that involved Roland to some degree and helped sharpen our picture of him. So now comes The Wind Through the Keyhole, a story within a story that's within the story of Roland and the Dark Tower.

Roland, Jake, Susannah, Eddie and Oy have left the faux Emerald City created by Flagg to trap them and allow him to kill them, as described at the end of Wizard and Glass. They make their way to a large river that still has an old ferryman who offers to take them across, and during the crossing unlocks the secret of Oy's strange behavior. The billy-bumbler, or throcken as it's sometimes called, is reacting to an impending monster-storm called a starkblast, whose frigid intense winds will destroy most wooden structures and kill anyone caught outside in it. Roland's memory almost recalled what Oy's behavior meant, but he needed the ferryman's reminder. The ka-tet manage to hole up in a stone building in an abandoned town just as the starkblast hits, and hunker down to wait it out. As they do, Roland tells a story of another such storm, as well as the time when he himself first told it.

We go back in time to just after Roland's trip to Meijis, when he is still grieving his lost love Susan Delgado as well as his mother, dead by his own hand when he was under the spell of the witch Rhea. His father Steven has reports of a monstrous killer near the town of Debaria which may be a "skin-man," or shape-changing human being who takes on the forms of beasts. Roland and his friend Jaime De Curry are sent to find out what is happening and stop the killing.

After they arrive in town, another attack happens, but this time there is a survivor who saw the skin-man in his human form. A boy named Bill Streeter saw a tattoo on the monster that will help identify him even if Bill never got a view of his face. Roland and Jaime work with the local sheriff to bring suspects to a place where Bill can view them. The young boy is terrified, so Roland tells him the story "The Wind Through the Keyhole" to pass the hours while Jaime and the Sheriff do their work.

That story is the tale of young Tim Ross, a boy about Bill's age who long ago sets out on a mysterious journey of his own after his father dies and his mother remarries a man who proves no bargain. He beats her, takes Tim from school and in general makes his new household miserable and afraid. Tim's prompted, or perhaps tempted is the better word, to make the trek by the Covenant Man, a tax collector for the Barony of Gilead who has some unpleasantly familiar manners and who wears the same color as does the man Roland will one day pursue across the Mohaine Desert -- black. Tim finds himself lost in a swamp, almost eaten by a dragon and befriended by a group of muddy people that gift him with what the long-gone Old Ones used to find directions and what we would call a GPS. It guides him to a drogan or shelter, but he has no key for the door. The key that would work is on a collar around the neck of a gigantic tyger, caged next to the drogan. Tim has a primitive gun with which he could kill the tyger, but he no longer trusts the leading of the Covenant Man and decides instead to try to make a truce with it. He does, and the pair shelter out of the starkblast behind a tent of some miraculous fabric that generates its own heat and absorbs the kinetic energy of the storm's lethal winds. Other magic Tim finds helps transform the tyger back into its natural form, that of Maerlyn the magician. The good wizard sends Tim back home, armed with the means to protect his family, avenge his father's death, and the news that the Covenant Man will not be coming around again any time soon.

When the story finishes, we step back out one degree as Roland's plan to identify the skin-man succeeds and the evil man-beast is killed by his silver bullet. Roland and Jaime leave young Bill with the convent at Serenity, where Roland's own mother stayed in an attempt to conquer her personal demons. The sisters give Roland a letter his mother wrote before she left, and he reads that she knew her return would mean her death at his hands. Her mind was so tormented, though, and her will so broken to Marten Broadcloak that she could not resist and she sought any end to her suffering. She closed the letter with words of forgiveness to Roland for the part he would play in her death.

We then step back out one degree more as we see the Roland and his present-day ka-tet finish riding out the storm before resuming their journey. Roland, having confessed to his friends that his mother died by his hand, also tells them of her words of forgiveness and her request that he forgive her. As he tells Susannah that he indeed did so, he smiles, and the next day they are off again, on their way to Calla Bryn Sturgis and The Wolves of the Calla.

At less than 100,000 words, Wind is the one of the smallest of the Dark Tower books. Structurally, it resembles Wizard and Glass, in that the travelers encounter some phenomenon that brings to Roland's mind a time from his past, and the main story stops while we hear the tale. It is light years better than that book, though, in brevity as well as execution. Tim Ross's tale is much more straightforward than the directionless muddle of the Meijis flashback in Wizard and the story of the skin-man which carries it is thankfully lean as well. Although the "present-day Roland" story that frames both is a little repetitive in showing the aging and breaking down of the world that moved on, it's also done with a welcome economy of words King hasn't mustered in some time.

The focus and discipline may have come from King's decision to tell Tim's story in a definitely different voice than he uses in other books. Even more so than in the other Dark Tower stories, Wind has an 18th or 19th century rhythm and feel to its language. Perhaps King is channeling the voices of the Maine old-timers he heard as a youngster or perhaps he has another source, but he evokes the aura of the fairy-tale better than he has in just about anything since 1987's Eyes of the Dragon. Back-to-back with 11/22/63, Wind is the second half of the strongest pair of releases from King in many years.

Now mentioning Eyes of the Dragon brings up what could be a troublesome point. A cynical person could say that Wind is a mashup of Eyes and the 1983 novellette Cycle of the Werewolf, hung on a Dark Tower marketing peg for maximum sales. Although I'm definitely a friend of Diogenes, I can't see King making such a decision consciously -- he would know that his loyal fan base would buy whatever he publishes with or without a Dark Tower connection. Blockade Billy sold, after all, and fans who spent $15 on it could be counted on to buy anything. I won't speculate on what the folks at Scribner's who keep track of these things, the ones who have the cash registers in their eyes, were thinking, though.

It seems to me that King is again making a meta-narrative commentary on the idea of stories and of their creation, much as he did with the last four books of the original Dark Tower series. Again the story wears its author's influences out in the open; the Debaria deputies are named Strother and Pickens and bear no small resemblance to well-known Western character actors Strother Martin and Slim Pickens, for example. And again what's happening in the narrative rests in a matrix of greater purpose and intent.

Tim Ross's story calms and encourages Bill Streeter. The story of the skin-man passes the time for the ka-tet waiting out the storm and is a major step towards Roland opening himself to them and strengthening their bonds. In fact, in telling about his mother's letter and its closure of forgiveness, Roland may have begun to let go of some of his own guilt from that long-ago episode. King is a believer in the power of story to heal, strengthen, inspire and enlighten as well as entertain, and exactly that happens as the nested stories in Wind unspool before their audiences.

As to why he returns to this meta-narrative commentary on narratives after having spent four books of the original series lurching about in pursuit of the same goal, and why he does it so much better and more quickly here, I can't say. Perhaps he wanted to try again, and he was better at it this time.

All that said, there's nothing about the fairytale at the center of Wind that needs to be in Roland's world, or to have any connection to the gunslinger and his ka-tet at all even if it is set in that world. In fact, by making it "The Dark Tower 4.5," as King calls it in the introduction, he gives his two framing tales a bad case of prequelitis. Our current ka-tet barely reaches shelter before the starkblast hits, but since we know when and how they perish we can't muster up much worry about their chances. Nor can we be too worried about teenage Roland and his friend Jamie De Curry, since we know their fate as well. But the Tim Ross fable is strong enough to push that condition to the back and combine with an unusually focused and economic Stephen King to make Wind one of the more enjoyable entries in the Dark Tower series.

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All to the good, but I couldn't resist one wicked little question before I go. As I said, King calls Wind "The Dark Tower 4.5," placing it between Wizard and Glass at No. 4 and Wolves of the Calla at No. 5. He means for us to see its events as taking place in between the events of those two books. If he had written the whole series in order, Wind would have come out before Wolves (and probably killed the series as well -- two books in a row stopping the action for long flashbacks? See ya later, Steve!)

But in The Dark Tower we learn that Roland has reached the Tower itself many times, each time drawn back to the beginning of the quest and destined to suffer through it again and again. I compared this to some of C. S. Lewis's ideas of hell, in that Roland is given what he sold his life and soul to have, only to find out that he has given away and sacrificed what truly mattered to acquire what didn't. King also suggested hell contains an element of endless repetition in his 1998 short story "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French," later published in Everything's Eventual.

We also learn that each quest may not be exactly the same. Roland may progress a little as he makes choices that work incrementally to increase his humanity and reduce his fatal (to others) monomania for the Tower quest. As he begins again to chase the man in black across the desert, this time he carries the Horn of Eld, abandoned in earlier iterations of the quest. What kind of difference will it make? How might it further redirect Roland's path? We don't know, but the difference stands out.

So bear with me. Is The Wind Through the Keyhole actually a part of the original quest we read in The Dark Tower series as printed between 1982 and 2004? Or is it something that happens on one of the repeats, where a slightly less damned Roland is given the gift of knowing his mother's forgiveness and granting his own? I haven't seen that talked about anywhere, although I'm sure some King fans somewhere have kicked it around. I don't know, myself. And even if it is such a "later quest" tale, I seriously doubt that King has in mind a series of new Dark Tower novels that take Roland all the way to redemption or have as their ultimate goal the description of what a redeemed Roland and some final quest for the Tower might look like. It took a near-death experience to get him to cough up the last three books of the original series; I can't imagine he'd be up for an even more complex superstructure on top of those seven books.

But who knows? After all, this whole discussion is about an eighth Dark Tower novel when we were all certain the series ended at seven. It seems the only thing you can be sure of is that here, sir, there are always more tales.

Who? Where? What? And Most Certainly, Why?

Sometime when I was 8 or 9, I ran across a comic book called Weird Worlds that ran two Edgar Rice Burroughs novel series in it. One was about Pellucidar, the hollow world at the Earth's core where dinosaurs, mammoths and cave-men still roamed. The other was about a former Confederate soldier who did his roaming on the planet Mars, surrounded by four-armed green men, fantastic creatures, bizarre science and a noble race of "red men," or copper-skilled humanoids, who included among their number the "most beautiful woman of two worlds," the princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris.

The soldier's name was John Carter, and a couple of years later I found in the library the book on which the comic series was based, A Princess of Mars. Although Burroughs' most famous creation, Tarzan, has been in dozens of movies and television shows, it took a century for his first hero to get to the screen, with the release of John Carter by Walt Disney Studios a hundred years after Under the Moons of Mars was serialized in 1912. It was re-titled Princess for a 1917 book printing.

I very very very very very very much wanted to like this movie. I'm old enough now to see Burroughs' limitations as a writer, but the tales of Barsoom gripped my 10-year-old imagination and really have yet to let go, and the back of my mind always harbored a hope that someday we would see on a screen the action, intrigue and adventure that sprawled across the dead sea bottoms of dying Mars. So I wanted to like it the way a 10-year-old wants a ten-speed bike. I didn't get that bike until I was 11, and I guess I'm also still waiting for my cinematic ticket to Barsoom -- the real Barsoom.

Burroughs' story is simple. Former Confederate officer John Carter searches for gold in the Arizona territory. Pursued into a mysterious cave by Apaches, he finds himself strangely overcome and then suddenly transported to a planet he immediately recognizes as Mars. At first a captive and then a chieftain among the tribe of 15-foot-tall, four-armed green Martians known as Tharks, he develops a friendship with one of their mighty warriors, Tars Tarkas. When the Tharks capture Dejah Thoris, the princess of Helium, Carter is moved to first help her escape and then eventually to win her for himself. Naturally, several obstacles will slow his quest and test his strength, endurance and the love he and Dejah Thoris share.

John Carter is written by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews of Pixar, with help from best-selling and Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon. John Carter's still an ex-Confederate soldier, he still winds up on Mars and he still befriends Tars Tarkas and loves Dejah Thoris. Other than that, Stanton, Andrews and Chabon have crafted a flat, plodding eco-fable filled with logic and plot holes, unnecessary characters, silly plot twists, extraneous story lines, expository blather and a title character who's saved from complete unlikeability only by lead actor Taylor Kitsch's dead-flat performance: He's too dull to really annoy that much.

Carter finds himself on Barsoom -- what its inhabitants call Mars -- in the middle of a war between the cities of Helium and Zodanga. The Zodangan jeddak Sab Than rules a mobile city that traverses the Martian countryside and devastates everything in its path. Matai Shang, the leader of the mysterious Therns, gives Sab Than a devastating weapon with which he will bring Helium to its knees, unless Helium's leader, Tardos Mors, consents to a marriage between his daughter Dejah Thoris and Sab Than. She runs, and finds herself a prisoner of the Tharks just as John Carter has been made a chieftain. The pair find evidence of the amulet which brought Carter to Barsoom and a connection in ancient religious icons in a ruined temple. Now Carter must find a way to stop Sab Than and learn how to use the amulet to return home, if indeed he wants to. Rarely has a plot so justified the use of "blah blah blah" to cover up its extended journeys into nonsense. Stanton, Andrews and Chabon throw in set pieces from many major science-fiction and action movies for no visible reason. This scene echoes Planet of the Apes, that one Lord of the Rings, and another Raiders of the Lost Ark.

John Carter is visually spectacular with the kinds of touches that have made Stanton one of the top storytelling directors around. The green Tharks have four arms, which means they would have a completely different body language than people with two arms. Stanton shows us this in several scenes, as well as some scenes that highlight what kind of confrontational stance you might take if you had tusks. The design of Helium is definitely not the product of an Earth culture, and although we don't see it much, what we can see is fascinating and definitively alien, while retaining just enough Victorian styling to have hints of the kind of steampunk Burroughs might have envisioned. But once you stop looking at the movie and start listening to it or trying to follow it, things don't go well.

It's filled with what seem to be changes for change's sake, as though Stanton and Co. felt overwhelmingly the need to make sure everyone knows that while this movie may have been based on Burroughs' books, it's all theirs. There's a ton of these confusing resets, from the airships to making the Therns shapeshifters, but one will probably stand in for all. Everyone on Barsoom now bleeds blue. They didn't in the books, so why do they do so now? No reason, except maybe to get a PG-13 rating. They made the change because they could, and it serves no real purpose. Stanton showed more creativity in trying to explain the inexplicable name changes the movie went through than in holding his story together coherently.

Almost every Burroughs character is changed, most for the worse. Carter is a surly, self-involved brawler, Tardos Mors a weakling, the noble Kantos Kan an afterthought. Dejah Thoris is still brave and beautiful, and she does benefit from being able to be brave according to 21st century sensibilities instead of early 20th. She's now a scientist who fights her own battles, thank you very much. Dominic West gives Sab Than a swashbuckling air that makes him a much better foil than the schemer Burroughs described. West also makes you wish he'd been given the title role, because Taylor Kitsch is a story-killing, interest-slaying spot of dead air for more than three-fourths of his screen time.

Logic gaps race with plot holes to see which pile up bigger at the end. On the smaller Mars, Carter's earthly muscles and bones give him greater strength than the Barsoomians, even the giant green men. Except when the story needs him to get manhandled by a Thark. The Therns' plot to engineer Sab Than's ascendance over Barsoom will gain them...what? Eh, I dunno. And Dejah Thoris' marriage to Sab Than will advance it how? Again, I dunno. And the Zodangans are endangering everyone, because why now? Go 'way, boy, you bother me.

Story expansions don't have to wreck a tale.  Dynamite Comics started running an adaptation of the original novels in 2010 and writer Arvid Nelson has taken advantage of the format to add some backstory for Tars Tarkas and John Carter, as well as strengthen the ties between the first novel and the subsequent pair with a bridging story. Dynamite also spun out a short-run feature about the last days of old Barsoom and adventures of Dejah Thoris some 400 years before John Carter arrived (Barsoomians usually live about 1,000 years). They've even created a tie-in story pulling in Gullivar Jones, the character that many people believe inspired Burroughs' Barsoom when he traveled to Mars in Edwin Lester Arnold's 1905 Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. The point is that Burroughs' own plot for Princess has plenty of room for the kind of character background and add-ons that modern audiences like and plenty of things that can be cut without hampering the plot to make room for them. But Stanton's John Carter muddies instead of clarifies with its expansions and alterations, like someone modified a human overcoat to fit a Thark but put the extra two arms in the front and back instead of underneath the existing ones.

John Carter isn't really an awful movie, not in the sense of Daredevil or Elektra, two other major franchise-type characters given early spring releases because their studios knew the summertime crowd would ignore them completely. But given the talent behind it -- Stanton wrote and directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E, for crying out loud -- and the budget and the backing of the Mouse Kingdom, it looks that much worse because it should have been so much better.

In several interviews, Stanton said he wanted to direct this project and one of the major reasons was his love of Burroughs' Barsoom stories. If he loved them that much, then he probably should have told one of them.

Wrinkled Time

Note: The following is a "reader's diary" post about Stephen King's 11/22/63. Spoilers abound.

Although Stephen King has been branded a horror writer, the horrific trappings have almost always been used as a way to tell the stories of and explore the lives of human beings rather than ghosts and monsters. Not so much in his short stories, in which he can indulge in his love of the gross-out, but certainly in his novels he has focused on the kind of reactions human beings have to extreme circumstances. Yes, those extreme circumstances may involve vampires, hordes of rats, buckets of blood or the walking dead -- but sub in some sort of more ordinary crisis or tragedy for the grinning ghoul at the window and you have some pretty basic and sometimes quite well-done reflections on human life and existence.

People don't always get that. When King said of his 1983 novel Pet Sematary that it scared him more than anything he'd written to that time, fans read it and wondered why the tried-and-true-standard of the dead being possessed by evil spirits would scare the master of horror. But King didn't mean the ghost story part; he meant the part where he as a father had to write about the death of the main character's child. His own son's close call on a busy highway made the book that much more realistic and frightening to him. King may or may not believe in supernatural horror, but he certainly believes in the kind of real-life horror that confronts people every day. His 1986 It doesn't draw people in with the cosmic eldritch horror of It, but with the slice-of-life story of a group of misfit kids who band together in the face of older bullies and abusive parents and who happen to be the ones who know about and choose to fight the monster. Those parts of the story are by far the strongest; It runs off its rails (and gets a little squicky) when King moves away from the mundane into the extraordinary.

This humanist focus sets King's 2011 time-travel novel 11/22/63 not nearly as far away from his usual work as it might first appear, even if he is definitely coloring outside his usual lines. It has little horrific imagery and rests much more in the realm of science fiction than in horror -- and even then it wears its sci-fi elements very lightly.

It's also very likely the best novel he's published in more than a quarter of a century and ranks with some of his best work, like the original publication of The Stand, the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Drawing of the Three, overall.

Jake Epping teaches high school English in Lisbon Falls, Maine, and has taken on a job teaching the same course for GED students. One of his students, Harry Dunning, submits a story for an assignment about how an event changed his life -- he writes about the night his alcoholic father murdered the rest of their family with a hammer. Affected by the story, Jake develops a friendship with Harry. Another friend of Jake's, Al Templeton, owns a diner and two years after Jake and Harry meet, invites Jake to step inside a pantry at the back. When he does, he finds himself in Lisbon Falls as it was at two minutes before noon on September 9, 1958 -- there is a kind of time travel effect operating in the pantry. Someone who walks in always goes back to 9/9/58, but they return two minutes after they left the present, no matter how long they spent in the past. Al has been using the pantry to buy meat at 1958 prices to use in his diner, helping his bottom line.

But he also begins to think how he might change things for the better, and he decides that he will prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination. Al believes that many of the problems the United States endured through the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s would have at least been eased if Kennedy lived. Partly because he believed that Kennedy would have pursued better policies than Lyndon Johnson did and partly because the assassination of a young, charismatic leader representing so much hope demoralized the country.

Only when Al tried to attack Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, he found himself stopped by a combination of his own uncertainty and time's resistance to change. That resistance is strong enough, he thinks, to have caused his terminal lung cancer. He doesn't have the strength or the time to go back again and try to stop Oswald, but Jake can. Jake is eventually convinced, but he tries an experiment first -- he uses the time slip to stop Harry Dunning's father from killing his family. The past resists his efforts and Jake has to fight off sickness and nausea that threaten to stop him, but he succeeds. When he returns from the past, he and Al learn that Harry, uninjured in the attack, never had to settle for being a high school janitor. Only Al and Jake know about the other timeline, but there is a strange man near the site of the time slip with a yellow card in his hat who seems to be slightly aware that Jake is out of place. But Jake also learns that a healthy Harry went to serve in Vietnam, where he was killed. He's unsure whether he wants to fulfill Al's mission, but Al overdoses on painkillers and leaves Jake only hours to make up his mind, so he returns through the time slip to 1958. Before he can go after Oswald, he has to once again stop Harry Dunning's father -- every trip through the portal resets things to their original path -- and also help out a young woman whom Al had rescued from a shooting accident.

Jake moves to Texas, where he works as a teacher and finds himself falling in love with Sadie Dunhill, the school librarian. She ends their relationship when his anachronistic behavior arouses her suspicions, and Jake leaves town to move to Fort Worth and set up shop across from what will become Oswald's apartment. When he reconnects with Sadie, he proves he's from the future by predicting the Cuban missile crisis resolution and although she is still unsure, she joins him in his quest. Jake loses his first good chance to stop Oswald during the attempted murder of Edwin Walker, as Sadie is attacked by her ex-husband. Jake has been using his knowledge of who won sports events to make his money, and a bookie who has lost quite a bit of money to him has him beaten into a coma. His recovery means he will not have a chance to stop Oswald before Nov. 22, and as it happens he reaches the assassin seconds before the fatal shot is fired. But he does prevent it, even though Oswald shoots and mortally wounds Sadie. Jake resolves to return to 2011 and re-engineer his attempt to fix his earlier mistakes, so that Kennedy and Sadie both survive.

At the portal, he meets a man with a green card in his hat, who has replaced the other man -- that one, with his card dead black, had committed suicide. The green card man says he acts as a guardian at portals like these, which bubble up now and again, to try to keep people from using them to change the past. The reason is that the past doesn't actually change. Every trip results in a new strand of history, and the strain of the multiple strands could destroy reality. People like the guardian, who are aware of the different strands, often go mad themselves. He suggests Jake take a look at the future he created, and then he will know he has to return to reset things.

Back in a new 2011, Jake finds a world not anything like the better world Al had envisioned. Kennedy hadn't escalated Vietnam to the degree that Johnson had, but neither had he been able to be as effective a leader on civil rights as Johnson. Unrest on that issue continued to plague the country, and subsequent presidents found themselves confronting and employing increasing violence to combat it. The reality-straining new timeline caused natural disasters that took their own toll on people, international tensions and the economy. Jake learns this from Harry Dunning -- not crippled by his father, but wheelchair-bound from a helicopter crash in a different Vietnam. Now convinced that his actions have truly endangered reality, Jake returns to the time portal to reset what he had done. He stays long enough to write his story and bury it, although he feels himself pulled to return to Texas and once again begin his relationship with Sadie, perhaps even to save her from her ex-husband. Eventually he goes back to 2011, not knowing if Sadie will live or not. It isn't until he is back in a now normal present that he learns she survived the assault, and it's a year before he decides to visit her small town in Texas. The book ends with Jake dancing with a now elderly Sadie, who does not know him, but who is somehow drawn to him.

Most of 11/22/63 is a straight-up historical fiction novel, albeit with a narrator that "knows the future," and that's one of its pluses. King's strongest talent has always been for storytelling and the kind of yarn-spinning that might start with, "Well, I went down to the store the other day," related in a perfectly normal if somewhat more reflective than ordinary voice. It's hardly a problem or a slight against his skill. After all, we talk that way all the time, so there's nothing wrong with writing in the same fashion. That quality often magnified the scary element of his best horror fiction; the fact that some great evil popped up right in the middle of the Mainest of Main Streets magnified the horror all the more.

When King marries this conversational, easy-flowing style to a good story, he offers books like 'Salem's Lot, Firestarter or Christine. All are great reads. But when he marries it to an interesting idea, he produces work that ought to be ranked with some of the best so-called literary fiction. And it would be if the folks who produced and marketed such didn't have such a public disdain for books that sold more than 8,000 copies and the writers who create them. In The Stand, people must choose between Randall Flagg's supposed security -- which will cost them their souls -- and Mother Abigail's community's seeming weakness and uncertainty -- which could cost them their lives. In Shawshank, Andy Dufresne must decide whether to "get busy living or get busy dying," to borrow a phrase from the movie made from the story.

And in 11/22/63, Jake has to confront the fact that even if a human being has the power to play God, he doesn't have God's knowledge. Some parts of the chaos that the time travels cause comes from the so-called "butterfly effect," cited as an example of how even the smallest of events -- the flapping of a butterfly's wings -- can have an influence on something halfway around the world. Each of Jake's choices, though he may have made them with good intentions, creates effects he can't foresee or even imagine. He must eventually come to terms with the fact that he can't know enough to re-order history as he sees fit.

King does cheat a little bit by creating the resonance effects that threaten the world and all of reality, which pushes Jake's inadequate knowledge in front of his face in an oncoming train kind of way. It might have been more interesting to see him deal with the kinds of changes that he might have made on numerous attempts to "fix" things and to see Jake himself, rather than the guardian, start to lose his grip on reality as he tried again and again to order history for the best. Of course, that's also the premise of the crappy 2004 Ashton Kutcher movie The Butterfly Effect, but the day that Stephen King can't tell a better story than the guys who wrote Final Destination 2 is on a calendar page yet unturned.

Even with this cheat, 11/22/63 is one of King's books that should stay on your shelf for awhile and merits a re-visit or two, with some food for thought about a whole lot of things. As Jack reviews Sadie's life in the timeline where he never met her, he finds she was a community activist who did a lot of good in and around her town, helping many people, and that the Kennedy assassination was a spark that moved her to do so. Is King saying that, even though human beings aren't able to stop every tragedy that happens in the world, our responses may change them from engines of despair to engines of hope? Well, a guy like me who's a few weeks away from marking a great tragedy followed by the greatest hope of all might be prejudiced towards that interpretation, but there are others and 11/22/63 provides plenty of room to talk about them all.

Whether it was the intensive research King put into the book or the stretch that came from writing outside his normal genre conventions, he's written it with a tight focus and discipline that he's largely lacked since the Reagan administration. It still meanders some, it could use a little closer editing -- the town in Texas is "Killeen" with two l's, Steve -- and the end sequence winds up with a little more rushed feel than the rest of the book has, but a book that tells us there are no perfect worlds can't really be faulted for showing us that there are no perfect books, either.

Not Exactly? Exactly!

One way to point out flaws in a proposal is to describe it as "vague," meaning that the proposer hasn't really spelled out what he or she wants to do. In those cases, "vague" is not a term of approval.

But coming from University of Aberdeen professor Kees Van Deemter, it just might be. The subtitle of his 2010 book Not Exactly is "In Praise of Vaguenes," and Van Deemter suggests vagueness is actually an important part of our world and one we can't really function very well without. Van Deemter has quite a bit of interest in the subject, since his area of specialty is artificial intelligence. In order to help computers think like people think, they have to be able to handle vague concepts and terms, as well as questions and situations which have more than two possible answers.

The first section covers physical measurements, an area where we may think precision rules. As Van Deemter points out, though, the scale at which you measure determines the amount of precision you have available to you. For most measurements people do in their ordinary lives, things like rulers, tape measures and yardsticks work just fine in giving them the precision they need. If something matches the ruler mark at, say, two feet three and three sixteenths inches, then that's how long or wide or deep it is for just about any everyday use you or I could think of.

But if someone is doing something that needs a greater degree of precision, they may be thrown off by something as small as the actual width of the mark at two feet three and three sixteenths inches.  The same way someone using a saw needs to take the width of the saw blade into account when making a cut, precision measurement needs to take in the width of the mark. Van Deemter uses the famed "metre bar" as an example. You can find an excerpt from Not Exactly telling this story here. Developed by international standards in the 19th century, the bar is one of platinum-iridium alloy that was measured to be exactly 1/40,000,000 of the distance between the north and south poles as measured along the specific longitudinal meridian that contained the Pantheon in Paris. Anyone who wanted to create an exact meter measurement petitioned to have their measuring device matched to the meter bar, kept in a vault in Paris.

Set aside why that meridian should be chosen over others, and you still have the problem that measurements in the 20th century showed that the bar was actually off by .00005 meters. No problem for most everyday work, but a big problem for some of the incredibly tiny distances with which scientists were beginning to work and the precision which that work required. The standard was changed to the wavelengths of certain kinds of radiation, and then in 1983 to the distance traveled by light through a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Van Deemter leaves out the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which tells us there is a level of precision we can't reach no matter how much we refine our equipment. But since he's shown the imprecision or vagueness that's a part of the universe on a much larger scale than Heisenberg worked with, he doesn't really need to explore it. Plus, Heisenberg's principle is actually a case of ambiguity, which differs from vagueness. Ambiguity, Van Deemter says, happens when we can't determine which of two or more equally clear cases or situations is true. Heisenberg showed that we can know either the spin or the position of a subatomic particle, but not both at the same time, so his principle describes ambiguity rather than vagueness, because vagueness means we aren't all that clear about what the cases or situations are. 

The next sections get into areas that start to affect Van Deemter's own work with artificial intelligence -- language and logic. We might think our language describes things in the real world, which is why we use it. But our language actually makes a whole host of assumptions in order to describe things; without the assumptions the words themselves are vague. What, for example, do we mean when we say something is "tall?" If we look at that statement, we know we don't have a specific measurement in mind. A tall person is not the same height as a tall tree, and a tall tree is not the same height as a tall building. We mean "comparatively" or "relatively" tall. A six-footer is tall compared to me, but short compared to a redwood. So then, Van Deemter asks, at what height does the adjective need to change so that instead of calling someone "short," we call them "tall?" The answer will depend on the group of people being measured. Obviously "short" on an NBA team is different than "short" on a middle-school basketball team.

Because their meanings depend on their surroundings, "tall" and other words like it are actually vague, rather than precise (Van Deemter uses the word "crisp"). In order for computers to begin to think like people think, they have to be able to use those vague words and the concepts they represent.

Most computers today use a different system, based on classical logic that has just two values: true and not-true. A two-valued logic system corresponds nicely with the binary numbering system that can be used to write computer programs. A computer is told that if a certain thing is true, then it should take one action. But if it is not true, then it should take a different action. Each step in a program involves the computer making an either/or choice and taking the step it's told to take. Obviously doing something according to this process would take a long time. Computers can make such decisions so quickly, though, that they can do in seconds what you or I would need hours to finish.

On the other hand, they can't easily do what you and I can do, which is use vague concepts like "tall" in our reasoning. They run into what's called the "sorites paradox," named after the Greek word soros, or "heap" in English. It goes like this: Do you call one grain of wheat (or of sand, or one stone, or one of anything) a heap? Do you call two grains a heap? How about three? Most folks say no to those and probably for awhile longer, but at some point you've got a heap. What is that point? If you stick with the truth/not-truth or "yes/no" binary kind of logic computers use, you can't name it with any clarity. Nor can we define words like heap, tall, short, fat or others that we use all the time.

Van Deemter uses a great deal of "symbolic logic" in this chapter to explore alternative systems of logic and how they might or might not handle vagueness. The symbolic part itself takes getting used to, because it uses shorthand for certain expressions the way that math equations use shorthand like "+" to show "is added to" or "-" to show "is subtracted from." Once you get to where you can keep the symbols straight, though, you can follow the ideas. The problem is that he spends a lot of time with them before throwing them out and moving towards the idea that seems to him best suited to handling a world that includes vagueness. That idea, which he refers to as "degrees of truth," allows for a logical system that can include context -- like designating someone as tall who is still shorter than an NBA player because they're among people who are mostly shorter than they.

The linguistics section also seems overly extensive and unfocused -- Van Deemter seems to want to show that vagueness is a part of language at its deepest levels and thus underlies most if not all languages. I don't know much about linguistics, but I'm leery of anything that relies this heavily on Noam Chomsky and cites Chomsky's political bushwah as proof of his perceptive abilities. The inclusion of a Tony Blair slam by way of demonstrating a malicious use of vagueness in political discourse seems a little forced as well. Whether or not language is vague seems to rely less on its inherent structure and more on the fact that the world deals in vagueness just as often if not more often than it deals in precision.

These missteps don't harm a wonderful  book exploring an amazing subject. For me, mired as I am in my traditional Christian theism, it's absolutely fascinating to see that some of the assumptions that people have made which seem to exclude my way of thinking may not be as warranted as previously believed. We've been told that the universe can be completely and precisely explained by descriptions of its physical processes, leaving no room for God -- or at least, no room for a God who mattered. But we find imprecision at all levels of our measurement. We find yes/no logic leaving great paradoxical gaps in our ability to reason, unless we assume (or "take on faith," as it were) certain things to be true.

Van Deemter doesn't really follow the religious implications of his work, and I have no idea if he'd consider the questions I believe it raises to be legitimate so I won't put them in his mouth. And vagueness by itself or combined with other uncertain aspects of the universe's existence do not make the case that God must exist. A vague universe could be without a God as easily as could a crisp and precise one.

On the other hand, it means that the supposedly open and shut case against God may not be wrapped up as tightly as has been thought either. Which is just fine with me.