April Fool, He Said

The following is a spoiler-heavy discussion of three of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, Ceremony, Taming a Sea-Horse and Hundred-Dollar Baby, and spoilerish references to several others. Readers who would like to learn how these stories turn out by using the old-fashioned method of reading them are advised that proceeding will make that rather difficult.

April Kyle never got a fair shake.

Over almost 25 years, crime and mystery grand master Robert B. Parker wrote about April and her interaction with his hero, private investigator Spenser, three times. We first met her as a high school dropout turning tricks in Boston's Combat Zone in 1982's Ceremony. Spenser's girlfriend, high school counselor Susan Silverman, is worried about the girl and asks Spenser to find her and bring her out if necessary. Four years later, a now high-class call girl April makes a bad decision that again puts her in need of Spenser's help in Taming a Sea-Horse. And finally, in 2006's Hundred-Dollar Baby, an adult April owns her own call-girl operation and is facing pressure from some thugs who want a piece of the action. Fortunately, she knows a thug who works for folks who are being bullied and she hires Spenser to teach the miscreants the error of their ways.

In one sense, April is a female counterpart of Paul Giacomin, the aimless young boy Spenser meets in Early Autumn. Paul's plight as a weapon in his parents' battles touches Spenser, who decides to get leverage on the parents in order to get Paul out on his own and give him a chance at a decent life. He becomes more of a parent to Paul than anyone else has been, and Paul becomes in many ways Spenser's son.

Spenser's initial encounter with April parallels his meeting with Paul. Sullen, withdrawn and uncommunicative, she is not a young person with a promising future. Her mother is weak and dominated by her father, who is a class-A jerk that Spenser wants to punch shortly after meeting him. Although her mother seems to genuinely care about her daughter, she will not be able to be any kind of parent or worthwhile guide for April as long as her husband is in the picture.

Like Paul, April is a young person who needs to escape her home in order to have any chance at a good life or to flourish as a person. Spenser blackmails Paul's parents into letting him attend a prep school and then a college to study dance, which he has discovered he loves. He gets April on with a high-class madam in New York City, allowing the 16-year-old girl who has spent the last several months as a hooker to remain one. Even though she will have a higher-class clientele and gather social skills and graces she now lacks, she'll still be a teenager being paid to have sex with men, most of whom will probably be quite a bit older than she.

Over the course of a couple of months spent with Spenser, Paul learns some basic carpentry, how to box and work out, jog and cook. These are the things he knows, Spenser says, so these are the things he will teach Paul. By adding them to his previous skill set -- TV-watching and shrugging -- Paul will be able to make his own way and if he happens across something else he wants to learn how to do, he will be able to take care of himself while he does. Spenser invests time and self in the boy and it's his realization that he has come to care what happens to Paul that prompts him to develop his blackmail plan. Despite both Parker and Spenser's oft-stated belief in sexual equality, the idea of offering the same sort of skill set to April doesn't come up. Apparently the only thing she can learn how to use is her body, and that only as a tool to please and satisfy men.

Spenser may very well not have as much invested in April as he did in Paul. She doesn't grow nearly as much and isn't any more likeable by the end of the story as she is at the beginning -- and that wasn't much to start with. He may not be willing to spend the time and energy on another child. Parker may not be able to figure out how to write Spenser as the surrogate father of a daughter as he was for a son. He'll take a shot at it later in his career as his female detective, Sunny Randall, tries to work with a 15-year-old runaway in 2000's Family Honor, with mixed results.

Spenser says he doesn't know any good social workers or other people in helping professions who he figures will be able to reach and help April. Given that finding her uncovered a massive child prostitution ring run by the chief of high-school counseling in the state of Massachusetts, he has no confidence any state system will be able to help either. He fears that any attempt to try will wind up with April a runaway again and back out on the street as a low-level prostitute, as she has no other skills -- and he, apparently, doesn't care enough to give her any, as he did with Paul. There could be any number of reasons for this. Spenser might not feel comfortable trying to "parent" a teenage girl. He might not believe he could successfully convince April's parents to back away as he did with Paul's parents. He recognizes the effort he put into Paul and might not believe he could muster the same thing for April. He might not like April enough to try. April might not have the spark in her for something that Paul had for dancing. I've read some suggestions that April doesn't have the self-discipline Paul had to try to make something of himself. Perhaps, but that's reading Paul after several weeks with Spenser -- the first adult in a long time to pay any attention to him. When he first shows up, there's no more indication of a diamond in the coal as there will be with April, and there's no initial effort to create it.

Or it could be that Parker, having given his hero one surrogate child, didn't want to write him another. Whatever the reason, what we have are Spenser and his girlfriend, high-school guidance counselor Susan Silverman, arranging for 16-year-old April to meet a New York City madam who Spenser knows from another case, so she can find a way to continue as a prostitute in a safer environment.

Susan has no illusions about April's home life, since she's the one whose initial worries about April brought Spenser into the case to start with. She makes some noises about saying that some serious therapy for the young girl and her family would be the best solution and about some uncertainty in enabling a 16-year-old girl to continue as a prostitute. And as a high school guidance counselor, she knows the wreck the state system will be with its chief director exposed as running a child prostitution/pornography ring. But she knows nobody who could find a way to help a 16-year-old kid not hook for a living? She has no contacts that might get her in touch with folks who may have some experience with that? Yes, this is 1982 and very much prior to large-scale efforts to make people aware of human trafficking and helping the many children involved in it, but what we're left with are the only two adults concerned with April's welfare enabling her to continue to see her body as her only value and sell it.

Ceremony has us see this decision as the best outcome right now for April, and Spenser says that if after meeting his friend the madam she doesn't want to go that way, they will try to think of something else. But since the only two adults who've cared about April for April's sake don't seem to want to put up much of a roadblock, it's hard to see her choosing a path where she's something other than a commodity, even if she will now be a much better cared for commodity -- a valuable toy instead of a cheap one.

Parker seemed to realize in some way his solution to April's problem was inadequate. When he wrote the screenplay for the Spenser: Ceremony TV movie in 1993, he had Susan and Spenser get April connected to a group that worked with young girls leaving prostitution. Whether he believed his original ending wouldn't have worked with a TV audience or he understood it to be an error, he did change it. And that makes the TV movie the only time Parker gave this character an even break.

Taming

Four years later, the madam who took April in calls Spenser. April left her employ and connected with another, less exclusive escort service and the madam, Patricia Utley, believes she will eventually wind up back on the street because the man who runs the service has done the same to other girls before.

Spenser calls April to meet with her and warn her about the danger she is in. But the pimp who runs her service has convinced her they are in love and she has what may be a fairly typical 20-year-old's reaction to adult authority's disapproval of her choice of partner: She storms out. Later it becomes apparent she has disappeared and Spenser has to trail her through a web of connections involving the mob, money-laundering and Parker's stand-in for Hugh Hefner and the Playboy magazine empire. When he finds out what happened to her, he learns that she has been taken from the pimp by an organized crime group who supplies women to a banker who launders money for them. Since, in the words of one of the mobsters, the banker likes "things that women don't," April has been held in captivity for several weeks. Spenser convinces the mobsters that it would be better business to return April to him. They do, and this time he offers her a connection on a personal level that he did not before.

Her reaction suggests that some kind of different life is ahead for April, and that Spenser has some awareness of responsibility towards her, which he is now willing to exercise. Although of the three books in which April appears she is onstage less in Taming than in any other, it is easily the most hopeful appearance for her.

Baby

But, we will learn 20 years later in Hundred-Dollar Baby, that hope was false. Spenser sits in his office one afternoon when a stunning young woman walks in. At first he doesn't recognize her, but then realizes it's a grown-up April Kyle.  After Spenser rescued her, she went back to work with the New York madam, who now has April set up in a kind of satellite operation in Boston's Back Bay. It's the same kind of high-end call girl work that April did herself, but it's run into problems. Some local criminal elements seem to want a piece of the action, and in this case the double meaning would actually be the better outcome. They want protection money from April, who doesn't want to pay it.

As Spenser works to try to uncover who's muscling into April's work -- and discourage them as only he knows how -- he learns that the situation is not as straightforward as April has said. In fact, April has provoked some of the confrontation in an attempt to get control of the business from her former employer and she makes a pass at Spenser as a part of whatever's going wrong with the wiring inside her head. When he finally confronts her with the knowledge of the crimes she's committed (that is, in addition to the whole prostitution ring), April loses it. First she threatens to shoot Spenser, then turns the gun on herself and pulls the trigger.

While Spenser packs his bullet-proof vest away in his car -- he expected April to shoot at either herself or him -- he and Hawk discuss why she went around the bend. Through this conversation, Parker retrofits April with a damaging history of abuse that scarred her so badly she really had no chance of leaving the path that led her to take her own life. So whatever hope we might have had that Spenser might finally take on some responsibility as an adult in April's life was apparently unfounded -- it's been long enough since he's had any contact with her that he doesn't even recognize her when she shows up in his office.

Of course, it's possible that after Taming a Sea-Horse, April shut down again once she was safe, and she distanced herself from Spenser. It's equally possible, and a lot more likely, that Parker is once again using April as a prop. Previously, she's been a MacGuffin he has to find but has had next to no role in her own story. In Baby, she offers Spenser a chance to have a monumental failure. He had the chance to call police at different times once he learned of April's involvement but refused, believing that since his decisions helped create this problem, he had to be the one to try to resolve it. Because of that decision and the confrontation he engineered, April wound up facing Spenser over a gun. Three choices followed: Drop the gun and be taken in, shoot at the bullet-proof-vest-wearing Spenser and get shot by him, or shoot herself. Spenser's pushed this confrontation, and he comes in second place in the "People responsible for April Kyle's death" race behind only April herself.

April's death represents a nearly complete failure for Spenser, on a par with his loss of Candy Sloan in A Savage Place. Then, Spenser's serving as a bodyguard for a Los Angeles TV reporter who is being threatened for her coverage of Hollywood corruption. He fails at a crucial juncture, and Candy is killed. Her death, as well as Spenser's decision to sleep with her, sets up personal conflicts that will echo through the next three books and culminate with Susan's decision to move to California and fall in love with another man.

Not here. Spenser fails April, she shoots herself and we never see another tremor of a mention about what her death or his role in it might cause for him. At almost every turn, he has made decisions that brought April to see her worth in terms of her body and little else, but once the covers of Hundred-Dollar Baby close, April and the failure she represents vanish as though they never existed. Parker can ret-con all the damaging abuse he wants into April's story, but all that does is sharpen the indictment against the two real adults in her life -- Spenser and Susan -- for not insuring she found someone who could help her heal.

Of course, this discussion treats April, Spenser and Susan as though they were actual people with their own volition. They're really only characters written by Robert B. Parker, and they don't do or say anything that Parker doesn't write. So rather than Spenser failing April, it's more accurate to say Parker fails. He fails to treat her as anything other than a prop; first as a MacGuffin that Spenser has to find and then as a handy means to give Spenser a Dramatic Failure. She joins Allie French in Parker's Westerns and Jennifer Stone, Jesse Stone's ex-wife, as women that Parker uses primarily as tools to create conflict for the lead character. To be fair, Parker uses Sunny Randall's ex-husband Richie in the same way. But he doesn't kill any of them off. So whether or not April represents Spenser's greatest failure (I vote no; I still think Candy Sloan holds that title), she very likely represents Parker's. Unless you want to count All Our Yesterdays.

Punchline

Little kids may not understand a lot about society, but when they see the way families are shown in entertainment and when they watch the majority of their peers' families, they develop a picture of the way things are supposed to be. The unwritten story is that whatever else goes on in the world, "home" is a safe place and Mom and Dad take care of you, protect you from harm and love you. One of the tragedies of child abuse is its betrayal of that worldview and hope. Considering what April's parents were like, she may have felt that betrayal early on, even if she suffered no actual abuse. We don't see anything in her father that would lend itself to picturing a nurturing parent, and his domination of the household means her mother is no help against him. When Spenser and Susan discuss some of the psychology or even pathology of prostitution, they consider the idea that many prostitutes may find some kind of meaning in it. Even if they are valued only as a commodity, they are valued, and that may have been lacking for them, as it apparently was for April.

Spenser will have similar discussions with Patricia Utley, the New York City madam with whom he first connects April. As he tries to understand why April left Utley for another organization, she explains the same idea; that like many other prostitutes April is trying to find value or even love and someone who knows that may be able to manipulate her into circumstances she rationally knows could be harmful.

The adults April meets could try to help her understand her value comes from somewhere else. Her parents should have, Spenser and Susan could have, but nobody does. A person in my line of work holds that we are valuable because we are God's creations, but even the agnostic world Spenser inhabits permits the idea that April has value just because she's a human being. In fact, that idea is a bedrock part of Spenser's code. It may or may not have been his responsibility to teach April that she had a meaning beyond what other people wanted to use her for, just like it wasn't necessarily his responsibility to teach Paul Giacomin that he had a value beyond being a pawn in his parents' divorce and battles. He chose to do the one, but not the other and so became another part of the joke played on the girl he rode in to rescue but never saved.

The Mote in God's Eye

The following is another "reader's diary," this time reflecting on The Mote in God's Eye, a novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Spoilers abound, so those who have not read it and wish to learn about the story the old-fashioned way are advised not to proceed hence.

ON THE ONE HAND

About 40 years ago, novice science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, who had a couple of pseudonymous novels and some short stories out under his own name, started working with Larry Niven, an award-winning young author to that point best known for his "Known Space" universe, especially the award-winning Ringworld.

The pair would start with the alien first-contact novel The Mote in God's Eye, and their success with it would spawn four decades and counting of joint works that stand at the front of science fiction publishing. One of its most attention-getting features was a cover blurb from science-fiction titan Robert A. Heinlein, who was about a year away from being named the first Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Heinlein eschewed common blurb-speak for a simple declarative sentence which ended: "...possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read." It would be hard to find tastier bait for the hard science fiction fan than a quote like that, and Mote went on to cement its iconic status and pave the way for other Niven-Pournelle idea-based fiction like Oath of Fealty and Lucifer's Hammer.

Heinlein had, in fact, read an earlier manuscript of the collaboration and offered the writers detailed suggestions about improving it. Although he told them he liked it very much, he didn't think they could sell it without extensive editing -- not to the plot itself, but for length and some in-universe logic. Looking at Mote from the perspective of the millions of books Niven and Pournelle had sold, it seems like its sale would have been a slam-dunk, but that's almost strictly a hindsight advantage.

Niven had been writing science fiction for about a decade and had pulled off a Nebula, Hugo and Locus award trifecta with Ringworld. But Pournelle had published mostly nonfiction and worked in political campaigns and the public policy arena. The pair would use an existing fictional universe for their novel of the first contact between human beings and intelligent aliens, but they didn't use Niven's Known Space. Pournelle said he couldn't believe the history and politics of Known Space, so they opted for his CoDominium universe, which at that time had a bare handful of serialized magazine stories in print. Publishers that might accept a collaborative maiden voyage set in a known name's preferred published history might also balk at the pair using the novice's setting.

Niven and Pournelle wisely paid attention to Heinlein's suggestions, which meshed with some of their own understandings of how they needed to revise their manuscript and which also made a lot of sense (The letter probably makes up the bulk of Heinlein's coherent output post-1970 outside of his novel Friday -- it's amazing that the narrative and writing eye he focuses so well on the Niven-Pournelle manuscript failed him so miserably when it came to almost everything he published after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress).

Heinlein's support and perceptive editing suggestions helped Niven and Pournelle tailor the original Mote manuscript into one Simon and Schuster would buy and publish in 1974. It gained good reviews from a variety of sources, including mainstream newspapers and magazines. From it came a fairly common expression amongst the nerdy, "on the gripping hand," which is something the three-handed aliens sometimes say when they're trying out English expressions. Although much of Mote's immediate future timeline didn't play out -- rather than joining with the United States in 1990 in a global duopoly called the CoDominium, the Soviet Union broke up, and we most certainly did not test and perfect an interstellar drive in 2008 -- the authors did suggest a personal computer not unlike an iPad and created a first-contact story that science fiction authors even today may find themselves measured against.

ON THE OTHER HAND

Rod Blaine, first officer of the Imperial Navy Spaceship MacArthur, finds himself promoted to captain following a battle against rebels in the system of New Chicago. Blaine is a hereditary noble in the Second Empire of Man and his victory helped bring New Chicago back into the Empire and rescue several Imperial citizens being held by the rebels, including Lady Sally Fowler.

Blaine is ordered to take the civilians, along with suspected rebel sympathizer Trader Horace Hussein Bury, to the sector capital at New Scotland. While there, MacArthur gets emergency orders to intercept a probe of unknown origin than has entered the New Scotland system and may be dangerous. He does, but all of the aliens on board the craft are dead. Their origin is traced to a small star companion of a red supergiant. From New Scotland, the supergiant is in just the right place to look like a hooded man's glaring eye when seen against the Coalsack Nebula and the small star appears like a mote next to it. Some New Scots believe the Nebula to be the actual face of God (they say "Face of Him"), and so the small star is often called the Mote or the Mote in God's Eye. About 150 years earlier, the Mote had abruptly changed color and blazed green. Humans now understand that change happened because a civilization at the Mote used a gigantic laser to power the light-sail of the alien probe.

MacArthur and another Imperial ship, Lenin, will take a group of scientists and specialists to the Mote system to try to make contact with the aliens and see if they have peaceful intentions. They will use humanity's Alderson Drive, which allows a spaceship to instantly travel interstellar distances from certain points in a star system. They find that the Mote's Alderson Point is actually inside the red supergiant, called Murcheson's Eye, but using their Langston Field they can survive briefly inside the sun and they make the jump to the Mote.

There they find a single habitable planet and two asteroid groupings, all evidence of an immensely old civilization. A ship meets them and its single inhabitant is brought aboard. It has two right arms and a single large left arm, but seems unable to learn human language. It can, however, use tools to fix and improve almost anything mechanical, and it brought aboard two small animals that seem similar to it, although they have four equal-sized arms and do not communicate at all.

Then a ship from the planet arrives with aliens that can communicate with humans and do so very well. The scientist and military mindsets clash, frequently. Although they are not allowed on board MacArthur, a smaller human vessel docks with the aliens and human scientists -- including Sally Fowler -- begin to interact with and study them. Since human throats can't produce the alien language, they learn the human language and are called Moties. The Moties are divided into castes based on their specialties -- the Motie that first met the humans is an Engineer, the ones that talk to the humans are Mediators and they all take orders from a Master. Several Mediators are assigned to the humans to learn about them, and are called "fyunch(click)s" after the Motie sound that describes their role.

The original Motie the humans brought aboard begins to sicken and dies, while the animals it brought on board escape their cage and hide in the spaceship. Other wrinkles develop as humans learn their mobile social structure is incomprehensible to the biological caste system of the Moties, to the point that the adaptability drives some of the fyunch(click)s insane. More mysteries develop when MacArthur travels to the Motie planet, which shows evidence of massive wars long ago. Clues about the way these wars were waged, found in asteroid clusters in the system, are overlooked because the astronomers dismissed moved asteroids as less interesting than naturally orbiting ones.

Eventually the fecund Motie animals the original brought aboard, called "Watchmakers," overbreed and begin fighting each other and the human crew, who are forced to abandon MacArthur for Lenin. Most of the crew and passengers escape, but some find themselves stranded on the Motie planet, where they learn the aliens' hidden history. Motie evolution selected frequent breeding as its dominant survival trait, and Moties must reproduce often or the hormone imbalance will kill them. This is what happened to the original brown Engineer the humans encountered. But confined within a single star system, the population pressure eventually brings a societal breakdown, a massive war, and savagery from the deadly Warrior caste, heretofore unseen by humans. The stranded humans who learn this are killed and can't share their information with the others, who will leave the Mote system on Lenin. They take Motie ambassadors with them, who intend to negotiate trade agreements with the humans and finally escape the prison of their solar system, while keeping the existence of the lethal, fast-breeding Warriors and their inexorable population growth a secret.

Thanks to the observant eye of one of the MacArthur officers, the secret of the Motie Warriors and their breeding cycle is uncovered just in time. Humans must decide whether they will wipe out the Mote system or try to conquer it when the Motie ambassadors themselves suggest a blockade. With the only faster-than-light exit from their system buried deep inside the red supergiant, they will be unable to break out with any kind of force and human warships can easily destroy them. Blaine and Fowler become engaged and found a scientific institute to research Motie biology and find a solution to their biological problem.

ON THE GRIPPING HAND

Roughly spoken, literary fiction makes its central aim some kind of exploration or commentary on the human condition. Storytelling, characterization and such are important, but they are aimed at that commentary or exploration. So-called genre fiction usually focuses much more heavily on the narrative or the characters. It may or may not aim for commentary and if it does, such commentary may be less developed and exploration not overly deep.

Mote probably doesn't fit anyone's definition of literary fiction, although as a novel of ideas it certainly isn't a pure genre read driven by plot and action alone. As they examine different ideas about humanity, what it means to be other and how a truly alien civilization might behave, Niven and Pournelle can't help but observe and comment a little on that human condition.

Moties, for example, are trapped in what they call "Cycles" of population explosion, war, barbarism, recovery, expansion and repeat. This is because Moties change sex during their lifetimes, and a Motie which does not change from male back to female and subsequently become pregnant dies. For whatever reason, this is a survival characteristic for which Motie evolution selected early in the history of life on their planet. They thus believe that all life has that feature and any other intelligent race has to deal with Cycles and their effects. A race without this reproduction imperative would not survive to reach intelligence and achieve space travel. Being trapped in their single system has led them to believe the problem of Cycles has no solution and as a species, the Moties suffer from extreme fatalism.

The humans, on the other hand, do not have Cycles. Nor do they have the rigid, biologically-defined castes or the fatalism that the Moties believe are basic facts of existence. The humans in Mote, in fact, overlook important information when they divide themselves along professional lines; the military misses what the scientists learn and among the scientists, each researcher focuses only on his own specialty while ignoring the others.

Humans believe every problem can have a solution, but Moties consider that idea as much a proof of madness as we would the hearing of voices in our heads. Their term for this condition translates into the human language as "Crazy Eddie." In fact, it is this human belief that helps drive the mimicking fyunch(click)s insane when they adopt it. Even though they don't really try to dig too deeply into individual Moties and how they operate in their fatalistic worldview, Niven and Pournelle do explore some of the impact such a belief can have on a species and its society.

In separate writings about the creation of Mote, Niven and Pournelle talk about how hard the process was. From revisions to cutting to recasting characters to developing the science, political structure and history of the human space empire, they worked and reworked the novel several times. In his reply memo, Heinlein said he had so many suggestions because he saw such a great story at the root of the manuscript they'd sent him, and he considered the pair good enough friends that he did not want them to send it out without giving them the best suggestions that he could and the manuscript the most thorough reading that he could.

Stylistically, the pair were a good match. Niven has a breezier, easier authorial voice than Pournelle, who tends to be heavier if not sometimes leaden in his storytelling and prose. But Niven can sometimes let the wonder of the world or situation within which he's working overshadow his characters -- The Integral Trees is a good example -- to the point that a reader is overwhelmed with such a fantastic "where" that he or she either forgets or never sees the "who." Pournelle, though, puts characters and story front and center. When MacArthur is overrun by the Watchmakers and needs to be destroyed, Rod hesitates about leaving before his crew is safe. Admiral Kutuzov, the expedition commander sometimes called "the Butcher" because he destroyed a rebel planet's society so thoroughly it's referred to as being "in the Stone Age," orders him to abandon his ship. When Blaine demurs, Kutuzov scoffs at him. "You are worried about what they will say about you?" he asks. "And this you say to me?" It's the kind of humanizing note that Pournelle often includes in picturing his parade of stoic military leaders and it helps draw a clear picture of a character whose role could have been pure cut-and-paste in a lesser book. Mote combines Niven's tone with Pournelle's humanism probably better than any other collaboration they did, except maybe Lucifer's Hammer.

Mote was well-reviewed when it came out, although it lost science fiction's top awards the year it was nominated. Some later opinion hasn't been as kind, as authors unfriendly to Niven and Pournelle's center-right-libertarian viewpoints use that antipathy as fuel for Mote's dismissal. English science-fiction author Brian Aldiss sniffs at it in his 1986 guide to science fiction, The Trillion-Year Spree, but reading that update of his earlier guide shows Aldiss sniffing at basically everything written 1) after 1970 2) by anyone born west of 30° longitude.

Niven and Pournelle returned to the Motie universe with 1993's The Gripping Hand, a confusing and not particularly necessary sequel, and allowed Pournelle's daughter Jennifer to do so with Outies, a didactic and flat expansion of the story that is even less necessary than Hand. Neither of these books needs to be read to appreciate The Mote in God's Eye as a great story, a great read, and a novel that explores quite a bit about what it means to be human. Mote can stand alone, and should.

Dune

This discussion of Frank Herbert's Dune contains spoilers and presumes the reader has either already read the novel or does not care if he or she learns how it turns out before he or she reads it.

Of course, this notice presumes that the item has readers, so it may all be moot.

Since Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have been churning out page after page of goings on in the "Duniverse" of Frank Herbert's Dune, it might be hard to remember that the original book, published in 1965, owns such a monumental status in science fiction.

It almost didn't. Frank Herbert's manuscript was rejected by 20 publishers before finally finding its home with Chilton -- best known as the house that prints those great auto repair guides. Copies of the first edition have gone for as much as $10,000 in auctions. Herbert had previously serialized it in Analog magazine, but the version he was shopping for book publication was longer and much more elaborate.

The ideas that would become Dune started, Herbert said, when he researched how certain kinds of grasses would anchor sand dunes in place to keep them from overcoming the nearby city of Florence, OR. The idea of sand dunes that could encroach and even cover up parts of a city put his mind to thinking about ecology and gave him the suggestion of the desert planet Arrakis, on which most of the action of Dune is set. His initial ideas about the book were different than what came out; Brian Herbert and Anderson wrote a novel from them called Spice Planet that was published in the 2005 collection The Road to Dune. This version focuses much more on ecological, mystical and theological themes than does the originally published version of the novel.

THE STORY

Some 20,000 years from now, Duke Leto Atreides is the feudal lord of the planet Caladan. But intrigue in the interstellar Imperium has led his enemies to combine forces with the Emperor, who sends Leto and his household to the desert planet Arrakis, called Dune. Arrakis is the home of the giant sandworms, which make a drug/spice called melange. Melange allows spaceship pilots to navigate faster than light ships without harm because it grants a limited prescience or knowledge of the future. The Imperium can't function without melange and Arrakis is the only place to get it, so it seems that the Emperor is giving Leto a great gift. Leto knows better.

His ancient enemies, the House Harkonnen, have had control of Arrakis and Leto suspects that the Emperor plans to use Baron Harkonnen as his weapon to remove Leto. But he can see no way out of the trap so he, his concubine Lady Jessica and their teenage son Paul move to Arrakis. Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, a kind of religious order of women who practice mental disciplines that allow them to detect truth and falsehood. Secretly, they are trying to manipulate breeding among the high nobles of the Empire to produce a male Bene Gesserit, called the Kwisatz Haderach. They suspect Paul may be this person and want to watch him closely; if he is he could help open up human knowledge and awareness beyond anyone's imagining.

On Arrakis, the Baron's plot comes to pass; Leto is killed and Paul and Jessica are thought dead after they barely escape into the great desert. There they are found by a tribe of Fremen, the tribes who dwell in Arrakis's deepest desert. Eventually they are accepted by the tribe and Paul's abilities and experiences with the melange spice push him to leadership among the Fremen, who call him Muad'Dib. Two or so years later, at the head of their nearly invincible army, he attacks the forces of Baron Harkonnen, who has returned to the planet. The Baron is defeated and killed; Paul becomes heir to the Emperor through an arranged marriage to Princess Irulan. Although he will never marry his true love Chani -- the mother of the son killed in the raids -- because she is a commoner, he pledges to her that his marriage to Irulan is for state reasons only and that it will never be a real union.

OTHER WORDS

Herbert's several years of studying the effect of grasses on the dunes in Oregon sparked some serious consideration of ecological matters, and ecology plays a large part in the story of Dune. The gigantic sandworms that make the melange spice come from a kind of jellyfish-like life form called "sand trout." When sand trout came to Arrakis, they began encysting its water supply, because water was dangerous to the adult sandworms. Eventually they changed the biosphere from a normal wet planet to one almost devoid of water, which allowed the sandworms themselves to flourish. Some of them are hundreds of yards long. Paul's escape and connection to the Fremen is aided by the Imperial Planetologist, in fact, a man who has helped the Fremen calculate the amount of water they will need to reintroduce a more human-hospitable envrironment.

Many of the themes of the novel can be seen through ecological lenses. The Harkonnen forces dimiss the Fremen as a rabble, unable to organize or fight in any coordinated fashion, and believe their efforts to wipe them out have rendered them irrelevant. But they control only a small portion of the planet and they ignore vast sections of the deep desert, failing to realize that the harsh environment has bred a very tough group of people who are anything but an undisciplined rabble. Duke Leto is betrayed by a member of his household he thought incorruptible, as a garden might be overgrown by a weed that at first looks like an ordinary plant. Paul's choice of "muad'dib" as his public Fremen name connects him to a tough little creature (related to a kangaroo mouse), that fits into the desert rather than try to force the desert to fit it.

Reading Dune again as an adult shows a number of these features maybe not appreciated earlier. The large role of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist who helps Paul and Jessica escape, shows to better advantage to readers who look for features other than the main growth of a hero narrative. Through Kynes' teaching, the Fremen have gathered water to ease the harsh desert character of their planet. He holds an almost prophetic significance for them, and his aid to Paul is later viewed in a sort of John the Baptist manner when Paul's role with his movement reaches messianic levels.

Dune also is one of the rare science fiction works to really grapple with religion and its centrality to human life. Rather than dismiss or ignore it like many writers do, he demonstrates how the Fremen's devotion to Paul as their leader does take on worshipful aspects. Paul's prescient visions, brought on by exposure to the melange spice, help fuel this even against his own wishes. He fears the vision of Fremen armies sweeping the Imperium in a jihad to bring worlds under his control, even as some of  the choices he has to make bring that vision closer to reality. Characters will quote "The Orange Catholic Bible," a syncretistc work made many thousands of years earlier by a conference of religious and spiritual leaders that combines teaching and ideas from many religions. The Fremen are the descendants of "Zensunni Wanderers," a persecuted sect of "buddhislamists" who follow a combination of Buddhism and Islam.

Some of the ideas and teachings that might result from this combined sect show in the organization and words of the Fremen, but Herbert doesn't spend a lot of time following them up. Of course, he already has a long novel and so his room to dally in the literary alleys of his universe is limited.

The length probably also kept Herbert from telling how Paul rose in leadership of the Fremen and how they squeezed the Harkonnens back to a small part of the planet. We close a section with Paul beginning to learn Fremen ways and we rejoin him when he is an experienced desert warrior only needing a solo ride on one of the sandworms to cement his status. The gap is a little jarring.

Herbert also fumbles the narrative as he brings it to a close. Paul's sister Alia, conceived just before Duke Leto's death, sneaks a poisoned needle with her when she is captured and kills the evil Baron Harkonnen as the Fremen defeat both Harkonnen and Imperial forces. On the one hand it's fitting, as the Baron's mode of operation has been behind-the-scenes manipulation and exploitation of his enemies' weaknesses. That he dies from poison at the hands of a seemingly helpless child fits, but it leaves the major confrontation to be between Paul and the Baron's nephew, the mostly heretofore offstage Feyd-Rautha.

Paul's infant son dies as well in an Imperial counterattack, but Herbert gives neither he nor his consort Chani any onscreen grief; we only learn about this tragedy through an offhand comment from someone else.

Reading Dune now, some 35 years after tackling it for the first time, I can see a good deal more humor lurking in Herbert's dialogue and narrative. It's more adult, subtler and -- forgive the phrase -- much drier than teenage me could see. But it has to labor pretty hard to leaven Herbert's Cecil B. Demille-styled dialogue and his frequent returns to Paul's impending feelings of dread. Dune also takes knocks because the female characters generally only react to what the men around them are doing instead of acting on their own and because the only overtly gay character is the evil Baron Harkonnen. Those are mostly unjustified complaints; much of the story we have comes from the work of the Bene Gesserit  sisterhood, after all. It's their plan that has created the foretold Kwisatz Haderach, and it's Jessica's choice to bear Leto a son that disrupts that plan. As for the Baron, I don't remember thinking of him as gay, since he never references relations with adult men. He's a pederast more than anything else, and that trait's used by Herbert as one more example of how he's governed by his appetites. Another is his weight -- he's said to be 400 kilos, which is more than 800 pounds and he uses personal anti-gravity devices to help bear his grotesque bulk.

UNNECESSARY WORDS?

Though Dune's concluding sequences may be a little bit weak, they definitely provide an ending. But sequels followed, and they can be roughly sorted into three groups. The first are two more books that purport to complete Paul's story, 1969's Dune Messiah and 1976's Children of Dune. These make the original Dune trilogy. Each, frankly, provides a good ending point for the narrative even though they only serve to weaken the strength of the story in the original novel.

But Herbert later released three more Dune novels and had the outline together for more, which were eventually finished by a collaboration of his son Brian and sci-fi novelist Kevin Anderson. This second group of sequels carries the story forward several thousands of years and finishes out with gholas (or special kinds of clones) of the original characters preparing to remake a planet into the image of the destroyed Arrakis after defeating a ghola of Baron Harkonnen and the forces that brought him back. When the last novel of a series brings you back to the same place you started, you way very well wonder why you spent the money. Neither Herbert's own work or the Brian Herbert/Anderson collaboration offer the same depth of ecological and theological reflection of the original novel.

The third group of sequels are actually "prequels" that chronicle events leading up to the universe we entered in the first book. They cover events many thousands of years before those of the original novel as well as those that happen a few years before that curtain goes up. Some newer ones are "interquels," or stories set inside the timeline of the original trilogy. They also fall short of the first Dune's reflection on the human condition and the other issues central to that novel. They can be omitted without losing any of the impact of Dune as a standalone. Although these hundreds of thousands of words are supposedly intended to explore the "Duniverse" in more detail and depth, they really only serve to -- and again, please forgive the phrase -- water it down.

From the Rental Vault: Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

(Note: This one has spoilers, be careful if you want to learn the movie's story on your own)

It says quite a bit about Hollywood's courage that, as late as 1960, a studio would give an actor in a movie's title role fourth billing, simply because he was black. Even though John Ford's Seargeant Rutledge turns on the fate and actions of Woody Strode's Braxton Rutledge, Strode shows up under the title in the "featured player" kind of spot. He's below Jeffrey Hunter (the officer defending him in his court-martial), Constance Towers (the lovely woman traveler with whom Hunter falls in love) and Billie Burke (the flighty and somewhat addled wife of the court-martial's presiding officer).

Whether director Ford could have affected the studio's decision or not, there was no secondary status for Strode and his work in the movie itself. He is its centerpiece and some of the get-the-mainstream-audience touches the story includes ring very hollow in comparison with his.

Rutledge is the top non-comissioned officer in the 9th Cavalry Unit during the 1880s, accused of assaulting and killing a young girl and murdering her father, the base commander. Wounded, he flees the base and saves Mary Beecher (Towers) when a band of Apaches attack the train station where she awaits her father. Resting at the station, he is captured by Lt. Tom Cantrell (Hunter) the next day, to be brought back for trial.

The story is told in flashback form as different witnesses testify about the events the night of the murder and during the ride back to the cavalry base. The prosecuting officer (Carleton Young) deviously tries to inflame racial tension against Rutledge by at first insinuating that he assaulted Beecher, playing on the fears of black male sexuality often used by bigots to justify hatred and prejudice. Rutledge himself, sure that no one will believe his story, refuses to accept help from his friends because he is worried their efforts to help him will only damage them.

But Rutledge's good character, dignity and honor continue to show through as witness after witness relates the events leading up to the trial. Each bit of testimony scrapes away the low-character stereotype the prosecutor wants the court to believe, until the truth comes out and Cantrell finally deduces what actually happened.

Sergeant Rutledge is not one of Ford's best movies -- as mentioned, too much of Hunter and Towers' roles seem to be there to get the idea of a black title character past a 1960s movie audience. Both are good enough, but neither is equipped to bring more to their lackluster plotline than they're given.

On the other hand, Sergeant Rutledge is probably one of the best Ford-directed performances in his long career. A 6'4" former football player, decathlete and WWII Army veteran, Strode brought size, strength and dignity to the screen on his own. Ford brought the directing skill to emphasize and focus on those characteristics. When Cantrell and Rutledge first confront each other at the train station, Ford alternates closeups as Cantrell questions and Rutledge responds. Jeffrey Hunter is shot at eye level as he speaks, Woody Strode from slightly below. The contrasting views give Strode the look of dignified bearing that keeps before us the honor and high character Rutledge possesses.

When we first meet Rutledge, he marches into the courtroom, crisp in a uniform and carriage. Ford's alternating shots between the stoic Rutledge and the grizzled, dirty mob that wants to lynch him on the spot do the latter no favors and tell us plainly who our hero is. Billie Burke's proper society grand dame may have more respect in society than freed slave Braxton Rutledge, but in Sergeant Rutledge she's an addle-pated airhead who can remember the names on the social register more easily than that of the advocate questioning her. Ford gives Strode every advantage a director can give a performer -- he even gets the racing-down-the-mountain-on-horseback John Wayne glory shot -- and it's a sign of Strode's talent that he picks those up and runs with them.

Nor does Ford pretend that the Cavalry gave black soldiers a completely fair shake in the 1880s. A wounded black private -- a new recruit -- is reassured he will be all right and did a good job when Lt. Cantrell tells him he'll probably make corporal in "8 or 10 years." I couldn't find information on how much time in grade it took to make corporal in the U.S. Cavalry in the 1880s, but in the modern U.S. Army it can be done in as little as 18 months.

In the press buzz surround the release of Quentin Tarantino's ahistorical revenge western Django Unchained, the director for some reason found it good to take a slam at Ford's racism. Tarantino cited Ford's role as an uncredited extra Klansman in D.W. Griffith's racially repugnant 1915 film Birth of a Nation, saying he wrote a scene in which the Klansmen of his movie have to lift their hoods to see where they're going based on Ford's scene in that movie. Tarantino then riffs for a bit on how he hates Ford and his movies because of that role.

No one who watches a Ford movie could believe he had a modern sensibility and understanding of race. And neither Sergeant Rutledge nor any other Ford movie can "prove" Ford was not prejudiced in racial matters as we understand them today, or even as they were understood during his lifetime. But Ford's storytelling style played not only on racial and ethnic types but also cultural and social ones. His method almost always used the shorthand of stereo- and archetyping as a way to get us into the story to see what the conflicts between those types and their values would bring about. It's difficult to see how Tarantino, who uses almost exactly that method with his characters and his movies, could miss the similarity.

Strode himself credited Ford with helping him as an actor and throughout his career saw Sergeant Rutledge as one of his best roles. It seems difficult to believe that anyone with two eyes and half a brain could watch Sergeant Rutledge, hear Strode's ringing declaration on the stand, see the way the movie is directed to emphasize every heroic line of the character and come away with the idea that Ford's entire career could be defined not by his work directing, but by his role as an extra in a movie at the age of 21. Such an idea hews as close to reality as does Django Unchained to the pre-Civil War south and Inglourious Basterds to World War II.

It's  as fair as judging Tarantino's catalog by his role as a less-than-convincing Elvis imitator in a 1988 episode of The Golden Girls. Just as Ford's bit as a Klansman in Birth of a Nation signaled and signified his lifelong racial prejudice, Tarantino's bit as a cheesy imitator of a cultural-force-turned-punchline signals and signifies his inability to create anything new, but only synthesize, re-mix and warp cultural clichés into a mashup that owes whatever appeal it has to a fondness for the originals rather than the atristry of the end result.

I don't really believe that, of course. Except for everything QT's done since Jackie Brown.

It Was Not The Ending...

Warning note: The following discusses different books in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of novels, and does so with spoilers aplenty. This especially includes the final volume, A Memory of Light, and so readers who want to learn what happens in the books the old-fashioned way should take a rain check on reading the following post.

The butler did it.

Of course, as everyone who's followed the 15-book, 20-year saga of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series knows, there's no butler. Well, actually, the four million plus words put to paper by the late Jordan and his successor, Brandon Sanderson, probably do have a butler or two tucked in them someplace. But not as any kind of major character.

WoT is an Empire State Building in modern fantasy writing -- whether you love it, hate it, know it inside and out or have never been there, it's pretty tough to find too many places in Manhattan where you can't see it. It represents some of the better and worse elements of genre fiction, modern publishing and fantasy world-building. Almost any discussion of a multi-volume fantasy series will include some reference to it, either in praise or disparagement, and an honest view of the books will have to admit the truth of the praise and the criticism. Praise it for its creativity and coherent view of its own magic, culture and society and you'll be on target. Dog it for its ever-decreasing narrative pace, explosively bloated story and cast and frequently careless writing and you've nailed it as well.

L. Ron Hubbard produced a 10-volume sci-fi blob called Mission:Earth just before he passed, with the last nine volumes published after his death. A couple of Harry Turtledove's alternate history series  hit the nine- and ten-volume mark, although neither Hubbard nor Turtledove come close to Jordan's word count. Only George R. R. Martin's ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire seems to seek the scale of WoT. Which is kind of interesting because Martin and James Oliver Rigney Jr. -- Jordan's given name -- became good friends and because a number of Martin's fans see his series with its royal incest, brutality, betrayal and whatnot as a grimy "corrective" to the much more PG-13 world of WoT.

Wheel of Time began with the 1990 publication of Eye of the World, but Jordan had already written several new adventures of Robert Howard's Conan for Tom Doherty of Tor Books. He began what would become EoTW in the mid-1980s after pitching the idea of an epic fantasy trilogy to Doherty, who accepted it but made the contract for six books, having had experience with Jordan going a little bit long. He had, of course, no idea just how true that would be. Although Jordan would take almost six years to finish the final version of EoTW, he would also complete much of the second book, The Great Hunt, soon enough after that one for them both to be published in the same year -- something that might astound series latecomers who became used to Jordan's two (or so) year gaps between volumes. In fact, the first six books of the series came out in just more than five years. After that, the pace slowed. And Jordan tucked in a prequel and a sort of guidebook-atlas to his world that soaked up a couple of years. And reading the books became like slogging through swamps, mired in more and more detail about less and less story.

Eventually responding to criticism of his pace -- both narrative and output-wise -- Jordan indicated that the 12th book of the series would bring WoT to a close. That, combined with a somewhat leaner narrative for Book 11, brought a lot of positive response. But in 2006, Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and that, with treatment, the average lifespan of someone with his condition was about four years. The treatments, much like chemotherapy for cancer, left him fatigued and made it difficult to write. He continued writing the manuscript for A Memory of Light, saying it would be the last book even if it had to be immense. At the same time, he prepared a detailed outline of what he had yet to finish, allowing for the chance another author could finish things if he could not. Jordan died in September of 2007 with that final volume unfinished. But Tor Books, in collaboration with his widow, selected fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson to finish it, making the announcement in December 2007.

Confronted with the large partially-finished manuscript and the even larger scale of what remained, Tor and Sanderson decided that the final book would instead be three books -- none of which, it may be noted, weighs in at much under 300,000 words in its own right. The first came in 2009, the second in 2010 and the third and final piece of the puzzle found itself on bookshelves in January 2013. Sanderson, of course, had work of his own to finish in and around his work on WoT. He noted on his blog that Memory is almost certainly the final volume set in the world of WoT, as there are not nearly enough notes or outlines available for the other three prequel novels and three or four "outrigger" novels outside the main sequence that Jordan had considered at one time. It's unlikely that Harriet McDougall, Jordan's widow, would consent to those stories being written, as Jordan's influence would be very light upon them.

THE STORY

In Jordan's world, time exists as a wheel made by the Creator, and is cyclical, much as some religions teach. All of life is a part of the Pattern woven by the Wheel under the Creator's direction. But the Dark One, Shai'tan, is not a part of the Pattern and seeks its destruction. The Creator imprisoned the Dark One at creation, leaving him unable to touch the Pattern even though he can influence those who let their minds turn to selfishness and evil. Through the One Power, the Creator allows people to channel his influence and energy to do good in the world. Men and women access different aspects of this One Power to do what we would call magic.

Thousands of years ago, some extremely advanced but arrogant researchers used their power to try to tap the power available from the Dark One without releasing him. This Bore allowed him to reach out and touch the Pattern, and to influence people to work towards releasing him and destroying both the Pattern and the Wheel of Time itself. Others used their strength in the One Power to place a seal over the Bore and reimprison the Dark One, but as he was being contained he struck out and tainted the male part of the One Power with his evil. Men who "channel" this power will now eventually go mad and destroy everything and everyone they love, as well as a whole lot else, before they destroy themselves.

Rand al'Thor is a young man living in a small village. His best friends are Perrin and Mat and he is perhaps interested in a village girl named Egwene. One day Rand learns he is in danger from attacks by evil beasts called Trollocs, which were created by powerful magicians who served the Dark One by combining human and animal characteristics. Rand, his friends and the young village wise woman Nynaeve flee, accompanied by a woman named Moiraine and her guardian Lan. Moiraine is an Aes Sedai, which is the name given to a sort of convent of women who can channel the One Power.

Over the course of the next thirteen books, Rand learns he is a man who can channel the One Power -- in fact, he is the Dragon Reborn, the champion who will lead the battle against the Dark One's forces and fight the Dark One face-to-face. But not everyone thinks he should be in charge of those forces, even if they also fight against the work of the Dark One. Rand has to navigate political alliances and survive attempts by the Dark One's followers to end his life before that final battle. He has to fight the Forsaken, immensely powerful "Darkfriends" being used by the Dark One to target Rand and his allies. Mat and Perrin will play their own roles; Mat as a supernaturally lucky general and Perrin as what we would call a werewolf. Egwene will find she too can channel and becomes not only an Aes Sedai, but is raised to the leadership of the order following its own division over how to fight the Dark One and deal with the Dragon Reborn.

Each of the young villagers will also find a mate; Rand will in fact find himself in love with three women and they with him.

THE LAST WORD

Memory on its own is not a bad fit for the finale. Sanderson brought a freshness to the series that Jordan began to lose somewhere in the middle of Book 6. He also had the good fortune to be writing the final act and so not saddled with all of the buildup that Jordan had deemed necessary (and Tor had deemed profitable). Even if he was putting out 300,000 words at a time, they were 300,000 words that went somewhere. He could unload some of the baggage that Jordan carried -- a habit of not-quite-matching metaphors now and again, and uncomfortably frequent incidences of female-on-female corporal punishment. And ridicuous time spent describing clothing and costuming under the rubric of "world-building." And a lot of energy devoted to incidental characters we just met who are suddenly crucial even though nothing about the main narrative requires their existence.

You can tell the difference pretty easily. Before he died, Jordan wrote what would be the epilogue of Memory. Sanderson's much lighter touch gets us through the end of the Last Battle, and then Late Jordanian Pomposity takes control to wind things down. A man who gave most of the last half of his life to one work certainly deserved to have it end with his own words, but a reader could wish he'd channeled his earlier days more than his later ones and their visible sense of self-importance.

Of course, Sanderson was completing someone else's story and not creating his own, so he couldn't in good conscience jettison Jordan's own ideas or rework them according to his own conception. Which is probably a big reason why the "final volume" became three books itself, even though reading them makes it clear that there's still a lot of trimming possible and probably desirable.

The majority of Memory is taken up by the physical battle between the forces of Light, originally split into four different armies, with some rather brief exchanges between Rand and Shai'tan, the Dark One. Because the Dark One has no real power over humans unless they cede it to him, his goal is to make Rand quit fighting -- he can't beat Rand, but if Rand quits he can win. So he shows Rand possible visions of the future, depending on the battle's outcome. In one, formerly good people have become twisted and evil, and the land is blighted and barren. This, says Shai'tan, is what everyone thinks the world will be like if he wins. In another, the battle scars of the land and the nations seem to be healed and people seem peaceful and happy. But a horrible incident shows Rand that the people in this future have neither compassion nor conscience. This, Shai'tan says, is what will actually happen when he wins. Rand declares neither vision will come true, because he himself is going to kill the Dark One and end the presence of the Shadow in human existence. So Shai'tan shows him the vision of that future, which also looks placid and peaceful. But when Rand meets the people he's known, he sees they are not themselves. By killing the Dark One, he has taken away human freedom to resist and reject the Shadow and made them more like automatons. Rand realizes this will happen, and is dismayed and discouraged. His awareness of the battles being fought and the people dying under his banner brings him to the edge of despair, as Shai'tan's voice urges him to just quit and seek oblivion.

But instead, Rand sees the courage of those who fight when hope seems lost, especially on the part of those who sacrificed their lives. He understands they made their free choices to give themselves to a cause and give their own blood for it and these heroic sacrifices inspire him. He surges back, mocking the Dark One because no one would fight beyond hope for him and his evil; his followers battle only from fear or lust for power. He rejoins a physical battle against the Forsaken champion Moridin, who manages to distract Rand long enough to gain hold of Callandor, a sword-like talisman that allows channeling unbelievable amounts of power. But it also allows a woman who channels to take control of a man who channels, so when Moridin seizes it, Rand's female allies immediately place Moridin under their control and add his power to Rand's. The combined power allows Rand to re-imprison the Dark One and re-forge his prison without any flaws and without the weakening Bore.

Exhausted from his battle and suffering the effects of many wounds over the past two years (the span of the story; it took 20 years to write but the series happens over a much briefer time), Rand collapses. Aes Sedai healers are unable to save him and he dies. Except that he doesn't. He actually transferred his soul from his own damaged body into Moridin's. While his friends mourn him at his funeral pyre, he sneaks out of camp to start a new life, unrecognized and unknown.

OTHER WORDS

It's hard to read WoT without seeing the Tolkienisms all over it. Rand is wounded in an early book by an evil talisman and that wound continues to plague him through the series, much as happens to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring. Jordan's kindly nature-lovers are "Ogiers" instead of Tolkien's Ents. The ultimate Evil loses when one of his followers has control of a powerful talisman but is defeated (Gollum falls to his death at Mt. Doom after taking the One Ring from Frodo, destroying it and Sauron's power; and Moridin's seizure of Callandor allows Rand and his allies the power to turn back the Dark One and reseal his prison). Completion of the main task is followed by the hero disappearing from the world (Frodo sails westwards from the Grey Havens, Rand slips away in the night in another's body). Jordan doesn't really have Elves, at least not in the role that Tolkien does, although he has orc-like "Trollocs." He also lacks a Gandalf. Tolkien has nothing like the Ways of Traveling used by the magic-wielders of Jordan's world, and Jordan's explanation of magic power and its use is far more detailed and far more integral to his story and plot. Both have "old languages," but in Tolkien's case you could almost say he developed his stories so he could have a place to use his created language. Jordan's is designed to serve his story; he could have typed random keys in the places where he uses it and been no worse off.

But WoT is not a four-million-word gloss on The Lord of the Rings. It's its own story, and Jordan had his own goals. If he moves on Tolkien's stage, it's with his own play. He offers some comment on the human condition, even if is a little on the thin side: Evil can only win when good quits, and only good can inspire effort beyond the last breath of hope. When confronted with truth, evil is powerless against it no matter what force it can muster against the truth-teller. None of those revelations are all that deep, although I would agree with them all and like how prominently they are featured as the story ends.

The unfortunate side of WoT is that four million words, though. You need three basic ingredients for a good series to catch bestseller's bloat and atherosclerose itself into piano-box-for-a-coffin levels of logorrhea and obesity. These are 1) A series that people are willing to buy, 2) A publisher who likes making money and 3) Authorial vanity. Only one of those is ever scarce, and it ain't the last two. Publishers always like money (it's the one thing they can't print themselves), and when it comes to their own words, writers are like surgeons: They don't cut unless someone writes a check (you can doubtless tell nobody's paying me for this).

It's hard to know where the bloat started. The first book seems obviously intended to move a major portion of the story, even if not the one-third that would have fit Jordan's initial vision of a trilogy. Two and Three equally obviously set the stage for a longer series, perhaps the six-volume work Doherty initially forecast. But to a small degree in Five and definitely in Six it's hard to deny that Jordan is a man who has lost most of his storytelling discipline. He took a prequel novella, turned it into its own novel and planned it as a four-book series on its own. Books Seven through 11 are next to unreadable for long stretches.

Long novels work fine. Les Miserables is a classic even though it takes awhile to get through it. Long novels with non-story digressions can also work fine. Moby-Dick has almost as much in it explaining how 18th century whaling was done as it does about the doomed Ahab and his mad obsession. But long novels that take more and more time to do less and less are trials upon the reader and they deaden or even erase any of their potential impact. Readers get used to skipping large sections or even just walking away from the series.

Memory is a good example. Most of the book is battle scene after battle scene, as different members of the good guys fight against overwhelming odds. They are losing for most of the book, outnumbered by their enemy and magically compelled to sabotage their own forces. The barrage of loss as the characters tire and are forced back gives us a sense of what Rand feels when he surveys the list of those who died for his cause. But a half or even a third as much narrative could have given us the same picture, and readers tempted to skip could wind up skipping too much to get that sense. Readers tempted to throw the book across the room should probably train in the shot put first. In Book 12, Rand spends pretty much the entire book cutting himself off from those whom he loves, so their suffering or death will not weaken him at the Last Battle, before he learns that he must feel -- pain as well as laughter -- or else he will definitely lose to Shai'tan. Working from Jordan's outline and notes, Sanderson spends three hundred thousand words to get that insight across. Is there a way to do the same with less? Almost certainly.

WoT frustrates because buried inside these fifteen books are seven good ones or maybe five great ones. Had Jordan more reason to rein himself in than blanket the pages with an endless prose blizzard...had Tor been as interested in series quality as it was in series quantity...had reader rebellion aganst the bloat been more pronounced and more effective...Who knows what might have happened? Jordan might have finished the series on his own and not needed the fresher style and energetic pace of another author to make the last books of the series worth buying. He might have created something that equals Tolkien in the fantasy genre and reminded folks that genre fiction can also be serious fiction.

In the end, though, the reality that he didn't do those things is not the whole of the story. Jordan earns praise for creating the means by which his great tale could be finished, a move that obviously takes some notice of a storyteller's compact with his or her readers and works from a position of responsibility towards those whose wallets have helped fund the author's house, car and college tuition for the kids (In contrast, Martin has said that if he dies before his ever-lengthening Song of Ice and Fire is finished, no one will complete it and he will leave no outline for a successor to follow. So thanks for playing, sucker). He was probably one of the first fantasy writers to weave together a detailed and coherent system of magic and make it foundational to his story. Despite the previously-mentioned frequency of descriptions of female corporal punishment, he wrote a series that doesn't make the usual delve into deviancy featured in much fantasy fiction today. His characters are well-drawn and realistic people, for all their living in a world of magic. In Mat Cauthon, he probably makes better use of an author's stand-in character than most other writers who try the same trick.

Reading A Memory of Light, despite its flaws, was a fun several afternoons. Because of Sanderson and because of Jordan and MacDougall's foresight, it's a good reminder that over the past 20 years, the Wheel of Time series has, despite its flaws, offered more of those than the other kind.

So thanks, Rand, Mat and Perrin, Min, Elayne, Egwene, Nynaeve, Lan and Moiraine, Siuan and Tuon and Faile, Thom and Loial and Gareth, Aviendha and Rhuarc and Sorilea and Cadsuane and Tam and all the others, for the diversion and the adventure and the excitement and the fun.

Most of all, thanks, Mr. Rigney, for the story. May it not pass away into Legend, nor fall into the Shadow, but always remain a story of the Light.